This book has the secondary title ‘A History of the Intellectual and Political Movement’, which sums it up quite nicely. It starts by looking at Communist theory and taught me something in the first few pages. I knew the Ancient Greeks gave us democracy. I didn’t know that they also had the idea of a classless, egalitarian society where land and produce belonged to the community. So, under other circumstances, they could have given us Communism, too. I also learned the similarities and differences between Communism and Anarchism, both of which saw revolution as the only way to change the status quo.
‘Communism’ looks at the origins of the movement with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and its adoption by Lenin. Lenin is revealed as a man driven by hatred of the system in Tsarist Russia. His hatred is understandable, his actions are unforgiveable and make him no better than Joseph Stalin, whose purges are well covered. The Soviet Union’s aim of a communist world led to their involvement in the regimes of many countries, all of which had to adopt Communism as the price of receiving Soviet support. The book explains why every country that has tried a Communist regime has had to resort to dictatorship and oppression of its people.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Communism as an ideology has been in retreat. In 2015, there are only five countries that are ostensibly Communist – China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. China, Cuba and Vietnam have had to adapt their version of Communism to fit the world’s prevailing economic structure, incorporating aspects of the capitalist system that Marx rejected. North Korea and Laos maintain their regimes through tight controls on their people.
So far, no communist regime has managed to last for a century, which seems to indicate that the system is inherently flawed. This book is an easy read and a good introduction to the political movement.
