Karl Marx, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.1 That sentence is not a slogan; it is a historical thesis, and it carries a precise claim: that the organizing antagonism of every epoch of recorded history has been the conflict between those who appropriate and those who are appropriated from, between oppressor and oppressed.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman — in each case, the two parties stood in constant opposition, carrying on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.2
What distinguishes our own epoch is not the existence of class antagonism — bourgeois society did not abolish that — but its simplification. Modern bourgeois society, which arose from the ruins of feudal society, has not transcended class conflict; it has merely established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old.3
Where earlier societies presented a complicated arrangement of orders and a manifold gradation of social rank, our epoch drives toward a starker geometry: society as a whole splitting more and more into two great hostile camps, two great classes directly facing each other — bourgeoisie and proletariat.4 The struggle does not begin as a political struggle; it begins in the factory, the mine, the workshop, in the daily collision between the buyer and seller of labor-power.
But it cannot remain there. Every class struggle is a political struggle.5 The organization of workers into a class — disrupted repeatedly by competition among the workers themselves, yet rising again each time stronger and more resolute — is simultaneously their organization into a political party.6 The bourgeoisie, in its own battles against the aristocracy, against rival fractions of capital, against foreign competitors, finds it necessary to appeal to the proletariat, to draw it into political action — and in doing so, supplies the proletariat with the very weapons that will be turned against the bourgeoisie itself.7
There is one further movement worth marking. As the class struggle comes to a head, dissolution spreads through the ruling class itself: a part of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, in particular those bourgeois ideologists who have worked out a theoretical understanding of the whole historical development.8 Of all the classes that today confront the bourgeoisie, the proletariat alone is truly revolutionary — the other classes decay and disappear with large-scale industry, while the proletariat is its specific and necessary product.9
Class struggle, then, is not a grievance to be managed or a misunderstanding to be corrected. It is the motor of historical development itself, and its present form is the one in which the stakes are finally universal: the emancipation of the proletariat is the emancipation of humanity, because the proletariat, in abolishing its own conditions of existence, abolishes the conditions for class antagonism altogether.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.The Communist Manifesto
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.The Communist Manifesto
Modern bourgeois society, which arose from the ruins of feudal society, has not transcended class conflict. It has merely established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), pp. 1–2
Society as a whole is tending to split into two great hostile encampments, into two great classes directly and mutually opposed - bourgeoisie and proletariat.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), pp. 1–2
Every class struggle, however, is a political struggle.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), p. 10
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and hence into a political party, is disrupted time and again by competition amongst the workers themselves. But it always rises up again, stronger, more resolute, more powerful.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), p. 10
In all these struggles it finds it necessary to appeal to the proletariat, to enlist its aid, and thus to draw it into political action. Hence it supplies the proletariat with its own materials for development, i.e. weapons for use against the bourgeoisie itself.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), p. 10
Finally at the time when the class struggle comes to a head, the process of dissolution within the ruling class, within the whole of the old society, takes on such a violent and striking character that a part of the ruling class renounces its role and commits itself to the revolutionary class... a part of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, in particular, a part of the bourgeois ideologists who have worked out a theoretical understanding of the whole historical development.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), p. 10
Of all the classes which today oppose the bourgeoisie, the only truly revolutionary class is the proletariat. The other classes come to the fore and then decline to extinction with large-scale industry, whereas the proletariat is its particular product.Manifesto of the Communist Party (with Friedrich Engels), p. 10