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LIGHTING MARX'S FIRE Revolution or romance?
FEW, if any, people/philos ophers get as bashed up on their
200th birthday anniversary as Karl Heinrich Marx did
on May 5,2018. Whether it is the neo-liberal atmosphere or a guttural reaction to
his opposition to private property rights, this
German philosopher's 21st Century portrait as a punching bag is woefully deficient
True, his arguments had as many holes as John Lennon's and Paul McCartney's "A day in the life" observed in Blackburn,
Lancashire. Nowhere better to find them than
in the two media outlets most hostile to Marx and Marxism: The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. As the flagship of free-trade from 1843 (three years before the Corn Law made it official British policy). The Economist proposed a sub-title to his accomplishments in its bicentennial anniversary write-up. "A study of failure, ’ it asserted, even though Marx's "diagnosis of capitalism" has been "surprisingly relevant." It chastised Marx for inspiring revolution, using communism to banish classes globally. Marx was worried about poverty widening income gaps, but The Economist correctly noted how capitalism was itself responsible for reducing poverty since Marx's time. Nonetheless, Marxis credited for accurately predicting the harsh consequences of capitalism: exponentially spiralling trade (after the 1930s), widening class-based income-gaps (21st Century), as well as boom-and-bust cycles (the 2008-10 Great Recession).
Even more trenchantly, TheWall Street Journal treats "Marx" as a profane “four-letter" word. No wonder, when Marx's own hometown, Trier, unveiled a 18-feet statue of him on his bicentennial anniversary, that august news outlet highlighted how US congressmen mimicked that tone. “Marxist regimes are responsible," they began, "for murdering at least 100 million lives: 65 million in China; over 20 million in the
Soviet Union; and over 2 million in North Korea.’ Apparently hostile US views on Marx might diminish if China dispenses with the “communist" label itself the way it has done with communist lifestyles (Mao vests and his iconic red book that were required possessions have all disappeared), a vain Vladimir Putin crushes communist leftovers and legacies while embracing US policies, or North Korea's Kim Jong-un becomes less authoritarian by shedding its nuclear programme. Though none of these leaders cultivate Marx's core ideas, The Wall Street Journal message interprets all the world's Maulana Bhashanis, Fidel Castros, and Ch£ Guevaras as Marxist stooges, as if their genuine local concerns (religion, antiauthoritarianism, and US exploitation across Latin America, respectively), were not themselves worthy, or independent of any foreign philosopher's ideas, particularly
German.
Both media represented the two countries at the heart of Marx's analytical framework: Britain because it was the first to champion free-trade, a policy approach necessary when industrialisation has matured; and the United States, since it became capitalism's champion from the very year of its independence, 1776. Though his name is so intertwined with such concepts as massproduction, surplus labour-value, capitalism's diminishing returns, and entrepreneurial innovation, Marx was born in an agrarian society, Prussia, who could only romanticise ideas about industrialisation a generation before it arrived in Prussia rather than observe their dialectics first-hand.
By the time industrialisation arrived, under Otto von Bismarck's "iron and rye* policy-approach from 1879, Marx was thirtyyears into his exile, much of that inside the
country where industrialisation began in the 1770s/1780s, only to shift from ready-made garments (RMGs) to steel by Marx's time, which pitted it against competitors across European, baiting African colonies. This last part sowed the seed for Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov's (Lenin's) 1917 "imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism" thesis. He made so much noise in exile, that the German government put Lenin on a train to Petrograd in April 1917, six months before the October Revolution, raising the second big "iF of modem history: If the Germans had not returned him, would there have been those "ten days that shook the world" to produce the Soviet Union? Of course, that only points to the first "iF: If Prussia had not driven Marx into exile, would he have had the chance in bucolic Prussia to do the research needed for Das Kapital that he could find only in the British Museum (then housing the British Library)?
We all know of Marx's romanticising ideas to bash the aristocrats in the 1840s through his writings and actions, but very few pay attention to his actual romanticised relationship with two other aristocrats. He married his childhood sweetheart in true Hollywood-scripted style. Jenny von Westphalen's father, Ludwig, a governing council member in Trier (and married to a descendant of the 9th Earl of Angus, with a son serving as Prussia's Interior Minister), who often walked the woods listening to the love-struck emergent philosopher's intellectual wailings, blessed their 1836 engagement and graced their 1843 marriage. A beautiful woman, Jenny remained an enraptured wife for 38 years, producing 7 children (some died early for health reasons), of whom one translated Marx's famous works into French by the turn of the 19 th Century. From them we learn how, when liver cancer was about to take her away in December 1881, their parents would hug as wistfully and lustfully as during their teenage courtship. Will the time ever come when "Marx the Romanticist” ever replace "Marx the Revolutionary" in our mindset? Or Titanic be replaced by Marxist as the preeminent celluloid love story?
The other aristocrat he enjoyed a mutual courtship with was Friedrich Engels. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Engels may have written a treatise far more powerful and relevant to current low-cost RMG producing countries, like Bangladesh, and mainstream people in developed countries, than the (in)famous 1848 Communist Manifesto he coauthored with Marx. This was his 1845 Condition of the Working Class in England, based on the textile mill his father owned in Manchester, home of the first RMG industry in modern history, and the document that swept Marx off his feet. Just imagine how the Alliance and Accord, two buyer-groups trying to reform Bangladesh's post-Rana Plaza RMG mills today (until the end of May 2018), could have extracted more meaningful mileage brandishing this book to remedy the ailments than their countrymen do with the Communist Manifesto to berate Engels or Marx's birth anniversary! Without Engels climbing the job-ladder, from a clerk to a leader, in his father's mill, doing precisely what Marx contended could never happen to the typical proletariat, Marx and Jenny might not have survived London; even more poignantly, Das Kapital might not have been published. Neither would the successive wardens invigilating the British Museum/Library have the occasion to point out to tourists the iconic table where Marx laboured during his long exile.
With a friend like Engels and wife like Jenny, no wonder Marx could (and still can) take on the whole world. If Marx's first birth centennial witnessed the birth-pangs of the world's maiden communist state (the Soviet Union), and the second today confronts his direst enemy (capitalists in full neo-liberal fury), let's hope a century hence we will be able to turn on the muses rather than manias associated with him. If a monolithically viewed Marx endorses romance or befriending a financial anchor across classlines, can capitalism's occupational hazards spawn so much dogmatism?
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain Is the head of Global Studies & Governance Program at Independent University, Bangladesh.