From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.įrom the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.

In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. “The history of all hitherto existing society (2) is the history of class struggles.įreeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master (3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. The Communist Manifesto: With Seven Rare Prefaces.

The communist manifesto 1848