WEBVTT NOTE The Communists 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:18.000 The Communists. All socialist thought centers around the idea that private property is somehow an unacceptable social anachronism and should be abolished in whole or in part. 2 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:45.000 When we think of modern socialism and the work done originally by anarchists, we are unavoidably moved in the direction of the communists who took over from the anarchists and actually became, both in purpose and in formula, the leading movers of the entire socialist movement during the 19th century. 3 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:55.000 and of course we cannot think of the communists without thinking of the founder of modern socialism or communism, Karl Marx. 4 00:00:55.000 --> 00:01:05.000 There have been many biographies written about Marx and it is not my purpose to go into that phase of his background. 5 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:12.000 What I'm concerned with here is the development of socialist thought and the development of the communist movement 6 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:17.140 as a means for promoting and expanding socialism. 7 00:01:17.140 --> 00:01:23.020 The first thing that we should keep in mind is that the idea of modern socialism was originally 8 00:01:23.020 --> 00:01:32.040 set forth by anarchists who saw, as they looked at the world, it at least seemed to them that 9 00:01:32.040 --> 00:01:37.500 the greatest evil that we had was the evil of private ownership of property. 10 00:01:37.500 --> 00:01:44.000 And they saw in the way that they looked at things that private property was only possible 11 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:50.040 because governments existed and therefore governments created a privileged class of 12 00:01:50.040 --> 00:01:52.120 people that had property. 13 00:01:52.120 --> 00:01:57.320 Ergo, the proper procedure would be to get rid of the government at which point you would 14 00:01:57.320 --> 00:02:00.940 automatically get rid of private property. 15 00:02:00.940 --> 00:02:04.400 Karl Marx began as an anarchist. 16 00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:10.080 He was first influenced by the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the foremost 17 00:02:10.080 --> 00:02:20.360 anarchists of the first part of the nineteenth century. However, Marx soon broke with Proudhon 18 00:02:20.360 --> 00:02:28.880 because he saw the inescapable flaw of anarchy. In fact, I can sum up Marx's position very 19 00:02:28.880 --> 00:02:35.220 Well, by simply quoting from him, he made a statement that pretty well abolished the 20 00:02:35.220 --> 00:02:41.700 rationale for the anarchist movement when he said, the owners of property will never 21 00:02:41.700 --> 00:02:48.160 give it up without a struggle. What he was drawing attention to was the fact that if 22 00:02:48.160 --> 00:02:54.140 the anarchists were successful in their endeavors to get rid of the state, this would make no 23 00:02:54.140 --> 00:03:00.860 No difference whatever insofar as property is concerned. Marx detected that private ownership 24 00:03:00.860 --> 00:03:07.580 of property precedes the state and would exist if there were no state at all, and therefore 25 00:03:07.580 --> 00:03:13.460 it was not the state that caused private property even though the state had become an instrument 26 00:03:13.460 --> 00:03:21.220 of the private property owners. Instead, Marx counseled a revolution, not one aimed at abolishing 27 00:03:21.220 --> 00:03:40.780 To understand Marxism, and that means to understand communism, you have to recognize that there 28 00:03:40.780 --> 00:03:48.340 are essentially four major points in the doctrine. And none of these points were original with 29 00:03:48.340 --> 00:03:54.180 Marx. Marx simply picked up these ideas from various people that he had read, and he wove 30 00:03:54.180 --> 00:04:00.380 them together into a new fabric, or what appeared to be new, in at least a strange and unique 31 00:04:00.380 --> 00:04:08.180 way. Marx is not original when it comes to either economic or social theory. However, 32 00:04:08.180 --> 00:04:13.580 he does have a degree of originality when it comes to political action. Politically 33 00:04:13.580 --> 00:04:19.780 Economically speaking, Marx is very shrewd. Economically speaking, Marx leaves a great 34 00:04:19.780 --> 00:04:25.740 deal to be desired. Although he has been hailed as a great economist, in point of fact his 35 00:04:25.740 --> 00:04:31.440 economic theories will not hang together. He is very faulty here, although many people 36 00:04:31.440 --> 00:04:39.440 as yet do not see that. Anyway, the four points within Marxism would be these. One, the abolition 37 00:04:39.440 --> 00:04:44.800 of Private Property. This is a major objective. That is to say, the abolition of the private 38 00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:51.000 ownership of property. And Marx got that idea, of course, fundamentally from Proudhon, an 39 00:04:51.000 --> 00:04:58.560 anarchist, but he also has a debt of gratitude to be paid here to such men as Plato and others 40 00:04:58.560 --> 00:05:06.360 who predate Proudhon and who had also argued that private property is the source of so 41 00:05:06.360 --> 00:05:10.280 so much mischief and discord and inharmony. 42 00:05:10.280 --> 00:05:18.680 The next point in the Marxian catalog of desirable goals would be the abolition of the family. 43 00:05:18.680 --> 00:05:25.040 Marx viewed children as, properly speaking, the products of society rather than the products 44 00:05:25.040 --> 00:05:30.680 of individual, particularly individual bourgeois families, where he thought the children were 45 00:05:30.680 --> 00:05:35.420 raised very, very badly, and he thought that there should be professionals raising the 46 00:05:35.420 --> 00:05:43.620 and the Children. This is an idea that he actually took from an early anthropologist 47 00:05:43.620 --> 00:05:50.220 who had done some remarkable studies in anthropology and who had concluded that as long as you 48 00:05:50.220 --> 00:05:55.460 have families, the children will be raised in a climate where private ownership of property 49 00:05:55.460 --> 00:06:03.020 is important. I am referring to Lewis Morgan, who Marx mentions in his note and in his writing, 50 00:06:03.020 --> 00:06:11.900 and to Morgan's pioneer study called Ancient Society. In here, Morgan fairly well demonstrated 51 00:06:11.900 --> 00:06:19.000 that the family itself is sort of the matrix of the idea of private property. And therefore, 52 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:23.900 as Marx saw it, if you intend to abolish private ownership of property, you're going to have 53 00:06:23.900 --> 00:06:30.100 to abolish the family. There must be nothing that comes between the individual, the family, 54 00:06:30.100 --> 00:06:36.120 and the State Ideal. The third point within the Marxian lexicon 55 00:06:36.120 --> 00:06:43.380 would be the labor theory of value. This is the idea that all value and indeed ownership 56 00:06:43.380 --> 00:06:51.900 itself is a derivative of labor, and Marx sees this as a necessary moral justification 57 00:06:51.900 --> 00:06:58.140 for the kind of thing that he proposes. Believing as he did that all value springs from labor, 58 00:06:58.140 --> 00:07:05.580 It seemed to him that individuals such as capitalists or employers or the management team as such 59 00:07:05.580 --> 00:07:11.920 really wasn't doing any work. They were simply engaged in profiting as a result of the labor 60 00:07:11.920 --> 00:07:18.460 expended by others. And consequently, since he saw value as a derivative only of labor, 61 00:07:18.460 --> 00:07:24.660 it seemed to him that exploitation was the common rule of the worker and therefore all 62 00:07:24.660 --> 00:07:29.260 All of the earnings should go to the worker and he has no place for the capitalist or 63 00:07:29.260 --> 00:07:34.100 the businessman. Actually, he is a little bit ambivalent here because what he says in 64 00:07:34.100 --> 00:07:41.360 Volume 1 of Das Kapital, he contradicts later in Volume 3 where he will allow the businessman 65 00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:46.780 some justification and possibly even a wage, but it would be a minor one because although 66 00:07:46.780 --> 00:07:54.120 he will now confess that businessmen also do a little labor, their labor is really unimportant, 67 00:07:54.120 --> 00:07:58.260 but he's willing to pay them for whatever it is that they do of value. 68 00:07:58.260 --> 00:08:06.360 The fourth point is the one that has confused many people. It is called dialectic materialism, 69 00:08:06.360 --> 00:08:12.100 and whereas Marx borrowed the labor theory of value from the classical economists, notably 70 00:08:12.100 --> 00:08:18.680 from Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, when he came to dialectical materialism, he borrowed 71 00:08:18.680 --> 00:08:25.200 This is from Hegel. Hegel, of course, was a Platonist, a man who was profoundly influenced 72 00:08:25.200 --> 00:08:31.480 by the early Greek philosopher, and the manner in which he came to his position respecting 73 00:08:31.480 --> 00:08:40.720 dialectic materialism is somewhat oblique. Marx was trying to figure out how to justify 74 00:08:40.720 --> 00:08:47.360 his theories relating to the future of the world in a commune, a world commune, and Hegel 75 00:08:47.360 --> 00:08:58.280 explained in something that he wrote, which he called the dialectics, how ideas are fashioned 76 00:08:58.280 --> 00:09:10.100 from both what was called—the word escapes me for a moment, but I'll think of it. Anyway, 77 00:09:10.100 --> 00:09:15.320 there is a kind of an evolutionary process by means of which there is first a body of 78 00:09:15.320 --> 00:09:21.760 of Thought, which is then met by a second body of thought, and the two collide creating 79 00:09:21.760 --> 00:09:27.480 a third body of thought, and this process apparently goes on indefinitely according 80 00:09:27.480 --> 00:09:38.320 to Hegelian theory. Marx picked it up and thought he saw within it the concept of the 81 00:09:38.320 --> 00:10:08.320 There is justification that there is such a thing as historic determinism. And as he saw it, the entire explanation of economics would fall into this idea of historical predeterminism, and therefore he was able to say, as a result of his theories relating to dialectic materialism, that it is historically inevitable that communism is the wave of the future, and that one day we will all be communists. 82 00:10:08.320 --> 00:10:14.920 Now, these are essentially the four points, the abolition of private ownership of property, 83 00:10:14.920 --> 00:10:21.600 the abolition of the family, the labor theory of value, and dialectic materialism. None 84 00:10:21.600 --> 00:10:26.140 of these, as I pointed out, were original with Marx. He borrowed heavily from others 85 00:10:26.140 --> 00:10:33.960 and he wove them together and that became the fabric of new world socialism or communism. 86 00:10:33.960 --> 00:10:39.500 Now the place where Marx was original related to his political theories. He saw the world 87 00:10:39.500 --> 00:10:46.120 divided between two dominant classes, the bourgeoisie, who were the property owners, 88 00:10:46.120 --> 00:10:50.820 and the proletariat, who had nothing but the shirts on their back. And there is a parallel 89 00:10:50.820 --> 00:10:57.360 line stretching around the earth between the upper and the lower class. As he viewed it, 90 00:10:57.360 --> 00:11:03.920 the government was the instrument of the bourgeoisie. And his idea, rather than abolishing the government, 91 00:11:03.920 --> 00:11:09.640 The government was first to organize the proletariat and have the proletariat execute a kind of 92 00:11:09.640 --> 00:11:15.200 end run in which it comes around above the line or breaks through the line, takes over 93 00:11:15.200 --> 00:11:20.880 the government, and then the government becomes the instrument of a new ruling class, the 94 00:11:20.880 --> 00:11:22.360 proletariat. 95 00:11:22.360 --> 00:11:28.800 Once the proletariat is in a position of power, it will use its power to extract from the 96 00:11:28.800 --> 00:11:34.920 The Property Owners, all of their property, notably what he calls bourgeois property, 97 00:11:34.920 --> 00:11:40.160 and then once all of the property is gathered in the hands of the government, then you could 98 00:11:40.160 --> 00:11:46.280 turn around and the government would simply redistribute to the proletariat and to everybody 99 00:11:46.280 --> 00:11:51.920 because at this time you would have a classless society because everybody, excepting the people 100 00:11:51.920 --> 00:11:56.460 in government of course who are excluded, everybody in society generally would be a 101 00:11:56.460 --> 00:12:02.620 a member of the proletariat, it would be a working class society in total, and then they 102 00:12:02.620 --> 00:12:08.540 would receive according to their need. You remember the famous Marxist idea, from each 103 00:12:08.540 --> 00:12:12.860 according to ability to each according to his need. 104 00:12:12.860 --> 00:12:21.740 Now Marx is paired in his career by the works of Friedrich Engels, who worked with him fairly 105 00:12:21.740 --> 00:12:31.380 Firstly, Engels was a mill owner and a man who had resources and he assisted Marx decidedly 106 00:12:31.380 --> 00:12:39.460 in his efforts to write and develop his theories and to see that they were promoted. 107 00:12:39.460 --> 00:12:43.620 Marx also became a very active organizer of labor unions. 108 00:12:43.620 --> 00:12:50.060 He felt that the whole future of communism related to the labor movement. 109 00:12:50.060 --> 00:12:55.900 In fact, if you are familiar with his writings, you will note that he is constantly exhorting 110 00:12:55.900 --> 00:13:00.720 everyone that is the workers of the world to unite. 111 00:13:00.720 --> 00:13:07.820 This is exactly the idea that he wanted to bring about, and it was the union movement 112 00:13:07.820 --> 00:13:13.740 that he saw as the organization that would help to make this happen. 113 00:13:13.740 --> 00:13:19.260 He was disappointed here because the labor unions that he assisted in organizing, he 114 00:13:19.260 --> 00:13:25.540 was particularly active in setting up one of the early unions in Germany. These various 115 00:13:25.540 --> 00:13:31.180 labor unions, although they were theoretically a part of an international classless movement, 116 00:13:31.180 --> 00:13:36.300 nonetheless took on national characteristics whenever pressures arose. And Marx became 117 00:13:36.300 --> 00:13:41.900 increasingly disgusted and discouraged with the working class because they would not put 118 00:13:41.900 --> 00:13:48.060 aside their racial and their nationalistic prejudices and join in one great movement 119 00:13:48.060 --> 00:13:51.100 to overthrow the hated capitalist. 120 00:13:51.100 --> 00:13:53.920 He became increasingly disgruntled here. 121 00:13:53.920 --> 00:14:00.480 His dialectic materialism didn't seem to be working out, and incidentally, the words that 122 00:14:00.480 --> 00:14:09.660 escaped me a moment ago relate to the terms thesis and antithesis and synthesis. 123 00:14:09.660 --> 00:14:13.480 I couldn't remember that for a moment, but these were the three steps in the creating 124 00:14:13.480 --> 00:14:15.420 of dialectical materialism. 125 00:14:15.420 --> 00:14:17.460 But they didn't seem to work out for Marx. 126 00:14:17.460 --> 00:14:22.860 didn't seem to go the way he wanted it to, and he finally died a very discouraged and 127 00:14:22.860 --> 00:14:30.660 a very bitter man. He was followed in the communist hierarchy by two other people named 128 00:14:30.660 --> 00:14:36.220 Lenin and Trotsky, and they struggled for a long time to get themselves in a position 129 00:14:36.220 --> 00:14:42.140 of prominence where they would be the major leaders of the entire socialist front. They 130 00:14:42.140 --> 00:14:48.020 They failed again and again. In process, they sought repeatedly to bring off revolutions 131 00:14:48.020 --> 00:14:55.540 in Russia to overthrow the Tsar. They had any number of abortive efforts in Russia to 132 00:14:55.540 --> 00:15:02.420 topple the government, and every one of them failed. Finally, Lenin was exiled from Russia 133 00:15:02.420 --> 00:15:10.020 and fled to Switzerland, where he took refuge. So his actions there were not successful at 134 00:15:10.020 --> 00:15:16.180 at first, and his actions also in organizing all of the socialists were not successful 135 00:15:16.180 --> 00:15:21.340 either. In fact, Lenin was having a very difficult time of it. The anarchists during this period 136 00:15:21.340 --> 00:15:24.980 were throwing bombs and getting most of the attention. 137 00:15:24.980 --> 00:15:30.580 But finally, shortly after the turn of the century into the twentieth century, Lenin 138 00:15:30.580 --> 00:15:36.860 and Trotsky cooperated in holding a major conference in London and in that same year 139 00:15:36.860 --> 00:15:43.180 And here another one at Brussels, and on these occasions they did bring together a great 140 00:15:43.180 --> 00:15:49.620 many people of the socialist persuasion, and the result was the forming of a new international 141 00:15:49.620 --> 00:15:55.820 with Lenin at the head of it. It is here that Lenin got the name the Bolshevik because 142 00:15:55.820 --> 00:16:01.660 he won majority support, and that is what the word means. Some people suppose that it's 143 00:16:01.660 --> 00:16:07.340 It's a special type of communism. It merely indicates the majority leader of the communist 144 00:16:07.340 --> 00:16:15.220 movement and Trotsky became known as the Menshevik because he had the minority support. However, 145 00:16:15.220 --> 00:16:22.100 the Russian Revolution was still a long way off and to everyone's surprise, and I presume 146 00:16:22.100 --> 00:16:27.060 to the surprise of some of you who are listening to me now, the first of the communist type 147 00:16:27.060 --> 00:16:32.620 Revolutions did not occur in Russia, although that is where most of the publicity has been 148 00:16:32.620 --> 00:16:41.060 centered. It actually occurred in the Western Hemisphere in Mexico. It began really in 1910 149 00:16:41.060 --> 00:16:47.740 with the overthrow of the Diaz government by a politician named Madero. Madero and Diaz 150 00:16:47.740 --> 00:16:56.900 was clashed and in the ensuing discord and inharmony and confusion that developed a trio 151 00:16:56.900 --> 00:17:02.500 of communists, well at least two of them were communists and one was something of an opportunist, 152 00:17:02.500 --> 00:17:08.260 put the pieces together to organize the party of the revolution in Mexico. The three to 153 00:17:08.260 --> 00:17:16.980 whom I refer were a man named Zapata and then a politician named Carranza and Pancho Villa, 154 00:17:16.980 --> 00:17:36.980 These three put together the party of the revolution, which I might advise is still the only political party in Mexico, and Mexico is still following the ideas that they set down, excepting, of course, since that time they have had to modify their position. 155 00:17:36.980 --> 00:17:43.500 An interesting point which should be brought forward here is this, while Marx was to see 156 00:17:43.500 --> 00:17:48.020 the failure of the anarchist movement from a practical point of view. 157 00:17:48.020 --> 00:17:55.360 In other words, he saw that if the anarchists were to be successful and government would 158 00:17:55.360 --> 00:18:00.980 cease to exist, nothing would happen as far as property is concerned because human beings 159 00:18:00.980 --> 00:18:06.340 will never give up their property without a struggle and therefore your property situation 160 00:18:06.340 --> 00:18:12.220 would remain the same. And since the socialist revolution is to be a disruption of the property 161 00:18:12.220 --> 00:18:17.420 relationship, the destruction of the government would not bring that about. Therefore, Marx 162 00:18:17.420 --> 00:18:23.620 recognized the government as the tool that could be used to bring about this type of 163 00:18:23.620 --> 00:18:29.100 reorientation of the property. But the interesting thing is that the anarchists were able to 164 00:18:29.100 --> 00:18:35.300 detect the flaw in Marxism. And Marx couldn't see his flaw, but he could see theirs, and 165 00:18:35.300 --> 00:19:03.720 The anarchists pointed out to many communists, and to Marx himself on at least one occasion, 166 00:19:03.720 --> 00:19:10.260 And even if Marx were successful and he got the proletariat organized and the proletariat 167 00:19:10.260 --> 00:19:17.180 went in and took over and extracted the property from the then owners, it would only be a matter 168 00:19:17.180 --> 00:19:23.520 of time before those people in power having the property now under their control would 169 00:19:23.520 --> 00:19:26.120 be acting just like the previous owners. 170 00:19:26.120 --> 00:19:31.420 And therefore you would not have a change at all in the management of property. 171 00:19:31.420 --> 00:19:35.780 You would simply take it out of the hands of certain property owners, transfer it into 172 00:19:35.780 --> 00:19:41.180 the hands of other property owners, and the exact situation would be the same. 173 00:19:41.180 --> 00:19:46.180 A point, incidentally, which has been borne out with all of the communist revolutions 174 00:19:46.180 --> 00:19:48.460 beginning with the ones in Mexico. 175 00:19:48.460 --> 00:19:55.700 Although Marx's ideas have often been politically and even militarily successful, they have 176 00:19:55.700 --> 00:19:58.240 never attained his economic objective. 177 00:19:58.240 --> 00:20:03.940 And since the entire movement of socialism is fundamentally geared to an economic objective, 178 00:20:03.940 --> 00:20:09.840 in that sense, Marxism has been a failure from the beginning, a point which many modern 179 00:20:09.840 --> 00:20:18.020 Marxists now recognize and they pay scant lip service anymore even to Marx. So this 180 00:20:18.020 --> 00:20:25.180 was what happened in Mexico when the Carranza government took over. Carranza became the 181 00:20:25.180 --> 00:20:28.940 and the First President under the Revolutionary Party. 182 00:20:28.940 --> 00:20:34.700 He instituted a kind of agrarian reform and the very ideas that Marx had recommended only 183 00:20:34.700 --> 00:20:37.720 to find the economy coming apart. 184 00:20:37.720 --> 00:20:43.860 Everything fell into a terrible depression, and it is only in the last, oh, possibly twenty 185 00:20:43.860 --> 00:20:49.880 years that Mexico has been moving away from the economic disaster that was imposed upon 186 00:20:49.880 --> 00:21:19.880 by the communist theory that was imposed on them from the top. Meanwhile, after Mexico went communist, which it still is today, although we have no real problem with them because they are moving more and more towards a free market and more and more towards private ownership of property, the second major communist revolution occurred in China. I say the second. I'm speaking in terms of chronology and not in importance. 187 00:21:49.880 --> 00:21:56.280 of the Manchu Dynasty. However, the new Republic of China founded by Sun Yat-sen lasted only 188 00:21:56.280 --> 00:22:03.800 two years. The Manchus were engaged in a little conspiracy with one of the leading figures 189 00:22:03.800 --> 00:22:11.320 of the Sun Yat-sen regime to be reestablished, and Sun Yat-sen made the discovery that this 190 00:22:11.320 --> 00:22:17.600 was happening, and the result was an internecine war that broke out in China between the forces 191 00:22:17.600 --> 00:22:24.600 of the World, The Theory of Money and Credit of the World, The Theory of Money and Credit 192 00:22:47.600 --> 00:22:53.600 to Japan for Refuge. While there in Japan, he selected the two men who were to carry 193 00:22:53.600 --> 00:23:02.000 on communist ideology in China after him, and they were Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. 194 00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:07.000 And for your information, in case you have forgotten it, Chiang was later to be sent 195 00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:13.800 up to Moscow to study under Lenin, and this is Chiang Kai-shek, the man that we have backed 196 00:23:13.800 --> 00:23:20.320 in his opposition to Mao, who is supposed to be the communist—actually, they both were 197 00:23:20.320 --> 00:23:25.440 communists, and it's of interest, I think, that Chang married the daughter of Sun Yat-sen 198 00:23:25.440 --> 00:23:34.120 and Mao married the cousin, so that actually, in a sense, it was just one big family. 199 00:23:34.120 --> 00:23:41.420 There isn't time in so brief a discussion to get into the details. The major communist 200 00:23:41.420 --> 00:23:48.480 This revolution that we all think of, of course, is the one that occurred in Russia in 1917. 201 00:23:48.480 --> 00:23:53.660 What happened was that there was a palace revolt right after Christmas in the early 202 00:23:53.660 --> 00:24:02.940 part of 1917, and a small band of radicals seized important offices in the palace in 203 00:24:02.940 --> 00:24:08.520 St. Petersburg and then sent a telegram to the Tsar who was visiting with the troops 204 00:24:08.520 --> 00:24:14.640 on the Russian Western Front suggesting to the Tsar that he abdicate. 205 00:24:14.640 --> 00:24:17.980 And the interesting thing is that he did so. 206 00:24:17.980 --> 00:24:23.320 Many people have felt that the Tsar was overthrown by force. 207 00:24:23.320 --> 00:24:24.960 Actually he resigned. 208 00:24:24.960 --> 00:24:29.640 He resigned his post, which is probably something he didn't have to do. 209 00:24:29.640 --> 00:24:35.000 And as a matter of fact, the group of radicals that had taken over these key posts were not 210 00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:36.320 at all prepared for this. 211 00:24:36.320 --> 00:24:41.360 They hadn't imagined that the Tsar would abdicate, although they had demanded it in 212 00:24:41.360 --> 00:24:47.160 a spirit of bravado, and so they found themselves in a position where they were trying to reorganize 213 00:24:47.160 --> 00:24:53.240 a new government, and it was at this time that Lenin returned from Switzerland and offered 214 00:24:53.240 --> 00:24:59.280 his services in helping to establish Marxism from the top, but the new people there, a 215 00:24:59.280 --> 00:25:05.840 Prince Levov, spelled L-V-O-V, and a man named Kerensky, did not want to try to put in Marx 216 00:25:05.840 --> 00:25:11.000 from the Top. They wanted to have a democratic type of government, such as we have in the 217 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:17.600 United States. And this caused Lenin a great deal of anguish, and he broke with them and 218 00:25:17.600 --> 00:25:24.080 went out and organized the faithful into a second revolution. And this is the so-called 219 00:25:24.080 --> 00:25:30.240 October Revolution, the ones that the Russians commemorate each year, which is the one that 220 00:25:30.240 --> 00:25:38.080 Put Lenin in Power. Lenin overthrew the Kerensky regime and not the Tsar, and chased Kerensky 221 00:25:38.080 --> 00:25:46.880 from the country. Kerensky fled to the United States and lived here, primarily in New York, 222 00:25:46.880 --> 00:25:52.360 although he did travel around and lecture in various places, including Stanford, on 223 00:25:52.360 --> 00:26:00.200 the glories of socialism and the evil of communism. He died, I believe, in 1970, in the first 224 00:26:00.200 --> 00:26:05.560 in the first part of the year. Meantime, of course, under Lenin, the communists gained 225 00:26:05.560 --> 00:26:12.440 ultimate control of Russia, and then when Lenin died, although Trotsky was slated to 226 00:26:12.440 --> 00:26:19.080 be the next in command, Stalin seized power. As Secretary of the Communist Party, he knew 227 00:26:19.080 --> 00:26:24.760 where the bodies were buried, and there is some evidence that he kept his own spade and 228 00:26:24.760 --> 00:26:32.960 Pitchfork Andy for just such occasions. Anyway, he sent an execution squad to get Trotsky 229 00:26:32.960 --> 00:26:39.400 out of the way. Trotsky's friends found out about it and intervened and managed to ship 230 00:26:39.400 --> 00:26:47.600 Trotsky to the United States. He came into New York, but they sent for him from Mexico 231 00:26:47.600 --> 00:26:53.400 where some of his friends were having difficulty with Marxian economic theory, and so he went 232 00:26:53.400 --> 00:27:01.720 down to Mexico to assist them there, and as I'm sure you remember, he was given protective 233 00:27:01.720 --> 00:27:02.720 custody. 234 00:27:02.720 --> 00:27:07.440 He was put in jail, as a matter of fact, to safeguard his life, but the execution squad 235 00:27:07.440 --> 00:27:13.440 found him even there, and he was executed in Mexico where he was trying to help establish 236 00:27:13.440 --> 00:27:15.880 the communist regime there. 237 00:27:15.880 --> 00:27:22.640 There have been, of course, other communist takeovers, the one in Cuba being perhaps one 238 00:27:22.640 --> 00:27:27.240 One of the last or one of the latest that we are very familiar with, although there 239 00:27:27.240 --> 00:27:35.220 has now been a rather a unique breakthrough in that a communist regime has arisen in Chile, 240 00:27:35.220 --> 00:27:40.800 in South America, by means of an election. So far as I know, that's the first time that's 241 00:27:40.800 --> 00:27:47.480 happened that a communist would come to full power without anything at his disposal but 242 00:27:47.480 --> 00:27:48.960 and Electioneering Process. 243 00:27:48.960 --> 00:27:51.980 Anyway, the communists are very interesting people. 244 00:27:51.980 --> 00:27:57.200 In a presentation as brief as this, I have only touched very quickly on a number of points. 245 00:27:57.200 --> 00:28:00.000 I suggest that you read more about it. 246 00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:01.800 It makes fascinating reading.