The history of all hitherto existing society 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 reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The industrial capitalists, for example, are now everywhere waging a war of extermination against the working-class, which sometimes takes the form of a direct war of the poor against the rich, but sometimes assumes the form of a war of the rich against the poor (the form it has just now assumed in England). The working-class is also becoming more and more organised, is gradually forming great trade-unions, which act as its State within the State. The struggle between the two classes is becoming more acute, and may at any moment take the most violent forms.