The Origins of Modern Political Communism

The international communist movement started in the nineteenth century and caused massive death, destruction, and misery in the twentieth century. It presented itself as a movement to liberate the working class.

In reality, the founders, leaders, and key figures in communism did not work strenuously in factories or on farms. They inhabited the comfortable libraries and homes of the upper middle class.

Karl Marx was born to a wealthy business class family in 1818. His chief confederate was Friedrich Engels, who was born in 1820 to an even wealthier family, and whose inherited wealth ensured that neither he nor Marx would ever need to labor to earn their bread.

Another communist leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, was born 1870 to middle class family. His father was a school administrator. Lenin studied Greek and Latin, and attended the university after completing high school. Many other communist leaders had similar backgrounds: claiming to fight for the lower classes, they actually emerged from comfortable middle class or even upper class settings. As historian John Stormer writes,

The story of communism is a story of contradictions. Despite Marx’s call for the workers of the world to unite, communism has never been a working class movement. Its strength is in the intellectual and thought centers of the world.

Both Joseph Stalin in Russia and Fidel Castro in Cuba, between them responsible for mass executions and torture, never worked at manual labor.

Modern political communism, unlike its ancient nonstate forms, claims to be an uprising of the blue-collar factory or agricultural class, but is in reality an exercise in social engineering carried out by university-educated sociopaths.

Hating the Hand that Feeds

Following the Russian Revolutions in February and October of 1917, and the civil war which engulfed that nation for several years afterward, the agricultural policies of the new Soviet Communist government caused a famine there.

Death by starvation threatened millions. Despite the fact that the new USSR government declared its hatred for the United States, the Americans wanted to provide humanitarian relief for the ordinary Russian citizens, who were victims of their own government.

Food delivered to the Russians from the United States saved lives. The chief organizer of this rescue effort was Republican Party leader Herbert Hoover. As the Encyclopedia Britannica states,

Hoover was the natural choice to head the American Relief Administration. The ARA sent shiploads of food and other life-sustaining supplies to war-ravaged Europe — including Germany and Bolshevik Russia during the famine in that country in 1921–23.

The communist government of the USSR, in the person of Vladimir Lenin, continued its war on the Russian people - its war on its own people.

Instead of thanking the United States for life-saving aid, Lenin continued his accusation that America was a capitalist society. As an excuse for his hostility toward the U.S., Lenin referenced American aid that had been given during the Russian Civil War.