János Kornai János Kornai János Kornai, until 1945 János Kornhauser, (born 21 January 1928) is a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. Kornai studied philosophy for two years at the Pázmány Péter University (now called Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest. He gained his knowledge in economics on his own, and holds a candidate degree in the field from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He wrote that he chose to become an economist after reading Marx's "Das Kapital". He started working on "Szabad Nép," the Hungarian Communist Party newspaper, and rose to
The Communist Manifesto of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself". The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or "proletariat", engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the "bourgeoisie". As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending