Author Name: Dibyajit Mukherjee
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it” – 11th Theses on Feuerbach
A Diverse Thinker
5th May 1818! Born in Trier, one of the most industrious regions of Germany at that time, is Karl Heinrich Marx, who went on to become a passionate poet dedicating his poetry to his muse Jenny Westpahlen; a Doctor of Philosophy writing his thesis on the difference between the Natural Philosophy of Epicurus and Democritus; a lawyer who through his debate on the timber stealing bill near the Rhineland province comprehended that legal relations and forms of state have their roots in material conditions; a radical journalist who believed in the merciless criticism of everything existing; a Mathematician whose instrumental work is recorded in his Mathematical Manuscripts, a dialectical materialist after an indictment on Hegelian dialectical idealism and a political economist who by giving us three volumes of Das Kapital and 3 volumes of Theories on Surplus Value showered us with the knowledge about the contradictory nature of Capitalism which is a system of inherent crisis where the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is directly proportional to the growth of capital thus excruciatingly jinxing the market.
In Das Kapital, he compares world history to a stage and says that two bloody characters have now entered this stage, causing an impediment in the very theory of progress. These characters are named Monsieur Capital and Madam Rent. Along with his friend Friedrich Engels he formed the Communist League and the First International whose sole aim would be to unite the working classes to overthrow Global Capitalism and establish the socialist appropriation of the means of production through democratic control in distribution of commodities. He was a strong analyst of Religion and was not against religion but the material conditions that give rise to religion. Enigmatically, he writes in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the heart of a heartless world, the sigh of the oppressed, the soul of soulless conditions and therefore the opium of the people.
Relevance in the Modern Era
But today is 5th May 2024 and we see Marx is more relevant than ever before. His 1848 pamphlet called the Communist Manifesto with its prophetic lines “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and “a spectre looms large over Europe, the spectre of Communism”, are more relevant if one analyses the contemporary situation of Global Capitalism. The Israel- Palestine conflict, mass unemployment in India, rising inflation in the UK, the Black Lives Matter in the USA,riots in Paris, the Youth Hell March in Germany, the Yellow Vest Movement in Europe, the Italian economic stagnation, Grexit, Brexit and the rise of Neo-Fascism in Europe, the struggle for an Independent Catalonia are just few out of the 100 systemic problems that are existing.
The bombarding of Syria by Imperialist forces and the austerity measures imposed on the Indian working class people due to the rise of Hindutva politics throws light on the gloom and doom of the future in this pestilence-stricken Capitalist Society. In such dangerous times we should go back, not to Highgate Cemetery, but to the school of Marxism and its main pillars of dialectical and historical materialism, a critique of Capitalist Economics and forging the organisation of revolution which Dr Karl Marx referred to as the locomotive of history.
Lessons from Historical Examples
The fall of the Soviet Union has proved Marx to be correct as the latter along with Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had analysed that socialism in one country was an aberration and destined to fall. Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed is one of the best Marxist critiques of the U.S.S.R where he showed how the historic revolution of October 1917 in Russia degenerated into the rise of bureaucracy due to the ISOLATION of the Russian Revolution which mainly happened because of the betrayal of the Second International, the attack on the nascent worker’s state of Russia by 21 countries and hence the introduction of N.E.P. But even though it degenerated into a bureaucratic caricature of Socialism one cannot deny the positive impacts of an anti-capitalist planned economy which transformed Russia from a backward country to a super power. China is also another example where we can see the benefits of 1949 revolution but a strong Marxist critique is to be made against the bureacracy of the Chinese Communist Party. One must remember that Marx had in his mind the Commune system of the 1871 Paris Commune revolution which was also the model of the 1917 revolution where a soviet system of workers councils was made the system of administration.
International Outlook and the Pandemic
The corona pandemic had shown us that we need International Health Care systems, International Education Programmes and International Management Studies to control the impending danger. Nationalism is bankrupt and so is the banality of its reiteration. Nationalism today is decadent and like Rabindranath Tagore said-“it is a menace”.
The 207th year of Karl Heinrich Marx should urge us to understand the pillars of this revolutionary outlook namely Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, the critique of the bourgeois state and a new economics controlled by the real owners of the wealth of society i.e the working class involved in primary productions.
Foot Note: Mr. Dibyajit Mukherjee, currently posted at the Department of English of Prabhat Kumar College, Contai is an Assistant Professor of English. A recipient of the Prof. SN Basu gold medal from Gurudas College in Kolkata from where he graduated, he has been awarded the M.A and M. Phil degrees in English from Calcutta University and is presently pursuing his Ph.D. from Rabindra Bharati University. He has written three books namely Amiri Baraka: Art and Struggle, Troika: Three Essays on Trotsky and The Tongue of Light in Fits of Flames which is book on poetry.
