just because I've been talking about it a bunch in the history

videos, and I haven't given you a good definition of what

it means, or a good understanding of what it means.

And to understand communism-- let

me just draw a spectrum here.

So I'm going to start with capitalism.

And this is really just going to be an overview.

People can do a whole PhD thesis on this type of thing.

Capitalism, and then I'll get a little bit more--

and then we could progress to socialism.

And then we can go to communism.

And the modern versions of communism

are really kind of the brainchild

of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher

in the 1800s, who, in his Communist Manifesto and other

writings, kind of created the philosophical underpinnings

for communism.

And Vladimir Lenin, who led the Bolshevik Revolution

in the-- and created, essentially, the Soviet Union--

he's the first person to make some of Karl Marx's ideas

more concrete.

And really every nation or every country

which we view as communist has really

followed the pattern of Vladimir Lenin.

And we'll talk about that in a second.

But first, let's talk about the philosophical differences

between these things, and how you would move.

And Karl Marx himself viewed communism

as kind of a progression from capitalism

through socialism to communism.

So what he saw in capitalism-- and at least this part

of what he saw was right-- is that you

have private property, private ownership of land.

That's the main aspect of capitalism.

And this is the world that most of us live in today.

The problem that he saw with capitalism

is he thought, well, look, when you

have private property, the people who start accumulating

some capital-- and when we talk about capital,

we could be talking about land, we

could be talking about factories,

we could be talking about any type of natural resources--

so the people who start getting a little bit of them--

so let me draw a little diagram here.

So let's say someone has a little bit of capital.

And that capital could be a factory, or it could be land.

So let me write it.

Capital.

And let's just say it's land.

So let's say someone starts to own a little bit of land.

And he owns more than everyone else.

So then you just have a bunch of other people

who don't own land.

But they need, essentially-- and since this guy

owns all the land, they've got to work on this guy's land.

They have to work on this guy's land.

And from Karl Marx's point of view, he said, look,

you have all of these laborers who don't have as much capital.

This guy has this capital.

And so he can make these laborers work

for a very small wage.

And so any excess profits that come out

from this arrangement, the owner of the capital

will be able to get it.

Because these laborers won't be able to get

their wages to go up.

Because there's so much competition for them

to work on this guy's farm or to work on this guy's land.

He really didn't think too much about, well,

maybe the competition could go the other way.

Maybe you could have a reality eventually where

you have a bunch of people with reasonable amounts of capital,

and you have a bunch of laborers.

And the bunch of people would compete for the laborers,

and maybe the laborers could make their wages go up,

and they could eventually accumulate their own capital.

They could eventually start their own small businesses.

So he really didn't think about this reality

too much over here.

He just saw this reality.

And to his defense-- and I don't want

to get in the habit of defending Karl Marx too

much-- to his defense, this is what

was happening in the late 1800s, especially--

we have the Industrial Revolution.

Even in the United States, you did

have kind of-- Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age.

You have these industrialists who

did accumulate huge amounts of capital.

They really did have a lot of the leverage

relative to the laborers.

And so what Karl Marx says, well, look,

if the guy with all the capital has all the leverage,

and this whole arrangement makes some profits,

he's going to be able to keep the profits.

Because he can keep all of these dudes' wages low.

And so what's going to happen is that the guy with the capital

is just going to end up with more capital.

And he's going to have even more leverage.

And he'll be able to keep these people on kind of a basic wage,

so that they can never acquire capital for themselves.

So in Karl Marx's point of view, the natural progression

would be for these people to start organizing.

So these people maybe start organizing into unions.

So they could collectively tell the person who

owns the land or the factory, no, we're not going to work,

or we're going to go on strike unless you increase our wages,

or unless you give us better working conditions.

So when you start talking about this unionization stuff,

you're starting to move in the direction of socialism.

The other element of moving in the direction of socialism

is that Karl Marx didn't like this kind

of high concentration-- or this is socialists in general,

I should say-- didn't like this high concentration of wealth.

That you have this reality of not only

do you have these people who could accumulate all

of this wealth-- and maybe, to some degree,

they were able to accumulate it because they were innovative,

or they were good managers of land,

or whatever, although the Marxists don't

give a lot of credit to the owners of capital.

They don't really give a lot of credit

to saying maybe they did have some skill in managing

some type of an operation.

But the other problem is is that it gets handed over.

It gets handed over to their offspring.

So private property, you have this situation where it just

goes from maybe father to son, or from parent to a child.

And so it's not even based on any type of meritocracy.

It's really just based on this inherited wealth.

And this is a problem that definitely happened in Europe.

When you go back to the French Revolution,

you have generation after generation of nobility,

regardless of how incompetent each generation would

be, they just had so much wealth that they were essentially

in control of everything.

And you had a bunch of people with no wealth

having to work for them.

And when you have that type of wealth disparity,

it does lead to revolutions.

So another principle of moving in the socialist direction

is kind of a redistribution of wealth.

So let me write it over here.

So redistribution.

So in socialism, you can still have private property.

But the government takes a bigger role.

So you have-- let me write this.

Larger government.

And one of the roles of the government

is to redistribute wealth.

And the government also starts having

control of the major factors of production.

So maybe the utilities, maybe some

of the large factories that do major things, all of a sudden

starts to become in the hands of the government,

or in the words of communists, in the hands of the people.

And the redistribution is going on,

so in theory, you don't have huge amounts of wealth

in the hands of a few people.

And then you keep-- if you take these ideas

to their natural conclusion, you get

to the theoretical communist state.

And the theoretical communist state

is a classless, and maybe even a little bit--

a classless society, and in Karl Marx's point of view-- and this

is a little harder to imagine-- a stateless society.

So in capitalism, you definitely had classes.

You had the class that owns the capital,

and then you had the labor class,

and you have all of these divisions,

and they're different from each other.

He didn't really imagine a world that maybe a laborer could

get out of this, they could get their own capital,

then maybe they could start their own business.

So he just saw this tension would eventually to socialism,

and eventually a classless society where

you have a central-- Well, he didn't even

go too much into the details but you have kind of equal,

everyone in society has ownership over everything,

and society somehow figures out where

things should be allocated, and all of the rest.

And it's all stateless.

And that's even harder to think about in a concrete fashion.

So that's Karl Marx's view of things.

But it never really became concrete

until Vladimir Lenin shows up.

And so the current version of communism

that we-- The current thing that most of us view as communism

is sometimes viewed as a Marxist-Leninist state.

These are sometimes used interchangeably.

Marxism is kind of the pure, utopian, we're eventually

going to get to a world where everyone is equal,

everyone is doing exactly what they want,

there's an abundance of everything.

I guess to some degree, it's kind

of describing what happens in Star Trek, where everyone can

go to a replicator and get what they want.

And if you want to paint part of the day,

you can paint part of the day, and you're not just a painter,

you can also do whatever you want.

So it's this very utopian thing.

Let me write that down.

So pure Marxism is kind of a utopian society.

And just in case you don't know what utopian means,

it's kind of a perfect society, where you don't have classes,

everyone is equal, everyone is leading these kind

of rich, diverse, fulfilling lives.

And it's also, utopian is also kind of viewed as unrealistic.

It's kind of, if you view it in the more negative light, is

like, hey, I don't know how we'll ever

be able to get there.

Who knows?

I don't want to be negative about it.

Maybe we will one day get to a utopian society.

But Leninist is kind of the more practical element of communism.

Because obviously, after the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917,

in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union gets created,

they have to actually run a government.

They have to actually run a state based

on these ideas of communism.

And in a Leninist philosophy-- and this

is where it starts to become in tension with the ideas

of democracy-- in a Leninist philosophy,

you need this kind of a party system.

So you need this-- and he calls this the Vanguard Party.

So the vanguard is kind of the thing that's leading,

the one that's leading the march.

So this Vanguard Party that kind of

creates this constant state of revolution,

and its whole job is to guide society, is to kind of almost

be the parent of society, and take it from capitalism

through socialism to this ideal state of communism.

And it's one of those things where

the ideal state of communism was never--

it's kind of hard to know when you get there.

And so what happens in a Leninist state is

it's this Vanguard Party, which is usually called the Communist