People march with red flags with the Christ the Savior Cathedral in the background during a Communist rally to mark May Day in Moscow, Russia. As in Soviet times, people paraded ac...
Members of the People's Liberation Front, a Marxist political party, carry a portrait of Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin during a parade held to mark May Day in Colombo, Sr...
Two Russian communists' supporters stand in Red Square holding a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and a red flag as they wait to visit the Mausoleum of the Soviet founder Vladimir Leni...
Pro Communists with Soviet flags gather outside the Kremlin to go to the mausoleum of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin to mark his 92nd anniversary of his death at Red Square in Mosc...
Portraits of Indian and world communist leaders is displayed for sale during a rally organized by left front trade unions celebrating International Labor Day, or May Day, in Kolkat...
Local residents walk past Soviet-era hammer and sickle sculptures outside an apartment building damaged after Saturday's shellingin Mariupol, Ukraine.
Portrait of late Communist leader Mao Zedong is reflected on a bus window near Tiananmen Square at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China.
From left, China's former President Hu Jintao, newly appointed President Xi Jinping, newly appointed Premier Li Kiqiang and former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrive to the closing ...
Delegates attend a plenary session of the National People's Congress held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China.
Students march with Red flags for SUCI (Socialist Unity Centre of India) Party founder Shibdas Ghosh to observe his death anniversary in Kolkata.
A supporter of the Lebanese Communist party, holds a hammer and a sickle to symbolize the Communist party, during a demonstration to mark Labor Day, in Beirut, Lebanon. More than 3...
A Chinese boy waves a Chinese national flag while tourists tour in front of a giant Chinese Communist Party emblem set up to celebrate the July 1 Chinese Communist Party's 90th ann...
In this photo released by the state media Cubadebate web site, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, right, speaks to Cuba's Fidel Castro, left, as Chavez 's daughter Rosa looks on at...
Review
Karl Marx, the original 'Commie', gets a positive reappraisal from the Vatican! The prolonged recession has also led to a critique of ally capitalism's "Lack of moral v...
In a controversial move, China's ruling Communist Party has directed its nearly 90 million members to shun religion for ma
In the wake of the killings of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) workers in Karnataka, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, on Mon
The Communist Party of China (CPC) from Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region expelled its member for partic
China's ruling Communist party for the first time has publicly said some of its officials were funding the Dalai Lama by d
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal today stressed the need for an alliance of "all good people" to fight the Bharatiya J
Days after a senior state BJP leader came out against iconic revolutionary leader Che Guevara and his posters across the s
A professor in East China's Shandong Province has been fired from his post of political advisor after he was accused
More than 100 authors from around the world signed a letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping today - Human Rights Day - to
Chinese President Xi Jinping has asked colleges and universities to strictly adhere to the leadership of the ruling Commun
The ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) today declared President Xi Jinping as the "core" of its leadership conferring o
Rudrangshu Mukherjee in the Telegraph goes beyond just Jyoti Basu and examines why, particularly in the late 1920s and the 1930s "sons of affluent families, many of them Westernized, who went to Great Britain, either for higher studies or to the Inns of Court to qualify as barristers-at-law, and then converted to communism":
The conversion brought with it a price tag and this was unquestioning loyalty to the cause of communism (read the Soviet Union) and blind obedience to the party line as laid down by RPD, who ran the Indian communist party sitting in London. The implication of this needs to be spelt out bluntly and without any qualifications. It meant that these men — some of the best and the brightest of their generation — surrendered their minds to the party. They allowed the party to do their thinking for them. If they had doubts they suppressed them. They refused to accept the many brutalities and horrors that communist regimes across the globe unleashed on the poor. Even in the 1930s, they refused to accept that the Moscow Trials were a sham. They embraced communism, like many others across the world, as a new and secular religion with the party as god.
...what none of them ever spoke about is what it meant for them mentally and psychologically to have surrendered their minds to the party and then suffer an intellectual imprisonment. Jyoti Basu suffered this imprisonment, bursting out only when his party stopped him from becoming the prime minister of India.
Read the full piece: Minds In Thrall
Perhaps you too have been barraged with emails asking you to identify the author of the following lines?:
"Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to..."
Christopher Hitchens doesn't tell us whether or not such is the case with him, but he writes in the Atlantic:
....One or two writers predicted that Marx’s relevance would be rediscovered: John Cassidy was arguably the most surprising of these in that one hardly expected, in the fall of 1997, an essay from the economic specialist of The New Yorker announcing that the co-author of the 1848 Communist Manifesto could turn out to be “the next” significant intellectual for those whose job it was to study the markets. James Ledbetter, himself an accomplished business journalist, has since produced an admirable Penguin edition of Marx’s journalism (most of the best, which was very good indeed, having been produced for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune). And Francis Wheen, who wrote a notable biography of Marx in 1999, has now published an anatomy of Capital (as I shall henceforth call it), which concludes with the opinion that Marx “could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century.”
Full article: The Revenge Of Karl Marx
