[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
| I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS |
| II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS |
| III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE |
| IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES |
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers ofold Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope andCzar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic byits opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back thebranding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties,as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself aPower.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the wholeworld, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nurserytale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, andsketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French,German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of classstruggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master andjourneyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition toone another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fightthat each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society atlarge, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicatedarrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of socialrank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in theMiddle 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 societyhas 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 distinctivefeature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is moreand 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 earliesttowns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie weredeveloped.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground forthe rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisationof America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange andin commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, animpulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element