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
The Communist Manifesto of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself". The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or "proletariat", engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the "bourgeoisie". As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending