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By Leo Timm, Epoch Times

All throughout 1917, the toils of war and cascading revolutionary activity overturned the Russian Czarist government and established the left-leaning but democratically principled Provisional Government. The new authorities made preparations to hold elections. For the many political philosophies and groups then existing in Russian intelligentsia, it was an exciting prospect.

In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II was deposed and forced to abdicate following major bloodshed in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. But the vast nation, containing many different cultures and races across about 20 percent of the worlds land area, had never been a democracy and was unprepared to implement a universal, secret electoral system.

By May, the Provisional Government had not been able to carry out an election, and dissent was mounting from all sides. The date was delayed multiple times and public opinion sank further.

After several violent anti-government actions throughout the summer, the radical Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin armed itself and mobilized. In their infamous October Revolution, 100 communist militiamen took the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing two people, and seized the Russian capital.

As a communist, Lenin despised democracy, calling it a capitalist tool of oppression. Yet to mollify the still-powerful opposition, the Bolsheviks agreed to go forward with elections.

The Bolsheviks would convene the Assembly, but were ultimately unwilling to accept its results. As claimed in one initial report, the proposed Russian parliament must right the historical wrongs and protect the working class from exploitation.

In a speech at the time, Lenins right-hand man Leon Trotsky proclaimed: Long live an immediate, honest, democratic peace. All power to the Soviets. All land to the people. Long live the Constituent Assembly.

There are conflicting reports on whether Lenin believed he would win the elections, or if he and his Bolsheviks were merely feigning support. In any case, their language provided an excuse for the Bolsheviks to later dissolve the Constituent Assembly.

Bolsheviks held power through underground Soviets, or councils of urban workers and soldiers. Lenins dictatorship of the proletariat was incompatible with the proposed democracy.

Lenin (center, with dark fur hat and coat) and other communist leaders with Red Army soldiers who participated in crushing the anti-Bolshevik Kronshtadt uprising. (Leon Leonidov)

In November, elections for the Constituent Assembly were held and confirmed the Bolsheviks fears that theythe self-appointed leader of the Russian Revolutionwould not win a popular vote. Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the total vote of 40 million Russians, losing badly to the Socialist Revolutionaries who had broad support from the peasant masses.

As described by Tony Cliff, a British communist writer, Lenin derided the election results, saying that obsolete laws had given the Socialist Revolutionaries (labelled as right-wing by the Bolsheviks) undue weight.

In the article The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin expressed his anger with the peasant population: The country cannot be equal to the town under the historical conditions of this epoch. The town inevitably leads the country. The country inevitably follows the town.

When democracy worked against the Bolsheviks, Lenin turned to violence. According to Cliff, revolution and the struggle between capitalist and proletarian forces boiled down to counting the machine guns, the bayonets, the grenades at their disposal.

The Bolsheviks were rejected by the rural peasants, but they gathered a large following among urban workers and soldiers who had deserted from the ongoing fight against Germany in World War I. Lenin and his political party had the military force to take power.

The Russian Civil War is readily understood as a fight between socialist Red and conservative White Russian forces, but this mischaracterizes the nature of the conflict and its participants. Tens of millions of Russian peasants, opposed to Lenins dictatorship, were the most numerous among victims in a war that by some estimates killed over 12 million people, or more than all combat deaths in World War I.

Bolshevik economic policies, or war communism, starved millions of people in the Russian countryside when their grain was seized. And after the civil war, millions more were fated to perish in the brutal projects of Lenins successor, Joseph Stalin.

Bolshevik PartyJoseph StalinLeon TrotskyNicholas IIOctober RevolutionRussian Czarist governmentSoviet Unionvladimir lenin

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How Lenin's Bolsheviks Brought Communism to Russia - The Libertarian Republic

There are many reasons that contribute to communism being the most pragmatic solution to the crises of world poverty, war and climate change.

Father of Economics Adam Smith has been accused of saying that individual ambition serves the common good. What this is often interpreted as is the notion that whatever is done in greed at the hands of the corporate overlords, is somehow good for the wage slaves. As if!

However, the soul of this statement isnt necessarily a fallacy. What is good for the individual is good for the group, provided that the individual strives to work for the common good.

As my dear colleague David Jenkins would say, the left is divided between moral high ground and the freedom to choose for yourself.

In the a capitalist democracy versus the communist democracy, the two are at different rankings in regards to importance; though both are very important in both.

For one person to be rich, another must be poor. No person is worth more than another. No one deserves more than another. No one should have the power to make another starve.

If such a power is given, the greediest people among us will use it to bleed people, institutions and the environment until these things are left empty.

This is the simple explanation for why capitalism has failed again and again.

For those who say that communism should not be attempted because it has never been successful, capitalism has never been successful except with some degree of socialism.

Communism has not yet been successful because there has been some element of capitalistic greed.

Therefore, it is pragmatic at first to strive for the moral high ground and make personal freedom second banana until materialism as a concept is wiped from the human psyche.

After this point, people would understand that they are morally responsible for the well-being of their neighbors and always choose that which is morally just.

German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx was filled with rage at seeing the surplus that was made and thrown away day after day in capitalist Europe; but this is also precisely what gave him hope.

If corporate America would stop creating false scarcity by throwing out goods that are not sold, the environment and society would experience less of a strain.

If production of luxury goods were halted and the manpower, time and resources were allocated toward things that were necessary we would without a doubt have a surplus of things that people actually need.

Giving children clothes; the hungry food; the homeless lodging; is much more valuable than the illusion of personal choice.

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Communism is the most pragmatic solution - Talon Marks (subscription)

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Posted: Apr 19, 2017 12:01 AM

PARIS -- On Sunday, France will head to the polls to vote in the first of two rounds of its presidential election. Barring the unlikely event of any candidate winning more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff on May 7 will determine the winner. One of the most remarkable aspects of this race is the stunning implosion of the French Socialist Party.

You might be tempted to ask: Does this mean French socialism is in its final throes? Well, not exactly.

Based on current polls, Socialist Party candidate Benoit Hamon is struggling to crack the single digits, currently sitting at around 8 percent, according to Opinionway's PresiTrack poll. All this really means is that current Socialist President Francois Hollande destroyed the brand.

Hollande's favorability rating is about 19 percent, according to a YouGov poll taken at the end of February. A pragmatist, Hollande might have scored better had he not been surrounded by actual Socialists for the past five years.

French citizens, however, seem tempted by the idea of electing another pragmatist from the Hollande camp, but one who isn't obligated to surround himself with Socialists.

According to an Opinionway survey from earlier this month, 50 percent of Hollande's voters now support independent presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron, a former Hollande minister who was with the Socialist party for three years. But Macron is a former investment banker whose program includes an entire section dedicated to making the lives of entrepreneurs easier. Rather than ideology, he's focused on renewal and the desire to bring outsiders into public life.

So this means that socialism is dead in France, right? Not so fast. French leftists have gravitated to Jean-Luc Melenchon, an independent candidate who wants a "fiscal revolution" that involves taxing at 100 percent any earnings over the "maximum revenue" of 400,000 euros annually. He's also expressed interest in involving France's overseas territories in ALBA (formally the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), founded by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who ran a country that represents the epitome of socialist end times. A recent Opinionway poll showed Melenchon sitting at 18 percent, behind Macron and the National Front's Marine Le Pen, both tied at 22 percent, and center-right candidate Francois Fillon at 21 percent.

Socialism as a French brand is tanking in name only. Almost all of the presidential candidates have integrated socialist policies into their platform. The least socialist option in this race is Fillon, who has a double disadvantage: He's the establishment candidate at a time when global electoral momentum is trending against the establishment, and he's facing accusations of the kind of nepotism widely practiced among the French establishment.

"Violent" is a term I've often heard used by Fillon's critics to describe the conservative aspects of his program. National Front Vice President Florian Philippot, who walks and talks like a socialist all over French media on behalf of Le Pen, called Fillon's attempt at a non-socialist program one "of unprecedented violence."

Reducing the number of civil servants? Violent. Wanting to give people the option of private health insurance instead of paying a fortune for a crumbling system with poor reimbursements? Violent. Cutting government spending through austerity? Well, if you're going to do that, then you might as well just go around punching voters in the face.

One way that socialism has been able to justify its continued presence in this race is by using former French President and General Charles de Gaulle, who consistently ranks as the country's favorite historical figure, as its shield. To those running for high office in France, de Gaulle has become what Ronald Reagan is to American candidates: an anachronistic specter evoked in a lazy attempt to justify questionable policies to the unconvinced. "You don't like my position? You're an idiot! It's Gaullist!"

I've only heard Gaullism used to defend socialist policies, however -- which is funny, because de Gaulle was hardly a socialist. In fact, the Socialist Standard (the monthly magazine of the Socialist Party of Great Britain) wrote of de Gaulle in its July 1958 issue: "Socialists are opposed to what de Gaulle stands for on principle, because he stands for French capitalism, and Socialists do not support any capitalist faction anywhere or at any time."

Much has also been made in this race of the role of supranational European Union governance, a socialist straitjacket imposed on the French economy. Nearly all of the candidates agree that it's a problem, whether they want to leave the EU or just reform it. What's rarely mentioned is that even if European governance disappeared tomorrow, France would still be stuck contending with its own socialist economic infrastructure.

Sunday's first round of voting will largely determine the extent to which the French electorate can see through the persistent socialist lie that has long worked against their interests.

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Socialist Party Implodes in French Presidential Race, but Socialism Still Omnipresent - Townhall

Last year, socialism was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called means of production as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: Ive published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive and impoverishing. In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the fundamental cell of society: the family.

But surely socialisms founders didnt realize that their system just flat-out didnt work, right? Actually, they believed that it didand in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural-traditional-biblical familythe Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of todays secular left.

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the abolition of the family, which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an infamous proposal of the communists. What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work.

A glance at the dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specificallyat least from a family-focused perspectivewas perhaps Robert Owen.

Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana, and delivered his Declaration of Mental Independence. It is a document you surely didnt read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age.

There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owens unholy trinity.

Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owens socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family.

The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and communism have always been for the people, the masses, the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Their socialist-communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.

But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead.

An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family.

All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in ideological colonizations.

In short, these were the bold ancestors of todays same-sex marriage movement and LGBTQ sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional and biblical model for the family.

It is not possible to speak of the family, insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization Beyond Marriage. They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His latest book (April 2017) is A Pope and a President:

John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.

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Socialism Attacks The Family - Greeneville Sun

After the Chinese government revealed its Xiongan New Area plan, many started thinking about another megalopolis in the making.

But as more details came out during the Easter holiday, Xiongans future looks nothing like that at all.

Though the Xiongan New Area will cover an area of 2,000 square meters when completely built a size close to that of Shenzhen or double the area of Hong Kong officials said the city would only accommodate 2 million to 2.5 million people.

That represents only a tenth of Shenzhens population, or the population of a small county.

According to the plan, a major transportation network and basic infrastructure should be in place in Xiongan by 2020.

The area will be well connected to Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei and construction of the core area will be completed by 2022.

By 2030, a green city with all the modern amenities will have been built, projecting great competitive advantage and influence while demonstrating harmony between man and nature, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Currently, China has 217 cities with population below 2.5 million.

So what makes Xiongan unique and important?

The new area will have three main features.First, the city will be dominated by public housing with a small private real estate market.

Second, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that the new city will strictly adhere to the principles of green economy and environmental protection.

Last but not least, cities with such small population usually function as satellite cities near large metropolises, to where residents would commute to work.

However, Xiongan will build its own industries to provide job opportunities to locals. It will also have its own educational facilities where residents can pursue academic degrees instead of having to enrol in schools and universities in Beijing or Tianjin.

These features are designed to tackle Chinas main challenges, such as the housing bubble, environmental degradation and regional disparities.

When authorities called Xiongan a millennium strategy, they meant it would be a testing ground for new economic and social models.

If successful, Xiongan will serve as a role model for other parts of China to copy.

It is an experiment in innovative systems based on socialist thinking. In Xiongan, for example, public housing will play a dominant role and the local government willharness new technologies such as big data for central planning.

Xiongan will show how socialism operates in building a unique, modern metropolis that is free of the problems encountered by most capitalist communities.

This is perhaps why Xiongan is often seen as a legacy project of President Xi, an ambitious and powerful leader with strong beliefs rooted in socialism.

This article appeared in the Hong Kong Economic Journal on April 18

Translation by Julie Zhu

[Chinese version ]

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Xiongan seen as testing ground for new socialism - EJ Insight