Free The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

CHAPTER I.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS .
    *By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the
means of social production, and employers of wage labour; by
proletariat the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means
of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in
order to live.
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    The history of all hitherto existing society 1 is the history of class struggles.
    1
That is, all written history. In 1837, the pre-history of society, the
social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but
unknown. Since then Haxthausen discovered common ownership of
land in Russia; 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 from India to Ireland. The inner organization of
this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by
Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its
relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval
communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and
finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of
dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
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    Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-masters 2 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.
    2
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.
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    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 colonization 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, in which industrial production was monopolized 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 aside 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 revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires- the