Florian Schumacher

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Western Literature II

April 27th, 2004

Communism ­ Two Different Views

The basis of my paper is a comparison between communism the way it is supposed to be,

as defined by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto, and the way

communism looks in reality, as it is described in Milan Kundera′s Book of Laughter and

Forgetting. At the beginning of this paper I will summarize the main ideas regarding

communism both of Marx and of Kundera, and afterwards I will compare those two points of

view.

In the first part of his Communist Manifesto, Marx says that the world is ruled by the

bourgeoisie and its capitalist attitude. With his manifesto, he wants to encourage the

Proletariat of the world to unite and fight side by side against capitalism. He thinks that the

main task of the communist party is to point out the common interest of the entire Proletariat

and to represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The main theory of communism is

­ according to Marx ­ the abolition of all private property, and in order to achieve that, the

party is even willing to sacrifice some parts of the individual freedom (like abolishing

families) as a part of the process to free the Proletariat from its oppressors.

Marx even admits that communism wants to abolish the eternal truths like freedom and

justice, as well as religion and morality. As some of the most important measures to make

communism possible he names heavy income taxes, abolition of property in land and, what is

very important considering my paper, the centralization of the means of communication and

transportation in the hands of the state. Being able to control the means of communication is

an important factor for a state to control and manipulate its population ­ like the example of

CNN and the manipulative media in the United States shows every day.

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Marx thinks that once all the measures he has in mind to make communism real have been

accomplished, the leaders can go on to achieve the final goal ­ the abolition of political

power. To sum it up you can say that Marx had a very specific and well structured idea of

what it would require to make a communist state possible.

In Kundera′s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, communism plays an important role too, as

in almost all novels of Kundera. He describes that when communism first came to

Czechoslovakia in 1948, "the more dynamic, more intelligent and better half of the population

cheered the accession of the communists to power." He, as one of those people, was

convinced of the communist ideas and saw the arrival of communism as a great success. But

he was rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new communist regime.

Suddenly all the people, including Kundera, who had wished that communism would come to

Bohemia, had the feeling of having sent something into the world that soon got out of their

control and that had lost all resemblance to their original idea.

Soon after realizing that, the young and intelligent people of Bohemia started to work

against the communist oppressors, trying to achieve a socialist state "with a human face".

Kundera was a leader of this reform movement and represented the movement′s desire for

more liberal socialism and freedom of art in any way. And in fact, the movement achieved

that the communism stepped back, and the final result of its efforts was the Prague Spring in

1968, in which the Czech borders opened and the whole country experienced a joyful

liberation. But as soon as the reform movement had accomplished this, they were defeated.

Seeing that communism, the way they wanted it to be, didn′t work in Bohemia, Russia sent

half a million of military troops to Czechoslovakia and totally occupied the country in order to

reanimate and enforce communism. At this point, the Russian leaders tried to erase the

nation′s memory of the revolutionary ideas by deporting the nation′s historians and critical

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writers (including Milan Kundera) and manipulating the past. The Soviets shifted the country

toward a repressive Soviet-dominant communism and banned everyone who refused to

cooperate with the new order. From Kundera′s point of view, Czechoslovakia then was more

like a totalitarian state than a communist state that he would have prefered, and because he

kept criticizing the Russian way to rule the country, the Czech government took his

citizenship away from him.

In my opinion it is very interesting to look and compare the points of view of Marx, as one

of the creators of communism, and Kundera, who actually experienced it. It shows that even

people like Kundera, who were convinced of the communist ideas, got disillusioned by the

way the Russians wanted to realize communism. Kundera agrees with the communist ideas

that the wealth of the world should be redistributed to make the people more equal, but he

refuses to accept that this plan can only be accomplished by sacrificing individual freedom.

In my opinion Marx, who had a very clear idea of how people could install communism in

their country, isn′t completely honest about all the necessary sacrifices they would have to

make in order to make communism possible. He admits that it would require the people to

sacrifice some parts of their individual freedom but he also says that this would just be

necessary to free them from their oppressors. Another part of the Communist Manifesto, in

which he writes that communism wants to abolish all eternal truths like freedom, justice and

morality, is also very interesting to consider within this context. He is aware that people

would have to cut back on their personal freedom and their human rights in order to make

communism possible, but he lets the readers of his manifesto believe that those are just

necessary steps in order to achieve complete social justice in the world.

Kundera on the other hand is able to tell us about the "real-world-communism", with all

its repressions and repercussions. The Russian communists ruled Czechoslovakia in a