“(Wo)Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 

Fidel Castro is dead, at the ripe old age of 90. He has taken with him the (second) most magnificent beard to ever grace a leader’s face, as well as the joy of those of us who delighted in his incessant, sly, excruciatingly long defiance of his superpower neighbour.

Professional outlets around the globe have faithfully reported both sides of the reactions towards the news of his demise. It is quite an achievement to have remained such a genuinely divisive figure over the course of a lifetime.

A number of jokes have cropped up making fun of the timing of Castro’s death. Some imply that Fidel decided to depart this earthly plane on Black Friday – America’s most incredibly alarming annual consumerfest – as one last message of contempt for unhinged capitalism. Others suggest that it was the thought of living through a Trump presidency that convinced him to throw in the towel, because there is only so much one man can take.

That the jokes are good means that the old man remained relevant even if only symbolically, in a world that is post-ideological. The consensus around the world is that communism failed and Castro’s Cuba developed more than enough social and economic disasters to give that argument weight.

Then again, there is plenty of evidence that neoliberal capitalism isn’t precisely the social and economic success its shills have been touting for a long time, today’s merciless global inequality giving it the lie. In the competition between the ideological poles of the Cold War, it is people who have suffered.

“The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit.

Time had passed Castro by, as it does us all. Even the mighty must age and eventually fall – especially defeated communists. I like the way the Commandante stepped down before he had to die in office.

I like the way he realised that Cuba would have to join the 21st century and embarked upon the process before he rejoined the ancestors. I wish the same dignity in old age for all revolutionary leaders who started out well, but have come to accept that it is the exception and not the norm.

Considering no one has come up with a cure for mortality (and don’t let the cryogenics people tell you otherwise), one would think people would prepare their legacies better. Oh well.

So... what now? What now for those of us who cannot bend the knee to the church of Mammon and are steadily running out of inspiring if flawed individuals to challenge our complacency. Everywhere I turn these days, books written for youth mention the word “entrepreneurship.”

Even our moral compass and philanthropic impulses must have a monetary component to them. Real debates of political ideology as the active and intimate everyday management of relations of power are scarce. Instead the dialogue gets buried in books that come across as historical accounts, when we have been trained to ignore the past as irrelevant.

Fidel Castro is dead, at the ripe old age of 90. People may die, but ideas don’t; they evolve. Literature is starting to emerge that is trying to cope with a future that is paradoxically promising a world of plenty and a world of trouble at the same time.

The plenty is in material terms: Poverty does not need to exist anymore, not in real terms, considering the resources we can produce with the help of technology. The trouble comes as always from negotiating the distribution of all that wealth and imagining the future as... better?

“...In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]