Argentina: Cartoons Teach Children to Hate Karl Marx

In the putrescent decadence of bourgeois imperialism, class propaganda has found a new field of action: children’s bedrooms. The pilgrimage is no longer entrusted only to newspapers, schools, and TV talk shows. Now it is disguised in cartoons. This is the case in Milei’s Argentina, but the model comes from the USA. Its missionaries are called the Tuttle Twins.

The Tuttles, liberalist puppets disguised as schoolchildren, explain to children how to “properly celebrate Karl Marx’s birthday.” AKA, how to spit on him. In an animation that is also popular on social media, the characters explain to young viewers that, “Marx believed in a socialist society where the state owns the means of production and everything is distributed equally among people.”

But don’t be fooled. The goal is not to teach Marx. In fact, one of the twins adds, “It is not surprising that regimes following Marxist ideology have suppressed dissent, restricted individual freedom, and caused famine and death.”

The bourgeois syllogism is clear as day: if you want equality, prepare for the gulag. If you criticize profit, you hate freedom. If you read Capital, you are already an accomplice of Stalin. It is the eternal trick of the ruling class to reduce scientific criticism of the capitalist mode of production to a childish menace, like the boogeyman hiding under the bed. Then comes the pearl of liberalist ideology, “It is almost as if people have free will, and do not willingly accept so-called ‘fair’ distribution.”

The child thus learns that if they are born poor, it is by their own free choice. And if the master exploits them, they must thank the free market for granting the honor of being squeezed. Commodity fetishism begins at age eight; anything but bedtime stories.

But the masterpiece of mystification comes when the characters conclude that “Private property is freedom. The state is slavery.” Yes, they explain this to children. Instead of telling them about fairies and dragons, they recite the religion of the individual-owner, the swaddled entrepreneur, the consumer as the supreme embodiment of the human being. The catechism of profit replaces Andersen’s fairy tales. Thus the bourgeoisie does what it has always done in its history: manufactures new generations of ideological serfs.

This Buffoonery Can’t Stop History

This grotesque ideological maneuver reveals the weakness, not the strength, of imperialism. If the capitalist system has to resort to cartoons to convince children that exploitation is freedom, it means that social reality is getting really out of hand.

Puppets talk, but factories close. Cartoons preach private property, but wages are in free fall. Tuttles smile, but unemployed parents don’t know how to pay the rent. And when these children grow up, they will remember not the liberalist tune, but the lines at the soup kitchen and unpaid bills. They will forget Marx preaching weird theories on a tricycle, but the caceroladas will remain sharp memories.

Bourgeois propaganda can multiply its puppets endlessly, stuffing its ideology into every toy and screen. But it cannot erase the contradictions of capital. It cannot stop the economic crisis from knocking at the door of every proletarian family. It cannot stop the exacerbation of the class struggle that springs from the very bowels of the capitalist mode of production.

Some of the children who sing with the Tuttle Twins today will cheer “necessary for the market” layoffs tomorrow. But those who suffer the crisis today will be forced to struggle to survive tomorrow. In that struggle, all the puppets of the world will not be able to hide the naked reality: that capitalism is exploitation, that private property entails enslavement, and that true freedom begins where profit ends.

The Communist Party’s task is not to denounce the “wrong cartoon,” but to expose the economic structure that generates this ideological rot. Children are not neutral ground but are already targets of class warfare. The bourgeoisie knows this and acts accordingly. We communists must know it just as well.