The Communist Manifesto German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels authored The Communist Manifesto an infamous pamphlet that explained the goals of communism along with the theory behind the political movement They argued that a communist revolution was bound to happen because of the repetitive class struggles between the oppressors and the oppressed They further argued that the exploitation of one class by another is the driving force behind all historical developments According to Marx and Engels class relationships are correlated to an era s means of production They continued to argue however that with time these relationships would lose compatibility with the developing forces of production thus leading to a political uprising where the oppressed class frees itself from the oppressors leading to a new class developing and emerging as the ruling one Marx and Engels believed that this would eventually lead to the future freedom for all of society In the era The Communist Manifesto was written the proletarians were laborers who made up the lower class while the bourgeoisie were typically employers of the laborers who made up the middle class The manifesto argued that the capitalist bourgeoisie callously exploited and oppressed the proletarians and proposed communism as a tactic to combat the class struggles and exploitation that existed within society Marx and Engels believed that a communist system would diminish the differences between the classes by means of a revolution
