The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848)

A spectre is haunting Europe, the pamphlet announces in its first breath, and the line still carries the thrill of something about to happen. What follows is not the screed a reader braces for. Before Marx and Engels indict the bourgeoisie, they praise it, marveling at a class that has torn down every ancient wall, dissolved every fixed relation, profaned everything once held holy, and conjured in a single century more wealth than all the ages before it. The famous verdict, all that is solid melts into air, is delivered almost with wonder. That is the strange power of these fifty pages: they make the world they condemn thrilling to behold, then argue that its own restless engine has built, in the worker, the force that will end it. The prescription has been fought over for nearly two centuries. The portrait of a world that cannot stop dissolving its own ground has been harder to wave away. It closes on a summons that still lifts the hair on your neck: you have nothing to lose but your chains.