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The Rise And Fall Of Communism (2009)

by Archie Brown(Favorite Author)

4.08 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0061138797 (ISBN13: 9780061138799)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Ecco

review 1: Considering the topic, I didn't think a good overview of Communism could be done in just over 600 pages (discounting the bibliography, which alone is about 100 pages). Archie Brown proved my assumption very wrong. This book was a good overview of all of international Communism, though it may have missed a bit of Latin American's pseudo-socialist/Communist states, but it can be forgiven since the focus of the book was on outright Communism with the capital "C." Without getting caught in the trap of providing too much depth and not enough breadth, the book went right to the salient points and summarized them, creating a broad, sweeping picture of Communism's rise and fall in the twentieth century.Eminently readable, cogent, and highly recommended for anyone wanting to unders... moretand the basics of Communism.
review 2: "While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.'" less

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