(Personal case, but i think i am not alone) I have been interested in science since Carl Sagan's Cosmos, i was a kid when it aired.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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Karl Marx' "Das Kapital" pretty much invented communism.
Malleus_Maleficarum/Hammer of Witches/Hexenhammer from 1486 was a rather popular book about witchcraft that helped popularize witchhunts, greatly helped by massive technological advances in book printing a few decades earlier.
Not really. It dunked so hard on capitalism that people are still afraid of it, and serves as a theoretical basis for many things, but communism is not new or invented.
Did communism exist as a political concept before Marx' works?
Yes.
You'd be naive of history to say otherwise.
Marx formalised an industrial era ideology from many existing concepts, evolving it further politically and economically to reapply those concepts to, what were then, modern times with rapidly expanding globalisation.
He was no Jesus, but he did preach the gospel.
I think they’re under the impression that until white western people formalize it, it doesn’t count. Which as a native I come across like weekly.
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Yes, although it wasn't as widely known.
From the wiki on Communism:
One of the first uses of the word in its modern sense is in a letter sent by Victor d'Hupay to Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne around 1785, in which d'Hupay describes himself as an auteur communiste ("communist author").[72] In 1793, Restif first used communisme to describe a social order based on egalitarianism and the common ownership of property.[73] Restif would go on to use the term frequently in his writing and was the first to describe communism as a form of government.[74]
As a political concept? Not in the exact words we use. Marx is what we can call a “discursive formation” for related and interconnected socio-political theories (just as Freud would be one for psychoanalysis). He gave us the standardized vocabulary, and effectively spoke it into being as we now conceive of it. I’m sure other posters are going to tag in quickly on this, but the tl;dr: there have always been class struggles. I would absolutely say it has always been a political matter. As far as a collectively-realized political concept, this has not always been the case. It really accelerated during the Industrial Revolution and the “Manifesto” pamphlet.
Edit: forgot to say, that’s a good question!
There hasn't always been class struggle. Early communalism took up the bulk of human history, and was classless.
True, however, there at some point is a social revolution creating the conditions necessary for a political revolution. So we have to ask ourselves, at what point did this classless society tip? What changed? I don’t have an answer, but something shifted to necessitate class struggle.
Agriculture created class society. Once it was discovered, the division of labor appeared, and thus from it sprang the division of society into workers and owners. The advancement to the next form of class society came alongside improvements in the means of production and distribution, creating new social relations and thus new classes to overtake the old.
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Might come as a shock, but most households are, in fact, communist.
Not quite the same. Communism is a fully collectivized global system, households are individual units within broader societies.
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Yes. Many "primitive" (as the euro-centric description typically was at the time) tribal societies were.
Early communalism is not the same as communism, nor was early communalism something consciously understood within its historical context as agriculture and class society had not truly come into existence yet.
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The Apprentice 😕
Mein Kampf
It was widely disseminated in Germany, but I don't know how influential it was. Like...would the NSDAP have been substantially different had Hitler not published it?
I doubt that, too. Reportedly it was really badly written and full of internal contradictions, which makes it a bad propaganda tool.
Well, for once if it wasn't published everybody could've just said "We didn't know about what Hitler would do"...wait
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I'm not claiming to fully understand the cultural impact, but I've heard from native Irish folks that Zombie had a material impact on The Troubles.
It's also a banger.
I'd probably rank the Bible as having the largest impact. It was both widely disseminated and had a large social impact in a number of areas.
Silent Spring helped kick off a number of environmental policies in the US and elsewhere.
Some of the early science fiction novels had real impact by providing plausible guiding lights for actual scientists about which directions to go in their pursuit of technological advancements. It’s been said that the first step in innovation is imagination, not actual scientific progress.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote Islands in the Sky about what could happen if artificial satellites became a real thing.
Prophetic.
Metallica held a concert in Russia and two weeks later communism fell.
Sounds like the effect JD Vance had on the Pope
Did the pope fall after their conversation?
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It won eight Oscars that year, including best screenplay.
Speaking of wine, Hannibal caused sales of Chianti to go down.
In contrast to Silence of the Lambs reducing sales, Sideways increased sales of Pinot noir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinot_noir
During 2004 and the beginning of 2005, Pinot noir became considerably more popular among consumers in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Asia as a result of the film Sideways,[45] and its deleterious effect on Merlot sales. Throughout the film, the main character speaks fondly of Pinot noir while denigrating Merlot.[46][47] Following the film's U.S. release in October 2004, Merlot sales dropped 2% while Pinot noir sales increased 16% in the Western United States. While the film mainly celebrated California's Santa Barbara County, it also highlighted Oregon's Pinot Noirs.[48] A similar trend occurred in British wine outlets.[47][49][50][51][52][53] A 2009 study by Sonoma State University found that Sideways slowed the growth in Merlot sales volume and caused its price to fall, but the film's main effect on the wine industry was a rise in the sales volume and price of Pinot noir and in overall wine consumption.[54] A 2014 study by Vineyard Financial Associates estimated that Sideways cost American Merlot farmers over US$400m in lost revenue in the decade after its release.[55]
EDIT: And I didn't read OP's post, which already referenced this. You were responding to it...
thp-thp-thp-thp
Patterson-Gimlin-Film maybe. I see this image everywhere!
