Rostow-1

(Also referred to as “Better Dead AND Red” and “Karl Marxed Out”)

“The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.” 

-Irving Berlin

In 1830, Karl Marx sits next to a man with yet undiagnosed Tuberculosis while on a train ride in Trier. This ultimately results in Marx dying from complications of the disease the next year at the age of 13. Friedrich Engels never colludes with Marx to write and publish the Communist Manifesto in 1848, leading to a world where Communism never gains prominence as a form of economic or political ideology.

While post-industrial collectivist dogmas similar to Communism do take shape over the following century in the minds of various philosophers and economists in various countries, they never gain prominence or amount to anything more than short-lived political experiments in tiny developing nations or communes in places like Africa.

This is a universe where Russia will never undergo an October Revolution in 1917, China will never undergo its “War of Liberation” in 1949 and the Soviet Union will never rise as a collectivist superpower to divide the post-WWII political landscape for half a century.