On the Urgent Need to Re-Engage Classical Marxism

Abstract

Humankind continues to face the two problems that have existed since the degeneration of the 1917 October Revolution that began in the mid-1920s. While it is experiencing enormous suffering caused by capitalism, there is also a crisis of anti-capitalist leadership. These two problems now cohabit with growing radicalization among sections of the working population and the youth, following the 2007 economic crisis; burgeoning threat of fascistic tendencies both within the state apparatuses and among the masses; and reformism among middle-class Marxist intellectuals (as well as among workers). In this global conjuncture, there is a need to return to the root of the Marxist agenda. This is the classical tradition, which includes the ideas of Marx and Engels and goes beyond their ideas. In this article, I offer an outline of that tradition.

Marxism and revisionism in the world today

“…There is no reason why the empirical/conjunctural issues at hand (e.g. defeat of workers’ movement; failure of 1917 to establish socialism) cannot be, more or less, explained within the framework developed by the founders of Marxism (Das 2020a).…”

“…With its materialist and dialectical philosophy, Marxism assigns primacy to class as a causal structure of antagonistic relations rooted in material conditions. Yet, in explaining the concrete world, Marxism pays serious attention to racial and gender and forms of non-class oppression (Anderson 2016; Brown 2012), and in the world of practice, Marxism – as an intellectual tribune of the people – places the struggle against special oppression at the heart of its socialist politics (Das 2020a, 2022b; Pateman 2021).…”

“…At the outset, it is essential to clarify some terminological issues. I use the term Marxism ('Marxism proper') to refer to the body of ideas of classical founders and their followers, which, armed with a materialist and dialectical philosophical perspective, explains the world on the basis of theories of such processes as value relation, class exploitation, capitalist accumulation, and the capitalist state, and advocates self-emancipatory class-struggle at multiple geographical scales aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism to establish a global socialist-democratic society (Das 2020a). What I call revisionist Marxism (or simply, revisionism) is highly critical of the central intellectual and political agenda of Marxism.…”

The Good and the Bad in David Harvey’s Popular Marxism

“…the struggle for a new society must be a struggle for the (defense of) general democratic rights (including the right to free speech and assembly) and for specific democratic rights of the socially oppressed groups (such as women and racialized and indigenous peoples), and economic-ecological-cultural concessions (e.g. a living wage; reduction in pollution levels; provision of means of cultural entertainment; affordable access to public spaces in the city) from the exploiting property-owning classes and their state, as a part of the fight to abolish class relations and capitalism (Das, 2020b, 2020c). …”

“… 22. Marxist (class) theory at an abstract level and the corresponding political goal of the abolition of class relations, as classical Marxism advocates, require very little change, although at the level of tactics one must take into account conjunctural changes (Das, 2020b). …”