The struggle for deservedness

Marx's theory of history as the struggle between classes is a theory of history as the struggle for deservedness. 

Lower classes struggling against upper classes is about which class deserves what. We usually focus in on the dialectical character of Marx's historical process, on the fact that there is some sort of creative struggle everywhere going on between a thesis and its antithesis, and that the resultant competitive process introduces telos  to necessity: the theses and antitheses are about some objective in the future so the causes are teleological; that there is a competitive struggle means that necessity governs the process because struggles strip away excess and accident and leave only necessity operating. 

That, however, it is the classes that are in the struggle, that the lower class is looking for its due, introduces justice into the process of history, and insofar as the justice is, in this process, the propeller of action it turnsout that justice-as-deservedness rather than justice-as-fairness is the essential virtue that drives history.