Ashoke Kumar Sarkar and Abdus Samad Gayen (Eds.),Karl Marx,Bicentennial (1818–2018) Lectures

One of the most visible phenomena on the frontiers of political philosophy has been a resuscitated Marxism among contemporary intellectuals and activists alike. Faced with the crisis of capitalism since 2008 and the profound contradictions that traverse it, we can only recall Jacques Derrida’s (1994, p. 13) affirmation that ‘it will always be an error not to read, re-read and discuss Marx’. From the end of the 1990s, the media and publishing industry has celebrated Marx as one of the relevant thinkers of our times. The rise in Marx’s popularity has of course been linked to the economic crisis but what has motivated a young academic generation to immerse in Marx’s diatribe of capitalism is that the neoliberal promise of better lives has proved to be a lie. For young people born in the technological boom of the 1990s, Marxism has undergone something of a revival because it provides conceptual tools to analyse the crisis that capitalism is going through now. Why Marxism in general and why Marx’s writings should have sprung up during the last decade is also about the need for understanding social movements in the face of populist leaders and authoritarian regimes. The disappearing factories, the de-industrialisation faced by many cities and the outsourcing of manufacturing work to countries where labour is less expensive have led to a revival of interest in class politics. So it is not surprising to see a series of books proclaiming Marxism’s relevance that include among others, Terry Eagelton’s Why Marx Was Right (Eagelton, 2012), Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis (Badiou, 2010) and David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Harvey, 2010).

For all their undoubted theoretical fertility in the past, Indian Marxism has remained a largely academic phenomenon, drawing upon Anglophone, Soviet and Chinese philosophical sources and marked by the most untraditional optimism. At the turn of the century, this ambivalent creative heritage was on the wane as renewed socialist militancy in many parts of the advanced capitalist countries appeared to herald a Marxism no longer tied to conventional party politics.

On the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx (1818–2018), a series of lectures were organised at Presidency University in Kolkata. The present monograph for review comprises a revised and expanded version of three eminent lectures by Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Sourin Bhattacharya and Sudipta Kaviraj. As a new generation has come to terms with how to read afresh the classic formulations of Marx and Engels in ways appropriate to the conditions of their time, these lectures are an inspirational example of how to re-theorise some of their methodological and conceptual contributions to the politics of the contemporary era.

Instead of a reversion to the classical problem of historical materialism, all the lectures emphasise the need for a theoretical basis for the socialist movement and a new programme that will modify but not invalidate Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In the first lecture, ‘Exploring Marx in the Post-Soviet Era’, Sobhanlal Datta Gupta sets himself the formidable task of looking at the political history of the project of publication of the complete writings of Marx and Engels (MEGA) that began in 1911 under the leadership of David Ryazanov. Given my interest in the relationship of manuscripts and politics, I will discuss briefly why the interrogation into the historical birth of these critical editions enables, and makes necessary, a new concern with Marx’s writings after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

If we look at the political contexts within which Marx wrote many of his texts, we find that they were difficult times where even the International Workingmen’s Association which he helped to found in the 1860s was a persecuted and proscribed organisation. Despite the dispersion of the material, disjointed sentences and illegibility of his handwriting, Marx’s texts after his death were reconstructed with great care by his friend Friedrich Engels. It is the selection and publication of unedited or incomplete texts that are now deeply worrying aspects for scholars working on Marx.

As Datta Gupta explains, though the Russian Revolution changed the prospects of Marxism in profound ways, it did not lead to a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of Marx’s original works in the Anglophone world. In fact, not much was added to the corpus of classical writings till the Marx–Engels Institute was built in the 1920s that led to a new wave of publications of some unknown manuscripts. Although the publication increased the circulation of these texts among the public, they were seen as manuals of the party, like handbooks or Marxist anthologies on arguments under strict party control during the Stalin era.

Since the International Marx Engels Foundation was established in the 1990s, there is a section in which all the notebooks of Marx and Engels would be available for acclaimed scholars free from any party affiliation. I am convinced that their publication will herald a new phase in dissemination and reception of Marx’s writings and would encourage new translations of these texts. Of considerable interest is the series dedicated to the ‘The German Ideology’ whose narration of the history of ideas is now modified by tracing the original fragmentariness of the text.

It is also clear that the three volumes of Capital, as they are presented, are far less uniform than it is usually assumed. Engels’ editorial decisions and interventions between 1885 and 1894 are viewed as altering the structure of many passages and concepts. However, if in the light of newly available evidence Marx’s writings turn out to be more problematic or tenable, will this involve revising reinterpretations made by scholars in the past? So the task which Datta Gupta sets for himself is not over because the manner in which he has opened this discussion also raises a larger question of how Marx’s volumes can be edited that allow us to re-read the important phases in his intellectual biography.

Some of these doubts about the MEGA which are now being revised are reiterated in the second lecture by Bhattacharya on ‘Nature of the Text: Its Implications for the Present’. He first reviews Marx’s reputation as a theorist of the socialist tradition as based on Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. He then looks at diverse readings that aim to give this text a mere economic reading which he claims is inspired more by science than by philosophy. In many respects, this lecture manages to bring back the debate on the unity of theory and practice. There is much to learn from it. The problem is that many Marxists build a singular and exclusive account of Marx’s theoretical writings which are contrasted with the insights of a real movement. While expressing admiration for this work Bhattacharya tries to formulate what in his reading should be retained and discussed by Marxists today. The protean malleability of Capital has never ceased and in the age of the late-industrial era of capitalism and its accompanying depreciation of labour-power, it has assumed even more importance. In these conditions, he rejects the view that Capital should be read exclusively as an essay on political economy as he concludes that we must relate this text to Marx’s whole project.

While endorsing Bhattacharya’s point about reading Capital, I want to take it a little further by saying that Marxist scholars and activists have related this unparalleled masterpiece to the success in revolutionary struggles that necessarily involved a dose of simplification and popularisation. ¹ That said we are all aware that many scholars would still think that Marx’s writing is limited to an economic and descriptive compendium of the nineteenth-century working class. In contrast many works by Michio Morishima, Ian Steedman and Bohm-Bawerk aim to restore the rightful status of Capital; they favour revisions that run the risk of abandoning concepts like the labour theory of value or by missing out the social aspect of the phenomena Marx was investigating. The two-fold weaknesses related to popularisation and exegesis should make it easier to understand the reasons behind the lack of interest in a somewhat lengthy and abstract discussion about value, commodities and labour in the past. That, in my opinion, would give us better reasons to install Capital to its rightful place in grasping the foundations of capitalism in the nineteenth century and not providing us with guidance to perceive the diversity of forms in which capitalism is being expressed today.

Of course there are other works that have had considerable influence while others have inspired the socialist imagination and helped formulate revolutionary action, but Capital is still seen as the most important contribution to political economy (see Marx, 1932; Marx & Engels, 1848). It perhaps above all explains the need for radical change in the way production should be organised and resources distributed in society. In the same spirit I would argue that undoubtedly Marx had understood better than any of his contemporaries about Victorian industrialised Britain, but he has enough to say about the nature of global capital and its infinite tendency to travel far and wide for profits. Therefore the study of political economy and the way economic processes are embedded in the organisation of society is what characterises the volumes on Capital and makes it a very relevant text today. While we should have much praise for Marx’s early writings on alienation and critiques of idealism it is Capital that defines the terminology related to the private ownership of the means of production, accumulation of goods and money and exploitation of labour-power. Although the analysis of values and commodities have been revised since this volume was first published it is important to remember the moral and ethical claims underlying this work. Marx’s theory of exploitation is premised on the claim that the value created by workers is appropriated by the capitalist and this transaction is thus based on unfairness and injustice. Exploitative exchanges are those in which one group commands a disproportionately large share of the social surplus leaving the other group with an unfairly small share. Marx understood the division of labour, the historical process of robbery, violence and force that brought about capitalism. But his most impressive insight is that concepts that are central to understanding inequality in bourgeois societies are inherent to the capitalist mode of production itself.

Clearly the volumes of Capital cannot be summed up in a few sentences without the risk of sounding either commonplace or dogmatic. At no point can Marx’s writings be seen as guiding principles to further action as these would have been decried by Marx himself. In The German Ideology, he spoke caustically of ‘abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men’ as having in themselves no value whatsoever when viewed apart from real history. Indeed that Marxist thought has inspired research frameworks in many fields of the social sciences (alienation, social history, revolution, political economy, state within capitalist societies) is very complex as there are areas where his ideas have been employed to give rise to new approaches as in the media and cultural studies. Hence Marxist social inquiry in the present century represents a chorus of many voices, many of which are inconsistent with each other.

The third lecture in this publication titled ‘On Marx’s Truth: A Historical Reading of his Thought’ by Kaviraj takes forward the discussion on methodological and theoretical premises of Marxism by posing the variety and diversity of emphases found in Marx’s work. At the same time he understands the dangers of abstraction, distance and inaction. This lecture is a work of synthesis, constructed largely from a number of essays he has written and published in the last two decades. Part of the success of this chapter lies in its willingness to stretch the boundaries of what we call Marxism, but in doing so Kaviraj brings Marxist theory into better alignment with intuitions underlying Marxist praxis.

Sudipta Kaviraj makes the categorical claim that Marx should be regarded as a critical figure in the evolution of German historicism and he is responsible for contributing to previous historicist thinking. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century western thought and leading to the professionalisation of historical studies, is a pioneer in presenting a new perspective on writing history distinct from the perspective of the dominant trend that would later support positivism. Enlightenment scholars and positivism view man as universal and characterised by an immutable nature. That this perspective is justified is demonstrated by the care which Marx took to soak in the historical details and by the richness of historical content in his writings. Instead of searching for the universal, Marx looks for difference as is reflected in his acceptance of a different trajectory from primitive communism for India. Though Marx did not elaborate on the subsumption of pre-capitalist economies he envisaged by implication a need to amend the sequence of modes of production and social forms. Further instead of being obsessed by discovering the immutable nature of man, Kaviraj views Marx’s philosophy as grounding theory and practice in terms of historically and geographically situated practices and knowledge. Marx according to Kaviraj, draws upon assumptions and spatial, temporal and material conditions that undercut universalist conceptions. According to him, by implication there are no laws of general character which are valid for all societies and any social, cultural or political phenomena can only be rigorously understood within history.

In this lecture, Kaviraj challenges the prominence of structural accounts of capitalism that are grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism. Such a critique has emphasised on the limited ability of capitalism to overcome its internal contradictions. ² Most proponents of this account advance an interpretation of Marxism encapsulated in a rigid definition of social property relations and their rules of reproduction. With a historicist perspective, Kaviraj shows his commitment to a more contextualised and open-ended interpretation of social conflicts and their non-deterministic resolutions. In proposing this interpretation, Kaviraj has opened a broader debate within Marxism on the need for rethinking capitalism as historically open category and for a more agency account of capitalism that avoids the pitfalls of a structuralist rendition of the rise of capitalism in India.

Even though Kaviraj makes a strong claim for Marx’s form of historicist thinking, and his work undeniably challenges and tries to move beyond structural and determinist accounts of Marxism, it is clear that the historicist paradigm triumphantly installed in Europe acquires a different meaning in the Indian context where historicism was formed from disparate elements. Here a historical consciousness is seen as the work of a rational outlook or historicism could be seen as divided into a more conservative stream and one that is related to the assimilation of relativism. To what extent this chapter strives to redress the kind of historical perspective adopted if at all by Indian scholars and activists is unclear. It does, however, emphasise the importance of understanding past practices and discourses in their own historical and intellectual contexts.

To what degree is Marx’s historicism translatable with other attempts within Marxist thought to articulate a relationship among classes and class fractions? To tackle this question and to draw out the spatial implications we could study the Indian context in which Marxist concepts were anchored in the debates of the Second International where the national and the colonial questions remained two distinct issues for a long time. By the Third International, nationalist struggles in the colonies were proclaimed to be progressive, even though not communistic they were component parts of the world revolution. This was followed by the Gramscian influence on concepts such as the autonomy of the political. ³ In retrospect, formalising the theoretical implications of Marxism has been a difficult task as Indian Marxists desired to stay close to the historical material while relying on the theoretical principles of Marx. These problems can be seen as products of the demands that structural frameworks placed on scholars and which severely hindered their abilities to separate the key parameters of Marxism from contexts which mobilised a different set of social forces. In the absence of this historical footing, many scholars found Marxism limited in its explanatory power.

Today, there is a need for a historiography that takes global diversity seriously and which is open to the twists and variations in the experiences of India, China, the Arab world and Southeast Asian states. ⁴ This opening up should also work with the reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the anti-colonial struggles to capture the trans-national interrelatedness. A final way is to incorporate the perspectives and traditions of non-western countries is by recognising the complexity and sophistication of their institutions into the popular intellectual traditions of conducting historical research.

The standpoints in these essays make for an imaginative and refreshingly controversial read. Because these essays embrace without regret the pluralisation of the Marxist tradition, they are meaningful contributions to debates about the core concepts found in Marx’s writings and the way they affect our politics. These essays challenge political theorists to be more capacious in their treatment of Marx, more attuned to the historical context that untidy their precious categories. It calls on scholars to be more deliberate about the political potential of the insights found in Marx’s writings. As individual essays and as a collection, this slim book should reach out into the shelves and classrooms of scholars and students alike.