Friday, January 30, 2009
By Harris Khalique
The texts from Karl Marx most referred to include The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852, published a couple of times during his own life and many more times since his death in different languages. This is where Marx looks at the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte in France of December 1851, relates it with his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte's coup of 1799, ten years after the French Revolution, and in his own words the intention of this writing was to show "how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part." The problem of quoting from Marx is the difficulty of knowing how and where to stop. The sheer beauty and strength of his prose and polemic overpowers the reader. Of historic Marxist writings, a student of politics, history and society or a political worker can enjoy and benefit reading from all luminaries, for they possess an incomparable grip over both, the language they use and the argument they make. But Marx surpasses them all as a prose writer. One who is able to teach us critical thinking by demystifying complicated philosophical thought and economics without solving a single mathematical equation.
Marxism is no faith. It proposes a philosophical appreciation of human society and its evolution in terms of class struggle, outlines a methodology to transform it in favour of those oppressed for centuries unending and encourages us to struggle in a systematic way for a new world where exploitation of human beings, irrespective of their caste, colour, creed or sex, becomes history. There is no denying the fact that the practical solutions it has offered have not always worked in tandem with the age-old human psyche. Besides, events in the name of people's revolutions have inflicted large-scale human suffering without being able to create what they aspired for. But Marxist attempts at power in different countries have also heralded a change in human consciousness and brought to the fore the ideals of human dignity, egalitarianism and social justice. Besides, there is no better critique of capitalism offered by anyone other than Marxist thinkers. For us in Pakistan, simultaneous battles have to be fought, one for the prosperity of the masses and the other for the creation of a modern, rational and progressive state. In the first chapter of 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx says, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language."
The reactionaries are always clear. For them, things are divine and matters of life are predetermined, with every question having an answer in the same or similar situation that has occurred before. The problem with Marxist dogmatists is that they claim to be "scientific" and "rational" and do not accept that they consider their philosophy and the answers their predecessors arrived at as a religion. But in practice that's how they are, basing arguments on the axioms of their favoured theorists rather than tools of Marxism to flog independent thinking. We continuously need to refer to old texts to scope values in case of faith and a framework in case of political ideology. But there is a need for us in Pakistan to understand afresh how the state and society determined by class, culture and beliefs have worked. After learning from history, rational thinking and renewed objectivity, we devise, proclaim and act upon our own indigenous strategy to realise our ideals.
The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and rights campaigner. Email: harris@spopk.org
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