So what role does class struggle play in historical materialism?

[nuisance]

Quotes and reccomended reading. Go, go, go!

[Vanguard1917]

I'd recommend Engels' book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as an excellent introductory work.

Engels:

'The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.'

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

Marx explaining that his conception of class struggle differs from previous understandings of it in the sense that, in his view, classes and class struggle are 'bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production':

'And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.'

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm