New Voice

I must begin with a quick qualification: I’m not a socialist by any interesting stretch of the word, though I would espouse an interest in socialistic matters – in that I would like to be helpful to my fellow citizen, if I can. But further than this, I have always been deeply curious of economic history and read so accordingly, which is (certainly for the twentieth century) heavily inundated with multitudinous words of a Marxist flavor. Incorporating all of this, I have been reading the auto-biography of Mr. Fidel Castro for the last few days. It is defined as an auto-biography but is essentially a printed interview. The interviewer, the French thinker Ignacio Ramonet, is somewhat left-leaning (though it would be unfair to call him a socialist or entirely a follower of the Cuban socialist project), which makes for a central theme that follows the movement of Castro’s Marxist ideas from their beginnings right through their revolutionary achievements. And at what rate these ideas are delivered! I could get bogged down at suffocating length in an attempt to tackle just a few of the plethora of interesting ways the socialist subject is delved into throughout the interview; but there is not the time or space (our website is terribly finite) to do so. But more importantly, I was immediately struck by the subject of Marxism itself, and how in the twenty first century it still remains such an antagonist to a capitalist view point. (continue reading…)