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

In this passage, the authors imply that the proletariat have the same role in society as which other classes in history? Check all that apply.

freemen
slaves
plebians
lords
serfs

Answer 1

slaves, plebians (plebeians), serfs

Explanation: Marx and Engels pair the bourgeoisie/proletariat with past oppressor/oppressed relationships; the proletariat correspond to the oppressed groups (slaves, plebeians, serfs), not to the ruling freemen or lords.