Dimensions
162 x 240 x 46mm
Communism was one of the most powerful political forces of the twentieth century. At the height of their influence, Communists controlled more than a third of the earth's surface and half the world's population - from the Caribbean in the West to the Pacific in the East, from Baltic to the South Atlantic. In the 1950s it was the Communist USSR, not the West, that seemed to be winning the race for space, and with it the struggle for technological supremacy. And as late as the 1970s the Vietnamese Communist guerrillas' victory over the United States convinced many that the future lay with the Communism, not capitalism. But more astonishing even than its rapid rise and many triumphs, was, in 1989, Communism's sudden, devastating collapse.
In The Red Flag, the extraordinary story of Communism's rise and fall David Priestland presents a bold and unorthodox challenge to conventional wisdom. He insists that Communism was neither merely a system of terroristic totalitarian control - as its harsher critics claim -, nor was it simply a tough project of modernization, as its apologists suggest. Communism was primarily an extreme response to the manifold inequalities - political, economic and ethic - that have divided humanity over the last two centuries. But paradoxically, while destroying one web of inequality, Communism was simultaneously weaving another. Privileged party bosses were given power over the population, and the result was a new cycle of Communist 'revolutions' against the new elites. It was this dynamic that led to the violence of Stalin's Terror and Mao's Cultural Revolution and ultimately destroyed Soviet Communism itself.
At a time when globalised capitalism is in crisis and Marxist criticisms have renewed appeal, The Red Flag is essential reading if we are to comprehend this crucial - and much misunderstood - episodein world history.
