Communism: 'The Greatest Fantasy of Our Century'

Fidel Castro’s recent pronouncement that the Cuban model is not working should serve as notice to those who still cling to communism that their ideological struggle will lead them only to an empty promised land. That whatever it is they are still fighting for – a utopic vision of total classlessness -- is just that – a utopia. Cuba’s experience is but another concrete affirmation that social justice and equality based on socialized ownership of property is untenable.

This should give Filipino communists (and communists everywhere for that matter) a jolt: there is nothing there for you at the end of the communist rainbow. For three decades now, Filipino communists have subjected the “toiling masses” of Filipinos to their ideological high-mindedness. Equipped with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, they have taken it upon themselves to wage a fierce revolution on behalf of and for the Filipino poor. They have considered it their duty to liberate the Filipinos from the shackles of U.S. imperialism as they believe it to be the root cause of all the problems of the Philippines. Once freed from imperial domination, they argue, Filipinos would be able to partake in a socialized and fair distribution of their country’s wealth.

The communists’ delusional fantasy revolves around the notion that the utopian vision will become a reality someday, that the future is knowable. The “iron laws of economic necessity” and the “scientific inevitability of history” could only lead to the realization of the communist revolution. To Marx, history is nothing but “a chain of cause-and-effect successions of certain types of society, following the preceding one with inexorable necessity.” The future is not open to possibilities, they say, and that the aims of the revolution will certainly come to fruition, giving birth to a society that is going to be completely free from material oppression. The certainty of the future gives communists a perspective on how to view the problems of the present: they are transitory and will soon come to pass. The future is more real than the present “because it is the ultimate destiny toward which everything present is moving” [Niemeyer, The Communist Mind].

It is this framework of thinking that encourages communists to get on with their ideological struggle. Despite hard evidence everywhere (the collapsed Soviet Union, a China that has hitched its economic destiny onto the free-market enterprise, and now Cuba’s broken model), the faithful ones continue with their fight. As to the reason why, Leszek Kolakowski has this explanation to offer:

. . . it is a certainty not based on any empirical premises or supposed “historical laws,” but simply on the psychological need for certainty. In this sense Marxism performs the function of religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporary eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be [Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism . . .].

But if that reasoning is not enough to convince these communists to give up their fight, just take a long, hard look at Cuba: their present predicament is the future you’ve been fighting for.