"Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marx Karl)

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 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, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities
generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an
impulse
never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in
the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production
was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the
growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took
its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the
manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the
different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of
labour in each single workshop.