In My View - Thursday-Wednesday

Whose Marx is it anyway?

In the initial years of this decade, the BBC had aired a poll it had organised in the penultimate years of the previous millennium about who was the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century. The resounding answer had been Karl Marx. The intellectual pull of Marx has been so much over a century that even his greatest enemies, the capitalists have had to denote their objective position in terms of their critique of Marxism. This column usually deals with subjects of international nature, albeit seen through an Indian prism. But today’s subject takes a look at the phenomenon of Marxism, which lies at the root of a politically significant fortnight, both internationally and domestically.

As noted in earlier weeks, Latin American nations are increasingly voting to power various governments who in some way or the other draw their inspiration from Marxism. Nearer home, Nepal has taken the first institutional step towards putting in place a revolutionary government that directly claim to be Marixist, Leninist and Maoist. All these developments are taking place in countries that are mired in inequality, privation, and underdevelopment.

On the other hand, in India’s own red bastion, West Bengal, a Leftist government led by avowed Marxists are showing intriguing signs of embarking on a path of new economic thinking that seems to smack of capitalist features. Indeed, one of the state’s Left leaders and senior CPI (M) Central Committee leader, Benoy Konar, who is knocking on the doors of the party’s apex Politbureau, has stirred a hornets’ nest by arguing that, “West Bengal is not a sovereign country. It is a province within a capitalist-feudal State. There has been no revolution in West Bengal. West Bengal does not have a socialist or a people's democratic government. The West Bengal government is a democratic government which has to work within the socio-economic framework of the capitalist-feudal State. Its main responsibilities are to realise the fullest potential of growth for its agriculture and its industries, to safeguard the interests of its working people, to provide some relief, to extend democracy and to make the people aware of the existing anti-people socio-economic system through their practical experiences and to project an alternative policy. Leave alone the LF government; let us recount the experience of the November revolution about capitalist development. In spite of being called the socialist revolution, Lenin had to say that in reality it was a working class-peasantry revolution, which means in real sense it was a democratic revolution under the leadership of the working class, whose task was to reach socialism after completing the task of bourgeois-democratic revolution.”

As if on cue, the state government had to acquire about 1,000 acres of land for a motor vehicle project of one pf the leading industrial groups of the country, know as the Tata group. Undoubtedly, the group can count on belonging to the top two per cent of the world population who control about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth. So by seeming to side with them, the West Bengal has come under withering criticism of the Left sympathisers – both aligned and independent. Hence, the question, Whose Marx is it anyway?

Benoy Konar and his party’s position can be best understood of one were to pick up the clues from an interpretation of Marxism by the German social scientist, Juergen Habermas. In his famous, The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory, he had analysed “In the dimension of labour as a process of production and appropriation, reflective knowledge changes into productive knowledge. Natural knowledge congealed in technologies impels the social subject to an ever more thorough knowledge of its “Process of material exchange” with nature. In the end this knowledge is transformed into the steering of social processes in a manner not unlike that in which natural science becomes the power of technical control.”

In other words, if labour, the key component of social transformation were to remain mired in primitivity of production relations, it fails to reach its historic level of emancipation where it can take social control of production processes serving its own interests. In fact, Habermas has gone further by describing the full knowledge of the “process of material exchange” almost as powerful as natural science’s hegemony over technology.

But returning to the internationalist roots of this space, the nations of Latin America too would have to eventually take a similar position as that being witnessed in West Bengal. For their commodity-based economies require urgent change towards modernisation that heightens the consciousness and technical competence of their own labour, by which the latter gain effective control of their own destinies.

Meanwhile, there would be pain from deviations – real and imagined; from increased exploitation as Capital seeks to inflict. Valdimir Illyich Lenin, the first successful revolutionary Marxist – as opposed to Marx, the failed Marxist in praxis – had written is his, Left Wing Communism: as infantile disorder about the transition of Russia from ‘pre-bourgeois patriarchal mode’ to bourgeois development that, “Illusions that stood outside and above class distinctions, illusions concerning the possibility of avoiding capitalism, were scattered to the winds. The class struggle manifested itself in a quite new and more
distinct way.”

He had also warned, “A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another - all this is common knowledge.”

Clearly, the followers of Marx need also to gain control of their own epistemeolgical roots.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi (Kerala). He writes on Strategic Security issues. And he can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in.