From MIT professor Leo Marx, who was a student at Harvard University in the 1930s. In those years many students were drawn to the Left. As an undergraduate I was active in the Harvard branch of the left-wing American Student Union and the editor of its magazine, the Harvard Progressive. For a year or so […]
On 1930s American intellectuals — quotation Read More »
This unit of the self-paced course on Socialism focuses on a theorist, revolutionary, and a leading figure in the October Revolution and the foundation of the Soviet Union. See our Executive Summary of Vladimir Lenin’s “How to Organize Competition”: ‘to achieve competitive socialism, Lenin urges that all the “vermin” be eradicated in Russia. War must
Vladimir Lenin, “How to Organize Competition” [Atlas Intellectuals] Read More »
This week in the A.U. course on Socialism we cover Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx, who devised the ideology of communism, proclaims the inevitable self-destruction of capitalism due to its internal contradictions and urges communists to lead the world to a classless society. The full course: https://www.atlassociety.org/course/socialism. Other Waterfall
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* [Atlas University course] Read More »
Waterfall is a guided series of courses for everyone interested in issues upon which Objectivism has something distinctive and important to say. The second course: Socialism. Examine the aspirations, arguments, strategies, and disasters of socialist theory and practice—as well as explore the strongest criticisms of socialism. Authors include Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Robert
Professor Kors’s classic lecture: “Socialism’s Legacy” [Waterfall] Read More »
September 1, 1939 is the date the German Nazis invaded Poland, initiating World War Two. Less well remembered is the shortly thereafter Soviet Russian invasion of Poland. A month earlier, the Nazis and Soviets had agreed not to attack each other and to divide Poland (and other parts of eastern Europe) between them. The Soviets
Remembering the Nazi-Soviet invasions of Poland Read More »
My four-minute response to interviewer Ignasi Boltó’s question about why National Socialism and Communism are often evaluated so differently. My full interview with Ignasi Boltó of Instituto Juan de Mariana: “Stephen Hicks on Postmodernism, Western Values and Jordan Peterson.”
Nazism is Bad, but Communism is “Cool”? Read More »
I’m reading Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Duke University Press, 1994), based on the French journalist’s trips through Germany in the early 1930s. Guérin was then a young leftist whose thinking later evolved in a communist-anarchist direction. Germany both attracted and appalled him with its extremist politics. From
Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany Read More »
Some data for my class discussions of wealth and poverty: Source.
Famine by social system, 20th century chart Read More »