‘Marxism needs to be re-imagined’

Addressing the international Conference on Marxism, Prof Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of Columbia University, US, on Monday stressed on the need to re-imagine Marxism to make it relevant today by thinking flexibly. “We should not only interpret Marxian philosophy but also try to change it,” she said. She mentioned that

Marx and Engels had said in 1872 itself that Communist Manifesto had become outdated.

Monday was the third day of the five day international conference being organised by the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI).

Taking potshots at corporate financing, she said the problem with development efforts aided by corporate funds is that they report good results, hide bad ones and the good results are often based on bad evidence.

Giving examples from rural West Bengal, she said some of the school buildings built by UNDP funds were never used for schools but for cowsheds. Students never went to those schools except during “advertised visits by officials”, who were responsible for using funds.

“We can make Marxism relevant for us by developing ourselves into folks who not only know how to regulate capitalism but also to contain it,” she added.

Prof Cynthia Lucas Hewitt of Morehouse College, Atlanta US, said that China’s economic progress is a good example of synthesis of Marxism and centralisation of capital. She said that China’s capital, unlike that of some of the Western economies of today, is not a product of slavery but of socialisation. Also, unlike them, China’s capital has not been acquired through colonialism and rabid militarism.

Other notable speakers on the third day of the conference included Andrew J Douglas, Associate Professor, Morehouse College, Atlanta, US, Julio Boltvinik, Professor, El Colegio de Mexico, Ajit Sinha, Professor, Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

In earlier sessions, the Nikolay Bukharin Memorial Lecture was delivered by Eugenio Lo Sardo, General Director, National

Archives, Rome on ‘Karl Marx and the Opium Wars’ and the S A Dange Memorial

Lecture was delivered by Mikhail Yu Pavlov, Associate Professor, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia on ‘Marx-XXI: The Reactualisation of the Philosophical Heritage’.