In their Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write: The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads despotischer Eingriffe on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production. It is a striking passage that puts especially sharply a point they drive home over the course of their preceding dialogue with an imagined bourgeois interlocutor. That interlocutor repeatedly challenges communism on the...