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Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, 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.

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, plebians, 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 class 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
distinct feature: it has simplified 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.