Championing potted Marxism

Binay Sarkar's onslaught takes the form of a book that is as short as a prolonged pamphlet with heavy bibliographical references drawn from Marxist literature. Hardnews reviews Binay Sarkars' A Socialist Critique of the BBC, Alber Einstein, Amartya Sen and Muhammad Yunus 

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

Thanks to Marx, no matter how exhausted we become of them, the spate of rants against capitalism has been and will continue to be constant and relentless. As Marxism is susceptible to countless denominations and interpretations out of context, it is good to recall at this point that in The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and his sidekick Frederick Engels upheld and even celebrated the achievements of capitalism in overcoming and controlling nature, through its rapid development of industry, science, agriculture, and telecommunications. The capitalist class was the first in history, said Marx and Engels, to "show what man's activity can bring about". In only a century, it had "accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades". But, can capitalism have a human face? Can Goliath be friends with David?
No, it cannot. Capitalism is the ultimate evil. If this sounds like commie rehash at a time when capitalism is suddenly fashionable, blame Binay Sarkar, an ideologue from the World Socialist Party of India (formed by a motley group of ex-Leninists which fraternised with the Socialist Party of Great Britain and established themselves as a companion party of the World Socialist Movement in 1995), whose onslaught takes the form of a book which is as short as a prolonged pamphlet. With heavy bibliographical references drawn from Marxist literature, and whole slices of quotations, this nitpicky book splits hairs about what constitutes deviations from the Marxist worldview and preens on its "true" Marxist credentials.
Sarkar, thus, takes exceptions to Amartya Sen's economic formulations, say, about famine and poverty; about Muhammad Yunus' programme for women's self-empowerment through micro-credit among other things. Sarkar's brief is simple. Socialism is an international alternative to global capitalism. Socialism is a society where people can democratically plan how we use the world's resources. It will replace the greed of the profit system. Hannah Sell (Socialism in the Twenty-First Century) found the major stumbling block to socialism's international aspirations: "It's impossible to create socialism in one country, surrounded by a world capitalist market".
Sarkar is viscerally loath to any kind of reformism. Amartya Sen takes the severest battering for his partaking of a state capitalist view of socialism. Sarkar questions Sen's understanding of present-day capitalism and gives some brownie points, instead, to another Nobel Prize-winner, physicist Albert Einstein. Einstein famously declared to the world that he was a socialist in an article entitled "Why Socialism?" in 1949, though, upon scrutiny, his conception of socialism was found, essentially, to be a form of state capitalism. Einstein's analysis of capitalism, instead, enjoys currency even today.
Sarkar comes crashing also the Noble-laureate banker of the poor, Muhammad Yunus, and wonders aloud the rationale of awarding a peace prize to him. Lest you wonder why Yunus should be guilty of being an unwary accomplice of capitalism, Adam Buick points out in his Introduction to this book that banking "is an integral part of the capitalist system of production for profit which is the cause of modern wars."
Sarkar rains down a barrage of bricks on Amartya Sen's praxis of "market entitlements" (and welfare economics) as they leave the class monopoly of the means of life untouched (thus failing to reduce poverty or famines). The "self-confessed leftwing Keynesian", says Sarkar, was wrong to find the solution to poverty and famines in increasing the "entitlement" of "the poor" by giving them or allowing them to acquire more money. Sarkar has withering contempt for economic textbooks for they teach that money, markets, wages, profits and the rest arise from the supposed natural fact of people's wants being "infinite" while the resources at their disposal are scarce and that economics is merely the study of the most "rational" way to decide priority areas of production.
"Modern capitalism" wrote Keynes, "is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers". It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch. While worshippers of market-libertinism like Alan Greenspan have no sympathy for the layabouts of capitalism ("Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."), Sarkar, with his groggy-eyed idealism, dislikes capitalism even if it is of the benevolent kind where "entitlement" to food, clothing, housing, etc., depend on having money.
That Karl Marx has supplied a critical mass of thought to the world is indubitable. Small wonder that in 1999 Karl Marx was voted the "Greatest Thinker of the Millennium" in a BBC online poll. In 2005 he was voted the "Greatest Philosopher" in a BBC poll. But Sarkar is irked over Francis Wheen explaining Marx's theories as a form of economic determinism, in that economic relations determine all other features of society, including ideas.
The point is, there has been ambivalence over Marx's views in the key fields of economics, sociology, politics and philosophy. In economics, whether the labour theory of value could prove a useful tool in analysing real economic developments had to await the posthumous publication of Kapital Volume Three and Marx's solution to the question of the transformation of values into prices. Marx was, for instance, clear that the collapse of the capitalist system was inevitable - but the exact mechanism was unclear. Was the key to be found in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? Or was it a question of overproduction and consequent underconsumption? Marx left the question sufficiently open for it to be a subject of considerable debate to this day.
In sociology, the Communist Manifesto had talked of the simplification of class antagonisms and declared that society as a whole was split up between two hostile camps - bourgeois and proletariat. Yet Marx's researches in the Theories of Surplus Value on the growth of the middle class and the unproductive service sector seemed to supply a much more subtle view that even Bernstein would have found congenial. Marx's attempt to define class was notoriously left unfinished.
In his writings on politics, Marx paid little attention to the continued growth of nationalism. Although strong on the analysis of contemporary political events (Eighteenth Brumaire, Class Struggle in France, Civil War in France) Marx left no coherent theory of the state. He had declared that the emancipation of the working class would be achieved by the workers themselves, it was clear that their leaders, beginning with Marx himself, would be almost exclusively of bourgeois origin.
Dealing with the question of Marx's philosophical legacy, Marx had talked of the abolition of philosophy, by which he meant that, in so far as philosophy posed ideal principles of essences, it would lose its function after a socialist revolution. With such a revolution long way off, the "philosophy" has to look scientific. The re-emphasis of the Hegelian (and therefore anti-scientific in the crude sense) was led by Lukács and given a firm foundation after Marx's early works. The notions of humanism and alienation were given unwonted prominence by many Marxists after 1930 and a long controversy ensued whether the 'young' or 'old' Marx was the real one.
Soon after Marx's death in 1883, leading intellectuals (Labriola and Croce in Italy, Sorel in France, Bernstein and Lassalle in Germany) were debating the practical implications of Marx's theories. It became evident that, when due attention was given to particular political contexts, Marxism could be used to justify an evolutionary as well as a revolutionary road to socialism. For Marxists such as Magdoff and Sweezy,. the realities of class struggle, imperialism, stagnation and the financial explosion are all aspects of an interrelated whole, out of which the modern imperative for revolution arises.
The simple problem is that the certainties and fixities of one age are the problems of the next. We all have to earn money or wither. In this age of existential Darwinism, we must try to turn some profit to the universe.