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NOTE The Planned Society

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Now, I want to say some things to finish up with the so-called utopian socialists which, as I mentioned to you, was a strategically concocted term to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin, invented by Marx and Lenin.

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The last of these early French socialists, and by far the most influential, was the School of Saint-Simon.

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Let me mention one more time the work by Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition, which is important for this.

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And we're talking now about Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers, the most important of whom were

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Enfantin and Bazar. Saint-Simon is a famous aristocratic name in France and he was indeed a member of the nobility.

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Saint-Simon was a very peculiar character.

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He flourished during the Asagnat inflation by speculating in the currency, made money that way,

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but then he lost a huge fortune and was reduced to writing rather pathetic letters to the crowned heads of Europe,

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informing them that he was starving to death and pleased to send them money, which never came about.

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He lived in Paris, in the area of the Ecole Polytechnique, which had been set up around this time, and this was one of the great scientific centers of Europe, and he loved associating with scientists and mathematicians, and dining with them, and cultivating them, and so on.

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He loved associating with scientists and mathematicians and dining with them and cultivating them

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and so on.

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This is going to be important in the creation of his philosophy.

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But a crucial fact about him is that he, Saint-Simon and also his followers, became very interested

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in the works of the theocratic conservative, as they're sometimes called, writers of this

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time, especially de Maistre and also Bonald.

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Now, these writers rejected the French Revolution, of course. They rejected the French Enlightenment.

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They were much more conservative and even reactionary, much more than Burke was. Burke

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Ludwig was fundamentally a supporter of the free market and a free, wiggish British society.

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These men, especially de Maistre, who was influential, wanted to return not to the pre-1789

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old regime, but back to the Middle Ages.

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And they're called theocrats because what they bemoaned was the absence of authority

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and Hierarchy in Modern Society and promoted the creation of new revived centers of authority

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and hierarchy culminating in the Pope. That is, they were ultramontanes in the Catholic

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tradition that is looking to the supremacy of the Pope. They were part of the movement

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that idealized the Middle Ages in a particular way, not the Middle Ages that we've talked

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about here, that is the enterprising Middle Ages, the Middle Ages of the towns, the Middle

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Ages of the beginning of European and world commerce, the Middle Ages that gave rise to

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free institutions.

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Instead, you could say that they adopted the reverse of a Protestant and Enlightenment

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Stereotype of the Middle Ages as a society of total stability and adherence to the status quo.

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That, they thought, was the sort of society that was most desirable, especially after all the

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tribulations and the upheavals of the revolutionary period. And in tracing this revolutionary

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philosophy that they thought had culminated in the excesses of the revolution and the reign of

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of Terror. They went back to the people they considered the first real revolutionaries.

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Well, the first revolutionary, of course, was Lucifer, in their view, who rose up against

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God himself. But they went back to Descartes, who introduced the modern philosophy with

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the idea of systematic doubt, but above all, the reformers of the Protestant Reformation.

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They were the ones who began to undermine traditional European society.

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So what we have with them, and de Maistre especially was an intelligent man, from my

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point of view just his ideas that were fundamentally flawed, and the San Simonians, well beginning

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with San Simone and then he collected a score, found this really fascinating, yes there was

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There is something wrong with modern history. There is a deep flaw in the enlightenment and also among the French revolutionaries.

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However, it's not backwards that we have to look for a society of stability and hierarchy and authority, but to the future.

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Where was this new authority to come from? Who was to compose this new hierarchy?

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Well, Saint-Simon learned from, or thought he learned, wasn't the position of the scientists themselves,

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but his idea of what the scientists were up to, this new authority was to be found in modern science.

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and the new hierarchy was to be composed of the proponents of the scientific world outlook.

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So that with Saint-Simon and he had these immediate disciples, he also had a disciple,

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a man who was his personal secretary, who then went out on his own, a man named Auguste Comte.

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And it's this school of thought that is the founder of positivism.

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The point of view that says that the only real, authentic knowledge of the world is to be gained through the methods of natural science.

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This Hayek deals with in a book that I've mentioned to you. It's an important book called The Counterrevolution of Science.

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It's a 1950s book of his. The first half, or the first part, is about methodology and philosophy. A little tough going, perhaps.

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What is most fascinating, I think, is the second part about the actual history of this philosophy of positivism.

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He talks about the Sasimonians, about Auguste Comte, and further ramifications.

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Maybe this begins to ring a bell with you, the idea that the so-called social sciences, by the way, Auguste Comte coined the term sociology,

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the idea that the so-called social sciences must imitate the methods of the natural sciences.

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What that means, for instance, is that in economics we don't have a science that's built up in an a priori way, as the great classical thinkers of the 19th century and especially the Austrian School insisted.

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What we have to have is a science that collects facts, statistics and so on, and in this way builds up theories, analogously to the natural sciences.

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Since the only authentic knowledge comes through the methods of the natural sciences, of course you really can't get any knowledge from religion, from tradition, from history.

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It has to be done in a modern scientific way. And what's the point of all this? Well, as with the natural sciences, knowledge is power.

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This had been set up by people like Francis Bacon. Once the natural sciences accumulate sufficient knowledge, the world is ours. We can do anything we want with it. In medicine, in civil engineering, in exploiting natural resources and anything. We use the methods of natural science, the conclusions of natural science to rule the natural world.

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Well, similarly, if we have a social science that's based on the methods of natural science,

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then that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is power over man and society.

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The idea was that in the future there would be developed a class of individuals who, let's

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They didn't bother to beat around the bush. We can call priests of positivism.

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They would be imbued with the philosophy of positivism, of positive social science,

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and they would know how to apply that in a social engineering kind of way to remake society,

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to remake the nature of man.

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All of the human problems could eventually be solved

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in the same way the technical engineering problems are solved by the natural sciences.

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Crime, well, we would investigate the causes of crime, the roots of crime.

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Does this sound familiar?

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And then start dealing with those causes and roots of crime.

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Eventually there would be no crime.

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All it takes is knowing enough about the subject.

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Now, they had also a philosophy of history that dovetailed with this. The period we're talking about, the first few decades of the 19th century, is a time when a lot of people had philosophies of history.

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I talked to you about the industrialist school and their philosophy of history of the predatory and the preyed-upon classes.

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Well, the Sansemonians had a philosophy of history also that dovetailed with their theory.

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History. History alternates between two phases. There is an organic phase and then this is

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followed by a critical phase. An organic phase is characterized by stability, sense of authority

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in society, social harmony, the subjection of the individual to the community, and in

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in this way provides a comfortable, psychologically appealing cocoon for the individual. The individual

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doesn't have to worry. He's told by his society how to live his life, what's right, what's

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wrong. There are no questions that come up to produce anxiety. Well, unfortunately, in

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In each of these previous organic periods, there was a prevailing philosophy.

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Well, I mean, it necessarily is, but it's unfortunate that prevailing philosophy was inadequate.

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For instance, in archaic Greece, before about the 5th century, there was a belief in the particular gods,

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in the rituals of the gods, in the Homeric heroes, in the rite of the chieftains to rule,

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and this provided a structure for the organic phase of Greek society.

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However, that was followed by the period of the philosophers,

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especially, let's say, someone like Socrates, kind of a model philosopher, who began questioning everything.

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What is justice as the beginning question of the republic is? What is justice?

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Well, in an organic society everybody knows intuitively, instinctively what's justice, what's right and wrong.

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Now the philosophers wanted to have reasons for it. You say this is justice, why?

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In the Sansimonian view that began the eroding of this organic phase and the coming into existence of a critical phase.

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It was necessary because the old ideas were not really adequate, the ideas of the Greek gods and goddesses.

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They were not really adequate, so it was necessary that the old system made way for a critical phase.

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However, human beings really can't live in critical phases. They're not made for it.

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It does create too much anxiety, questioning, problems.

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If we take a modern example, one might say, a sense of money might say, is the case today.

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Who knows how to raise children today in our society? Who knows how to raise children?

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At one time, people had a very good idea how to raise children.

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In my neighborhood, Angelo, come over here, I'll break your legs.

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If you keep doing that, I'll break your legs, wait until your father gets home.

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I thought it worked pretty good, but nowadays there are so many conflicting ways, and young couples, now if they happen to have some anchor in their life, all to the good.

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If they're the typical product of liberal education, so-called liberal education in America, there are real problems, and then very soon after, maybe at about the age of two and a half, the kid takes over.

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And that certainly leads to its own problems. So you see, this in other words is a critical phase of the evolution of our society, and people are not sure about things.

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Now, so the critical phase of ancient society was followed by an organic phase, according to the Sansimonians, and that was medieval Catholicism.

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There was an assured sense of the rightness of things. You can see it, for instance, in any of the great medieval systems, let's say Dante's Paradise Laws, in society, that is, in the social structure of feudalism, in religion, one religion, and within that religion, the authority of the Pope at the very top.

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There was the great chain of being, with God at the top, and then the angels, and then the Pope, and then the kings, and then the nobility, and then average people, and among average people, the father and the family, ruling it over the mother, the parents ruling it over the children, human beings ruling it over animals, that was the great chain of being going from the very top to the bottom.

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And according to the Sans-Simonians, who, like everyone at the time, had a very simplistic view of what the Middle Ages was like, that provided the organic phase that was necessary.

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However, as with the Greek gods, medieval Catholicism could not withstand criticism of critical reasoning.

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So the Protestant Reformation came along. If this seems, you know, awfully quick to you, well, I'm saying they're not particularly deep historians.

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The Protestant Reformation came along and, above all, the rise of modern science.

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So the medieval synthesis was shattered and a period, a critical period followed.

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And that critical period lasted for a number of centuries, the French Enlightenment is a good example of it, destroying everything and really creating, not very much, positive from the Sansimonian point of view.

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The French Revolution illustrated that in politics, and now the time has come for the creation of a new organic stage of society.

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And this will be the last stage of society.

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That's another thing these philosophies of history had in common.

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They not only talked about how history had developed up until this time,

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but somehow, either now or very soon, the end stage will have been reached.

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Because now we have an authority, we have an authority, we have an overriding philosophy that can be permanent.

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and that is positivism, that is the application of modern science to social, to all social and human questions.

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So the senseimonian idea was, we're going to be able to solve all of the problems created by critical phases,

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all of the anxieties and conflicts, and enter onto an organic phase that will be permanent.

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It will be the rule over society of the positivist thinkers, positivist priests, wielding the methods of positive science.

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And this is going to have implications for every aspect of society.

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Now, Saint-Simon's last work was The New Christianity, because it turns out that positivism is another aspect of true Christianity.

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True Christianity has nothing to do with particular doctrines or particular liturgy, particular services in one religion or another.

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True Christianity is simply the message of Jesus.

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Love thy neighbor as thyself.

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And the positivist rulers of society will be using the methods of natural science

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to further the aim of true Christianity, of a total human brotherhood

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among people of a nation and eventually of the whole world.

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Now, Saint-Simon maybe is not himself, strictly speaking, a socialist, but his followers certainly

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were, and they were the most consistent and, for a time, the best known socialists in Europe.

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He died in 1825, and just a few years later, his followers, the Saint-Simonians, began

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holding first of all a series of famous lectures in Paris to which hundreds and hundreds of people came,

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hundreds and hundreds of people of the elite and foreigners of the elite also. Heinrich Heine,

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the German poet, attended these lectures and here they published the exposition of the

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Doctrine of Saint-Simon which was largely their own doctrine. Here they came up with most of the

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The arguments against modern capitalism. Modern capitalism is a new form of feudalism. Now the rule of the factory owner over his wage slaves.

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Modern capitalism leads eventually to depressions, the business cycle. This is inherent in capitalism.

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Competition is inherently and vastly wasteful.

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What is the point of having two different companies building railroads from Paris to

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Lyon when we can have scientists, engineers, experts get together, find out which the best

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route between Paris and Lyon is and build that instead of having trains going half full

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from each of two competing companies who would have a prosperous railroad company that was

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built by experts. And they came up with the idea that these experts would get together,

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experts in all fields, and concoct plans for the whole economic life of society. In this

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In this way, the Sansimonians really were the originators of the idea of central economic planning.

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For a while, in the late 1820s, 1830s, Sansimonianism was the success of the day in Europe.

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It was the wave of the future. It was the sort of thing that anybody who was interested in fashionable ideas

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would get acquainted with, think about, adopt very often. Carl Marks, a young lad in the Rhineland, in his hometown,

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there was an elderly gentleman, or an older man there, the man named von Westphalen, a minor nobleman,

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and Marx was already in his young teen years interested in in new ideas and

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one of the main things that he discussed with this gentleman were the ideas of the

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Sansamonians. Vestfallen afterwards became Marx's father-in-law when Marx

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married his daughter but what I'm getting at is that here Karl Marx

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interested in what's fashionable in the way of ideas being acquainted coming to

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So this sets the stage now, in the 1830s, early 1840s, for the appearance of Marxism.

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Now, Marxism, the thing to understand about Marx, as Murray Rothbard says,

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at the beginning of his many pages on Marx, at the end of the second volume of his History of Economic Thought,

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The thing to understand about Marx is that Marx was a communist, and what Murray means, among other things, by that, is that Marx was a communist before he was anything else, that is, he was a communist before he was an economist, in fact, he learned economics in order to rationalize his communism, this is well known among people who know about Marx's life, by 1844, he had already written a book,

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The Paris Manuscripts

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1844, there's no economics at all. All it is, is playing around with Hegelian kind of categories.

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There's what's sometimes called a philosophical anthropology that is dealing with the nature of

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man and juggling around aspects of that in a philosophical way, having no connection with

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empirical reality practically and certainly no connection with economics. It was only around

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It was around this time, in the mid-1840s, that Marx became interested in economics for the first time, and under the influence of another young German that he had met, Friedrich Engels.

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By the way, let me say something about the literature on this subject.

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I've mentioned Alexander Grey, who also has some very good chapters on Marx and Marxism and the different Marxists.

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This has as much to do with this book I'm talking about now as much to do with Soviet Russia as with Marxism.

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And I mentioned the last time the book by Martin Malia on the Soviet Union.

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Now, Leszek Kalikowski, who's still alive, was at one time himself a communist in Poland.

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However, he outgrew that, became a critic of communism, and in the 1970s wrote a magnificent

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and three-volume work called Main Currents of Marxist Thought. It's, I think, still

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in paperback from Oxford University Press. The first volume on origins of Marxism and

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Marx and Engels, the second volume on the thinkers of the second international like

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Lenin, for instance, and the third volume on 20th century Marxists. It is one of the

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It is one of the great works of intellectual history of the 20th century in my opinion.

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And Leszek Kalikowski is a great scholar, familiar with all of the relevant languages.

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We saw something about the depths of the stupidity of many Americans in regard to foreigners just a few weeks ago

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When they started mocking the French, and France, and French culture, there are Americans who mock the Polish people, the great Polish people.

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Leszek Kolokowski is a good antidote to that. He is today even a man of immense learning, and these three volumes are indispensable, I would say, to anyone interested in Marxism.

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I suppose it would come as a surprise to many of the people who retail Polish jokes and so on,

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that among the greatest logicians of the 20th century were Poles,

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which is one reason why the Poles were able to crack the German code

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and bring their findings over to England and were instrumental in permitting the British

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to follow German secret messages in their code.

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Well, this is as far as the literature goes. Paul Craig Roberts, I see that his book is available right out here,

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Alienation and the Soviet Economy. Now, what Roberts does is very interesting.

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Some people have said, well, in the early Marx, the humanist Marx, the economic and philosophical manuscripts, for instance,

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He keeps talking about alienation, but that escapes Marx's attention after a short while,

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and then he starts talking in the very familiar terms about historical determinism and substructure,

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superstructure, and one phase of society necessarily following another.

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Therefore, this earlier humanist Marx, with his emphasis on alienation, is not very important.

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What Robert shows is really that that concept, although not explicitly used by Marx in later

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years, underlay everything that he did afterwards, and underlay also the Soviet experiment.

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So I think that this is a very important work of Marxist scholarship, I think, fairly brief,

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with very important implications.

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What was Marx after?

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It would be a terrible mistake, and Lenin understood this.

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This is why he hated the revision of socialists.

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It would be a terrible mistake to reduce Marxism to the idea that working people would be a

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lot better off under socialism, that socialism is more efficient, will bring prosperity to

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To all, we'll do away with class domination. Yes, he believed those things. But most of all, and centrally what he believed, was that for the first time the human race could achieve real human dignity, which it had not up until now. Why not?

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Because up until now, human history has been accidental.

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People have done things, acted in history, and often their actions produced consequences,

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the opposite of what people wanted.

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Nobody wants depressions, for instance, and yet the capitalist system is such that people act,

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and within a limited sense they act rationally, and yet depressions occur.

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So what's going on here? What's going on here is that man does not have control of his own destiny.

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And man will not have control of his own destiny until the time comes when society is totally planned.

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That planning aspect is not simply a way of bringing about more efficiency,

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it's a way of affirming human dignity and the human control of human affairs.

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Marx, as I said last time, there isn't very much in the corpus of Marx and Engels that tells us what the future society is going to be about, but this point is certainly clear.

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This is what Marx wrote of the stage of communist society just before the disappearance of scarcity.

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Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under a common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature.

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You understand what he's saying? He's not talking about thunderstorms or earthquakes.

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He's talking about the course of history as being like the blind forces of nature in that human beings have to submit to, have to endure events, sufferings that they never intended.

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The point is made clearer by angles.

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This is a longish quote, but I'll read it in such a way I hope that you can follow it and you can understand what he's getting at.

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With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with.

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Production of commodities is what he means by the name for the market economy.

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Production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of product over the producers.

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In the market economy, with the so-called invisible hand, there is no invisible hand.

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It's total anarchy of production, anarchy of production, a term coined by the Sansimonians.

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And here, repeated by Engels, anarchy of social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan.

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The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround men, which ruled men up until now, now comes under the dominion and conscious control of men, who become for the first time the real conscious lords of nature, because, and in that, they become masters of their own social organization.

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The laws of their own social activity, which confronted them until this point as alien laws of nature controlling them, then are applied by men with full understanding and so mastered by them.

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Only from then on will men make their history themselves in full consciousness.

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Do you understand that? Make their history themselves in full consciousness. That is, everything that happens in history will have been planned.

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Only from then on will the social causes, they set into motion, have in the main, and in constantly increasing proportion, also the results intended by them.

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It is a leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

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In another place Engels refers to it as the end of the prehistory of mankind.

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Up until now, it's been almost like the history of the apes.

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Human beings not in control of their destiny.

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Only with this total conscious planning of the economy and society

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will human beings then be in control of their destiny, of their history.

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So this is what was aimed at as the ultimate goal of communist society, and this is what Lenin understood, this is what the other Bolsheviks, Trotsky especially, understood.

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Now I mentioned revisionist socialism. Much could be said about the history of Marxism, and Marx dies in 1883 and Engels in 1895.

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They live a long time, they write a lot of things. They engage when they can in revolutionary activity, especially in 1848.

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But Europe is sort of quiescent. When the Paris Commune comes about in 1871, suddenly their excitement is ignited again and they think that this is maybe the dawn of the revolution.

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It wasn't even a Marxist revolution, it was more of a Jacobin and even a Proudhonist revolt in Paris. So it never amounted to anything.

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So the actual revolutionary activity they could engage in was limited. They did help form with others, the first international, the working men's international, but that came to grief over the conflict between Marx and his side and Bakunin and the anarchists.

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Bakunin, incidentally, you probably know the name Bakunin, right, he was a lovable old

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He was a psychotic. He was an anarchist and just traveled around trying to, in the mid-century, he died, what, in the 1870s I think, trying to raise up revolution wherever he went, go to some country and learn enough of the language to start haranguing mobs, and so on.

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He never really succeeded very much.

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He was in Dresden during the Saxon Revolution of 1849

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and heard Wagner conducting Beethoven's Ninth.

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And Bakunin said, what a pity that this tomb must be destroyed.

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You know, I mean, crazy things like that.

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On the other hand, he never actually killed anybody.

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He was imprisoned by the Tsars and escaped

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from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, and he tried to get back into Europe to start

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revolutions again. He went the long route, you know, across Siberia. Well, it just was

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less danger coming across the police. Came to America, looked around and said something

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to the effect of, why am I spending my time on this anarchy? They have anarchy. Where

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Here is the government here. Made his way to Europe, constantly writing pamphlets and so on.

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He translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian.

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So he was an admirer of Marx and especially Martin of Engels for a while,

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but then became progressively disillusioned.

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Bakunin was the first critic of Marxism to bring up the question of the new class

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that became famous in criticisms of Marxism.

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The most famous, although not the deepest, critic along these lines was the Yugoslav

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Milovan Djilas, who wrote a book that was titled The New Class in the post-World War

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II period.

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But other anarchists along the line, this was their main criticism of Marxism, and that's

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That's why they insisted that the state had to be abolished totally and immediately.

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Because they said the alternative was that a small group, as Marx said, communists are

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the vanguard of the proletariat because they know more about the historical process than

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the proletariat does.

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The alternative is that a small group is going to gain control of the state and what reason

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is it to suppose they'll ever give up their power?

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We notice that in the Communist Manifesto, one of the items is that agriculture is now

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to be conducted by vast armies of agricultural laborers.

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But Kuhnens said an army means that there are soldiers and there are officers.

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And what have we got here?

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These vast armies working the fields and the plantations.

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We have here the Roman lot of fundia again.

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Well, what we have here is a new system of slavery under a new ruling class. Well, Marx didn't want to hear this, and correspondence between Marx and Engels, I haven't actually checked it out, except for certain theoretically important letters, but they're filled with ethnic and racial slurs, mainly against their socialist and anarchist opponents. But Bakunin himself said that Marx's position is very typically Jewish.

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Very typically Jewish and German, Bakunin being Russian and not Jewish.

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So this is somewhat amusing, but also because of Bakunin's analysis,

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interesting episode in the 19th century, history of radicalism.

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Bakunin did start some centers of anarchism, mainly in Spain.

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and the anarchists come around during the Spanish Civil War, also in Italy, but it was Marxist socialism that prevailed.

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And Marxist socialism, the Marxist idea that finally took over the great social democratic party of Germany, the SPD,

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which as you know exists to the present day and is the ruling party in Germany.

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And, towards the end of the 19th century, the great, especially after Engels passes away,

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the great theoreticians of Marxism are mainly German socialists.

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But, after Engels dies, maybe he waited for it, one of the German socialist leaders,

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Here's Edward Bernstein, begins to publish works that are questioning and then critical,

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although he'd been very close to Engels.

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But Bernstein says is this, okay, we're at the end of the 19th century, Marx had a definite

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Scenario for the Collapse of Capitalism. The working class would get poorer and poorer.

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Capitalism is not able to sustain its slaves in their slavery. There would be fewer and

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fewer businesses and ultimately only a very few very large businesses. The middle class

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is going to disappear. The business cycle is going to get worse and worse. And then

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And finally, with the organization of the working class by the communists, society will

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have had enough and the socialist revolution will occur.

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Bernstein said, none of these things is happening.

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The working people are not getting poorer and poorer, far from it.

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We now have the, of course there's much poverty and pockets of deep poverty, but we have the

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Most affluent working classes have existed in Europe.

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There are very big businesses, but there are more and more small businesses that act as

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feeders to the big businesses.

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And anyway, you have the joint stock company, which means you have a big business, but there

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can be thousands and thousands of owners of this big business.

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There is a business cycle, but it does not appear to be getting worse than it has been

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in the past.

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So what are we going to do?

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Doomsday for Capitalism does not seem to be around the corner, and what he says is that we have to revise Marxism, so it's Bernstein's Writings of the Origin of Revisionist Marxism.

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He says there's not going to be any de tag, there's not going to be any the day when capitalism falls to be replaced by socialism.

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Socialism, we have to work for piecemeal reform through labour unions, through government

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regulation.

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Well, if you think about it, so Bernstein's revisionism that was condemned by the big

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socialist theoreticians becomes essentially socialism, what is today socialism, as opposed

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to what became communism.

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However, one member, Bernstein and the other leaders of the German social democracy and

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Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and actually Benito Mussolini and others are all members of the

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second international, which is a Marxist international.

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One of the Russian members, Lenin, took the party name of Lenin, is outraged by this revisionism.

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He says, how do we have the Marxist totally planned society that guarantees human dignity

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and freedom for the first time?

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How do we have that by means of these small concessions that the capitalists give us to

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the labor unions and government regulation?

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We have to have an overall revolution in order to bring about the radically different planned

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society that Marx wrote about and that is the socialist aim.

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So Lenin opposed revisionism, insisting on a purer interpretation of Marxism, and revisionism

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means different things.

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This has nothing to do with revisionism in the historical sense, in the sense of revising

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history.

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This is revisionism in the context of the history of socialist thought.

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And revisionism became one of the worst, if not the worst curse word that socialists and

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During the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, for instance, when the Soviet leadership and Mao were at loggerheads, Mao accused Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders of being revisionists.

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So, as we now approach the 20th century, many people in the western countries think that a socialist revolution is inevitable.

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Certainly in Germany, the socialist party is getting more and more powerful every year, gaining votes, deputies in the Reichstag, and socialist parties are forming everywhere.

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I mentioned in Italy, among other places, and in Italy the real radical fire brand and enemy of the revisionists is a young socialist named Mussolini.

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In Russia there's a small socialist movement, relatively small, after the 1905 revolution it becomes legal,

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If it's legal, except that these Marxist leaders insist on talking about overthrowing the Tsar, killing the Tsar and so on, then that's not legal.

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So some of them have to leave the country as Lenin does.

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In 1914, in early 1914, Lenin gave a talk in Zurich, where he was in exile in Switzerland.

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And he said something to the effect that, you younger socialists who are listening to me now, you will be the ones who will have to carry on the torch of the socialist revolution.

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I'm getting on in years. Well, he was only in his early 50s, late 40s, early 50s. I'm getting on in years and nothing has happened so far.

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The Marxist party in Russia, as a matter of fact, had split into two sections, his own, the Bolsheviks, and the other section, the Mensheviks.

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And we're just a few thousand people.

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He didn't have to make it explicit, but how in heaven's name were they going to overthrow the imperial Tsarist army, standing army of two million men,

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and reserves of many, many millions after that. How are these few thousand Bolsheviks going to do that?

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Well, history came to Lenin's aid. No, actually what came to Lenin's aid was war

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and the terrible European war that I'll talk about tomorrow morning.

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The Bolsheviks were not able to destroy the largest army in the world, the Imperial Tsarist Army.

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What destroyed that army was the German army and made it possible for the Bolsheviks to take over a shattered, collapsed Russia.

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And that's what happens in the crucial year of 1917.

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I mentioned the man who was shown decisively on the basis of not only the latest documentation, but really documents that were known before,

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The so-called October Revolution, what the communists for decades called Great October, Red October,

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this landmark in the history of the human race, was simply a coup d'etat by a few thousand Red Guards,

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first of all in Petrograd and then in some other Russian towns, and that was followed then by the Civil War.

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This is Richard Pipes, a Russian historian. Actually, Pipes wrote a very good book on the principle of property through history.

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He's a Harvard professor. I think he still is, not emeritus. And I forget the name of his book, but you'd be able to see which one it is by looking over the title of his many books.

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It's a book on the role of property in history.

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What's that?

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Me?

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It's possible.

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I read it in Czech, so maybe I have a different name in mind.

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It's a remarkable book.

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If for no other reason, we have a Harvard professor, aside from Bob Nozick,

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who for the first time mentions Ayn Rand.

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He talks about, he has some chapter, kind of mixed up chapter about proponents, modern proponents of property.

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I don't think he mentioned the Austrian School, although as I said, Martin Malia does, who's better informed about these things.

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But Pipes has also a book on the coup d'état of October.

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Richard Pipes is not to be confused with his evil and twisted son, Daniel Pipes,

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Who was that?

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Hey, come on, if you didn't boo for Rousseau, why are we going to boo for some wimp chicken hawk like Daniel Pipes?

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Tomorrow, that's going to be very relevant, okay?

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And I think that by now you'll know who to boo for.

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Anyway, so Pipes shows it was a coup d'etat.

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In any case, the Bolsheviks do come to power, they win the civil war, they establish what

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they afterwards try to call war communism.

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Now, Craig Roberts shows this with complete conviction as far as I'm concerned.

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It wasn't war communism, it wasn't a special emergency system of measures to deal with

384
00:50:43.080 --> 00:50:49.800
the Civil War and the war with Germany that was still going on. What it was, was communism,

385
00:50:49.800 --> 00:50:57.600
what Lenin and all the other Bolsheviks understood as communism. What they tried to do, as much

386
00:50:57.600 --> 00:51:04.840
as they could, was simply abolish the market. They were Marxists, authentic Marxists, they

387
00:51:04.840 --> 00:51:09.480
had come to power for this reason, to abolish commodity production, and that's what they

388
00:51:09.480 --> 00:51:22.480
The result was a catastrophe. Of course, there were other bad things going on, but that was enough to bring the Soviet regime to the edge of the abyss.

389
00:51:22.480 --> 00:51:37.480
And Lenin understood that. He was always a very good tactician. If we continue with this war communism, abolishing all the private economic transactions, that's what's called speculation.

390
00:51:37.480 --> 00:51:46.480
If you go to the edge of the town, bring in some of your books to exchange for a sack of potatoes that a farmer is bringing in.

391
00:51:46.480 --> 00:51:55.480
If found doing it, you could be shot on the spot by the new Soviet secret police.

392
00:51:55.480 --> 00:52:01.480
Lenin realized that this whole system of communism, as he said, was premature.

393
00:52:01.480 --> 00:52:09.480
So this is when, in 1921, he introduced the new economic policy of a modified socialism and capitalism.

394
00:52:09.480 --> 00:52:17.480
The kind of thing that Gorbachev tried to realize finally in the last years of the Soviet regime, but was not able to.

395
00:52:17.480 --> 00:52:26.480
But now in the meantime, we can talk a little bit maybe about the Soviet Union in a little while and what happened there.

396
00:52:26.480 --> 00:52:44.480
But in the meantime, I want to give you an idea of what the communist leaders were actually aiming at.

397
00:52:44.480 --> 00:52:52.480
This is a book by Leon Trotsky called Literature and Revolution.

398
00:52:52.480 --> 00:53:04.480
It's famous, I think, most of all, because of its last ridiculous sentences about what will happen eventually in communist society.

399
00:53:04.480 --> 00:53:18.480
He says, the average human type will rise to the heights, the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx, and above this ridge new peaks will rise.

400
00:53:18.480 --> 00:53:27.480
As I remarked to a friend of mine one time, that would be a real hard class to teach.

401
00:53:27.480 --> 00:53:32.480
So those lines are quoted by Mises among other people.

402
00:53:32.480 --> 00:53:39.480
But the whole of the last few pages is very instructive.

403
00:53:39.480 --> 00:53:48.980
Because Trotsky was, in a conventional intellectual sense, the most brilliant of the Bolsheviks.

404
00:53:48.980 --> 00:53:57.980
Robert Conquest also calls him the most ferocious for good reason, but he certainly was intellectually adept.

405
00:53:57.980 --> 00:54:05.980
He understood the connection of ideas, and this is what he understood as what was being aimed at,

406
00:54:05.980 --> 00:54:12.980
What the whole purpose of the Bolshevik Revolution was, the whole purpose of bringing communism to Russia was.

407
00:54:12.980 --> 00:54:27.980
In the end, what's going to happen is that man will free himself from mystic and every other intellectual vagueness,

408
00:54:27.980 --> 00:54:35.980
and his effort will be directed to reconstructing society and himself in accord with his own plan.

409
00:54:35.980 --> 00:54:42.980
By the way, notice, and this goes throughout Marx and Engels whom I discussed before,

410
00:54:42.980 --> 00:54:53.980
this odd notion that the human race is somehow one person, man, who has one plan to reconstruct himself.

411
00:54:53.980 --> 00:54:59.340
This, evidently, was seriously the way these people thought.

412
00:54:59.340 --> 00:55:05.260
For instance, the imperceptible ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick,

413
00:55:05.260 --> 00:55:11.100
from generation to generation, will give way to titanic constructions of city villages

414
00:55:11.100 --> 00:55:14.380
with map and compass in hand.

415
00:55:14.380 --> 00:55:18.940
Well, you know, sort of urban renewal writ large.

416
00:55:18.940 --> 00:55:28.940
But that idea of the city-villages, that became a standard with modern architects who essentially were communists.

417
00:55:28.940 --> 00:55:39.940
Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected.

418
00:55:39.940 --> 00:55:45.940
Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments.

419
00:55:45.940 --> 00:56:03.940
The human species, the coagulated homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation and in his own hands will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.

420
00:56:03.940 --> 00:56:10.940
I mean, it's a good idea that the genome didn't fall into the hands of these people.

421
00:56:10.940 --> 00:56:18.940
It will become possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life.

422
00:56:18.940 --> 00:56:27.940
And as for reproduction, the human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital,

423
00:56:27.940 --> 00:56:36.940
in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection.

424
00:56:36.940 --> 00:56:43.580
You understand? Blind sexual selection, which is what happened up until now. You know, the boy-girl thing.

425
00:56:45.660 --> 00:56:48.860
That's blind sexual selection. It will all be planned.

426
00:56:51.420 --> 00:56:55.900
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts

427
00:56:55.900 --> 00:57:00.780
to the height of consciousness, make them transparent, extend the wires of his will into

428
00:57:00.780 --> 00:57:07.100
into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane to create a higher

429
00:57:07.100 --> 00:57:12.100
social biological type, or if you please, a superman.

430
00:57:12.100 --> 00:57:27.980
Well, I'm not saying that that's the furthest thing from a reasonable comparison to what

431
00:57:27.980 --> 00:57:43.100
So, that is the ultimate in the total planning, totally conscious, the development step-by-step,

432
00:57:43.100 --> 00:57:49.700
everything that happens in society consciously planned beforehand, and that is, I think that

433
00:57:49.700 --> 00:57:55.380
he discovered and made it somewhat more explicit, the Marxist idea.

434
00:57:55.380 --> 00:58:05.380
Well, as you know, most likely, Trotsky lost out in his battle with Stalin for leadership after the death of Lenin.

435
00:58:05.380 --> 00:58:11.380
Stalin was not as successful as Lenin.

436
00:58:11.380 --> 00:58:20.380
Well, as you know, most likely Trotsky lost out in his battle with Stalin for leadership

437
00:58:20.380 --> 00:58:31.000
after the death of Lenin. Stalin was not by any means as agile and intellectual and thinker

438
00:58:31.000 --> 00:58:38.120
as Trotsky was. And he had his problems. I mean, before you can go on to this planning

439
00:58:38.120 --> 00:58:45.280
of the Total Psycho-Biological Nature of Man and so on, you know, you have to produce enough

440
00:58:45.280 --> 00:58:49.520
John paper and so on, right, you have to, the sort of things that the Soviet regime

441
00:58:49.520 --> 00:58:53.820
never succeeded in doing.

442
00:58:53.820 --> 00:59:03.360
So Stalin was taken up by economic problems for a long time, and now one of the things

443
00:59:03.360 --> 00:59:27.360
One of the things that's important to understand that didn't depend on modern research and the opening of Soviet archives, but is confirmed by such research and opening of archives, is that the Stalinist system was put into place in its beginnings by Lenin.

444
00:59:27.360 --> 00:59:39.360
The first labor camps, for instance, were set up under Lenin and the Soviet secret police that afterwards became the NKVD and finally the KGB.

445
00:59:39.360 --> 00:59:47.360
This was put into effect by Lenin under the name the Cheka.

446
00:59:47.360 --> 00:59:57.360
Now, one thing I mentioned last time that's going to be of great significance is the Comintern,

447
00:59:57.360 --> 01:00:07.360
the Communist International, set up and brought into existence by Lenin,

448
01:00:07.360 --> 01:00:10.360
the organization of all communist parties in the world.

449
01:00:10.360 --> 01:00:15.360
There had been socialist parties and socialist movements and factions in many different places.

450
01:00:15.360 --> 01:00:28.360
After the communists take over in Russia, what Lenin does is offer an invitation to all of these different socialist groups to join his new Communist International.

451
01:00:28.360 --> 01:00:41.360
Change your name to Communist Party, for instance, CPF, the Communist Party of France, CPUSA, CPUK, CPC, Communist Party of China, and so on.

452
01:00:41.360 --> 01:00:46.080
and then you obey the regulations and rules of the common term and they have

453
01:00:46.080 --> 01:00:50.800
conventions from time to time and the program of the common term they don't

454
01:00:50.800 --> 01:00:55.080
make any secret about it it's not anything that that the FBI has to go and

455
01:00:55.080 --> 01:01:02.960
find out they openly proclaim that if it could even find it in the newspapers they

456
01:01:02.960 --> 01:01:08.280
openly proclaim that their aim is the overthrow by force if necessary by

457
01:01:08.280 --> 01:01:13.000
by the elections, well, it's not too likely the bourgeoisie is going to react to that

458
01:01:13.000 --> 01:01:18.640
by force, whenever necessary, of every bourgeois government in the world.

459
01:01:18.640 --> 01:01:22.020
Replacement of those governments by communist governments.

460
01:01:22.020 --> 01:01:30.920
See, Lenin was enough of a Marxist to realize that according to his theory, you really can't

461
01:01:30.920 --> 01:01:35.320
have communism in one relatively backward country alone.

462
01:01:35.320 --> 01:01:41.040
So what he said was that Russia was relatively backward. However, the revolution in Russia

463
01:01:41.040 --> 01:01:47.280
would begin to spark the world revolution. So then you would have the revolution in Germany,

464
01:01:47.280 --> 01:01:52.400
in Britain, in America, in more advanced countries. And then you would have a world communist

465
01:01:52.400 --> 01:02:02.760
community. So the Comintern's aim was to bring about these revolutions everywhere. Germany

466
01:02:02.760 --> 01:02:07.720
Germany was the one he was most interested in for obvious reasons.

467
01:02:07.720 --> 01:02:14.960
Geopolitically, whoever controls Russia and Germany is about to control the continent.

468
01:02:14.960 --> 01:02:20.760
And you can have England off on the periphery there, but you'd get hold of Europe and then

469
01:02:20.760 --> 01:02:25.880
European colonies, and then the world revolution would really be underway.

470
01:02:25.880 --> 01:02:31.720
This common turn was a mortal threat to everybody who was not a communist in Europe, including

471
01:02:31.720 --> 01:02:39.720
Socialists, including the German SPD, the socialists of the German Social Democratic Party, who broke with Lenin.

472
01:02:39.720 --> 01:02:49.720
And it had some consequences that were extremely unfortunate.

473
01:02:49.720 --> 01:02:59.720
Nowadays, very often, the history of fascism, let's say Italian fascism or German Nazism, National Socialism, sometimes called a kind of fascism,

474
01:02:59.720 --> 01:03:04.720
These histories are written as if they occurred in a vacuum.

475
01:03:04.720 --> 01:03:13.720
In Germany, for instance, there were elements that pointed in this authoritarian direction in previous German history,

476
01:03:13.720 --> 01:03:17.720
the Italian problem and the weakness of the Italian state are brought in.

477
01:03:17.720 --> 01:03:28.720
It is not made nearly clear enough that Italian fascism certainly, and German national socialism to a large degree,

478
01:03:28.720 --> 01:03:33.920
were the product of the communist threat.

479
01:03:33.920 --> 01:03:39.160
This is demonstrable in the case of Italy, where the Italian Socialist Party became a

480
01:03:39.160 --> 01:03:44.720
Leninist party and openly threatened a Leninist revolution in Italy.

481
01:03:44.720 --> 01:03:48.920
And the Italian fascists, the supporters of Mussolini, didn't amount to anything until

482
01:03:48.920 --> 01:03:55.480
the public became very scared of this, of the takeover of the factories by the Leninist

483
01:03:55.480 --> 01:04:08.480
by the takeover of the land of the po farmers by squatters under the direction of sympathizers with Lenin.

484
01:04:08.480 --> 01:04:15.480
The announcement by the leaders of the Italian Socialist Party that the Leninist revolution is around the corner,

485
01:04:15.480 --> 01:04:20.480
well, this empowered the Italian fascists.

486
01:04:20.480 --> 01:04:28.060
Fascists. They began to get their support from the middle class and from businesses, and that's a whole other story that one could go into.

487
01:04:28.400 --> 01:04:32.440
But without any communist threat, Mussolini wouldn't have amounted to anything, and

488
01:04:33.080 --> 01:04:38.680
to a large extent, that's also the case with the National Socialists in Germany.

489
01:04:40.000 --> 01:04:43.040
To many American historians,

490
01:04:43.040 --> 01:04:49.240
it's not very much of a big deal that if you were a German or an Italian or a Spaniard at the time of the Civil War,

491
01:04:49.240 --> 01:05:05.240
or a poll for instance, you had to live on the same continent with a power that told you that its aim was the forcible overthrow of your government in order to impose the kind of system on your country that we have in Russia.

492
01:05:05.240 --> 01:05:14.760
As we know now, this does come out from documents, and Pipes has written about this, in 1920

493
01:05:14.760 --> 01:05:21.400
occurred a war between the Soviet Union and Poland, the new Republic of Poland.

494
01:05:21.400 --> 01:05:28.760
And Trotsky was the leader and organizer of the Red Army, led this attack into Poland,

495
01:05:28.760 --> 01:05:39.880
Lenin expected the Polish peasants and workers to greet the Red Army with open arms. Bounties

496
01:05:39.880 --> 01:05:48.080
were offered for anybody who would hang a priest or a landlord. The executions took

497
01:05:48.080 --> 01:05:54.400
place on the way and Lenin and his friends were looking forward to a Red Poland. What

498
01:05:54.400 --> 01:06:00.120
What happened was that the Polish people, the Marshal or then General Pilsudski, met

499
01:06:00.120 --> 01:06:07.400
the Red Army at the Vistula and stopped them, and then some compromise was reached between

500
01:06:07.400 --> 01:06:10.320
Russia and Poland for a while.

501
01:06:10.320 --> 01:06:17.200
But the Poles from then on, as you can imagine, terrified of a possibility of Soviet takeover

502
01:06:17.200 --> 01:06:19.240
by their big neighbor.

503
01:06:19.240 --> 01:06:24.360
So that European peoples in general, you'd have to be a millionaire or a vast landowner

504
01:06:24.360 --> 01:06:29.400
to Fear a Communist Revolution. People knew what was happening in the Soviet Union. Mass

505
01:06:29.400 --> 01:06:37.480
famine in 1921 under that so-called war communism, mass terror, the Red Terror of the Cheka,

506
01:06:37.480 --> 01:06:46.400
the attempt to extinguish, annihilate Christianity, open, massive attempt by the government. People

507
01:06:46.400 --> 01:06:56.440
People knew what this communist regime entailed, and many of them fled into the arms of demagogues

508
01:06:56.440 --> 01:07:04.800
like Mussolini and afterwards Hitler.

509
01:07:04.800 --> 01:07:11.660
The crimes of the Nazis were one of the worst things that have ever happened in history,

510
01:07:11.660 --> 01:07:14.120
but I think we know a lot about them.

511
01:07:14.120 --> 01:07:20.680
I think in many cases we're informed about them. In my case, I try to keep up with things,

512
01:07:20.680 --> 01:07:25.120
so I'm informed about them every single day of my life, literally every single day of

513
01:07:25.120 --> 01:07:31.720
my life. In what I read and on the Internet and so on, I hear about things like the Holocaust,

514
01:07:31.720 --> 01:07:39.640
and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to forget. However, the crimes of Soviet Communism are

515
01:07:39.640 --> 01:07:49.640
are much more rarely mentioned and figure much more infrequently, much more rarely in the

516
01:07:49.640 --> 01:07:50.640
minds of people.

517
01:07:50.640 --> 01:07:52.920
I mean, the average person doesn't know the first thing about them.

518
01:07:52.920 --> 01:07:58.640
I don't think that the average person has ever heard of Kolomog or Rakuta, massive slave

519
01:07:58.640 --> 01:07:59.640
labor camps.

520
01:07:59.640 --> 01:08:06.480
The average person certainly has not heard about the Ukrainian and North Caucasus famine

521
01:08:06.480 --> 01:08:12.280
that took, we don't know exactly, six, seven, eight million lives, something like that.

522
01:08:12.280 --> 01:08:20.420
The lying, deceptive, duplicitous rat who was a New York Times correspondent and won

523
01:08:20.420 --> 01:08:26.960
a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union that there was no famine going

524
01:08:26.960 --> 01:08:35.800
on, privately said, probably about 10 million people have died when he had to report to

525
01:08:35.800 --> 01:08:48.000
of British Intelligence. This man is Walter Durante. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the

526
01:08:48.000 --> 01:08:55.360
New York Times in 1932. There's now a movement to take his Pulitzer Prize away from him on

527
01:08:55.360 --> 01:09:02.200
the model of the Bancroft Prize being taken away from Belial, this lying historian from

528
01:09:32.200 --> 01:09:38.200
should think posthumously to take Durante's prize away from him.

529
01:09:38.200 --> 01:09:41.200
Now, why should this be?

530
01:09:41.200 --> 01:09:46.200
There's been a very good book written by Anne Applebaum.

531
01:09:46.200 --> 01:09:50.200
It just came out a little while ago.

532
01:09:50.200 --> 01:10:19.200
called the gulag. The gulag, as you probably know, is the name, it's a Russian acronym given to the camp system, the system of forced labor camps.

533
01:10:19.200 --> 01:10:27.200
Alexander Zolginitsyn, who was temporarily an inmate, wrote three volumes called the Gulag Archipelago.

534
01:10:27.200 --> 01:10:34.200
And the concept there is that these camps were spread like islands throughout the whole Soviet Union,

535
01:10:34.200 --> 01:10:38.200
like an archipelago of islands throughout the whole Soviet Union.

536
01:10:38.200 --> 01:10:47.200
Now, the victims of Soviet communism, actually it's not correct to concentrate on the Gulag,

537
01:10:47.200 --> 01:10:51.680
and the Gulag. More of them died outside of the Gulag than died there in the camps, for

538
01:10:51.680 --> 01:11:00.680
instance, in the terror famine or in the constant executions. I put down her name, Ann Appelbaum,

539
01:11:00.680 --> 01:11:08.200
an excellent, really brilliant journalist and more than a journalist, very good historian.

540
01:11:08.200 --> 01:11:16.360
She's written before about this issue. In one of her articles, she pointed out that

541
01:11:16.360 --> 01:11:46.360
President Clinton, some years back, went to visit Minsk, which is the capital of what used to be called White Russia, and now goes by the name of Belarus, and he had heard that there was a big killing field outside of Minsk, which in fact there was, of thousands of people, tens of thousands probably, who had been executed by the Soviets under Stalin's time. And he asked the president of Belarus to be brought there to say something about it.

542
01:11:46.360 --> 01:11:53.360
And the president, I forget the man's name, said, no, we don't want to, we don't want to wash our dirty linen in public.

543
01:11:53.360 --> 01:12:02.360
There's no need to go back to all that old stuff. It's water under the bridge. Let's just go on from here.

544
01:12:02.360 --> 01:12:13.360
Now, contrast that with what's done in regard to the crimes of the Nazis, where memorials and museums are set up all over the world,

545
01:12:13.360 --> 01:12:19.920
World, which one might argue they ought to be, but here nobody wants to know about the

546
01:12:19.920 --> 01:12:28.920
places where millions suffered and died, which is one reason this woman, Applebaum, feels

547
01:12:28.920 --> 01:12:35.600
the need to bring this out, to tell people about this.

548
01:12:35.600 --> 01:12:40.000
And in general, this is the attitude of the Russian people.

549
01:12:40.000 --> 01:12:44.400
Another idea is, you know, it makes Russians look bad to keep talking about all these crimes

550
01:12:44.400 --> 01:12:50.040
of Stalin, because in fact, point of fact, yes, many of the Russians were, people were

551
01:12:50.040 --> 01:12:58.920
accomplices to this, of course, and in East European countries as well.

552
01:12:58.920 --> 01:13:04.880
So that you have a completely different attitude, that in regard to Hitler's crimes, there's

553
01:13:04.880 --> 01:13:16.880
There's a constant limelight shining on it. In regard to Soviet crimes, there's been an attitude that let's forget about it. Let's put it behind us.

554
01:13:16.880 --> 01:13:32.880
Nonetheless, people like Applebaum, or years ago, even before the Soviet archives were open, the great British historian Robert Conquest

555
01:13:32.880 --> 01:13:40.640
did investigate these matters, and there is, for anybody who cares to look into it, substantial

556
01:13:40.640 --> 01:13:43.600
literature on the subject.

557
01:13:43.600 --> 01:13:54.840
Now, one reason that we don't know very much about this even now, and certainly a reason

558
01:13:54.840 --> 01:14:01.120
why we didn't know about it when it was happening, was because of a very peculiar bias on the

559
01:14:01.120 --> 01:14:13.120
This is a larger subject than we can discuss in a few minutes, as are the specific crimes of Soviet Communism.

560
01:14:13.120 --> 01:14:17.120
So I'm going to leave that for one of my last lectures tomorrow.

561
01:14:17.120 --> 01:14:27.120
And today, in the time that remains, we can talk about utopian socialism, we can talk about Rousseau, if you want to bring up something about that.

562
01:14:27.120 --> 01:14:33.120
In addition to that, we can talk about Marx and the setting up of the Soviet regime.

563
01:14:33.120 --> 01:14:37.120
So, comments and questions? Yes.

564
01:14:37.120 --> 01:14:44.120
The Bakunin, did he pass away around the same time that Marx did?

565
01:14:44.120 --> 01:14:50.120
No, earlier than that, I think. I would guess the late 1870s.

566
01:14:50.120 --> 01:14:56.120
Just a quick clarification, I missed one. Who is the guy up there?

567
01:14:56.120 --> 01:15:05.120
Milovan Djilas, I think he was a Montenegrin that is one of the Slavic people of former Yugoslavia

568
01:15:05.120 --> 01:15:13.120
and he was kind of more or less second in command to Tito during World War II.

569
01:15:13.120 --> 01:15:20.120
However, when Tito set up the communist regime in Yugoslavia, he became very disillusioned

570
01:15:20.120 --> 01:15:36.120
and I wrote a book called The New Class and wrote about this new regime and he said, because he was a theoretician, he was a very intelligent man, and he wanted to understand what is the nature of this regime.

571
01:15:36.120 --> 01:15:47.120
As a communist he had opposed capitalism, which is a system whereby the means of production are under the control allegedly of a few people, so the whole life of society is at their mercy.

572
01:15:47.120 --> 01:15:53.760
Mercy. Well, what is this new regime? And he says, and he was a friend of Stalin or couldn't acquaint

573
01:15:53.760 --> 01:15:59.760
us of Stalin, what is the nature of the Soviet regime? He said what we're doing here in Yugoslavia

574
01:15:59.760 --> 01:16:07.520
is replicating the Soviet regime, the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union itself is a joint stock

575
01:16:07.520 --> 01:16:16.320
company owned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and their employees or serfs, if you want

576
01:16:16.320 --> 01:16:20.320
are the people of the Soviet Union.

577
01:16:20.320 --> 01:16:27.320
It's the managerial, bureaucratic, military class that rules the Soviet Union.

578
01:16:27.320 --> 01:16:36.320
It's not my idea because it equates too much western capitalists with communist rulers.

579
01:16:36.320 --> 01:16:39.320
But it's the idea you see at the end of Animal Farm.

580
01:16:39.320 --> 01:16:43.320
Everybody's read Animal Farm?

581
01:16:43.320 --> 01:17:03.320
Okay. Well, I think some people should maybe not be going to see, whatever, Halloween 13 or something, or Bride of Chuckie and spend their time maybe in more productive ways, like reading 1984 or Animal Farm.

582
01:17:03.320 --> 01:17:33.320
And an animal farm, an animal farm, at the end, right, those of you who have read it, right, the animals are all around the farmhouse, they look in, the pigs, who are the new class, in this communist regime, they're with the farmers, the human farmers, they're playing poker, one is trying to cheat the other, they come to a fight, the animals look in and they look from the pigs to the farmers to the pigs and they can't tell who's who.

583
01:17:33.320 --> 01:17:37.160
Now that's what Orwell believed because he was still a socialist in the end. He believed

584
01:17:37.160 --> 01:17:45.480
that somehow the capitalists are just an earlier version of what the communist rulers have

585
01:17:45.480 --> 01:17:53.480
become. What can you say about that? The communist rulers have gained their position through

586
01:17:53.480 --> 01:18:01.360
terror and murder, constant oppression, and they rule over people who, or they have ruled

587
01:18:01.360 --> 01:18:22.320
The Walton family is the largest corporation in America, larger than any oil company, larger

588
01:18:22.320 --> 01:18:29.920
than any computer company, those people have more money than all of us put together.

589
01:18:29.920 --> 01:18:31.160
And how do they make their money?

590
01:18:31.160 --> 01:18:36.720
by this retailing revolution, by bringing cheap prices to millions and tens of millions

591
01:18:36.720 --> 01:18:45.160
of Americans in areas that had never known retailing competition, small towns in Arkansas,

592
01:18:45.160 --> 01:18:49.680
Tennessee, Missouri, all over, and then into larger cities. That's how they made their

593
01:18:49.680 --> 01:18:56.460
money. How did Bill Gates make his money? Right? Of course, as the government says by acting

594
01:18:56.460 --> 01:19:17.460
So Ludwig von Mises is giving as a monopolist, among other things giving various products away free, but he made his money by serving consumers, this is how good capitalists, not state-connected capitalists, but good capitalists make their money, it's not the same as the leaders of Soviet regimes.

595
01:19:17.460 --> 01:19:29.460
So when G. Loss, for instance, makes that kind of comparison, I can't follow him in that.

596
01:19:29.460 --> 01:19:38.460
Nonetheless, pointing out the class nature of the Soviet regime and communist regimes in general is very important.

597
01:19:38.460 --> 01:19:46.460
I visited a few communist countries, well, East Germany, very early on, a few times.

598
01:19:46.460 --> 01:19:53.060
Regimes, but then towards the end of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in

599
01:19:53.060 --> 01:19:55.820
Gorbachev's time.

600
01:19:55.820 --> 01:20:03.140
And one thing that was common to all of the countries was the existence of special stores,

601
01:20:03.140 --> 01:20:05.660
special retail outlets.

602
01:20:05.660 --> 01:20:11.620
In East Germany they were called Interladen and there were similar stores in Poland, Hungary,

603
01:20:11.620 --> 01:20:13.340
the Soviet Union and so on.

604
01:20:13.340 --> 01:20:20.980
Those were stores where the new class, the nomenclatura, could shop and they could buy

605
01:20:20.980 --> 01:20:27.140
Japanese television sets instead of Russian television sets that often exploded.

606
01:20:27.140 --> 01:20:34.780
They could buy French wine instead of Bulgarian wine and they could buy, which they preferred

607
01:20:34.780 --> 01:20:38.980
really, Virginia cigarettes rather than Armenian cigarettes.

608
01:20:38.980 --> 01:21:08.980
In any case, where you could buy goods that were competitive on the world market and not be forced to buy East Bloc goods, only a limited number of people, Cuba had the same thing, has the same thing for all I know, only a limited number of people could shop there, and I guess the others just thought there was in the nature of things, but it very much carried out Orwell's idea, and back here,

609
01:21:08.980 --> 01:21:20.980
Do you have a time frame or date to go along with Trotsky's sexual selection in the 20th century?

610
01:21:38.980 --> 01:22:02.940
1929 pardon me 1924 yes oh yeah yeah and you mean for Marxist position or let's

611
01:22:02.940 --> 01:22:24.940
From the position Marx held Lenin is liable.

612
01:22:24.940 --> 01:22:31.940
Perhaps Marxists could make the argument that he was helping to prolong capitalism.

613
01:22:32.940 --> 01:22:54.940
Well, there might be Marxists who could have made that argument. I don't think Marx could have made that argument, because Marx's view was that the forces that were going to destroy capitalism were acting inevitably, implacably.

614
01:22:54.940 --> 01:23:05.940
Every year, the system is getting more and more vulnerable, so that some propositions by a particular German theoretician wouldn't have made any difference.

615
01:23:05.940 --> 01:23:07.940
I don't think Marx would have said that.

616
01:23:07.940 --> 01:23:15.940
Whether other Marxists would have maintained that, I don't know. It's possible.

617
01:23:45.940 --> 01:23:53.940
In other words, we told you that sooner or later the capitalist system was going to destroy itself.

618
01:23:53.940 --> 01:24:02.940
This guy just smiled as wide as he could be. Well, we tried not to gloat, but it's...

619
01:24:02.940 --> 01:24:05.940
This was a reporter from the New York Times?

620
01:24:05.940 --> 01:24:09.940
No, it was one of the nightly news shows. I don't remember which network it was.

621
01:24:09.940 --> 01:24:38.940
The New York Times had an article some years back about an old folks home in California for retired commies, and they had busts of Lenin there and Stalin and the works there, and it really was kind of nostalgic, rather sweet in a way.

622
01:24:38.940 --> 01:24:54.940
There was no animosity, no acrimony that these people had been communists, had been supporters of Lenin and of Stalin, some years back a man died in a Moscow named Kuganovich,

623
01:24:54.940 --> 01:25:04.940
Lenin and of Stalin. No, they were just... Some years back, a man died in a Moscow named Kuganovich.

624
01:25:04.940 --> 01:25:17.940
What was his name? Lazar Morozovich Kuganovich, of whom one of the Soviet dissident writers, Roy Medvedev,

625
01:25:17.940 --> 01:25:34.060
Medvedev, one of those zamistat writers I mentioned to you this morning, of whom Medvedev,

626
01:25:34.060 --> 01:25:38.420
very familiar of course with Soviet history, said, this Kaganovich had as much blood on

627
01:25:38.420 --> 01:25:45.620
his hand as Heinrich Himmler. He was in charge of the Ukraine during the terror famine, he

628
01:25:45.620 --> 01:25:49.020
He was in charge of the Moscow district during the purges.

629
01:25:49.020 --> 01:25:54.060
He died peacefully in his bed in Moscow, an old man.

630
01:25:54.060 --> 01:25:57.900
Everybody knew where he lived, of course.

631
01:25:57.900 --> 01:26:00.660
Never put on trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity,

632
01:26:00.660 --> 01:26:01.820
anything of that kind.

633
01:26:01.820 --> 01:26:04.860
And the New York Times had a very big obituary on him,

634
01:26:04.860 --> 01:26:06.660
because he was a very famous man.

635
01:26:06.660 --> 01:26:10.740
He'd been in the Politburo, very close to Stalin,

636
01:26:10.740 --> 01:26:16.300
for many, many years, throughout most of, almost all of the regime. He had built on

637
01:26:16.300 --> 01:26:25.300
the Moscow subways as a leader of the Moscow district. And it was a balanced obituary. I

638
01:26:25.300 --> 01:26:32.220
mean, there were some good things that Kaganovich had done, the Moscow subways, for instance,

639
01:26:32.220 --> 01:26:38.220
and there were some questionable things that he had done. For instance, he had been involved

640
01:26:38.220 --> 01:26:44.900
in repression, there's no doubt about that, but if you can imagine an obituary in the

641
01:26:44.900 --> 01:26:57.780
New York Times on Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, being balanced, Himmler did away

642
01:26:57.780 --> 01:27:07.580
with urban sprawl in many Polish cities, there's positive and negative also, but this is very

643
01:27:07.580 --> 01:27:14.580
Well, I think that's about all for now. We have two more sessions tomorrow, especially in the final session. You might think of questions that have come up along the line, and I'll see what I can do about them. Thank you.

644
01:27:37.580 --> 01:27:39.580
Thank you very much.