Communism, Rising and Falling

From : Dissent Magazine

Photo : http://dissentmagazine.org/

The Red Flag: A History of CommunismBy David PriestlandGrove Press, 2009
The Rise and Fall of CommunismBy Archie Brown,Harper Collins, 2009
Zhivago’s Children: The Last IntelligentsiaBy Vladislav Zubok,Harvard University Press, 2009.





A RUSSIAN JOKE begins with the following question: “What is communism?” To which the joke gives a simple answer: “Communism is the longest path from capitalism to capitalism.” This joke, in its exploitation of the ironies implicit in communism’s long decline, could only have been told after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The sharpest of these ironies is that communism could be the historical midwife of capitalism. But in a similar contortion of theoretical logic, communism—which, for Marx, was rigorously internationalist— has also served as an agent of nationalism. In its rise and fall, from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, communism was “most successful when it could enmesh itself within local nationalisms,” as David Priestland writes in his new survey, The Red Flag.





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