Where Communism Really Started

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4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2026

⏱️ 125 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 205 Where did Communism really come from? Did it originate with Karl Marx? Is it... "Jewish"? The answers to these latter questions are no. Communism arose out of a combination of German idealism and French socialism, and the first documents on the subject were composed in France. In fact, not only that, the first revolutionary Communist was a Frenchman as well, Francois-Noel "Gracchus" Babeuf, who derived many of his ideas for communist life from an obscure French thinker and tax official named Etienne-Gabriel Morelly. Morelly wrote a tract called The Code of Nature (https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/morelly/code-nature.htm ) in 1755 outlining what we recognize today as Communism. Babeuf took these ideas and tried to install them through his "Conspiracy of the Equals," which had a manifesto, "The Manifesto of Equals," (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sylvain-marechal-manifesto-of-equals) written by his collaborator Sylvain Marechal in 1796. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay takes you through these documents and makes it abundantly clear that the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848 had these ideas at their core. Join him to learn the true origins of Communism. Join us for the Preserving Liberty Conference at Sea!: https://ndcruise.com Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2026 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Communism

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. This is James Lindsay and you're listening to the New Discourses podcast.
0:24.1	And today we're going to talk about where communism came from.
0:27.4	We all know it's from Karl Marx, right?
0:29.4	No, it's older than Karl Marx.
0:32.0	And Karl Marx was an important figure in the development of communism.
0:35.7	That's no doubt.
0:36.9	He, along with
0:38.0	Fridic Engels, wrote the document that came to be called the Communist Manifesto. And that was
0:44.4	based off of another document that was written in part by them and in part by Moses Hess called
0:49.9	the Communist Confession of Faith. And we've covered that here on the New Discourses podcast.
0:56.0	So Karl Marx is usually associated with the creation of communism, but he's not.
1:01.6	He's much more a popularizer of communism and a very significant advanceer of communist theory.
1:09.6	And it's not even all of communism, by the way,
1:11.6	that Marx really developed. It is something called revolutionary communism, which means that you're
1:18.0	going to have a revolution in order to install communism, or actually to install a political,
1:24.4	economic, and social system that will eventually become communism when enough people
1:30.2	have been transformed back, allegedly, into socialists. And so the question is, where did these
1:38.9	ideas come from? Now, there's a pretty rampant accusation all over the internet, all over history, since the
1:46.6	probably mid-19th century, that in fact it came from the Jews.
1:51.8	The Jews invented communism, that communism is a Jewish formula.
1:57.1	Of course, the Nazis, for example, but also the communists accused capitalism of being a
2:02.8	Jewish formula as well. So that's not right. In fact, it's completely wrong, although there are
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