workingclasshistory:

On this day, 21 February 1848, the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was published. Translated into over 200 languages, and widely read by workers across the world, it remains one of the most influential texts ever written. Its chapter 1 begins with a note on history:
“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 modern bourgeois [capitalist] 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.”
You can get a modern edition of it here, with an introduction by historian Eric Hobsbawm: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/books/products/the-communist-manifesto-a-modern-edition-karl-marx-and-frederick-engels https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1656670041184806/?type=3