All recorded history is fundamentally a history of class struggle

Marx and Engels open with the claim that every society with recorded history has been organized around a division between an oppressing and an oppressed class — from ancient slaveholders and slaves, to feudal lords and serfs, to the modern relationship between capital owners and wage laborers — and that this ongoing conflict, not ideas or great individuals alone, is the real engine driving historical change.

Their argument treats political and legal structures, religious institutions, and cultural norms as ultimately shaped by and serving the interests of whichever class holds economic power in a given era, rather than existing as neutral or independent forces above the economic conflict. Ideas, in this reading, tend to reflect and justify existing material arrangements more than they independently determine them.

This framing sets up the pamphlet's larger argument: capitalism isn't a final, natural resting point for human society but simply the latest stage in a much longer historical sequence of class conflicts, each of which eventually gave way to the next. History moves because groups with opposing material interests are constantly, structurally in conflict — not because ideas evolve on their own.