The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx

"The great corruption of Socialism … calls itself Fascism in Italy, Nationalism Socialism in Germany, New Deal in the United States, and is clever enough to remain nameless in England; but everywhere it means the same thing: Socialist production and Unsocialist distribution." --George Bernard Shaw

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Written in flowing and forceful prose, The Manifesto evokes some of the most emotive images ever penned by political man. It remains a classic among objective students of politics today. "A specter is haunting Europe --" the document begins, "– the specter of Communism."

Although The Manifesto outlines the theory of Communism rather than Socialism, the two philosophies derive from a common paradigmatic source. They contend that human behavior is primarily social (rather than individual) in nature, that history describes the movement of the relationship between the Haves and the Have Nots, and that the ideal state controls the production of goods and services. "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties," Marx writes, "formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."

Marx was born in Trier, in Germany, in 1818. The idea of economic centralization did not originate with him, but he is undoubtedly its most famous articulator. That economic matters exert a strong, and perhaps even dominant, influence on individuals, and that in capitalist economies a gap exists between rich and poor, are incontestable truths, and Marx explained these phenomena as no one else before him or after. The validity of the explanations Marx offered should be questioned, but the genius of his mind cannot be.

Intuition tells, and historical practice has confirmed, that centralizing the locus of economic decision making inevitably leads to the monopolization of political power and the forcing on society as a whole the preferences of a small elite.