The Bactra Review Thought
Contagion
Lynch's argument makes it very hard if not impossible to understand how the
Social Democratic Party could have gotten a third of the vote in Germany before
the First World War, or how the Communists could become one of the leading
parties in Italy after the Second, or even how the British Labour Party could
come to power after that war. It's a very American perspective on socialism
and Communism, which forgets what America was fighting against in the '40s and
'50s. For all this, and much else besides, see Adam Westoby's The
Evolution of Communism (NY: The Free Press, 1989), which flirts with
memetic notions later developed in ``The Ecology of
Intentions: How to Make Memes and Influence People,'' a manuscript on which
Westoby was working at the time of his much-to-be-regreted demise.