This crucial opening to The Communist Manifesto holds the key to understanding Karl Marx's conception of history. Marx outlines history as a two dimensional, "linear" chain of events. A constant progression of class divisions being created and overthrown, one after the other, until the result is the utopian endpoint, otherwise known as communism.

Karl Marx, in writing the Communist Manifesto, argued that human history unfolds in a teleological manner; therefore it unfolds according to a distinct series of historical stages, each necessarily following the other. These stages ultimately lead to a given Utopian endpoint, after which there will be no more change, an end to history. Marx thought that these stages can be forecasted, because there are scientific laws, which govern the progress of history. He believed to have discovered these laws and with certainty, predicted the demise of capitalism and the success of communism.

According to Marx, the course of human history takes a very specific form, class struggle. The reason for change in the aforementioned historical stages is class animosity. He states, "Hitherto, every form of society

Using these models, Marx explains his account of feudalism's passing in favor of bourgeois capitalism; and his forecast of bourgeois capitalism's passing in favor of proletarian rule. These changes are not the results of random social, economic, and political events. Each change follows the other in a predictable linear succession.

And, so, by an inevitable historical process, "the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange."(57) And each of these has been "accompanied by a corresponding political advance in class."(57) At each new change, whichever class represented and controlled the modes of production were also the city policymakers, organizing the affairs of the state to best suit its conditions. In Marx's words, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie." (57)

So Serfs gave rise to burghers who formed the beginnings of the new bourgeois class. The beginnings of European trade with America and the Far East contributed to the "rapid development" of "the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society"(56). New markets, which became unable to be supported by the feudal systems' means of production, caused that system to be replaced by the "manufacturing system.... The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in a single workshop." (56)

"The history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces agai

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