The Dichotomy Of Capitalism And Communism

For a little over seven million people, the year 1959 changed the course of their entire future when the Cuban Government under President Fulgencio Batista was toppled by a guerrilla army lead by Fidel Castro and the Movimiento 26 de Julio–the 26th of July Movement–became reality in Cuba. The subsequent government that replaced the Batista regime was lead exclusively by the leaders of this revolution and everything that the government embodied–everything from its policies, its politicians, and all the way down to those on the ground–would be known simply as La Revolución. However, on the 2nd of December in 1961, Fidel Castro officially came out and said:
“I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life… Marxism or scientific …show more content…
To begin with, the dichotomy of the systems of Capitalism and Communism are ultimately rooted in an economic sense, meaning their differences are in how the economy is managed by the government. This, however, fails to accurately represent Communism as a whole because it exists as a political and social entity as well, while Capitalism is only truly present in the real of economics. The argument can be made, as it has been done most famously by Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, that there is a culture attached to capitalism wherein the public makes economic decisions based on their own rational self-interest. While this is certainly the case, it must be noted that there is no inherent link between Capitalism as a economic policy and a social institution as it has no official doctrine or manifesto for such a link to be codified into its ideological fiber. The implication of this fact in regards to this discussion lies in the fact that because Communism is well-defined and specifically lists what elements are and are not present, there are many variations of Communism that may be extremely different from one another despite similar ideological roots. Communism was first introduced by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels in their seminal The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but did not appear as a major, lasting political entity until the founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. This party would later split into two distinct factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the former calling for the construction of a socialist state by means of a revolutionary vanguard establishing the entire system immediately and the latter advocating for the construction of capitalist stage of development through a bourgeois revolution on top of which a socialist