Something to Think About / Fernando Damaso

Fernando Dámaso, 29 August 2020 — During the 19th century, while socialist ideas struggled on the theoretical level, the capitalist ones did so on the theoretical and practical levels, since capitalism already existed in most countries and, in others, it was about to be established. In that era, socialist ideas, like capitalist ones, were defended by different theorists, with a diversity of proposals.

In the 20th century, with the establishment of Soviet power in ancient Russia, this situation totally changed: while capitalist ideas and practice continued to develop, with their particular characteristics in different countries, socialist ideas were subordinated to the practice that was just recently developed beginning in the USSR, acquiring the category of a dogma, which had to be rigidly applied, on pain of being accused of being a reformist, bourgeois, deviationist, etc., by the Soviet Communist Party.

It began with Lenin, continued with Stalin and continued with Khrushchev, Breshnev and others, who imposed it on all the so-called socialist countries of Eastern Europe, after the Second World War, and it reached Cuba in 1959. The exception was Yugoslavia, accused of being revisionist.

In China the ideas of Mao Tse Tung prevailed, in North Korea those of Kim Il Sung and in Vietnam those of Ho Chi Minh. From a certain moment, and continuing for a long time, there was an ideological confrontation between the communist parties of the USSR and China, which even led to armed violence along portions of their borders.

While they argued, supported by this one or that one, capitalism continued to develop and adapt to the new times, respecting the characteristics in each country. The result was the fall of socialism and the consolidation of capitalism. The USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe disappeared. Even those who still defend socialism (China and Vietnam), have adopted capitalist approaches in their economies and North Korea, one of the last of the Mohicans, also begins, slowly, to flirt with them.

Only Cuba remains, backward, frozen in time, in perpetual crisis, clinging to dogma and with no real possibilities for development, despite the primitive rhetoric of its historical and current leaders. The change is imposed.