Stephen Kotkin

We distribute.

And so this civil war on the left, which arises in real time, the critics of Lenin's revolution, the German Social Democratic Party, people like Bernstein and the rest of them, they are critics in real time of this.

And yet, some of the critics who are what we would call the Social Democrats of Europe, Lenin was also a member of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, but the communist thing...

makes this divide between those who are serious about destruction of capitalism and those who are, quote, revisionists.

This denunciates her term.

What happens is some of the people who are in the revisionist camp begin to flirt with the capitalism is evil analysis.

And so they begin to truck with the communists that they've broken from and are in civil war with.

So you get left-wing social democrats who are closer to Lenin than they are to right-wing social democrats like Bernstein and the rest who are pro-capitalism but pro-redistribution.

And so this is confusing to people.

Because not everybody is a communist.

Some people, like in Sweden, accept private property and markets.

But some of the people in Sweden seem to go back on that promise of accepting it and arguing that if we don't get rid of capitalism, we're still going to end up with an evil system.

And so this civil war on the left never gets resolved.

It's ongoing.

And the right uses this confusion to paint everybody as anti-capitalism.

And the left gives them ammunition by talking about the evils of capitalism, even when they've come along to accept private property and markets.

And so you have this really deep and fundamental problem for the left, the tragedy of the left that it's never able to overcome, even to this day, where it comes out and says,

No more anti-capitalism ever.

That is over.

That leads to death, bloodshed, gulag, ration tickets, war.