Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined, in their work, the Communist Manifesto, the term class conflict as "athe idea that the social order is divided into classes based on conflicting economic interests." They cited such historical examples as "freeman and slave, patrician and phleban (aristocrat and commoner, in the ancient world), lord and serf, guild-master (master craftsman) and journeyman (who worked for a guild-master), in a word, oppressor and oppressed." According to the Manifesto, the …showed first 75 words of 374 total…

…showed last 75 words of 374 total…be: The class with the majority of wealth has the rule. Despite the genuine intellect of the theory, Karl Marx's predictions of the Communist Manifesto have not come to pass. I believe there is a multitude of reason for the failure of the predictions, including the overwhelming power and appeal of the capitalist system, man's diverse phychological makeup within the classes themselves, making the causal basis of the commumist theory to be basically over simplistic.