Marxism, Socialism, and Communism: Solzhenitsyn, Mises, and Hayek
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the deeply personal and precinct writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
In “Marxism, Socialism, and Communism,” professors of history, politics, and economics look at Marx’s life and writings, the misery and brutality in the Soviet Union, the atrocities of communist China, and the proliferation of Cultural Marxism in America. They explore how many ideas animating American politics today are rooted in Marxism, and yet how they differ from Marx’s thought. By taking Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Frankfurt School seriously, we can see the injustice and evil inherent in all strands of Marxism. We also better understand the critiques of communism made by Mises, Hayek, and Solzhenitsyn. We are, therefore, better equipped to defeat it.
Solzhenitsyn captured the brutal degradation of the human spirit inherent in communism. Mises and Hayek demonstrated the flaws in its economic principles.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:14.1 | And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with Marxism, Socialism, and Communism. Episode number four today, The Critics, Solzhenitsyn, Mises, and Hayek. |
| 0:24.5 | So we've been looking at the history of Marxism as a theory and communism put into practice. |
| 0:31.2 | We've looked at figures like Lenin and Stalin, and now we get some contemporary criticisms of their regimes, |
| 0:36.5 | both from the political side, from |
| 0:38.1 | Solzhenitsyn, and from the side of economics from Mises and Hayek. Yes, and if you haven't |
| 0:44.7 | read Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I cannot encourage him enough. I encountered his writings first as a |
| 0:52.8 | grad student here at Hillsdale, and it's incredible. |
| 0:58.1 | And I actually, if it's okay, I want to read a little excerpt from the Gulag Archipelago. |
| 1:03.8 | You've probably heard about it, but it'll just give you a little sense of the person of Solzhenitsyn why communism is so bad, but why there is |
| 1:14.5 | hope actually in Christianity. Let's hear it. Yeah, Solzhenitsyn in the first chapter of the |
| 1:20.9 | gulag, interestingly called The Ascent. He's describing essentially the context of what I'm going to |
| 1:27.1 | read is, why do evil people |
| 1:29.2 | prosper and good people get punished? Of course, you know, he's describing his experience in the |
| 1:35.4 | Goulogs, so that question is very prescient to him. And one of the things that he's responding to |
| 1:40.6 | is people that say that, you know, we're all guilty and we all get punished for |
| 1:46.1 | the evil that we've done. One would have to admit that on that basis, those who had been punished |
| 1:51.8 | even more cruelly than with prison, those shot, burned at the stake, were some sort of super |
| 1:58.5 | evildoers, and yet the innocent are those who get punished most |
| 2:02.2 | celestly of all. And what would one have to say about our so evident torturers? He's complaining |
| 2:10.3 | about the people torturing him, the prison guards. Why does not fate punish them? Why do they |
| 2:17.2 | prosper? And the only solution to this would be that the |
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