Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier or Trèves in the Rhine Province of Prussia. His father was a Jewish lawyer. The family converted to Christianity in 1824 when Karl was six years old. He entered the University of Bonn to study law when he was seventeen and later transferred to the University of Berlin. There he ultimately took his PhD. in Philosophy in 1842 after studying a wide variety of disciplines. Georg W. F. Hegel, a philosopher, was an enduring influence on Marx during his years in Berlin.

After an unsuccessful attempt to secure a teaching position, he made his living as a journalist. His outspoken opinions nearly resulted in arrest so he went to Paris. There he met Friedrich Engels who became his intellectual partner and lifelong friend. As an economist, Marx became the foremost exponent of "scientific socialism" with his working-class theories.

In a nutshell, this is what he postulated:

Historically, slaves performed the primary means of production as in Greece and Rome. During the medieval times, society changed and feudalism emerged as the political, economic and social system. Landowners protected and allowed the vassals (with variations of the names, serfs and peasants) to use the land provided tribute, military service and utter loyalty to the lord were rendered in return.

The medieval guilds produced a majority of the craftsmanship and labor. These guilds became the precursors of Labor Unions. With the exploration and discovery of new lands and trade routes, feudalism faded and capitalism came into view. Machinery and factories completed the cycle with the Industrial Revolution.

The French Revolution combined with the Industrial Revolution to form a synthesis against a social structure that had been unchanged since time immemorial. For the first time, social doctrine was based on and supported by economic rather than moral factors. This is an extremely important distinction! Wars had traditionally been fought for territories and trade routes. The new wars would be fought over ideology.

Marx saw society, especially capitalism, comprised of two warring classes:

1. The bourgeoisie, the property-owners, were a small percentage class of the population. Ownership of private property had been and continued to be obtained through birth or the production of others.

2. The proletariat was by far the vast majority class of workers who had to sell its labor to the bourgeoisie at a subsistence level in order to survive.

Marx was convinced that reconciliation between the interests of these two classes was impossible. The proletariat could never hope for any help from the bourgeoisie. ARMED REVOLUTION was the only means of liberating the proletariat in its struggle against capitalism. This was the core of Marx' theory of "scientific socialism".

Socialism was already in existence to a certain extent as a result of the reforms that had taken place all over Europe when the absolute power of monarchies had been weakened by the rise of various elected constitutional means. The idea of communism had been around for a long time. Remember Mazdak of the Persian Empire and Moslem Ismailite Seveners that evolved into the Carmathinians?

Obviously, Marx did not think much of capitalism. He thought that capitalism would become extinct because of the very methods it employed to preserve its class. These means gave the proletariat the motives for revolution as long as the rich became richer and fewer and the poor, poorer but greater in number.

He believed that Democratic constitutions would be of no value as the class distinction heightened. He foresaw that once capitalism had been obliterated, the proletariat would take complete control and socialism would prevail for an intermediate time as a proletariat dictatorship.

Socialism would be succeeded by communism when the entire population evolved from working class to a classless society. This concept would work only if communism were achieved WORLD WIDE! Then in the final stage of development for civilization, society would live happily ever after in Utopia.

In 1845 Marx was exiled from France and went to Belgium for three years. He founded the first Communist Political Party in 1846. His party differed from the Socialist Party already in place. He and his family spent the rest of their lives in poverty in London supported mainly by contributions from Engels. His most famous works were "The Communist Manifesto" and "Das Kapital". He died in London in 1883.

Marx considered religion to be the opiate of the people. He would have been surprised that communism took hold first in Russia and then China rather than England and the United States. At that time the West was far more industrialized than Russia and China.

It is easy to see how communism, on paper and rhetoric at least, would appeal to the working people. But it is all in the methodology. What Marx and others seemed to have over-looked were a few other intrinsic human attributes; personal initiative and aptitudes coupled with healthy competition and incentive.

Kerensky and Lenin had very similar backgrounds, even having been born in the same isolated town overlooking the middle part of the Volga River in Russia. Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk ) in 1881. The town had a social hierarchy that had gone on for generations. "Each sleepy provincial town was much like the next: at the top a crust of the local nobility and gentry, then the bureaucrats and professional classes - judges, lawyers, doctors and teachers - and below them, priests and clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, workmen and servants."₁₆

Kerensky's father was a teacher who at one time had aspired to be a priest. He became the director of the local high school. His mother's grandfather had been a serf and her father rose to be an officer in the military. His uncle was the parish priest of Simbursk. The family was imbued with an abiding devotion to the czar, love of Russia and her traditions. When Kerensky was eight, the family moved to Tashkent because his father was promoted to Director of Education for the Province of Turkestan.

While attending the University of St. Petersburg, Kerensky became interested in politics. He was not attracted to Marxism because he felt that was a foreign concept. Thoroughly Russian, he gravitated toward the homegrown variety of socialism. He became a lawyer, defending those accused of political infractions.

He was renowned as a brilliant orator and was elected to the Fourth Duma, the legislative body instituted by Czar Nicholas II. Kerensky was responsible for major reforms such as freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion, universal suffrage and equal rights for women. He favored Russia's entry into World War I and he supported the end of the monarchy during the March Revolution of 1917.

With the support of the Mensheviks, Kerensky was elected Minister of Justice in the new Provisional Government in a coalition with many monarchists. He was unable to consolidate the various factions within, however. In the November Revolution when the Bolsheviks assumed power, he was forced to flee. He never revealed how he made his way to Europe. In 1940 he moved to the United States and lived in New York and Palo Alto, California. He continued to write and lecture on his experiences until his death in 1970.

There were two major components of the organized Russian Marxist movement, the Bolsheviks, majority, and the Mensheviks, the minority. The R.S.D.L.P. (the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) was formally organized in 1903 in Brussels, Belgium and London. It soon split into two factions. The Mensheviks advocated a principle of evolutionary change by means of a parliamentary constitution to replace the autocracy of the czar.

The other faction, the Bolsheviks, adhered to the strict Marxist view of total war against the bourgeoisie and dictatorship of the proletariat. These viewpoints emerged as two irreconcilable political ideologies. The Bolsheviks ultimately became the Communist Party in Russia. After the revolutionaries gained a foothold in St. Petersburg, the radical Bolsheviks grew in strength in the industrial centers of Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinburg.

The Narodniki were also a group whose interests lay with the peasants in revolution. This group believed that Russia would remain primarily agricultural. The Bolsheviks were convinced that Russia would follow Europe and the United States into rapid industrialization.

The organizational structure of the party was that of Soviets, that is, councils of deputies, representing grass root levels of associations either of factory workers, farmers or soldiers. After the Bolsheviks seized power, some of the Mensheviks and Narodniki joined the Bolsheviks. Others were active in counterrevolutionary movements.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov a.k.a. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin a.k.a. N. Lenin a.k.a. Vladimir Ilyin a.k.a. Karpov also born in Simbursk, (Ulyanovsk) was eleven years older than Kerensky. The son of a freed serf, Lenin's father graduated from the University of Kazan and became a mathematics teacher, then Director of schools for the Province of Simbirsk and finally Actual Councilor of State, a rank of hereditary nobility.

Lenin's mother was the daughter of a prominent Volga German doctor who had a large estate. Lenin was third of six children. He was a gifted, excellent student. As a teenager he proclaimed himself an atheist.

When he was sixteen, Lenin's father had a stroke and died in his son's presence. Sixteen months later his older brother, Alexander was arrested and hanged with four other students at the University of St. Petersburg for an attempted assassination of Czar Alexander III.

Lenin did not get along well with his brother so it is not known how or if the deaths of his father and his brother affected him at the time or in later life. All five of the surviving Ulyanovs (Lenin's siblings) became revolutionaries.

Lenin graduated at the head of his class and the head master, Kerensky's father, wrote a glowing recommendation of the student. The elder Kerensky had been a friend of Lenin's father and for a time looked after the young man's affairs.

Lenin went off to the University of Kazan but within three months involved himself in a student political demonstration and was expelled. His family had moved to Samara to live with his mother's parents. He set about to educate himself in law and foreign languages, completing four years of study in one. He eventually became fluent in English, French, and German and was able to read Italian, Polish and Swedish. He especially wanted to learn German so he could read Marx and Engels in the original language.

He successfully passed his law examination in St. Petersburg in 1891 and returned to Samara to unsuccessfully practice law. Two years later he returned to St. Petersburg to launch his career as a professional revolutionary. He attended study group meetings where he met another committed Marxist, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. All her life, she insisted on being called Krupskaya.

Lenin went to the major cities of Europe, meeting with prominent revolutionaries and gathering propaganda leaflets that were illegal in Russia. Back in Russia he began writing and printing anti-government manifestos and organizing strikes. He was arrested and spent a year in jail in St. Petersburg where he continued his study and writing. He was then sent into exile in the Siberian village of Shenskoye, Yenisei Province near the Mongolian border. It was there that he met fellow revolutionaries including Leon Trotsky. Lenin often said that his three-year exile was the happiest time of his life.

Exile during the reign of Nicholas II was not as harsh as later Communist Gulags were, especially if the banished had some money. Lenin's mother provided him with funds most of his life from her widow's pension and her family's holdings. Lenin was probably the richest man in the village. He lived in a house, sent and received volumes of correspondence from his family, friends and revolutionary companions all over Europe. He continued his study and copious writing of Marxist propaganda. ("Propaganda" is now referred to as "spin".) It was while he was in exile that he first used the pseudonyms, N. Lenin and Vladimir Ilyin.

Krupskaya was also soon arrested and sent into exile. She arrived in Shenskoye with her mother. She had told the authorities that she was Lenin's "fiancee" in order to be sent to the same village. After a time she and Lenin were married. Lenin disliked his mother-in-law intensely. When Lenin was released in 1900, Krupskaya had not yet served out her term of exile so he left her and her mother in Siberia.

Lenin obtained a Russian passport and went to Munich, tore up his old one and got a new Bulgarian passport under an assumed name. In Munich he started an underground newspaper called Iskra, "The Spark". (The Spark that would ignite the flame of revolution.)

Krupskaya was released and joined him in Munich. Again, she brought her mother with her. Krupskaya worked with him thereafter as his secretary. They moved to London, then Geneva, always organizing and skipping out one jump ahead of arrest. In 1903 he was in Brussels for the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. The police chased them out so they reconvened in London.

It was then in London that the party split into the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Lenin lost control of Iskra to the Mensheviks. Under an assumed name, disguised in a blond wig and clean-shaven, he slipped back into St. Petersburg when the Russian Manifesto granted political freedom in 1905. He gained personal notoriety throughout Europe as he continued to preach violence as the primary means of political reform. He went to Sweden, then back to St. Petersburg where he gave a speech under the name of Karpov.

Again leaving St. Petersburg, he lived for a time in Finland then began relentless travel to London, Stuttgart, Geneva, Paris and Copenhagen, ever fomenting and promoting the strict Marxist dogma. In 1912 while he was living in Prague he launched his newspaper, Pravda, for underground distribution in St. Petersburg. He was the militant architect of the Third International, (Comitern), the world organization of communists to follow the earlier ones of the 1860's and 1880's. The Comitern was held in 1919 in Moscow and was followed up by the Second Congress in 1920.

In 1914 he was arrested as a Russian spy by the Austrians and deported to Switzerland. While they were in Switzerland Krupskaya's mother was very ill. Krupskaya had been tending the stricken woman around the clock. "Desperate for sleep, the younger woman asked Lenin, who was writing at a table, to awaken her if her mother needed her. Lenin agreed and Krupskaya collapsed into bed. The next morning she awoke to find her mother dead and Lenin still at work. Distraught, she confronted Lenin, who replied, 'You told me to wake you if your mother needed you. She died. She didn't need you.'"₁₇

A cold man.

When the Russian Revolution of March 1917 occurred Lenin was determined to get back into his homeland. Once back in St. Petersburg he hammered away at the Provincial Government and against the war, (World War I). Kerensky put down the Bolshevik uprising and Lenin escaped again to Finland, this time disguised as a locomotive fireman.

Before long the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Provincial Government so it was time for Lenin to go back and seize power. In the November Revolution of the same year, Lenin formed the first Russian Bolshevik Government and became the first Chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars. He named Trotsky as his Commissar of Foreign Affairs.

As the Germans advanced toward St. Petersburg, Lenin moved the capital to Moscow and took up his residence in the Kremlin Palace. He negotiated the peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, March 3, 1918. Trotsky then became head of the Department of the Army and Navy.

Lenin's tenure as head of state was short lived. In August of that same year, 1918, a terrorist of the Socialist Revolutionary Party attempted to assassinate him. Lenin recovered. In May of 1922 he suffered his first stroke but slowly recovered. In December he had his second stroke that paralyzed his right side and removed him from power. He lost speech in his third stroke in March 1923 and then had a fatal stroke in January of 1924. He was embalmed and placed on permanent public display in a mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow.

There has always been speculation that Stalin poisoned Lenin. Josef Stalin succeeded Lenin and expelled Trotsky from the Bolsheviks on grounds of "obstructionism", whatever that may have meant.

Exiled once again, Trotsky found his way to Turkey, France, Norway, and ultimately to Mexico. There he met his fate, undoubtedly on orders from Stalin. Trotsky was killed by a pickax to his skull. Stalin went on to a thirty-nine year reign of terror that rivaled Czar Ivan IV the Terrible some four hundred years before.

Hitler and his ilk were the reactionary result against the excesses of communism. Whichever, totalitarian regimes that have complete control, and by cruel repressive means allow no other political voices to be heard, are beyond contempt.

Here we are now with all the epithets of the political spectrum. Right-wing, left-wing, arch-conservative, flaming liberal, communist, reactionary, ad nauseam. I wonder when I hear those names hurled at opponents, if the adversaries have any idea of what they are talking about. Or is it merely a greedy attempt to get a bigger chunk of mammoth meat and a nicer cave than the other guy. There is not an over abundance of altruism in politics despite professions of "Public Service".

What is Social Security but socialism?

When we were in China, it had been discovered (?) that a family could (1.) pay rent and diligently save its money for thirty years to buy a house. Or another family also had the option to (2.) borrow the money from a mortgage bank, pay interest and live comfortably in the house for thirty years until it was paid off. In the end both families wound up in homes of their own.  Furthermore, it is quite possible to finance a car!  Rank capitalism!!!

China has such an ancient past that this communist thing is only a tiny blip on its continuing history.  Creeping capitalism is rampant in China now. Creeping socialism reigns in the United States. Perhaps there is some merit to both ideologies.

We all know that the Greeks practically invented democracy, although it was a process that had been evolving almost since recorded history.  The concept was of a government of people rather than a king, oligarchy or dictator.  It was not all smooth sailing for the early Greeks!  For the most part, their brand of democracy was engaged in frankly an aristocratic manner.  The Greeks had more slaves than freemen, and of course, women had no part in the proceedings.  In some cities, leaders of the government were chosen by popular acclaim, that is, whoever received the loudest cheers at the time of  "election"! 

Like most empires, at one time Greece was spread out all over the Mediterranean as well as its myriad islands.  Sparta was the capital of the city state in the region of Laconia on the large Peloponnesian Island.

"In Laconia, as elsewhere, the simple paid tribute to the clever; this is a custom with a venerable past and a promising future.  In most civilizations this distribution of the goods of life is brought about by the normally peaceful operation of the price system: the clever persuade us to pay more for the less readily duplicable luxuries and services that they offer us than the simple can manage to secure for the more easily replaceable necessaries that they produce.  But in Laconia the concentration of wealth was effected by irritatingly visible means, and left among the Helots [defeated indigenous people turned slaves] a volcanic discontent that in almost every year of Spartan history threatened to upset the state with revolution."₁₈

Across the Aegean Sea in what is now Turkey, this is what happened in the prosperous Greek city state of Miletus during the sixth century BC.

"Competition for the goods of the earth became keener as the old faith lost its power to mitigate class strife by giving scruples to the strong and consolations to the weak.  The rich, supporting an oligarchic dictatorship, became a united party against the poor, who wanted democracy.  The poor secured control of the government, expelled the rich, collected the remaining children of the rich on threshing floors, set oxen upon them, and had them trampled to death.  The rich returned, recaptured power, coated the leaders of the democracy with pitch, and then burnt them alive.  de nobis fabula narrabitur, [about us the story will be told.]...........Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death."₁₉

And so, treachery is not the special province of any political philosophy.  The wrangling that goes on in congress, the media and the street corner is now pretty tame when compared to the annals of history.