Marx lives

Published May 6, 2016
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

THE title of this article may sound provocative, and I make no excuses for it. Karl Marx, and the brand of political theory and activism that followed in his wake, is arguably the single most important thinker of the modern era. For most of the past 25 years, Marxism has been derided as a washed-up creed with no relevance to contemporary life. Over the past few years, however, Marx has made somewhat of a comeback.

Yesterday (May 5) marked 198 years since Marx was born in the then state of Prussia, later to be part of united Germany. Trained in German idealist philosophy, and then exposed to schools of thought from across Europe, Marx devised a schema to explain the dynamics of human society over the ages, in which property and class were the primary determinants. History, for Marx, was the history of class struggle.

This idea was so powerful that it inspired countless political movements first in Europe and across the non-white world through the 20th century. The political left and the working class that was its revolutionary subject saw its heyday after Marx’s death in 1883, and particularly after the turn of the century. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was of course the poster-child of international Marxism, but it is often forgotten that Germany, Italy and Poland (among other European countries) also boasted extremely powerful left-wing/labour movements that were on the cusp of acquiring state power in the post-First World War era.

As it turned out the left-wing tide in Europe could not sustain itself, and so it was in the non-European world that Marxism had its next wave of victories. Starting with China in 1949, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, Angola and many other countries experienced revolutionary upheavals until the 1970s, after which the red tide started to suffer a global retreat.


Marxist thought and practice has continued to evolve.


The endgame was the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, which was preceded immediately by the collapse of socialist governments in Eastern Europe. Since then talk of the death of Marxism has become so hackneyed that a young generation has grown up almost accepting it as an historical fact. The reality is far more complex.

Marx’s ideas have been amended, adapted and reformulated for more than a century to reflect the changing social contexts within which emancipatory movements have taken root. Even during the zenith of classical Marxism in the early 1900s, iconic figures like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg fought bitterly over the means and ends of revolutionary struggle.

Since the Second World War, a host of sub-Marxisms have emerged in different parts of the world to build upon the basic materialist framework that Marx outlined but also to fundamentally revise it in accordance with changed circumstances. In India, for instance, a school of historiography named Subaltern Studies came to prominence in the 1980s which took Marxism as a point of departure and established the need to transcend Eurocentric notions embedded within the original theoretical formulations.

Part of the reason that there has been so much polemic directed against Marxism despite its dynamism is because it represents a perennial threat to the status quo. As an intellectual framework of political action against oppression, it is necessarily viewed with trepidation by governments, the traditional intelligentsia and the mass of ordinary people who have been socialised to believe that it is amoral, unnatural or simply impractical.

There has also been deep scepticism towards Marxism from within progressive circles for being one-dimensional in the conceptualisation of oppression. The criticism that Marxism reduces everything to class has been a pervasive one, bringing together feminists, environmentalists and anti-racism activists (to name but a few).

Yet despite these challenges — or perhaps because of them — Marxist thought and practice has continued to evolve. Marxists and feminists have created new conceptual frameworks as well as strategies for action, just as the green movement has always found ways to combine itself with the red. As I hinted at the outset, Marxism has even undergone somewhat of a revival in recent years in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that rocked north America and Europe in 2007, with ripple effects through the rest of the world.

In this country, Marxist ideas are often reduced to a negation of religion which reflects just how much the state feared left-wing thinkers and activists, especially during the Cold War. There are also Pakistani progressives who rightly point out that this region has its own share of revolutionaries, and that we need not eulogise individuals who hail from a European tradition quite distinct from our own subcontinental roots.

I agree. But there is something to be said for Marx as the first truly global revolutionary in a modern, capitalist world that was entirely different from all that preceded it. That is why his spectre continues to haunt the rich and powerful so long after it first appeared.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2016

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