Tilting at Red Windmills
Modern Communists and Their Quixotic Quest
Few literary characters are as emblematic of naive preposterousness as Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Caught up in the romantic ideal of chivalry, this doomed but noble knight-errant actually saw windmills swaying in the distance and charged at them, thinking them to be giants. Recent history has given us new and surprising candidates for the spirit of Quixote: namely, the modern communists. Like Quixote, modern communists believe that not only is a perfect, classless society possible, it exists in a form that one can take wings to reach.
In this respect, modern communists are a bit like our original knight: they’re chasing a quixotic dream (for the sake of humans) that regularly runs aground on the shoals of reality. Their windmills are the archons of global capitalism; their Dulcinea, a workers’ paradise that can never quite be captured. But, like our original knight, they’re wreaking havoc in the meantime.
Behold, then, the Soviet Union and its inspirational, but ultimately tragic, life as the queen of all communist endeavors. The revolution of the workers (of 1917) turned into the dictatorship of the Party (of the 1930s); a classless utopia was not born, but rather a new breed of masters: the Party nomenklatura that enjoyed VIP privileges while workers waited in the bread queue. In other words, all classes but one had been blasted away: the one that counted, the master class.
China, too, pursued a Quixotic adventure, as a Mao Zedong-led Great Leap Forward that was to industrialise the economy within a generation turned into one of the worst famines in world history. Communists, like those Spanish knights, refused to recognise the reality that the policies they had devised were failing, just as Don Quixote insisted that whatever a barber’s basin was it had to be the Helmet of Mambrino.
If Sancho Panza had eaten all the food on his promised isle, the Kim dynasty would have turned communist ideologies on their head, the country’s ‘Juche’ (self-reliance) ideology has plunged it into abject poverty and severe isolation, all the while enriching the ruling family.
Once the poster-boy of revolutionary romanticism, Cuba limped through decades of economic privation and political repression, its people promised a workers’ paradise and delivered the trend-frozen nightmare of a 1950s automobile parked beneath a 1950s overpass. Even when Castro’s revolutionary ardor seemed as powerful as his white beard, he was as likely to be charging windmills as knights.
More recently, the Venezuelan experiment in ‘21st-century socialism’ – launched by Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor Nicolás Maduro – has produced a deep economic collapse and soaring inflation and food shortages. The country with the planet’s largest oil reserves can no longer feed its people. It’s as if, after Don Quixote had finally harnessed the great windmill, he’d looked around him and realised that it was the only mill for miles.
Even with all these historical failures, contemporary communists still chase after this dream, tilting at the windmills of international capitalism with their lances held high. ‘True communism’ had never been given a chance; it was only ‘socialism’ that had existed so far, and that was a sort of trial run for the real thing. It was like Quixote saying he’d never yet managed to find the right windmill-giant.
To their credit, one might say that the quest for a more egalitarian society is noble, but to then continue to believe in – and advocate – an ideology that continues to fail so miserably in the real world, despite decades of rehearsal, is to risk exposing yourself as a Quixotic cuckoo caught up in a fantasy. Much like Don Quixote, so many communists continue to see peasant girls amidst flocks of sheep and end up tilting at the wrong windmills.
We laugh, as we watch these modern Quixotes ride out to meet what they see as the windmills of market economies. We laugh at their folly and maybe feel a bit of worry too – they mean well and have hearts in the right places, but their approach is mistaken, fundamentally misguided. They are attacking a windmill even as they think it is a giant.
Perhaps the moral is less about laughing at these ideological adventurers and more about relating to their human desire for a better world. Like Don Quixote, whose insanity was birthed in the longing to live in a more chivalric reality, today’s communists reveal the historical pull of utopian future dreams – and the perils of pursuing them with a lack of realism.
In our own ideological endeavors, perhaps we should emphasise wishful thinking a little less and bring some political realism to bear. After all, a windmill is still just a windmill, and the road to a better society might not be via charging into it, but rather using it to generate energy for everyone.
!!!!To all my communist friends, dreaming for a great future is essential, but so is pragmatism!!!!
