I wrote an earlier post looking at the persistence of communist-inspired language. I conducted that analysis using Google ngrams. But I have since learned, to quote James Feigenbaum, that friends don’t let friends use Google ngrams. (One reason is that the corpus which they draw on has been changing.)
A better alternative is the bookworm app which uses the Hathi Trust archive. This post thus replicates my previous analysis using their data. Unfortunately, their database only allows single-word queries, so I wasn’t able to replicate everything. But Hathi does allow me to limit the search to non-fiction works which helps control for the increasing representation of fiction in the ngram database.
The point of my earlier post was to ask whether language inspired by Marx and communism continues to dominate academic discourse - as cultural commentators like Jordan Peterson claim - or whether the end of actually existing communism also signaled the end of its prominence in academic discourse. I found there that communist language had declined significantly starting in the 1970s and 1980s and that 1989 was often a breakpoint. The exceptions were terms related to repression like Gulag and show trial.
Using the Hathi archive and confining myself to non-fiction mostly confirms those earlier results. Probably the major revision is to push the declines farther into the past. Writers in English had mostly given up on communist-inspired terminology by the 1970s and 1980s. The fall of communism only put the nail in the coffin for these discursive moves. I did discover a few additional upward trends (sometimes for different terms) as with Stalinism, exploitation, dialectics, expropriation, though some of these are likely used pejoratively (like Stalinism) and some tended not to be used a lot or to be closely associated with communism.
[I’d note that since my last post, a fairly controversial paper used ngrams data and a difference-in-difference design to show that Marx’s reputation owed a lot to the Bolshevik Revolution. Here’s one take on those results, though it doesn’t consider the issues with the ngrams dataset.]
Ideology/Regimes
Searches on regime designations - communism, socialism, and Marxism - showed large declines since the 1960s in the case of communism (a peak in 1958), since the 1970s in the case of socialism (a peak in 1967), and since the 1980s in the case of Marxism (a peak in 1983). It is noteworthy that these declines all began when communist regimes were still around and it is difficult to see an inflection point in 1989 when the regimes fell. At most, 1989 was sometimes the moment when references to these ideologies/regime types plateaued at a substantially lower level from their peaks.
As a sidelight, the term Stalinism does not follow these trends and in fact has been following an upward trend. I would assume, however, that Stalinism is mostly used pejoratively. Leninism by contrast has been declining precipitously since the late 1950s and Maoism since Mao’s death. In all of these cases, the references are at a fairly low level even at their height.
Theoretical terms
It was harder to track theoretical terms because many of them consisted of two words. I thus substituted some new terms and in some cases they may not be as tightly linked with Marxist and communist ideologies. I saw a decline in use of the term alienation (a peak in 1978), but the terms exploitation and dialectics saw secular increases though at a low base.
Class
Use of the class language of communism - in particular the terms proletariat and bourgeoisie - declined substantially since the 1970s. Proletariat peaked in 1966 and bourgeoisie in 1970. And their drop was mostly completed before 1989.
Economy
The economic terms most connected to communism - collectivization and nationalization - show a rapid decline from their peaks all the way back in 1960 for collectivization and 1955 for nationalization. A couple of terms less closely connected with communism were more equivocal. Capitalism has actually become more common and expropriation has seen a more moderate decline. Unfortunately, I could not search for terms like central planning or planned economy.
Repression and Dissent
As I found earlier, the distinctive term for the repressive apparatus of the communist system - gulag - has increased consistently since its introduction to English in the 1960s. I wasn’t able to look at terms like show trial and enemy of the people, but the converse of repression, the references to dissidents shows a relatively consistent upward trend, though mentions of the most well-known dissidents like Sakharov, Walesa, and Havel have mostly gone by the wayside.
Leaders
Perhaps not surprisingly, references to communist leaders have taken a large hit with Lenin declining steeply from a peak in 1963, Stalin from a peak in 1953, and Mao from a peak in 1976 though Stalin and Mao plateaued at a significant level in the 1980s. Even Marx himself is down substantially from his peak in 1977.
Conclusion
To reiterate my conclusion from last time, communist and Marxist-inspired language has become less common over time. Writers of non-fiction books are not using terminology related to communist and Marxist regimes as much as they did in the past. And looking at a better data source here, most of the decline occurred even before the fall of the iron curtain in 1989.
One interpretation is that writers had seen the flaws in these regimes and ideologies even before events caught up with them. Even more to the point, the terms that best avoided this decline were those connected with the most obvious problem of the regime like the gulag and dissident.