Bourgeoisie and proletariat
Manifesto Of The Communists
Bourgeoisie And Proletariat
The History of Society in the past is the history of class struggles. Freemen and slaves, patricians and plebians, nobles and serfs, guild members and journeymen - in short, oppressors and oppressed, have always stood in direct opposition to each other. The struggle between them has sometimes been open, sometimes concealed, but always continuous. A never ceasing struggle, which has invariably ended, either in a revolutionary alteration of the social system, or in the common destruction of the contending classes.
In earlier historical epochs we find almost everywhere a minute division of society into classes or castes - a variety of grades in social life. In Ancient Rome we find patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in Mediaeval Europe, feudal lords, vassals, burghers, journeymen, serfs; and in each of these classes there were again grades and distinctions.
Modern bourgeois society which arose from the ruins of the feudal system has not wiped out the antagonism of classes. New classes, new conditions of oppression, new modes and forms of carrying on the struggle, have been substituted for the old ones. The characteristic of our epoch - the epoch of the bourgeois, or middle class - is that the struggle between the various social classes has been reduced to its simplist form. Society tends more and more to be divided into two great hostile classes - the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat.*
*'Bourgeoisie' is a synonym of the propertied class - the Capitalist: proletariat means the propertyless class – the working people and others.