Polemics

Marx versus Marxism
Sankar Ray

"My friend, all theory is grey, and green
The golden tree of life"—Mephistopheles
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Faust

One hundred forty years ago on 14 March 1883, Frederick Engels wrote after the end of mundane innings of Karl Heinrich Marx, "On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep—but forever". The craze for and queue up at book-sellers for buying copies of Marx's magnum opus Das Capital after the sub-prime crisis rocked the US financial economy proved beyond doubts that Marx remains valid very much in the 21st Century. Apologists of Neo-Liberal Finance Capital, the DNA of belligerent foreign policy of the United States and aggressive market-dominated capitalism of OECD countries seem to be disillusioned with the prescriptions of Chicago School of Monetary Economics whose high priest was Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, a rarely versatile economist of 20th Century.

But there is no such market-buoyancy for Lenin's Imperialism, the Latest Phase of Capitalism (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was never the title, given by Lenin). Official Marxist parties (OMP) of the 20th Century like the Communist Party of Soviet Union, CP of China and CP of Great Britain distorted, misinterpreted and revised Marx arbitrarily. Those CPs are theoretically on ventilation. David McLellan, formerly professor of political theory at the University of Kent wrote in his 88-page monograph Marx in 1975, "Marx's writings have too often been reduced to ill-digested slogans....it is not surprising that Marx still remains so misunderstood."

OMPs and their members prescribed Maurice Comforth's Dialectical Materialism. CPI(M) ideologues wanted their rank and file from 1964 to bank on Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Revolution. But it did not occur to founders of CPI(M) like EMS Namboodiripad, B T Ranadive and M Basavapunnaiah (not even to CPl's S A Dange, C Rajeswar Rao, Bhowani Sen or Mohit Sen) that Marx never used words 'dialectical materialism' and 'historical materialism'. Sociologist Simon Clarke in his paper, Was Lenin a Marxist? The Populist Roots of Marxism-Leninism that Lenin's mentor Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov invented the term 'dialectical materialism' which is "significantly different from Engels's characterisation of the 'materialist dialectic', and from Marx's own critique of bourgeois philosophy. The difference is quite fundamental, for Plekhanov's 'dialectical materialism' is nothing less than the philosophical materialism of the populist followers of Feuerbach". Similarly, Engels in his Socialism–Utopian and Scientific spoke of "materialist conception of history" that begins with the proposition that "the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure". Thus OMPs inverted these two original concepts upside down.

Eminent Marx scholar Paresh Chattopadhyay who studied original text of Marx and Marxism (official) in German, French, Spanish,Russian and Italian have been critical of Lenin for revising Marx (latest being a paper at the international conference on the 'Relevance of Leninism in the 21st Century at the Wuhan University in China in October 2012- Lenin Reads Marx on Socialism, published in Economic and Political Weekly, 15 Dec, 2012 [See Frontier for the debate with Hiren Gohain-http://frontierweekly.com/views/mar-13/2-3-13-A%20Leninist% 20Defense% 20of%20Lenin.html, http://frontierweekly.com/views/mar-13/2-3-13-Did%20Lenin%20Distort %20Marx.html & http://frontierweekly. com/pdf-files/vol-43-12-15/lenin-43-12-15.pdf)]. Lenin formulated socialism as the lower phase of communism, completely revising Marx. Chattopadhyay argues, "In Marx there is no distinction between socialism and communism, either of them referring to the "society of free and associated producers" which passes through (at least) two phases sequentially. Lenin calls Marx's first place of the new society 'socialism' and (often) reserves the term 'communism' for the second phase. Secondly, Lenin's approach to socialism is rather narrow, compared to Marx's and basically juridical." (Economic Content of Socialism in Lenin–Is it the Same as in Marx? EPW, 26 Jan 1991).

Indeed, Marx was theoretically unsafe in the hands of his followers; and Marxism, a definition Marx objected too. Eric Hobsbawm in an interview to New Statesman in January, 2011, equipped that Marxism in the Soviet Union was "a Marxist state only of a kind", but many people thought it was "a diversion from the original path." Marx profoundly disliked the nomenclature Marxism. It was a coinage from the French 'Marxists' and Marx had promptly written to Paul Lafargue, "Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste." (If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist). That was during the years of the First International.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 39, Apr 7-13, 2013

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