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Transcription
The Communist Manifesto discusses the rise of communism and the class struggles in society. It highlights how all European powers view communism as a threat and calls for communists to openly publish their views. The manifesto explains the history of class conflicts and the formation of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. It emphasizes that modern society is divided into two opposing classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The development of commerce, trade, and industry has led to the growth of the bourgeoisie and the decline of feudal society. Okay, I think this is on, so let's start the actual recording now. The Communist Manifesto. Introduction A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. Pope and Tsar, Metternich, French radicals and German police spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not held back the branding reproach of communism against the more advanced opposition parties as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Let's have some soaring music at this point because this is the exciting bit. Two things result from this fact. One, communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. Two, it is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself. To this end, communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. Chapter 1 – Bourgeois and Proletarians The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster 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 the 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, plebeians, slaves. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guildmasters, 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 distinctive feature that 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 burgers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses, the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opening up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie, the East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization 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.
