Freiheit
Silver Member
- Sep 30, 2015
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Cuba is not a socialist country. It's an authoratarian dictatorship. There are no open or fair elections in Cuba and there haven't been fair and open elections since Castro came to power. The fact that the so-called "communist" leaders are billionaires shows that the economy is neither socialist nor communist. Any country where a class of people is allowed to accumulate more than their "needs", isn't communism. And any country where the ruling class of people accumulates great wealth, while infrastructure crumbles and poverty is rampant, isn't socialist.
Cuba is an authoritarian communist country. All communist countries were authoritarian.
It doesn't matter if the communist countries didn't devolve into some pure socialist paradise that checked all the boxes as articulated by Marx. People are people, not automatrons idealized by philosophers.
What matters is the primary order of organization that best resembles the ideals of the ideology.
And in that, communism was tried and failed. It should be relegated to the dustbins of history as a failed socioeconomic experiment.
A country cannot be authoritarian and communist at the same time. Communism is the antithesis of authoritarianism. Attempts at communism quickly devolved into authoritarianism in China, Russia and Cuba. Labelling a country "communist" or "socialist" is often a misnomer, and certainly authoritarianism and communism cannot exist within the same government. The moment there is an authoritarian elite, it defeats the whole premise of communism.
There are left wing authoritarians who provide for their people to keep popular support (the old "bread and circuses" of Roman times"), especially during times of brutal repression, and who paint those who criticize them or oppose them as "enemies of the people", as Stalin and Trump refer to the press. And right wing authoritarians like Duarte, who rule through fear and intimidation, and who steal the country blind (a frequently problem in countries ruled by strong men).
Marx stated "Until the “higher” phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers' control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat. How is it impossible for communism to be authoritarian? The founder of communism proposed dictatorship. Marx thoughts on democracy: "Democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation. But democracy is by no means a boundary not to be overstepped; it is only one of the stages on the road from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to communism. Democracy is not a requisite for communism according to Marx the author of communism.