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In the days of Marx, the western
capitalist economies were primitive in nature. The nature of
imperialism was visibly and explicitly militaristic and
expansionist in terms of territory. All that is changed now.
Imperialism as it was - territorial occupation and
colonialism, is defeated. Yet there is a sense of profound
loss in any conscious individual anywhere in the world. While
in west, there is an alienation that is often understood in
terms of a loss of a social community, in the underprivileged
majority, the loss is multiple. There is a loss of identity, a
loss of culture and of course, the same old loss of capital.
Ironically,
this sense of loss coexists with a fantasy, especially in the
middle class that everyone is going to live under a
capitalistic ‘global government.’ This illusion is based
on the myth that capitalism had evolved in such a way so as to
ameliorate its contradictions, and the world was progressing
in an evolutionary and peaceful manner. This myth was
strengthened in the first half of the twentieth century as the
concept of a welfare state evolved using what economists call
the Keynesian intervention.
After the
collapse of the Soviet bloc, however, the welfare state is
crises-ridden in the western European nations and the hopes of
its coming out of it are disappearing fast in the third world
countries. Thus a social order dictated by the ‘free’
market and yet, ironically, ‘determined’ by the globalised
capital is fast imposing itself as a fate accompli.
What is
social order? Put simply, the capitalistic social order is a
kind of caste system, where an individual’s role in society,
ambitions, desires, achievements and essentially your identity
are determined by the money one has and how much of it he or
she can invest in the global capitalistic game.
Michel
Foucault has shown how our common-sense understandings of
identities, bodies, characteristics and relationships are the
result of long-term social processes of definition and
categorisation, processes by which dominant institutions
define the boundaries of acceptability, label anything outside
those boundaries deviant, and organise and impose discipline
upon individuals and groups who fail to comply with the
"normal". As the world - the globe - is claimed by
the new capital, the deviant and the normal are being
redefined. It is he who drinks the coke or the pepsi that the
dil mange more, who is normal, not the one who drinks the
gunnkaras. Get lost if you do not believe in the pepsi freedom
and make way for the neo-consumerist tradition of a ‘free’
world of mental slaves.
Are there
alternatives to this? What do Marxists say? Istvan Meszaros,
one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals, professor emeritus
at the university of Sussex, where he held the chair of
Philosophy for fifteen years, writes in his new book on his
vision of the alternatives using Marxian analysis. The title
of the first chapter, "Implications of Ongoing
Developments: The Coming Century of ‘Socialism or
Barbarism", shows how perceptive the author is. In the
world after Sep 11, 2001, most thinking people are looking at
the future in terms of these two clear choices - first stated
by Rosa Luxemburg, ‘socialism or barbarism.
Meszaros
writes, " ... now the catastrophic dangers that would go
with a global conflagration ... are self-evident even to the
most uncritical defenders of the (capitalist) system .... no
one in his or her right mind could exclude the possibility of
the eruption of a deadly conflict and with that the
destruction of humankind. Yet, nothing is really done in order
to resolve the underlying massive contradictions that point in
the fateful direction. On the contrary, the continued
enhancement of the economic and military hegemony of the one
remaining superpower - the United State of America - casts an
ever darkening shadow on the future."
From the
combination of imperialism, capital, military and terrorist
methods - name any one component and we face contradictions
galore. Bin Laden — a creation of the CIA of the USA, today
declared USA enemy number one of USA (even before the attacks
on World Trade Center and the Pentagon Bin Laden gained that
status; Bill Clinton ordered his assassination while in office
as president); thousands die at the center of capitalism but
someone or some people gain from the overnight conversion of $
one hundred and twenty four thousand to eight million dollars;
the countries that were enemies a decade ago are allies in a
joint war; desperation to declare that Islam created to defeat
Russians in Afghanistan is not Islam anymore - it is merely
terrorism; all the horrors known about Taliban that were
ignored are now widely publicised (like the movie, ‘Beneath
the Veil’ shown on CNN after wide publicity) and so on and
so forth.
One cannot
but pitifully smile at the pundits who go on blowing the
trumpet of capitalism using their undeserving positions of
expertise. To quote Meszaros, "It should be of no
surprise that under the present conditions of crisis the
siren-song of Keynesianism is heard again as wishful remedy,
appealing to the spirit of the old ‘expansionary consensus’
in the service of ‘development’". Bail out American
Airlines $ 5 billion dollars in cash and $ 10 billion in loan,
rebuild the towers.
"However,
today that song can only sound as something very faint,
emerging through a long pipe from the bottom of a very deep
Keynesian grave."
Meszaros
provides technically sophisticated explanations in a common
sense manner, though using appropriate jargon. "The
fundamental problem is that the sectional plurality of labour
is closely linked to the hierarchically structures conflictual
plurality of capitals, both within every particular country
and on a global scale. If it was not for the latter, it would
be much easier to envisage the successful constitution of
labour’s international unity against unified or unifiable
capital." Yet one reason for hope is that "while
capital’s dependency on labour is absolute - in that capital
is absolutely nothing without labour which it must permanently
exploit - labour’s dependency on capital is relative,
historically created and historically surmountable."
Meszaros
looks at these issues with keen elaboration and presents
convincing arguments. Those with serious interest in the
relationship of capital’s structural crisis and the changes
in the political nature of imperialism will find the chapter
on ‘The Potentially Deadliest Phase of Imperialism’ a
classic work. Here the author analyses the political
developments in international relations in the past few
decades and establishes an analytical relationship with
capital’s social order.
Likewise, those with interest
in the politics of socialist tendencies, the Section on ‘Historical
Challenges Facing the Socialist Movement’ should be very
useful. It may not be possible to convince those who are
doomed to seek Nostradamus, but to the small set of thinking
minds left with possibilities to expand the size of their
tribe, this book is recommended as an essential reading.
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