In a spirit of boredom, I have decided to modify a small portion of the Communist Manifesto. Maybe the sharper among you can guess whose voice it is 'speaking'. The modification is in brackets.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

[Oh, you're such a drama queen!}

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-masterand journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another

[It takes more muscles to frown than smile!]

, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

[Me, me, me, that's all you talk about]

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.

[Stop whining!]

In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

[You'd be happier if you lightened up!]

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.

[Just get over it! It's not that crucial!]

It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

[Happiness is a state of mind!]