Thank you; so few people realize how much Lenin changed the ideas of Marx. Not that Marx was correct on everything but what Lenin created was a horrific bastardization of the idea of communism. He and Stalin were right wing.
How much do you want to stop His Royal Heinous and the fascist takeover of the country?
Enough that you’re willing to make a small sacrifice? Like altering your spending habits for a month or two or three? That could be all it would take to get the attention of the oligarchs (formerly known as The Robber Barons in the first Gilded Age, also The Fat Cats, The Greedy Bastards).
A brief demonstration of We, the People’s, power of the purse could persuade them to quit supporting HRH and the politicians who enable him.
We quit spending, except on essentials, businesses lose money, stock market goes down, Greedy Bastards pay attention to our demands.
Greedy Bastards own most of the politicians of both major parties. GBs start losing money, tell politicians to change course and do what We, the People want.
We are running out of peaceful options. The legislature and Supreme Court are controlled by HRH. He controls the executive branch, including the Military, Justice Department, FBI, ICE, the IRS. He controls all levers of power.
We, the people, still have the power of the purse. No one can control our spending, or lack of spending. When all else fails we can go on a spending strike until the business community stops supporting HRH and the politicians who enable him.
Economic warfare is the only thing the oligarchs, the business community will understand and act on. Call it a Surreptitious General Strike (Quiet Quitting). Go to work, do as little as possible. Stop spending money except on essentials. Quit feeding the corporate beast that supports the HRH.
Stop participating. Nearly 70% of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending. All of us. Hobble the economy and the stock market. Mahatma Gandhi drove the British from India by peaceful civil disobedience and economic disruption. We can stop the fascist takeover in the same way.
We can keep rehashing past and present atrocities until our access to the internet is taken away by the regime, or we can DO something!
Please: Resist. Stop cooperating. Stop spending. Stop the fascist takeover.
Thank you for restacking, and sharing, to help Spread the Word!
After you finish defecating on this Peaceful Solution, please favor us with your own peaceful solution, that will stop and reverse the fascist takeover of America.
I have literally stopped spending on anything unless it’s food, gas, utilities…I never really like shopping to begin with…so I just by the essentials….even in food. I buy local, farmers markets, locally owned stores & absolutely no processed foods. FRESH veggies & fruit. Dry beans, eggs …
If we all stopped going to the malls, which I hate, big dollar stores; Walmart, Whole Foods, Target, Amazon, etc. the message would get to them really fast as their stocks tumbled!!
Instead of ‘shopping’ enjoy family time…go to the park, go for a walk by the ocean, woods, go for a hike, tear up your front/back lawn & turn it into a vegetable garden!
Go to the library, read a book, play board games, do puzzles, etc.
I continue to enjoy this series. It is bookmarked in my YouTube. Thank you so much for sharing them Professor. I continue to learn so much from your posts.
This morning my friend Yuliya in Irpin sent me a brief email - “Sending hugs. Y.” - to let me know she was all right after last night’s bombardment. Then an email arrived from the Haitian Support Centre in Springfield, about the ankle-tagging of Haitian people. Then this next lecture in the series “Hitler and Stalin Today”. I am sick at heart, and don’t know what to do.
Navalny should never have gone back to Russia. He should have remained in Europe as the Russian President of the Russian Democratic Government in Exile. It is a Great Tragedy that He is Gone. We must develop new Russian Leaders to Take His Place. Russian Democracy Now!
Thank you. It's so sad, though, that he has to start his lecture trying to convince the students that reading the material is important. University students!
About 32m in, when you're talking about Hegel: "All of this killing has a meaning." The first thing that popped into my head is that famous line from Dostoevsky's "Demons" (Pevear/Volokhonsky, p. 405), which I read 16y ago: "Now it is being suggested to us, through various strewn-about leaflets of foreign manufacture, that we close ranks and start groups with the sole purpose of destruction, under the pretext that however you try to cure the world, you're not going to cure it, but by radically lopping off a hundred million heads, thereby relieving ourselves, we can more assuredly jump over the little ditch."
OK, that's closer to Stalin, but I don't have any control over what pops into my head when you lecture about Hegel. But Hegel did say that all the killing has meaning.
*'Foreign manufacture' is pure Dostoevsky. It's the outsiders who brought these ideas into Mother Russia. Why, we're the pure ones here in MR, don't you know.
Perhaps Relevant to the Current Struggle Between Authoritarianism and Constitutional Democracy.
What Follows below is a Refutation of Communism from my old Social Theory Class. Communism is often Well Intentioned but it is a Fatally Flawed Ideology. If you are opposed to Communism I invite you to read this. If you Subscribe to Communism, I would please ask you to read the following in a thoughtful manner. There are a lot of intelligent people out there who are wasting their time trapped in Communist Thinking. If you disagree with that, I am open to respectful criticisms and comments. I will try and find a Political Theory Site on Substack where I can re-post this. For now I am posting it on political pages. I will probably start my own page on some point but I want to get this Draft out there. Strike While the Iron is Hot.
—Dan “Fenris” Baron
[Rough Draft That Needs Paragraph Breaks And Editing And Polishing.]
I wrote a Senior Paper in my Undergraduate Social Theory course that was a Refutation of Marxism. If you are for or against Communism, I invite you to read this.
What follows is a brief note about Marx in common language, not the academic language that I used in the paper. So please excuse the casual nature of the language, if that sort of thing bothers you. Furthermore, this is a rough draft, so I apologize if it is not as readable as it could be.
Marxists are usually well intentioned, in contrast to Fascists, who start from a position of hate and ill intent. Marxism promotes the idea of helping the working class. Who would not want to help working people?
Unfortunately, Marxism does not work in actual practice. It is a well-intentioned but fatally flawed ideology. It places an abstract concept ("the Working Class") over all other persons or categories. I am not a "working class" and you are not a "working class ". You are an Individual and I am an Individual, not some abstract or hypothetical construct like the "Working Class".
The only legitimate government or political structure in the 21st Century is the Political Structure that protects the Rights of Individuals. That single legitimate political structure is Constitutional Democracy. If you want to protect human lives and human freedom, Constitutional Democracy is the way to go.
As Social Scientists, History is our Laboratory. Wherever Marxism or Communism has been established, it has inevitably led to Totalitarianism. Russia, China, and Cuba are examples. Cuba might be described as "Boutique Communism". Maybe more about this in another paper.
When you place the rights of an abstract concept like the Working Class over the Rights of Individuals, then you will inevitably get a political system that is willing to sacrifice the lives of Individuals in the name of the abstract concept (in this case, the " Working Class"). This leads to Oppression and Authoritarianism.
So Marxism, while well-intentioned, inevitably leads to totalitarianism. The Russians were never the Enemy. Marxist Communism and Authoritarianism was the Enemy. The Russians were oppressed by Communism. They are a Great People and they deserve Democracy just as every other nation does.
So, the Russian People were oppressed by the very system that they built. The remnants of that Authoritarian structure is controlled by the Dictator Putin and his Oligarchs and Supporters.
The real conflict of the 21st Century is the Conflict between Democracy and Authoritarianism.
The main current example is the War Between Ukraine (a Democracy) and the Authoritarian Regime in Russia (the Putin Dictatorship). America used to be a Democracy before the MAGA Trump Fascist Regime. America will be restored to Democracy when we retake power in 2026 and 2028.
So those are some raw, unedited ideas about freeing people's minds from Marxist and Communist ideology. It is a strong ideology but again, I believe that it is fatally flawed. A lot of good people believed in it. Those people need to re-examine their positions in my opinion. I am open to respectful discussion and reasonable disagreement.
To be clear, I am a life long anti-communist and anti-fascist. Communism inevitably leads to totalitarianism from the Left. Fascism inevitably leads to totalitarianism from the Right, unless it is stopped.
Just to be clear--I am a center left progressive with some social moderate positions. I believe in a healthy Private Sector that is reasonably regulated and taxed, and a strong Public Sector with a good Social Safety Net.
These notes are Copyright 2026 by Dan Baron. Please contact me if you wish to post this material elsewhere. I will generally grant such requests as long as all of this material is credited to me Dan Baron.
Addenda- Navalny should never have gone back to Russia. He should have remained in Europe as the Russian President of the Russian Democratic Government in Exile. It is a Great Tragedy that He is Gone. We must develop new Russian Leaders to Take His Place. Russian Democracy Now!
The only times that true communism can be observed in the world is in first, small, and then most important, consenting groups of people. And, I’ll throw in another condition, intelligence. Under these conditions a commune (a system of communism) a type of living which can be a happy arrangement of governing and living of the people by those people and for THOSE people.
Marx did not understand or care about basic human nature or behavior under so-called good times or stressful times. That wasn’t even thought about or seriously considered or possibly, even understood. Even if in his mind he believed he understood human nature. Also, another factor, human nature as observed not only as individuals, but in large groups.
Philosophers like Marx see in ideals of behavior not how stress, greed, emotion and sheer numbers play into the behavior of a population, especially a population of very divergent backgrounds and numbers.
That’s why he couldn’t relate or possibly even care how Russian people thought or behaved. Or why none of these words can in turn be applied to today and our country or world.
That’s also why when our so-called government officials talk of communism or even Socialism they are throwing trigger words out to crowds in the hopes of inciting negative emotion and succeeding because they have redefined these words according to their personal desires of outcome from saying them. They are using derogatory labeling and succeeding.
"Which is where I came in – the advantage of the Marxist analysis is that you understand that profit is a return on capital, and that a return on capital is an intrinsically political quantity. If you don’t fancy going all the way into Marxist economics, and god knows I understand why you might not, just remember that for nearly all questions of business analysis, “who owns the real estate?” is almost never a stupid question to ask, and that it’s often a huge time saver to understand early on in the project who is paying rent to who."
The readings linked on this post are the same ones linked to last week's lecture. But the recommended readings on communism (indeed for all the lectures) can be found at the Munk School site: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/phl/hitler-and-stalin-today
Thank you; so few people realize how much Lenin changed the ideas of Marx. Not that Marx was correct on everything but what Lenin created was a horrific bastardization of the idea of communism. He and Stalin were right wing.
Exceptionally well written piece!
The Peaceful Solution-Part 1
How much do you want to stop His Royal Heinous and the fascist takeover of the country?
Enough that you’re willing to make a small sacrifice? Like altering your spending habits for a month or two or three? That could be all it would take to get the attention of the oligarchs (formerly known as The Robber Barons in the first Gilded Age, also The Fat Cats, The Greedy Bastards).
A brief demonstration of We, the People’s, power of the purse could persuade them to quit supporting HRH and the politicians who enable him.
We quit spending, except on essentials, businesses lose money, stock market goes down, Greedy Bastards pay attention to our demands.
Greedy Bastards own most of the politicians of both major parties. GBs start losing money, tell politicians to change course and do what We, the People want.
We are running out of peaceful options. The legislature and Supreme Court are controlled by HRH. He controls the executive branch, including the Military, Justice Department, FBI, ICE, the IRS. He controls all levers of power.
We, the people, still have the power of the purse. No one can control our spending, or lack of spending. When all else fails we can go on a spending strike until the business community stops supporting HRH and the politicians who enable him.
Economic warfare is the only thing the oligarchs, the business community will understand and act on. Call it a Surreptitious General Strike (Quiet Quitting). Go to work, do as little as possible. Stop spending money except on essentials. Quit feeding the corporate beast that supports the HRH.
Stop participating. Nearly 70% of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending. All of us. Hobble the economy and the stock market. Mahatma Gandhi drove the British from India by peaceful civil disobedience and economic disruption. We can stop the fascist takeover in the same way.
We can keep rehashing past and present atrocities until our access to the internet is taken away by the regime, or we can DO something!
Please: Resist. Stop cooperating. Stop spending. Stop the fascist takeover.
Thank you for restacking, and sharing, to help Spread the Word!
To all the naysayers out there:
After you finish defecating on this Peaceful Solution, please favor us with your own peaceful solution, that will stop and reverse the fascist takeover of America.
Step 1: Realize it's not fascism.
https://dgilesphd.substack.com/p/why-trump-is-not-a-fascist
You have some good ideas, but you can't fight the real problem if your opening salvo is to mislabel the problem.
"If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is probably a duck."
You need to dig deeper.
You need to come up with a plan to stop the fascist takeover, or keep quiet.
Funny you should mention me having a plan!!!
https://imnotyourechochamber.substack.com/p/new-book-getting-beyond-trump-now
I have literally stopped spending on anything unless it’s food, gas, utilities…I never really like shopping to begin with…so I just by the essentials….even in food. I buy local, farmers markets, locally owned stores & absolutely no processed foods. FRESH veggies & fruit. Dry beans, eggs …
If we all stopped going to the malls, which I hate, big dollar stores; Walmart, Whole Foods, Target, Amazon, etc. the message would get to them really fast as their stocks tumbled!!
Instead of ‘shopping’ enjoy family time…go to the park, go for a walk by the ocean, woods, go for a hike, tear up your front/back lawn & turn it into a vegetable garden!
Go to the library, read a book, play board games, do puzzles, etc.
Totally agree. Give me the simple life.
I continue to enjoy this series. It is bookmarked in my YouTube. Thank you so much for sharing them Professor. I continue to learn so much from your posts.
Thank you. This was so good! Going to save and watch again when I can give it my full attention!
This morning my friend Yuliya in Irpin sent me a brief email - “Sending hugs. Y.” - to let me know she was all right after last night’s bombardment. Then an email arrived from the Haitian Support Centre in Springfield, about the ankle-tagging of Haitian people. Then this next lecture in the series “Hitler and Stalin Today”. I am sick at heart, and don’t know what to do.
Navalny should never have gone back to Russia. He should have remained in Europe as the Russian President of the Russian Democratic Government in Exile. It is a Great Tragedy that He is Gone. We must develop new Russian Leaders to Take His Place. Russian Democracy Now!
Excellent lecture. I’m on my second listen. Thank you for all you do.
The assigned readings above are incorrect. Here are the actual assigned readings for this lecture listed in the YouTube video description.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
• Vladimir Lenin, "What is to be done?" 1902.
• Judt and Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 2012, ix-xvii, 75-105.
Edit: Also, from Miller Maley's comment below: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/phl/hitler-and-stalin-today
Thank you. It's so sad, though, that he has to start his lecture trying to convince the students that reading the material is important. University students!
About 32m in, when you're talking about Hegel: "All of this killing has a meaning." The first thing that popped into my head is that famous line from Dostoevsky's "Demons" (Pevear/Volokhonsky, p. 405), which I read 16y ago: "Now it is being suggested to us, through various strewn-about leaflets of foreign manufacture, that we close ranks and start groups with the sole purpose of destruction, under the pretext that however you try to cure the world, you're not going to cure it, but by radically lopping off a hundred million heads, thereby relieving ourselves, we can more assuredly jump over the little ditch."
OK, that's closer to Stalin, but I don't have any control over what pops into my head when you lecture about Hegel. But Hegel did say that all the killing has meaning.
*'Foreign manufacture' is pure Dostoevsky. It's the outsiders who brought these ideas into Mother Russia. Why, we're the pure ones here in MR, don't you know.
Professor Snyder-
Perhaps Relevant to the Current Struggle Between Authoritarianism and Constitutional Democracy.
What Follows below is a Refutation of Communism from my old Social Theory Class. Communism is often Well Intentioned but it is a Fatally Flawed Ideology. If you are opposed to Communism I invite you to read this. If you Subscribe to Communism, I would please ask you to read the following in a thoughtful manner. There are a lot of intelligent people out there who are wasting their time trapped in Communist Thinking. If you disagree with that, I am open to respectful criticisms and comments. I will try and find a Political Theory Site on Substack where I can re-post this. For now I am posting it on political pages. I will probably start my own page on some point but I want to get this Draft out there. Strike While the Iron is Hot.
—Dan “Fenris” Baron
[Rough Draft That Needs Paragraph Breaks And Editing And Polishing.]
I wrote a Senior Paper in my Undergraduate Social Theory course that was a Refutation of Marxism. If you are for or against Communism, I invite you to read this.
What follows is a brief note about Marx in common language, not the academic language that I used in the paper. So please excuse the casual nature of the language, if that sort of thing bothers you. Furthermore, this is a rough draft, so I apologize if it is not as readable as it could be.
Marxists are usually well intentioned, in contrast to Fascists, who start from a position of hate and ill intent. Marxism promotes the idea of helping the working class. Who would not want to help working people?
Unfortunately, Marxism does not work in actual practice. It is a well-intentioned but fatally flawed ideology. It places an abstract concept ("the Working Class") over all other persons or categories. I am not a "working class" and you are not a "working class ". You are an Individual and I am an Individual, not some abstract or hypothetical construct like the "Working Class".
The only legitimate government or political structure in the 21st Century is the Political Structure that protects the Rights of Individuals. That single legitimate political structure is Constitutional Democracy. If you want to protect human lives and human freedom, Constitutional Democracy is the way to go.
As Social Scientists, History is our Laboratory. Wherever Marxism or Communism has been established, it has inevitably led to Totalitarianism. Russia, China, and Cuba are examples. Cuba might be described as "Boutique Communism". Maybe more about this in another paper.
When you place the rights of an abstract concept like the Working Class over the Rights of Individuals, then you will inevitably get a political system that is willing to sacrifice the lives of Individuals in the name of the abstract concept (in this case, the " Working Class"). This leads to Oppression and Authoritarianism.
So Marxism, while well-intentioned, inevitably leads to totalitarianism. The Russians were never the Enemy. Marxist Communism and Authoritarianism was the Enemy. The Russians were oppressed by Communism. They are a Great People and they deserve Democracy just as every other nation does.
So, the Russian People were oppressed by the very system that they built. The remnants of that Authoritarian structure is controlled by the Dictator Putin and his Oligarchs and Supporters.
The real conflict of the 21st Century is the Conflict between Democracy and Authoritarianism.
The main current example is the War Between Ukraine (a Democracy) and the Authoritarian Regime in Russia (the Putin Dictatorship). America used to be a Democracy before the MAGA Trump Fascist Regime. America will be restored to Democracy when we retake power in 2026 and 2028.
So those are some raw, unedited ideas about freeing people's minds from Marxist and Communist ideology. It is a strong ideology but again, I believe that it is fatally flawed. A lot of good people believed in it. Those people need to re-examine their positions in my opinion. I am open to respectful discussion and reasonable disagreement.
To be clear, I am a life long anti-communist and anti-fascist. Communism inevitably leads to totalitarianism from the Left. Fascism inevitably leads to totalitarianism from the Right, unless it is stopped.
Just to be clear--I am a center left progressive with some social moderate positions. I believe in a healthy Private Sector that is reasonably regulated and taxed, and a strong Public Sector with a good Social Safety Net.
These notes are Copyright 2026 by Dan Baron. Please contact me if you wish to post this material elsewhere. I will generally grant such requests as long as all of this material is credited to me Dan Baron.
Addenda- Navalny should never have gone back to Russia. He should have remained in Europe as the Russian President of the Russian Democratic Government in Exile. It is a Great Tragedy that He is Gone. We must develop new Russian Leaders to Take His Place. Russian Democracy Now!
IMO, Marx created a doctrine of Marxism.
The only times that true communism can be observed in the world is in first, small, and then most important, consenting groups of people. And, I’ll throw in another condition, intelligence. Under these conditions a commune (a system of communism) a type of living which can be a happy arrangement of governing and living of the people by those people and for THOSE people.
Marx did not understand or care about basic human nature or behavior under so-called good times or stressful times. That wasn’t even thought about or seriously considered or possibly, even understood. Even if in his mind he believed he understood human nature. Also, another factor, human nature as observed not only as individuals, but in large groups.
Philosophers like Marx see in ideals of behavior not how stress, greed, emotion and sheer numbers play into the behavior of a population, especially a population of very divergent backgrounds and numbers.
That’s why he couldn’t relate or possibly even care how Russian people thought or behaved. Or why none of these words can in turn be applied to today and our country or world.
That’s also why when our so-called government officials talk of communism or even Socialism they are throwing trigger words out to crowds in the hopes of inciting negative emotion and succeeding because they have redefined these words according to their personal desires of outcome from saying them. They are using derogatory labeling and succeeding.
Just read Dan Davies' https://backofmind.substack.com/p/rent-always-rent? where he mentions Marx.
Last paragraph:
"Which is where I came in – the advantage of the Marxist analysis is that you understand that profit is a return on capital, and that a return on capital is an intrinsically political quantity. If you don’t fancy going all the way into Marxist economics, and god knows I understand why you might not, just remember that for nearly all questions of business analysis, “who owns the real estate?” is almost never a stupid question to ask, and that it’s often a huge time saver to understand early on in the project who is paying rent to who."
The readings linked on this post are the same ones linked to last week's lecture. But the recommended readings on communism (indeed for all the lectures) can be found at the Munk School site: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/phl/hitler-and-stalin-today
Thank you for sharing this series. I am learning a lot about the bigger picture in our process here - scary 😳
I've been watching these online. Once you mentioned the reading material & I glanced into the notes - I'm impressed.