2024年3月27日发(作者：乾致)

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 Czar,

Metternich and Guizot, 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 the Opposition that has not hurled back the

branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties,

as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a

Power.

II. 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.

I. 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, 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.

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, 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 clash 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: it 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 burghers of the

earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were

developed.

2024年3月27日发(作者：乾致)

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 Czar,

Metternich and Guizot, 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 the Opposition that has not hurled back the

branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties,

as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a

Power.

II. 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.

I. 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, 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.

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, 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 clash 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: it 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 burghers of the

earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were

developed.