By Amanda Prahl

Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828-November 20, 1910) was a Russian writer, best known for his epic novels. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, Tolstoy wrote realist fiction and semi-autobiographical novels before shifting into more moral and spiritual works.

Early Life

Tolstoy was born into a Russian aristocratic family whose lineage was, quite literally, the stuff of Russian legend. According to family history, they could trace their family tree back to a legendary nobleman named Indris, who had left the Mediterranean region and arrived in Chernigov, Ukraine, in 1353 with his two sons and an entourage of approximately 3,000 people. His descendant then was nicknamed “Tolstiy,” meaning “fat,” by Vasily II of Moscow, which inspired the family name. Other historians trace the family’s origins to 14th or 16th-century Lithuania, with a founder named Pyotr Tolstoy.

He was born on the family’s estate, the fourth of five children born to Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy and his wife, the Countess Maria Tolstoy. Because of the conventions of Russian noble titles, Tolstoy also bore the title of “Count” despite not being his father’s eldest son. His mother died when he was 2 years old, and his father when he was 9, so he and his siblings were largely brought up by other relatives. In 1844, at age 16, he began studying law and languages at Kazan University, but was apparently a very poor student and soon left to return to a life of leisure.

Fast Facts: Leo Tolstoy

Full Name: Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Born: September 9, 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, Russian Empire

Parents: Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy and Countess Mariya Tolstoya

Died: November 20, 1910 in Astapovo, Russian Empire

Education: Kazan University (began at age 16; did not complete his studies)

Selected Works: War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878), A Confession (1880), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Resurrection (1899)

Tolstoy did not marry until his thirties, after the death of one of his brothers hit him hard. On September 23, 1862, he married Sophia Andreevna Behrs (known as Sonya), who was only 18 at the time (16 years younger than him) and was the daughter of a doctor at court. Between 1863 and 1888, the couple had 13 children; eight survived to adulthood. The marriage was, reportedly, happy and passionate in the early days, despite Sonya’s discomfort with her husband’s wild past, but as time went on, their relationship deteriorated into deep unhappiness.

Travels and Military Experience

Tolstoy’s journey from dissolute aristocrat to socially agitating writer was shaped heavily by a few experiences in his youth; namely, his military service and his travels in Europe. In 1851, after running up significant debts from gambling, he went with his brother to join the army. During the Crimean War, from 1853 to 1856, Tolstoy was an artillery officer and served in Sevastopol during the famous 11-month siege of the city between 1854 and 1855.

Although he was commended for his bravery and promoted to lieutenant, Tolstoy did not like his military service. The gruesome violence and heavy death toll in the war horrified him, and he left the army as soon as possible after the war ended. Along with some of his compatriots, he embarked on tours of Europe: one in 1857, and one from 1860 to 1861.

During his 1857 tour, Tolstoy was in Paris when he witnessed a public execution. The traumatic memory of that experience shifted something in him permanently, and he developed a deep loathing and mistrust of government in general. He came to believe that there was no such thing as good government, only an apparatus to exploit and corrupt its citizens, and he became a vocal advocate of non-violence. In fact, he corresponded with Mahatma Gandhi about the practical and theoretical applications of non-violence.

A later visit to Paris, in 1860 and 1861, produced further effects in Tolstoy which would come to fruition in some of his most famous works. Soon after reading Victor Hugo’s epic novel Les Miserables, Tolstoy met Hugo himself. His War and Peace was heavily influenced by Hugo, particularly in its treatment of war and military scenes. Similarly, his visit to the exiled anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon gave Tolstoy the idea for his novel’s title and shaped his views on education. In 1862, he put those ideals to work, founding 13 schools for Russian peasant children in the aftermath of Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs. His schools were among the first to run on the ideals of democratic education—education which advocates democratic ideals and runs according to them–but were short-lived due to the enmity of the royalist secret police.

Between 1852 and 1856, Tolstoy focused on a trio of autobiographical novels: Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. Later in his career, Tolstoy criticized these novels as being overly sentimental and unsophisticated, but they’re quite insightful about his own early life. The novels are not direct autobiographies, but instead tell the story of a rich man’s son who grows up and slowly realizes that there is an insurmountable gap between him and the peasants who live on the land owned by his father. He also wrote a trio of semi-autobiographical short stories, Sevastopol Sketches, which depicted his time as an army officer during the Crimean War.

For the most part, Tolstoy wrote in the realist style, attempting to accurately (and with detail) convey the lives of the Russians he knew and observed. His 1863 novella, The Cossacks, provided a close look at the Cossack people in a story about a Russian aristocrat who falls in love with a Cossack girl. Tolstoy’s magnum opus was 1869’s War and Peace, a massive and sprawling narrative encompassing nearly 600 characters (including several historical figures and several characters strongly based on real people Tolstoy knew). The epic story deals with Tolstoy’s theories about history, spanning many years and moving through wars, family complications, romantic intrigues, and court life, and ultimately intended as an exploration of the eventual causes of the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Interestingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be his first “real” novel; he considered it a prose epic, not a true novel.

Tolstoy believed his first true novel to be Anna Karenina, published in 1877. The novel follows two major plotlines which intersect: an unhappily married aristocratic woman’s doomed affair with a cavalry officer, and a wealthy landowner who has a philosophical awakening and wants to improve the peasantry’s way of life. It covers personal themes of morality and betrayal, as well as larger social questions of the changing social order, contrasts between city and rural life, and class divisions. Stylistically, it lies at the juncture of realism and modernism.

After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy began further developing the seeds of moral and religious ideas in his earlier works into the center of his later work. He actually criticized his own earlier works, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as not being properly realistic. Instead, he began developing a radical, anarcho-pacifist, Christian worldview that explicitly rejected both violence and the rule of the state.

Notable Quote

“There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”

Between 1871 and 1874, Tolstoy tried his hand at poetry, branching out from his usual prose writings. He wrote poems about his military service, compiling them with some fairy tales in his Russian Book for Reading, a four-volume publication of shorter works that was intended for an audience of schoolchildren. Ultimately, he disliked and dismissed poetry.

Two more books during this period, the novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and the non-fiction text What Is to Be Done? (1886), continued developing Tolstoy’s radical and religious views, with harsh critiques of the state of Russian society. His Confession (1880) and What I Believe (1884) declared his Christian beliefs, his support of pacifism and complete non-violence, and his choice of voluntary poverty and asceticism.

In his later years, Tolstoy wrote almost solely about his moral, political, and religious beliefs. He developed a firm belief that the best way to live was to strive for personal perfection by following the commandment to love God and love one’s neighbor, rather than following the rules set by any church or government on earth. His thoughts eventually garnered a following, the Tolstoyans, who were a Christian anarchist group devoted to living out and spreading Tolstoy’s teachings.

By 1901, Tolstoy’s radical views led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church, but he was unperturbed. In 1899, he had written Resurrection, his final novel, which critiqued the human-run church and state and attempted to expose their hypocrisy. His criticism extended to many of the foundations of society at the time, including private property and marriage. He hoped to continue spreading his teachings throughout Russia.

For the last two decades of his life, Tolstoy largely focused on essay writing. He continued advocating for his anarchist beliefs while also cautioning against the violent revolution espoused by many anarchists. One of his books, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, was one of the formative influences on Mahatma Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent protest, and the two men actually corresponded for a year, between 1909 and 1910. Tolstoy also wrote significantly in favor of the economic theory of Georgism, which posited that individuals should own the value they produce, but society should share in the value derived from the land itself.

Literary Styles and Themes

In his earlier works, Tolstoy was largely concerned with depicting what he saw around him in the world, particularly at the intersection of the public and private spheres. War and Peace and Anna Karenina, for instance, both told epic stories with serious philosophical underpinnings. War and Peace spent significant time criticizing the telling of history, arguing that it’s the smaller events that make history, not the huge events and famous heroes. Anna Karenina, meanwhile, centers on personal themes such as betrayal, love, lust and jealousy, as well as turning a close eye on the structures of Russian society, both in the upper echelons of the aristocracy and among the peasantry.

Later in life, Tolstoy’s writings took a turn into the explicitly religious, moral, and political. He wrote at length about his theories of pacifism and anarchism, which tied into his highly individualistic interpretation of Christianity as well. Tolstoy’s texts from his later eras were no longer novels with intellectual themes, but straightforward essays, treatises, and other non-fiction work. Asceticism and the work of inner perfection were among the things Tolstoy advocated for in his writings.

Tolstoy did, however, get politically involved, or at least publicly expressed his opinions on major issues and conflicts of the day. He wrote in support of the Boxer rebels during the Boxer Rebellion in China, condemning the violence of the Russian, American, German, and Japanese troops. He wrote on revolution, but he considered it an internal battle to be fought within individual souls, rather than a violent overthrow of the state.

Over the course of his life, Tolstoy wrote in a wide variety of styles. His most famous novels contained sweeping prose somewhere between the realist and modernist styles, as well as a particular style of seamlessly sweeping from quasi-cinematic, detailed but massive descriptions to the specifics of characters’ perspectives. Later, as he shifted away from fiction into non-fiction, his language became more overtly moral and philosophical.

Death

By the end of his life, Tolstoy had reached a breaking point with his beliefs, his family, and his health. He finally decided to separate from his wife Sonya, who vehemently opposed many of the ideas and was intensely jealous of the attention he gave his followers over her. In order to escape with the least amount of conflict, he slipped away secretively, leaving home in the middle of the night during the cold winter.

His health had been declining, and he had renounced the luxuries of his aristocratic lifestyle. After spending a day traveling by train, his destination somewhere in the south, he collapsed due to pneumonia at the Astapovo railway station. Despite the summoning of his personal doctors, he died that day, on November 20, 1910.

When his funeral procession went through the streets, police tried to limit access, but they were unable to stop thousands of peasants from lining the streets—although some were there not because of devotion to Tolstoy, but merely out of curiosity about a nobleman who had died.

Legacy

In many ways, Tolstoy’s legacy cannot be overstated. His moral and philosophical writings inspired Gandhi, which means that Tolstoy’s influence can be felt in contemporary movements of non-violent resistance. War and Peace is a staple on countless lists of the best novels ever written, and it has remained highly praised by the literary establishment since its publication.

Tolstoy’s personal life, with its origins in the aristocracy and his eventual renunciation of his privileged existence, continues to fascinate readers and biographer, and the man himself is as famous as his works. Some of his descendants left Russia in the early 20th century, and many of them continue to make names for themselves in their chosen professions to this day. Tolstoy left behind a literary legacy of epic prose, carefully drawn characters, and a fiercely felt moral philosophy, making him an unusually colorful and influential author across the years.

___________________

Courtesy: ThoughtCo.

The post Leo Tolstoy – The Great Russian Novelist and Philosophical Writer first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Oskar Verkaaik

MYSTICISM AND MARXISM COMBINED

Till the mid-1960s, G.M. Syed’s ideas about mysticism and Joyo’s Marxism still seemed incompatible, as Joyo, a self-declared materialist had little patience with mysticism. Despite their close mentor–pupil relationship, the two men did certainly not agree on everything. Joyo was diametrically opposed to the ‘‘Syedism’’ of his G.M. Syed. Like other reformists such as Muhammad Iqbal and Maulana Maududi, he condemned the devotion to spiritual leaders as a form of idol worship (shirk).

On a personal level, however, Joyo always remained loyal to the man who had made his higher education possible. Joyo’s admiration for G.M. Syed was made easier because G.M. Syed himself dismissed uncritical commitment to the spiritual leader as wrong. His reform of mysticism was a radical one, leading to the rejection of the various Sufi brotherhoods. As Joyo told me in an interview, ‘‘G.M. Syed accepted no guides, only books. ’’In his personal conduct, however, he continued to behave like a Syed, wearing white clothes to express his purity and detachment from worldly matters. Till the end of his life, the peasants working on his lands would touch his feet asking for favors. This was unacceptable to Joyo. When in 1966 his house arrest was lifted, however, G.M. Syed turned to Joyo’s group of young Sindhi students in order to return to politics. This turned out to be mutually beneficial. G.M. Syed gave to his new friends his charisma as a Syed, a social reformer, and a political leader. In return he received the revolutionary enthusiasm and street power of the young intellectuals. This was the beginning of a new twist to Sindhi nationalism, which combined both G.M. Syed’s reformed Sufism and Joyo’s interpretation of Marxism, resulting in a powerful and attractive ideology for many young Sindhis.

G.M. Syed encouraged his new friends and ‘‘comrades’’ not to restrict their activities to the university Campus and schools. He sent them to the many shrines of local holy men in the rural areas, especially on the annual Urs celebration, when the holy man’s release from this world is celebrated in colorful festivals that attract many pilgrims. These events were important for several reasons. New intellectuals went back to the rural areas from which they originated, bringing with them a new way of looking at these places of pilgrimage. In the interpretation of G.M. Syed and his group, the holy men were martyrs for the cause of mysticism, Sindh, and the liberation of the peasant. Jam Saqi, the student leader, for instance, wrote a book on one of these local holy men, the eighteenth century Shah Inayat of Jhok, calling him somewhat anachronistically a ‘‘socialist Sufi’’. In Saqi’s reading, Shah Inayat had been the leader of a commune of liberated peasants, for which he was beheaded. This reinterpretation of holy men as social reformers was a potential threat to many local landlords, Pirs, and Syeds, who often claimed to be the descendent (sajjada nishin) of holy men, who had inherited part of their miraculous powers (barakat).

In Sindh, as elsewhere in South Asia, traditional Sufism consists of various brotherhoods of holy men (Pir), their descendent (sajjada nishin), and their followers (murid). As the sajjada nishin are often landlords, traditional Sufism is related to patron–client relations. By way of speeches, songs, and discussions with fellow-pilgrims, however, G.M. Syed and his group criticized this hierarchical structure of spiritual authority based on inherited charisma. They condemned the patron–client relations that were ritually confirmed and reproduced during the traditional Urs. Instead, they tried to turn the local holy men into historical heroes of Sindh and prophets of mysticism, with whom the disciples could get in touch through the traditional practices of music and dance. In these mystical encounters they would be able to find the spirit to free themselves from their oppressors, that is, the landlord families, most of whom supported the military government.

Although these activities probably did spread some awareness among pilgrims and peasants about the causes of social inequality, the main effect of these activities was a deeper engagement with mysticism and Sindhi separatism among the Sindhi students and intellectuals themselves. The trips to the rural shrines became important rituals for the Sindhi left.

Identifying with the rural fakir and other mystical figures who are so absorbed in the love for God that they are indifferent to pain and fear, they derived from these trips a romantic sense of passion and belonging, which was apparently more compelling than Ibrahim Joyo’s belief in the inevitability of progress.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, also a Sindhi, recognized the potential of this reformed Sufism when he founded the Pakistan People’s Party to contest the elections of 1970. He, too, went to the rural shrines, sat down to talk to the peasants and pilgrims, and called himself a fakir. However, whereas G.M. Syed called for the independence of Sindh, Bhutto’s ambition was to rule Pakistan, and when he did, he turned some of the shrines in Sindh into places of national, rather than provincial, importance. Attracted by Bhutto’s rhetoric of socialism and mysticism, some of the Sindhi leftwing intellectuals joined Bhutto, but most of them were soon disappointed and returned to the Sindhi separatist movement of G.M. Syed. In 1973, the latter founded the Jeay Sindh Movement, which, two years after the foundation of Bangladesh, called for an independent Sindhudesh. From then on, G.M. Syed spent most of his life under house arrest. This seriously damaged the Sindhi movement. However, the notion of Sindh’s unique identity rooted in a history of mysticism was spread widely. Today, it is commonly understood in Pakistan that Sindh is a place of religious tolerance and mysticism.

A brief note, then, on the question why Bhutto could successfully use the reformation of Sufism for his own project, while the separatist movement of G.M. Syed failed. Due to the Anglo-Saxon system of democracy, in which people vote in districts according to the Winnertakes-all principle, people in Pakistan tend to vote for local power brokers rather than along ideological lines. In this way, landlord families have become the most powerful political class in Sindh. The Pakistan People’s Party, in particular, relied for many years on the brokerage of local landlords within their districts. It is mainly for this reason that Sindh’s new intellectuals and radical politicians have not been able to become an important political factor, even though many people in Sindh were sympathetic to their dual agenda of social reform and the revival of mysticism. Till recently, it was not uncommon for Sindhis to have a portrait of G.M. Syed in their house, often alongside a portrait of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto or his daughter, Benazir. The former was widely admired as a true Syed. When it came to voting, however, most people opted for his rivals, the Bhutto family of the Pakistan People’s Party. After one of the many elections he lost, G.M. Syed remarked about the people of Sindh:

‘‘They sing and dance for me, but they don’t vote for me.’’

The lack of electoral success may have been the reason why the Sindhi separatist movement disintegrated into various smaller parties from the 1970s onwards. Nonetheless, the Pakistan People’s Party adopted the discourse of peasant liberation and mysticism, for which G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo were largely responsible. In the hands of the Pakistan People’s Party, however, this discourse, once meant to bring to power an up-and-coming class of new intellectuals within an independent Sindhudesh, served to confirm the political power of landlord families within Pakistan.

CONCLUSION

The new intellectuals I have described called themselves secularists because of their rejection of Muslim nationalism. Following G.M. Syed’s distinction between religion and mysticism, they rejected the political relevance of religion, that is, religious doctrine and ritual, as well as the authority of the Ulama, the Mullahs, and the Pirs and Syeds. I have, nonetheless, called their ideology a specific form of Islamic reform or revival. Whereas some Islamic reformers revived the tradition of Ijtehad or the individual interpretation of Islamic sources, and others returned to the sovereignty of the Shariat or Islamic law, the Sindhi movement built upon the Sufi notion of Wahdat ul-wajud or the oneness of being. Like the other variations of Islamic reform, the claim was to return to the original meaning of the concept, to rationalize it, and to purify it from the corruption of later innovations (bidat). In practice this meant an attack on the hierarchy of religious authority. Whereas other forms of Islamic reform undermined the authority of the Ulama and the mullahs, the Sindhi form criticized the Sufi brotherhoods and their leaders, that is, the Pirs and Syeds who claimed to be the descendent of the founder of the brotherhood. In Sindh, the Pirs and Syeds used to be the most powerful religious specialists, more important than the Ulama.

In this article I have focused on the network of new intellectuals responsible for this peculiar form of Islamic reform. For want of space I have not analyzed the wider debates on Islam, nationalism, and ethnicity as they have evolved after independence in the process of nation and state building. Like most other Islamic reformists, the students, teachers, lawyers, journalists, poets, and social workers who joined the Sindhi movement received their education in secular educational institutions.

Most of them were among the first of their social milieu to be trained in these institutions. Their secular education took them out of their environment and into the city – the Sindh madrassah in Karachi and, after independence, the University of Hyderabad. Moreover, they did not only benefit from new education opportunities, they also actively promoted secular education as a means to reform society. Apart from politicians and intellectuals, they also were, and self-consciously wanted to be, teachers, founders of schools and boarding houses, and educational reformers.

Secular education enabled them to look at the villages from which they came in a new way. It also gave them the tools to develop their own kind of Islamic reform. Of particular importance was the reformation of the Urs celebration at local shrines. For the new-leftist intellectuals, the Urs no longer was an occasion in which the authority of the landlord qua Pir or Syed was confirmed. For them, it rather became an event to commemorate the martyrs of Sindh and its peasants.

Although critical of the state and the state ideology of Muslim nationalism, the Sindhi intellectuals were influenced by other forms of Islamic reform as well as the discourse that links the nation to the religious community. In their own unique ways, they were searching for the essence of Islam, finding it in mysticism, and defining the distinct character of the Sindhi nation on the basis of this mystical essence of Islam. They were, in Gramsci’s term, on the defensive, that is, responding to a dominant discourse of religious nationalism, appropriating it to argue for the uniqueness of the Sindhi people within Pakistan. They did so in opposition to an authoritarian regime, initially a military government, followed by a democratically elected regime that was, however, hardly less oppressive than the military rule that preceded it – witness G.M. Syed spending years under house arrest.

However, state oppression was not the main factor that rendered the Sindhi movement powerless. Paradoxically, the movement suffered more from the gradual incorporation of its ideas into official nationalism. In the 1970s, the Pakistan People’s Party under the leadership of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto managed to cut the grass from under the feet of G.M. Syed and his followers by reconciling the latter’s ideas on ethnicity and mysticism with the notion of religious nationalism. This perhaps shows how close G.M. Syed and Ibrahim Joyo remained to the dominant discourse of Muslim nationalism and Islamic reform, despite their efforts to show that Pakistan was a mistake and despite the uniqueness of their interpretation of Islamic reform. In their opposition to state discourse they remained inextricably connected to it. (Concludes)

_____________________

Oskar Verkaaik is Assistant Professor at the Research Center for Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam, and head of the branch office of the International Institute for Asian Studies. He is the author of A People of Migrants and a popular book in Dutch based on his experiences in Pakistan.

Courtesy: The International Institute of Social History, one of the largest archives of labor and social history in the world. Located in Amsterdam

Click here for Part-I, Part-II, Part-III,  Part-IV 

The post Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan – Part-V first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Developing crisis of capitalism, growing economic and power imbalances and the resultant environmental crisis take us to Marx

     By V Upadhyay                                                   

May 5, 2021, marked the 203rd birth anniversary of Karl Marx, considered as “one of the greatest thinkers in human history”. Marx was born in Germany, but due to his political publications and activities, he had to live in exile most of his life. He was exiled from his native country in 1849. After spending a few months in France, he settled in London with his family. In London, Marx was provided financial help by Friedrich Engels, his collaborator for his entire political career that made it possible for Marx to do research and write. Marx died on March 14, 1883, in London.

Marx authored many books (several with Engels) on diverse subjects of dialectics, material conception of history, class conflict, the labor theory of value, surplus value, exploitation and alienation. His most influential works are The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Marx was able to write and publish only the first volume of Das Kapital. Based on Marx’s copious notes, the second and third volumes were edited by Engels after Marx’s death.

The main thrust of Das Kapital is to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production. The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, provides an analysis of the internal conflicts of capitalism, focusing on the class-struggle between labor and capital. The Manifesto has become one of the most important documents influencing revolutionary movements the world over.

Critique of Contemporary Thinkers

A famous quote of Marx reflects his critique of his contemporary thinkers: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo provided a historical understanding of the decline of feudalism and the emergence of bourgeoisie during the period of the industrial revolution in Europe. But for most of the economists in the classical political economy tradition, history stopped once the transition towards capitalism was accomplished. For Marx, even capitalism was a transitory phenomenon.

Marx contended that capitalism was prone to systemic crises and internal conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to him, these contradictions within the system would ultimately lead to the breakdown of the capitalist system and replacement of capitalism by a higher economic mode of production called socialism. A very distinctive aspect of the Marxist theory is that in addition to the examination of the existing capitalist system as such, it provides tools to understand the dynamic and historical process of the transformation of the capitalistic mode of production.

Global Capitalism

Coming to the recent times, there are various approaches to global political economy which elucidate the contemporary challenges posed by global capitalism. These range from liberal mainstream approaches to Marxist approaches. The mainstream approaches have a serious drawback because of their ahistorical approach as they take the capitalist system as given and do not consider the global economic problems as an outcome of the accumulation logic of capitalism.

The conventional wisdom that has been developed by the neoliberal politicians and intellectuals of the Global North about the advantages of neoliberal policies came under severe criticism after the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2008. The ideology of neoliberalism posits that the only hope for prosperity for the people of the Global South lies in opening up all the markets (and even the social and cultural spaces that have traditionally not been part of the market) for capital, domestic as well as foreign. The deregulation of capital in the name of free market has given birth to multiple threats in developed as well as developing countries that have not been the subject matter of mainstream economics.

The Russian Revolution

The influence of Marx’s ideas, already popular in parts of Europe in his lifetime, became a global force to be reckoned with by the victory of Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution was the first revolution in the world that established a socialist state in a country. The 1917 Revolution gave a huge impetus and encouragement to anti-colonial movements across Asia, Africa and Latin America. It gave hope to millions of people engaged in national liberation struggles across the globe that it was possible to score a victory against the capitalist imperialist forces and to establish a social system in their societies based on the principles of freedom, equality and justice.

The collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the doctrinal changes in China after Mao and the revival of capitalism in many other erstwhile socialist countries clearly point to the fact that linear progression towards socialism has not proven to be possible. The Communist Party of China (CPC) makes abundant use of Marxist phraseology. The CPC’s official ideology – Socialism with Chinese characteristics – is claimed to be based on the Marxian philosophical concept of ‘dialectical materialism’. It, however, needs to be understood here that ‘class-struggle’ is the essence of Marxian politics. The socialist rhetoric used by the communist leadership, however, does not point to any class-struggle being waged in Chinese society.

In the case of Russia, even this debate – capitalism Vs socialism – does not exist. All this, however, does not automatically lead to the conclusion that socialist experiments in many countries have all been worthless and without any positive contribution.

The most significant contribution made by the Soviet Union to world history is that it saved the world from Hitler. During World War II, the Soviet Union suffered the most destruction and casualties at the hand of the Nazi war machine. The Soviet Red Army played the most important role in the defeat of Germany. Although in the public memory it may not be acknowledged now in the West, the fact remains that the Soviets played the most crucial role in ending the menace of fascism in Europe.

For about four decades during the Cold War era, the Soviet Union was able to provide a counterbalance to the US and other Western powers. Just four years after the American bomb, the Soviet Union succeeded in producing its own nuclear weapon. This fast catching up in the area of mass destruction technology was the primary reason why America was not able to use nuclear weapons in its wars in Korea, Vietnam and other places during the Cold War period.

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and despite the devastating experience of the nineties, Russia – with a much smaller population base compared with the US and Europe – continues even today to match the military might of the US. With seven decades long continuity in maintaining military balance with the West, the Soviet Union’s (and now Russia’s) historic role in preventing the Third World War so far should be considered nothing but phenomenal.

Socialist Planning Ideas

Socialist planning played a very important role in the economic and political history of many countries during the last century. Detailed theoretical and practical constructs of socialist planning were first designed and developed and put in practice in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. These ideas spread not only to socialist countries in Eastern Europe and China where there were repeated attempts to replicate them but also influenced economic institutions and economic policies in countries following capitalist path or mixed economy models (such as the US, Japan, France and India).

It is true that most countries which experimented with these ideas have now abandoned them. But the developing crisis of capitalism in many parts of the world and the environmental crisis affecting the whole world may create conditions that necessitate the adoption of socialist planning ideas.

The phase of unipolarity has ended and a new world order characterized as multipolar is emerging. It represents a fundamental break from the last several centuries’ long history of European domination. In the global transformation that is underway, the role of China has been the most crucial. China’s rise in recent years as a major power is the main causal factor behind the global transformation towards multipolarity. A multipolar world provides some space for independent action to other nation-states. And this is true even for major powers such as India and Turkey.

Balancing World

The most significant aspect of the geopolitical reality today is that imperialism is becoming increasingly aggressive. Although it is true that Western imperialism faces new unprecedented challenges in the form of emerging multipolarity in world affairs, it, however, remains a threat to world peace as ever. The fears posed by Western powers are the reason why the vast majority of the global population is unable to choose paths of living of their own choice. The responsibility to provide counterbalance today to the Western powers majorly falls on the shoulders of Russia and China in the same way it did during most of the twentieth century.

Like the Soviet Union during the Cold War era, Russia today is able to provide a counterbalance to the US in military terms. Despite very close relations with China, Russia is the main proponent of multipolarity in world affairs. Russia has acted very forcefully and decisively against Western designs in many places, such as Syria. There are many countries, such as Iran and Venezuela, which are victims of US aggression in the forms of economic sanctions and even threat of direct military action. These countries invariably turn to Russia for support not only at the United Nations Security Council but also in the forms of direct material assistance.

It is true that by no stretch of the imagination, Russia can be called a socialist country today. But, on the other hand, no one can deny the fact that all the strength the Russian state is able to display today on the international stage has its genesis in its socialist past.

On Your Marx

Capitalism is a transitory phenomenon and is prone to systemic crises and internal conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat

These contradictions within the system would ultimately lead to the breakdown of the capitalist system and replacement of capitalism by a higher economic mode of production called socialism

The conventional wisdom developed by neoliberal politicians and intellectuals of the Global North about the advantages of neoliberal policies came under severe criticism after the global financial crisis of 2008

The responsibility to provide counterbalance today to the Western powers majorly falls on the shoulders of Russia and China in the same way it did during most of the twentieth century

_____________________

The author is SK Dey Chair Professor, Institute of Social Sciences New Delhi

Courtesy: Telangana Today  

The post Marx and Marxism in Modern Times first appeared on Sindh Courier.