The Communist Manifesto | Page 4

by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that
has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the
more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary
adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be
itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the
whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet
this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the
party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in
London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the
English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master
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
re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a
complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold
gradation of social rank. 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.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of
feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but
established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of
struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the
bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has
simplified the class antagonisms: 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.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the
earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the
bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets,
the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the
means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce,
to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby,
to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was
monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing
wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place.

The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing
middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds
vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was
taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle
class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies,
the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an
immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of
industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways
extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased
its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down
from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under
the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing
association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban
republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the
monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture
proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered
for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal,