One does not have to be a member of any communist party to read or appreciate the significance of The Communist Manifesto. One does not have to read it as a gospel in order to transform oneself into a communist either. Communism, per se, may have been wiped off the face of Europe and elsewhere, but it would be nothing short of myopic MacCarthist bullheadedness either to acknowledge the historical importance of the Manifesto, or to see present-day world in the light of what Karl Marx perceived the world 150 years back in time and thought it would be today. It is not without reason it is said that the Bible and the Quran are the only two books that have been printed in more editions and disseminated more widely than the Manifesto. Published in March this year at the fag end of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Manifesto by a fledgling publishing house in New Delhi, A World to Win carries three brilliant essays by three of India's foremost scholars who explain the relevance of the laconic and terse booklet in Marxist theory and praxis.


"The Communist Manifesto: In its own time, and in ours"

Karl Marx, points out political and cultural theorist Aijaz Ahmad, visualised the proletariat as a 'universal class' at a time when no country in Asia or Africa could be considered as having something even resembling a modern proletariat. The term was used in two senses. "The first was in part a philosophical proposition: since what all proletarians have in common is an experience of exploitation and a location in processes of production that were collective as well as impersonal, they had an inherent interest in a revolution against the system of exploitation as such; and since the system of exploitation could not be abolished piecemeal, nor could it be abolished without abolishing both capital and 'wage-slavery' at the same time, along with all the political, social and ideological superstructures that arose on the premise of that exploitation, the proletariat could not emancipate itself without abolishing the system as a whole, emancipating society as a whole; it was the class par excellence of universal emancipation." (p 43).

Marx's philosophical proposition opposed Hegel's description of the bureaucracy as a 'universal class'. Moreover, since capital had an inherent drive towards globalisation, it was destined to constantly increase the number of proletarians around the globe so that eventually the proletariat would come to comprise the great majority of humanity, spread universally in all parts of the world: a world proletariat.

According to World Bank estimates, the number of proletarians doubled between 1965 and 1995. The number now is said to be two and half billion of whom 120 million are unemployed and one billion subsist on less than a dollar a day. Ahmad says the same set of statistics also suggest that no more than 12 to 15 per cent of labour activity is now left on the surface of the earth which is not in one way or another directly or remotely connected with the world market; well over 80 per cent now produces for this integrated market - a novel 'universalisation' in its own terms.

For 80 per cent of the people around the world the share of wealth was cut half in the course of barely 25 years, while the share of the lower 40 per cent at the latter point dropped to just over 3 per cent of the total. What Ahmad also finds significant is that the share of the second highest 20 per cent slab - presumably, the so-called 'middle class' or even perhaps 'upper middle class' - also saw its share in total wealth cut by almost half. "For the average share to be cut drastically, at least a good number must have fallen into the category of 'lower income' or even 'poor' and great many more must have seen their standards of living decline sharply and perhaps their levels of indebtedness rising proportionately" (p 45). What he also finds striking is the absolute polarisation: roughly 3 per cent of the income for 40 per cent of the people and 83 per cent of the wealth for the top 20 per cent.

Increasing polarisation, immiseration, proletarianisation and primitive accumulation are ongoing processes in our own time. "In the imperialist centres of the world which have experienced the highest concentration of accumulated capital, and where the processes of proletarianisation and primitive accumulation were completed earlier, the emphasis has shifted more toward intensive exploitation and accumulation of relative surplus value, based on more advanced technologies. In the formations of backward capital, the intensity of labour rather than of capital is still very substantially at the heart of 'globalisation'. China, which had spectacular though now declining success in expanding its exports, something like three-fourth of all exports are now labour-intensive whereas less than 40 per cent were so a decade back when the volume of exports was more limited. The increase in exports is not so much to any technological 'modernisation' of the process of production but to the more methodical, more intensified exploitation of labour."

In terms of global spread, the proletariat is now infinitely more 'universal' than ever before. Capital has more than completed what was once conceived as its historic mission: it has created a single world market and it has taken the process of proletarianisation deep into the farthest nook and corner of this world. Marx, in other words, stands vindicated.


"The reading of history in The Communist Manifesto"

If the Manifesto was written in time to offer to the proletariat a guide before it entered the revolutionary upsurge of Europe in 1848, India's foremost historian Irfan Habib says, its value has only grown further in that today, after the 'retreat' of socialism, the working class of all countries needs to be rallied to the cause of socialism still more urgently and more resolutely. "But these very circumstances also require that Marxian theory should also be closely and critically grasped. One needs, therefore, to look at the Manifesto's contents carefully in the light of the stage in the evolution of Marxism at which it was written. The perception of historical development, especially of the development of capitalism, was considerably enriched by Marx and Engels in the years after the publication of the Manifesto" (p 67). Habib's essay tries to indicate what areas must be supplemented the theoretical framework of the Manifesto by drawing upon the later discoveries and insights by its authors.


"The reading of history in The Communist Manifesto"

The euphoria in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the former Communist regimes of East Europe that the days of the Marxist world outlook were over has turned out to be an ephemeral one, argues economist Prabhat Patnaik. The condition of life in East Europe has gone from bad to worse: if losses in terms of truncated lives were to be added up, then millions would be found to have died under the free market. The percentage of unemployed workers in West Europe continues to be in double digits, and even Japan, the most successful capitalist country of the post-War years, is enmeshed in crisis (p 79). The entire capitalist world other than the United States and Great Britain are in the throes of economic stagnation and high or rising unemployment. There is a serious possibility of this crisis becoming a worldwide depression engulfing these two countries as well.

During world capitalist booms, argues Patnaik, the leading capitalist country provides a market for its rivals within its own boundaries and solves its own market problem by finding additional markers elsewhere. This is what sustains the boom. The boom from the mid-18th century to the First World War saw Britain providing a market within its boundaries to an industrialising Europe, and in turn finding its own market increasingly in China and India. This sustained the long boom. In the post-Second War scenario, the United States ran current account deficits financed by printing dollars, while its own markets expanded through large budget deficits. The essence of the leadership role consists precisely in running such deficits which help the system as a whole to expand. Depressions are associated with the leader's unwillingness to fulfil this role. With the US cutting down its fiscal deficit, owing to which its current account deficit in real terms has not expanded in a decade, the conditions for a depression are maturing. However, as Patnaik continues, the fact that capitalism is experiencing a crisis which may develop into a general depression does not automatically entail an immediate revival of socialism. In fact, as the experience in Europe shows, in such crises most parties calling themselves socialist start distancing themselves from socialism.

What is intrinsic and unique to the contemporary world economy is the emergence of international finance capital in a new form, one that differs from what Vladimir Lenin had perceived. Finance now constitutes a large international bloc. It gets sucked in from particular countries and gets deployed in particular areas in the quest for quick profits without any concern whatsoever for the nation of its origin. There is a competition among advanced countries about the location of the financial centre of the capitalist world (the Euro being a manifestation), but this competition is not the same as the fragmentation of finance capital into nation-based blocs. The coalesce of finance and industry too is less significant now since the primary form of international finance today is 'hot money' flows in search of quick profits. This finance also operates in the context of, and in turn contributes to, a situation of comparative unity rather than rivalry among capitalist powers (p 82).

Any inter-imperialist rivalry, which manifests itself in some form of discriminatory treatment in one metropolitan country against finance originating in another, runs counter to the current tendency to open up the entire globe for the unfettered operation of international finance capital. The liberalisation-cum-structural adjustment policies imposed upon the Third World by the Bretton Woods institutions is a case in point. Patnaik says there are a host of motives underlying the advocacy of these policies, such as the need to prise open the Third World markets as a mechanism of 'centralisation of capital' on a world scale, especially in a situation of slowdown of growth in advanced countries, and the need of advanced countries to obtain tropical primary commodities and other raw materials cheaply (p 82). "But a very important motive is to prise open the Third World for the operation of international finance capital, which then has the opportunity of making 'killings' through stock market booms, and of buying up natural resources, prime land, and public enterprises for a song." This makes the partition of the globe into hostile spheres of influence among rival imperialist powers undesirable. This keeps rivalries in check too.

Patnaik says globalised finance capital has undermined the possibility, not only of Keynesian demand management but indeed of any form of significant state intervention. It is not just Keynesianism that is in retreat today but social democracy, welfare capitalism, Third World nationalism, planning in all its varieties, and all 'isms' that seek to use the state to overcome the problems of spontaneous capitalism. He does not spare the Soviet-style socialism either. He says the fact that its contradictions could not be resolved within the altered, nonetheless socialist, framework as because financial outflows during the last years of Soviet rule, by state-owned enterprises themselves and despite the existence of formal controls, brought down the economy to its knees (p 83). All reform agendas rely on the state as the agency of intervention, while the state needs a control area which in turn gets undermined if there is a de facto capital mobility between the country in question and the rest of the world.

Globalised finance capital, the economist maintains, is a major cause of crisis and stagnation. Firstly, it has made Keynesian policies of demand management difficult in individual countries, because of which governments cannot take counteracting measures, thus accentuating the crisis. Secondly, a world of globalised finance capital is a world with a tendency towards deflation. Competition between countries where each seeks not to have a worse 'investment climate' than others gets intensified. Deflationary tendencies inevitably thrive: fiscal deficits are lowered, elimination of inflation acquires prime status among policy objectives, to the detriment of growth. Thirdly, this tendency also affects the leading capitalist country without whose active pursuit of expansionary policies and active efforts to transmit such expansion to the rest of the advanced capitalist world, high levels of activity in world capitalism become difficult to sustain.

The third implication, asserts Patnaik, is the acute all-round crisis to which globalised finance reduces the Third World. The crisis of world capitalism that globalised finance becomes associated with afflicts the Third World with particular variety. Third World producers too cause centralisation on a world scale. The possibility of any protection is removed because of the laissez-faire policies which Bretton Woods institutions championing inter alia the interests of globalised finance impose on these economies.