Originally posted by normbenign
I've read and understood every word of the English translation. If you read German, and can show me differences by all means.
That is an ambitious claim for you to make. I would not dare to say the same of myself, knowing something of the scale of Marx's writing and the degree to which one source has to be cross checked against others, because Marx never actually did resolve his account of class, using the concept in diverse ways. The only place where he attempted a systematic analysis of class was in Volume Three of Capital, where he identified three classes in capitalist society - wage earners, capitalists and landowners. But then,
as you clearly know having read and understood every word of it, he died and this volume was never completed. So we have to root around other sources to clarify the matter. However, as you refer to the Communist Manifesto, here is the relevant section and a link to the full text:
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, 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.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It 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 distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Which of these
two great hostile camps is the middle class? (There is a clue in the question)