How the British Invented Communism

What It Is

A short, combative work of revisionist history, written by Richard Poe with Noor Bin Ladin and published independently in 2024, after the argument had first appeared in essay form online.

The starting point is a real document. In February 1920 Winston Churchill published an article in a London Sunday paper arguing that a conspiracy of international Jews stood behind Bolshevism. Poe's claim is that Churchill knew better than to believe his own article, and that the accusation was a deflection. The title tells you where he thinks the blame belongs instead.

From there Poe reaches back to Marx's decades in the reading room of the British Museum and forward to the modern institutions of global governance. It is written with the confidence of a man who believes he has found the thread.

Why It Matters

Take the book seriously and you have to concede that some of its raw material is solid and usually left out of the story. Marx wrote Capital in London, on Engels's Manchester money, unmolested. Britain sheltered the revolutionaries of half of Europe through the nineteenth century. The Fabian Society was an English invention and an unembarrassed one. Churchill's 1920 article says what Poe says it says, and it is one of the ugliest things published under his name. British agents were active in Petrograd in 1917 in ways historians still argue over.

Its stated purpose is to dismantle the Jewish Bolshevism libel by showing whose interests it served, and the men who broadcast that libel did have reasons of their own for pointing away from home.

The method is where it fails. Poe argues from proximity, and he is generous with proximity. That two men met, or shared a club, or corresponded, is treated as evidence of design. Distinct and often hostile phenomena, Fabian gradualism, Marxist theory, Bolshevik seizure of power, are gathered under one intention because one nation is somewhere near all three. The sourcing leans on a small circle of revisionist writers who cite one another, and the book carries no scholarly apparatus and no engagement with the historians who have spent careers in these archives.

Before You Read

Three or four hours. Poe is a professional writer and the pages turn.

Come with the notes open. Almost every striking assertion is either a documented fact you can verify in twenty minutes or an inference resting on one, and telling those apart is the discipline of reading this book. It will not do the work for you.

If you know nothing of the Fabians, of the Russian Revolution, or of British foreign policy between 1900 and 1920, you will have no way to weigh anything you are told here.

Which Edition to Read

• The paperback (2024) — recommended. The only complete, revised version of the argument, with the sourcing gathered in one place, which the scattered online essays never managed. The cost: it is independently published and it shows. No editor pushed back on the weaker inferences, and the referencing is thinner than a book making claims of this size requires. View on Amazon →
• The ebook. The practical choice for a suspicious reader: the text is searchable and the sources can be chased down as you go, which is how this book ought to be taken. The cost: none worth naming.
• The original essays on Poe's Substack. Much of the argument first appeared there and remains free. A sensible way to find out whether you want the book. The cost: unrevised, disorganised, written as instalments rather than as a case.

Read the essays first. If the argument still interests you, buy the paperback and read it with a historian of the period beside you. There is no annotated edition, and no university press has come near it.

Getting the Most From This Book

Separate the documents from the design. Churchill's article exists and can be read in ten minutes. What Poe infers about why it was written is another matter, and the book depends on your not noticing where one ends and the other begins.

Read a serious history alongside it. Any decent account of the Fabians, or of British policy in Russia in 1917, will show which claims are contested scholarship and which are Poe's own construction. It is not always the ones you would guess.

And read it as a specimen as well as an argument. This is what a conspiracy theory looks like when it is aimed at power rather than at a minority, and the machinery, the hidden hand, the unbroken design, the century-long plan, is the same machinery in a different coat. That is the most useful thing the book has to teach, and Poe did not intend to teach it.