Fascism Throughout History w/ Timothy Snyder (Class 4)

Join the library and Bluestockings Book Club for a 10-week video class series all about fascism throughout history taught by Professor Timothy Snyder, Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Afterward, there will be time for discussion. No need to attend all 10 weeks, but classes build on each other. Free! No registration required!

Class 4: What is Communism? Communism was a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century and remains a lived reality for many in the twenty-first century. It is based in an analysis of capitalism and a theory of history proposed by Karl Marx, which is the main subject of this lecture. Marx’s ideas were revised by Vladimir Lenin so as to allow the individual (or the party elite) much greater latitude to choose the timing and the place of revolution. Lenin’s very success in making a revolution in a country that Marx regarded as backward led to the Stalinist program of accelerated development and associated starvation and mass terror. That model was the copied in China and elsewhere.