Question

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. . . .

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. . . . Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

–The Communist Manifesto,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848

The central idea of this passage is that history is best described as

a conflict between freemen and lords that continues today.
a conflict between the rich and the poor that continues today.
a modern bourgeois society that is less equitable than those of the past.
a feudal society that is more equitable than those of the past.

Answer 1

a conflict between the rich and the poor that continues today.

Explanation: Marx and Engels argue that history is defined by class struggles between oppressor and oppressed, culminating in the modern opposition between the bourgeoisie (owners, rich) and the proletariat (workers, poor).