Question

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle...[in our time], society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing one another.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto" (1848)

According to Marx and Engels, the great class struggle of their time was:

Answer 1

Marx and Engels identified the great class struggle of their time as being between the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, the workers they exploited. They predicted that this would lead to a proletariat uprising and the establishment of a communist society.

Step-by-step explanation:

According to Marx and Engels, the great class struggle of their time was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, or the capital-owning class, owned the means of production, such as factories, mines, and railroads, while the proletariat comprised the workers whose labor was exploited by the bourgeoisie.

The broad narrative proposed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto conceptualized history as a series of class struggles, culminating in their era with a fundamental conflict arising from the economic systems of capitalism. They theorized that the class struggle would lead to the proletariat's uprising, with the eventual goal of establishing a classless and stateless society known as communism.

Marx and Engels predicted the inevitable fall of capitalism and replacement by socialism, an interim phase before realizing full communism, where both property and means of production would be owned in common by the public instead of private individuals or companies.