ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS. Keywords: Hegel, dialectic materialism, Karl Marx, Marx-Engels, Lenin, Fukuyama, Marxism, Fascism, Extreme Right, American Communism

 

ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS

A meditation about the new rise of communism in America

By Xuan Quen Santos

PART  II

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves"

 

It is hard to find a communist that will admit to being one. The few countries that still practice that doctrine after the spontaneous collapse of the center of international communism of Moscow in 1988, and the final dissolution of the Soviet Federation in 1991 are hiding behind masks, but without changing much. Today, the Russian Federation acts very much the same as the former Soviet Union did and it is a mystery when now it receives the blessings of Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. What political ideology or philosophy supports their current structures? Beware of the masks, even of the one the Patriarch wears!

 

Vintage poster celebrating the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution in 
October 1917, and its planned expansion to the rest of the world

Our initial quote is a phrase of the Sermon on The Mountain by Jesus, as recorded in Mathew 7:15. In a defiant attitude, the atheists of the Fabian Society of England chose the image of a wolf in sheep’s clothing as their logo since 1884. They established their own university and political party. One wears the mask of London School of Economics and the other hides as the Labor Party. Since then, they have used the infiltration of culture and its institutions to promote communism under the mask of a moderate “democratic socialism”.

 

Collection of posters celebrating Che Guevara, an Argentinian Physician, member of the International Brigade that started revolts in Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba and Bolivia. Still available online and around colleges and universities in America

In America we see the extension of the same strategy in many previously prestigious and scholarly colleges and institutions that have become centers of anti-capitalist indoctrination and agitation. The mobs are dressed now in cap and gowns covered with poison ivy. Once they hit the streets, they hide behind other masks, whether it is now anti-ICE protests or previously LGBTQ+ claims, free abortion demands, BLM/Defund the police riots, etc. They are following the same disguise that ensnares the idiots with short, hypnotic, tantric chants, well-practiced before they hit the streets. Gone are the days of the demonstrations with yellow hammer and sickle on red flags, or T-shirts with Che Guevara’s face, or Malcolm-X’s image. You don’t see the forecasted “armies of exploited workers”.  What we now see are idiots who don’t work. Even worse, they get paid for not working. Universities that don’t teach and students that don’t study are funded with public money. For three generations now, bureaucrats have used masked public policies inspired by the same idea to advance their final goal. This includes the Democratic Party, The Federal Reserve, the State Department, AID, HUD, EPA, Energy, Education, Social Security, Medicare, Indian Affairs, countless bureaus and agencies, and many Federal Courts. None has publicly come out and say – These are communist policies, and we support them.

 

Malcolm X is still an icon of the Marxist cells started in the 60s among black communities under the mask of Black Power and Civil Rights. He changed his views shortly before he was killed as a traitor, a fact ignored in the propaganda that still surrounds his name

The Marx-Engels-Stalin-Mao’s methods of very visible violence have been substituted by the soft-violence implicit in a masked bureaucracy that controls culture through economic policy and the fiscal budget, information and all money matters. Destructive high taxes and inflation have replaced the Molotov cocktails and bullets. Entitlements, subsidies and grants have paved the way to indoctrination and obedience. Vote buying is just preceding the rationing cards.

But there is hope.

Beware of false prophets that promise HOPE

These are recent political campaign posters

Masked socialists that double-speak in Keynesian language instead of Marxism know they can’t claim victory.

They know their essential idea is fundamentally flawed, but they are caught in a trap of their own making. If a logical construct is based on erroneous foundations, the whole edifice will soon fall. This is the parable of the house built on sand. Without solid foundations, when it floods, the house will soon fall. The flood has come in many waves, and it is rising.

Portrayal of early stages of the industrial-urban age

The first wave is a look at reality from a more distant historic perspective.

Marx was no economist. He wanted to be a groundbreaking historian. We are no longer in 1848, 1914 or 1945. Capitalism was not doomed for self-destruction in 1848 when Marx made its predictions. Capitalism was the name he gave the system that was just beginning to be understood when the ideas of free trade, equal rights and limited government were combined. In his erroneous analysis of what was happening in a decaying Europe, he declared that the capital that energizes the economic process was the result of cheating the laborers of the worth of their product. Capitalism was not dead in the 1930s either, when Keynes popularized the illusion of saving it by creating many government programs financed with monetary inflation that generated armies of new government dependents and more parasitic bureaucrats. Total government dependence is the ultimate goal of socialism. American entrepreneurial industry, even leashed and tethered, won WWII after Europe led by England had already lost. We are just now getting rid of the leashes and tethers, a bit too slow in my opinion.

During the same period, more serious scholars studied what now is described as a free market economy, a free enterprise economy or just the free economy. They were ignored at the time. Marx, Engels and Keynes made their analysis on what was clearly the last gasp of the European feudal system during the transition to industrialization and consumer markets. What they called the defects of capitalism as the business cycles of boom and bust, including The Great Depression, have been found to be nothing less than the result of previous governmental manipulations of money and credit. Calling it “the business cycle” was another clever mask that has allowed politicians to deflect responsibility.

As it turns out, the old rigid system they criticized in Europe never existed in America, regardless of what the pseudo-social scientists of the New England revisionist academic establishment have been spewing for over a century. Historians refer to the long colonial experience up to the 1765 imposition of new taxes and restrictions that led to the War of Independence as the period of “benign royal neglect”, meaning little government interference. Self-reliance led to self-government as a community. Even the chartered royal colonies of the south had developed without any feudal heavy-handed system. They actually were more commercial ventures of the King’s cronies and not government projects with a specific colonial policy.  Throughout the colonies, refugees and squatters became settlers going into the wilderness and learned to survive independently. Indentured servants quickly became property owners or pioneers in the frontier. The large land-grant estates intended for tenant farmers became real estate development projects. Mineral rights owned by the king were not retained by the new governments but transferred to the new land owners. The rules for self-rule created a diverse experiment, still visible in the diverse state constitutions that evolved from the compacts and charters adopted during colonial times.

President F. D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
Meeting in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1943

It should be obvious there is an intellectual, political and emotional connection between Old England and New England that has perpetuated the errors or political inclinations of the Old World view as seen by the “ruling class” elite on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the academic world. It is a bias reflected in the myth of the WASPs. It is also evident in the so called “special relationship” between the United States and England. This label is the half-truth and mask made up by Winston Churchill to obtain the support and subsidies needed by their failed socialist-monarchy during WW II. The Churchill family’s personal details reflect that special relationship too. Winston’s mother was a New York socialite that married with her own inheritance of dollars. His cousin Charles Spencer-Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, married Consuelo Vanderbilt-Balsan, heiress to one of the Vanderbilt fortunes of the Gilded Age of New York. The duke obtained a large dowry and reportedly used it to "save Blenheim Palace", his ancestral home. 

Consuelo Vanderbilt as Duchess of Marlborough and

her family at Blenheim Palace, U. K.

More than 20 such millionaire brides were reported in the social pages of New York with arrangements between the crumbling palaces and estates of English lords and American fortunes. These arrangements mirror the American tax payers subsidizing the failed socialist-monarchy of England, and most of Europe since the beginning of the XX century. We recently saw the most shameful use of this half-truth mask with the “first in history” personal invitation extended to President Donald Trump by King Charles III to visit him for a second time. Such an act was devised by socialist Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and performed by the King to disguise their need of assistance under especially favorable conditions again. The King can’t extend such an offer for a state visit without the previous planning and direction of the Prime Minister backed by his socialist majority in Parliament. We will see if the inferiority complex of the rich and famous of the new Gilded Age is still present as crumbling England needs America again.

The American connections to the English monarchy are not as strong as is implied in the “special relationship”. Most colonists were escaping from the English royal boot and/or his oppressive church. This is particularly descriptive of Scottish, Irish and Welsh immigrants, and all English Catholics. The royal government sent to the colonies all their “undesirables”. American blood won independence from King George III. English troops burned the capitol and the White House in 1812. The British supported the Confederate States during the Civil War…In more recent times, even the English Conservative party was in the anti-Trump cabal of European politicians, and its spies were involved in the famous “dozier” ordered by Hillary Clinton.

The young American free enterprise system was not the decaying European capitalism in 1848, but Neither Marx nor Engels saw the differences. Between 1776 and 1789, a new model of political organization in America stumbled upon the matching principles of a free market economy based on the rights of all individuals to exercise their personal choices respecting the laws applicable to all, whether it was by selecting a candidate for public office, or by selecting a type of tea or rum. The American mega-market began by erasing the economic effects of the barriers to free trade implied by the colonial (state) borders. It protected the rights of inventors and innovators to profit by benefiting others. Multiple UK expatriate entrepreneurs succeeded in America, not in the old country. America expanded and protected the ownership of property to the common European, a right denied to most of them in the old continent. As a result, America became a world power at the same time as the old countries continued to decline. Contrary to the Marxist model, an unpredicted American middle class emerged elevating the standard of living of great numbers. Since then, American ingenuity and innovation have improved the living conditions of the world. Continuing to use the word capitalism instead of a free market economy reinforces the errors of Marx-Engels by using their language.

Franklin speaking at the Constitutional Convention

The American model does not fit their linear model, or any other existing model because it was an unplanned innovation without a name. It took more than a decade to take an initial form as new form of organization. The political system is not a democracy, never was intended to be, and it never will under the U. S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers clearly refused any link to that concept that history and reality equate to the dictatorship of a majority and the eventual rule by mob; a system that easily obliterates any notion of respect to the rights of any individual person. They also rejected the old models of monarchy and oligarchy. George Washington refused to be crowned king when his victorious army began to advance the idea. The federal upper house, the US Senate, is elected by the people; it is not a hereditary corporate body like its precedent House of Lords. When he was leaving the Constitutional Convention for the last time, a lady asked Ben Franklin what kind of country they had created. He answered, “A republic, madam, if we can keep it”.

Defining a republic is a challenge. The main problem is that there is no specific description of what a republic is, except that its government must have a separation of functions and periodic elections by the citizenry. The devil is in the details, which are contained in the Bill of Rights (Prohibitions to the Federal Government) and the Constitution of the United States of America that describes the structure and functioning of the federal public administration. The rest is the foundation of thousands of years of surviving customary law resulting from our human experience, plus the complement that state constitutions and legislation add. After nearly 250 years, most countries pretend to have a constitution and elections, somewhat inspired by the American exceptional example, but they are very far from the details. Even Kings, socialist dictators and plain despots have constitutions now. Another mask for a half-truth.

The new American political system was designed to protect the people from the abuses of government; a key detail most constitutions evade. The second amendment is its guarantee.

What is not evident is that the economic system compatible with the political system is, like Adam Smith correctly identified it, a system that is just the extension of our natural liberty: the market economy, the free market economy or the free enterprise system. Why was there no organized description of an economic system in 1776 or 1789? Because those years mark the appearance of the first systematic research for a notion of the system that creates wealth and prosperity. It was found to be separate from the functions of government. In fact, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” by Smith clearly warns that the actions of governments may stand in the way of prosperity and freedom of choice in the market. “It is the highest impertinence and presumption… in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people” (Book II, Chapter III). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” (Introduction to Book IV). The formal name of “political economy” appeared only in the next century, in opposition to domestic economy, which is the meaning of the original Greek root oikos-nomos, meaning “the rules of good household management”.

A logical, new and complete model would place the United States intended political and economic system at one end, and at the opposite end, the rest, all variations of the same fundamental idea that people are subjects of the sole authority of government. This end would include the tribal-patriarchal communities, the totalitarian bureaucratic state, the autocratic monarchies, the Keynesian middle-way, and all other versions of the socialist-communist model regardless of name.

The second wave of arguments exposed Marxism as flawed reasoning.

A theory is an accepted explanation, not a supposition, not a hypothesis, and not a prophecy. Science aims at formulating theories only after rigorously searching for proof, filtering evidence, carefully collecting facts, and developing solid chains of reasoning and criticism. The word “theory” is very abused and misused to almost mean anything goes. Just like it has happened to “truth”. Now everyone feels entitled to “their truth”. Just like moral relativism leads to no morality, semantic relativism ends in confusion, disagreement, and confrontation. For Marxists, it is done on purpose; it is a strategy. Think for a moment of the many words that woke culture tried to insert. They were double-speak intrusions into our everyday lives. (Birthing person, LatinX, gender fluid, inter-sectionality, cultural appropriation, white privilege, micro-aggression, racist highways, safe-space, existential threat…)

Marxism lacks a foundational theory from the scientific and formal perspective.

There are a number of caveats which concern the validity of any scientific theory. The scientific methods can clearly disprove hypotheses and only approximate to validate a generally accepted theory. Over time, improvements in the methods and availability of better data, or new ideas make all theories subject to future revisions or substitutions with a better explanation. An honest scientist will recognize its limitations with humility and be open for the next improvement as an opportunity to advance human knowledge. An arrogant one will elevate science to an altar and develop a religious belief in his own power.

The image built for Marx after nearly 200 years of his first publications on economic and political topics is that of a great economist and political scientist. He was neither. He was really a college agitator, a failed academic at that, who was obsessed with the idea that human history could be explained with a “scientific theory”. He studied philosophy and became trapped with the “dialectic” method of philosophical inquiry used by G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). Better known by its components, "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”, it is one systematic development of the ancient Socratic method. In simpler terms, a proposition is confronted by its contradiction, and eventually a reconciled new conclusion is found. Then the cycle starts again. To measure Marx, one must understand Hegel first.

George F. Hegel

In a lecture given on September 18, 1806, Hegel announced that “We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one. All the mass of previous representations, concepts, and bonds linking our world together are dissolving and collapsing like a dream picture. A new phase of the spirit is preparing itself. Philosophy especially has to welcome its appearance and acknowledge it, while others, who oppose it impotently, cling to the past.”

Hegel’s and Marx’s lives were framed by one of the most violent and consequential periods of modern Europe. Intellectually, it is the period named “The Enlightenment”, when science and technology transformed not only the universities, but also impacted the daily lives of the common man with new machines and the first mass products. It also transformed war. It is the period of the French Revolution and its degeneration into the Reign of Terror, only to return to the elevation of Napoleon from the “people’s revolutionary” to dictator, emperor and conqueror of most of Europe. The Napoleonic wars led to the emergence of Prussia as the leading state of the Germanic principalities causing more wars. Hegel spent his formative years at the University of Jena, as a student and professor. After the wars, he taught at the University of Berlin, a city that became the capital of the first unified German state. Marx studied there after his failure in Bonn. He completed his studies in Jena. He was following the trail of influence left by Hegel.

Hegel’s contributions to philosophy are identified with German Idealism. His view of absolute idealism is based on the belief that reality is essentially shaped by ideas and that all aspects of existence are interconnected through a rational structure that evolves through the dialectic process. He became a celebrity and developed a following. Hegel's dialectics call for understanding that reality, and thus history as its record, is shaped by the evolution of ideas, while Marx's dialectics are based on absolute materialism, asserting that material conditions drive historical change. Hegel proposed that ideas emanating from human persons (individuals) are the primary force behind the development of humanity, whereas Marx focused on the material conditions of society, particularly the economic relations of production and class divisions.

Marx's dialectics are applied to analyzing class struggles and the development of society, particularly in the context of capitalism as he defined it. In the borrowed Hegelian model, and in his insufficient knowledge of economics, Marx’s thesis became the self-destructive force of capitalism that would end in the monopolization of all industries and the concentration of wealth in a few rich people. They are the oppressors. His anti-thesis appeared with the growth in the number of workers he labeled “the proletariat”, who he described as exploited, impoverished, alienated, drug addicted and alcoholic. They are the oppressed. His synthesis would result from the conflict or confrontation that takes the form of a socialist revolution. His forecasted result would be a new kind of society described as a workers’ paradise with the name of communism. In popular culture, socialism and communism are now used indistinctively, or as different in degrees. Usually, socialism is considered mild, and communism thought of as violent, exactly the opposite of Marx’s vocabulary. In his analysis, socialism is the radical change that leads to communist bliss.

Hegel views history as an evolution of ideas that lead to change, while Marx defines history as a struggle of socio-economic classes that will result in new stages of development for society. Hegel stands for the discourse of ideas that will inspire individuals to act as they see fit. Marx stands for the revolution and violence of the conditioned robotic mob and provides for it the scientific excuse, the mask, with what he called “dialectic materialism”.

A college classroom slide explaining the evolution of history

according to Marx's Dialectic Materialism

The American philosopher Francis Fukuyama described the Hegel-Marx connection in his 1992 book “The End of History and The Last Man” with this passage. “Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited and “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society”. Fukuyama uses the term liberal as related to liberty, as in liberal democracy associated with a capitalist system. In his book, he shares the idea of reaching a final form of the social order. Not only that, but he also claimed victory for the seekers of individual freedom in a society bound by the concept of defending personal liberty and the market economy. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state subject to international law on 26 December 1991. What does Fukuyama think of his conclusion in 2025? It did not take but a few years for the Russian Federation to emerge as a Phoenix from the communist ashes of the Soviet Union. My superficial review of the world, including the current fundamental disagreements taking place in the United States of America, have proven Fukuyama as premature, if not totally wrong.

One fundamental flaw shared by Hegel’s and Marx’s models is enough to disprove their conclusions. Both have at their cores the idea of an evolutionary process, that is, a series of changes. Interested in history, both accepted the idea of labeling the “eras” or “ages” of history that we still see in most textbooks. They show a sequence from pre-history to modern. Names such as, classical antiquity, feudalism, renaissance, industrial age, modern age, and many others have been used. It was not long ago that a common European belief was that history spanned about 6,000 years from the beginning, using Jewish biblical accounts. Ancient Chinese and Hindu folklore had similar estimates. Today, there is enough archaeological evidence to place the appearance of hominids beyond two million years ago. Even today, in 2025, there are a few small and isolated cultural groups that are classified as primitive, still living in the stone age. The Euro-centered classifications do not describe all of human history. There were many other cultures that did not continue evolving; they dissolved and disappeared. Many cultures have suffered periods of decline, a process that in zoology is called “involution”, the regression from evolution. Although Darwin’s (1859) and Wallace’s (1855) ideas about evolution did not appear until Hegel had died and Marx had published his forecasts about the end of capitalism, evolutionary ideas had been discussed in academia for three decades but without any formal theoretical construct.

What is Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectic evolutionary flaw? Evolution is open-ended, endless; it is multi-directional and does not evolve in a single line. Modern science is using the term “chaos” to describe these complex natural phenomena that have such characteristics that cannot fit perfectly in any model for accurate prediction. The weather of the day is but a sampling of our limited understanding of climate. The universe, solar flares, matter and energy, are but a few marvels that make arrogant scientists accept their limitations. Advanced social sciences have pointed to many such phenomena that involve human activity. Since the XVIII century, they have been described by the phrase “the result of human action, but not of human design”. The different forms of social orders that appear in the “historic eras” are such. Institutions -different from organizations- such as moral rules, the family, customary law, commerce and the market, prices and money…are the product of human interactions, but not the product of any one’s mind. Think of languages. What is their origin? Why are there so many? Why do so many disappear? Do they change -evolve- over time? Academics that study language only listen or read to what people say or write and then deduce the rules that people have already unwittingly adopted.

If Fukuyama had changed his famous title to “Did History End?” he may have seen that his own conclusion was flawed. Why would there be a final era called “modern”? Is that not the name given to whatever the present is? There will always be the next modern. Hegel reached the end of his evolution in what was called at the time “a liberal social order”, using liberal as related to individual liberty, and not socialism. Marx predicted the opposite, an order organized and ruled nominally by “the people” through the state. Why would the evolutionary process they had both envisioned as the natural structure of the process they were observing come to an end? Would there logically not be a next phase? This is the contradiction that brings down their separate constructs. The passing of history confirms their mistake.

Hegel’s idealized Germanic state led to Prussian autocracy that evolved for survival into a socialist-constitutional monarchy; then, it had a brief period of republicanism that degenerated into socialism, only to become the totalitarian state of Hitler’s national-socialism. Every one of these changes happened as a consequence of a war that had nothing to do with the collapse of capitalism or the proletarian revolution. After the soviet conquest resulting from WW II, the German states divided. West Germany was occupied and governed, mainly by the United States; East Germany became a communist soviet satellite. Only until 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany was unified as a federation of 16 states, in an organization similar but not the same, as the United States of America. They are a parliamentary federation, where the executive is a Chancellor elected by parliament, and a special assembly elects a mostly ceremonial President.

Marx’s predictions called for the spontaneous internal collapse of the capitalist states, which means those countries with the most advanced processes of industrialization and developed markets. It never happened. The first place where socialism triumphed was the most backward of the European powers, Tzarist Russia. The regime in 1914 was still feudal, with large masses of serfs (slaves) attached to the land holdings of absentee landlords. Industrial development was just beginning. The Tzarist regime was toppled in 1917 by military insurrections for its failures in WW I. An ephemeral constitutional republic followed; it was led by Kerensky, a moderate socialist. It was then overtaken by mobs and violence led by the radical party of Lenin. Lenin’s propaganda machine turned the ideas of Marx about a workers’ revolution into a reality, regardless of their lack of substance. Terror was the origin, not the implosion of an advanced capitalist economy. All the countries that adopted the ideas of Marx, as interpreted through the masks of the Soviet Union, never met any of the “conditions for revolution” that his scheme required.

Predictability is a quality of a scientific theory. Marxism does not have it.

The Soviet Gulags - forced labor and re-education camps for dissidents