Marion Smith: Lenin and Marx Believed ‘End Goal of Socialism Is Communism’

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told Breitbart News that “the end goal of socialism is communism,” offering his remarks on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.

“More than 100 million people [were] killed in some 40 countries governed by a communist party since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,” said Smith.

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Pollak asked, “What would you say is the definition of socialism versus communism?”

Smith replied, “I’m not going to make more of a distinction between socialism and communism than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did, insofar as they did make a clear distinction between those two concepts. Communism was the end goal, it was the destination that socialism was aiming for. Lenin said, ‘The end goal of socialism is communism.'”

Smith added, “Of course, almost immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, which was the world’s first attempt to turn the idea of Marx into a reality, Lenin and the others realized that this was so far from human experience and the reality of the world — that utopian vision that Marx had envisioned as communism — that we’re going to really push that very far in the future, and we’re going to call ourselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — that’s the U.S.S.R., that’s the Soviet Union — when Mao was asked what he was doing in China, it’s socialism in one country. Fidel Castro, it was the socialist revolution. So communism, I think insofar as we can have a popular culture distinction from socialism, communism is the end goal, and socialism is the step before we get there.”

Smith quipped, “I say that Christians go to heaven and socialists go to communism.”

Pollak invited Smith’s explanation of “democratic socialism.”

“I put as much store in democratic socialism as I put in democratic fascism,” responded Smith. “The qualifier of how you get it isn’t the most important thing, it’s what you’re getting. Both intellectually and historically, the concepts of socialism and democracy are antithetical. So it’s an oxymoronic thing to say, that you’re a democratic socialist.”

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.