Q 1. We know what there is to know about Marxism through available literature and the general truisms about the creed have become a part of common intellectual discourse. What is the practical relevance, today, of revisiting its theoretical and scholastic heights which are often difficult to climb?
Well, today, in I997, India reaches its 50th year of independence. But instead of celebrating its Golden Jubilee with unanimity and consensus, the nation-state stands at a crossroad. The rich are ranged against the poor, communities against communities, caste against caste, industrialist against worker, industrialist against industrialist, politician against the people, politician against politician. Every one agrees that the economy is in crisis and structural reforms are needed. But while one group argues about a globalised economy and a pro-multinational path, others propose the radical opposite. There are plenty of arguments which strike a middle path further complicating the scenario.
What is more, many ideals of the freedom movement actually stand on their heads. Secularism is giving way to soft and hard communalism, self reliance to dependence and socialism to the naked rule of the big bourgeoisie.
50 years of Indian independence also mark 72 years of communist movement in India. The movement had once held the promise of change and revolution. But today it is passing through an acute phase of trials, tribulations and transition. The same holds true for post-independence artistic and literary currents and Indian culture in general.
The international situation is also similarly riddled with contradictions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, The ‘End of History’ was predicted. Instead, we are seeing the revival of old conflicts, rapid advances in technology, fresh threats to the environment, and a new millennium fast approaching hell bent on exploding the established contours of theory and practice.
Earlier decades of the 20th century were perhaps no less exciting and conflict ridden. But people knew what was right and what was wrong, who was the enemy and who was the friend — they, in short, had an ideology.
This absence of a way of seeing, understanding and changing the world ts a speciality of our times. And Marxism steps in at this point : not as a scholastic exercise but as a political and philosophical weapon in the hands of the industrial workers, peasants, white collar employees, women, professionals, believers, non-believers, party cadres, leaders, in short people of alt denominations grappling with the spiritual and material issues of the day.
Q 2. But I thought Marxism dealt exclusively with economic problems of poverty, unemployment and the like. That it was a principle of equality between human beings and promised things like a paradise on earth. ...
These issues arise from the various applications of the ‘method’ of Marxism. But Marxism, first and foremost, makes men and women conscious of an infinite cosmos-universe-world, independent of the will of God or Man, as the mode of their existence. This is the universe of infinite material, physical reality — something which encompasses everything living, moving, dead, good, bad, black, white and grey. A universe where great structures, ideas, subjects — even the known frames of time, space and history, rise only to peter away. And yet, often they come back with renewed vigour and on a new basis.
It is a universe where hope is balanced by despair, need by fulfilment, necessity by freedom and the old by the new, where categories like society & individual, body & soul etc form binary opposites and yet are always interchangeable. There is a relationship between events by which victory is accompanied by the possibilities of defeat and defeat by the anticipation of victory.
Marxism introduces us to the laws of this cosmos-universe. It makes us see and experience the principle governing our outer and inner ‘Universes’, as residing in the ‘power’ of material motion and ‘energy’.
From this principle emerges a new view of family, property, state, religion, society and intimate human relations. They all become products of physical, material and spiritual needs and interests, and an arena where these needs collide and explode frontiers. Thus these institutions represent the struggle of one power against another, of the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, equal against equal and vice versa. It is through this collision of interests that great events are born, history is made, revolutions take shape, beauty is created and great ideas and spiritual quests evolve in time.
Marxism emerges from this process with two sides, albeit of the same coin. On the one hand it takes the form of a social, political and cultural movement in the ‘physical’ sense. And in that capacity, gets related to the history of ‘praxis’ of economy, of production, distribution and consumption and the attendant conflicts and struggles which shape society, politics and culture.
On the other hand, it shapes up as a method of thought and a discipline of knowledge, related to the history of ‘ideas’ — the development and interpenetration of the successive ‘notions’ of science, art, philosophy, economy, politics, religion, society, law, morality, linguistics, environment, nature, in short all conceivable branches of thought and knowledge.
Q 3. But how did this idea crop up in the heads of its formulators, Marx and Engels?
The search for a material basis of existence actually began in the crisis-ridden period of mid-19th century Europe. By that time Europe had accomplished in 1789, a successful revolution in France which proclaimed, for the first time in history, the ‘Rights of Man’. This was a breakthrough of immense significance as it brought to the fore the concept that man could make his own destiny without the aid of God. And that the values of justice, freedom, goodness need a grounding in ‘human individual behaviour’ of ‘this world’ rather than the communitarian strictures of the other heavenly world.
From here on was opened the way for Marx and Engels to ground philosophy in the practices of material reality. And to take it, ultimately, beyond a focus on the mundane actions of ‘man’ to concrete, impersonal laws of the universe as such.
Q 4. How did the French revolution come about in the first place? Why did people decide to focus on ‘man’ instead of God?
The French revolution was a product of a struggle between material forces and interests produced due to changes in productive technology.
Right from the 12th and 13th centuries onwards, there was a massive growth in cultivable land. This was followed by growth in cash crops and the commercialization of agriculture Soon, the technology of wind or water power replaced muscle. This led to the discovery of new sources of energy which opened the path for using ‘natural resources’ to create new amounts of wealth.
This technology created its own social force in the form of an entrepreneurial-trading aristocracy and a forward looking peasantry. The latter constituted new, concrete ‘categories’ of social, economic and political functions, or ‘classes’, demanding a new set of relations in all three spheres. They clashed with the technology and set of relations of the old feudal Barons and Lords and produced a movement in art, culture and ideas known as the ‘renaissance’. Later, the development of steam power in 18th century England led to the separation of manufacture from trade and agriculture. This was the beginning of the industrial revolution which created new social forces in the form of the industrial bourgeoisie and working class. It was the aspiration and energy of the new class of the bourgeoisie which swept the society, including sections of the feudal aristocracy, off its feet and effected the final rupture with the ancient and medieval worlds.
Q 5. But how did the basic tenets of Marxism evolve out of this complex situation?
In the later half of the 18th century, another development was also proceeding on the heels of the French revolution. England, which was ahead of France in economic development, just as France was ahead in social and political sphere, was consolidating its hold on the continent of Asia. The Asian countries were competitors of Europe in trade, economic and political development. But they were soon transformed into colonies and bases for loot, plunder and accumulation of wealth by the western bourgeoisie.
This contradiction was die contradiction of a new system — the system of capitalism. It was based on the accumulation and circulation of capital; on the principle of turning all material and spiritual resources of the world into fixed or moving forms of ‘money’. Capitalism introduced a new set of ‘impersonal’ production and social relations Expressed in terms of ‘capital’ and ‘labour’, this relation was fundamentally different from the master-serf relation that characterised the earlier feudal era.
The growth of capitalism was thus revolutionary, it dissolved everything, all existing ties based on emotion and spirituality and brought before the human race the naked material facts and laws of existence.
But bourgeois society began losing its progressive dynamism after the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. These upheavals, coming one after the other, were initially attempts to carry forward the incomplete agenda of the French revolution and usher in a liberal, democratic and just society.
But during their course, it became evident that this agenda could no longer be completed under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. What it needed was the leading role of the working classes. But their empowerment would have gone against the logic of capitalism — a system then exposing itself, more and more, as symbolising the exploitation of labour, rather than the exploitation of nature and material resources which was its hallmark during the earlier dynamic and entrepreneurial phase.
Hence, it was logical for capitalism to turn its back on the ideals of the French revolution. A historic compromise was effected with the old aristocracy, particularly with its values and ideals. Old values and norms were revived where they were dead and a phase of reaction set in. Right after the 1848 revolutions, die progressive phase of colonialism, where even its loot depended on the expansion of local internal market and encouragement to local entrepreneurial tendencies in the colonies, also ended. European colonial powers, faced with a series of insurrections and political challenges in India, China and Persia in the 1850s, halted their steps when the reforms which they engendered began unleashing revolutionary, anti-colonial impulses.
Marxism was a product of these historic conditions prevailing in Europe, Asia and the wider world. The individuals responsible for its genesis, Marx and Engels belonged to the ranks of the bourgeois intelligentsia of Europe and were part of the revolutionary impulses of 1848. They represented its Left wing which began veering towards a new mode of justice and democracy when the uprisings of die working classes became common. They noted that a new class — the industrial proletariat was coming to the fore on the heels of the historic betrayal by the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels brought to a logical conclusion the line of thinking that had emerged in the bourgeois schools of English political economy, German philosophy and French socialism. English political economy had begun by stating that it is labour, and not natural resources like land that determine the value of products. Marx and Engels put forward the question: if labour determines value, then the value of a product ought to come from the amount of labour put into it. But if this is true what is the source of die capitalist’s profit? And why does not labour exercise full control over its product?
Likewise, German philosophy projected history as a movement, as a constant struggle between opposites, as ‘Dialectics’. But it stopped its movement in the first half of the 19th century projecting the bourgeois-Prussian state as the most perfect state. But didn’t this conclusion go against its own thesis of perpetual movement?
In a similar vein, French socialism raised the issue of an egalitarian society. But it stopped short of handing the capitalist system over to the workers. It failed to answer the question: would not there be further development transcending the categories of worker and capitalist?
Q 6. Oh! So Marxism itself emerged from certain contradictions? Could you give us some rudimentary ideas about the basic components of Marxism?
Well, let us do this with the help of excerpts from Lenin’s short essay The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism:
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, which was die scene of a decisive battle against every kind of mediaeval rubbish, against feudalism in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. …
But Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eighteenth century: he advanced philosophy. He enriched it with the acquisitions of German classical philosophy, especially of the Hegelian system, which in its turn led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The chief of these acquisitions is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest and deepest form, free of one-sidedness, the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, which provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science — radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements — have remarkably confirmed Marx’s dialectical materialism, despite the teachings of the bourgeios philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and rotten idealism.
Deepening and developing philosophical materialism, Marx completed it, extended its knowledge of nature to the knowledge of human society. Marx’s historical materialism was the greatest achievement of scientific thought. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in the views on history and politics gave way to a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops – how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.
Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter) which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines — philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a super-structure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modem European states serve to fortify the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. …
Having recognized that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted most attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modem, i.e., capitalist society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work. He rigorously substantiated and consistently developed this theory. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between men. The exchange of commodities expresses the tie between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that this tie is becoming closer and closer, inseparably binding the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this tie: human labour power becomes a commodity. The wageworker sells his labour power to the owner of the land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day the worker toils without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus value is the corner stone of Marx’s economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, presses on the worker by ruining the small masters and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is at once apparent, but we observe the same phenomenon in agriculture as well; the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture increases, the employment of machinery grows, peasant economy falls into the noose of money-capital, it declines and sinks into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. In agriculture, the decline of small-scale production assumes different forms, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social — hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a systematic economic organisation – but the product of the collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. The anarchy of production grows, as do crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population.
While increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of combined labour…
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
When feudalism was overthrown, the “free” capitalist society appeared on God’s earth, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the toilers. Various socialist doctrines immediately began to arise as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. But early socialism was Utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it indulged in fancies of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But Utopian socialism could not point the real way out. It could not explain the essence of wage slavery under capitalism, nor discover the laws of the latter’s development, nor point to the social force which is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of the whole development. …
The genius of Marx consists in the fact that he was able before anybody else to draw from this and consistently apply the conclusions that world history teaches. This conclusion is the doctrine of class struggle.
People always were and always will be the foolish victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of these classes and that is to find, in the very society which sorrounds us. and to enlighten and organise for the struggle, the forces which can – and owing to their social position, must — constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.
Q 7. But Marx and Engels evolved these ideas in the context of 19th century Europe. How were they developed, subsequently, by later Marxists?
The meaning and application of these concepts changed as Marxism was applied to different contexts and ‘time frames’. The evolution of ‘Finance capitalism’ was later cognized as denoting a new stage of imperialism by Lenin who was working to revolutionise a half-European. half-Asian country like Russia in the 20th century. This is a stage where technological development coincides with the exploitation of foreign markets by capital — consequently the arena of the battle of socialism slowly shifts from the countries of western Europe to that of eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa and the Third World.
But this shift also added new features to Marxism and it did not remain a methodology derived exclusively from schools of 19th century western Europe. In the modern age of imperialism two more vital components are added, one from the most advanced capitalist power, America, further west, and the other from erstwhile medieval and ancient civilisations, and now backward countries, further east. From the former came the practical scientific philosophy of efficient management. From the latter came the best of its past wisdom and visionary sweep.
This enriched Marxism of the modem age, the age of imperialism and proletarian revolution came to be called Leninism, following its successful application in Tsarist Russia. It meant, more and more, the seeing of the whole through part, the complex through the simple, the general through the particular, the abstract through the concrete and the real through the visionary. It also bridged, further, the gap between theory and practice by taking Marxism out of the rationalist positivism of 19th century Europe. This had come to dominate ail schools of bourgeois thought and had trapped 19th century Marxism in the metaphysical categories of European academia, away from modern, dialectical developments in America and the East. Soon Marxism re-emerged, as an ‘experience’, as a philosophy of action which brought the intellectual and the worker, the doer and thinker, the most advanced section and the ‘uneducated’ mass, together in a unity of purpose, belief and understanding.
The post second world war period saw the revival, and taking over, of many democratic and socialist ideals by the western bourgeoisie. This denoted a completely new situation, beyond traditional Marxist unique of the reactionary role of the bourgeoisie, and was accompanied by the further rise of non-European nations. Following the successful Marxist revolution in China, accomplished by the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Ze Dong, Chinese wisdom, intuition and scientific relativism became parts of a Marxism which established the revolutionary role of the peasantry in the Asiatic context. The contradictions of the modern age were cognised as operating at several levels, both antagonistic and non-antagonistic, and within different sections of a single class.
By the 60s and the 70s, a scientific and technological ‘revolution’ finally arrived in the west, even as America surpassed Europe as the most dynamic culture of the world. At the same time, the traditional picture of Asia and the Third World, built by European scholars during the phase of colonialism, was altered fundamentally. A vast reservoir of technological and historical knowledge, ‘unseen’ during the time of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, came into focus. Suddenly, many fixed axioms of the 19th century, which were very much a part of early 20th century Marxism, were toppled. It was seen that the focus on man, ‘the individual’, rationalism, science and thiswordliness began not in renaissance Europe, but Islamic Arabia. Many European innovations in science and technology were drawn from Asia, where, by the 16th century, countries like India and Turkey had become thriving empires. They were evolving their own vision of the ‘modern’ based on a spirit of composite culture and a fusion of several Asiatic strands, like ‘Indo-Persian’ or ‘Indo-Islamic’ in India. Their incipient bourgeois growth and developmental possibilities were stamped out only after bitter and conscious political struggles with European powers.
This rediscovery of history opened up new possibilities for the present as well. The theory and practice of Marxism was no longer confined to the classic ground of Russia and China. The question came up as to whether it could be enriched by the ethos of the Indian sub-continent which stood as a unique window to the historical and epistemologieal insights of Hinduism, Islam, as well as the secular currents of ancient and medieval India. Also, unlike China, here the native bourgeoisie succeeded in leading an anti-colonial movement and installing a democratic form of government, even while maintaining sophisticated semi-colonial relations as well as strong feudal remnants and postponing a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The challenge in India has opened the way for Marxism to interact with the fresh possibility of engineering a revolution in a vital but backward link of modern parliamentary democracy in the world.
Q 8. Marxism is often projected as a complete doctrine which has uttered the final word on every point. Is this a valid claim?
The history of Marxism is very young. Hence, despite the fact that it has a superior methodology it has yet to learn much from systems which went before. Besides, capitalism keeps throwing up new ideas which outstrip conventional Marxist understanding. Indeed, capitalism, despite its chronic crisis and destructive capability, has managed to develop productive forces and evolve new, sophisticated mechanisms of economic functioning. It has also kept alive the global urge for modern values. The only exception is China where a Marxist government has succeeded so far in leading the urge for modem development, mainly, however, in the economic sphere.
Religion by untversalising God and Spirit and placing all creations of nature, good or bad as per previous pre-religious, pagan beliefs, as ‘His’ creations, brought everything existing into the sphere of understanding. Bourgeois philosophy did the same thing by universalising Man and the secular spirit delving deep into the inner secrets of man, like the subconscious, and his physical activity tike language and art.
Marxism similarly universalised Matter, elevating everything including the dark, unknown secrets to the fold of sophisticated understanding. It understood mystery, memory and magic as profound conectionns of matter — some of the best works on primitive cults, the magical effort of man to discover science, were conducted by Marxists of the modern era right after the revolution in Russia. In India too, the rediscovery of Tantra, of pre-religious myths was a result of the efforts the Marxist scholars. Marxism thus opened the way for an understanding of the infinite though, like the practitioners of other ideological, philosophical and political movements, its followers also erred at several points.
Q 9, It is said that Marxism envisages the movement of history as taking place independent of the will of the actors. Are things pre-ordained then? Does it mean that the subject has no initiative of its own and must simply follow the rules of the objective world? Beyond philosophy, at a social level, is it the material world of economics which determines everything?
The basic principle of Marxism is dialectics; its view of the universe is based on the premise that yes, there are objective laws which determine the course of history. But the subject is not powerless before them. One basic law of dialectics is the transformation of ‘quantity’ into ‘quality’ – the process by which things change their form, by which ‘water’ turns into ‘gas’ if heated upto a certain degree of temperature and a small political party, into a big force. A small party is made big by the efforts of thousands of men and women. But when it actually happens, there is a leap which surprises these very men and women. It is their creation and vet goes beyond them. Their subjective efforts set into motion an objective law. They determined this course of advance and were in turn determined by the latter.
Similarly, the same general laws of economics produce entirely different results in the developed and underdeveloped parts of the world. The ‘iron laws’ are subject to their own zigzags – the economic base of a system determines its societal and political superstructure, ‘but only in the last instance’. Economy is affected profoundly by political shifts and balances which in turn are often influenced, not only by culture, legal system etc, but its own inner laws. In India, the reigning political crisis has its independent dimension embedded deep in the nature of its ruling political elite. In fact, much of the economic troubles are a result of the particular ‘choices’ made by this political elite. At a later stage, determinism becomes irrelevant as many philosophical and semantic divisions, created during the bourgeois age commensurate with the division of labour, are finally transcended in communism.
Q 10, Then Marxism does not envisage history as a linear process?
The Marxist view of history is based on successive stages corresponding to the mode of production. For European history, it delineated five stages – that of primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and finally socialism. The order can carry a different terminology in Asiatic societies; in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves it is indicated that the basis of ancient societies of Asia was different from that of Europe. It was not the slave mode of production but self sufficient, autonomous village production (combining features of many successive stages into one), which provided for the stability and prosperity of ancient Asiatic empires.
In Europe, feudalism was more developed than the slave society in terms of advanced production relations. But it marked a regression not only in art and culture but technology as well compared to the Greek and Roman civilisations. Yet, it was in the latter half of feudalism that leaps in technology were made which laid the basis of capitalism. The process of history from a Marxist standpoint is thus full of unevenness in a single context. It is more so when it comes to comparing different contexts say Asia, Africa and Europe where the period of development of one region may turn out to be the dark age of another, and vice-versa.
Q 11. Is Marxism Internationalist or Nationalist?
Marxism is a science and laws of science have no national barriers. But like religion and bourgeois philosophy, which despite being universal take root and form only in specific contexts, the theory and practice of Marxism is incomprehensible without its national specificities.
Marxism is a product of capitalism which extended the local customs, feelings, loyalties, as well as economy, language, geographical identity etc. of well-demarcated regions, upto the Nation State. In Europe, Marxism emerged as a movement of the working classes of various nationalities. Marx and Engels, even while giving the call, ‘workers the world unite’ wrote in terms of German working class, English working class, the French working class and so on.
Lenin was always conscious of the fact that he was addressing primarily the Russian proletariat. And Mao knew that he was speaking to the Chinese peasantry. All these observations required an understanding of socialist movements as emerging from within the contradictions of the half baked or fully formed nations, or conditions as multinational in the case of Russia. They also required a cognisance of movements led by the Communist Party as actually leading the transition of old civilisations into modem nationhood. In such cases, as in China and Vietnam, Marxism served, actually, also as the ideology of nationalism.
Marxist nationalism, thus, is as real as Marxist internationalism. But Marxist nationalism is not bourgeois nationalism. Marxism recognises the positive role of diverse national aspirations led by the bourgeoisie and other class forces at different junctures. But it also strives to bring new classes, chiefly the working classes and the peasantry, in the forefront of the nation and national movements wherever the stage is ripe. At such moments, Marxist movements desist from depicting the people’s struggle of a modern phase simply as a carry over of the people’s struggle of the past in the linear sense. Mao robbed, from his bourgeois-comprador rivals in China, who were keen on building their own nation state, the much needed historical legitimacy by invoking the ‘national’ memory of China, its wisdom, politics, culture, and harnessing it to the revolutionary cause.
Q 12. What is the Marxist conception of culture?
The national question is also a cultural question. Civilisations are based on the mode of production but after food, it is tahzeeb or culture which humankind seeks to nurture and build upon.
In the same period, however, the bronze age civilisations of Asia and Africa carried different cultural values. In ancient India, various states had their own cultural and political values, ranging from democracy to military autocracy. Even the same ruling class carried different cultural values, as was the case of the aristocracies of the West and the East.
Culture in the Marxist sense is not reducible to the mode of economy or ‘ideology’. Though certain epochs are identifiable with certain cultural values related to its economic and ideological environment, the opposite is also true. Thus ancient society, representing the childhood of ‘man’ with a lower, ‘slave’ mode of production, produced the kind of art which could not be surpassed even by early bourgeois epochs.
During the course of revolutionary movements, ideological barriers are often transcended by cultural factors and political interests. To cite just one example, Mao Ze Dong enjoyed the respect and support of many orthodox Chinese, who were opposed to him ideologically, as he represented, in their eyes, indigenous Chinese wisdom. The success of Marxist movements has also depended upon their level of integration in the culture of a region. At many places, like Indo-China, religo-cultural symbols and ‘fervour’ played a vital part in popularising Marxism. At the same time, traditional cultural values were modernised under the influence of Marxism which proved to be the gateway for ancient civilisations to step into the modern era.
Cultural movements, therefore, do not got reduced to class struggles in the political and the social sphere. The creations of writers and artists are seldom the result of their levels of income or nature of occupation. It is also not as if there is a strict demarcation of content, with themes depicting the lower classes coming forth as progressive and those depicting the upper classes as reactionary. The conflict in culture is essentially a conflict of ideas and form — between dialectical and non-dialectical, closed and open, traditional and modern, canonical and subversive, conceptual and gestural interpretations of the same theme. An artistic creation may be very proletarian in its orientation, but if its form is closed, it ends up being metaphysical and conservative in some respects. Many films made under the banner of social realism in Soviet Russia fall under this category.
But political and social processes are fundamental to culture — art is nothing but the record of tensions of social and political styles, gestures and ideas. An artist gets his or her style through conscious or unconscious involvement with the political and social mood of the times. But an artistic work then creates a world of its own which adopts a clear or contradictory posture or attitude towards the real world. Both the subjective independence, and the objective politics, of art is constituted in this dialectical relationship.
Q 13. Is it true that Marxism is incompatible with democracy?
The concept of democracy was first articulated by the nascent Capitalism in Europe, invoking universal franchise as a demand and Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as the guiding principles, the living soul. Elements of democracy were however to be found not in the European countries alone but also beyond that in the Asian countries. The mature capitalist class, today projects parliamentary system as the most potential institution of democracy. But this form, i.e, parliamentary democracy has over time, been solely identified with a few electoral principles; Liberty, Equality & Fraternity are substituted by more sophisticated forms of subjugation, astounding disparities of wealth & racism, communalism and xenophobia.
The main reason for this ignominious outcome of several ‘noble’ projections is that, under Capitalism, democratic institutions and civil laws have been constricted and shaped according to the needs of perpetuating the rule of the Capitalist class and its exploitation of human labour power. This again exposes the skin deep character of this form of democracy.
For a Marxist, concept of democracy starts by undoing this hypocrisy. For her/him the real worth of democracy comes alive only by reincarnating the dilapidated soul, i.e., the lost principles of Liberty, Equality & Fraternity and actualising them in favour of the exploited. Religiously harping on and pursuing a particular state form is no substitute for that. The state form though is no less important. After the most basic facet of democracy i.e., access to the minimum requirements of life, is achieved what matters for a human being is her/his right to speak, to dissent, even to revolt. These things are important, but for sure not more than the very basics.
No direct electoral principle had ever been in practice in any of the socialist states, erstwhile or present and ‘authoritarian’ state form under socialism has earned lot of infamy to the Marxists. But this particular form is neither sacrosanct not a cul-de-sac. Necessities and possibilities of plurality under socialism had time and again figured in the writings of great Marxist thinkers. A few months after February revolution in Russia Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, “The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms (emphasis added), but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Marxist pluralism has its philosophical basis in ‘Dialectics’ which comprises not only a ‘struggle’ but the ‘unity’ of opposites too and recognises the basic fact of individual and social ‘difference’. Its slogan has been to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend’. Its concept of the cosmos also entails no fixed centre but many solar systems in the process of becoming or dying out. The life which emerges from this is thus diverse, creating many truths and levels of reality.
Q 14. Does the same complexity apply to the phenomena of class struggle which is usually presented as a mechanical struggle between the rich and the poor?
The basic struggle in history emerges due to a hiatus between those who own and those who operate the productive forces. Both are the product of the other and yet their movement depends on the annihilation of the other. But their conflict becomes active in society as a political struggle between parties or social forces. Even a direct, military confrontation between the antagonistic classes takes place behind the cover of ideas and issues.
Class struggle, in the Leninist sense, also reveals the true, conflict ridden basis of social and human relations – the relationship of power present in educational institutions, family, even love relations. For most of the time, its result go beyond the intentions of the participants. In ancient Rome, the struggle between patricians, plebeians and slaves struck at the basis of Roman-European society and hastened its dissolution. But the new ruling class was made up of Germanic tribes, coming from northern Europe, as it was they who earned the germs of new production relations. The same was true of ancient India – here the central Asian, Hun tribes emerged as new feudal rulers of north India towards the close of the Gupta Empire, even when they played no active part in the class and political struggles of that period.
Q 15. What is the concept of revolution in Marxism? Does it happen all of a sudden? How far is it true that Marxists glorify the use of force and violence? How does a democratic revolution differ from a socialist one?
Revolution is a science and a passion. It ‘happens’ but it is also ‘made’. It is a product of circumstances which change the whole balance of social forces and the appropriators get appropriated. But even though economic and political crisis fuel a revolutionary situation, what is crucial here is the preparedness of an ‘agency’, in the form of a party or an organised class force. Even when there is a spontaneous revolution, a long history of subjective or objective preparations lie behind it. In 1857, during the first war of Indian independence, there was no party in the contemporary sense. But, as Marx noted, there existed an armed, prepared, organised peasantry, in the form of the ‘Sepoy army’, standing as the vanguard of Indian society.
Revolutions in the era of imperialism acquire, a scientific and professional character. They are engineered not by suppressed individuals or sections of the society but by rising, mainstream class forces, conscious individuals and professional revolutionaries aspiring for change and power. But when they actually happen, they explode all rational and calculated expectations to pieces and offer a tantalising glimpse of the past, present and future in one instance.
Marxism presents the aspect of force and violence as a ‘natural’ principle attendant upon the very phenomena of societal change, the need of which arises from within, not without. As such, it cannot be either imposed or withdrawn as an autonomous factor and is forever subservient to politics.
Democratic revolutions in the 20th century imply social change in those countries where the bourgeoisie rules in an alliance with feudal and imperialist forces and thus has abrogated its anti-feudal, bourgeois-democratic and nationalist tasks. In those countries. Marxists arc called upon to lead a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The state they create is not a proletarian state acting as a transition between capitalism and socialism, but a new democratic one acting as a transition between a bourgeois-landlord dispensation and a modern, socialist one.
Q 16. Will there be no contradictions, no further developments under socialism ?
As Lenin had pointed out in his pamphlet Tax in Kind, “… only by series of attempts – each of which, taken by itself, will be onesided and will suffer form certain inconsistencies — will complete socialism be created by the revolutionary cooperation of the proletarians of all countries.” And this socialism again is also a stage which will be superseded by a higher stage, that of communism. In the stage of socialism, all forms of bourgeois society, market pressures, division of labour, will persist minus die: ‘big’ bourgeoisie. Bourgeois forms of ownership will persist alongside public-state forms of ownership, in its early, rather prolonged phase which might also see two systems, of capitalism and socialism, co-existing in a single country.
But this in itself will be replaced by a higher stage where even bourgeois forms like state, money, division of work, et al will disappear the very notion of exchange through money, which breeds alienation, and which is bound to breed alienation in the socialist stage also, will vanish. All of this would happen as a natural process, through trial and error, leaps and bounds.
Late socialist society would be based on a level of technological development where the whole relationship between the capitalist and the worker is rendered absurd, where virtually there is no ‘worker’ but people managing their own work and the sophisticated workings of Finance capital, held together by mutual economic, political, cultural and social interests and receiving the full reward of their work as per their ability.
Communism would be a higher stage of this phase of social development where even old style, mutual interests, and the political-social structures they throw up, would not be necessary to ‘hold’ people ‘together’. Individual men and women would be self dependent, technically expert, social beings in a ‘natural’ sense, with their individual work naturally contributing to the society and the society naturally fulfilling their needs.
Under socialism, property will not be abolished. Capitalist property would co-exist with public-state property in the early phase while later, both may give way to ‘social property’ with individual belongings and possessions being received according to ability. Under communism the very category of property would vanish in a world where every man or woman would naturally ‘own’ everything and society will inscribe on its banner the great principle : “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
Like socialism, communist society will also have its own contradictions which will propel it further forward.
