文档介绍：MANIFESTO OF MUNIST PARTY
MANIFESTO OF THE
COMMUNIST PARTY
edited by Friedrich Engels
Transcribed by allen lutins with assistance from
Jim Tarzia
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MANIFESTO OF MUNIST PARTY
CHAPTER 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 mon 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 clash 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,
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MANIFESTO OF MUNIST PARTY
the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the incre