FL Governor Ron DeSantis is celebrating a new law mandating teaching of the History of Communism in Florida K-12 public schools. It’s not clear why he has decided to center an obsolete/fringe political movement in Florida’s education*, but it is a relevant framework for studying 19th and 20th century history, so lets support him and our teachers in their efforts. This isn’t a simple topic — communism emerged within a period of rapid change — but I’m sure Gov. DeSantis wouldn’t want us to oversimplify things or ignore more important historical developments just so we can bash communism out of context. I’m no historian, but for those who haven’t studied this somewhat esoteric topic before, I can suggest the following topics and readings.
1. The Communist Manifesto (1848) is the cornerstone for studying the history of communism. You can find it online, but if you want to add some context to the political ideas, I suggest grabbing Bob Blaisdell’s anthology from Dover Thrift books: “The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings” as well as Blaisdell’s collection of “Essays on Civil Disobedience”. It would also be helpful to put this movement, and Marx specifically, in the context of ideas about scientific progress of that time.
2. Students will also want to understand the political and economic conditions of mid-19th century Europe: the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars; the failure of mid-century liberal movements and growing centralization of authority and repression; continued imperialist wars within Europe; overseas colonial wars; slavery; genocide (both overseas and within Europe); the misery of industrial workers and their families, even in the wealthiest cities (Out of This Furnace is an excellent fictional account of industrial life in Pittsburgh form 1881-1940).
3. Pre-Soviet history of the communist movement. Some notable events in the history of communism include the founding of the First International in 1864, followed by it’s fracturing in 1876 as statist (Marxist) and anarchist factions went their separate ways. Of course, the American labor movement needs some attention, along with the depressions and unrest of the late 19th century. And finally some of the unsuccessful revolutionary attempts, such as the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin (which is a great story).
4. The FL law mandates that teachers address:
The economic, industrial, and political events that have preceded and anticipated communist revolutions.
Teachers will be able to comfort their students by emphasizing that communist revolutions only succeed in the most repressive countries with horribly corrupt and cruel leaders, such as Tsarists Russia, Qing China after a century of humiliation, Batista’s Cuba, and French Colonial Indochina.
5. This will naturally lead to discussion of anti-communist movements. In addition to the actions of the governments that eventually fell to communists, we have plenty of examples from the American Red Scares, European Fascism, McCarthyism, South American dictatorships, and the theocratic movements in Iran and Afghanistan.
6. It will also be good to look at the hypocrisy of Communist governments — specifically how they oppressed the workers. For example, they regularly ban independent trade unions, such as the Polish union Solidarity, which helped bring down the Warsaw pact. They also also have a tendency to join the capitalist system, to the point where the CCP is now little more than a plutocratic, monopolistic dictatorship that can easily buy the cooperation of money-worshiping Western corporations.
7. Finally, we get to the totalitarian foundations of the USSR and the PRC. I personally like Hannah Arent’s musings in the Origins of Totalitarianism, but that material is a bit dense for K-12 students and is probably dated. The Death of Stalin is an entertaining effort to convey the fear permeating totalitarian states. I also recommend The Lives of Others. On second thought, both of these movies are probably considered too “adult” for FL students. Maybe books will be better. The novels “1984” (Orwell) and “The Outsider” (Wright) both provide fictional depictions of the cultish practices of the Communist Party, while “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin) and “Animal Farm” (Orwell) can be read as illustrating how the USSR failed to live up to its own stated goals. On the ‘culty’ front, several culty political movements using communist rhetoric are described in the book “On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right”. Communist propaganda is definitely a major concern, so it will be important to examine how totalitarian regimes rely conspiracy theories and xenophobia to rally violent mobs and keep the population under control. Also consider their obsession with purging political opponents from any position of influence. I personally think it would be a good idea to cover Lysenkoism, and the general use of Soviet schooling to indoctrinate children and vilify political opponents. There might be some lessons here for modern America.
* Just kidding, it’s totally clear that this act exists purely to indoctrinate students in a way that supports GOP smear campaigns against their opponents (I remember the billboards from 2020 calling Biden a Communist)