Communism - Two different views

Schumacher 2 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

Schumacher 3 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