Route of Lenin’s famous train journey

Episode 1: The Locomotive of History*

The Rise of Communism from Marx to Lenin

Dr Vejas Gabriel Liulevius (2019)

Film Review

I have been keen to know more about the early history of communism ever since learning about the role of London, Wall Street and German bankers in funding the Bolshevik Revolution (see Who Financed the Bolshevik Revolution?). I have been even more intrigued to learn of links between British intelligence and Marx and his mentor Friedrich Engels during their long sojourn in Britain during the second half of the 19th century.**

Liulevius begins this lecture by describing the secret train hired, allegedly by German intelligence, to transport Lenin and 30 other revolutionary exiles from Switzerland (where Lenin had lived in exile for ten years), via Germany, to Petrograd. As Liulevius describes, they were housed in a secret compartment, all station platforms were cleared and guards were forbidden entry to the train to check passports. On arriving in Russia, it took Lenin less than a year to install the small Bolshevik faction in power.

Liulevius defines communism, a term that first came into use in the 1840s, as the abolition of private property and the capitalist controlled market in favor of collective control, by the people, of the means of production. Theoretically communism is characterized by total equality.

By this definition, St Paul preached communism when he preached that money was the “root of all evil.” Marx rejected this comparison of communism to Christianity, asserting that Christianity was preaching poverty.

At the time Marx was writing, he used the terms communism and socialism*** interchangeably, though according to Liulevius, the meanings of both terms have changed.

Anarchists, in contrast to communists and socialists, denounce state structures of any variety as corrupting and constraining.

Liulevius notes that modern day communism has deviated significantly from the original theories Marx laid out:

1. Role of individual in history – Marx asserts the masses were responsible for making history, yet in reality communism was cursed by a plague of charismatic leaders.
2. In most cases, new elites, rather than Marx’s proletariat, have run modern communistic societies.
3. Communism was supposed to start in Germany, Europe’s major industrial power. According to Marx and Engels, communism wasn’t possible in an agrarian economy like Russia because (according to Marx and Engels) peasants were too backwards.
4. Despite Marx’s rejection of faith in favor of scientific rationalism, real life communism has become a form of political faith and people are routinely purged from speaking out against either the communist elite or the dogma they promulgate.

*”War is the Locomotive of History” – Karl Marx

**How the Liberals Tried to Make Engels’ Monkey into a Man

***During Marx’s time, socialism was defined as public, rather than proviate ownership or control of property and the vision of the replacement of private property, the free market and individual choices with a cooperative society.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/11239598/11239600