Part 1 — Bourgeois and Proletarians

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. The claim is stated plainly in the first sentence and the rest of Part 1 is its working out. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman — the pairs change costume, but the structure persists: oppressor and oppressed, in constant opposition, in 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 epoch has simplified this struggle to two great hostile camps: bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The bourgeoisie's origins are traced from the burghers of medieval towns, through the merchant adventurers of the colonial trade, through the manufacturing system, to the modern industrial capitalist. And here the Manifesto makes its strangest move: it celebrates the bourgeoisie at length. The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary part. It has accomplished wonders surpassing Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts. It has melted all that is solid into air, all that is holy has been profaned. It has drawn even the most barbarian nations into civilisation through the cheap prices of its commodities. The tone is not regret. It is recognition — and the recognition is the indictment, because a class that cannot stop revolutionising everything cannot expect its own relations to survive.

The proletariat is then introduced as the bourgeoisie's direct product. A class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. Defined by propertylessness, not poverty. Concentrated in factories, connected by railways and the press, organised through trade combinations and strikes almost without willing it. Part 1 closes with the sentence the rest of the Manifesto builds toward: the bourgeoisie has produced, above all, its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.