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What is the contemporary relevance of Marxism? . (UPSC CSE Mains 2019 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1).
- Marxism is a social, economic and political philosophy that analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers, leading to uneven distribution of wealth and privileges in the society. It stimulates the workers to protest the injustice. The theory was formulated by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in their work, ‘The Communist Manifesto’. it was a pamphlet they created during the age of Imperialism, rooting from their own struggles as members of the proletariat lot. According to Marx, History demonstrates the existence of class struggle centuries earlier.
- Marxism, along with socialism and Communism were formulated to put an end to the Capitalist ideologies. Socialism insists on common ownership of wealth and land while still allowing individuals to own assets privately. The main idea of this philosophy is to ensure equal distribution of wealth and reward people based on the level of contribution an individual extends to the economy of the country. Whereas Communism means the absence of private property. It insists the control of such assets be only in the hands of the Government. The government shall provide the people with all the necessities like education, medical aids and housing.
- Though an absolute socialist or communist country or democracy is still impossible, some countries have managed to set up such governments using maximum efforts. Some of the countries that follow Communism are China, Cuba and North Korea. And the most Socialist countries are Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
- The continuing relevance of Marx has been dramatically demonstrated by the current crisis of contemporary capitalism. Marx had made several important observations about the laws of motion of capitalism. He had made the point that as the capitalist competition progresses, centralization and concentration of capital would inevitably occur. This would lead to an ever-increasing monopolisation. Competition among capitalists and the class struggle between labour and capital would lead to increasing mechanization, which would constantly create and replenish a reserve army of labour, an expanding pool of workers who would go in and out of employment. An increasing proportion of them would become permanently unemployed. These processes of capitalist accumulation would concentrate wealth and income in fewer and fewer hands, while inequalities will increase enormously. Marx made the brilliant observation that the general law of capitalist accumulation was the accumulation of wealth at one pole and misery at the other.
- A key consequence of this would be that there would always be a problem of demand under capitalism. Even as the capitalist mode of production causes the rapid growth of productive forces, the profit-driven system limits the growth of the consuming power of society, causing capitalism to function as a demand-constrained system. Moreover, given its unplanned character, there would always be ‘overproduction’ in some sectors relative to demand and ‘inadequate production’ in others. These imbalances can also be the cause of a general crisis in a capitalist economy. Further, as capitalists mechanize to meet competition and to overcome the power of workers, production would involve the use of more and more machinery and less and less of living labour, which is, in fact, the source of surplus value and of capitalist profit. This, too, would give rise to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, from time to time. Taking all this together, it is clear that, under capitalism, though there can be episodes of rapid growth, there would also be economic breakdowns from time to time, resulting in massive unemployment and collapse of markets. The history of capitalism since Marx wrote his magnum opus, Das Kapital, has borne out Marx’s analysis of the crisis-prone nature of the capitalist economy. Nothing illustrates this better than the contemporary situation, so dramatically different from what was observed twenty years ago.
- Around 1989-91, ten years before the new millennium arrived, it appeared to many that the battle for a society free of exploitation and not based on the drive for private profit had been lost, with the decisive rise to unipolar global dominance of the USA, the dismemberment of the mighty Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism in former USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe that had been engaged in building socialism. Confident spokespersons for global capitalism even announced ‘the end of history’. Unfortunately for those who thought that capitalism had decisively won the battle for the hearts and minds of the people all over the world and that history had effectively been “ended”, the world today presents a rather different picture. Since the last quarter of 2007 when the US economy officially entered into a recession – recall, by the way, that this was several months before the collapse of Lehmann Brothers and the official recognition of what is somewhat misleadingly referred to as the ‘global financial crisis’ – there has been no end to the prolonged economic slump and a long period of slow growth in the developed capitalist world.
- The recurrent crises of capitalism alone would testify to the continuing relevance of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the viewpoint of historical materialism. But there is much else that Marx had anticipated, including many of the contemporary concerns about the environment. In a brilliant passage in the first volume of Capital, Marx makes the point that capitalism advances agriculture precisely by sapping the basic sources of wealth, namely the soil and the labourer. His analysis of many aspects of culture, of the alienation that characterises capitalist society, of the issues of gender equality, of colonial plunder and its role in the development of capitalism in the western world –all these remain relevant today, as we face the onslaught of contemporary imperialist globalization that seeks to once again enslave the developing countries and is causing grave and irreparable damage to the environment and the earth we live in. The climate crisis cries out for collective solutions, but the logic of corporate profit maximization, without let or hindrance that defines contemporary globalization, makes it impossible under capitalism.
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