Book review: Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism", by Kuusinen et al.

Astral Codex Ten book review entry

Well, the summer pause was longer than I anticipated due to university studies and various other things. I plan to start writing again the next year, but for now, I’m posting something I should have posted a long time ago: my entry to the Astral Codex Ten book review context, so as to not have to refer to a cumbersome Google Docs every time I want to refer to it. While not winning any mentions in the contest itself, I’ve seen some comments stating they appreciated the entry, so at least something positive has come out of it.

Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism", by Kuusinen et al.

Reading a book like this is the opposite of watching a movie with a twist for the first time. In Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, the audience knows what the twist is. The authors—a committee of committed communists working on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the late fifties—did not.

Out of the big modern ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, communism has been the most insistent in codifying its beliefs to a creedal form. Not in short creeds like the Christian churches but in large, extensive volumes of texts meant to serve as the one-stop shop where anyone, a current or potential believer or even an opponent, can quickly check what, exactly, it is that these communists believe. And that was indeed the intent of this book, first published in 1960 and revised in 1963.

One reason for this codification was the party structure. In communist parties, you weren't a mere activist but a militant. Party cadres were issued specific agendas with tight schedules—sell papers at three, Organizing Committee at six, and discussion circles on Saturdays. For these discussions, you needed text in an easy-to-chew format.

A book like this would not only elucidate the party's view or as a part of an ideological debate; it would be an educator that would be accessible to the broad party masses, telling them what to think on every issue. Not every issue, as "it need hardly be said that one book cannot encompass all the wealth of Marxism-Leninism. This book deals only with its fundamentals" (p. 15), but the ones considered significant.

Eight hundred pages of dry text is not an easy feat to chew. Once chewed, though, it would arm you with arguments for every opponent, not least the small voice inside your head that might question why you are a member of a movement like this.

Those who are not members will ask why we should even care. A book like this does not even seem to deserve a debunking. It might still be, amazingly enough, used as study material by recluse cells of Marxist-Leninist micro sects. Most of the rest of us, though, would consider history itself enough evidence against as much as cracking it open. Even in countries where movements declaring themselves Marxist-Leninists still rule or form a considerable political force, the studied texts would likely be of domestic origin.

This, then, is a vantage point to an ideology at its arguable apogee, soon facing an eventual downslide and then a crash but currently confident that its victory was at hand. It's a book that's wrong, but anyone sharing a mindset as sure of its victory might heed well to take stock of why and how it's wrong—and why there are still people who would share this mindset.

After the first section, this review is divided into five sections that share names with the five parts of the book, though they also cover other subjects than those discussed in the particular part under review. The page numbers for the direct quotes refer to a version of the book that is accessible in the Internet Archive here.

THE APOGEE OF COMMUNISM

In 1960, a vastly more significant amount subscribed to the beliefs outlined in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. Hundreds of millions of people held a genuine belief in the superiority of communism to capitalism. As the book says, "today, the socialist camp embraces percent of the world's population, i.e., about one thousand million people." (p. 322)

The Soviet Union had already pulled itself together after the Second World War and had dramatically announced its head start in the space race by launching Sputnik. Dozens of countries were officially Marxist-Leninist, with economies being run entirely or almost entirely by the state, with that state ruled by the local Communist Party.

In the background, the stage was being set for the coming twist. Khruschev's secret speech exposing Stalin's crimes had circulated. While communists could still speak of Stalin's "outstanding abilities as an organizer and theoretician, iron will-power, implacability in fighting the enemy," it is also said that "Stalin's character possessed other features—rudeness, intolerance of the opinions of others, a morbid suspiciousness, petulance" and that "Stalin carried centralization to the extreme, concentrated excessive power in his own hands and violated the principle of collective leadership which is inherent in Communist Parties." (p. 229).

Insofar as the rest of the world cared, the Soviet Union and the PRC were still mighty friends, forming two pillars of a united block that held a third of the world's population. Behind the scenes, the Sino-Soviet Split was taking place. The actual expected audience of the book, the working-class communist sympathizer, did not yet have a view behind the scenes, nor did they care much if the Communists had to break a few thousand eggs to make omelets, like in Hungary in 1956.

And the Cold War-era Western communist parties, apart from the English-speaking countries, tended to be very working-class-based. "The Italian Communist Party, for example, consists of 44.6 percent workers, 18.6 percent agricultural laborers, 13.4 percent sharecroppers, 5.3 percent small peasants, and 5.6 percent handicraftsmen. The French Communist Party has 40.3 percent workers, 5 percent agricultural labourers, 8.2 percent peasants, and 12.2 percent office employees. Of the Communists of Finland, 85.5 percent are workers" (p. 411), the book states.

Whether those numbers are correct or not, they still point in the right direction. The middle-class types were a minor factor in the mass communist parties on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though they started getting more prominent in the 70s.

Here are some notable names leading communist countries and their professions before politics: Nikita Khrushchev was a metalworker, as was Władysław Gomułka, the general secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Walter Ulbricht of the German Democratic Republic was a joiner. Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Josip Broz Tito, was a machinist. The same applied to the Western communist parties. Maurice Thorez, the longtime leader of the Communist Party of France, was a miner, for example.

"The relations between these classes always remain antagonistic, based on conflicting interests. The capitalist, for example, is interested in compelling the worker to produce as much as possible while paying him as little as possible. The worker, naturally, is interested in exactly the opposite." (p. 188) Such words would have been very understandable to a worker of this era and, of course, to many workers of the current era. Communism seemed to solve this contradiction: no capitalists, no antagonism.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE MARXIST-LENINIST WORLD OUTLOOK

We might thus expect the book to start with a description of the struggle between the working class and the capitalists. It doesn't. It will get there eventually, but instead, the book starts describing two philosophical outlooks: "The history of philosophy is the history of the struggle between these two camps, these two parties in philosophy—materialism and idealism." (p. 25)

The side of idealism represents religion, all the various “bourgeois philosophies” from positivism to existentialism (with Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, among others, mentioned as examples of such ideological perversions), to theoretical physics. The concept of an ever-expanding universe, for example? That's just Catholic neo-scholasticism—automatically false.

During this time, anti-communists in the West would have frequently been religious. Organizations like the John Birch Society or the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe strongly promoted the idea of godless communism. Even so, throughout the book, religion is treated less as the most concrete of enemies but as something that is already outmoded, not something a serious person would believe, as “science has conclusively shown the untenability of such fantasies. There is no place for God in the true, scientific conception of the world. The eighteenth-century French astronomer Joseph Lalande remarked that he had searched the skies but did not find any God there." (p. 39)

Materialism, on the other hand, is a simple yet powerful doctrine. The world is real; what you experience is what is, and the universe observes laws fundamentally understandable to science. Objective truth exists, is verifiable by observation, and is comprehensible to the human mind, as "man's cognition is all-powerful. It has no bounds, no limits." (p. 126). There's no space for any postmodernity in such declarations. And, of course, all this leads to the triumph of communism as the final form of ideology, with the endpoint of any logical materialist being joining the Communist Party to build socialism and then communism.

…what? Isn't that a bit, well, underpants gnomes? At the time, the presumed reader would not have conceived it that way. The connection between the materialist mindset and Marxism-Leninism was thought of as solid, so strong that for many people, after concluding that God and other supernatural things do not exist, becoming a communist was only the logical next step. Marxism was ready to present itself as the ultimate science and as something useful for them, especially if they were proletarians by class or bourgeois offspring looking to rebel against their parents.

The book explains why some would not: "In our day the reactionary bourgeoisie does not burn progressive scientists and philosophers at the stake. But it has other means of exerting pressure on them: dismissal from universities and scientific institutions, factual deprival of opportunities to publish their works, moral and political discrediting, etc. (…) By these methods and by the propaganda of reactionary ideology, the ruling class "conditions" people's minds, instilling ideas it wants them to accept and obstructing the spread of progressive, materialist ideas." (p. 24) Still, the ones who joined figured such cancel culture efforts could surely not hinder an ideology whose time has come.

THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

In the 1950s, the Marxist-Leninists could still claim a mighty ideological power: the power of prediction, that “crucial developments in the first half of the century thus provide irrefutable proof that the Communists, armed with the Marxist theory, on the whole, correctly predicted the general course of history.” (p. 19) They believed this power was granted to them by the correct understanding of dialectic materialism, particularly its contradictions.

Marxist-Leninist understanding of the processes of historical development goes through contradictions between two societal or material forces, leading to the resolution of this contradiction one way or another in a way that creates something new. Particularly important are antagonistic contradictions, like the one between workers, who want a larger share of the fruits of their labor, and capitalists, who want a larger share of the profits created by that work. As such contradictions resolve themselves and society progresses to greater and greater levels, the forms of society must change.

"Marxists have on several occasions predicted events many years in advance of their occurrence, such as the victory of national-liberation movements in the colonies and the dependent countries, the victory of the revolution in China, the destruction of the fascist regime in Germany, the victory of the democratic countries headed by the U.S.S.R. in the Second World War, and many others. (…) On the other hand, the countless prophecies of bourgeois politicians and sociologists about the inevitable collapse of socialism, a great revival of capitalism, and so on have proved a disgraceful fiasco", the book proclaims, before adding "Such will be the fate, too, of the many hysterical babblers of the present day who shout about the "crisis of communism" and foretell the "destruction of human culture."" (p. 181)

Fate decreed otherwise. The national liberation movements in colonies and the dependent countries gave birth to regimes more concerned with staying on the West's good side than opposing it. The revolution's victory in China led to China turning on the Soviet Union and then transforming itself into a non-democratic national social democracy. The same applied to many Communist parties in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, with European parties succumbing to reformism and postcolonial ones becoming apolitical parties of power. The workers began leaving the parties of the workers, turning towards nationalism or simple consumption.

For some time, communism could survive with new appeals to young radicals. They, too, eventually started to increasingly find new muses that were more alluring. New Left members tended to get heavily disenchanted with Marxism-Leninism after noting that the boring bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits, like Khrushchev, Gomułka, and Thorez, were, actually, quite similar to the boring bourgeois bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits doing the same in their own systems, especially when students wearing similarly fashionable clothes and carrying similar slogans of socialism with a human face on placards were getting beaten up by riot police and soldiers in both Prague and Chicago at the same time in 1968.

Throughout the Soviet Union's existence, plenty of people in the West and elsewhere believed that the Soviet Union was just a tragic mistake, as all reasonable men see progress the same way—democracy, liberalism, moderate though continuous reform. Since it was apparent all that Bolshevik stuff was just a silly and inefficient way to get there, surely, at some point, the Bolsheviks would realize the error in their ways and change courses. Thus, they would peacefully join the community of Western nations, and all would be well.

This shines through, for instance, in H. G. Wells's famous interview with Stalin. Wells keeps trying to confirm that surely Stalin must see things the rational way, in other words, in the way of H. G. Wells. Stalin replies by quite directly confirming that he does not see it thus.

Still, eventually, those finally taking the place that Stalin and his lieutenants once held—Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and their respective henchmen—did indeed see their previous beliefs as a mistake and adopt reformism. This, in turn, meant the fall of the whole Soviet Union, and Russia momentarily joined the community of Western nations. It simply happened much later than many liberals and social democrats believed it would and after many events that may or may not have contributed to this realization. And the eventual results may not have been quite what they hoped for.

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CAPITALISM

Today, many consider capitalism synonymous with the free market. Those who ideologically define themselves as "capitalist" would certainly prefer to do so. A frequent argument is that the current systems, with their considerable state intervention in all aspects of the economy and society, are something else, like corporatism or even socialism or fascism. This amusingly mirrors the stereotypical modern-day communist argument that the Soviet Union "did not represent communism."

However, Marxist-Leninists consider such a definition wrongheaded. To communists, state intervention was not only part and parcel of the capitalism they opposed; they, quite understandably for the 1950s, considered the present term of capitalism to include increasingly more and more of it. The term for the ideological process of the era was "state-monopoly capitalism," often later shortened to stamocap.

As the book describes it, "a particularly important feature of modern state-monopoly capitalism is the creation of a substantial state market in the form of government orders, allocations for the purchase of surpluses, etc. (…) An ever-increasing part of the National revenue in the form of direct and indirect taxes is concentrated in the hands of the state and redistributed in favor of the monopolies." (p. 327)

Despite this intervention, the natural tendency of capitalism to lead to greater and greater ruin for small producers and the natural tendency of the rate of profit to fall was considered to apply. “The tendency towards a worsened position of the working class as capitalism develops, discovered by Marx, continues to operate at the present day. Opponents of Marxism (…) attempt to show that history does not corroborate Marx’s theory and that modern capitalism opens up unlimited prospects for the improvement of workers’ conditions.” (p. 291)

And yet, capitalism still stands and the predicted tendencies were reversed. Currently, only leftist historians would recognize the word "stamocap." The neoliberal turn in the late 1970s led, at least on a rhetorical level, to a turn away from state intervention to the lionization of competition. It turned out that when "many bourgeois economists, recognizing that monopolies hold up technological progress, have called for a return to the era of free competition," it couldn't be refuted by saying that "Lenin showed how completely unfounded were such hopes for a return to the past.” (p. 309)

During this time, the Soviet economy appeared to be growing in leaps and bounds. "As a result of fulfilling its economic plans, the Soviet Union already in 1965 will surpass the present (1958-59) total output of some key items in the United States and approach the U.S. level of output of other items." (p. 848), the book could predict confidently, even if those numbers, as well, have been questioned later on.

Again, we know the twist. While Khrushchev attempted some reforms, such as "giving the collective farms the right themselves to plan their production, abolition of obligatory deliveries to the state and the change-over to a system of purchases of farm produce, and the sale of machinery to the collective farms" (p. 811), the Soviet economy ended up in deeper and deeper stages of sclerosis as the American economy reached new heights.

Eventually, inevitably, faith in planning then ended. When, during Gorbachev's times, the socialist state was seen even by CPSU members "as an unnecessary bureaucratic excrescence on the social body, which [revisionists] allege, impedes free economic development" (p. 698), free-market liberalism seemed like a natural option. (Its failure in post-Soviet Russia is another story.)

When people think about an equivalent figure for capitalism as Vladimir Lenin for communism, they will often think about another person who lived in St. Petersburg in 1917 and who, very briefly, could have theoretically met Lenin. Alissa Rosenbaum, who would soon flee the revolution with her family to Odessa and eventually to America, took there the name she is better known as—Ayn Rand.

The writer of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged considered herself the opposite of the communists in almost every way. Nevertheless, in many other ways, her ideology shares essential points with Marxism-Leninism. Rand conceived herself as a strong materialist, with a clear image of a world explainable through human reason and modifiable human action, with no room for supernatural explanations for anything. Her worldview, in its black-and-whiteness, has provided moral clarity for many modern atheists who didn't want to get stuck in postmodernity in the same way as Marxism-Leninism has supplied to numerous others and still provides to some.

If one has internalized the logic of Marxism vis-a-vis there being a process of societal change from primitive societies to the classical slavery-based system, then feudalism and serfdom, then capitalism, and then socialism and communism, and one then concludes that socialism and communism are entirely untenable, it would become completely logical for them to become as strident a supporter of capitalism as you can, as that would be as good as it gets. Ayn Rand had not been a Marxist-Leninist at any point, but having grown up in the same milieu, it may not be entirely accidental that her ideology is tailor-made for such a turn.

THEORY AND TACTICS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST MOVEMENT

While Rand's books had already been published, they get zero mentions in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. It was a movement considerably to the left of Rand that would draw the most ire, at least the most after the “idealists”. These would be the "revisionists" or "right-wing socialists", social democrats who had chosen to side with the West in the Cold War.

When communism was still going strong, there was a dividing line on the left: you subscribed to Marxism-Leninism with all its features, in which case you were a communist, or you didn't, in which case you probably joined the country's main social-democratic party, even though “there is no “third” way between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between reaction and democracy. The Right-wing Social-Democrats demonstrate it very clearly themselves by actually co-operating with the bourgeois reactionary circles.” (p. 451)

The book is quick to add that they do not mean all social democrats, stating that “Left-wing socialists not infrequently display political inconsistency, but in any event they are the most progressive section of Social-Democracy." (p. 457) However, historically, the acceptability of the left wing of social democracy and its fit under the rubric of revisionism has waxed and waned considerably during the decades.

Among the sins of revisionism, perhaps even more important than affinity for capitalism is a supposed love for nationalism. Communism has always fashioned itself as an internationalist movement. As the book describes, "Without internationalism, without the united efforts of the workers of all countries, it is impossible to defeat the world bourgeoisie and build a new society." (p. 37)

At one time, this did not only mean that it was a movement whose power was spread through a wide variety of nations and regions. It also referred to the Communist International, the organization was meant to formally be a super party above all other parties, uniting communists the world over.

During the Stalinist era it was run down, as "the increased political maturity of the Communist Parties made the existence of a world communist organisation of the previous type superfluous." (p. 437) To Leon Trotsky and his followers, this was not just a random tactical decision but one of the things signaling the betrayal of the entire revolution. Even if one disagrees with Trotsky, it did signal the beginning of a turn from Soviet self-conception as the beacon of revolution to a country among countries with its geopolitical interests.

These geopolitical interests did not always meet with the interests of other communist countries. According to the book, it was not accidental that the “most poisonous flowers of revisionism blossom in the nationalist morass. (…) They pretend that there is a recipe for communism that is fully compatible with national isolation and exclusiveness, that can allegedly be built by a country standing apart from other socialist countries and even being in hostility to them, renouncing all loyalty to the principles of proletarian internationalism and class solidarity." (p. 774)

At this point, this was a direct reference to Tito's Yugoslavia, which, after a short while of cooperating with the other communist countries, soon split from them over regional issues and grew closer to the West. The same was attempted by leaderships in both Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the impetus for reforms that eventually culminated into a break had come from nationally-minded communists who did not mind the socialism thing but felt their country chafed in a Soviet leash.

Instead of improper, revisionist nationalism or bourgeois cosmopolitism, the book promotes a good, progressive nationalism that is fully compatible with socialism. "The nations and national consciousness in the countries of Asia and Africa are being formed in the struggle against imperialism and feudalism (…) All this imparts to the nationalism of the contemporary East a democratic, progressive content” (p. 493) as the national liberation movements of the Third World are described.

However, national sovereignty from American rule is also used in appeals to Europeans: "For the financial oligarchy of the U.S.A., cosmopolitism has proved the best way of disguising its struggle for world supremacy and for doing away with the independence of other states. For the West European monopolists, it has become a convenient excuse for their betrayal of the national interests, for their bargains with the U.S. finance capital at the expense of their peoples." (p. 539) This campaign against “rootless” cosmopolit(an)ism had been conducted quite literally in the postwar period by Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin's top lieutenants—and was connected to the worsening climate for Soviet Jews during that period.

During the time of the book and increasingly onwards, the Soviet Union would come to rely on "Soviet patriotism" as a legitimizing ideology, eventually even more so than in Marxism-Leninism. Such patriotism was intended to simultaneously rebuke the Western-oriented cosmopolitanism and the nationalist movements that troubled the Soviets inside and outside the Soviet Union.

Eventually, even this proved too weak for the Soviet Union to keep going, as the Baltic nations, Ukrainians, and others demanded their independence. Its remnants were included in the current Russian national identity, allowing for Russian troops hewing to the memory of the Russian Empire to fight for the same cause in Ukraine with other troops flying the Soviet flag.

The precise function of Marxism-Leninism was ensuring that the parties wouldn't become bourgeoisie, revisionist and prone to siding with their bourgeoisie for reasons of national unity, as Lenin, etc., had concluded that parties without the specific Leninist party structure would become. That didn’t succeed, but 64 years ago, it was still possible to believe it would.

And the final argument was always the Marxist-Leninists could retort that while others were prattling, the communists were Getting Things Done, building socialism right there in the Soviet Union, warts and all included. This was a persuasive argument to many, no matter how many warts there were.

SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

The book's final chapters describe the coming socialist and communist society that would result from that building effort: a paradise of abundance and free time, with unlimited resources for everyone. This seems quite natural, as it's hardly like the communists would author a book about their ideology that would predict it's destined to fail. Still, today few movements, including the ones that call themselves communists, possess faith in their own ability to make the world a better place.

Rote modern declarations that "a better world is possible" are far removed from the continuous drumbeat of doom. Climate change, acidification of oceans, the “peak oil” and other such resource peaks, overpopulation, a fascist onslaught lurking beyond every corner, or technologies like AI only ushering in dark corporate feudalism.

While environmentalism was, during the Cold War and after it, seen as a socialist plot, it played a part in the social movements that would play a part in bringing the East Block down. This is partly due to its criticism of environmental catastrophes of the Soviet Era, like the death of the Aral Sea and the disaster at Chernobyl, but even more so because of its secular challenge to the thesis that science, development, and the use of natural resources would automatically bring humanity almost nothing but benefits, whether under socialism or capitalism.

Neither did the Soviets, who gloried in their defeat of fascism in the field of battle, see doom lurking around other corners: "The best that the authors of contemporary bourgeois utopias [such as Aldous Huxley or E. M. Forster] can promise the world today is a society where a certain material well-being is achieved at the cost of complete rejection of democracy, culture, and human dignity, a society inhabited by people who have nothing human in them, people who have become mere appendages of the machine, its slaves. Frequently, they prophesy an even grimmer future for humanity—a return to barbarism. All that will remain of civilization, so these "prophets" tell us, will be the ruins of cities and desecrated graves, where starving crowds of brutalized and degenerate creatures will scavenge for clothing and ornaments." (p. 243)

In the book, the potential for computer developments and AI is seen differently from becoming “appendages of the machine”: "The development and further improvement of electronic computers open the greatest prospects for the further progress of science and technology. These devices make it possible to automate the control of machines; more than that, complicated logical processes (for example, translation from one language into another) can be performed with the help of computers." (p. 804)

Today, such positive visions of human grandeur and advancement are generally offered by distinctly non-Marxist technologists, such as Elon Musk in the most populist form. Whatever other things Musk might have said or done, he has been able to, often crudely, elucidate an idea of humanity's quest for the stars in a way that brought him fame.

When the book states that "despite the assertions of some bourgeois sociologists, disciples of the reactionary Malthus, about the "over-population" of the earth, mankind has every opportunity of satisfying its growing material requirements" (p. 176) it is Musk who it comes closest to sounding like, in all of its confidence. All that is part of why, even after all the follies and scandals, Musk continues to have his fans.

At the end of the book is a grand prediction of the future tasks of communism. In the vision of Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, "science, which will take an outstanding place in communist society, will be faced with ever new problems. It is already clear today that their range is truly immense. Academician V. A. Obruchev, the well-known Soviet scientist, reflecting on what people have a right to expect of science, wrote:

"It is necessary:

"to prolong man's life to 150-200 years on the average, to wipe out infectious diseases, to reduce non-infectious diseases to a minimum, to conquer old age and fatigue, to learn to restore life in case of untimely, accidental death;

"to place at the service of man all the forces of nature, the energy of the sun, the wind and subterranean heat, to apply atomic energy in industry, transport, and construction, to learn how to store energy and transmit it, without wires, to any point;

"to predict and render completely harmless natural calamities: floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes;

"to produce in factories all the substances known on earth, up to most complex—protein—and also substances unknown in nature: harder than diamonds, more heat-resistant than firebrick, more refractory than tungsten and osmium, more flexible than silk and more elastic than rubber;

"to evolve new breeds of animals and varieties of plants that grow more swiftly and yield more meat, milk, wool, grain, fruit, fibers, and wood for man's needs;

"to reduce, adapt for the needs of life and conquer unpromising areas, marshes, mountains, deserts, taiga, tundra, and perhaps even the sea bottom;

"to learn to control the weather, regulate the wind and heat, just as rivers are regulated now, to shift clouds at will, to arrange for rain or clear weather, snow or hot weather." (p. 876)

Even today, many continue to hold out for a world where technology allows us to do these things – and a few more; Sputnik aside, the conquest of space does not yet feature in this vision, and advocates of singularity and transhumanism would consider 150-200 woefully inadequate a lifespan.

THE CONTINUING ALLURE OF THE RED

The sickle and the hammer continue to hold appeal to some small but visible groups in the West and sometimes surprisingly large groups elsewhere. Communist groups still organize protests in various countries, with Soviet banners most recently visibly popping up in the university campus occupations in support of the Palestinian cause, one of those national liberation causes the communists found so progressive during the Cold War, too.

Within social media, the "MAGA communist" Jackson Hinkle draws out thousands of likes—and also considerable befuddlement from people who find it evident that "MAGA" and "communism" are two opposite poles. Many summarily dismiss Hinkle as a mere far-right charlatan. His actual audience is most likely not Western far-righters but various social media users from the Global South, who find nothing strange about a mixture of communism and patriotism, such as Palestinians, whose cause has included communist movements like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Some of his followers might also find the modern left not only too feminist but even more importantly too feminine. The old socialist imagery of manly workers, aggressive strikes, guerrillas with a rifle in hand and so on, has been replaced by pastel tones and images of care. To those for whom the Age of Man is not over on the left, the Soviet imagery of strength and manly valor offers an alluring point of reference, one not connected to capitalism or fascism, movements they might not feel comfortable in supporting for other reasons.

The Soviets, of course, too proclaimed women's rights, but in terms that might sound conservative to our ears: "The socialist system (...) not only gives women equal rights with men, but it also accords the mother honour and respect. The state grants working mothers long paid maternity leaves, gives monthly allowances to mothers of large families and unmarried mothers, and decorates mothers of large families with orders or medals.” (p. 742)

A charlatan Hinkle may be. Ideologically, his "communism" is a combination of anti-American talking points, social conservatism and personal promotion. Most Western communists would not trust Hinkle farther than they can throw him. Instead, they tend to trust progress in the modern progressive sense, feminism and environmentalism included alongside Old Left methods and symbology. Even the economic models that they implicitly support may be closer to stamocap than to the Soviet trust in a state where the state explicitly ran the great majority of the economy.

We should consider what "communism" really symbolizes in this debate. For a long time, the left has run away from organizations for anarchist-influenced inchoate models of "uprisings" and from belief in the forces of technological and material progress to doomsaying and postmodern criticisms of the same. Authoritarianism and even the body counts of tens of millions are not, then, an argument against the ideology to such people. Instead, they symbolize the idea of Getting Things Done. Are those things sensible or sane? That's a whole different question.

To the rest of us, a return to a book like this does not only offer a history lesson or a potential mirror for our foibles in predicting a sure victory for our chosen ideology. It provides a chance to try and understand a mindset that started with a bang, burned like a flame, charred tens of millions in the process, fizzled out, and died. It is a fire that may return, at least if there are no better alternatives to those who have historically felt the heat.