Daily Times

The relevance of Marx was proved once again formidably when even numerous apologists of neo-liberal finance capital queued up at bookshops for Das Capital after a mega-crisis had engulfed Wall Street. Shocking as it may seem to ‘official’ Marxists, Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest (in original text, Latest) Stage of Capitalism is bearish. The demise of official Marxism reflects the invalidity of Leninism although Lenin was one of the greatest revolutionaries in human history.

Apologists of neo-liberal finance capital whose think tank is the Chicago School of Monetary Economics, whose mentor was Milton Friedman, suffer from a haemorrhage of confidence in all variants of neo-classical and neo-Keynesian economics. The hype and halo of hedge funds evaporated with the ‘sub-prime’ catastrophe. I remembered John Kenneth Galbraith’s jibe at neo-Classicists and neo-Keynesians in his speech as the president of the American Economic Association in the early 1970s: “Our capacity for erroneous belief is great.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Professor Randhir Singh, India’s eminent scholar in political theory, stated poignantly in a treatise, “The World After The Collapse of The Soviet Union” that the fall of the USSR was merely the defeat of “official communism”, not of Marxism. A highly respected academic among Marx-followers and scholars, Dr Singh’s words were proved prophetic.

Unfortunately, official Marxist parties, including those in the Indian subcontinent, are too adamant and stubborn about the reality due to their obsession with Lenin and Leninism (including their derivatives such as Stalinism and Maoism/Mao Zedong Thought), and thus fail to cash in on the new realisation among the bourgeois economists on Marxian economics that reading Das Capital in trying to understand the causation of the ongoing global financial crisis. In other words, the Communist Parties (CP) are sinking due to their obsession with ‘official Marxism’, which is a deviation from the main formulations of Marx and Engels. The masses too are distancing themselves from the CP leaderships. Take the communist parties of India, the most powerful of the Left parties in the region. In 1967, the Communist Party of India won 23 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, with 5.11 percent of total valid votes, followed by the CPI (Marxist) which got 19 seats and 4.28 p.c. votes. The two parties together performed better than the Hindu rightist Bharatiya Jana Sangh (rechristened in 1979 as the Bharatiya Janata Party), which won 35 seats with a voting share of 9.31 percent. In 2004, the CPI won 10 seats but its share of votes was just 1.41 percent and the CPI-M with 5.66 percent bagged 34 seats, but in 2009 the CPI-M won 16 seats with 5.33 percent of votes and the CPI got four seats and less than 1.20 percent of votes.

In Pakistan, the communists are too small in number to be seen through an electron microscope with the highest achievable resolution. Out of 42.5 million valid votes in this year’s national election, the CP of Pakistan got just 91 votes and the Awami Workers Party, formed through a merger of three groups on November 11, 2012 got less than 1,900 votes. Ludicrously enough, the Economic and Political Weekly carried a 2,400-word article by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, a member of the Awami Workers Party Pakistan and a revered scholar, calling it a “major turn in the fortunes either of the Pakistani left, or its long-suffering working people.” Armchair revolutionism is the identification mark of the elitist Left, which is tagged with the dying official Marxism. The same is true in Bangladesh where the CP of Bangladesh, once a force to reckon with, does not get even one per cent of votes.

The roots of conspicuous decline of the influence of parties grown under the now-defunct Communist International, a global phenomenon, are in Leninism. The October Revolution (1917) was a coup unlike the February Revolution (1917) when people were up against the atrocities of the Czar. The works of Oskar Anweiler, Alexander Rabinowitch and others clearly indicate that the Bolsheviks under Lenin forgot the categorical statement of Engels in the preface to the 1888 edition (English) of the Communist Manifesto that for the ultimate triumph of the ideas in the Manifesto, “Marx relied solely and exclusively on the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion,” and not outsiders or so-called “professional revolutionaries”, one of Lenin’s faulty ideas.

Perhaps the best living Marx scholar of Asia, Paresh Chattopadhyay in a paper, “Illusion of the Epoch — Twentieth Century Socialism” demolished the myth of Leninism, the basis of 20th century socialism. For Marx, socialism is synonymous with communism. For Lenin, socialism was “the lower form of communism”. The Bolshevik Revolution was no more than a seizure of power sans revolutionary conditions. Lenin’s arguments such as completion of the bourgeois revolution in February 1917 and his declaration in 1915 on the possibility of socialist revolution outside Europe, given the ‘unequal development of capitalism’ were perceived in a tearing hurry a few months after the October seizure of power, “differently from what Marx and Engels had expected.” Marx wrote in a polemic in 1844, “Without revolution socialism cannot be viable. It needs this political act to the extent that it needs destruction and dissolution. However, where its organising activity begins, where its aim and soul stand out, socialism throws away its political cover” (Kritische Randglossen zu dem Artike or Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform of a Prussian”). For a revolution, Marx is not essential, but in achieving radical change in social relations, Marxian socialism presents a well-defined trajectory.

Lenin’s theory of ‘socialist state’ was an oxymoron, a self-contradiction in Lenin who in his State and Revolution, wrote, “So long as the state exists there is no freedom, where there is freedom, there is no state.” The same Lenin stressed on the need for a “bourgeois state” to enforce “bourgeois right” in the first phase of the new society. But Marx in a letter to Dr Ludwig Kugelman on 12 April 1871 wrote, “If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent.”

Marxists have to preserve Marxism from the distortions of Lenin, although he was one of the greatest revolutionaries in the history of human civilisation. We all gravitated to Marxism through Lenin. The point is to remember Marx’s motto, taken from Descartes: De omnibus dubitandum (doubt everything).

The writer is a Kolkata-based veteran journalist