World Communism

For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices, and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up.

The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free-market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism - while drinking a lot of beer.

The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin was published in 1917. Lenin's definition of the State is “a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of a class." Quoting Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the role and functions of the State in society after the proletarian revolution. He addresses the arguments of anarchists, reformists and social democrats, claiming that a social democratic system cannot establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Emma Goldman was initially supportive of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. This 1918 pamphlet was published in elucidation of the revolution and in justification of the Bolsheviks. Goldman reversed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion and denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices.

Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, Pope John Paul II and President ­Ronald Reagan took bullets from would-be assassins. Few realized at the time how close both men came to dying. Surviving these near-death experiences created a singular bond between the pope and the president that ­historians have failed to appreciate. When John Paul II and Reagan met only a year later, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for a ­reason. That reason? To defeat Communism. In private, Reagan had a name for this: “The DP” - the Divine Plan.

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged. Mark Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The author, Gary Allen, of the international bestseller, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Since the end of World War II, forty three nations, representing nearly one-third of the earth's surface, have fallen to Communism. In every single instance, the US State Department was a willing and knowing accomplice to the betrayal. Why? The world's richest capitalists have for decades cooperated with and bankrolled their alleged mortal enemies, the Communists. Why? As you will learn in this book, it was planned that way, as part of an elitists' scheme to create a New World Order.

1945. Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno, Moravia. For Gerta Schnirch, daughter of a Czech mother and a German father aligned with Hitler, it’s not deliverance; it’s a sentence. She has been branded an enemy of the state. Caught in the changing tides of a war that shattered her family - and her innocence - Gerta must obey the official order: she, along with all ethnic Germans, is to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. With nothing but the clothes on her back and an infant daughter, she’s herded among thousands, driven from the only home she’s ever known.

Coming of age in America in the 1970s and 80s, Joe Weisberg was a Cold Warrior. After briefly studying Russian in Leningrad, he joined the CIA in 1990 - just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse. But less than a decade after the first Cold War ended, a new one broke out. Russia changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might - more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But US sanctions have crippled Russia's economy; and Russia's interventions have exacerbated political problems in America.

Former high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, alongside an army colonel, a judge, a diplomat, a propaganda official, a secret agent, and a CCP role-model student, lift the veil on the Marxist culture that has molded the thoughts and actions of Chinese people for over 70 years. It is this culture that created China’s “Walking Dead”. Filmmaker and author, Kay Rubacek, weaves together interviews with these Chinese communist insiders with extensive research, and a sense of humor, into a rich narrative.

"Manifesto of the Communist Party" is an 1848 political pamphlet by the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.

Edited by Samuel H. Beer, with key selections from Capital and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", this volume features an especially helpful introduction that serves as a guide to Marxist political and economic theory and to placing the specific writings in their contemporary setting. Included are a bibliography and list of important dates in the life of Karl Marx.

The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda 'proved' it was 'the will of the people', but few know that the brutal rebellion, which killed millions and raised Lenin's numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power, was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered through a Swedish bank and a shady arms dealer who had made a fortune in the Balkan wars.

The downfall of Bo Xilai in China was more than a darkly thrilling mystery. It revealed a cataclysmic internal power struggle between Communist Party factions, one that reached all the way to China’s new president Xi Jinping. The scandalous story of the corruption of the Bo Xilai family - the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood; Bo’s secret lovers; the secret maneuverings of Bo’s supporters; the hasty trial and sentencing of Gu Kailai, Bo’s wife - was just the first rumble of a seismic power struggle that continues to rock the very foundation of China’s all-powerful Communist Party.

After the Berlin Wall fell, a group of Christian colleges in the US seized the opportunity to begin strategic faculty and student exchanges with universities inside the Soviet Union. They could not have foreseen the doors that would open next. During a 1990 visit to Russia, John Bernbaum and his colleagues received a surprising invitation from a Russian government official: come help build a faith-based university in Moscow. Thus, after 70 years of fierce religious persecution under communism, the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) was born.

This rather incoherent work by Russian anarchist philosopher Michael Bakunin is described in a way that he described his own life: a fragment. Rife with criticisms on Christianity and the technocracy, Bakunin presses communist values without fear of bordering extremism. Listening to this work is like walking through Bakunin’s disjointed mind; often cutting off and starting mid-sentence, including footnotes several paragraphs long as if his thoughts suddenly start to wander, as well as ending rather abruptly mid-sentence.

China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it - political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth - are unraveling.

Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight.

In 1944, there was still no united Yugoslavia, the Axis controlled most of Europe, and D-Day was only in the planning stages. In the Balkans, Tito was a beacon of hope against the advancing Nazis. He led a force of resistance fighters that bedeviled the occupying German army throughout Slavic regions and empowered people's committees to act as local government in all liberated areas. For observers on the political left, Tito seemed uniquely poised to unite the East and West against fascism - once and for all.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a short book first published in 1880 by German-born socialist Friedrich Engels. The work was primarily extracted from a longer polemic work published in 1876, Anti-Dühring. It first appeared in the French language.