The Communists

0:00The 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. 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.

0:45and of course we cannot think of the communists without thinking of the founder of modern socialism or communism, Karl Marx. There have been many biographies written about Marx and it is not my purpose to go into that phase of his background. What I'm concerned with here is the development of socialist thought and the development of the communist movement as a means for promoting and expanding socialism. The first thing that we should keep in mind is that the idea of modern socialism was originally set forth by anarchists who saw, as they looked at the world, it at least seemed to them that the greatest evil that we had was the evil of private ownership of property.

1:37And they saw in the way that they looked at things that private property was only possible because governments existed and therefore governments created a privileged class of people that had property. Ergo, the proper procedure would be to get rid of the government at which point you would automatically get rid of private property. Karl Marx began as an anarchist. He was first influenced by the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the foremost anarchists of the first part of the nineteenth century. However, Marx soon broke with Proudhon because he saw the inescapable flaw of anarchy. In fact, I can sum up Marx's position very Well, by simply quoting from him, he made a statement that pretty well abolished the rationale for the anarchist movement when he said, the owners of property will never give it up without a struggle. What he was drawing attention to was the fact that if the anarchists were successful in their endeavors to get rid of the state, this would make no

2:54No difference whatever insofar as property is concerned. Marx detected that private ownership of property precedes the state and would exist if there were no state at all, and therefore it was not the state that caused private property even though the state had become an instrument of the private property owners. Instead, Marx counseled a revolution, not one aimed at abolishing To understand Marxism, and that means to understand communism, you have to recognize that there are essentially four major points in the doctrine. And none of these points were original with Marx. Marx simply picked up these ideas from various people that he had read, and he wove them together into a new fabric, or what appeared to be new, in at least a strange and unique way. Marx is not original when it comes to either economic or social theory. However, he does have a degree of originality when it comes to political action. Politically Economically speaking, Marx is very shrewd. Economically speaking, Marx leaves a great

4:19deal to be desired. Although he has been hailed as a great economist, in point of fact his economic theories will not hang together. He is very faulty here, although many people as yet do not see that. Anyway, the four points within Marxism would be these. One, the abolition of Private Property. This is a major objective. That is to say, the abolition of the private ownership of property. And Marx got that idea, of course, fundamentally from Proudhon, an anarchist, but he also has a debt of gratitude to be paid here to such men as Plato and others who predate Proudhon and who had also argued that private property is the source of so so much mischief and discord and inharmony.

5:10The next point in the Marxian catalog of desirable goals would be the abolition of the family. Marx viewed children as, properly speaking, the products of society rather than the products of individual, particularly individual bourgeois families, where he thought the children were raised very, very badly, and he thought that there should be professionals raising the and the Children. This is an idea that he actually took from an early anthropologist who had done some remarkable studies in anthropology and who had concluded that as long as you have families, the children will be raised in a climate where private ownership of property is important. I am referring to Lewis Morgan, who Marx mentions in his note and in his writing, and to Morgan's pioneer study called Ancient Society. In here, Morgan fairly well demonstrated that the family itself is sort of the matrix of the idea of private property. And therefore, as Marx saw it, if you intend to abolish private ownership of property, you're going to have

6:23to abolish the family. There must be nothing that comes between the individual, the family, and the State Ideal. The third point within the Marxian lexicon would be the labor theory of value. This is the idea that all value and indeed ownership itself is a derivative of labor, and Marx sees this as a necessary moral justification for the kind of thing that he proposes. Believing as he did that all value springs from labor, It seemed to him that individuals such as capitalists or employers or the management team as such really wasn't doing any work. They were simply engaged in profiting as a result of the labor expended by others. And consequently, since he saw value as a derivative only of labor, it seemed to him that exploitation was the common rule of the worker and therefore all All of the earnings should go to the worker and he has no place for the capitalist or the businessman. Actually, he is a little bit ambivalent here because what he says in

7:34Volume 1 of Das Kapital, he contradicts later in Volume 3 where he will allow the businessman some justification and possibly even a wage, but it would be a minor one because although he will now confess that businessmen also do a little labor, their labor is really unimportant, but he's willing to pay them for whatever it is that they do of value. The fourth point is the one that has confused many people. It is called dialectic materialism, and whereas Marx borrowed the labor theory of value from the classical economists, notably from Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, when he came to dialectical materialism, he borrowed This is from Hegel. Hegel, of course, was a Platonist, a man who was profoundly influenced by the early Greek philosopher, and the manner in which he came to his position respecting dialectic materialism is somewhat oblique. Marx was trying to figure out how to justify his theories relating to the future of the world in a commune, a world commune, and Hegel

8:47explained in something that he wrote, which he called the dialectics, how ideas are fashioned from both what was called—the word escapes me for a moment, but I'll think of it. Anyway, there is a kind of an evolutionary process by means of which there is first a body of of Thought, which is then met by a second body of thought, and the two collide creating a third body of thought, and this process apparently goes on indefinitely according to Hegelian theory. Marx picked it up and thought he saw within it the concept of the 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.

10:08Now, these are essentially the four points, the abolition of private ownership of property, the abolition of the family, the labor theory of value, and dialectic materialism. None of these, as I pointed out, were original with Marx. He borrowed heavily from others and he wove them together and that became the fabric of new world socialism or communism. Now the place where Marx was original related to his political theories. He saw the world divided between two dominant classes, the bourgeoisie, who were the property owners, and the proletariat, who had nothing but the shirts on their back. And there is a parallel line stretching around the earth between the upper and the lower class. As he viewed it, the government was the instrument of the bourgeoisie. And his idea, rather than abolishing the government, The government was first to organize the proletariat and have the proletariat execute a kind of end run in which it comes around above the line or breaks through the line, takes over the government, and then the government becomes the instrument of a new ruling class, the

11:20proletariat. Once the proletariat is in a position of power, it will use its power to extract from the The Property Owners, all of their property, notably what he calls bourgeois property, and then once all of the property is gathered in the hands of the government, then you could turn around and the government would simply redistribute to the proletariat and to everybody because at this time you would have a classless society because everybody, excepting the people in government of course who are excluded, everybody in society generally would be a a member of the proletariat, it would be a working class society in total, and then they would receive according to their need. You remember the famous Marxist idea, from each according to ability to each according to his need.

12:12Now Marx is paired in his career by the works of Friedrich Engels, who worked with him fairly Firstly, Engels was a mill owner and a man who had resources and he assisted Marx decidedly in his efforts to write and develop his theories and to see that they were promoted. Marx also became a very active organizer of labor unions. He felt that the whole future of communism related to the labor movement. In fact, if you are familiar with his writings, you will note that he is constantly exhorting everyone that is the workers of the world to unite.

13:00This is exactly the idea that he wanted to bring about, and it was the union movement that he saw as the organization that would help to make this happen. He was disappointed here because the labor unions that he assisted in organizing, he was particularly active in setting up one of the early unions in Germany. These various labor unions, although they were theoretically a part of an international classless movement, nonetheless took on national characteristics whenever pressures arose. And Marx became increasingly disgusted and discouraged with the working class because they would not put aside their racial and their nationalistic prejudices and join in one great movement to overthrow the hated capitalist.

13:51He became increasingly disgruntled here. His dialectic materialism didn't seem to be working out, and incidentally, the words that escaped me a moment ago relate to the terms thesis and antithesis and synthesis. I couldn't remember that for a moment, but these were the three steps in the creating of dialectical materialism. But they didn't seem to work out for Marx. didn't seem to go the way he wanted it to, and he finally died a very discouraged and a very bitter man. He was followed in the communist hierarchy by two other people named Lenin and Trotsky, and they struggled for a long time to get themselves in a position of prominence where they would be the major leaders of the entire socialist front. They They failed again and again. In process, they sought repeatedly to bring off revolutions in Russia to overthrow the Tsar. They had any number of abortive efforts in Russia to topple the government, and every one of them failed. Finally, Lenin was exiled from Russia

15:02and fled to Switzerland, where he took refuge. So his actions there were not successful at at first, and his actions also in organizing all of the socialists were not successful either. In fact, Lenin was having a very difficult time of it. The anarchists during this period were throwing bombs and getting most of the attention. But finally, shortly after the turn of the century into the twentieth century, Lenin and Trotsky cooperated in holding a major conference in London and in that same year And here another one at Brussels, and on these occasions they did bring together a great many people of the socialist persuasion, and the result was the forming of a new international with Lenin at the head of it. It is here that Lenin got the name the Bolshevik because he won majority support, and that is what the word means. Some people suppose that it's It's a special type of communism. It merely indicates the majority leader of the communist movement and Trotsky became known as the Menshevik because he had the minority support. However,

16:15the Russian Revolution was still a long way off and to everyone's surprise, and I presume to the surprise of some of you who are listening to me now, the first of the communist type Revolutions did not occur in Russia, although that is where most of the publicity has been centered. It actually occurred in the Western Hemisphere in Mexico. It began really in 1910 with the overthrow of the Diaz government by a politician named Madero. Madero and Diaz was clashed and in the ensuing discord and inharmony and confusion that developed a trio of communists, well at least two of them were communists and one was something of an opportunist, put the pieces together to organize the party of the revolution in Mexico. The three to whom I refer were a man named Zapata and then a politician named Carranza and Pancho Villa, 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.

17:36An interesting point which should be brought forward here is this, while Marx was to see the failure of the anarchist movement from a practical point of view. In other words, he saw that if the anarchists were to be successful and government would cease to exist, nothing would happen as far as property is concerned because human beings will never give up their property without a struggle and therefore your property situation would remain the same. And since the socialist revolution is to be a disruption of the property relationship, the destruction of the government would not bring that about. Therefore, Marx recognized the government as the tool that could be used to bring about this type of reorientation of the property. But the interesting thing is that the anarchists were able to detect the flaw in Marxism. And Marx couldn't see his flaw, but he could see theirs, and The anarchists pointed out to many communists, and to Marx himself on at least one occasion, And even if Marx were successful and he got the proletariat organized and the proletariat

19:10went in and took over and extracted the property from the then owners, it would only be a matter of time before those people in power having the property now under their control would be acting just like the previous owners. And therefore you would not have a change at all in the management of property. You would simply take it out of the hands of certain property owners, transfer it into the hands of other property owners, and the exact situation would be the same. A point, incidentally, which has been borne out with all of the communist revolutions beginning with the ones in Mexico. Although Marx's ideas have often been politically and even militarily successful, they have never attained his economic objective.

19:58And since the entire movement of socialism is fundamentally geared to an economic objective, in that sense, Marxism has been a failure from the beginning, a point which many modern Marxists now recognize and they pay scant lip service anymore even to Marx. So this was what happened in Mexico when the Carranza government took over. Carranza became the and the First President under the Revolutionary Party. He instituted a kind of agrarian reform and the very ideas that Marx had recommended only to find the economy coming apart. Everything fell into a terrible depression, and it is only in the last, oh, possibly twenty years that Mexico has been moving away from the economic disaster that was imposed upon 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.

21:49of the Manchu Dynasty. However, the new Republic of China founded by Sun Yat-sen lasted only two years. The Manchus were engaged in a little conspiracy with one of the leading figures of the Sun Yat-sen regime to be reestablished, and Sun Yat-sen made the discovery that this was happening, and the result was an internecine war that broke out in China between the forces of the World, The Theory of Money and Credit of the World, The Theory of Money and Credit

22:47to Japan for Refuge. While there in Japan, he selected the two men who were to carry on communist ideology in China after him, and they were Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. And for your information, in case you have forgotten it, Chiang was later to be sent up to Moscow to study under Lenin, and this is Chiang Kai-shek, the man that we have backed in his opposition to Mao, who is supposed to be the communist—actually, they both were communists, and it's of interest, I think, that Chang married the daughter of Sun Yat-sen and Mao married the cousin, so that actually, in a sense, it was just one big family.

23:34There isn't time in so brief a discussion to get into the details. The major communist This revolution that we all think of, of course, is the one that occurred in Russia in 1917. What happened was that there was a palace revolt right after Christmas in the early part of 1917, and a small band of radicals seized important offices in the palace in St. Petersburg and then sent a telegram to the Tsar who was visiting with the troops on the Russian Western Front suggesting to the Tsar that he abdicate. And the interesting thing is that he did so. Many people have felt that the Tsar was overthrown by force.

24:23Actually he resigned. He resigned his post, which is probably something he didn't have to do. And as a matter of fact, the group of radicals that had taken over these key posts were not at all prepared for this. They hadn't imagined that the Tsar would abdicate, although they had demanded it in a spirit of bravado, and so they found themselves in a position where they were trying to reorganize a new government, and it was at this time that Lenin returned from Switzerland and offered his services in helping to establish Marxism from the top, but the new people there, a Prince Levov, spelled L-V-O-V, and a man named Kerensky, did not want to try to put in Marx from the Top. They wanted to have a democratic type of government, such as we have in the United States. And this caused Lenin a great deal of anguish, and he broke with them and went out and organized the faithful into a second revolution. And this is the so-called

25:24October Revolution, the ones that the Russians commemorate each year, which is the one that Put Lenin in Power. Lenin overthrew the Kerensky regime and not the Tsar, and chased Kerensky from the country. Kerensky fled to the United States and lived here, primarily in New York, although he did travel around and lecture in various places, including Stanford, on the glories of socialism and the evil of communism. He died, I believe, in 1970, in the first in the first part of the year. Meantime, of course, under Lenin, the communists gained ultimate control of Russia, and then when Lenin died, although Trotsky was slated to be the next in command, Stalin seized power. As Secretary of the Communist Party, he knew where the bodies were buried, and there is some evidence that he kept his own spade and Pitchfork Andy for just such occasions. Anyway, he sent an execution squad to get Trotsky out of the way. Trotsky's friends found out about it and intervened and managed to ship

26:39Trotsky to the United States. He came into New York, but they sent for him from Mexico where some of his friends were having difficulty with Marxian economic theory, and so he went down to Mexico to assist them there, and as I'm sure you remember, he was given protective custody. He was put in jail, as a matter of fact, to safeguard his life, but the execution squad found him even there, and he was executed in Mexico where he was trying to help establish the communist regime there. There have been, of course, other communist takeovers, the one in Cuba being perhaps one One of the last or one of the latest that we are very familiar with, although there has now been a rather a unique breakthrough in that a communist regime has arisen in Chile, in South America, by means of an election. So far as I know, that's the first time that's happened that a communist would come to full power without anything at his disposal but

27:47and Electioneering Process. Anyway, the communists are very interesting people. In a presentation as brief as this, I have only touched very quickly on a number of points. I suggest that you read more about it. It makes fascinating reading.