Communism lives

Not only does it live, it reigns. Apparently, like Nosferatu it cannot be killed, or at least not easily.

Sean McMeekin is Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College and the author of essential books including The Red Millionaire: Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940 (2004), The Russian Revolution: A New History (2017), and Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (2021). His new book is To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, just published by Basic Books. In the current issue of the New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson assesses it “the best short history of communism I know.” It may be the book of the year. I invited Professor McMeekin to write something for us to bring it to the attention of our readers. Professor McMeekin writes:

My new book is To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. As implied in the subtitle, one of the claims I make in the book is that Communism did not really die off with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and not only in the literal sense that avowedly Communist governments still exist in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, and only slightly less avowedly one-party Communist regimes in Cambodia and Cuba. Rather, I argue that certain practices common to Communist regimes have endured, thrived, and spread to many once-free countries in the West, above all in the realms of government surveillance, CCP-style “social credit” systems, “cancel culture,” and forms of public and private (or semi-private) censorship which grow more blatant all the time.

The Covid-19 lockdowns, from forcible government shutdowns of business to censorship of Youtube videos and the shutdown of government-critical Twitter accounts, to travel and work restrictions on the “unvaccinated,” were the most obvious example of this, but lately one can hardly miss the tsunami of news headlines about threats to shut down Twitter (now X), arrest or silence Elon Musk, or the sentencing of UK citizens for offensive social media posts. Indeed, since I finished drafting this book in spring 2023, the warning about creeping threats to freedom of speech in the US and western countries in my epilogue has proven, if anything, to have undershot the mark.

Nonetheless, I understand that drawing these historical comparisons can be unsettling. Several reviewers of the book, including Professor Harvey Klehr, have objected that my concerns about western crackdowns on freedom of speech are overblown, and that by focusing on contemporary parallels in the intellectual-cultural sphere to, say, China’s Cultural Revolution, I underplay the hard material side of maximalist Communist regimes, from nationalization of the means of production to state economic planning – material failures, that is, as every such regime grossly underperformed capitalist counterparts at best (most famously with the parallel examples of East vs. West Germany or North vs. South Korea) and produced famines and complete economic collapse at worst.

Professor Klehr was fair enough to point out that it is impossible to fit everything into a history of global Communism, objecting merely to the priority I devoted to some subjects rather than others. In the book, I should emphasize, I cover everything from War Communism and the New Economic Policy in the Lenin era to Stalinist central planning to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China and Gorbachev’s perestroika – along with the supposed “Chinese economic miracle” of recent years and its darker aspects. Still, Professor Klehr is not wrong that I end the book discussing censorship and social control and how these, and not maximalist suppression of private property and full-on central planning, represent the Communist “state of the art” today, and are therefore matters that should concern us.

Like all historians, I am writing at a particular moment in time. If I were writing the history of Communism in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was surging ahead in geopolitical competition with the USA, winning new client states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and American allies like Britain were descending into quasi-socialist stagnation owing to excessive state intervention in the economy, I likely would have focused more heavily on the woeful economic performance of Communist regimes, as many people – including, famously, CIA analysts – were then under the impression that fully state-planned economies could produce better growth and performance than freer ones, and it would have been necessary work to interrogate their claims against the historical evidence.

But not even Chinese Communist leaders really believe this anymore, and in the West only those deeply ignorant of history think that we should give full-on property nationalization and central planning of the entire economy another try. True, there are degrees of statism and central planning everywhere from China to the EU to the U.S. federal bureaucracy, and the implications of, say, Green New Deal-style statist schemes for energy policy, are worth training a critical eye on. Nonetheless there is little sign even the most ambitious bureaucrats of Brussels or Washington are about to bring back Gosplan.

“Only those deeply ignorant of history”—so, all D卐M☭CRATs; the overwhelming majority of college students and professors, university admin, staff, and alumni; labor and trade union leadership; every corner of the entertainment, mass media, and “journalism” industries; most dwellers in our urban hellscapes, whether rich or poor; Wokester corporate CEOs and/or their underlings; FederalGovCo bureau-rats; phonus-balonus Vichy GOPer swine; all of our notional Western European “allies”; ethnic minorities, especially Neegrows and Hispanics; and veritably all actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers, painters, and sundry other artists, auteurs, and creative types, then.

Ran across a real sockdolager of a meme the other day, DL’d it, and stuck it in the folder with all the rest of ‘em, expecting it would come in right handy sooner or later. I figger there’ll never be a better, more fitting time than right now for it.

True, dat. Or, as I put it in this image I brewed up a while back for use over at the CF Muthashippe:

It’s the plain and simple truth, and like it or not, you damned well know it is.