History of Hitherto

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 capitalist society that 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 capitalists, 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: Capitalist and Proletariat.