Marx and the Threat of Inequality
In March 1983, the centenary of the death of the German revolutionary thinker, Karl Marx, was marked in Nigeria with a week-long conference at the Ahmadu Bello University campus in Zaria. The theme was Marx and Africa. That was seventeen years before Marx emerged as the “greatest thinker” of the last millennium in a BBC News Online Poll. Marx got more votes than influential philosophers Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes as well as famous scientists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, who died only a few weeks ago.
Among the leading lights of the Nigerian Left vibrating with ideological disputations at the Zaria conference (who, sadly, are now dead) were scholars such as Ntiem Kungwai, Ola Oni, Claude Ake, Ikenna Nzimiro, Bade Onimode, Bala Usman, Festus Iyayi, Eskor Toyo and Rauf Mustapha.
It is certainly a measure of how much things have changed in the Nigerian public sphere that the bicentenary of the birth of Marx has hardly attracted a similar interest as the one demonstrated at the centenary of his demise. If you mention Marx today to our petit-bourgeois intellectuals, their response would hardly be more than the vacuous chorus of “communism is dead” because of the 1989 Fall of Berlin Wall.
Ironically, at the headquarters of global capitalism, the bicentenary of Marx’s birthday is spurring a rethink of his ideas. Some are focussing on issues in which Marx got it “wrong” while the argument of some others is to explain as the radical literary critic Terry Eagleton entitles his reprinted book, Why Marx was Right.
The thread in the appreciation of Marx in the last few months is that while as a thinker (of course, not a god!) he got some points wrong, his ideas, especially the critique of capitalism, cannot be ignored. For instance, The Economist of London in its online edition entitles an informed piece to mark the birthday of Marx like this: “Rulers of the World: Read Marx.” The decidedly right-wing journal is predictably critical of Marx in terms of what the thinker got wrong such as the supposition that socialist revolution would happen first in the advanced capitalist countries instead of the relatively backward Russia and China. It also points to the oversights on the part of Marx about the robust capacity of capitalism to reform itself and the emergence of the welfare state, which was helpful in the West especially after World War II.
However, ideologically literate elements of the Right would agree that the relevance of Marx still lies principally in his penetrating analysis of capitalism in which he acknowledged the achievements of the socio-economic system while laying bare its enormous contradictions. The faults that Marx identified in capitalism include its endemic crisis (the cycle of booms and busts); unemployment, inequality, social injustice and mass poverty. Human progress would continue to be hindered by these phenomena.
For example, on inequality alone capitalism simply has no definitive answer except rationalisation and the various neo-liberal experiments at “poverty reduction” since “poverty eradication” is often considered as utopian. Taking a global view of things, Robert Shiller, the 2013 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, said that the “most important problem we are facing now … is rising inequality.” This statement is hardly controvertible more than 160 years after Marx and his comrade, Friedrich Engel, wrote the Communist Manifesto. While the 1% at the top gets richer those at the bottom of the 99% get poorer.
In response, anti-capitalist protesters such as those in the Occupy Movement (who are mostly non-Marxist) have been resisting the trend. Inequality provides the rich substratum to feed right-wing populism and extreme nationalism. The retreat of the liberal order, which Donald Trump personifies, is actually being fuelled by the increasing inequality.
Inequality is, of course, worse in the poor countries of the south. For instance, in Nigeria at the root of the present climate of insecurity are the material issues of inequality and poverty. Although it is more convenient for the elite to wrap criminality with ethnic and religious labels, the material root of the crisis should be rigorously examined. To do that, politics of ideas must replace this politics of ethnic and religious manipulation in which thuggery reigns supreme and elections are conducted as bazaars.
Things could probably have been different if ruling political parties are convinced about the principles of the welfare provisions in the Chapter II of the 1999 Constitution. These constitutional provisions are supposed to be the Nigerian approach to reform its own brand of neo-colonial capitalism. Rather than pursue these provisions as ‘fundamental objectives and directive principle of state policy,” our bourgeois politicians and their lawyers are wont to tell you that the constitution implies that socio-economic rights are not “justiciable.” Hence inequality and social injustice remain the hallmarks of the system while politicians yearly celebrate their “dividends of democracy” on May 29 amidst burgeoning poverty. By the way, Chapter II that was brought forward from the Second Republic Constitution came into existence largely as a concession to the principled efforts of two exemplary Marxists - Bala Usman and Segun Osoba - as members of the Constituent Assembly that debated the constitution.
Unfortunately, those in power playing politics are hardly passionate about implementing the existing laws that could widen the access to basic education, primary healthcare, social housing and cheap transportation. In a way, these anti-poverty laws are derivatives of Chapter II of the constitution. Their implementation would help in tackling inequality.
All told, you may ask this pertinent question: what is the relevance of Marx to the present Nigerian condition? The answer is simply this: at least Marx was right about the inevitability of inequality in capitalism.