From Marx to Mao and beyond - essays on global communism

edited by S.A. Smith
Oxford
4 stars
Julia Lovell

Writing the history of communism - an ideology that has been described as "the most ambitious attempt to create a world organisation since the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church" - demands a global perspective.

Until now, many Anglophone accounts of communism have rooted themselves chiefly in the Soviet Union and Europe; Asian, African and Latin American experiences have tended to figure as little more than byproducts of a Eurocentric story. But contemporary geopolitics requires the reorientation of these older approaches.

A quarter of a century since communism collapsed in Europe and then in the USSR, China's Communist Party - seemingly - continues to flourish. Under its direction, China has become a global economic and political force. The party has recast itself as a champion of the market economy, while remaining an essentially secretive, Leninist organisation.

Within 10 years, the Chinese communist revolution will have exceeded the 74-year lifespan of its Soviet older brother. China's leaders feel a jittery pride at this prospect: the causes of the Soviet collapse in 1991 remain a subject of horrified fascination to past and present members of the Politburo.

If the party survives beyond this point, historians may come to see October 1949, rather than October 1917, as the game-changing revolution of the 20th century.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism embraces this new imperative to understand world communism as a polycentric (indeed, often terminally fractious) phenomenon. Its editor, S.A. Smith, is impressively cosmopolitan, an expert on both Soviet and Chinese communism, and almost all of the book's 36 essays - written by an international cast of scholars - are comparative in some way.