Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

En resumen, lo que en 1848 tal vez impresionara a un lector sin compromisos como retórica revolucionaria -o, a lo sumo, como una predicción creíble- puede hoy leerse como una concisa caracterización del capitalismo de fines del siglo XX.

...toda la historia de la sociedad [...] es una historia de luchas de clases, de luchas entre clases explotadoras y explotadas, dominantes y dominadas...