1. MARX, LENIN AND MAO: Communist Revolutions
Marxist theory on revolutions and their outcomes

2. The World View of Karl Marx
The educational experience of Marx
German Philosophy and Hegel
French Revolutionary experience
British economics
Three Motifs in Karl Marx:
Romantic: Critique of Industrialism
Promethean: The Role of the Philosopher
Enlightenment-Rationalist: The Power of Capitalism & Science

3. The Communist Manifesto
Forces of unrest in Europe
Socialist critique of bourgeois society
The departure of Marx: seminal argument
The significance of the Manifesto
Images in the Manifesto:
specter; bourgeois v. proletarians; alienation; dictatorship of proletariat

4. Alienation and Freedom
Alienated labor
Worker as commodity
Dehumanization and human creativity
Revolution as Transcendence
Five Concepts of alienated labor:
Product of labor
Object of structural forces
Cog in machinery
Deformed human identity
Organic connection to nature

5. Lenin & the Revolution Revolution: the one and only goal
Lenin & totalitarianism
No neutrals in revolution
Exaggeration and distortion
Lenin: revolutionary morality

6. The Chinese Revolution in Perspective
19th Century Precursors—the decline of Imperial China
The history of rebellion in China
The evolution of dynastic change
Mandarin Society
The Manchu Dynasty and the J-curve
Modernizing Ideas
Japanese invasion, civil war and the rise of Mao Zedong & the communists

7. Communism in the 20th Century: Summary
The Ideas of Karl Marx
Lenin, socialism & Marx
Lenin’s 3 innovations:
The cadre/vanguard party
Theory of Imperialism
The State & Revolution
Why Russia and Agrarian society?

8. Aftermath & Consequences
Rise of Guerilla War & Peasant Revolutions
One Party State
Responses to Modernization
The Tragedy of Lenin’s Strategies
Universal Applications:
Critique of the West
Imperialism
Neo-colonialism
Corporatism
Dependency Theory
Cold War
Sovereignty & nationalism