Ayn Rand was twelve years old when the Bolshevik Revolution arrived in Petrograd. She watched the State confiscate her family home and her father’s business, a pharmacy he had built through his own work and effort. There was no compensation, no due process, no possibility of appeal. The Soviet Constitution of 1918 had stated it with surgical precision in Article 3: “private ownership of land is abolished, and all rural estates are declared public property.” Article 79 further authorized the State to satisfy its needs “without stopping at the violation of private property rights.” Years later, already in the United States and transformed into Ayn Rand — novelist and philosopher — she would describe Marxism as the system of those who wished to sacrifice “the able, the intelligent, the successful” in the name of a utopia that never materialized. What happened to her family was not an accident of the revolution nor an excess committed by its executors. It had been written from the beginning, in Article 3, signed and published.
There is a question that gnaws at my soul: how is this possible? After one hundred years of accumulated evidence — after Holodomor, after the gulags of Joseph Stalin, after the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, after Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, after the fall of the Fall of the Berlin Wall that seemed to settle the debate once and for all, how is communism becoming fashionable again? Not as melancholic nostalgia, but as a serious academic and political proposal. Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski warned before his death in 2005: “It may come back to life.” He was right. And here I am, writing this column, because I believe indignation can also be an argument.
I am anti-communist because I have read the documents. The Soviet Constitution of 1918 leaves no room for romantic interpretations. Article 9 establishes as an explicit constitutional objective “the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Vladimir Lenin was equally precise in The State and Revolution (1917): the objective is to replace one “special force of repression” — that of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat — with another special force of repression in the opposite direction. He called it dictatorship. Not government of the people, not popular sovereignty, not workers’ democracy. Dictatorship. Karl Marx had already anticipated it in The Communist Manifesto (1848) with a clarity his modern admirers prefer to ignore: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” And Che Guevara, idol of university posters and t-shirts, completed the picture in his 1967 Message to the Tricontinental: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations and turns him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine.” This is not a caricature of communism. It is communism describing its own method in its own words.
Karl Popper demonstrated that Marxism is not science but faith: its predictions can never be falsified because they are constantly reinterpreted to survive evidence. Bertrand Russell, who considered himself both socialist and pacifist, was even more direct: “I have always disagreed with Marx… What seems particularly disastrous to me is his abandonment of democracy.” And Aristotle, twenty centuries before Marx, had already warned about something dialectical materialism could never refute: “What is common to the greatest number receives the least care. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own interest, hardly at all of the common interest.” Common property does not produce equality. It produces neglect.
But today communism no longer arrives with military uniforms or incendiary manifestos. It arrives through the language of social justice, progressivism, and rights. In Spain, the progressive left-wing party Más Madrid recently declared in the regional Assembly that “nobody should have the right to own 10 homes, not 10 nor 3: anyone with 10 properties should be taxed to death and expropriated.” Notice the word: right. They are not speaking about fiscal policy or market regulation. They are speaking about what you deserve to own — which means what the State may take from you. It is Article 3 of the Soviet Constitution of 1918 translated into the language of the twenty-first century.
In the United States, the phenomenon has a name, a surname, and a genealogy. Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-American academic at Columbia University, has spent decades building the intellectual architecture of a postcolonial Marxism that describes the liberal nation-state as the root of all structural violence. His influence over an entire university generation is enormous. His son, Zohran Mamdani, has transformed those ideas into a political platform: a New York socialist openly advocating rent control, massive State expansion, and a program that sounds like justice but smells like concentration. The father’s academic communism gives birth to the son’s political communism. It does not emerge from nowhere. It has roots, classrooms, and votes.
In Colombia, Gustavo Petro speaks of “democratic capitalism” while systematically weakening the institutions that should restrain him. In Mexico, the political party Morena has patiently built, through opaque clientelist programs and handouts that purchase loyalty, an architecture of power disturbingly reminiscent of the seventy years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party: a party that does not govern for the people, but buys the people in order to govern indefinitely, while weakening autonomous institutions — the INE and the Supreme Court — that should function as counterweights. The pattern is always the same: someone who knows, someone who decides, someone who concentrates, someone who distributes power unto himself.
To understand why this always ends in tyranny, one must return to Polybius and Cicero, who before the first century had already diagnosed the problem with a precision that two thousand years of history have never disproven. Every system of government has a virtuous form and a defect that corrupts it. Monarchy — rule by one — degenerates into tyranny when it loses restraint. Aristocracy — rule by the best — degenerates into oligarchy when the best become merely the richest ruling for themselves. And democracy — rule by the people — degenerates into anarchy when collective passions dissolve order and law. The remedy they proposed was the mixed constitution of the Republic: a system in which the power of the ruler, the power of the elite, and the power of the people balance and limit one another. Not out of philosophical naïveté, but because the experience of Rome had taught them that no unchecked power resists the temptation to abuse. The England that preceded modern democracy embodied this principle through parliamentary monarchy: a king, a House of Commons, and a House of Lords. Three distinct forces compelled to negotiate. It was a system in which nobody could do everything.
Communism destroys that equilibrium at its root. By eliminating private property, it destroys the economic foundation upon which an elite independent from the State may stand. By concentrating all power in the party, it eliminates genuine representation of the people. And by suppressing institutional counterweights, it leaves the ruler without restraint. The result was predicted by Polybius two thousand years ago: when the people are left alone — without defense, without property, without institutions protecting them from themselves and from their rulers — their natural defect, anarchy, drives them to surrender all power to a strongman promising order and justice. That is how Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Daniel Ortega, and Fidel Castro are born. And in its modern, technological, popularly approved version: Nayib Bukele. They are not anomalies of the system. They are its logical destination when counterweights disappear.
The democratic disenchantment that today fuels the return of communism is born precisely from this: democracies that ask who governs but not how power is exercised; elections that legitimize the origin of rulers but do not limit their actions; institutions that exist on paper but have been emptied of real authority. Cicero expressed it with a precision that has not aged: “We are slaves to the laws in order to be free.” Freedom does not come from a leader who liberates us. It comes from institutions that protect us from leaders. And the Republic, in its deepest sense, is not merely a system for electing rulers. It is a system for constructing truth collectively, because it begins from the most honest and difficult premise of all: nobody knows enough to plan the future of millions of people, knowledge is dispersed among millions of individual decisions, and the only way to harness it is to guarantee each person the freedom to make those decisions. A mediocre leader within a system of strong counterweights does little damage. A brilliant leader without counterweights is a catastrophe. The history of communism does not refute this. It confirms it without exception.
That is why I am anti-communist. Not out of nostalgia for any ancient order nor in defense of privilege. But because I have read Marx, Lenin, and Che. Because I have read the Soviet Constitution of 1918. Because I have read Polybius and Cicero. And because I believe truth belongs to no one: it is built collectively, in liberty, with property, with law, and with the institutional counterweights that prevent anyone from appropriating it.
