ARCHIT MUKHERJEE
Today
is the birth anniversary of a German philosopher whose life was much more than
just philosphy. A rather unknown and diregarded intellectual of his time His
ideas shaped the greatest revolutions of the modern world decades after his
death. He was the earliest and the most brilliant critique of capitalism, which
was in its initial stages in his time. His analyses of our economic system, of
poverty, human nature and ambition are one of the most remarkable works in the
annals of economics and philosphy. Yet, the modern world led by “superpower”
counties that carry out global imperialism have chosen to disregard Marxism and
labeled it as evil. It is true that Marxism was used to establish nasty
dictatorships and unscientefically planned economies but we cannot reject Marx as
quickly as his analysis of our ailment is true till date.
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March
1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political
theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and
philosophy at university. He closely
worked with a group of intellectuals who called themselves “communists”. After
moving to England, many of his works were published by the help of his rich
friend Friedrich Engels. Engels ensured that his works were published. It is
true, that capitalism paid for communism.
Critics have for long upheld
the fall of tightly controlled beauracracies in the east as a failiure of
Marxism, even though Marxists had long predicted the fall of Stalinism. Indeed, Leon Trotsky already
analysed the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and, using
the Marxist method, explained the inevitability of its collapse.
In the first place,
Stalinism and socialism (or communism), so far from being identical, are
mutually exclusive. The regimes in the USSR and its Eastern European satellites
in many ways were the opposite of socialism. As Trotsky explained, a
nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body requires oxygen.
Without the democratic control and administration of the working class, a
regime of nationalisation and planning would inevitably seize up at a certain
point, especially in a modern, sophisticated and complex economy.
The supporters of
capitalism will agree that it needs to be reformed. It has created economic
inequality, poverty, leads to erosion of human rights and incentivizes
imperialist expansion and war. This is where Marx can come in as a guide for us;
his diagnosis of capitalism’s ills can help us navigate our society to a more
promising future.
Marx was an ardent critique of
modern work; he identified the following problems in it.
1 modern work lead to alienation
The most insightful idea of his
analysis of capitalism is that modern work leads to alienation. The worker
makes a genuine contribution to the economy through his labour. Labpour, at its
best, offers us a chance to externalise the good within ourselves, something
which is rarely seen in modern work, where work is highly specialised.
Specialised work increases the efficiency of the system, but the individual
worker loses the sense of the contribution he might be making to humanity.
2.
Modern work is insecure.
Capitalism
makes human beings a commodity, hence, expendable. Human labour is just another
factor of production and will be immediately let go as soon as costs rise and
technology reduces the labour. The problem is that no human being wants to be
arbitarily let go. Understood emotinaly, Marxism is not just an economic
theory, but a thought, that no one can be ousted and this world belongs to all
of us.
3.
The Capitalist get richer, while the worker gets poorer.
One
of the most obvious analyses of modern work by Marx is that the capitalists
shrink the wages of the labourer as much as possible I order to gain a higher
profit margin. The capitalist see profit as the reward for intinuity and
talent, Marx says that profit is the unpaid wage of the labourer. Marx insists
that profit is made by paying a worker for his labour and selling the produce
to someone else on a much greater price. Hence, profit is just a fancy term for
exploitation.
4.
Capitalism is highly unstable.
Marx
argued that in a capitalist system, there are a series of crisis, each one
bieng called rare, freakish and the last one, but that’s not the case.
Capitalist crisis are caused by something rtather odd. Unlike the crisis of
shortage in the past, we have now crisis of abundance. This is due to the fact
that our systems are so efficient that they produce more than what we need, yet
are unable to end oppression.
Marx and India
A
common rant by the Indian right wing against Marx is that Marxism is alien to
our nation and that Marx had nothing to do with India. Even many major Marxist
ldeologues were unaware of Marx’s writtings on India, where he has analysed the
condition of existence and a pre capitalist economy in India, apart from
decrying the British Imperialism in India as evil.
it is
clear, then, that to Marx, the pre-modern mode of production in India was
neither slavery- based nor feudal (the two forms recognised for Europe). But it
was not a class-fewer mode, for Marx recognised the existence of classes within
even the village community; and, of course, the vast apparatus of the despotic
state contained a ruling class that appropriated the bulk of the surplus. It stands to
commonsense that a mode of production where the state collects rents as tax
over a large country (like the Mughal Empire, which Marx had in mind since he
extensively cited Francois Bernier, the French traveller who visited India in
Aurangzeb’s time) could not by any stretch of imagination have been a
‘primitive’ system.
The
system was, of course, certainly precapitalist, and, therefore, Marx used much
information relating to India in Capital, Vol. I, 1867, to underline how a
non-capitalist system could still function without the features characteristic
of capitalism. Thus craft production in India represented one level of division
of labour, where the Dacca weaver could produce the finest muslin by combining
his own ‘inherited’ skill with use of the rudest of tools, while under
capitalist manufacture (prior to machinery) a more detailed division of labour led
to more specialised compartmental skills and varied tools. Elsewhere he
also cited the case of Indian ‘magnates’ employing artisans to produce goods of
use for them, whereby “production and reproduction on a progressively
increasing scale go on their way without any intervention of capital”
Both apologists and opponents of
colonialism have argued that Marx had seen British colonialism as a progressive
intervention of history in a stagnant and backward India. There can perhaps be
a no bigger misreading and misrepresentation of Marx’s views about India.
Marx was very clear that capital did not
operate only in the apparently legally regulated environment of capitalist
countries; he was very much alive to the reality of colonial plunder and
violent accumulation of capital from across the world, which in fact had
created the conditions for capitalism to emerge.
About british
imperialism in India he said; “the misery inflicted by the British on
Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind
than all Hindustan had to suffer before…The profound hypocrisy and inherent
barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from
its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes
naked” [dispatch to new york herald, 1853]
In the same dispatch
titled The Future Results of British Rule in India, Marx said “The
Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among
them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling
classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the
Indians themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke
altogether.” Marx proposed of complete Indian independence in July 1853, four
years before sections of Indians rose in revolt to wage India’s first war of
independence.
it
is also often heard that Marx despised religion as ‘opium of the masses’ and
called for a ban on all religions. This again is a gross misrepresentation, of
Marx’s ideas on religion.
Marx wrote “Religious
suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a
protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,
the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the
opium of the people.” Marxism has
therefore always focused on changing that ‘heartless world’ and its ‘soulless
conditions’, and insisted on treating religion as a matter for the individual,
strictly separating it from the state and public affairs administered by the
state.
Marxism and our current situation
Capitalism is facing
at least three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly
ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial
stability, and all of this is playing out against the backdrop of a climate
crisis that cannot be addressed by “business as usual.” Until just two months
ago, the news media were full of frightening images of overwhelmed
firefighters, not overwhelmed health-care providers.
.
Governments are now
extending loans to businesses at a time when private debt is already
historically high. In the United States, total household debt just before the
current crisis was $14.15 trillion, which is $1.5 trillion higher than it was
in 2008 (in nominal terms). And lest we forget, it was high private debt that
caused the global financial crisis.
The problem is that
capitalism’s ultimate motive is to increase profit, even if at the cost of the
workforce. The top 10 billionaires in the world have added $200 billion to
their wealth while the workforce across the world is being laid off, unemployed
and in a state of destitution.
In the case of India,
cronies who default bank loans have had their loans written off by RBI worth
rupees 68,000 crores. This happening at a time when CMIE has projected that
around 14 crore Indians have been unemployed due to the Virus crisis and lakhs
of migrant laborers have been stuck across the country is a clear example of
how capitalism always favors the rich at the cost of the poor. The virus
doesn’t discriminate between the rich and poor, but capitalism differentiates
between those who can withstand the virus and those who are vulnerable to it.
Conclusion
Marx
was a like a brilliant doctor in the early days of medicine. He analysed the
nature of the disease so well but failed too find a cure to it. Still, I
believe that we should all be Marxists in the terms of agreeing to his analysis
of the ailments of our economic system. However, as he said that;
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Taking
Marx as a guide, we need to reform our economic system in oprder to end
exploitation and create a better future for our civilisation, using solutions
that will actually work.
Sources:
National Herald, marxist.com, schooloflife.com
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