By Michel E. Torres Corona
I confess that, before reading the Communist Manifesto, I watched the Star Wars movies. And I watched them as a child in “canonical order” — that is, the “new” ones (at the time) first, and then the “old” ones.
If you haven’t seen any of those movies, you probably feel a little lost right now, but you can save yourself that cinematic journey: I’m recounting this simply to declare that I saw the first episode of that saga, called “The Phantom Menace,” before I had what is called “political awareness.”
In that film, the term “phantom menace” refers to a hidden enemy, one that doesn’t reveal itself, that plays with the plot. But the threat is indeed real. Other English terms that might be associated with it, such as phantom pain, have a different connotation: this refers, for example, to the pain a person experiences when a limb, say an arm or a leg, has been amputated and, therefore, is no longer part of their body, no longer exists.
However, various factors contribute to this strange ailment: damaged nerve endings, scar tissue at the amputation site, the physical memory of the pain prior to the amputation in the affected area… While “phantom pain” can have psychological components, it is also a physical condition. The amputated limb no longer exists, but it leaves lasting effects. This pain is not a figment of the mind, it is not a hallucination.
Years after watching Star Wars (and I’m excluding the three more recent installments at this point), I read Marx. And Engels, of course. I remember the teacher giving me the pamphlet with the Manifesto, perhaps to keep me occupied for a while and prevent me from making any more pointed comments or asking uncomfortable questions. And I read it.
I didn’t fully understand it, but one thing was clear: the world wasn’t what it seemed. It never had been. Things weren’t simple. And we had to fight so that this oppressive complexity could give way to a simple and tranquil peace.
And from then on, the image of the specter haunting Europe also stayed with me. It wasn’t the ghost of Canterville, written by Wilde, a tragicomic representation of a past desecrated by modernity; but rather the symbol of demonization. The specter of communism was the demon everyone had to hate, without a second thought. Communists were monsters.
Even for a teenager, Marx and Engels managed to make it clear that behind this demonizing campaign lay the interests of the powerful, who felt threatened. Because the communists didn’t just want to understand the world, they wanted to transform it, they wanted to overturn hierarchies, blow them up, and make the planet a place of solidarity, not exploitation.
[ SOURCE: www.cubainformacion.tv ]
