Who Sold Us This Idea? · Following the ideas of Marxism

The Long Manifesto

Ever since college at the University of Florida, when I spent hours in a far-left bookstore, I have been enamored with the ideas of Marxism. Only when I got a little older did I realize they are ideas to critique. Marxism is a lens, but it is not the only lens. It is a good thing to know, but it is not the only thing to know.

The ideas are genuinely interesting. Marxist thinkers are brilliant on culture: on art, on music, on film. Put into practice, though, the ideas lead to disaster. So I keep coming back to one question: why do these ideas keep recirculating through history?

Intellectuals have always been drawn to the Marxist way of thinking. The ideas are awful when they are implemented, and yet there is something very alluring about them.

Drag the map, or use the arrow keys

Each row is one path the idea took. The blue token is the row you are following; Back and Next step through its stations, and Up and Down switch rows. Dashed lines show where one row fed another.

Countries ruled by a communist party

Counted from the date ranges in Wikipedia's list of communist states: sovereign states whose constitutions named a ruling communist or Marxist-Leninist party (self-described socialist, people's democratic and national democratic states). Soviet Russia and the USSR count as one; Kampuchea and the People's Republic of Kampuchea count as one Cambodia. Short-lived and unrecognized republics are left out. Other rules give slightly different numbers. A country is not a population: China alone outweighs most of the rest. Small dots on the baseline mark the stations of the row you are following. (source 16)

A flop before it was a bibleThe Manifesto sank after 1848 and was almost forgotten for twenty years. Trials, the Paris Commune and a Russian translation of Capital brought it back.

Every country rewrote itMarx expected revolution in industrial countries, made by factory workers. Lenin added a party of professional revolutionaries, Mao swapped in the peasants, Ho Chi Minh joined it to national independence, and Bernstein's heirs dropped revolution altogether.

Moscow was the distributorAfter 1919 the Comintern set the rules for communist parties abroad and paid for many of them. It helped found the Chinese party, split the French left at Tours, and renamed Ho's party. Pol Pot joined the French party that Tours created.

The other side

Marx is not the same as Lenin or Pol Pot. Marx described capitalism; the vanguard party that seized and held power was Lenin's addition, and Lenin himself did not consider the early Soviet state socialist.Britannica on What Is to Be Done?; Wikipedia, List of communist states · sourced, sources 12, 16
The biggest descendant may be the welfare state. The reformist branch of Marx's movement gave up revolution and helped build Europe's social democracies.Wikipedia, Godesberg Program; Social Reform or Revolution? · sourced, sources 4, 26
Communist parties have presided over some of the largest drops in poverty on record: about 800 million people in China and 40 million in Vietnam. Critics answer that both came after those parties adopted markets.Wikipedia, Reform and opening up; IMF · sourced, sources 11, 19
Body counts are disputed. The Black Book of Communism's figure of nearly 100 million was criticized by two of its own contributors, and estimates for the Chinese famine alone range from under 4 million to 55 million.The National Interest; Wikipedia, Great Chinese Famine · sourced, sources 27, 9

Sources

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