'To simply act as if the mere fact that these unpleasant regimes that called themselves communist is therefore evidence that communism is doomed, and to have no curiosity about the internal debate, again, it's not just serious. Where is that prevented within the manifesto, within a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'? Where is the room for dissent and debate?īut Mr. This ignores that if there were actually serious critiques inside communist regimes, the dissenters were liquidated. This is why these regimes cannot be considered legitimate representations of this political program.'

Oh, sure, anti-communists use 'the existence of Stalinist regimes against communism,' but that ignores that 'literally for over a hundred years there have been very serious debates within Marxism, within the Left precisely criticizing those regimes - not just that these were not desirable and not sustainable, but they are also not in any meaningful way communism, if you look at Marx and Engels's writing. Suddenly, I was thrust backward into my college years in the 1980s, listening to this British scoundrel try again to say the Soviet Union wasn't really communism. Wilson was wrong to mock Marxism as contrary to human nature, as 'lovely theory, wrong species.' Gladstone suggested the manifesto's a great read: 'It's stirring! It scans!' She quoted another Marxist, Marshall Berman, insisting for the oppressed, the book provides 'music for their dreams.' Its literary merit should not be held against it, these two agreed. Gladstone gushed that since 1847, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have 'offered refuge, inspiration and argument, so many arguments still.' She oozed, 'like Hamlet's ghost, the manifesto is both impossible and imperative in its call for action.' She introduced British author China Mieville, whose 2022 book 'A Spectre, Haunting' is, she said, 'a nonfiction rumination on that stalwart text.'Ī 'stalwart text'? The incendiary inspiration for ruthless and expansionist dictatorships that murdered millions of people from 1917 forward is celebrated on American radio? Yes, and what this has to do with 'the media' is anyone's guess. It was predictable when she chatted with socialist Naomi Oreskes about their mutual loathing of 'free-market fundamentalism.' But the next segment was even worse.

Since I'm a conservative glutton for punishment, I was driving on the highway on Sunday morning listening to the NPR-distributed program 'On the Media' with host Brooke Gladstone, a longtime fixture on NPR.

But it's a little more surprising when it openly touts 'The Communist Manifesto.' It's entirely predictable, even inevitable, that public broadcasting would favor socialism in all its programming.

The communist manifesto was written by