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.
The last of these early French socialists, and by far the most influential, was the School of Saint-Simon.
Let me mention one more time the work by Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition, which is important for this.
And we're talking now about Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers, the most important of whom were
Enfantin and Bazar. Saint-Simon is a famous aristocratic name in France and he was indeed a member of the nobility.
Saint-Simon was a very peculiar character.
He flourished during the Asagnat inflation by speculating in the currency, made money that way,
but then he lost a huge fortune and was reduced to writing rather pathetic letters to the crowned heads of Europe,
informing them that he was starving to death and pleased to send them money, which never came about.
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.
He loved associating with scientists and mathematicians and dining with them and cultivating them
and so on.
This is going to be important in the creation of his philosophy.
But a crucial fact about him is that he, Saint-Simon and also his followers, became very interested
in the works of the theocratic conservative, as they're sometimes called, writers of this
time, especially de Maistre and also Bonald.
Now, these writers rejected the French Revolution, of course. They rejected the French Enlightenment.
They were much more conservative and even reactionary, much more than Burke was. Burke
Ludwig was fundamentally a supporter of the free market and a free, wiggish British society.
These men, especially de Maistre, who was influential, wanted to return not to the pre-1789
old regime, but back to the Middle Ages.
And they're called theocrats because what they bemoaned was the absence of authority
and Hierarchy in Modern Society and promoted the creation of new revived centers of authority
and hierarchy culminating in the Pope. That is, they were ultramontanes in the Catholic
tradition that is looking to the supremacy of the Pope. They were part of the movement
that idealized the Middle Ages in a particular way, not the Middle Ages that we've talked
about here, that is the enterprising Middle Ages, the Middle Ages of the towns, the Middle
Ages of the beginning of European and world commerce, the Middle Ages that gave rise to
free institutions.
Instead, you could say that they adopted the reverse of a Protestant and Enlightenment
Stereotype of the Middle Ages as a society of total stability and adherence to the status quo.
That, they thought, was the sort of society that was most desirable, especially after all the
tribulations and the upheavals of the revolutionary period. And in tracing this revolutionary
philosophy that they thought had culminated in the excesses of the revolution and the reign of
of Terror. They went back to the people they considered the first real revolutionaries.
Well, the first revolutionary, of course, was Lucifer, in their view, who rose up against
God himself. But they went back to Descartes, who introduced the modern philosophy with
the idea of systematic doubt, but above all, the reformers of the Protestant Reformation.
They were the ones who began to undermine traditional European society.
So what we have with them, and de Maistre especially was an intelligent man, from my
point of view just his ideas that were fundamentally flawed, and the San Simonians, well beginning
with San Simone and then he collected a score, found this really fascinating, yes there was
There is something wrong with modern history. There is a deep flaw in the enlightenment and also among the French revolutionaries.
However, it's not backwards that we have to look for a society of stability and hierarchy and authority, but to the future.
Where was this new authority to come from? Who was to compose this new hierarchy?
Well, Saint-Simon learned from, or thought he learned, wasn't the position of the scientists themselves,
but his idea of what the scientists were up to, this new authority was to be found in modern science.
and the new hierarchy was to be composed of the proponents of the scientific world outlook.
So that with Saint-Simon and he had these immediate disciples, he also had a disciple,
a man who was his personal secretary, who then went out on his own, a man named Auguste Comte.
And it's this school of thought that is the founder of positivism.
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.
This Hayek deals with in a book that I've mentioned to you. It's an important book called The Counterrevolution of Science.
It's a 1950s book of his. The first half, or the first part, is about methodology and philosophy. A little tough going, perhaps.
What is most fascinating, I think, is the second part about the actual history of this philosophy of positivism.
He talks about the Sasimonians, about Auguste Comte, and further ramifications.
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,
the idea that the so-called social sciences must imitate the methods of the natural sciences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, similarly, if we have a social science that's based on the methods of natural science,
then that knowledge is power, and that knowledge is power over man and society.
The idea was that in the future there would be developed a class of individuals who, let's
They didn't bother to beat around the bush. We can call priests of positivism.
They would be imbued with the philosophy of positivism, of positive social science,
and they would know how to apply that in a social engineering kind of way to remake society,
to remake the nature of man.
All of the human problems could eventually be solved
in the same way the technical engineering problems are solved by the natural sciences.
Crime, well, we would investigate the causes of crime, the roots of crime.
Does this sound familiar?
And then start dealing with those causes and roots of crime.
Eventually there would be no crime.
All it takes is knowing enough about the subject.
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.
I talked to you about the industrialist school and their philosophy of history of the predatory and the preyed-upon classes.
Well, the Sansemonians had a philosophy of history also that dovetailed with their theory.
History. History alternates between two phases. There is an organic phase and then this is
followed by a critical phase. An organic phase is characterized by stability, sense of authority
in society, social harmony, the subjection of the individual to the community, and in
in this way provides a comfortable, psychologically appealing cocoon for the individual. The individual
doesn't have to worry. He's told by his society how to live his life, what's right, what's
wrong. There are no questions that come up to produce anxiety. Well, unfortunately, in
In each of these previous organic periods, there was a prevailing philosophy.
Well, I mean, it necessarily is, but it's unfortunate that prevailing philosophy was inadequate.
For instance, in archaic Greece, before about the 5th century, there was a belief in the particular gods,
in the rituals of the gods, in the Homeric heroes, in the rite of the chieftains to rule,
and this provided a structure for the organic phase of Greek society.
However, that was followed by the period of the philosophers,
especially, let's say, someone like Socrates, kind of a model philosopher, who began questioning everything.
What is justice as the beginning question of the republic is? What is justice?
Well, in an organic society everybody knows intuitively, instinctively what's justice, what's right and wrong.
Now the philosophers wanted to have reasons for it. You say this is justice, why?
In the Sansimonian view that began the eroding of this organic phase and the coming into existence of a critical phase.
It was necessary because the old ideas were not really adequate, the ideas of the Greek gods and goddesses.
They were not really adequate, so it was necessary that the old system made way for a critical phase.
However, human beings really can't live in critical phases. They're not made for it.
It does create too much anxiety, questioning, problems.
If we take a modern example, one might say, a sense of money might say, is the case today.
Who knows how to raise children today in our society? Who knows how to raise children?
At one time, people had a very good idea how to raise children.
In my neighborhood, Angelo, come over here, I'll break your legs.
If you keep doing that, I'll break your legs, wait until your father gets home.
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.
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.
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.
Now, so the critical phase of ancient society was followed by an organic phase, according to the Sansimonians, and that was medieval Catholicism.
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.
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.
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.
However, as with the Greek gods, medieval Catholicism could not withstand criticism of critical reasoning.
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.
The Protestant Reformation came along and, above all, the rise of modern science.
So the medieval synthesis was shattered and a period, a critical period followed.
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.
The French Revolution illustrated that in politics, and now the time has come for the creation of a new organic stage of society.
And this will be the last stage of society.
That's another thing these philosophies of history had in common.
They not only talked about how history had developed up until this time,
but somehow, either now or very soon, the end stage will have been reached.
Because now we have an authority, we have an authority, we have an overriding philosophy that can be permanent.
and that is positivism, that is the application of modern science to social, to all social and human questions.
So the senseimonian idea was, we're going to be able to solve all of the problems created by critical phases,
all of the anxieties and conflicts, and enter onto an organic phase that will be permanent.
It will be the rule over society of the positivist thinkers, positivist priests, wielding the methods of positive science.
And this is going to have implications for every aspect of society.
Now, Saint-Simon's last work was The New Christianity, because it turns out that positivism is another aspect of true Christianity.
True Christianity has nothing to do with particular doctrines or particular liturgy, particular services in one religion or another.
True Christianity is simply the message of Jesus.
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
And the positivist rulers of society will be using the methods of natural science
to further the aim of true Christianity, of a total human brotherhood
among people of a nation and eventually of the whole world.
Now, Saint-Simon maybe is not himself, strictly speaking, a socialist, but his followers certainly
were, and they were the most consistent and, for a time, the best known socialists in Europe.
He died in 1825, and just a few years later, his followers, the Saint-Simonians, began
holding first of all a series of famous lectures in Paris to which hundreds and hundreds of people came,
hundreds and hundreds of people of the elite and foreigners of the elite also. Heinrich Heine,
the German poet, attended these lectures and here they published the exposition of the
Doctrine of Saint-Simon which was largely their own doctrine. Here they came up with most of the
The arguments against modern capitalism. Modern capitalism is a new form of feudalism. Now the rule of the factory owner over his wage slaves.
Modern capitalism leads eventually to depressions, the business cycle. This is inherent in capitalism.
Competition is inherently and vastly wasteful.
What is the point of having two different companies building railroads from Paris to
Lyon when we can have scientists, engineers, experts get together, find out which the best
route between Paris and Lyon is and build that instead of having trains going half full
from each of two competing companies who would have a prosperous railroad company that was
built by experts. And they came up with the idea that these experts would get together,
experts in all fields, and concoct plans for the whole economic life of society. In this
In this way, the Sansimonians really were the originators of the idea of central economic planning.
For a while, in the late 1820s, 1830s, Sansimonianism was the success of the day in Europe.
It was the wave of the future. It was the sort of thing that anybody who was interested in fashionable ideas
would get acquainted with, think about, adopt very often. Carl Marks, a young lad in the Rhineland, in his hometown,
there was an elderly gentleman, or an older man there, the man named von Westphalen, a minor nobleman,
and Marx was already in his young teen years interested in in new ideas and
one of the main things that he discussed with this gentleman were the ideas of the
Sansamonians. Vestfallen afterwards became Marx's father-in-law when Marx
married his daughter but what I'm getting at is that here Karl Marx
interested in what's fashionable in the way of ideas being acquainted coming to
So this sets the stage now, in the 1830s, early 1840s, for the appearance of Marxism.
Now, Marxism, the thing to understand about Marx, as Murray Rothbard says,
at the beginning of his many pages on Marx, at the end of the second volume of his History of Economic Thought,
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,
The Paris Manuscripts
1844, there's no economics at all. All it is, is playing around with Hegelian kind of categories.
There's what's sometimes called a philosophical anthropology that is dealing with the nature of
man and juggling around aspects of that in a philosophical way, having no connection with
empirical reality practically and certainly no connection with economics. It was only around
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.
By the way, let me say something about the literature on this subject.
I've mentioned Alexander Grey, who also has some very good chapters on Marx and Marxism and the different Marxists.
This has as much to do with this book I'm talking about now as much to do with Soviet Russia as with Marxism.
And I mentioned the last time the book by Martin Malia on the Soviet Union.
Now, Leszek Kalikowski, who's still alive, was at one time himself a communist in Poland.
However, he outgrew that, became a critic of communism, and in the 1970s wrote a magnificent
and three-volume work called Main Currents of Marxist Thought. It's, I think, still
in paperback from Oxford University Press. The first volume on origins of Marxism and
Marx and Engels, the second volume on the thinkers of the second international like
Lenin, for instance, and the third volume on 20th century Marxists. It is one of the
It is one of the great works of intellectual history of the 20th century in my opinion.
And Leszek Kalikowski is a great scholar, familiar with all of the relevant languages.
We saw something about the depths of the stupidity of many Americans in regard to foreigners just a few weeks ago
When they started mocking the French, and France, and French culture, there are Americans who mock the Polish people, the great Polish people.
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.
I suppose it would come as a surprise to many of the people who retail Polish jokes and so on,
that among the greatest logicians of the 20th century were Poles,
which is one reason why the Poles were able to crack the German code
and bring their findings over to England and were instrumental in permitting the British
to follow German secret messages in their code.
Well, this is as far as the literature goes. Paul Craig Roberts, I see that his book is available right out here,
Alienation and the Soviet Economy. Now, what Roberts does is very interesting.
Some people have said, well, in the early Marx, the humanist Marx, the economic and philosophical manuscripts, for instance,
He keeps talking about alienation, but that escapes Marx's attention after a short while,
and then he starts talking in the very familiar terms about historical determinism and substructure,
superstructure, and one phase of society necessarily following another.
Therefore, this earlier humanist Marx, with his emphasis on alienation, is not very important.
What Robert shows is really that that concept, although not explicitly used by Marx in later
years, underlay everything that he did afterwards, and underlay also the Soviet experiment.
So I think that this is a very important work of Marxist scholarship, I think, fairly brief,
with very important implications.
What was Marx after?
It would be a terrible mistake, and Lenin understood this.
This is why he hated the revision of socialists.
It would be a terrible mistake to reduce Marxism to the idea that working people would be a
lot better off under socialism, that socialism is more efficient, will bring prosperity to
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?
Because up until now, human history has been accidental.
People have done things, acted in history, and often their actions produced consequences,
the opposite of what people wanted.
Nobody wants depressions, for instance, and yet the capitalist system is such that people act,
and within a limited sense they act rationally, and yet depressions occur.
So what's going on here? What's going on here is that man does not have control of his own destiny.
And man will not have control of his own destiny until the time comes when society is totally planned.
That planning aspect is not simply a way of bringing about more efficiency,
it's a way of affirming human dignity and the human control of human affairs.
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.
This is what Marx wrote of the stage of communist society just before the disappearance of scarcity.
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.
You understand what he's saying? He's not talking about thunderstorms or earthquakes.
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.
The point is made clearer by angles.
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.
With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with.
Production of commodities is what he means by the name for the market economy.
Production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of product over the producers.
In the market economy, with the so-called invisible hand, there is no invisible hand.
It's total anarchy of production, anarchy of production, a term coined by the Sansimonians.
And here, repeated by Engels, anarchy of social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan.
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.
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.
Only from then on will men make their history themselves in full consciousness.
Do you understand that? Make their history themselves in full consciousness. That is, everything that happens in history will have been planned.
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.
It is a leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
In another place Engels refers to it as the end of the prehistory of mankind.
Up until now, it's been almost like the history of the apes.
Human beings not in control of their destiny.
Only with this total conscious planning of the economy and society
will human beings then be in control of their destiny, of their history.
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.
Now I mentioned revisionist socialism. Much could be said about the history of Marxism, and Marx dies in 1883 and Engels in 1895.
They live a long time, they write a lot of things. They engage when they can in revolutionary activity, especially in 1848.
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.
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.
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.
Bakunin, incidentally, you probably know the name Bakunin, right, he was a lovable old
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.
He never really succeeded very much.
He was in Dresden during the Saxon Revolution of 1849
and heard Wagner conducting Beethoven's Ninth.
And Bakunin said, what a pity that this tomb must be destroyed.
You know, I mean, crazy things like that.
On the other hand, he never actually killed anybody.
He was imprisoned by the Tsars and escaped
from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, and he tried to get back into Europe to start
revolutions again. He went the long route, you know, across Siberia. Well, it just was
less danger coming across the police. Came to America, looked around and said something
to the effect of, why am I spending my time on this anarchy? They have anarchy. Where
Here is the government here. Made his way to Europe, constantly writing pamphlets and so on.
He translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian.
So he was an admirer of Marx and especially Martin of Engels for a while,
but then became progressively disillusioned.
Bakunin was the first critic of Marxism to bring up the question of the new class
that became famous in criticisms of Marxism.
The most famous, although not the deepest, critic along these lines was the Yugoslav
Milovan Djilas, who wrote a book that was titled The New Class in the post-World War
II period.
But other anarchists along the line, this was their main criticism of Marxism, and that's
That's why they insisted that the state had to be abolished totally and immediately.
Because they said the alternative was that a small group, as Marx said, communists are
the vanguard of the proletariat because they know more about the historical process than
the proletariat does.
The alternative is that a small group is going to gain control of the state and what reason
is it to suppose they'll ever give up their power?
We notice that in the Communist Manifesto, one of the items is that agriculture is now
to be conducted by vast armies of agricultural laborers.
But Kuhnens said an army means that there are soldiers and there are officers.
And what have we got here?
These vast armies working the fields and the plantations.
We have here the Roman lot of fundia again.
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.
Very typically Jewish and German, Bakunin being Russian and not Jewish.
So this is somewhat amusing, but also because of Bakunin's analysis,
interesting episode in the 19th century, history of radicalism.
Bakunin did start some centers of anarchism, mainly in Spain.
and the anarchists come around during the Spanish Civil War, also in Italy, but it was Marxist socialism that prevailed.
And Marxist socialism, the Marxist idea that finally took over the great social democratic party of Germany, the SPD,
which as you know exists to the present day and is the ruling party in Germany.
And, towards the end of the 19th century, the great, especially after Engels passes away,
the great theoreticians of Marxism are mainly German socialists.
But, after Engels dies, maybe he waited for it, one of the German socialist leaders,
Here's Edward Bernstein, begins to publish works that are questioning and then critical,
although he'd been very close to Engels.
But Bernstein says is this, okay, we're at the end of the 19th century, Marx had a definite
Scenario for the Collapse of Capitalism. The working class would get poorer and poorer.
Capitalism is not able to sustain its slaves in their slavery. There would be fewer and
fewer businesses and ultimately only a very few very large businesses. The middle class
is going to disappear. The business cycle is going to get worse and worse. And then
And finally, with the organization of the working class by the communists, society will
have had enough and the socialist revolution will occur.
Bernstein said, none of these things is happening.
The working people are not getting poorer and poorer, far from it.
We now have the, of course there's much poverty and pockets of deep poverty, but we have the
Most affluent working classes have existed in Europe.
There are very big businesses, but there are more and more small businesses that act as
feeders to the big businesses.
And anyway, you have the joint stock company, which means you have a big business, but there
can be thousands and thousands of owners of this big business.
There is a business cycle, but it does not appear to be getting worse than it has been
in the past.
So what are we going to do?
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.
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.
Socialism, we have to work for piecemeal reform through labour unions, through government
regulation.
Well, if you think about it, so Bernstein's revisionism that was condemned by the big
socialist theoreticians becomes essentially socialism, what is today socialism, as opposed
to what became communism.
However, one member, Bernstein and the other leaders of the German social democracy and
Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and actually Benito Mussolini and others are all members of the
second international, which is a Marxist international.
One of the Russian members, Lenin, took the party name of Lenin, is outraged by this revisionism.
He says, how do we have the Marxist totally planned society that guarantees human dignity
and freedom for the first time?
How do we have that by means of these small concessions that the capitalists give us to
the labor unions and government regulation?
We have to have an overall revolution in order to bring about the radically different planned
society that Marx wrote about and that is the socialist aim.
So Lenin opposed revisionism, insisting on a purer interpretation of Marxism, and revisionism
means different things.
This has nothing to do with revisionism in the historical sense, in the sense of revising
history.
This is revisionism in the context of the history of socialist thought.
And revisionism became one of the worst, if not the worst curse word that socialists and
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.
So, as we now approach the 20th century, many people in the western countries think that a socialist revolution is inevitable.
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.
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.
In Russia there's a small socialist movement, relatively small, after the 1905 revolution it becomes legal,
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.
So some of them have to leave the country as Lenin does.
In 1914, in early 1914, Lenin gave a talk in Zurich, where he was in exile in Switzerland.
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.
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.
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.
And we're just a few thousand people.
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,
and reserves of many, many millions after that. How are these few thousand Bolsheviks going to do that?
Well, history came to Lenin's aid. No, actually what came to Lenin's aid was war
and the terrible European war that I'll talk about tomorrow morning.
The Bolsheviks were not able to destroy the largest army in the world, the Imperial Tsarist Army.
What destroyed that army was the German army and made it possible for the Bolsheviks to take over a shattered, collapsed Russia.
And that's what happens in the crucial year of 1917.
I mentioned the man who was shown decisively on the basis of not only the latest documentation, but really documents that were known before,
The so-called October Revolution, what the communists for decades called Great October, Red October,
this landmark in the history of the human race, was simply a coup d'etat by a few thousand Red Guards,
first of all in Petrograd and then in some other Russian towns, and that was followed then by the Civil War.
This is Richard Pipes, a Russian historian. Actually, Pipes wrote a very good book on the principle of property through history.
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.
It's a book on the role of property in history.
What's that?
Me?
It's possible.
I read it in Czech, so maybe I have a different name in mind.
It's a remarkable book.
If for no other reason, we have a Harvard professor, aside from Bob Nozick,
who for the first time mentions Ayn Rand.
He talks about, he has some chapter, kind of mixed up chapter about proponents, modern proponents of property.
I don't think he mentioned the Austrian School, although as I said, Martin Malia does, who's better informed about these things.
But Pipes has also a book on the coup d'état of October.
Richard Pipes is not to be confused with his evil and twisted son, Daniel Pipes,
Who was that?
Hey, come on, if you didn't boo for Rousseau, why are we going to boo for some wimp chicken hawk like Daniel Pipes?
Tomorrow, that's going to be very relevant, okay?
And I think that by now you'll know who to boo for.
Anyway, so Pipes shows it was a coup d'etat.
In any case, the Bolsheviks do come to power, they win the civil war, they establish what
they afterwards try to call war communism.
Now, Craig Roberts shows this with complete conviction as far as I'm concerned.
It wasn't war communism, it wasn't a special emergency system of measures to deal with
the Civil War and the war with Germany that was still going on. What it was, was communism,
what Lenin and all the other Bolsheviks understood as communism. What they tried to do, as much
as they could, was simply abolish the market. They were Marxists, authentic Marxists, they
had come to power for this reason, to abolish commodity production, and that's what they
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.
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.
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.
If found doing it, you could be shot on the spot by the new Soviet secret police.
Lenin realized that this whole system of communism, as he said, was premature.
So this is when, in 1921, he introduced the new economic policy of a modified socialism and capitalism.
The kind of thing that Gorbachev tried to realize finally in the last years of the Soviet regime, but was not able to.
But now in the meantime, we can talk a little bit maybe about the Soviet Union in a little while and what happened there.
But in the meantime, I want to give you an idea of what the communist leaders were actually aiming at.
This is a book by Leon Trotsky called Literature and Revolution.
It's famous, I think, most of all, because of its last ridiculous sentences about what will happen eventually in communist society.
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.
As I remarked to a friend of mine one time, that would be a real hard class to teach.
So those lines are quoted by Mises among other people.
But the whole of the last few pages is very instructive.
Because Trotsky was, in a conventional intellectual sense, the most brilliant of the Bolsheviks.
Robert Conquest also calls him the most ferocious for good reason, but he certainly was intellectually adept.
He understood the connection of ideas, and this is what he understood as what was being aimed at,
What the whole purpose of the Bolshevik Revolution was, the whole purpose of bringing communism to Russia was.
In the end, what's going to happen is that man will free himself from mystic and every other intellectual vagueness,
and his effort will be directed to reconstructing society and himself in accord with his own plan.
By the way, notice, and this goes throughout Marx and Engels whom I discussed before,
this odd notion that the human race is somehow one person, man, who has one plan to reconstruct himself.
This, evidently, was seriously the way these people thought.
For instance, the imperceptible ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick,
from generation to generation, will give way to titanic constructions of city villages
with map and compass in hand.
Well, you know, sort of urban renewal writ large.
But that idea of the city-villages, that became a standard with modern architects who essentially were communists.
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.
Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments.
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.
I mean, it's a good idea that the genome didn't fall into the hands of these people.
It will become possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life.
And as for reproduction, the human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital,
in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection.
You understand? Blind sexual selection, which is what happened up until now. You know, the boy-girl thing.
That's blind sexual selection. It will all be planned.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts
to the height of consciousness, make them transparent, extend the wires of his will into
into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane to create a higher
social biological type, or if you please, a superman.
Well, I'm not saying that that's the furthest thing from a reasonable comparison to what
So, that is the ultimate in the total planning, totally conscious, the development step-by-step,
everything that happens in society consciously planned beforehand, and that is, I think that
he discovered and made it somewhat more explicit, the Marxist idea.
Well, as you know, most likely, Trotsky lost out in his battle with Stalin for leadership after the death of Lenin.
Stalin was not as successful as Lenin.
Well, as you know, most likely Trotsky lost out in his battle with Stalin for leadership
after the death of Lenin. Stalin was not by any means as agile and intellectual and thinker
as Trotsky was. And he had his problems. I mean, before you can go on to this planning
of the Total Psycho-Biological Nature of Man and so on, you know, you have to produce enough
John paper and so on, right, you have to, the sort of things that the Soviet regime
never succeeded in doing.
So Stalin was taken up by economic problems for a long time, and now one of the things
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.
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.
This was put into effect by Lenin under the name the Cheka.
Now, one thing I mentioned last time that's going to be of great significance is the Comintern,
the Communist International, set up and brought into existence by Lenin,
the organization of all communist parties in the world.
There had been socialist parties and socialist movements and factions in many different places.
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.
Change your name to Communist Party, for instance, CPF, the Communist Party of France, CPUSA, CPUK, CPC, Communist Party of China, and so on.
and then you obey the regulations and rules of the common term and they have
conventions from time to time and the program of the common term they don't
make any secret about it it's not anything that that the FBI has to go and
find out they openly proclaim that if it could even find it in the newspapers they
openly proclaim that their aim is the overthrow by force if necessary by
by the elections, well, it's not too likely the bourgeoisie is going to react to that
by force, whenever necessary, of every bourgeois government in the world.
Replacement of those governments by communist governments.
See, Lenin was enough of a Marxist to realize that according to his theory, you really can't
have communism in one relatively backward country alone.
So what he said was that Russia was relatively backward. However, the revolution in Russia
would begin to spark the world revolution. So then you would have the revolution in Germany,
in Britain, in America, in more advanced countries. And then you would have a world communist
community. So the Comintern's aim was to bring about these revolutions everywhere. Germany
Germany was the one he was most interested in for obvious reasons.
Geopolitically, whoever controls Russia and Germany is about to control the continent.
And you can have England off on the periphery there, but you'd get hold of Europe and then
European colonies, and then the world revolution would really be underway.
This common turn was a mortal threat to everybody who was not a communist in Europe, including
Socialists, including the German SPD, the socialists of the German Social Democratic Party, who broke with Lenin.
And it had some consequences that were extremely unfortunate.
Nowadays, very often, the history of fascism, let's say Italian fascism or German Nazism, National Socialism, sometimes called a kind of fascism,
These histories are written as if they occurred in a vacuum.
In Germany, for instance, there were elements that pointed in this authoritarian direction in previous German history,
the Italian problem and the weakness of the Italian state are brought in.
It is not made nearly clear enough that Italian fascism certainly, and German national socialism to a large degree,
were the product of the communist threat.
This is demonstrable in the case of Italy, where the Italian Socialist Party became a
Leninist party and openly threatened a Leninist revolution in Italy.
And the Italian fascists, the supporters of Mussolini, didn't amount to anything until
the public became very scared of this, of the takeover of the factories by the Leninist
by the takeover of the land of the po farmers by squatters under the direction of sympathizers with Lenin.
The announcement by the leaders of the Italian Socialist Party that the Leninist revolution is around the corner,
well, this empowered the Italian fascists.
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.
But without any communist threat, Mussolini wouldn't have amounted to anything, and
to a large extent, that's also the case with the National Socialists in Germany.
To many American historians,
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,
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.
As we know now, this does come out from documents, and Pipes has written about this, in 1920
occurred a war between the Soviet Union and Poland, the new Republic of Poland.
And Trotsky was the leader and organizer of the Red Army, led this attack into Poland,
Lenin expected the Polish peasants and workers to greet the Red Army with open arms. Bounties
were offered for anybody who would hang a priest or a landlord. The executions took
place on the way and Lenin and his friends were looking forward to a Red Poland. What
What happened was that the Polish people, the Marshal or then General Pilsudski, met
the Red Army at the Vistula and stopped them, and then some compromise was reached between
Russia and Poland for a while.
But the Poles from then on, as you can imagine, terrified of a possibility of Soviet takeover
by their big neighbor.
So that European peoples in general, you'd have to be a millionaire or a vast landowner
to Fear a Communist Revolution. People knew what was happening in the Soviet Union. Mass
famine in 1921 under that so-called war communism, mass terror, the Red Terror of the Cheka,
the attempt to extinguish, annihilate Christianity, open, massive attempt by the government. People
People knew what this communist regime entailed, and many of them fled into the arms of demagogues
like Mussolini and afterwards Hitler.
The crimes of the Nazis were one of the worst things that have ever happened in history,
but I think we know a lot about them.
I think in many cases we're informed about them. In my case, I try to keep up with things,
so I'm informed about them every single day of my life, literally every single day of
my life. In what I read and on the Internet and so on, I hear about things like the Holocaust,
and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to forget. However, the crimes of Soviet Communism are
are much more rarely mentioned and figure much more infrequently, much more rarely in the
minds of people.
I mean, the average person doesn't know the first thing about them.
I don't think that the average person has ever heard of Kolomog or Rakuta, massive slave
labor camps.
The average person certainly has not heard about the Ukrainian and North Caucasus famine
that took, we don't know exactly, six, seven, eight million lives, something like that.
The lying, deceptive, duplicitous rat who was a New York Times correspondent and won
a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union that there was no famine going
on, privately said, probably about 10 million people have died when he had to report to
of British Intelligence. This man is Walter Durante. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the
New York Times in 1932. There's now a movement to take his Pulitzer Prize away from him on
the model of the Bancroft Prize being taken away from Belial, this lying historian from
should think posthumously to take Durante's prize away from him.
Now, why should this be?
There's been a very good book written by Anne Applebaum.
It just came out a little while ago.
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.
Alexander Zolginitsyn, who was temporarily an inmate, wrote three volumes called the Gulag Archipelago.
And the concept there is that these camps were spread like islands throughout the whole Soviet Union,
like an archipelago of islands throughout the whole Soviet Union.
Now, the victims of Soviet communism, actually it's not correct to concentrate on the Gulag,
and the Gulag. More of them died outside of the Gulag than died there in the camps, for
instance, in the terror famine or in the constant executions. I put down her name, Ann Appelbaum,
an excellent, really brilliant journalist and more than a journalist, very good historian.
She's written before about this issue. In one of her articles, she pointed out that
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.
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.
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.
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,
World, which one might argue they ought to be, but here nobody wants to know about the
places where millions suffered and died, which is one reason this woman, Applebaum, feels
the need to bring this out, to tell people about this.
And in general, this is the attitude of the Russian people.
Another idea is, you know, it makes Russians look bad to keep talking about all these crimes
of Stalin, because in fact, point of fact, yes, many of the Russians were, people were
accomplices to this, of course, and in East European countries as well.
So that you have a completely different attitude, that in regard to Hitler's crimes, there's
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.
Nonetheless, people like Applebaum, or years ago, even before the Soviet archives were open, the great British historian Robert Conquest
did investigate these matters, and there is, for anybody who cares to look into it, substantial
literature on the subject.
Now, one reason that we don't know very much about this even now, and certainly a reason
why we didn't know about it when it was happening, was because of a very peculiar bias on the
This is a larger subject than we can discuss in a few minutes, as are the specific crimes of Soviet Communism.
So I'm going to leave that for one of my last lectures tomorrow.
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.
In addition to that, we can talk about Marx and the setting up of the Soviet regime.
So, comments and questions? Yes.
The Bakunin, did he pass away around the same time that Marx did?
No, earlier than that, I think. I would guess the late 1870s.
Just a quick clarification, I missed one. Who is the guy up there?
Milovan Djilas, I think he was a Montenegrin that is one of the Slavic people of former Yugoslavia
and he was kind of more or less second in command to Tito during World War II.
However, when Tito set up the communist regime in Yugoslavia, he became very disillusioned
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.
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.
Mercy. Well, what is this new regime? And he says, and he was a friend of Stalin or couldn't acquaint
us of Stalin, what is the nature of the Soviet regime? He said what we're doing here in Yugoslavia
is replicating the Soviet regime, the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union itself is a joint stock
company owned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and their employees or serfs, if you want
are the people of the Soviet Union.
It's the managerial, bureaucratic, military class that rules the Soviet Union.
It's not my idea because it equates too much western capitalists with communist rulers.
But it's the idea you see at the end of Animal Farm.
Everybody's read Animal Farm?
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.
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.
Now that's what Orwell believed because he was still a socialist in the end. He believed
that somehow the capitalists are just an earlier version of what the communist rulers have
become. What can you say about that? The communist rulers have gained their position through
terror and murder, constant oppression, and they rule over people who, or they have ruled
The Walton family is the largest corporation in America, larger than any oil company, larger
than any computer company, those people have more money than all of us put together.
And how do they make their money?
by this retailing revolution, by bringing cheap prices to millions and tens of millions
of Americans in areas that had never known retailing competition, small towns in Arkansas,
Tennessee, Missouri, all over, and then into larger cities. That's how they made their
money. How did Bill Gates make his money? Right? Of course, as the government says by acting
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.
So when G. Loss, for instance, makes that kind of comparison, I can't follow him in that.
Nonetheless, pointing out the class nature of the Soviet regime and communist regimes in general is very important.
I visited a few communist countries, well, East Germany, very early on, a few times.
Regimes, but then towards the end of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in
Gorbachev's time.
And one thing that was common to all of the countries was the existence of special stores,
special retail outlets.
In East Germany they were called Interladen and there were similar stores in Poland, Hungary,
the Soviet Union and so on.
Those were stores where the new class, the nomenclatura, could shop and they could buy
Japanese television sets instead of Russian television sets that often exploded.
They could buy French wine instead of Bulgarian wine and they could buy, which they preferred
really, Virginia cigarettes rather than Armenian cigarettes.
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,
Do you have a time frame or date to go along with Trotsky's sexual selection in the 20th century?
1929 pardon me 1924 yes oh yeah yeah and you mean for Marxist position or let's
From the position Marx held Lenin is liable.
Perhaps Marxists could make the argument that he was helping to prolong capitalism.
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.
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.
I don't think Marx would have said that.
Whether other Marxists would have maintained that, I don't know. It's possible.
In other words, we told you that sooner or later the capitalist system was going to destroy itself.
This guy just smiled as wide as he could be. Well, we tried not to gloat, but it's...
This was a reporter from the New York Times?
No, it was one of the nightly news shows. I don't remember which network it was.
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.
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,
Lenin and of Stalin. No, they were just... Some years back, a man died in a Moscow named Kuganovich.
What was his name? Lazar Morozovich Kuganovich, of whom one of the Soviet dissident writers, Roy Medvedev,
Medvedev, one of those zamistat writers I mentioned to you this morning, of whom Medvedev,
very familiar of course with Soviet history, said, this Kaganovich had as much blood on
his hand as Heinrich Himmler. He was in charge of the Ukraine during the terror famine, he
He was in charge of the Moscow district during the purges.
He died peacefully in his bed in Moscow, an old man.
Everybody knew where he lived, of course.
Never put on trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity,
anything of that kind.
And the New York Times had a very big obituary on him,
because he was a very famous man.
He'd been in the Politburo, very close to Stalin,
for many, many years, throughout most of, almost all of the regime. He had built on
the Moscow subways as a leader of the Moscow district. And it was a balanced obituary. I
mean, there were some good things that Kaganovich had done, the Moscow subways, for instance,
and there were some questionable things that he had done. For instance, he had been involved
in repression, there's no doubt about that, but if you can imagine an obituary in the
New York Times on Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, being balanced, Himmler did away
with urban sprawl in many Polish cities, there's positive and negative also, but this is very
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.
Thank you very much.