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A World to Win: Essays on The Communist Manifesto, edited by Prakash Karat. New Delhi, India: LeftWord Books, 1999. [[email protected]] $10.00; paper, $6.00. Pp.149.
This concise volume of essays by three distinguished scholars - Aijaz Ahmad, Irfan Habib and Prabhat Patnaik - is intended as a critical survey of Marxism since the publication of The Communist Manifesto 150 years ago, and as a response to the general question as to the continued viability and relevance of Marxist theory. Clearly and elegantly, all three argue that Marxism is as important as ever, perhaps more so than in the past. The process of economic globalization has enormously sharpened several features of capitalism articulated in the Manifesto: huge growth and immiseration of the proletariat; free flow of capital all over the globe and subordination of all values and policies to that; deleterious cultural and political effects, which include heightened ethnic divisions, loss of democratic aspects of national sovereignty, and undermining of unified class consciousness among the working classes of the world. All three urge a theoretical "reconstitution" of Marxism, a substantial and continuous theoretical effort to grasp the latest developments of capitalism, going considerably beyond what Marx could or did prognosticate. Nonetheless all three discuss, in subtle detail, the significance of the Manifesto for the current situation, especially its strengths and weaknesses with regard to the history and future of India.
The first essay, "The Communist Manifesto In Its Own Time, And In Ours," is by the literary and political theorist Aijaz Ahmad. As in his work In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) Ahmad is concerned to locate the text (in this case the Manifesto) concretely within the course of Marx's intellectual development as well as in the historical circumstances and political purposes that were at hand. The Manifesto is thus seen...