can no longer eke out a tolerable existence in their own pursuits, but are lowered to working inhumane hours in these factories. This widens the rift between the upper and lower class-called bourgeois and proletariat, until they are essentially two different worlds. The bourgeois, a tiny portion of the population, has the majority of the wealth while the proletariat, the huge majority, has nothing. It is with this background that Marx, with the collaboration of Engels, prepares a party platform at the request of The Communist League, an organization of workers, now called the Communist Manifesto.First, the topic of the individual and society will discussed. This topic in itself can broken down even further. First, the flaws with the "current" system in respect to the bourgeois and proletariat will be shown, thereby revealing the problems in the relationship between individual and society. Secondly, the way that communism addresses these issues, and the rights of the individual, as seen through the manifesto.Quite clearly, Marx is concerned with the organization of society. He sees that the majority of society, that is the proletariat, are existing in sub-human conditions. Marx also sees that the bourgeoisie has a disproportionate abundance of property and power, and that because of what they are, they abuse it. He writes of how the current situation with the bourgeoisie and proletariat developed. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (9). There have always been struggles between two classes, an upper and lower class. However, Marx speaks of the current order saying, "It [bourgeois] has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. sociality as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps...
