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,