“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radical and German police spies.” So opens Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. These bold words certainly captured the times. Written in 1848, his Manifesto proclaimed that Communists would “forcibly overthrow” the existing power structure of society. They would also be fighting history itself, since Marx thought that “historical materialism” was the doctrine that best described how history unfolded.

What is historical materialism? According to Marx, the only correct interpretation of history is an economic one. Historical materialism is the idea that a society's economic structure — whether it be feudalism, capitalism, or Communism — determines the nature of its cultural and social structure. So historical materialism leads to a kind of economic determinism.

Those who control the means of production control the culture, including all moral and religious ideas. It is the capitalists who own the means of production or control the mode of production and thereby control the ideas of humankind. Imagine a capitalist who runs or directs a publishing company. This person is in a position to control the ideas to which people are exposed and hence to influence and direct social and cultural developments. To use another example, the class in power can tolerate the speech and protests of members of the lower classes or they can choose to ignore them.