The Communist Manifesto · Concept
Class struggle
Marx and Engels open with the claim that history is the history of class struggles — a lens the Manifesto applies to modern bourgeois society.
The Communist Manifesto begins by replacing moral sermon with conflict: freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, guildmaster and journeyman, until bourgeoisie and proletariat define the present. Class struggle is not an occasional riot but the motor of legal change, family form, and ideology. Each ruling class reshapes the state in its interest; each new order carries the seeds of its antagonist.
For readers in 1848 and after, the point was urgency. Europe’s revolutions needed a vocabulary that tied factory conditions to historical pattern. The Manifesto’s famous opening lines train students to ask who benefits from “freedom” and “nation,” not whether conflict exists. Link this concept to Section I’s account of bourgeois revolutions and to Section IV’s address to communists as party actors within ongoing struggle.