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  • An Anti-Anti-Communist FAQ: A Literary-Philosophical Rebuttal to the Right’s Most Persistent Arguments

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    Anti-communism rarely begins as an economic theory. More often, it begins as a scene of fear: the home invaded, the church closed, the small shop confiscated, the child indoctrinated, the nation betrayed, the family dissolved. In the classic Cold War manuals of anti-communist propaganda, communism is not merely presented as a political doctrine; it is staged as an existential contamination. The 1949 pamphlet 100 Things You Should Know About Communism, prepared by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, described communism as “a system by which one small group seeks to rule the world” and claimed that its basic methods were conspiracy abroad and “iron force” where it governed. J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit similarly framed communism as a threat to “home”, “children”, “freedom”, religion and Western civilisation itself.

    This FAQ does not deny that historical communist states committed grave crimes, nor does it pretend that every criticism of communism is propaganda. A serious communist argument must face bureaucracy, censorship, famine, police power and the deformation of socialist ideals into state domination. Rosa Luxemburg’s warning remains indispensable: socialism without democracy becomes not liberation, but a new form of rule. Yet the right-wing case against communism usually does something less honest. It takes the worst authoritarian experiences of the twentieth century, treats them as the eternal essence of communism, and then hides the everyday violence of capitalism behind words such as “freedom”, “merit” and “order”.

    Gramsci would have recognised the mechanism immediately. Hegemony works when a ruling class does not merely dominate institutions, but teaches society to experience its domination as common sense. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a process of “intellectual and moral leadership” through which a ruling class embeds itself across society. Anti-communism, in this sense, is not only an argument; it is a cultural grammar.

    What follows is a set of replies to the most common arguments of the right against communism.

    1. “Communism abolishes freedom.”

    The first question is: freedom for whom, and freedom to do what?

    Right-wing propaganda usually defines freedom as private property, market choice and minimal state interference. Hoover’s Masters of Deceit claimed that communism would steal “your rights, liberties, and property”, while HUAC’s pamphlet imagined a life in which one could not choose one’s job, school, church, home or movement.

    The communist reply begins by refusing this narrow definition. Marx and Engels do not deny freedom; they ask why capitalist freedom is so unevenly distributed. In The Communist Manifesto, they argue that bourgeois private property already does not exist for the majority: its existence for the few depends on its non-existence for the many. Their point is not that ordinary people should lose personal possessions, but that no class should possess the means by which it can command the labour, time and life chances of others.

    The liberal says: freedom is the right to sell your labour.
    The communist asks: what kind of freedom is it when survival forces the sale?

    This is where Marx meets Amartya Sen. Sen’s theory of capabilities defines freedom not merely as non-interference, but as the real capacity to live, learn, eat, move, think and participate in society. A starving person is not free because the state has left him alone. A child without education is not free because the market offers private schools she cannot afford. A sick worker is not free because a hospital exists somewhere behind a paywall.

    Communism therefore does not abolish freedom; at its best, it radicalises the question of freedom. It asks that freedom be measured materially, not rhetorically.

    2. “Communism means dictatorship.”

    The right-wing argument usually commits a philosophical error: it confuses historical degeneration with theoretical essence. Based on rhetoric and propaganda, it concludes that communism must contain dictatorship as its inevitable truth. This is not dialectics; it is reduction. A dialectical reading, from Hegel to Marx and later Lukács, asks us to distinguish between an idea, its historical conditions of realisation, its contradictions, and the forms into which it may be distorted under pressure. The Soviet Union did not emerge in the abstract realm of political theory; it emerged from imperial collapse, world war, civil war, foreign intervention, economic backwardness, famine, isolation and military encirclement.

    Rosa Luxemburg had already warned that socialism without democracy would become a contradiction against itself. Trotsky later described the Soviet bureaucracy not as the fulfilment of communism, but as a degeneration of the revolution under conditions of scarcity, isolation and political repression. In this sense, authoritarian socialism should be read not as the transparent essence of communism, but as one possible historical deformation of it — a deformation produced when a revolution that promises the self-rule of workers becomes administered by a party-state standing above them.

    The same standard, however, must then be applied to capitalism. If the authoritarian degeneration of the Soviet Union proves the dictatorial essence of communism, then the historical alliance between capitalism and fascism would prove the fascist essence of capitalism. Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere protected private property, crushed trade unions, persecuted communists and socialists, militarised labour, collaborated with industrial and financial elites, and transformed national crisis into authoritarian class discipline. Historians such as Robert O. Paxton and Karl Polanyi show that fascism was not merely irrational barbarism descending from nowhere; it was also a political answer to capitalist crisis, mass democracy, socialist threat and the fear of class revolution. Max Horkheimer’s famous warning — that one cannot speak honestly of fascism while remaining silent about capitalism — captures precisely this relation.

    Yet the liberal right rarely accepts the conclusion that capitalism is therefore inherently fascist. It calls fascism an aberration, an excess, a crisis-form, a pathological response, a betrayal of liberal principles.

    This is where dialectical thought becomes necessary. Historical association is not essence. A phenomenon must be understood in the totality of relations that produced it: class struggle, war, imperial pressure, scarcity, institutional form, ideology, state power and material development. Communism contains within itself a tension between emancipation and centralisation, between collective ownership and bureaucratic command, between the abolition of class domination and the danger of a state claiming to speak permanently in the name of the class. Capitalism contains its own tension between formal liberty and material domination, between parliamentary rights and economic coercion, between market freedom and imperial violence. To analyse one system by its worst historical manifestation while analysing the other by its most idealised self-description is not philosophy. It is propaganda.

    A serious communist argument should therefore concede the tragic truth: twentieth-century socialism often produced authoritarian forms that betrayed its emancipatory promise. But a serious anti-capitalist argument must add the corresponding truth: capitalism has repeatedly produced colonialism, slavery, fascism, imperial war, racial hierarchy, ecological destruction and economic dictatorship while continuing to describe itself as freedom. The task is not to protect communism from history, but to protect historical thinking from ideological simplification. The question is not whether communist states have committed crimes. They have. The question is why the crimes of communist states are treated as revelations of essence, while the crimes of capitalist states are treated as deviations, accidents or unfortunate necessities.

    The dialectical answer is that both systems must be judged not by their slogans, but by the social relations they create and the contradictions they generate. A democratic communism for the twenty-first century must therefore learn from the failure of bureaucratic socialism without surrendering to the myth of capitalist innocence. It must reject the party-state monopoly of truth as firmly as it rejects the capitalist monopoly of property. It must say: no dictatorship of the bureaucracy, no dictatorship of capital, no imperial dictatorship disguised as democracy, and no reduction of historical tragedy into anti-communist common sense.

    3. “Communism will take your house, your savings and your toothbrush.”

    This is perhaps the oldest trick in anti-communist rhetoric: confuse personal property with capitalist property.

    HUAC’s 1949 pamphlet told readers that under communism all real estate would belong to the government and that even bank accounts would be confiscated above a small sum. Hoover’s version intensified the fear, claiming that homes, businesses, deposits and personal possessions would be taken in a total communisation of life.

    Marx’s distinction is crucial. Communism is not primarily about abolishing personal belongings. It is about abolishing bourgeois private property: the ownership of productive assets that allows one class to live from the labour of another. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly distinguish personal appropriation for human life from property that becomes capital, rent and command over others.

    Your home is not the same thing as a real-estate empire.
    Your savings are not the same thing as a private bank.
    Your small workshop is not the same thing as a monopoly.
    Your personal belongings are not the same thing as ownership of land, infrastructure, credit, media and logistics.

    The right deliberately collapses these distinctions because fear is politically more efficient than analysis.

    4. “Communism destroys the economy.”

    The first answer is that capitalism also destroys economies — repeatedly, structurally and globally. Marx’s theory of crisis, later developed by David Harvey, begins from capitalism’s instability: overproduction, speculation, debt, unemployment, asset bubbles, enclosure, financial collapse and the constant search for new areas of extraction.

    The second answer is that capitalist economies are already massively planned. Central banks plan interest rates. States plan infrastructure. Corporations plan supply chains. Platforms plan behaviour. Supermarkets plan logistics. Military procurement is planned. Agribusiness is planned. The question is not planning versus no planning. The question is: planning by whom, and for whose benefit?

    Karl Polanyi argued that the idea of a self-regulating market was historically destructive because it turned labour, land and money into commodities, even though human beings and nature were never produced for sale. Nancy Fraser extends this critique: capitalism depends on care work, ecology and public institutions, yet systematically devalues and exhausts them.

    The economic case for communism is not that a central committee should decide the colour of every shoe. It is that strategic sectors — health, housing, transport, energy, education, land, water, digital infrastructure, banking and ecological transition — are too important to be governed by profit alone.

    The empirical problem is also severe. The World Inequality Report 2026 states that the global bottom 50% owns only 2% of wealth, while the top 10% owns 75% of total personal wealth and captures 53% of income. This is not efficient civilisation; it is organised asymmetry.

    5. “Without profit, no one will work.”

    This argument assumes that human beings are animated only by greed. It is sociologically false and philosophically miserable.

    People work for income, yes, but also for dignity, recognition, obligation, skill, care, curiosity, vocation, loyalty, public duty and meaning. Nurses, teachers, firefighters, researchers, parents, artists, volunteers and public servants do not fit neatly into the fantasy of the purely self-interested market actor. Even capitalism relies constantly on non-capitalist motivations.

    Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser are decisive here. They show that capitalism rests on enormous amounts of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labour: cooking, cleaning, raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining emotional life, repairing bodies and households. If people truly worked only for profit, society would collapse by breakfast.

    Communism does not deny incentives. It asks why incentives must be organised through fear, unemployment, humiliation and artificial scarcity. A socialist economy could still reward skill, responsibility, effort and difficulty. What it would reject is the right of one person to become fantastically rich merely by owning what others need in order to live.

    6. “Communism is against merit.”

    Capitalism does not reward merit in any pure sense. It rewards ownership, inheritance, networks, credentials, race, gender, geography, family wealth and proximity to power. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital explains why privilege disguises itself as talent. The elite child inherits not only money, but accent, confidence, taste, institutional familiarity and the ability to move through the world as if it were built for them.

    Brasil is a particularly clear example. IBGE reported that Brazil’s Gini index for per capita household income was 0.504 in 2024, and would have risen to 0.542 without social programme benefits. This means that public redistribution already prevents Brazilian inequality from becoming even more brutal.

    A communist critique of meritocracy does not say that effort does not matter. It says that effort begins from unequal ground. The child who studies hungry and the child who studies with tutors are not running the same race. The right calls the result merit because it refuses to look at the starting line.

    A communist society would seek to make merit more real by reducing inherited advantage.

    7. “Capitalism lifted billions out of poverty.”

    This argument contains a truth, but it is never the whole truth.

    Capitalist development did increase productivity, urbanisation, medicine, communication and industrial capacity. Marx himself cited capitalism’s revolutionary energy. He never described capitalism as merely stagnant or primitive; he saw it as historically dynamic and historically destructive.

    But several questions remain.

    Who produced the wealth?
    Who captured it?
    At what ecological cost?
    How much poverty was reduced by markets alone, and how much by land reform, public health, labour rights, industrial policy, state planning, anti-colonial struggle, trade unions and social programmes?

    The OECD has found that high inequality harms long-term growth, particularly by damaging educational opportunities and human capital among poorer groups. Even from a mainstream economic perspective, inequality is not just morally ugly; it is economically irrational.

    The communist answer is not to deny capitalism’s productive achievements. It is to argue that humanity now possesses the technical capacity to move beyond a system that distributes abundance through domination.

    8. “Communism always causes famine.”

    Amartya Sen famously argued that famines are not caused simply by lack of food, but by failures of entitlement, distribution, democracy and public accountability. Famines have occurred under colonial capitalism, market economies and authoritarian socialist states alike. The Bengal famine of 1943, under British imperial rule, is one of the most devastating examples of famine within a capitalist-imperial order.

    The correct lesson is not “markets feed and communism starves”. The correct lesson is: any system that combines concentrated power, weak accountability, restricted information and disregard for human life can produce catastrophe.

    A democratic socialism must therefore protect free information, local accountability, agricultural diversity, ecological planning, food sovereignty and strong rights for rural workers and small farmers. The issue is not only ownership, but democratic control over the conditions of life.

    9. “Communism destroys religion and the family.”

    This is one of the most culturally effective anti-communist claims. HUAC’s pamphlet on communism and religion declared that one could not be both communist and believe in God, and claimed communism would attack religion, family, moral codes and education. The American Legion’s anti-communist material similarly fused patriotism, suspicion and moral alarm, urging citizens to identify supposed communist influence in schools, churches, unions and cultural life.

    The reply requires precision. Marx criticised religion as ideology, but he also understood it as the “heart of a heartless world” — a response to suffering, not merely stupidity. Liberation theology in Latin America, Christian socialism, Catholic social teaching, Black church radicalism, Islamic anti-colonial socialism and many religious labour movements prove that religious life and anti-capitalist politics are not inherently incompatible.

    The right’s deeper fear is not that communism destroys the family. It is that communism politicises the family. It asks why domestic labour is feminised and unpaid; why children inherit class destiny; why women are economically trapped in marriage; why care is treated as private burden rather than social responsibility.

    Marx and Engels’ critique of the bourgeois family was not a demand to abolish love. It was a critique of a family form structured by property, inheritance, patriarchy and economic dependence.

    A democratic communist politics should defend religious freedom and family pluralism. What it should abolish is not faith or affection, but the economic coercion hidden inside them.

    10. “Communism is foreign infiltration.”

    This was central to Cold War propaganda. HUAC presented communism as conspiracy; Hoover described the Communist Party as a “state within a state” and a transmission belt for Soviet mentality. The American Legion pamphlet encouraged citizens to detect “fronts” and boycott suspected sympathisers in cultural and civic life.

    The Gramscian reply is that anti-communism often functions by making domestic suffering appear foreign. Low wages are not foreign. Hunger is not foreign. Evictions are not foreign. Police violence is not foreign. Racial hierarchy is not foreign. The exhaustion of teachers and nurses is not foreign. These are internal contradictions of the national order.

    In Brasil, anti-communism has long served as a way to criminalise demands for land, labour rights, racial justice, public education and democratic reform. Scholarship on Brazilian historical denialism notes that defences of the 1964 coup often relied on the claim that it was a counterrevolution against an alleged communist threat.

    The foreignness accusation is powerful because it makes capitalism appear native, natural and patriotic, even when Brazilian capitalism has always been entangled with colonial extraction, foreign debt, multinational corporations, IMF pressure, commodity dependence and global financial hierarchy.

    Communism, in a Brazilian key, need not be imported. It can emerge from quilombos, Indigenous land defence, peasant movements, urban peripheries, public health workers, teachers, domestic workers, trade unions and the memory of people who have always known that survival is collective.

    11. “Communism means crime, disorder and social collapse.”

    The right usually treats crime as moral decay. Communism treats it as a social fact.

    This does not mean excusing violence. It means asking what kind of society produces zones where legal life becomes structurally unavailable. Loïc Wacquant’s work on urban marginality shows how neoliberal states often withdraw welfare and then expand punishment. The state disappears as school, clinic, housing and employment, then returns as police and prison.

    A communist response to crime would not be naive abolition of all security. It would combine public safety with the elimination of the conditions that feed crime: unemployment, school failure, housing precarity, untreated addiction, family stress, racialised policing, prison recruitment by organised crime and territorial abandonment.

    The right asks: how do we punish after collapse?
    The communist asks: why do we organise society so that collapse becomes routine?

    12. “Communism is anti-national.”

    Marx and Engels wrote that workers have no country in the bourgeois sense: not because they hate their homeland, but because the nation-state often asks them to die for an order in which they possess very little. Yet they also write that the proletariat must first become the leading class of the nation.

    Communism is not hatred of the nation. It is hatred of the capture of the nation by property.

    A Brazilian communist patriot would ask: what does it mean to love Brasil? Does it mean loving agribusiness more than forests? Banks more than schools? Arms more than sanitation? The flag more than the hungry? The anthem more than the people who clean, build, cook, teach, drive, nurse and bury?

    The right confuses nation with hierarchy. Communism can reclaim nation as shared life.

    13. “Look at Venezuela, Cuba, the USSR.”

    One should look. But one should look historically, not theatrically.

    The USSR cannot be reduced either to gulags or to industrialisation. Cuba cannot be reduced either to healthcare achievements or to political repression. Venezuela cannot be explained only by socialism while ignoring oil dependency, sanctions, currency crisis, state mismanagement, corruption and global commodity shocks.

    The right’s method is selective comparison. Every failure of a socialist experiment is attributed to socialism. Every failure of capitalism is attributed to corruption, bad government, lack of capitalism, or individual irresponsibility.

    A serious answer must be symmetrical. If famine, censorship and bureaucracy count against socialism, then colonialism, slavery, fascist alliances, imperial wars, coups, sweatshops, climate breakdown, homelessness and medical bankruptcy must count against capitalism.

    SIPRI reported that world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth. If communism must answer for the violence committed in its name, capitalism must answer for the global military and imperial order through which it has repeatedly defended markets, resources and strategic dominance.

    14. “Communism failed; capitalism won.”

    This is not an argument. It is a survivor’s boast.

    Feudalism once looked eternal. Monarchy once looked natural. Slavery was defended as economic necessity. Patriarchy was described as divine order. Every dominant system mistakes its temporary victory for permanent truth.

    Gramsci‘s lesson is that no order survives by force alone. It must occupy language, religion, school, entertainment, law, journalism and everyday morality. Anti-communism became powerful because it taught people to fear equality more than exploitation; to fear redistribution more than hunger; to fear public ownership more than private monopoly; to fear “ideology” in teachers while ignoring ideology in advertising, television, churches, banks, police and family inheritance.

    The right did not defeat communism only by argument. It built a common sense in which capitalism became reality itself.

    The communist task is therefore not merely to answer objections. It is to create another common sense: one in which housing is not a commodity, healthcare is not a privilege, education is not inheritance, work is not humiliation, and democracy does not end at the factory gate.

    Conclusion: The Real Question

    The right asks whether communism is dangerous.

    The communist reply should be: compared with what?

    Compared with a world where the bottom half owns 2% of wealth?
    Compared with cities where empty apartments coexist with homelessness?
    Compared with economies that depend on unpaid care while mocking dependency?
    Compared with trillion-dollar military systems and collapsing ecosystems?
    Compared with democracies in which money speaks louder than citizens?

    Communism is not defensible when it becomes censorship, bureaucracy, militarised party rule or contempt for individual life. But capitalism is not defensible merely because its violence is familiar, privatised and distributed through contracts rather than decrees.

    The most honest defence of communism today is not that it has all the answers. It is that it asks the questions capitalism is structurally designed to avoid: who owns the world, who works for whom, who benefits from scarcity, why abundance produces misery, and why freedom should belong first to property rather than to human beings.

    A society that cannot ask these questions has not defeated communism. It has only become afraid of thinking beyond its masters.

  • Capitalism at the End of Its Moral Imagination: A Gramscian Essay on Brasil, Communism and the Need for Systemic Transformation

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    The contemporary defence of capitalism often begins with a triumphal sentence: capitalism produces wealth. This may be true, but insufficient. A system must not be judged only by what it produces; it must be judged by what it concentrates, what it destroys, what it normalises, and what kind of human being it asks us to become in order to survive within it. Capitalism has produced abundance, but it has also produced a civilisation in which abundance is structurally separated from need. It has created technological splendour beside hunger, financial sophistication beside precarious labour, private luxury beside public exhaustion.

    The central philosophical question, therefore, is not whether capitalism works. It clearly works for some. The question is whether it can still be morally defended as the organising principle of a society that claims to value dignity, democracy and human flourishing.

    The communist argument begins precisely here: not as a nostalgic return to twentieth-century authoritarianism, but as a critique of the private appropriation of collective life. In Marx, capitalism is not merely an economy; it is a social relation in which labour produces value while capital captures it. In Karl Polanyi, the market society becomes intolerable because it turns land, labour and money into fictitious commodities, treating human beings and nature as if they existed primarily for exchange. In Nancy Fraser, capitalism survives by cannibalising the very spheres it depends on: care, ecology, public institutions and social reproduction. In David Harvey, capitalism is restless accumulation: it must expand, privatise, extract and urbanise, even when human need no longer requires it.

    The result is not accidental inequality, but organised inequality.

    Globally, the World Inequality Report 2026 states that the richest 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half of humanity owns only 2%. The same report notes that the poorest half captures less than 10% of global income. This is not a marginal imperfection; it is the architecture of the system. It means that billions of lives are lived downstream from decisions made by a tiny class whose power is not merely economic, but political, cultural and ecological.

    Capitalism thus produces a paradox: the more productive society becomes, the less socially rational it appears. It is possible to produce enough food, yet tolerate hunger. It is possible to build hospitals, yet deny care. It is possible to educate every child, yet transform education into inherited advantage. It is possible to house people, yet preserve homelessness as a disciplinary spectacle. The communist critique insists that such contradictions are not failures of generosity, but failures of ownership.

    I. Inequality as the Hidden Constitution of Capitalism

    The first defect of contemporary capitalism is the concentration of income and wealth. Liberal theory often treats inequality as a tolerable side effect of freedom. But this is a philosophical deception. Extreme inequality does not merely distribute goods unequally; it distributes life chances, time, health, education, safety and political voice unequally.

    Thomas Piketty’s historical work shows that, when capital accumulation is left largely unchecked, inherited wealth tends to grow faster than wages and productive growth. Pierre Bourdieu helps explain why this inequality reproduces itself beyond money: economic capital becomes cultural capital, educational advantage, confidence, taste, language, networks and legitimacy. The child of the elite does not inherit only property; they inherit the grammar of power.

    Brasil is one of the clearest laboratories of this problem. Even after recent improvements, IBGE data show that Brasil’s Gini index for per capita household income remained at 0.504 in 2024; without social programme benefits, it would have risen to 0.542. In other words, the Brazilian state already prevents inequality from becoming even more obscene. The country is not poor because it lacks wealth; it is socially wounded because wealth is badly organised.

    This is where communism makes philosophical sense. It refuses to treat redistribution as charity. It asks why the productive structure itself allows so much wealth to be privately captured in the first place. A communist horizon does not simply mean taxing the rich after inequality has been produced. It means democratising the institutions that produce wealth: land, credit, housing, infrastructure, technology, natural resources and strategic industries.

    In capitalist society, redistribution is often treated as correction. In communist thought, equality must be built into production itself.

    II. Crime, Violence and the Social Manufacture of Despair

    A second defect of capitalism is its tendency to criminalise the consequences of its own exclusions. Societies that deny stable housing, dignified labour, education and social belonging then express astonishment when abandonment returns as violence. This does not mean every crime has a simple economic explanation. It means that crime is never merely individual. It is also spatial, historical and institutional.

    Loïc Wacquant’s sociology of urban marginality is essential here. He shows how neoliberal states often withdraw social protection from poor territories while expanding penal control over those same territories. The state disappears as school, clinic, housing policy and labour guarantee, then reappears as police, prison and surveillance.

    Brasil’s violence must be read through this lens. Ipea and the Brazilian Forum on Public Security reported 45,747 homicides in Brasil in 2023, a rate of 21.2 per 100,000 inhabitants; although this was the lowest rate in eleven years, the figures remain devastating, and the highest rates are concentrated in the North and Northeast.

    Communism answers this not by romanticising crime, but by attacking its social conditions. A society organised around common welfare would treat violence prevention as housing policy, school policy, employment policy, mental health policy, urban policy and racial justice. The right-wing answer to crime is usually punishment after social collapse. The communist answer is the prevention of collapse itself.

    This is not sentimentalism. The OECD has found that inequality has a negative and statistically significant impact on subsequent economic growth, partly because it damages human capital formation among people from poorer backgrounds. The IMF has also concluded that inequality is a robust determinant of both the pace and durability of growth, and that it is a mistake to “focus on growth and let inequality take care of itself.”

    A society with less inequality is not only fairer. It is more stable, more intelligent, less violent and less wasteful.

    III. Health and Education: The Moral Proof of Socialism Already Existing Inside Brasil

    Brasil already contains, within its own institutions, fragments of a socialist moral order. The SUS is the clearest example. It is founded on the principle that health is not a commodity, but a universal right. According to Agência Brasil, 76% of Brazilians depend directly on the SUS, which conducts around 2.8 billion consultations per year. The Commonwealth Fund also describes Brasil’s SUS as a tax-funded universal system, free at the point of care, covering all residents and visitors.

    This is philosophically decisive. When Brazilians defend the SUS, they are already defending a principle that contradicts pure capitalism. They are saying: life must not depend entirely on purchasing power.

    The same applies to education. The OECD reports that Brazilian adults aged 25–64 with tertiary education earn, on average, 148% more than those with upper secondary education, far above the OECD average premium of 54%. This shows that education in Brasil is not merely a personal good; it is one of the central mechanisms through which class destiny is reproduced.

    A communist perspective does not see education as training for the labour market alone. It sees education as the formation of free human beings capable of participating in collective life. Here Gramsci is fundamental. For him, every class that wishes to govern must produce its own intellectual and moral leadership. Education is not neutral; it is where society teaches people what is possible, what is respectable, what is “natural” and what must never be questioned.

    The struggle for education, therefore, is also the struggle over common sense.

    IV. War, Empire and the Capitalist Organisation of Fear

    Capitalism also has an international form. It does not exist only as private enterprise within nations; it exists as competition between states, corporations, currencies, supply chains and military blocs. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, despite their differences, both understood imperialism as connected to capital’s need for expansion. Immanuel Wallerstein later described capitalism as a world-system divided between core, semi-periphery and periphery, where wealth flows through unequal global structures.

    War cannot be reduced to capitalism alone. Nationalism, religion, territory, ethnicity and state ambition all matter. But capitalism intensifies the material incentives for domination: resources, energy corridors, cheap labour, arms markets, reconstruction contracts, debt dependency and strategic control.

    The scale of militarised irrationality is staggering. SIPRI reported that world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth, with global spending up 41% over the decade from 2016 to 2025.

    From a communist perspective, this is not merely a budgetary fact; it is a civilisational indictment. A world that can mobilise trillions for war but hesitates before universal sanitation, climate adaptation, food security and public health is not poor. It is politically deformed.

    Communism proposes the replacement of competitive accumulation with planned sufficiency: production organised around need rather than profit, international cooperation rather than imperial hierarchy, and public investment rather than permanent militarisation.

    V. How the Right Won the Cultural War in Brasil

    To understand Brasil, however, one must not imagine power only as government. This is the core of Gramsci’s relevance. Gramsci argued that ruling classes do not govern by coercion alone. They govern through hegemony: intellectual and moral leadership that makes a particular social order appear natural, inevitable and commonsensical.

    The Brazilian right did not gain strength merely through elections. It gained strength by occupying the imagination.

    For decades, anti-communism was not presented only as an economic argument, but as a moral instinct. The left was associated with disorder, corruption, atheism, sexual threat, criminal leniency and national decline. Meanwhile, capitalism was translated into the language of family, merit, entrepreneurship, religious virtue, security and individual effort.

    This is Gramsci in practice: the transformation of class interest into common sense.

    Brazilian media concentration helped form this terrain. The Media Ownership Monitor found that five families controlled 26 of the 50 media outlets with the largest audiences in Brasil, with Grupo Globo alone holding nine of them and reaching an audience larger than the second, third, fourth and fifth largest groups combined. Such concentration does not mean every journalist or outlet is ideologically identical, but it does mean that the symbolic infrastructure of public debate has long been narrow, elite-centred and commercially organised.

    Religion also became a decisive field of hegemony. Brasil remains religiously plural, but the 2022 Census data show a major shift: Catholics fell to 56.7%, while Evangelicals rose to 26.9%. This transformation cannot be treated with contempt. Many Evangelical churches provide community, discipline, care, music, language, welfare and belonging in places where the secular state has often arrived late or not at all. But conservative political actors learned to translate economic anxiety into moral panic, and moral panic into electoral discipline.

    More recently, digital networks accelerated this process. Studies on Brasil show that WhatsApp became a key infrastructure for political disinformation, including during the rise of Bolsonarism, and research on the 8 January Brasília attack found attempts to manufacture consensus in public WhatsApp groups around anti-democratic narratives.

    The contemporary Brazilian right, then, did not simply defend capitalism. It disguised capitalism beneath resentment. It converted economic suffering into hatred of teachers, feminists, artists, Black movements, LGBTQIA+ people, environmentalists, public servants and the poor themselves. As recent Gramscian analysis of Bolsonarism argues, cultural conservatism, anti-globalism, nationalism and conspiracy theory have helped preserve a neoliberal economic agenda by shifting attention away from political economy and towards moral threat.

    VI. A Gramscian Route for Brasil

    A Gramscian “turn” for Brasil cannot be imagined as a sudden seizure of the state followed by decrees from above. That would misunderstand both Brasil and Gramsci. In complex modern societies, Gramsci distinguishes between a war of manoeuvre and a war of position. A war of manoeuvre is frontal rupture. A war of position is slower, deeper and cultural: the construction of a new historical bloc capable of leading society before it governs it.

    For a country like Brasil — continental, unequal, religious, racially stratified, institutionally dense and culturally plural — the communist route would need to be democratic, constitutional, pedagogical and material.

    First, it would need to rebuild common sense. The left cannot speak only in administrative language: programmes, budgets, acronyms, ministries. It must produce a moral vocabulary capable of competing with the right’s simplicity. It must say, repeatedly and concretely, that hunger is not fate, rent is not destiny, illness is not a market opportunity, and poverty is not proof of personal failure.

    Second, it must form organic intellectuals. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals are not merely professors or writers; they are organisers of feeling and meaning. In Brasil, they would have to emerge from schools, unions, churches, neighbourhood associations, cultural movements, universities, health workers, delivery workers, domestic workers, public servants, artists, pastors, mães de santo, favela leaders, small farmers and digital creators. The point is not propaganda in the crude sense. The point is democratic pedagogy: helping people name the structures that injure them.

    Third, the left must stop treating culture as decorative. Culture is infrastructure. Music, television, memes, literature, sport, religion, humour, schools and neighbourhood rituals shape political possibility long before manifestos do. A communist project in Brasil would need popular media, community journalism, public digital platforms, cultural funding outside elite circuits, and a language that does not humiliate ordinary conservatism but patiently separates legitimate moral anxiety from authoritarian manipulation.

    Fourth, the economic programme must be concrete enough to touch daily life. It should include progressive taxation of income, wealth, dividends and inheritance; expansion of public housing; universal full-time public education; strengthening of the SUS; public control over strategic infrastructure; green industrial planning; land reform where socially and environmentally justified; incentives for worker cooperatives; public banking for development; and democratic planning mechanisms at municipal, state and federal levels.

    Fifth, crime must be removed from the monopoly of the punitive imagination. A communist-inspired security policy would combine intelligence against organised crime with investment in schools, urban infrastructure, employment, drug policy reform, mental health, prison reform and police accountability. The goal would not be naïve pacifism, but the end of the social production of disposable populations.

    Sixth, the project must defend democracy more seriously than liberalism has defended it. This means plural parties, free elections, independent courts, press freedom, anti-corruption mechanisms, transparency, participatory budgeting, social councils and constitutional guarantees. A Brazilian communism worthy of the twenty-first century cannot be authoritarian; it must be more democratic than capitalism, or it will deserve to fail.

    Seventh, it must construct a new historical bloc. In Brasil, this bloc cannot be only the industrial working class in the classical European sense. It must include informal workers, app drivers, care workers, teachers, nurses, Black and Indigenous movements, women, favela residents, progressive religious communities, small entrepreneurs crushed by monopolies, family farmers, environmentalists and the precarious middle class. Its unifying principle would be simple: no one should have to live permanently afraid in order for others to accumulate without limit.

    Conclusion: Communism as the Name of an Unfinished Moral Demand

    The case for communism today is not that history has given us a perfect model. It has not. The twentieth century offers warnings as well as hopes. Any serious communist argument must recognise the dangers of bureaucracy, repression, party absolutism and state idolatry.

    But the failures committed in the name of communism do not absolve capitalism of its present violence.

    Capitalism continues to ask society to accept hunger amid abundance, loneliness amid connectivity, ecological breakdown amid technological brilliance, and obscene wealth amid preventable misery. It tells us that there is no alternative, which is always the sentence spoken by systems that fear being imagined beyond.

    Gramsci teaches that political transformation begins before government. It begins when a society stops mistaking domination for common sense. Brasil’s future will not be changed only by winning elections. It will be changed by rebuilding the moral imagination of the country: by making solidarity appear practical, equality appear intelligent, public goods appear sacred, and exploitation appear as archaic as monarchy.

    Communism, at its strongest, is not merely a doctrine of the state. It is the insistence that human beings are not born to be managed as costs, ranked as competitors and abandoned as failures. It is the claim that the wealth of a society belongs, in the deepest sense, to those who produce and sustain it.

    And in a country like Brasil — so vast, so wounded, so inventive, so accustomed to surviving what should have been politically unacceptable — that claim is not an abstraction. It is perhaps the beginning of a new common sense.

  • Reflections of a skyline

    , ,

    There’s a particular kind of silence that settles in small towns after midnight — the sort that feels less like absence and more like a held breath. In the North, where streets narrow into memory and memory into habit, he walked without direction, though he would later insist he knew exactly where he was going.

    He had said cariad once without thinking. It slipped out, unguarded, somewhere between a half-finished pint and a confession he didn’t yet understand he was making. The word lingered after, as certain words do — not for what they mean, but for what they reveal about the speaker. It is one thing to love, quite another to admit it in a language that feels inherited rather than chosen.

    He told himself it had been incidental. A linguistic accident. Yet he repeated it in his head now, testing its edges like a loose tooth: cariad. Not quite love, not quite darling, something denser, less willing to dissolve into the casualness of modern speech. A word that resisted the disposability of feeling.

    The town offered no answers. Only familiar façades, brickwork worn into quiet resignation, pub windows dimming one by one. He paused outside one — the same one, of course, it was always the same one — and watched his reflection hesitate in the glass. There is a peculiar estrangement in seeing oneself as a figure among objects, as though one’s interiority were merely an aesthetic choice imposed upon an otherwise indifferent world.

    He wondered, not for the first time, whether love is less an emotion and more a structure — a way of organising perception. To call someone cariad is to rearrange the hierarchy of the visible: suddenly, they occupy the centre, and everything else recedes into a kind of functional irrelevance. The problem, of course, is that such structures are rarely symmetrical. One inhabits the architecture alone.

    She had not replied. Not then, not since. The absence of response had grown, over time, into a presence of its own — something almost tactile, like humidity before a storm. He found himself narrating her silence, assigning it motives, depths, complexities that might justify its persistence. It is easier, he thought, to believe in the opacity of another than in one’s own misreading.

    A group passed him, laughing too loudly for the hour. He envied them briefly, not for their joy — which seemed rehearsed — but for their apparent immunity to reflection. There is a violence, he realised, in thinking too much about feeling; it dissects what ought perhaps to remain whole. Yet he could not help himself. Thought had become his only reliable companion.

    By the time he reached the end of the street, he had almost convinced himself that the word had meant nothing. That it had been an echo of something cultural, a borrowed intimacy, devoid of genuine commitment. But even as he constructed this argument, he felt its inadequacy. Language does not betray us so easily; it exposes us.

    He stopped beneath a flickering streetlamp. The light stuttered, briefly illuminating then withdrawing, as though undecided about its own purpose. In that intermittent glow, he understood—not suddenly, but with the slow clarity of something long resisted—that what unsettled him was not her silence, but the irreversibility of having spoken.

    To name is to fix, at least partially, the fluidity of experience. Once uttered, cariad could not be taken back into the realm of ambiguity. It existed now, independent of intention, lodged somewhere between them, whether or not she chose to acknowledge it.

    He stood there for a moment longer, listening to the faint hum of the town recalibrating itself for morning. Then he turned, not towards home exactly, but away from where he had been.

    It seemed, in the end, that love was not defined by reciprocity, nor even by endurance, but by the quiet, irrevocable act of having meant something — once — without the possibility of revision.

  • Love as an imposed fate

    ,

    And other philosophical abstractions

    All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour  
(Paris Paloma, Labour)

    The history of the philosophy of love can be read as a long narrative about human desire; but also, silently, as the history of inequality. In almost every era, love appears as a universal experience, although it is experienced in profoundly different ways. For men, it appears as one dimension among others: an occupation of existence. For women, it often becomes the very meaning of life. This difference does not arise from the feeling itself, but from the way culture has distributed freedom, time, and identity between the sexes.

    In ancient times, love was already thought of from a male perspective. In Plato, eros leads the soul beyond the body, in an ascent towards beauty. The one who loves moves, seeks, overcomes. Love is a path, not a destination; an impulse that accompanies a life dedicated to philosophy, politics, action. Even when love takes centre stage, it does not devour the subject who loves. The lover remains focused on the world. When women appear, they occupy above all the place of symbolic objects: something that inspires, rarely something that thinks. From early on, therefore, love is structured as an active experience on the one hand and a contemplated presence on the other.

    Centuries later, Christianity transforms love into devotion, but maintains the asymmetry. The feminine ideal becomes linked to care, purity, dedication. While men are divided between God, war, work, and thought, women are drawn to the intimate sphere, to bonds, to fidelity. Love becomes their central virtue. The distribution is already beginning to take shape: he loves, but he also builds; she loves and, through this, she exists. The distance between loving and being loved already heralds an asymmetry that would continue for centuries.

    Modernity shifts love to the inner self. With the birth of Romanticism, this difference reaches its most delicate point. Love ceases to be merely a moral or spiritual issue and becomes a promise of completeness. Passion becomes the great drama of modern subjectivity. However, it is not distributed equally: for men, love appears as an intense episode among other projects: career, work, adventure, social recognition. For women, the same love is presented as the final destination, as the place where their identity finds fulfilment. Marriage, home and intimacy become the territory where she must accomplish what he can temporarily abandon. The home becomes the setting where love must prove its truth, and this setting has a gender.

    This is where the thesis becomes visible: men are educated to have a life in which love fits; women, to have a life that fits within love.

    Nietzsche, in criticising the romantic ideal, reveals something essential. For him, absolute passions can threaten the autonomy of the individual. The creative subject needs to keep his distance, to preserve his own strength. Although he does not formulate a feminist critique, his distrust of totalising love shows that the risk of fusion is to lose one’s own self. What Nietzsche describes as an existential danger becomes, for many women, a socially expected condition: to love until one disappears. Love, then, loses its innocence. It is no longer redemption; it is tension. Your critique opens up space to see that love is not necessarily liberating — it can also be a field of power.

    Simone de Beauvoir accurately names this historical difference. In The Second Sex, she shows that men were constituted as subjects: those who act, work, create, move towards the world; while women were taught to seek recognition in the gaze of others. When love presents itself, therefore, it occupies different places. For him, love is one occupation among many. He can love deeply and still preserve a defined identity outside the relationship. For her, love often becomes an absolute project: the relationship ceases to be part of life and becomes the axis that organises all other parts.

    Beauvoir describes this movement with almost painful clarity. A woman in love tends to transform the man into meaning, into a measure of value, into a justification for her own existence. She invests totality where he invests partiality. He loves without abandoning his world; she abandons her world to love. The imbalance is not in the intensity of the feeling, but in the structure that defines what each can lose.

    Love, thus, ceases to be merely a sentimental theme and becomes a political problem. Beauvoir does not claim that women love more; she claims that they have been taught to exist through love. The loving union, so celebrated by romantic tradition, proves to be a trap when it requires one of the two to disappear in order for the couple to exist. To love, in these terms, is to lose oneself.

    Psychoanalysis helps to understand the depth of this phenomenon. To love is to seek recognition, to desire to be chosen. But when an entire subjectivity is built around this choice, love becomes a permanent risk of annulment. The woman not only loves the other: she loves the possibility of existing through him. The man, on the contrary, usually loves from a place that is already socially secure; he does not need to put everything at stake to be recognised.

    Freud and, later, Lacan describe love as an attempt to fill a structural void. The beloved is invested with idealizations that no human being can sustain. To love is also to project, to desire recognition, to negotiate one’s own incompleteness. Love is no longer destiny or virtue: it is the movement of desire, always unstable.

    Contemporary feminist philosophy insists that this difference is not natural. It is taught, repeated, transmitted as if it were inevitable. Boys learn that love is one dimension of life; girls learn that it is the very story of life. One moves on even when he loves; the other is encouraged to stay, wait, sustain. Thus, love becomes an occupation for him and a vocation for her.

    Bell hooks asks why love has been associated with female sacrifice and proposes thinking of it as an ethical practice, not as submission. Judith Butler shows that romantic roles are performative — repeated until they seem natural. Love ceases to be an essence and becomes a learned social language. If it was possible to teach women to live for love, perhaps it is possible to learn to love in another way.

    Perhaps the most delicate point of this thesis is to admit that the problem is not love itself, but the inequality of freedom surrounding it. When a person has multiple projects, love can be experienced as a choice. When one’s entire identity is channelled into the bond, love becomes an ontological necessity. What is an experience for one is a foundation for the other.

    The historical line of philosophy reveals, then, a kind of paradox: the more love was culturally idealised, the more it was associated with the feminine. And the more men were linked to action and creation, the more love became just one of their possible occupations. He can love without disappearing; she was taught to prove her love precisely through disappearance.

    Today, when revisiting this trajectory, we realise that the central question is not whether men and women love differently, but why they were allowed to love in such unequal ways.

    Perhaps the true philosophical transformation occurs when love ceases to be the meaning of life for only one side and becomes an encounter between two existences that already have meaning before they meet.

  • Learning to Walk Without the Map I Drew for Us

    , ,

    For a long time, loss did not feel like an ending. It felt provisional, temporary, as if life itself were holding its breath with me. I carried the quiet conviction that what had been interrupted could still be resumed — that there was an earlier version of the world waiting patiently for my return, unchanged, intact. I moved through days as though rehearsing, not living, convinced that at some point the doors would reopen and I would simply step back into the life I had imagined continuing.

    That illusion was difficult to surrender because it was gentle. It did not scream or collapse dramatically; it lingered. It asked very little of me except patience. And so I waited. I walked streets whose pavements remembered our conversations. I crossed intersections where I had once pictured our shadows overlapping. The city became a museum of anticipated moments, and I behaved like a devoted visitor, preserving what was never fully real.

    What finally dissolved the illusion was not a single event, but exhaustion. The fatigue of waiting without being met. The dull ache of directing energy towards someone who stood still, not out of certainty but fear. I began to see how much colour had drained from my days — not because the world had dimmed, but because I had narrowed my gaze to a single, unresponsive point.

    Letting go was not heroic. It was quiet and almost accidental. One day I stopped imagining explanations. Another day I stopped checking. Then, without ceremony, I stopped arranging my life around a possibility that refused to choose me.

    The streets changed after that. Or perhaps I did. The same routes began to show details I had overlooked: the uneven rhythm of footsteps at rush hour, the sudden brightness of shop windows at night, the way the city breathes differently when you are no longer waiting for someone to arrive beside you. I had to relearn colour — not as nostalgia, but as presence. What once felt washed out by expectation regained texture once I released the future I had been postponing myself for.

    I started listening to new music, not because I needed novelty, but because my ears were finally open. Sounds no longer had to compete with imagined conversations. I walked unfamiliar streets without assigning them symbolic weight. Cafés were just cafés. Parks were simply places to sit and exist. There was relief in this ordinariness, in allowing spaces to belong to themselves again.

    I finally ended that wait that arose purely from my hope of seeing you. Now I hope I never run into you again, because I have finally accepted that all our business is finished. I don’t want to see you. Not in the square, not on the street, not at the market. I no longer waste my time dreaming of meeting your gaze among the lights of dusk.

    I realised how deeply being ignored had shaped my perception. How the absence of response had trained me to doubt my own vividness. Now, without that constant background noise of waiting, things appeared sharper. Light reflected differently. Words landed more clearly. I did not feel louder or more urgent — only more real.

    Melancholy remains, but it has changed its posture. It no longer pulls me backwards; it stands beside me, observant, almost companionable. It reminds me of what I once hoped for, without demanding that I rebuild it. The past is no longer a destination. It is a reference point, useful only insofar as it clarifies what I will not repeat.

    I am beginning again, not dramatically, not triumphantly, but honestly. I walk forward without rehearsing reunions that will never happen. I make room for memories that have not yet been lived. And in this unclaimed space — free of expectation, free of silence imposed by another — I feel something steady and unmistakable.

    Not the joy of return, but the quieter happiness of arrival.

    
We take a chance from time to time
And put our necks out on the line
And you have broken every promise that we made
And I have loved you anyway

Took a fine time to leave me hangin' out to dry
Understand now I'm grieving
So don't you waste my time
Cause you have taken
All the wind out from my sails
And I have loved you just the same

We finally find this
Then you're gone
Been chasing rainbows all along
And you have cursed me
When there's no one left to blame
And I have loved you just the same
And you have broken every single fucking rule
And I have loved you like a fool