Not Yet the End of History

Last Saturday marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birthday. The great revolutionary philosopher was born in the city of Trier in Germany on the May 5, 1818. Karl Marx espoused the theory of socialism and communism flowing from a time-tested critique of 19th century capitalism. Vladimir Lenin, (a lawyer) was the great Russian revolutionary Marxist of the 20th Century who (together with other Bolshevik revolutionaries) audaciously translated Marxist theory into political practice by overthrowing Tsarist dictatorship in 1917 and proclaimed first socialist state on earth.

Lenin summed up Marxism as “…. three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, …represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general”.

Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883 in London. He was buried next to his wife at Highgate Cemetery in London, a globally acknowledged tourist destination. I visited Highgate Cemetery in company of my mentor, uncle, and the late Oxford University Marxist political economist, Dr Abdulrauf Mustapha in the early 90s! There is no dull moment at Highgate as visitors of different left ideological persuasions in turn queued for photo opportunity at the graveside of a great humanist thinker. Even Marx’s ideological opponents acknowledged him for giving the world an integrated alternative theory and program of transformation and development.

Marx’s seminal works on great themes such as “revolution”, “class struggle”, “socialism and communism” include Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Summer (1844), Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology (with Engels, who became his lifelong friend), The Communist Manifesto (1848), Value, Price and Profit given (1865), Capital (1867). One essential idea of Karl Marx is revolution. According to Marx, “revolution is the motive force of history”, in which the oppressed alienated masses would inevitably overthrow their few oppressors. “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles” is, perhaps, the most popular quote of Marx.

The socialist revolution is still a polemical question among Marxists. Led by the working class as envisaged by Marx (and proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in 1917) or led by the peasants as in Mao Tse-tung’s China? What is however clear is that it was Karl Marx, through historical and dialectical materialist analysis that showed scientifically that “Revolutions are the locomotives of history”.

The world is still-hunted by the spectre of revolution (even if not socialist or communistic!) Of course, there have been scores of revolutions inspired by Marxism, from the Russian revolution to the Chinese revolution led by Chairman Mao, from the Vietnamese revolution led by Ho Chi Minh to the Cuban Revolution led by the legendary Fidel Castro. Even the Iranian Revolution, which took spiritual dimension, had its root in oppressive and exploitative social relations of the old monarchy. All the liberation movements in Africa, from Ghana to Angola, Algeria to Namibia drew inspirations from Marxism.

In his classic, Long walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela noted: “Marxism’s call to revolutionary action was music to the ears of a freedom fighter. The idea that history progresses through struggle and that change occurs in revolutionary jumps was similarly appealing. In my reading of Marxist works, I found a great deal of information that bore on the types of problems that face a practical politician. Marxists gave serious attention to national liberation movements, and the Soviet Union in particular supported the national struggles of many colonial peoples”.

The revolts of the Arab spring from Tunisia to Libya and Egypt to Yemen show that it’s not yet the end of history of revolutions. Just last month, massive street protests forced the Armenia’s long-time leader Serzh Sargsyan to resign.

The late Nigerian Marxist political economist, Professor Claude Ake, long wrote almost prophetically about Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (1978). The current Somalian failed state, the endless wars of attrition in South Sudan, mass graves in DRC Congo and the cancerous bloody Boko Haram war in Nigeria’s North East point to the validity of the scientific observation of Ake that “…the choice for Africa is not between capitalism and socialism after all, but between socialism and barbarism”!

The collapse of Soviet communism and central planning in former eastern Europe and Africa (Benin Republic, Ethiopia) in 1990, made the likes of the American political economist, Francis Fakuyama to proclaim the “End of History,” in the title of his famous book, declaring with outlandish verdict the triumph of global capitalism, the market and liberal democracy.

However, we witnessed the deafening collapse of international capitalism in 2008 (in the United States following the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers). Yet no one has proclaimed the end of ideology of capitalism. On the contrary, the desperate return to socialist solutions, namely state interventions through nationalisation of private losses and unprecedented stimulus public spending further confirms that footloose capitalism as analysed by Marx without state support would collapse on its greedy terms.

Conversely, the continuous transformation of socialist China with, dramatic lifting of millions out of poverty and creative mix-bag of state/market models of development shows that it is not yet the end of Marxism.

No doubt, “socialism” collapsed under the weight of cult of personality, absence of democracy and dictatorship of one party in former USSR. But not without unprecedented industrialisation including space technology that put the first human on the moon.

Marx was possibly the first internationalist in theory and practices. “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains ‘ was as his clarion call on international labour movement to confront global capital and promote decent work? The world today agonises over the great divide between the few rich and increasing poor billon bottom without acknowledging Marx who long foresaw it.

Karl Marx long envisioned a world in which the law of social relations would be “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, not his greed.

Certainly he would not have imagined the viciousness of such a class struggle in today’s world in which there is so much for the greed of few but little for the needs of many!

Karl Marx wrote about “primitive capital accumulation” arising from plain robbery and slavery rather than exploitation of labour surplus value in production.

How would Marx describe today the OXFAM revelations according to which in Nigeria, between 1960 and 2005, about $20 trillion was stolen from the treasury by public office holders, the amount said to be larger than the GDP of United States in 2012 (about $18 trillion)?