Stephen Kotkin

It turns out that that doesn't deliver freedom, right?

It doesn't deliver prosperity and it doesn't deliver peace.

It delivers massive statization because once you eliminate private property and individual choice, the state is now responsible for everything.

And it delivers ration tickets and the gulag.

So you get a bunch of socialists that break from this.

They say, you know what?

Lenin is wrong.

Eradicating private property, markets, civil liberties, and parliament is a mistake.

We have to accept private property, markets, capitalism, and parliaments because that's the only way to get to freedom.

Otherwise, you get to the Leninist dictatorship, total statization, gulag, and ration tickets.

These people are denounced as revisionists, like Edward Bernstein in Germany, for example, the Swedish Social Democrats.

They say, we accept capitalism, markets and private property.

We want to redistribute the income.

because it's tough for some people to make their way in the system.

The system produces inequality, and let's make it more equal with social engineering, redistribution.

But we keep capitalism, we keep markets and private property, and we keep democracy, voting, rule of law, etc., and we'll evolve.

towards full socialism and eventually communism, but we will not do it the Leninist way.

And so there's this huge break in the socialist movement between those who are real revolutionaries and want to overthrow, eradicate capitalism to get to the just and prosperous and peaceful future, and those who want to use the existing system and evolve, embrace and accept it.

So the left has a civil war.

a civil war on the left, which is still going on, between those who say capitalism is evil and must go versus capitalism has a lot of problems, but we need it in order to have peace and prosperity, in order to have freedom, and we just need to manage it better.