The Communist Manifesto Ranks Third in Assigned University Texts

(flickr/Kevin Steinhardt)

 

 

The Communist Manifesto is the third-most popular assigned book in universities’ syllabi, according to the Open Syllabus Project.

The Open Syllabus Project was made available to the public on January 22. It gathered over 1 million syllabi published on university websites, and set up a Syllabus Explorer to rank the frequency of assigned texts. The project’s founders describe it as an “effort to make the intellectual judgment embedded in syllabi relevant to broader explorations of teaching, publishing and intellectual history.”

Has America Been Influenced by Communism?

 

Many today ridicule prior generations’ concern over Communist infiltration. But current trends are bringing that concern back into focus.

Imagine the United States allying with Russia. If you were alive when Nazi Germany was rampaging across Europe during World War ii, you didn’t have to imagine it. You saw it: The world’s greatest capitalist nation forged a “strange alliance” with the world’s greatest Communist state, the Soviet Union.

When this happened, a peculiar phenomenon surged across America: a wave of popular emotional fervor for the Soviets.

Influential men and media fawned over Joseph Stalin. President Franklin Roosevelt released Communist Party-U.S.A. leader Earl Browder from prison to promote “national unity” between American Communists and the general public.

Yet even during this trying and confusing time, one strong voice cried out a warning against not only the imminent fascist threat from Germany, but the less-understood Communist threat from the Soviet Union.

Is America’s Economy Being Sovietized?

The foundation of the Soviet model of trade and investment was centralization under the guise of “universal public ownership”. The entire goal of communism in general was not to give more social and political power to the people, but to extinguish alternative options and focus power into the hands of a select few. The process used to reach this end result can vary, but the goal always remains the same. In most cases, such centralization begins with economic hegemony, and it is in our fiscal structure that we have the means to see the future. Sovietization in our financial life will inevitably lead to sovietization in our political life.

Does the U.S. economy’s path resemble the Soviet template exactly? No. And I’m sure the very suggestion will make the average unaware free market evangelical froth at the mouth. However, as I plan to show, the parallels in our fundamentals are disturbing; the reality is that true free markets in America died a long time ago.