s.
Beginning with the statement, "The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles,"[7] the Manifesto treats at
length the modern struggle between the working class and the capitalist
class. After tracing the rise of capitalism, the development of a new
working class, and the consequences to the people of the new economic
order, Marx and Engels outline the program of the communists and their
relation to the then existing working-class organizations and political
parties. They deny any intention of forming a new sect, declaring that
they throw themselves whole-heartedly into the working-class movement of
all countries, with the one aim of encouraging and developing within
those groups a political organization for the conquest of political
power. They outline certain measures which, in their opinion, should
stand foremost in the program of labor, all of them having to do with
some modification of the institution of property.

In order to achieve these reforms, and eventually "To wrest, by degrees,
all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of
production in the hands of the State,"[8] they urge the formation of
labor parties as soon as proper preparations have been made and the time
is ripe for effective class action. All through the Manifesto runs the
motif that every class struggle is a political struggle. Again and
again Marx and Engels return to that thought in their masterly survey of
the historical conflicts between the classes. They show how the
bourgeoisie, beginning as "an oppressed class under the sway of the
feudal nobility," gradually ... "conquered for itself, in the modern
representative State, exclusive political sway," until to-day "the
executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."[9] Tracing the rise of the modern
working class, they tell of its purely retaliative efforts against the
capitalists; how at first "they smash to pieces machinery, they set
factories ablaze"; how they fight in "incoherent" masses, "broken up by
their mutual competition";[10] even their unions are not so much a
result of their conscious effort as they are the consequence of
oppression. Furthermore, the workers "do not fight their enemies, but
the enemies of their enemies."[11] "Now and then the workers are
victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies
not in the immediate result, but in the ever-