Antonio Gramsci, painted portrait, 2015. Flickr/Thierry Ehrmann. Some rights reserved.Mike Makin-Waite seconded the motion to dissolve the Communist Party of Great Britain as a delegate to its final Congress in 1991. He was then active in the CPGB’s successor organisation, Democratic Left, and remains involved in networks concerned with the history of the left.
In this book, Communism and Democracy: History, Debates, Potentials (Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), he offers a fresh and unflinching overview of the history of communism from its roots in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the demise of the international communist movement and the emergence of a global capitalist system from which the “spectre” of communism has been banished.
His central concern is the troubled relationship between communism and democracy.
