Marx Was Right, Absolutely Right
By Vidyadhar Date
08 December, 2007
Countercurrents.orgThe violence against the peasants in Singur and Nandigram in the past few months has raised serious questions about the nature of governance by the West Bengal government led by the Communist party of India (Marxist).
However, the fault lies not with Marxist philosophy. Actually, Marx was on the ball , as David Harvey, the eminent Marxist geographer, author and thinker, pointed out in Mumbai on December 6.
He was not referring to the developments in West Bengal but about Marxism in general.He speaking at the conclusion of the fifth international conference of Critical Geography at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. A large number of participating academics and activists, many of them left-wing, were concerned over the developments in West Bengal.
Dr Harvey knows what he is talking about as he is teaching Marx's Capital since 1970 and this may be the last year of doing so as his students have now decided to put his teaching on the internet for free.
He began with an anecdote. Two yers ago he was on a panel to evaluate the design for a new city , 200 km south of Seoul in South Korea. During the discussion two members of the panel, an architect and a landscape designer, went on arguing endlessly whether the pattern of the city should be of a grid or should it be circular.
Then Dr Harvey intervened and said there were much more important issues to be looked at. What kind of technology, transport, social relations, labour processes, daily life of people, the production system, the city's relation to Nature all this will have to be taken into consideration. Only then a city can be properly planned. Since the city was to locate various ministries, it would become dull and this will have to be prevented by taking other
measures.The architect and landscape designer were quite impressed and asked Dr Harvey where he got all these good ideas from ? The reply stumped them. The ideas came from a footnote in Marx's Capital, chapter 15, volume 1.
The foot note says that `technology discloses man's mode of dealing with nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.'
In the chapter on machinery Marx shows how capitalist society grows. Marx was also on the ball in anticipating the tremendous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few under the current neoliberalism.
The problem with capitalism is that it will collapse if it does not invest huge surplus and people do not use their credit cards and go on buying things. That is why there is such a huge construction boom in cities all over the world. It is not just that slums are mushrooming as Mike Davis has shown in his book The Planet of Slums.
Dr Harvey said blaming imperialism, the World Bank and IMF will not take us far. People have to check the elites in their own countries. The bank and IMF are not currently as powerful as before.
The financial markets are in a deep crisis and the people at the helm themelves do not know what to do as the situation is very volatile. But the trgedy is that if the crisis worsens, it will hit the poor the most so some Leftists are not right when hope the system will crash.
In reply to a question he said capitalism had some positive aspects, there was a better recognition of individual rights, gay rights and the rights of the handicapped in the United States.But the environmental and other consequences of capitalism were so serious that there was no way the system can sustain itself socially or politically.
A severe critique of claims of India as a shining success story of economic reforms was made by Prof Utsa Patnaik of the Jawaharlal Nehru university in her inaugural lecture.
Citing from her extensive research she showed how the per capita food consumption in India was much lower than during world war II and there was widespread malnutrition not only among children and women but also among men.
The policy of diverting millions of acres of land under food crops for export crops and crops to make biodiesel had created severe problems of food security. This was accompanied by reducing the purchasing power of the masses and through mass unemployment.
The situation in Nandigram was explained to the delegates by conference convener Prof Swapna Banerjee Guha who hails from West Bengal. She said it was important to analyse the disturbing developments and the role of Left Front government in a Parliamentary democracy.
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