The Idea of Communism (What Was Communism?) Hardcover – November 15, 2009

The book’s binding is not bad.

Absolutely loved it! tariq Ali is quite possibly the greatest modern historian alive today. i would highly suggest this as well as any of his other works

No complaint. Delivery was excellent in every way.

Ali did not disappoint in this somewhat loosely structured but at times brilliant essay. The small hardback volume was, however, very poorly bound. Pages fell out in clumps on my first reading. I nearly decided to send it back with a demand for repayment, but passed on the bother. I will not, however, buy from this house again.Jack Russell207-244-5394

I enjoy reading Ali in other formats, and this work is a fine defense of many of Marx's ideas. The main problem I had with it is that there are too many errors in the text...verb tense, word choice, etc. which should have been caught. For a part of the book, it seemed as if Ali was writing like the USSR was still in existence! Be that as it may, still worth the price of admission as a re-thinking of Marxism...

If you have ever head Tariq Ali speak, you know him as one of the most thoughtful political commentators living today. This is exactly how his book The Idea of Communism reads. This is an excellent piece of historical analysis. Instead of being concerned with Communism as an ideology, it concerns how the Soviet State rose, how it fell, and how it will reappear and may succeed in the future.His sage observations run throughout the book. Ali sets the historical record straight. The Soviet State was created almost by accident, Stalinism prevailed more due to internal happenstance and external foreign pressure, and the Soviet State fell because its leadership, clinging to the past, had been exhausted. The external foreign pressure never let up. Yeltsin is seen as an American dupe. Gorbachev arrived too late with, considering the circumstances too little.He ends on a positive note. It took three hundred years for Capitalism to become the prevailing worldview. History is rarely lineal. There are peaks and valleys. The road to Communism has barely begun.