Both American Political Parties Have Adopted Lenin’s Strategy for the Destruction of Capitalism

April 20, 2023 By Alexander G. Markovsky  

On April 22, 1919, on his 50th birthday, Lenin gave an interview to London’s Daily Chronicle and made stunning revelations about the Bolshevik's struggle to destroy capitalism. The next day the interview was published in the New York Times as “Talk with Bolshevist Head.”    

“Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation, for however ruthlessly such measures may be applied, astute speculators and obstinate survivors of the capitalist classes will always manage to evade them and continue to corrupt the life of the community," he said.

To accomplish this, Lenin declared, “Debauch the currency to overturn the basis of society.” The destruction of currency was the main component of the Bolshevik strategy.

During the interview, Lenin further elaborated on the implementation of his strategy at length:............To Read More.

The Twitter Files: Lenin Would Be Proud

Brian Balfour January 8, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research

''The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution; 1917

 

 This Lenin quote leapt to mind amid the recent revelations coming from the “Twitter files” and exposed over the past several weeks. Among other disclosures, the files revealed direct lines of communication between government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Defense, and the social media company. 

Twitter was found to not only be a landing spot for many agents in the government intelligence community, but also doing the bidding of agencies to suppress information deemed to be antithetical to the agencies’ goals and preferred narratives. Indeed, journalist Matt Taibbi went so far as to describe Twitter as an “FBI subsidiary.” 

And it wasn’t just Twitter that the government targeted. Late last month Elon Musk tweeted “*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” illustrating his point by saying, “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Such revelations undercut many defenders of tech giants, who insist “they’re private companies, they can do what they want.” Instead, we must ask: are these truly ‘private companies’ in any meaningful sense?

Indeed, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman are all nominally “private companies.” But they are private in name only because they are in reality appendages of the state, relying on defense contracts (not market transactions) for their success. 

We should treat big tech companies with the same skepticism we apply to tools of the military industrial complex. Certainly so after the “Twitter file” revelations.

In his quote above, Lenin was, of course, bragging about the progress made toward complete nationalization of industry in the Soviet Union of the time.

But we can also consider his statement as descriptive. When your main mission is to do the bidding of the state, rather than serving consumers in the voluntary marketplace, you are not really a private company in the true sense of the term. Your company is not a market phenomenon.

It’s no longer possible to defend social media corporations on the basis of private property rights, because big tech are what Michael Rectenwald would describe as “governmentalities,” not private companies.

Michael Rectenwald, former professor of liberal studies at New York University and author of the book “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” provided context for how he believes tech goliaths like Google and Twitter come to do the state’s bidding in a November 2020 lecture.  

“In a series of lectures entitled Security, Territory, Population, the postmodern theorist Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘governmentality’ to refer to the distribution of state power to the population, or the transmission of governance to the governed,” Rectenwald noted. 

“Foucault referred to the means by which the populace comes to govern itself as it adopts and personalizes the imperatives of the state, or how the governed adopt the mentality desired by the government—govern-mentality,” he added.

Rectenwald, however, went even further than Foucault. “I adopt and amend the term to include the distribution of state power to extragovernmental agents—in particular to the extension and transfer of state power to supposedly private enterprises.”

What transpires, then, is a form of ‘governmentalization’ of nominally private enterprises, rather than the privatization of government functions that free market advocates prefer. 

How intertwined with the government are the tech giants? The relationship predates the more recent phenomena revealed by Elon Musk’s divulgences. 

“First, both Google and Facebook received start-up capital—both directly and indirectly—from US intelligence agencies,” Rectenwald informs us. In their early days, Google in particular was heavily reliant on CIA contracts and deals with other U.S. intelligence agencies. 

As Lenin boasted, “The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” And work for the government, including shutting down dissident voices, is what big tech has indeed been doing for years.

As a result, they can no longer be defended with cries of “but they’re private companies,” and instead be called out for what they really are: tools of state oppression.

READ MORE

Brian Balfour is Senior Vice President of Research for the John Locke Foundation, where he oversees the organization’s research and analysis on a variety of issues. He previously worked for the Civitas Institute for 13 years, and has a master’s degree in economics from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.  Get notified of new articles from Brian Balfour and AIER. SUBSCRIBE

 

Public schools are feeling the fallout from the COVID lockdowns

May 19, 2022 By Andrea Widburg

Vladimir Lenin allegedly said, "Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted."  America's leftists have taken those words to heart and, since the 1930s, have assiduously winnowed their way into America's education system.  The COVID lockdown, for all its destruction, may have ended up performing a huge service by exposing to parents just how bad the leftist toxin has grown in the last ten to fifteen years.  The sea change in parental attitudes toward education is shown in the fact that, across America, public school enrollment is collapsing.

In the years after WWII, leftists began to infiltrate the American education system.  They started with the colleges, but, for decades now, as generations of college graduates become teachers themselves, and write the textbooks, their ideas have been drifting steadily down to the lower grades.  We've gone from a public school system intended to create useful, patriotic American citizens to a public school system intended to create Democrat party die-hards who hate America, embrace Critical Race Theory, despise free speech, dream of overthrowing the Constitution, demand unlimited abortion, and believe that biological sex is an artificial construct.........Suddenly, parents saw what was really going on in their children's classroom...........Parents also learned that the teachers' unions, which always insisted they existed for the children's good, cared nothing about children........... parents had even more opportunities to see how awful many of those teachers are...........

Well, that second reason is one way of saying that parents also realized that Lenin's dream was coming true: their children weren't being educated; they were being indoctrinated...........it's the possible end of a public school system that has long been inefficient, ineffective, and morally and ideologically corrupt.............To Read More...... 

• Mom Sues School for Indoctrinating Biracial Son in CRT Says Son Sees Things that Don't Go His Way as Racism Including Chores
• Forcing 1 Million Escaped Students Back to the Public School Plantation, Those kids mean money in the bank for teachers’ unions and Democrats.
  
  

The Face of Evil

April 3, 2021 by John Hinderaker

Michel Foucault is the intellectual godfather of the modern Left. I have always found this fact strange, as his theories, to the extent they are intelligible, are obviously wrong. But they formed the basis for such leftist staples as identity politics and sexual confusion, and so, coherent or not, they were welcomed enthusiastically by liberals.

Foucault has long been known to have been, personally, a sinister figure. At the Epoch Times, Roger Simon writes about recent revelations of Foucault’s history. Roger starts with the scandal of Major League Baseball weighing in on behalf of voter fraud, one of endless instances of virtue signaling and moral narcissism. Then, on to Foucault:

[J]ust who is this godfather of “woke”?  Well, there’s a lot of convoluted graduate school rhetoric, but it turns out the reality of the man may not be very flattering. Rumors of a certain amount of perversion have surrounded Foucault for some time but now testimony has surfaced that is distinctly “unwoke.”

I am not sure I agree with Roger here. Are the “woke” actually opposed to perversion? I doubt it............ 

The interesting question, to me, is whether a man who is a moral monster can nevertheless produce sound philosophy. I think the answer is No. On the Left, it is fashionable to nit-pick great men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. But the men and women who founded what we now know as conservatism were good, if inevitably imperfect, people.

Conversely, the icons of the Left–Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Michel Foucault and many more–were hideously deformed and evil. I think a flawed man or woman–which is to say, a normal person–can produce sound political and social philosophy. But I think it is impossible for a moral leper like Michel Foucault to produce anything good or useful. Which helps to explain, perhaps, why today’s Left is irredeemably corrupt............To Read More.... 

• Karl Marx: Worst Person in World History? On March 14, 1883 Karl Marx made his most important contribution to mankind.....He died. Disregarding his personal life, which was swinish at best, in the last 138 years since his death he influenced some of the bloodiest, mass murdering, genocidal dictators in history.
  

Ernst Röhm, Maximilian Robespierre, and Democrat Party Stormtroopers

The Brownshirts are coming under Dem rule.

Sep 10, 2020 Gary Gindler 171

In 1933, Hermann Goering was appointed Minister of the Interior (i.e., Police Commissioner) of Prussia.  One of Goering’s first innovations was a radical change in the priorities of police, including specific restrictions of police activities.  The novelty of Goering’s approach was that he departed from the socialist tradition of demanding the abolition of the police, which was first proposed by Vladimir Lenin a quarter of a century before the described events in his article “April Theses” of 1917.

Another radical proposal of Russian socialists – the closure of prisons and the release of all prisoners – has been partially implemented by some American Democrat Governors a hundred years later.  In the spring of 2020, a massive number of criminals were released from local (non-Federal) prisons – allegedly due to the coronavirus – who then went on to make a significant contribution to pogroms, looting, and riots.........To Read More....