Rethinking Communism’s History, by Paul Mason

There is, in the origin story of communism, something akin to what happens the first lines of the Book of Genesis. Left-wing politics in the 1830s are like the biblical “formless void”, with the early workers’ movement mesmerised by pointless speculative Utopias. Then Marx turns up in Paris in 1843, armed with the dialectical logic he has learned at Berlin University, and says, “Let there be light!”

An intellectual system is formed, based on the principles of social science. It conquers the European labour movement in the back half of the century, is ported over into the extreme social conditions of Russia by Lenin, gets rocket boosters from the slaughter of the Great War, and by 1949 bestrides Russia, China and half of Europe.