The combination of two logically incompatible propositions. A contradiction arises when one statement negates the other as in Beckett’s wonderful phrase (quoted by Foucault, Michel in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France), ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ If one literally cannot go on, then obviously one cannot go on, so to put these two phrases together is a contradiction. This is also what gives it its poetic power. In Marx, Karl’s view contradiction is the motor of history---in his theory, the relationship between the owners of the means of production (i.e. the bourgeoisie) and the proletariat is contradictory because their interests do not coincide: it is not in the interest of the bourgeoisie to pay high wages because it reduces profits and it is not in the interest of the workers to accept low wages. This is the basic form of what Marx called class struggle. Marx always thought that this contradiction would become so acute in real terms that it would lead to an upsurge of revolutionary unrest such that the workers would topple the bourgeoisie and bring an end to capitalism. History, to date, suggests he was wrong about this. Consequently, there has arisen a branch of Marxist thinking known as post-Marxism which tries to rethink history minus contradiction.