An article on Marx was recently published in the Indian
magazine The Statesman and our comrades in the World Socialist Party (India)
responded:
Dear Editor,
In the evening of August 23, 2015 in the Sunday Discussion
Meeting of our party, the World Socialist Party (India), we read with interest
the Saturday Statesman, August 22, 2015 article “Relevance of Marx” written by
Professor Gargi Sengupta. It is really heartening to note that a nineteenth
century communist revolutionary, Karl Marx, is being revisited by the 21st
century mainstream press to find answers to the present-day woes and worries.
Hopefully, this signals the beginning of Marx’s media-ride in India too. This
happens because, as Marx and Engels themselves observed, “consciousness can
sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical conditions,
so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can refer to earlier
theoreticians as authorities." – (The German Ideology) “Men make their own
history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
encountered, given and transmitted from the past,” wrote Marx in The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
In her defensive appreciation of Marx, Gargi Sengupta has
rightly claimed that “Marxism enables us to understand the nature of the
capitalist crisis,” and also that “Marx believed that human development
requires a cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of
production.”
She has excellently pronounced, “The overall significance of
religion may have declined, but the family, the schools, and the capitalist
controlled mass media continue to brainwash the working class and prevent them
from realizing their true destiny.”
Her observation: “From a global perspective, a class-based
analysis is still relevant,” holds up one of the basic principles of Marxism.
She defends Marx for “making a very fundamental contribution” whereby “He
placed human beings and their conscious, purposive activity – human labour – at
the centre of his analysis” and also for a “unique contribution” – the role of
“class struggle” in “human historical development”. She is right in pointing
out that “Marx’s writings still evoke interest across the world. … Marx’s
writings can throw light on the problems of our age”. Simply because, as Marx
viewed, “The nature of capital remains the same in its developed as in its
undeveloped form”; and “Production of surplus value is the absolute law of this
mode of production.” – Capital , vol - I
Actually, Marx is more relevant today than ever before.
This said, I would like to comment on a couple of
inaccuracies in Professor Sengupta's article. She says, “Marx visualized the
remedy in violent revolution followed by decades of civil and international
warfare.” This is a half-truth. True, in his early years Marx held a “violent
revolution” view. However, eventually and finally he arrived at the following
conclusion: “proletariat – organized in a separate political party. That such
organization must be pursued by all the means, which the proletariat has at its
disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of
trickery, which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation.” –
Written on about May 10, 1880, Printed according to L'Égalité, No. 24, June 30,
1880, checked with the text of Le Précurseur.
Secondly, in portraying capitalism as only a “private
enterprise” system she has missed the yardstick of defining state capitalism –
the defining characteristic of which is state ownership and control of the
means of production and articles for distribution. As a result she is mistaken
in recognizing the erstwhile so-called ‘communist’ dictatorial and despotic
state capitalist regimes of Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. How could there be
“the eclipse of Communism” when Communism (Socialism the same) has nowhere and
never been attempted at all? Just what happened in these countries was
appropriately described in 1918 by Fitzgerald of the Socialist Party of Great
Britain: “What justification is there, then, for terming the upheaval in Russia
a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the
November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists.” – Socialist Standard, Aug
1918
Hopefully the letter will be published by the magazine in due
course, if not, then the reply on this blog will have to suffice.
For those interested in the WSP (India)
Email: wspindia@hotmail.com
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