The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in aword, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on anuninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionaryreconstitution 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 societyinto 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 doneaway with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
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* By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers ofwage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, arereduced to selling their labour power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
† That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recordedhistory, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land inRussia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history,and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere fromIndia to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, byLewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. Withthe dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonisticclasses. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, secondedition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]
‡Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]
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Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it hassimplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two greathostile 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 theseburgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the risingbourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with thecolonies, 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 revolutionaryelement in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds,now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing systemtook 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 labourin each single workshop
