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In this new episode of Culture War, Emmanuel Rincón, Editor-at-Large at El American, analyzes the ideas of Karl Marx that during the 20th century would inspire revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and many other countries where the dominant group was overthrown, and the workers took over private property and the means of production.
Emmanuel tells us that Marx “theorized about the need to replace the capitalist system with workers’ democracy” and this would “open the way to socialism, which, in turn, after developing, should culminate in a society without a state and without classes, which he called communism”, something that Emmanuel found “absurd and crazy considering that a state would never favor its own disintegration, thus losing all the privileges of the ruling class.”
After giving us a review of the history of Karl Marx, Emmanuel also describes in this new installment of Culture War how Lenin (1870-1924) applied the Marxist model to Russia, constituting the Soviet Union, just as Mao (1893-1976) did in China and Fidel Castro (1926-2016) did in Cuba.
“Marxism-Leninism was applied in different countries around the world […] And in all these states it has been necessary the imposition of strong police regimes completely repressive to sustain their policies, which, moreover, in no case have generated economic benefits or in the quality of life of their citizens,” he explains.
Emmanuel was emphatic in recalling and highlighting that these regimes have “broken the productive apparatus of nations, have massacred, tortured and murdered citizens to impose their social policies,” which, he said, originated massive migrations to countries with free market economy models. “There they have exterminated their own peoples causing genocides” and gave the example of Cambodia, as well as other nations that ended up choosing to “abandon socialist policies to achieve the development of their countries.”
“Marx’s theory was almost never fully developed because in his notions, communism was the stage following socialism, which at least in theory should lack a State, contrary to what many think, communism and socialism are not excluded, socialism is simply an interim until reaching this utopian communist society that was only half-seen for a couple of years,” explains Emmanuel.
Finally, he concludes that to speak of communism in Cuba today is “incorrect”, and asserted in his analysis that “what predominates in authoritarian states such as the Cuban-Venezuelan one is socialism, only that the global left has tried to attribute everything that is pestilent and harmful to its ideology to communism in an attempt to clean up the image of socialism.”
