… Civilization has accomplished things of which the old gentile society was not remotely capable. But it accomplished them by setting in motion the most sordid instincts and passions of man, and by developing them at the expense of all his other faculties. Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from its first day to the present time; wealth, wealth and wealth again; wealth, not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole determining aim. If, in the pursuit of this aim, the increasing development of science and repeated periods of the fullest blooming of art fell into its lap, it was only because without them the ample present-day achievements in the accumulation of wealth would have been impossible.
Since the exploitation of one class by another is the basis of civilization, its whole development moves in a continuous contradiction. Every advance in production is at the same time a retrogression in the condition of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority. What is a boon for the one is necessarily a bane for the other; each new emancipation of one class means a new oppression of another class. The most striking proof of this is furnished by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are today known throughout the world. And while among barbarians, as we have seen, hardly any distinction could be made between rights and duties, civilization makes the difference and antithesis between these two plain even to the dullest mind by assigning to one class pretty nearly all the rights, and to the other class pretty nearly all the duties.
But this is not as it ought to be. What is good for the ruling class should be good for the whole of the society with which the ruling class identifies itself. Therefore, the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the ills it necessarily creates with the cloak of love, to embellish them, or to deny their existence; in short, to introduce conventional hypocrisy — unknown either in previous forms of society or even in the earliest stages of civilization — that eventually culminates in the declaration: The exploiting class exploits the oppressed class solely and exclusively in the interest of the exploited class itself; and if the latter fails to appreciate this, and even becomes rebellious, it thereby shows the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters.
Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", 1884