Communism: Theory vs. Practice
To say that Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, or Lenin or Stalin’s Russia was a communist nation is a lie. The mere fact that these countries are nearly defined by their leaders should indicate to anyone knowledgeable of Marxism that the governments enacted by Castro, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin were anything but communist. These leaders took elements of communism and mixed them with totalitarianism. Where communism is a system designed to eradicate oppression, these leaders have been characterized by oppression of their people.
When Castro sent the “undesirables” out of Cuba, he took his first step away from communism. Communism is for everyone. There are no “undesirables” in a truly communist nation. “From the greatest ability to the greatest need” doesn’t necessarily imply inequality, though many have interpreted it as such. However, Marxism makes no scientific claims about the nature of man, and to infer from “from the greatest ability to the greatest need” that communist theory implies inequality, one must make an unsupported assumption about the scientific nature of man. If all men are born equal, but different, i.e. all having the same measure of ability but in different fields, where all fields are considered equal, then “from the greatest ability to the greatest need” implies that for all men to remain equal, they must put forth equal effort. This is the heart of communism. Therefore, a true communist nation cannot acknowledge the presence of “undesirables” because there is no such thing in a sea of equal men. It then follows that Castro is not truly a communist.
This is not to discount the many good things Castro did for Cuba. His efforts in the medical sector alone all but make up for his human rights violations. His successes in the country are attributable to the elements he borrowed from communism in creating the new Cuba. However he, like Stalin, chose to interpret communist theory in such a way that reduced social and political freedoms, when communism was intended to facilitate freedom. In focusing only on economic freedoms, and ignoring or trivializing personal freedoms and encouraging state endorsed discrimination, Castro ceased to be a communist leader and became a dictator. A communist leader, though the phrase itself is anomalous, as in a truly communist state there is no leader, would protect all his citizens from injustice, economic and otherwise.
Though communism is primarily a system concerned with the distribution of wealth and shifting the power from the bourgeois to the proletariat, it is more generally a system concerned with attaining equality. Once economic equality has been achieved, or a political structure that will lead to it has been implemented, moving on to remedying the social inequalities plaguing a newly communist nation is the obvious next step. In a time when the proletariat often was overworked and underfed, one can understand how Marx and Engels could have failed to see the necessity of mentioning social injustice in their Communist Manifesto. In current capitalist and “morality” fueled times in America, the need for a “social communism” is of parallel importance to that of the traditional economic communism.
Capitalist nations such as the US wish to vilify communism, because the governmental power in capitalist nations is held by the same people who have power over the media, and by extension, public opinion. As long as the same people control both the government and public opinion, uninformed Americans will always dislike and fear communism, basing their ideas about the nature of communism on the “communist” countries of Cuba, Russia, and China. America’s capitalist leaders would like to see their citizens blind, deaf, and dumb to any good another system might offer, for if America were to suddenly turn to communism, it would mean an end to their power and extravagant lifestyle. Capitalism fueled greed has, in fact, made them blind, deaf, and dumb to the true value of life versus the value of money.