Marx and Engels had no idea what they were setting loose in 1848 when they wrote The Communist Manifesto -- and they would be the first to admit it. That's the sense you get reading Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism a short book in the "What Was Communism" series. It is no longer 1991. The Soviet Union is gone. Rather than a communist utopia China resembles aspects of Dickens' England ... on methamphetamine. A few anomalies like Cuba and Korea remain, but the safe money is that they will not remain thus.

LIKE HIS LATE FRIEND and colleague Edward Said was, Britain's Tariq Ali is an intellectual in exile who has risen to a place of prominence and eminence in his adoptive country, writing on both universalist themes and subjects (the anti-imperialist and anti-war movements; socialist theory, philosophy and praxis; Islam and Islamic history) as well as the politics and history of his homeland.