The Creep of Marxism with Mark Moss - WBD593

Mark Moss is a serial entrepreneur, author, speaker and host
of The Mark Moss Show. In this interview, we discuss his
recent co-authored book “The UnCommunist Manifesto”, which is
a critique of Communist theory in response to its continued
influence in our modern world.


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The Communist Manifesto was one of the most influential
political writings in modern history. It was written by the
19th-century philosophers, historians and political theorists
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Despite falling into
obscurity for a generation after its initial publication in
1848, it went on to provide a theoretical basis for one of
the 20th century's most pervasive ideologies.


The Soviet Communist Empire the Manifesto inspired ultimately
failed. Proponents have argued that the Soviet political and
economic system was not the same form of communism proposed
by Marx and Engels. Many others have indicated that the fall
of the USSR and its vassal countries showed the inherent
fallacy of centralised control being the optimum political
system.


It wasn’t merely that communism failed, but the brutal nature
of the system it inspired. There is a debate about whether
the quantum of deaths under communist regimes could be
referred to as genocide. Semantics aside, tens of millions of
people have been killed in Communist countries. Further, it
discouraged innovation whilst encouraging waste, corruption
and nepotism.


Boris Yeltsin acknowledged the Soviet issue when he made an
impromptu visit to a US supermarket during a state visit.
“There would be a revolution" he stated when contemplating
how normal Russians would react to seeing the range and
quality of produce. And yet, despite the epic collapse of the
USSR, young people are increasingly being drawn to socialist
ideas that underpin the Manifesto.


Does a review of the Communist Manifesto provide adequate
insight into the system it inspired? Can we identify the
dangerous tenets of a communist system to better protect
society? Is there anything theoretically sound in the
Manifesto? Ultimately, do the transparent weaknesses of our
current system give rise to society underestimating the
weaknesses of competing systems?