8. The Planned Society

Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism.

Capitalists were seen to be an important component of the industrial class. Saint-Simon did not promote class conflict. Auguste Comte was his disciple. Comte founded sociology and the doctrine of positivism. He is regarded as the first philosopher of science.

Main Currents of Marxist Thought by Kolakowski is an indispensable work about Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. He describes Marxism as the “greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” Marx was after the human race achieving real human dignity. Man will only achieve control of his own destiny by creating planned societies. There is no invisible hand. Man must be conscious masters of nature. Everything will be planned. That will free mankind.

Trotsky’s book, For Literature and Revolution, claimed that the average human type will rise to the stature of an Aristotle. Lenin first put into place the Stalinist planned society – communism.

Lecture 8 of 10 from Ralph Raico’s History: The Struggle for Liberty.

[This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.]

I want to say some things to finish up with the so-called “utopian socialists.” Remember this phrase was a strategically concocted by Marx and Lenin to denigrate their enemies. The last of these early French socialists—and by far the most influential—was the school of Henri de Saint-Simon. Let me mention one more time the work by Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition, which is important for talking about Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers, the most important of whom were Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin and Amand Bazard.1

Saint-Simon is a famous aristocratic name in France and Henri was indeed a member of the nobility. Saint-Simon was a very peculiar character. He flourished during the assignat inflation by speculating in the currency and 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 please to send him money, which never came about. Then, somehow, he revived his fortunes. 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. 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. A crucial fact about him is that Saint-Simon, and also his followers, became very interested in the works of the theocratic conservatives—as they were sometimes called—especially Joseph de Maistre and also Louis de Bonald.

De Maistre and de Bonald rejected the French Revolution, of course. They rejected the French Enlightenment. They were much more conservative—even reactionary—than Edmund Burke was. Burke was fundamentally a supporter of the free market and free Whiggish British society. These theocratic conservatives, especially de Maistre, who was influential, wanted to return, not to the pre-1789 old regime, but back to the Middle Ages. De Maistre, especially, was an intelligent man, from my point of view, but his ideas were fundamentally flawed. These theorists are called theocrats because they bemoaned the absence of authority and hierarchy in modern society. They promoted the creation of revived centers of authority in hierarchy culminating in the Pope. 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. Their Middle Ages was not the Middle Ages that we’ve talked about here—the enterprising Middle Ages of the towns, or the Middle Ages of the beginning of European and world commerce. The Middle Ages we discussed here is the Middle Ages that gave rise to free institutions. Instead, you could say that de Maistre and de Bonald adopted the reverse, the 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 upheavals of the revolutionary period. In tracing this revolutionary philosophy that they thought had culminated in the excesses of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, they went back to the people they considered the first real revolutionaries. The first revolutionary, of course, was Lucifer, in their view, who rose up against God himself. The conservative theocrats went back to René Descartes who introduced the modern philosophy with the idea of systematic doubt, but above all, they opposed the reformers of the Protestant Reformation. They were, according to the theocrats, the ones who began to undermine traditional European society.

The View of the Saint-Simonians

The Saint-Simonians, beginning with Saint-Simon, found this conservative view really fascinating. The Saint-Simonians agreed that yes, there was something wrong with modern history. There is a deep flaw in the French 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—or thought he learned—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.

Saint-Simon had a disciple, a man who was his personal secretary, who then went out on his own, a man named Auguste Comte. 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. Hayek deals with this in an important book called The Counterrevolution of Science.2 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 Saint-Simonians, about Auguste Comte, and further ramifications.

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 nineteenth 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. We use the methods of natural science, the conclusions of natural science, to rule the natural world. 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—they didn’t bother to beat around the bush—we can call “priests of positivism.”3 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 human problems could eventually be solved in the same way that technical engineering problems are solved by the natural sciences. Crime? Well, we would investigate the causes of crime, the roots of crime. We’d then start dealing with those causes and roots of crime, and eventually there would be no crime. All it takes is knowing enough about the subject.

The period we’re talking about, the first few decades of the nineteenth 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 Saint-Simonians had a philosophy of history also, that dovetailed with their theory: 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, a sense of authority in society, social harmony, and the subjection of the individual to the community. In this way, the organic phase 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.

The Saint-Simonian Theory of History

In each of these previous organic periods, there was a prevailing philosophy, and, unfortunately, the prevailing philosophy was inadequate. For instance, in archaic Greece before about the fifth century BC, there was a belief in the particular gods and the rituals of the gods in the Homeric heroes. There was a general belief in the right 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. In this new period, someone like Socrates—a kind of a model philosopher—began questioning everything.

This is the beginning question of the republicans: 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 this view. You say this is justice. Why? In the Saint-Simonian 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—the ideas of the Greek gods and goddesses—were not really adequate. So, 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, and problems.

One might say—a Saint-Simonian might say—that a modern example is the problem of raising children. For example, who knows how to raise children today in our society? At one time, people had a very good idea how to raise children. In my neighborhood, “Angelo” would come over here and “break your legs,” if you keep doing that. Parents said, “wait until your father gets home,” and I thought it worked pretty well.

But nowadays, there are so many conflicting ways parents are taught to raise children. Young couples now, if they happen to have some anchor in their life, that’s all to the good. But, if they’re the typical product of so-called “liberal” education in America, there are real problems.

This, in other words, is a critical phase of the evolution of our society and people are not sure about things. So, the critical phase of ancient society was followed by an organic phase, according to the Saint-Simonians 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 Divine Comedy.4 In society—that is in the social structure of feudalism—you have one religion, and within that religion, the authority of the pope is 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. Among average people, there was the father in the family ruling over the mother, and then the parents ruling over the children, and human beings ruling over animals. That was the great chain of being going from the very top to the bottom.

According to the Saint-Simonians, who like everyone at the time had a very simplistic view of what the Middle Ages was like, the medieval hierarchy provided the organic phase that was necessary. However, as with the Greek gods, medieval Catholicism could not withstand criticism and critical reasoning. So, the Protestant Reformation came along. If this seems awfully quick to you, well, that’s because the Saint-Simonians are 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 critical period followed. 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 that was positive, from the Saint-Simonian point of view.

The French Revolution illustrated that in politics 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. This is because now we have an authority and an overriding philosophy—which is positivism— that could be permanent. This new positivism is the application of modern science to all social and human questions. So, the Saint-Simonian idea was that we’re going to be able to solve all of the problems created by critical phases, all of the anxieties and conflicts, and enter into an organic phase that will be permanent. Society will be ruled by the positivist thinkers and the positivist priests wielding the methods of positive science. 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.”5 True Christianity has nothing to do with particular doctrines or particular liturgy, or particular services in one religion or another. In the Saint-Simonian view, true Christianity is simply the message of Jesus: love thy neighbor as thyself. The positivists—the rulers of society—will be using the methods of natural science to further the aim of true Christianity: a total human brotherhood among people of a nation and eventually the whole world.

Now, Saint-Simon maybe is not himself, strictly speaking, a socialist, but his followers certainly were. They were the most consistent, and for a time, the best-known socialists in Europe. Saint-Simon himself died in 1825. Just a few years later, his followers, the Saint-Simonians, began holding, first of all, a series of famous lectures in Paris. Hundreds and hundreds of people came to the lectures, including hundreds and hundreds of members of the elite, including elite foreigners. For example, Heinrich Heine, the German poet, attended these lectures which were then published as The Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon which was largely the doctrine of Saint-Simon’s followers and not of Saint-Simon himself.6

Here they came up with most of the arguments against modern capitalism: modern capitalism is a new form of feudalism. It is now the rule of the factory owner over his wage slaves. Modern capitalism leads eventually to depressions and the business cycle, and 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, and experts get together and find out which is the best route between Paris and Lyon? The experts can build that instead of having trains going half-full from each of two competing companies. You would then have a prosperous railroad company that was built by experts. The Saint-Simonians came up with the idea that these experts in all fields would get together and concoct plans for all and for the whole economic life of society. In this way, the Saint-Simonians really were the originators of the idea of central economic planning.

For a while in the late 1820s and the 1830s, Saint-Simonianism 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. Karl Marx, a young lad in the Rhineland in his hometown, knew an older man there, a man named von Westphalen, a minor nobleman. Marx was already in his young teen years interested in new ideas and one of the main things that he discussed with this gentleman were the ideas of the Saint-Simonians. Westphalen afterwards became Marx’s father-in-law when Marx married his daughter. What I’m getting at here is that Karl Marx was interested in what’s fashionable in the way of ideas, and was becoming acquainted with Saint-Simonianism. So this sets the stage now, the 1830s and early 1840s, for the appearance of Marxism.

Marx and 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, is that Marx was a communist.7 What Rothbard means, among other things, 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, but not published, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, what is sometimes called the Paris Manuscripts. They were only discovered long afterward, around 1930, and then they were published, and for a while created a whole industry called Marxist humanism.8 That is, the Marx who wasn’t a determinist, but somehow more humanistic. Now, it’s easy to find these things in print and if you look at the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 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 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 this time in the mid-1840s that Marx became interested in economics for the first time while under the influence of another young German that he had met, Friedrich Engels.

Let me say something about the literature on this subject. I mentioned Alexander Gray, who also has some very good chapters on Marx and Marxism and the different Marxists. And I mentioned the last time the book by Martin Malia on the Soviet Union.9 This book that I’m talking about now has as much to do with Soviet Russia as with Marxism. Leszek Kołakowski 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 three-volume work called Main Currents of Marxism.10 He is a great scholar, familiar with all of the relevant languages. The first volume is on the origins of Marxism, and on Marx and Engels. The second volume is on thinkers of the Second International, like Lenin, for instance. The third volume is on twentieth-century Marxists. It is one of the great works of intellectual history of the twentieth century, in my opinion.

We saw something about the depths of stupidity of many Americans in regard to foreigners just a few weeks ago when they started mocking the French, and France, and French culture.11 There are Americans who mock the Polish people, the great Polish people. Kołakowski 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 retell Polish jokes and so on, that among the greatest logicians of the twentieth century were Poles, which is one reason why the Poles were able to crack German codes and bring their findings over to England, and were instrumental in permitting the British to follow German secret messages.12

Another key concept in Marx’s thinking is “alienation.” On this, Paul Craig Roberts does something very interesting in his book Alienation and the Soviet Economy.13 In the early, “humanist” Marx—in the Economic and Philosophic 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 how one phase of society necessarily follows another. Therefore, one might conclude this earlier humanist Marx who puts his emphasis on alienation, is not very important.

What Roberts 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, Roberts’s book is a very important work of Marxist scholarship, I think. It’s fairly brief, but with very important implications.14

What was Marx after? It would be a terrible mistake—and Lenin understood this, this is why he hated the revisionist socialists—to reduce Marxism to the idea that working people would be a lot better off under socialism, that socialism is more efficient, that it will bring prosperity to all, and that it will do away with class domination. Yes, Marx believed those things, but most of all, what he believed —and central to it all—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 that were the opposite of what people wanted. Nobody wants depressions, for instance, and yet the capitalist system is such that people act—within a limited sense—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. 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 their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.”15

Do 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 that human beings have to submit to—have to endure—events and sufferings that they never intended.

The point is made clearer by Engels. This is a longish quote, but 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, and with it the domination of the product over the producers. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround man, which ruled men up until now, now comes under the dominion and control of men, who become for the first time the real, conscious lords of nature, because and in that they become the 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, with full consciousness; only from then on will the social causes they set in motion have in the main and in constantly increasing proportion, also the results intended by them. It is the leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.16

“Production of commodities” is another name for the market economy, and, “the mastery of the product over the producer” is the idea of the so-called “invisible hand.” For Engels, however, there is no invisible hand, it’s total “anarchy of production,” a term coined by the Saint-Simonians and here repeated by Engels.

Engels also says “…make their history themselves in full consciousness.” That is, everything that happens in history will have been planned. Engels continues: “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, that’s been almost like the history of the apes, with 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 and their history.

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.

Bakunin and the Socialists

Marx died 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 this is maybe the dawn of the revolution. It wasn’t even a Marxist revolution, it was more of a Jacobin—and even Proudhonist revolt—in Paris. So, it never amounted to anything. So, the actual revolutionary activity Marx and Engels could engage in was limited. They did help form, with others, the First International, the Working Man’s International. But, that came to grief over the conflict between Marx and his side, and Mikhail Bakunin and the anarchists.

Bakunin was a loveable old psychotic—he was an anarchist and just traveled around in the mid-century. He died in the 1870s—trying to raise up revolution wherever he went. He would 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 too must be destroyed.”17 He said crazy things like that. On the other hand, he never actually killed anybody.

He was imprisoned by the tsar 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 across Siberia. Well, it just was less dangerous than coming across the police. He 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 is the government here?18

He made his way to Europe, constantly writing pamphlets. He translated The Communist Manifesto into Russian. So, he was an admirer of Marx, especially Marx, and of Engels for a while, but then became progressively disillusioned. Bakunin was the first critic of Marxism to bring out the question of the “new class.” That became a famous criticism 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.19 This is why anarchists insisted the state had to be abolished totally and immediately. They said the alternative was that a small group of communists is going to gain control of the state and what reason is there to suppose that they will ever give up their power? As Marx himself said, communists are the vanguard of the proletariat because they know more about the historical process than the proletariat does. Marx imagined this group would have to gain control of the state.

Bakunin noticed that in The Communist Manifesto agriculture is to be conducted by vast armies of agricultural laborers. Bakunin 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. What we have here is the Roman latifundium again. What we have here is a new system of slavery, under a new ruling class.

Well, Marx didn’t want to hear this. Correspondence between Marx and Engels—I haven’t actually checked it out except for certain theoretically important letters—is filled with ethnic and racial slurs, mainly against their socialist and anarchist opponents.20 But, Bakunin himself said that Marx’s position is very typically Jewish and German, Bakunin being Russian and not Jewish.21 This is somewhat amusing, but Bakunin’s analysis is part of an interesting episode in the nineteenth-century history of radicalism. Bakunin did start some centers of anarchism, mainly in Spain. Anarchists come around during the Spanish Civil War, and also in Italy, but it was Marxist socialism that prevailed. It was 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.22

Post-Marxist Socialism

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the great theoreticians of Marxism are mainly German socialists. After Engels dies, one of the German socialist leaders, Eduard Bernstein begins to publish works that are questioning and then critical, although he’d been very close to Engels. What Bernstein says is this: we’re at the end of the nineteenth 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 and 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 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.23 The working people are not getting poorer and poorer—far from it. Of course, there’s much poverty in pockets of a lot of deep poverty, but we have the most affluent working classes that 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. Anyway, you have the joint stock companies 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 Bernstein says we have to revise Marxism, so his writings are the origin of revisionist Marxism. He says there’s not going to be any “Der Tag”—no coming of “the day”—when capitalism falls to be replaced by socialism.24 According to Bernstein, we have to work for piecemeal reform through labor unions, and through government regulation.

If you think about it, Bernstein’s revisionism, which was condemned by the big socialist theoreticians, becomes essentially “socialism”—what is today socialism—as opposed to what became “communism.” Bernstein and the other leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, and 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, is outraged by this revisionism. He asks: 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 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. That is the socialist aim. So, Lenin opposed revision, insisting on a purer interpretation of Marxism.

Revisionism means different things. This has nothing to do with revisionism in the historical sense, in the sense of rewriting history. This is revisionism in the context of the history of socialist thought. Revisionism became one of the worst, if not the worst, curse words that socialists and communists could hurl against each other. During the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, for instance, when the Soviet leadership and Mao were at loggerheads, Mao accused Nikita Khrushchev and the other socialist Soviet leaders of being revisionists.

The Communist Dream of a Totally Planned Society

As we now approach the twentieth 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 and gaining votes and deputies in the Reichstag.

Socialist parties are forming everywhere. In Italy, the real radical firebrand and enemy of the revisionists is a young socialist named Benito Mussolini. In Russia there’s a relatively small socialist movement. After the 1905 Revolution, it becomes legal, except that these Marxist leaders insist on talking about overthrowing the tsar, killing the tsar, and so on, and that’s not legal. So, some of them have to leave the country as Lenin does.

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 and nothing has happened so far.” The Marxist party in Russia, as a matter of fact, had split into two sections—Lenin’s own, the Bolsheviks, and the other section, the Mensheviks—and were 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—a standing army of two million men and reserves of many, many millions after that? How were these few thousand Bolsheviks going to do that?

Well, history came to Lenin’s aid. 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 the tsar’s army was the German army. That’s what made it possible for the Bolsheviks to take over a shattered, collapsed Russia, and that’s what happens in that crucial year of 1917. Richard Pipes has shown decisively on the basis of not only the latest documentation, but also documents that were known before, that the so-called October Revolution—what the communists for decades called Great October or Red October—was simply a coup d’état by a few thousand Red Guards.25 This happened, first of all, in Petrograd and then in some other Russian towns. That was followed then by the civil war.

(Pipes also wrote a very good book on the role of property in history.26It’s a remarkable book, if for no other reason than with this book we have a Harvard professor, aside from Bob Nozick, who for the first time mentions Ayn Rand.)

Pipes—who is not to be confused with his evil and twisted son, Daniel Pipes—shows it was a coup d’état that enabled the Bolsheviks to come to power. The Bolsheviks win the Russian Civil War and they establish what they afterwards try to call “war communism.” Now, Paul Craig Roberts shows with complete conviction, as far as I’m concerned, that 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. It was what Lenin and all the other Bolsheviks understood as communism.27

What they tried to do as much as they could was to simply abolish the market. Authentic Marxists, they’d come to power for this reason: to abolish commodity production and that’s what they did. The result was a catastrophe, of course. There were other bad things going on, but abolishing the market was enough to bring the Soviet regime to the edge of the abyss. Lenin understood that. He was always a very good tactician.

This war communism meant abolishing all private economic transactions, which was 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 was bringing in, you could be shot on the spot by the new Soviet secret police if you were caught doing it. Lenin realized that this whole system of communism, as he said, was premature. 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.

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.28 It’s famous, 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 of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.”29 As I remarked to a friend of mine one time, “that’d be a really hard class to teach.” Those lines are quoted by Ludwig von 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.

Trotsky 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: 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.”30 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, Trotsky writes “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.”31 It’s a sort of urban renewal writ large, and we see that idea of the city villages, that became a standard with modern architects who essentially were communists. Trotsky continues: “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.”32

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.”33 It’s a good idea that the genome didn’t fall into the hands of these people.

For Trotsky, 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!”34

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. More from Trotsky: “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the height of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will 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.”35

That is the ultimate in total planning. The development, step-by-step, of everything that happens in society is consciously planned beforehand. I think Trotsky made this Marxist idea somewhat more explicit. The Marxist idea is not simply better housing and better healthcare and that kind of thing. It is total planning. It’s metaphysical. Malia understood that and Kołakowski understood that.

Well, Trotsky lost out in his battle with Stalin, the leadership after the death of Lenin. Stalin was not, by any means, as agile and intellectual a thinker as Trotsky was and he had his problems. But, before you can go on to this planning of the total psychobiological nature of man, you have to produce enough drawing paper and so on, the sort of things that the Soviet regime never succeeded in doing. So, Stalin was taken up by economic problems for a long time.

The Soviet Communist Threat in Europe

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, as were 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.” 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. It was 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 communist takeover in Russia, what Lenin does is offer an invitation to all of these different socialist groups to join his new Communist International and change their name to “Communist Party.” For instance, the CPF, the Communist Party of France, the CPUSA, the CPUK, the CPC, Communist Party of China, and so on. Then you obey the regulations and rules of the Comintern and they have conventions from time to time. The Comintern doesn’t make any secret about its program. The program is not anything that the FBI has to go and find out, because the Comintern’s goals could be found in the newspapers. It openly proclaims that the aim is the overthrow by elections—well, that’s not too likely, the bourgeoisie is going to react to that—or by force, whenever necessary, of every bourgeois government in the world. These bourgeois governments are to be replaced by Communist governments.

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—and Lenin thought 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, and 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 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 on the periphery there, but get hold of Europe and then European colonies, and then the world revolution would really be underway.

This Comintern was a mortal threat to everybody who was not a Communist in Europe, including socialists, including the German SPD, and the socialists of the German Social Democratic Party, who broke with Lenin.

It had some consequences that were extremely unfortunate. Nowadays, very often the history of fascism, let’s say Italian fascism or German Naziism—National Socialism, sometimes called a kind of fascism—these histories are written as if they occurred in a vacuum. In Germany, for instance, it is mentioned that there were elements that pointed in this authoritarian direction in previous German history. In Italy, 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 the Leninist party and openly threatened a Leninist revolution in Italy. The Italian fascists who supported Mussolini didn’t amount to anything until the public became very scared of this. The public feared the takeover of the factories by the Leninist unions and 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—this empowered the Italian fascists that begin to get their support from the middle class and from businesses.

Without any communist threat, Mussolini wouldn’t have amounted to anything. 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 if you were a German or an Italian or a Pole or a Spaniard at the time of the Civil War, and you had to live on the same continent with a power that told you that its aim was the forceable overthrow of your government in order to impose on your country the kind of system that they had in Russia.36

The Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 was part of this plan. When the war began between the New Republic of Poland and the Red Army—led and organized by Trotsky—Soviet forces invaded Poland. As we know now—this came out from archival documents, and Pipes has written about this—Lenin expected the Polish peasants and workers to greet the Red Army with open arms.37 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 happened was that the Polish people, under General Józef Piłsudski, met the Red Army at the Vistula and stopped them. Then some compromise was reached between Russia and Poland for a while, but the Poles from then on, as you can imagine, were terrified of the possibility of a Soviet takeover by their big neighbor. People knew what was happening in the Soviet Union such as mass famine in 1921 under that so-called war communism. People also feared mass terror such as the Red Terror of the Cheka and the Soviet government’s open, massive attempt to extinguish and annihilate Christianity. People knew what this communist regime entailed. 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 that I’m pretty sure I’m not going to forget. However, the crimes of Soviet communism are much more rarely mentioned and figure much more rarely in the minds of people. The average person doesn’t know the first thing about them. I don’t think that the average person has ever heard of Kolyma or Vorkuta, which were 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, or eight million lives.

Walter Duranty, the lying, deceptive, duplicitous rat who was a New York Times correspondent, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union, said that there was no famine going on. He privately said that probably about 10 million people had died, when he had to report to British intelligence.

Duranty 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 Michael Bellesiles, this lying historian from Emory who said nobody in early America had guns, and they hated guns. The idea is maybe somebody at the Columbia School of Journalism should think, posthumously, to take Duranty’s prize away from him.38

Now, why should this be? There’s a very good book written by Anne Applebaum called Gulag.39 The Gulag, as you probably know, is the name—it’s a Russian acronym—given for the system of forced labor camps.40 And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was temporarily an inmate, wrote three volumes called The Gulag Archipelago and the concept there is that these camps were spread like an archipelago of islands throughout the so-called Soviet Union.41 Actually, it’s not correct to concentrate on the Gulag. More victims of Soviet communism died outside of the Gulag than died there in the camps. For instance, in the Terror Famine or in the constant executions.

Anne Applebaum, is an excellent, brilliant journalist—and more than a journalist, a 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. Clinton 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 during Stalin’s time. Clinton asked the President of Belarus to be brought there to say something about it and the President of Belarus said no, we don’t want to wash our dirty linen in public.42 There’s no need to go back to all that old stuff. That’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—which one might argue they ought to be. But here, nobody wants to know about the places where millions suffered and died at the hands of communists. This is one reason this woman, Applebaum, feels the need to bring this out, to tell people about this.

In general, this is the attitude of the Russian people. Their idea is it makes Russians look bad to keep talking about all these crimes of Stalin because in point of fact, yes, many of the Russians were people who were accomplices to this, of course. This is true in East European countries as well. So, you have a completely different attitude about the Soviets than the Nazis. In regard to Hitler’s crimes, there’s a constant limelight shining on it. In regard to Soviet crimes, there’s been an attitude of “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, a substantial literature on the subject.43 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 part of the intellectuals.

• 1

  Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin (London: Ballantyne Press, 1946).

• 2

  F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1955).

• 3

  Sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, calls Comte the “high priest of positivism.” Comte also founded what he regarded as a “secular religion” known as the Religion of Humanity. 

• 4

  In the original lecture Raico refers here to “Dante’s Paradise Lost” but he almost certainly meant to say “Dante’s Divine Comedy.”

• 5

  Henri de Saint-Simon, The New Christianity, trans. J.E. Smith (London: B.D. Cousins, 1834). 

• 6

  Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Premiere Annee. 1829, ed. Célestin Bouglé and Elie Halévy  (Paris: M. Rivière, 1924) or The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition, First Year, 1828-1829, trans. Georg G. Iggers (New York: Schocken, 1972). 

• 7

  Murray N. Rothbard, Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2006) pp. 317-345. 

• 8

  Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988), pp. 13-170.

• 9

  Martin E. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994).

• 10

  Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005). Originally published in 1978. 

• 11

  This is a reference to the anti-French sentiment that surged in the United States around the time of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. 

• 12

  The Polish government had begun efforts to decipher German codes in the early 1930s. Notable among the code breakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski, and Marian Rejewski.

• 13

  Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy: Toward a General Theory of Marxian Alienation, Organizational Principles, and the Soviet Economy (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). 

• 14

  See the text of Raico’s 1964 lecture “Capitalism, Socialism, and Alienated Man” available online: https://mises.org/speech-presentation/capitalism-socialism-and-alienated-man.

• 15

  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, chap 48, part vii, retrieved online June 10, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm.

• 16

  Friedrich Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Berlin: Dietz, 1923), p. 51.

• 17

  Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner: 1848-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1937), p. 2:49. A month later, the site of the concert, the Dresden opera house, was destroyed by fire in an uprising encouraged by Bakunin. See Karol Berger, Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), p. 183.

• 18

  Following his visit, Bakunin heaped praise on the United States as offering “a freedom which does not exist anywhere else.”  Bakunin more than once said he considered emigrating to the US. See Paul Avrich, “Bakunin and the United States,” International Review of Social History 24, no. 3 (1979): 328-330. 

• 19

  Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957). 

• 20

  One often-quoted example of this is Marx’s July 30, 1862 letter to Engels in which Marx writes about German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle: “The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation.” Retrieved online, June 10, 2024, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.htm.

• 21

  Bakunin wrote of Marx that he lacked Proudhon’s concern for freedom because “As a German and a Jew [Marx] is authoritarian from head to toe.” See “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain,” June, 1872, retrieved online, June 10, 2024: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-to-the-brothers-of-the-alliance-in-spain.

• 22

  In recent decades, the Social Democratic Party of Germany was the dominant ruling coalition member from 1998 to 2005, and again from 2021 until the time of this writing. 

• 23

  Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, trans. Edith C. Harvey (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1909), pp. 203-213, 216-222, 224). 

• 24

  “Der Tag” was a toast, apparently used among military officers in the nineteenth century, to a future momentous victory over one’s enemies. 

• 25

  Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 

• 26

  Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 

• 27

  Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, p. 14.

• 28

  Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).  

• 29

  Ibid., p. 256.

• 30

  Ibid., p. 244.

• 31

  Ibid., p. 249.

• 32

  Ibid., p. 254. 

• 33

  Ibid., pp. 254-255.

• 34

  Ibid., p. 255.

• 35

  Ibid., p. 255-256. 

• 36

  Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 178-183. Pipes details Lenin’s plans to “Sovietize Poland,” and for “opening a general offensive against the West.”

• 37

  V.I. Levnin, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed., Richard Pipes, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 95-100.

• 38

  Raico is referring to the Michael Bellesiles controversy in which Bellesiles, in his 2000 book Arming America, was exposed for using fraudulent research in claiming that privately-held guns were rare in the early decades of the United States. Bellesiles’s Bancroft Prize was subsequently revoked. Raico jokes in an aside about Bellesiles’s claims: “Oy-vey, yikes, yikes! Guns, in colonial times. It’s the last thing on the mind of anybody in the American frontier to have a gun. Or you can just call 911 and the cops will show up if there’s a problem with the Indians.”

• 39

  Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

• 40

  The abbreviation GULAG comes from the Russian phrase for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps.” 

• 41

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007). The three volumes were originally published from 1958 to 1968.

• 42

  See Anne Applebaum, “A Dearth of Feeling,” originally published in 1996. Retrieved online, June 10, 2024, https://www.anneapplebaum.com/1996/10/11/a-dearth-of-feeling/. The location in question is the Kuropaty forest near Minsk. 

• 43

  See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).