Where Communism Really Started

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 205

Where did Communism really come from? Did it originate with Karl Marx? Is it... "Jewish"? The answers to these latter questions are no. Communism arose out of a combination of German idealism and French socialism, and the first documents on the subject were composed in France. In fact, not only that, the first revolutionary Communist was a Frenchman as well, Francois-Noel "Gracchus" Babeuf, who derived many of his ideas for communist life from an obscure French thinker and tax official named Etienne-Gabriel Morelly. Morelly wrote a tract called The Code of Nature (https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/morelly/code-nature.htm ) in 1755 outlining what we recognize today as Communism. Babeuf took these ideas and tried to install them through his "Conspiracy of the Equals," which had a manifesto, "The Manifesto of Equals," (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sylvain-marechal-manifesto-of-equals) written by his collaborator Sylvain Marechal in 1796. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay takes you through these documents and makes it abundantly clear that the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848 had these ideas at their core. Join him to learn the true origins of Communism.

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