FYS480

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." With this rousing call to revolution in 1848, Karl Marx inspired an international movement that would destroy capitalism and replace it with a more just society. Where revolutions did succeed, however, the reality of communist rule differed significantly from Marx's vision. This course examines the trajectory of communist theory and practice from Marx's Manifesto, through the revolutions in Russia and China and the brutal dictatorships that followed them, through the collapse of the communist utopian vision in the late twentieth century.