The Communist Manifesto Engels in their youth—that he opposed for its violent Blanquist tendencies, and later "mature" Marxism that he supported. This latter form refers to Marx in his later life acknowledging that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means through legislative reform in democratic societies. Bernstein declared that the massive and homogeneous working-class claimed in the "Communist Manifesto" did not exist, and that contrary to claims of a proletarian majority emerging, the middle-class was growing under capitalism and not disappearing as Marx had claimed. Bernstein noted that the working-class was not homogeneous but heterogeneous, with divisions and factions within it, including socialist
The Communist Manifesto and non-socialist trade unions. Marx himself, later in his life, acknowledged that the middle-class was not disappearing in his work "Theories of Surplus Value" (1863). The obscurity of the later work means that Marx's acknowledgement of this error is not well known. George Boyer described the "Manifesto" as "very much a period piece, a document of what was called the 'hungry' 1840s." Many have drawn attention to the passage in the "Manifesto" that seems to sneer at the stupidity of the rustic: "The bourgeoisie ... draws all nations ... into civilisation ... It has created enormous cities ... and thus