Lesson 5

Marx and Engels inherited Dialectics from Hegel and Materialism from Feuerbach. Hegel developed dialectical thinking -it was a powerful tool, but his dialectics was standing upside down considering real world as unreal, as mere reflection of thought. Hegel's dialectics was standing on its head. Marx brought it back to its feet and footed it well in materialism. He redefined thought as reflection of the real world, explained that nature's realities are dialectical, that is why dialectical thinking becomes powerful.

Feuerbach also gave primacy to real world, opposed religion but could not capture the dialectical motion of the real world, could not understand the motives of history which is derived from history itself, therefore ended up advocating new religion of love ( rhyming with Kumaranasan ? ) . This I can understand , I too started as materialist( thanks to my father and also AT Kovoor and MC Joseph whose Yuktirekha educated my father). I did not believe in a god or after-death domain of life, but was sad that life will end, felt in vague terms that life till the end of life should at least be beautiful, believed that there are eternal virtues which would make our short duration life a pleasure, that human beings should comfort each other, being kind to others and not being aggressive etc. were ingrained in my personality (I think I became a decent kid not in an organic way but in a self-deceptive way, out of philosophical compulsions ! )

Love? I will be very much pleased if the whole Manorama family was to take a chartered flight journey and that plain was to crash! I desire so our love for my nation-kerala. So, what is love? How is its standard set? You can answer in many ways. But you will understand that there is nothing absolute or immutable about love. All virtues of life have to be ultimately resolved in terms of material conditions, in the real world, in actually developing history. You cannot fight for eternal causes; the causes for which you struggle are also derived from your life. Anybody has any doubt? Ask your parents, what did they struggle for? They struggled for you not because they were following any eternal moral principle that men and women are supposed to struggle for their offsprings. But because you -the causes of their life-were derived from their life itself. Of course those parents who had more important causes which were more dear to them (like making wealth, conducting revolution) might have struggled more for those causes -but those causes also were derived in the actuality of life not from any eternal command. All eternal commands are ones, which we, from our material premises, conjure up as eternal commands.

Dialectical-materialistic understanding of the world thus tries to capture the physical universe and human history in motion.

Any philosophic individual tries to understand the past and present and future of universe and tries to locate him or her in it. He or she will be enquiring into two sets of relations. One, nature and its relations with human race. Two, relations between human beings.

Resolving mysteries of the universe (making it more comprehensible today than it was yesterday) is what we call science or precisely speaking natural science. What to look for, what hypothesis to be assumed, which experiment to conducted are all decisions which will be taken based on some philosophy. E.g. there have been experiments to find out electro-magnetic effect (or something like that) of Mantrocharanam in our kerala's Somayagam. (Looking back now one can find that RSS growth in Kerala has lot to do with the ideological ambience created in Kerala middleclass through those few yagams). One's philosophical perception of nature will affect his/her approach in resolving the mysteries of nature.

The converse is equally true. The mysteries of nature (before solving and after solving) will affect one's philosophy also. For example, Engels says that the whole concept of a soul residing in body arises out of man's earliest resolution of the phenomenon of dreams. You can read that somewhere in one of the appendices to this mail. For ancient Greeks who saw nature as changing rapidly in front of their eyes without them being to comprehend them, proper form of thought was dialectical (everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away). But when mysteries of natural phenomena and objects got resolved one after the other, things appeared like static realities, many things became graspable, others were attributed the virtue of " thing in itself "-this is metaphysics. Immanuel Kant in philosophy and Issac Newton in natural science are to be remembered here. Newton's laws of motion are final settlements for the phenomenon for which those laws are laid down. Others are "things in themselves". It is not for nothing that Lenin claimed dialectics to have been vindicated by Einstein's theory of relativity, which undermined Newtonian view of universe.

The ancient Greek dialectical concept of Universe in flux regained the status of valid materialistic philosophy in modern times and Marx and Engels became convinced dialecticians when natural science brought out the truth that nature is an accumulation of processes -not static entities. Engels is pointing out three chief discoveries- discovery of cell in organisms, Darwin's theory of evolution (quantitative change resulting in qualitative change), and energy changing forms from heat to light etc. Discovery of matter and energy inter changing occurred after his death. Otherwise he would have jumped in joy. Engels has traced this ' give and take' between modern natural science and dialectical philosophy in his Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature (which is an incomplete work).

One thing you have to take note of. Marxism is an object of fierce attack, we all know. The all-powerful media and bourgeois intelligentsia have been hounding every single tenet of Marxism. But none of these attacks amount to an offensive on Dialectical materialism on the basis of scientific discoveries. Lot of nonsense is being preached about class antagonisms vanishing due to technological changes. Political Economy of Marxism is under severe theoretical and ideological offensive especially after the velvet revolutions. Materialist conception of history is also being attacked by undisguised and disguised (read Post-modernism) bourgeois intelligence. But the challenge to Dialectical materialism as enunciated in Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature (coming from post-modernism as an attack against Science itself) is extremely feeble. Of course this is not the proper way to champion the correctness of Dialectical materialism, it should be done in true scholarly way with actual contemporary science (including astronomy and genetics) in your hand. But I was just scratching your thoughts. [And remember, it is not surprising that Peoples Democracy is the only political journal in India with a regular Science and Technology column.]

So what I wanted to say is this much, there is a 'give and take' relation between natural science (which concerns with nature and its relationship to human race) and philosophy including dialectical philosophy. What about the second set of relations i.e. relations between human beings?

This is the realm of social sciences. Anthropology and History, Psychology (I am deliberately omitting the aviyal branch Sociology- it is almost entirely American shallowness, a branch fabricated in order to establish that classes / class struggles etc. are just fiction, it will take some more years for that branch to perish or find out its true moorings, unfortunately my wife wasted two years earning an MA in that and true to the character of that branch she learned nothing ).

Engels was thrilled by Morgan's findings in Anthropology. In general the theme of history being decided by material (economic) conditions and in particular the concepts of private property/classes / class struggles/ state etc. got abundant evidence from the history of man's early societies as it came out in Morgan's findings. Even before that Marx and Engels had studied and understood history as a history of class struggles.

But what is my point? Listen carefully, this is very important. Earlier I said that the development of science and the knowledge acquired by human society at each historical stage contribute towards fashioning the philosophy of that epoch. As an example I quoted Engels who said that we had "metaphysics" in philosophy corresponding to Newtonian phase of scientific knowledge. Similarly the class structure and balance of force between classes and actual clash of interests between classes also contribute towards determining the state of philosophies of any historical stage. In other words, actual history contributes towards fashioning the philosophy of history.

Here we will go back to AdiShankaran and Hegel. First let us take the nearby fellow Shankaran. His idealist philosophy and Maya with its central concept was best suited for maintaining caste hierarchy. The sufferings in actual life need not be cause for anguish simply because this life is not actual at all. This is only Maya. So the cognition of nature and man as elaborated in Shankaran's AdwaitaVedantam becomes official philosophy, it defeats all materialist thoughts. It becomes the philosophy of that epoch; it guides all further attempts at cognition and can be shaken only when a new class attains some amount of power (owing to the changes in economic base which cannot be arrested by philosophy).

Now let us go to Hegel. He says ideal (rational) thought exists and progresses in spite of the material world. And the real world is just a manifestation of thought. Thought progresses dialectically from lower to higher forms. Dialectics is the highest form of thought. And what is the manifestation in real world of this highest form of thought? That is the grand word. The STATE (Bharanakootam). For Hegel, state is the reflection in real world of the most rational thought; state stands above all classes and class antagonisms. Class antagonisms correspond to a lower form of thought and State corresponds to highest form of thought, state mediates between antagonistic classes and establishes tranquility and peace. Even if state appears to you as oppressive, that is no reason to undermine the state. State shall not be undermined, because State is the highest form of rationality! More specifically the Prussian state of Frederick William -3 in whose rein Hegel was living and who declared Hegelian system as official Prussian philosophy. The idealistic dialectics suited Prussian aristocracy, it helped them to keep its subjects under ideological control, conditioned them to suffer oppression willingly. Thus the history of Hegel's times contributed towards fashioning the philosophy of history of that period.

Marx and Engels salvaged the dialectical mode of thinking in Hegel and characterised Hegel's philosophical 'system' as sheer perversity. [One of the astonishing achievements of Marx is to demolish the understanding of state as physical reflection of man's absolute idea. He clarified that instead of being an agency reconciling class antagonisms state is the instrument of dominant class to dominate other classes.]

So philosophy also embodies class interests. Everything that breathes its life in a class society embodies class interests. Class struggle is important not just as class struggle, it is important as a reality, which warps all other realities. Because Class struggle is the most massive reality of our historical stage. Read the following paragraphs from Engel's pamphlet "Socialism: Utopian and scientific":

"....................certain historical facts had occurred which led to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first working-class rising took place in Lyons; between 1838 and 1842, the first national working-class movement that of the English Chartists, reached its height. The class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie came to the front in the history of the most advanced countries in Europe, in proportion to the development, upon the one hand, of modern industry, upon the other, of the newly-acquired political supremacy of the bourgeoisie. Facts more and more strenuously gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy as to the identity of the interests of capital and labor, as to the universal harmony and universal prosperity that would be the consequence of unbridled competition. All these things could no longer be ignored, any more than the French and English Socialism, which was their theoretical, though very imperfect, expression. But the old idealist conception of history, which was not yet dislodged, knew nothing of class struggles based upon economic interests, knew nothing of economic interests; production and all economic relations appeared in it only as incidental, subordinate elements in the "history of civilization". The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange - in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics - he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".

From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.

That is it. There is a dialectics of dialectics. Materialist Dialectics emerges from the historical storehouse of accumulated human thought (natural science, social sciences and previous philosophies also). Thus it is continuity. But it is a break too. It took birth in a particular historical phase in working class's frantic search for a world view that could demolish bourgeoisie's philosophical justification to be establishing the end of history, the end of all shackles to freedom in the form of free market ( but in which the working class understood that it will still be shackled ! ).

Materialist dialectics applying dialectical method to conception of history proclaimed that history has not ended, this is not the highest form of society, bourgeois society too has its thesis and anti-thesis, it also carries within it the contradiction between social production (of surplus) and individual appropriation ( of surplus ) which cannot be reconciled beyond a point, and the clash of interests between working classes and bourgeoisie cannot be resolved without bourgeois system itself giving way to a new system. Materialist dialectics searches for the anti-thesis of Capitalism (anarchic production for profit) and puts forward Socialism as the anti-thesis (orderly production for consumption). It also looks for the anti-thetical class to bourgeoisie and identifies that as working class.

Dialectical Materialism thus posits working class as the agency destined to usher in the next higher form of society namely socialism. Philosophy searches history and finds working class; working class in struggle finds philosophical justification for its struggle in dialectical materialism. In Marx's poetic prose: " Philosophy obtained its body in the working class and working class obtained its soul in philosophy".

As far as its status as a break in the sequence of man's changing cognition of himself and nature is concerned Dialectical materialism has fallen in the following trap. In order to be non-partisan, not to become the weapon of the working class, to become every class's philosophy, Dialectical Materialism has to stop midway in its development, it has to close his eyes and insist that it will not look at history, it should cease to become dialectical materialism. This unique position of dialectical materialism confers on it the status of the philosophy of praxis (practice). This world view is one in which class struggle comes to light, this world view compels to take position on history's side, it cannot digest the notion that free market economy and bourgeois democracy represents the ultimate stage in man's destiny. And when it sees clearly a class struggle raging, pretending not to participate (even if in a self-deceptive way) amounts to participating on the other side. That is why Marx dedicated a lot of energy and time on actually organising the International Working Mens Association (nick named as the first international). When International' s conference took place in Paris (Marx was not delegate) there was suggestion from various quarters that non-working class people should not be admitted to International. The workers (tailors and barbers) who went from London vehemently opposed the proposition. They said citizen Marx who is working among them in London is no less dedicated to their struggle than the most militant worker. Marx lived unto the axiom, which he laid down in his Theses of Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

This aspect - the status of Marxism as Philosophy of Praxis - is one, which academic Marxists are most likely to miss. And K N Raj missed it in his Frontline essay. EMS while congratulating Dr. Raj for his excellent understanding of Marxist theory added this fifth point. EMS recounted the endless sufferings, which Marx underwent (the death of his children, poverty, sickness, shame and many other misfortunes) and pointed out that this readiness to suffer arises not from any simple empathy with the working class but from the philosophical cognition of the dialectical process of history and the philosophical compulsions arising out of that cognition. I submit this to you as the fifth flame of Marxism.

So that is the break. Marxism is the product of actual class struggle, it belongs only to those who are in struggle. What is the other side -of interpenetrating opposites - in what I termed as dialectics of dialectics. Marxism is not only a break, it is continuity too. It inherits everything that is valid from previous natural sciences and social sciences and philosophies, it will enrich itself, it will subject its world view to changes from the present and future streams of both its sources-namely advance in natural sciences and experiences of class struggle. It is not dogma. I will quote Aijaz Ahmad here and then will explain why in this mail and in the previous mail, Engels (not Marx) is coming too frequently and then write something about the scheme of our study and then go and sleep. It is already 12.30 night and I do not know how much more time I will take in editing and selecting appendices etc. But before all that I will go to the coffee making machine and make one cup of tea for me.

I will now quote (will not add any comment) from Aijaz Ahmad's second essay in the 7 essay long series, which he is writing now for Frontline. The sixth one came in the current issue. This Aijaz Ahmad series is very exciting and informative, I will give you all the 5 previous ones (Shaji has them, I can send again), and the sixth one Rasheed has already sent to you. He wrote:

" Finally, an attribute that is peculiar to Marxism is the attempt to combine a politics that is based squarely within the working class with the greatest achievements of 'high culture'. Hence comes Marxism's distinctive contributions to scientific thought, economic science, social and political philosophies, cultural theory and the arts. Marx was so formidable a philosopher that even The New Yorker, the magazine par excellence of the American bourgeois literati, was constrained to nominate him as the likely philosopher of the 21st century. Similarly, no roster of the great decisive poets of the 20th century would be possible without the commanding presence of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aime-Fernand Cesaire, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Va llejo, Ernesto Cardenal, Nazim Hikmet and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. With the exception of Cardenal and Vallejo, they were all members of communist parties; Vallejo himself went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and Cardenal was an illustrious Minister in Sandanista's Nicaragua. Coming from Latin America, the Arab world, the Caribbean, Europe, Central America and South Asia, these are a small number of the great figures in what one may call 'Poetry International'. Indeed, it is a fundamental feature of the Marxist intelligentsia that every member of it, anywhere in the world, has always considered him/herself as part of a global fabric. I could equally well give the example of modern cultural theory where most of the commanding figures also turn out to be something of a debating society within the broad parameters of Marxism: V.N. Voloshinov, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. One could offer many such examples. The point nevertheless is that it is this combination of a working class politics and the most advanced thought of the age which accounts for socialism's reach far, far beyond its distinctive precincts. "

You might have noticed that I wrote the fourth and fifth mails after some reading. In the third mail I was ignorant of Hegel altogether except his three laws which I had memorised earlier. Now I know some very very little about him. I glanced through (giving attention to something directly usable for writing the last two mails) Engel's works (1) Ludwig Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy (2) Dialectics of Nature (3) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (4) Anti-Duhring. All these are Engel's works (one final chapter of Anti-Durhing was by Marx it seems). Before reading these texts from Marx-Engels archives in Internet, I tried reading Marx's " Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" which I had brought from Bombay. I could not continue, stopped it and looked for Engels' s works. I could grasp them. Why the Paris manuscripts appeared tough for me? Because it was written in 1844 when Marx was only 26 years old. In this book and German Ideology and Holy Family he was settling accounts with Hegelian dialectics and Kantian metaphysics and Feuerbach's materialism. Marx was young, he was achieving clarity, he was become master. But the prose is tough, is not written keeping working class readers in mind. But by the time he writes Capital he wants the ordinary worker to understand, writes it in simple and beautiful prose. After the initial years he did not write any book to treat philosophy as such. Instead the new philosophical outlook was spread in all works, which were works in political economy - Wage, Price, Labour, Introduction to Critique of Political Economy and Capital itself. And then there are just history books -Civil War in France, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte are the major ones, then Critique of Gotha programme which was his critical dissection of German Social Democratic Party's programme. Philosophy is present in all these works. But Marx did not write Philosophy texts as such later. If he had the time to write, those texts would have been real poetries in prose. But it fell on the shoulders of Engels who lived after Marx to clarify philosophical questions as such, they are brilliant texts and that is what we have got as direct sources to discuss Dialectical Materialism as such.

Before stopping this mail, I will repeat: nothing of what I wrote should be treated as authentic.

Now about Shaji's initial aspiration which started all this lafda- that of being well versed in Marxism. It is every one's aspiration. I do not want to pretend humility. I know I am at the moment in the focus of this small circle. But you should understand that I too am standing at the dividing line between what Dr.Rajan Gurukkal once told me and Preethy as " impressionistic Marxism" and theoretical Marxism. Remember what I quoted from Marx in the mail before the first mail. There is no royal road to science. One has to read and debate. Reading is easy. You have to finish first reading even without understanding anything. Then you have to read again and again....that is the trick. It is like entering into a dark room. First you don't see anything and you feel like going out. But if you remain there, things slowly begins to become clear. The first book has to be Manifesto of the Communist Party. That text is beautiful but Prefaces are also important. Then we can choose the Engels works, which we have used here. especially " Ludwig Feuerbach.....". And Lenin's State and revolution etc. But interspersed with the reading of classics one has to read contemporary writing also. EMS 's pamphlets, and some books, Ellen MeksinsWood, Prabhat Patnaik, Aijaz Ahmad.....I am pointing out the simple but dense writers...the ones who are not corrupted by current fashion post-modernism.

Manifesto reading has to start immediately and along with that you should continuously ask questions. Not necessarily from what I wrote in these mails but from anywhere. In the beginning I suspect I alone might be in the answering position, that might change quickly in the matter of weeks. That I am sure, if all of us show sincerity. And all books are available in the Internet. I will quote my room partner AdyBudi's axiom and stop. He says: " there are no stupid questions, there are only stupid answers " . So from today it is shooting time. Ask questions.

Lesson 4

Every teacher will ask his pupils to learn certain sentences by heart. Marx is asking you to memorise three laws, none of which he established. All three inherited from G.W.F.Hegel.

(1) the law of transformation of quantity into quality and viceversa.

(2) the law of interpenetration of opposites.

(3) the law of negation of negation.

These are the three laws of dialectics as enunciated by Hegel. He laid them down as rules of thinking. Marx and Engels inherited those laws but corrected Hegel and said they are laws of nature. We shall become marxists for a moment and start looking for these three laws manifested in nature.

First law first.The most familiar example ( the one which M. V. Govindan Master often used ) is that of boling water. Gradual addition of heat is a quantitative change which at one particular point( 100 degree centigrade) results in a qualitative change. And shall I give nuclear reaction for the converse of the law-that of qualitative change giving rise to quantitative change? Or anger making a man unusually strong?

Now the second one. Water is what it is, and water is what it is not. The reality which we understand is an interpenetration of two opposite realities. Taking help from the first law we may elaborate that the charecter of a reality( synthesis ) at any given time is determined according to which of the opposites( theseis or anti-thesis ) is quantitatively predominent at that time. Till 100 degree centigrade water's liquid character is quantitatively predominating its gaseous character and therefore it is liquid.

Now on to the third law. The thesis of a reality is challenged by its anti-thesis and at sometime point of time the anti-thesis begins to predominate and that becomes the thesis now. Old thesis is no more, old anti-thesis becomes the new thesis and a new anti-thesis germinates. Realities thus go from lower forms to higher forms. One thesis is negated by its anti-thesis which is later( when it becomes the thesis ) negated by another,.....this is the process of nature and history. That is the law of negation of negation. There are no static realities, all are processes. Motion is the constant state, rest is temporary. " Except the statement that everything changes, everything changes".

The peasants of Malabar never demanded entitlement for land. Their slogans never reached that point. It was a dialectician ( EMS Namboothirippad ) who coined that demand( ." Land to the tiller "-whoever cultivates is the real owner ). In his historic dissent note to Kuttikrishna Menon committee's recommendations. That was a committee of legislators appointed by Madras assembly in which EMS was a member. The state of affairs then was that Land belongs to Landlord and no one else. EMS grasped it as a dialectical reality, not a static( metaphysical) one. Land belongs to landlord( thesis), land does not belong to the landlord( antithesis) together constitutes the synthesis. How the anti-thesis became thesis is now history. I will add ( though not in connection with this discussion ) that the land question as resolved now cannot be and will not be the final. There are higher forms of land ownership for Kerala; earlier we reach them, the better.

Communist Marxist Party at this point of time ( thanks chiefly to Prakash Karat) has a revolutionary vision for india -that is its thesis. There are two realities struggling to take the position of its anti-thesis-namely that of a more ethically charged organisation versus a corrupt bureacratic body. Which of these asserts itself as the anti-thesis and determines its future is a matter of the future. Ice and Steam are both anti-theses of liquid water, whether steam will assert itself in place of ice is a matter of whether water will be cooled or heated by history.

I try to explain these three rules only in the context of nature and history. I follow Marx and Engels.But for Hegel dialectics was just the method analysis. For nature and history he had developed a system. Let us hear what Engels says about about Hegel's system and how they treated him:" Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, a start was made from his revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form, this method was unusable. According to Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept does not only exist -- unknown where -- from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. It develops into itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated at length in the Logic and which are all included in it. Then it "alienates" itself by changing into nature, where, unconscious of itself, disguised as a natural necessity, it goes through a new development and finally returns as man's consciousness of himself. This self-consciousness then elaborates itself again in history in the crude form until finally the absolute concept again comes to itself completely in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development apparent in nature and history -- that is, the causal interconnection of the progressive movement from the lower to the higher, which asserts itself through all zigzag movements and temporary retrogression -- is only a copy [Abklatsch] of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with. We again took a materialistic view of the thoughts in our heads, regarding them as images [Abbilder] of real things instead of regarding real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought -- two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the dialectic of Hegel was turned over; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. And this materialist dialectic, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen "Note:-This passage I have taken from Engels's book " Ludwig Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy" . One full chapter of that book from where I took this para, I am sending as appendix. All of us ( I am only slightly better than you ) have to read a lot of books ( all available in internet ). But about reading and about asking questions , I will give my opinions in the fifth mail.

So that is Hegel. For him thought is primary. Thought originates from eternity and material world is reflections of thought. Thought progresses following the three rules described above and when thought blossoms into the absolute idea, its reflection ( i.e. nature and history ) also becomes completely rational. Hegel was an idealist, his philosophy was idealistic and not materialistic as we defined in last mail. Marx and Engels have ridiculed as rubbish " thought coming from eternity and going to absolute idea". They said natural world is real and thought is reflection of nature in human brain. Since natural processes are dialectical, the reflection of those process on human mind-human thought- is dialectical. When you think dialectically you think correctly becasue that is when your thought harmonises with nature.

Marx and Engels obtained dialectical thought from Greek philosophers Heracleitus & Aristotle and Hegel . Engels is referring to a chinese philosopher who has also developed dialectical thinking. But we get it from a keralite-the Shankaran before EM Shankaran. That is Adi Shankaran. His method of analysis is dialectical , in his terminology thesis and anti-thesis are poorva paksha and sidhanta paksha ( or is it the reverse? I am not at all familiar with these subjects, what I write here is what I heard casually from here and there ). His dialectics was powerful . I am told he defeated many budhist philosophers in formal argument( tarkam) with the power of his dialectical analysis. And as was the custom all those defeated budhist thinkers had to submit themselves immediately to death. Shankaran had killed many budhist preachers like this! Like Hegel's ideal concepts Shankaran has his Maya. The real world is unreal for him also. Real world is manifestaion of Atma or Paramatma or what nonsense I do not know. We have the duty of reading Indian philosophy also. Debiprasad Chatopadhyaya, D D Kosambi, N E Balaram...........our own Darmaraj Adat ( a brilliant fellow not getting much recognition in Kerala because he has no intellectual pretensions ). My Vasai branch comrade Anil ( intellectual, diploma from West Hill Polytechnic, his company closed shop, unemployed for the last 3 months-Bomaby is in real sorry state ) told me a story. When N E Balaram was about to die, EMS visited him in hospital and do you know what EMS talked? EMS asked the dying Balaram whether in his observation there is any strand of materialism in Shankaran's philosophy! And Balaram said No. Was EMS just trying to get an expert's opinion before the expert becomes no more or was he trying to give comfort to the sick Balaram? Because Balaram would be best comforted by thinking and talking of indian philosophy. EMS had very high regard for Debiprasad Chatopadhyaya also. That respect was oozing out of an article which he wrote in ' the Marxist' about Debiprasad.

This mail is only this much. There are appendices. I could have talked about chance-necessity dialectics etc. But there is no need. We are going to read from now, No? We can gather all these from the original texts of classical Marxism. If in this mail I have created some confusing and suspicious notions of laws of dialectics, my purpose is served !

I had stopped this mail here and gone ahead with the fifth mail. That turned out to be a long message. I completed that now and it is 2.15 midninght. I am exhausted. No more energy to write.

Lesson 3
Marxism as a philosophy is titled " Dialectical and Historical Materialism" . To discuss what Dr. K. N. Raj called 'materialist interpretation of history' without explaining 'dialectics' is risky affair. Yet I choose to avoid the term 'dialectics' in this mail. One of the reasons for doing so is that in our original chapterisation we had decided to bring in dialectics only in the third mail.

Marx is an atheist. He has no god. He believes that all objects and phenomena of the material world are free of any influence from outside the material world; there is no reality outside the realm of material universe; human consciousness also originated and develops in the material world, hence human consciousness influencing the state of objects and phenomena is also a material force; therefore in understanding and addressing this material universe intelligently one should not count on any agency or spirit or power or hope ( e.g. hope of soul freeing from body after death and taking another life form ) outside the material universe. This simple atheism which my father's generation imbibed from AT Kovoor and M C Joseph and their Yuktirekha was inherited by Marx from Feuerbach ( Foyerbah is how this German name is pronounced ).

This atheism stands directly opposite to Religion. Religion conjures up a systematic supernatural world and postulates that our material world is governed primarily by forces of that supernatural world. I will remember one sentence from the Old Testament and quote one from Capital Volume -1 just to show how Marx confronts religion directly. First from the Old Testament: " On the sixth day god created man in his own image" . Now from Capital : ".......in the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race."

However ,Marxist materialism is opposite not just to religion. It is in constant quarrel with all shades of philosophical idealism. Due to limitations of my knowledge, I will give a limited definition for philosophy and go ahead. I will define philosophy as a set of very general generalizations which act as guiding principles for individuals and societies to comprehend themselves and the universe in which they are positioned. There are two categories in philosophy :materialist and idealist. Lenin in his short essay 'Three sources and three Component parts of Marxism ' says :".... various forms of philosophical idealism, in one way or other, amounts to an advocacy or support of religion". I will give an example. Listen to the following train of thoughts:

" A god which controls the fate of human beings is obviously not existing, other wise why should there be earthquakes? but there should be some meaning for human life , there should be some reason for us to live, some aims other than seeking pleasures, otherwise what is the purpose of living ? otherwise one could as well commit suicide, there should be certain ideal meanings for our existence and justifying those meanings by actual living is what life is all about....".

This kind of philosophising is not religion but definitely is religion's cousin brother. This thinking does not trivialise human life as pavakkoothu played by god but does seek to import aims and objectives and rules and meanings for human life from an above- world! Which is this above-world? It is not really above; all the meanings of life conjured up by this philosophy originated in human brain and then they are alleged to be the causes for which human life exists! Human life existed before these grand schemes originated in human brain.

Does this mean that there are no laws of motion in the development of human society? No; there are laws of motion , but those laws have to be derived within the sphere of the actually lived ( consciously and unconsciously lived) human life. An absolute idea ( -I am sorry to add this sentence without understanding anything about this Hegelian theme, but I cannot avoid it too ) cannot be supposed to exist just because it suits Hegel. If you want to factor in ideas in order to construct an explanation mankind's fate that idea can only be the ones actually existing in the minds of actual human beings composed of carbon and hydrogen.

What are these laws of motion according to Marx? What comes to mind quickly is that famous sentence from manifesto: " The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Now what is class? Classes are economic categories. Class structure of any society is the way in which members of that society arrange themselves in production process. When you describe class structure two aspects are involved. One, social division of labour. Two, ownership pattern in society. For example when we say that one particular individual is an agricultural labourer we are defining his/her position in the social division of labour and also we imply that he/she labours in some one else's property. How different functions of production are divided among members of society and how is the means of production owned - these two taken together defines class structure. Let us look at the whole paragraph of manifesto:

" The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations."

Marx says struggle between classes contending for economic advantage, for political power and for ideological supremacy, is the motor of human history. Here comes a break. After Marx's death in the edition of manifesto, Engels added the following footnote as clarification to the quotable quote:" The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

Engels wrote: "That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence ommitted)]

Here we will go back a little to the second mail. There we had done some arithmetic for the purpose of understanding surplus value. We assumed that commodities valuing 4 man-hours was sufficient to empower Shaji to produce commodities worth 8 man-hours. Surplus generation at the rate of 100 %. Now let us assume that food production sector and cloth production sector etc. are undergoing technological improvement. More clothes and food and other consumption goods will now be produced at lesser time. Shaji's daily food was worth 0.8 man-hours. The same amount of food is now produced in 0.4 hours. His clothes were worth 0.2 man-hours. They are now worth only 0.15 man-hours....Thus let us assume that the sum of values of all 'input to Shaji' commodities came down to 2 man-hours instead of the earlier 4 man-hours. Still Shaji' s output is 8 man-hours. 5manhours are surplus value. What I want to say is that as productiveness of labour increases, as technology improves, the production of surplus also increases. Consider a case where ratio of surplus value is 0. That is commodities worth 20 man-hours are consumed by a labourer to make him/her capable of working 20 man-hours. This is the case of a naked and nomad family ( I made them naked and nomad in order to exclude housing and clothing ,in short everything other than food from their consumption) who cultivates and harvests just the seed for next sowing and the grains for them to eat till next harvest . Here there is no surplus. Land is available, but the state of their agricultural techniques and their implements is such that they have to work all days' non-sleeping time to get what they now get. There can be ( and there was ) even worse conditions. Historical periods when man could not produce even the minimum needed for him to sustain himself fit for labour continuously, let alone surplus. These are times when there are no classes. Classes are absent during these epochs for two reasons:(1) the division of labour is not advanced sufficiently for different sections to take different positions in the economic process (2)there is not enough surplus ( or no surplus at all ) so that a section of the society can appropriate the surplus of society on the basis of them being owners of means of production. The practice of using force to gain control of means of production and thereby cornering the surplus produced by the collective started only after productiveness of human labour and implements developed sufficiently . That took ages. That is why Engels had to correct the stylistic sentence of Manifesto.

Thus we will have to now revise our understanding as to what is fundamentally the "motor of history". If history of class struggles ( past and present ) will not be complete history in all completeness how should history be written ? If Class struggle is not fundamentally fundamental, then what is? As the answer to this I will now quote from the preface of Marx's ' Introduction to Critique of political Economy'. Before that I will tell you why I have used the word fundamental in this paragraph many times. That is because I do not want to lower the status of class struggle. Later I will try to stress the centrality of Class struggle - may be in this mail or the 5th mail which will be about "philosophy of praxis" -the point added by EMS to K.N.Raj's description of Marxism. Now let us listen to what Marx said in 'preface': "........My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term "civil society".................. ...................................... In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. .........."

These paragraphs are very clear. The famous geometry of human life's totality comes out here: economic foundation and political / legal / ethical superstructure . The true raw material of history ( mode of production and relations of production ) is posited against the finished goods ( which alone was considered as history till Marx arrived ) . All eternal truths evaporate. God is located in human consciousness from where, Marx said, it will vanish along with the material conditions, which gave rise to religious consciousness.

I will now move away from 'preface'. Before that I will do some controversial talking about romance( ! ) in a mischievous bid to explain the proposition "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. Now listen to my remarks on romance: ShaJahan loved many women not just Mumtaz. He loved her most because for him she was the most sexually pleasing object. What struck me most at Taj Mahal was a short history of Mumtaz written there and the astonishingly large number of children she produced ( was forced to produce ) in her short duration of life! Romance- attempt to look for one's own image mirrored in the personality of an individual from opposite sex - corresponds to a new mode of production. i.e. the bourgeois mode of production where individual is set free-where all other chains other than that of free market is broken. Before the bourgeois epoch, there was no individual as we understand today-there were only soldiers of god and subjects of king and kings themselves. The bourgeois epoch released the individual in certain ways because free market of labourers is what charecterises bourgeois mode of production. A market where labourers confront the process of production as free individuals. But once the free individual enters the process of production , he is chained again. He is now an appendage of machine till he punches his card and comes out of factory gate and becomes a free individual again. What I want to say as an example is that Romance like Democracy is a human practice of bourgeois age-and both correspond to the bourgeois mode of production.

It is time to stop. Historical materialism has two parts: (1) It quarrels with all attempts to impose extraneous consciousness to human society. It compels all philosophical questions and answers to be bound within the material world. It locates as the basis for totality of human practices , the modes and relations of production . These are its guidelines to comprehend history of mankind. (2)Marx not only gives these general principles of history's movement, he himself applies these principles and narrates mankind's past and projects its trajectory to a long distance in the future. Struggles between classes as classes occupy the central location in his narrative in which for the first time kings and queens lose their role of history makers.

Before stopping I will touch slightly on the fate of historical materialism after Marx's death. Marx' s philosophical model of human life as two storey structure( economic base and legal/political super structure ) was subject of a century long criticism. Marx was denounced for considering economic factor alone as the creator of history. There have been series of scepticisms for this after Marx's death. I think Louis Althusser is the latest one who addressed this aspect in a major way. He changed the model. He said human life is a totality of 4 different sets of practices namely economic,political,ideological and theoretical. He further said that all these practices influence each other-but there is relative autonomy between them also. Althusser initially earned great admiration for 'modifying' Marxism fundamentally-but himself submitted that these are not modifications at all. These concepts, these modifications to the simplistic structure( of economic base and cultural superstructure) are scattered every where in Marx's own writings, said Althusser. That brings us to the one single instance where Engels confronted the accusation of attributing to economic life , undue importance as determining factor of all human life. This he does in his famous letter to Bloch. Let us read from that letter:

" According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one................................

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant - the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals - each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) - do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

This passage is simple and does not require any explanation. I will just call your attention to the sentence just above which I have underlined. This is the other side of what Engels has written in this same letter as "We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions". This "definite assumptions and conditions" are the material conditions. Connect this to a sentence ( a favourite sentence of Aijaz Ahmad ) in the 'preface' :"In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out". This sentence I did not include in the earlier quotation from 'preface'. Aijaz Ahmad quotes this sentence to highlight the usage" fight it out" and stresses the need to fight ideologically too so that the in shaping the future of human civilisation, working class's will have greater stake.

Now I am really stopping with a warning that every word which I have written in this should be suspected for its authenticity. And requesting you to read both appendices thoroughly.

Lesson 2

In this mail we are taking up the 'Capitalism' in Marx's theory. With all the babbabbas of my having read only Vol-1, that too roughly. First I will try to explain Surplus Value in a very simplistic way. Then I will write something as reason for writing nothing other than surplus Value.
Equation1:-
Profit = Selling Price of Produced Goods --( Buying Price of Means of Production + Price of labour).

Means of production will include raw materials and machinery and buidings and other infrastructure and maintenance costs. There are techniques to count how much of the machinery price is going into every single day's produced goods. Practical technique is counting depreciation or something like that. Price of labour means wages.

Now let us talk a little about prices. There can be cases of under pricing and over pricing. A good being sold and bought below or above its actual value. Ideal transaction is where all items are bought and sold at prices equal to their value.

Equation 2:-(Warning- this equation is not derived from Equation1. This is a comparable equation )
Surplus Value=Exchange Value of Produced Goods -- ( Exchange Value of Means of Production + Exchange Value of Labour )
Surplus Value equals Profit in the case of ideal transaction where all goods are bought and sold at prices exactly equal to their value . If any of the transactions are not done in ideal terms then profit will differ from actual surplus value . E.g. if products are sold at prices lesser than their value, then that will bring down profit below surplus value. Another example: if labour is bought at lesser price than its actual value ,then profit will rise above surplus value.

There is a school of bourgeois economic thought ( is it called Mercantalism, I am not sure ) which argues that there is nothing called Surplus value. Similar to the conservation of energy which we studied in Pre-degree physics , these fellows say there is a conservation of values. Value of Means of Production + Value of Labour = Value of Produced Goods . No Surplus value. But then where does profit come from? This school says that profit arises only out of non-ideal transactions.i.e. by the capitalist buying labour and raw materials below their value and selling produced goods above their value.

There is another strand of this thought which agrees that more value comes out of the production process than that goes into it , but does not agree that this extra value is produced by labour. They also assert that value creation happens in the transactions, not in production process. This is more stupid than "conservation of value" theory.

Marx has spent some time in settling the confusions created by these mercantalists( ! ) but does not have to exert himself much for that purpose. Classical bourgeois political economy itself ( Adam Smith and Ricardo ) had established that labour is the value creating substance. There is already a well-developed labour theory of value which is Marx's basis for advancing to Surplus value theory.

How does labour create surplus value ?
We should begin by asking another question, i.e. how is value of a commodity determined ? The answer is : By the quantity of labour time ( social average labour time ) spent in its making. For those working in consultancy firms, this is easy to grasp. If a design package will be completed in 1000 manhours then the consultancy Company will quote for that job at K dollars and if another project will take 2000 manhours to complete it will be quoted for 2K dollars. Of course the company may get the 1000 manhour job for something more or less than K dollars. That is over/under selling and is not significant here. Again, Engineer's 1 manhour and Draftsman's 1 manhour are not equal. But everything is clubbed and a social average manhour is determined across the company. In short, the exchange value of that design package is 1000 manhours of average Zamilsteel labour time which may be equal to average 1400 manhours ( for example ) of entire Saudi Arabian Labour force. There is no room for confusion in this. We had earlier clarified that 1 manhour of Zamil engineer is equal to more han one averagemanhour of Zamil work force. The exchange value of the design package produced by Zamilsteel has to be ultimately expressed in terms of one national average manhour. Thus it is worth 1400 average Saudi manhours. Similarly the value of bricks with which the designed plant will be built also can be expressed as the number of average saudi manhours spent in producing those bricks. How can bricks be valued by manhours spent in its making? What about clay spent in its making? No problem ,the value of that clay was also expressed previously as some manhours, those manhours added to manhours spent in brick-making togther will give the total exchange value of bricks. In this way exchange value of machinery and everything else that goes into the making of the plant can be expressed as a big figure of average Saudi Arabian manhours.

Thus every commodity's exchange value is nothing but the aggregate of labour time that is condensed into it till the present point of time. Water in the river has no exchange value because human labour has not been spent in its making. You can drink that water without paying money.But when it comes out through water taps in your kitchen, it has exchange value because human labour of X or Y or Z. socially average manhours have been spent in taking that water from river to your kitchen. You have to pay for that water.

We could easily calculate the value of design package as 1400 average saudi manhours. We could similarly find out the value of bricks. But what is the exchange value of Shaji.M. Scaria ? To be precise , what is the exchange value of Shaji's 8 hours of willing enslavement in Zamil office ? Remember how we calculated the exchange value of the plant. We added the exchange values of all that went into its making- that of bricks, design package ( which was 1400 average saudi hours), machinery etc. Similarly in calculating the value of Shaji's capacity to work for 8hours we have to add up the exchange value of all constituents parts which go into making this capacity. 0.8 manhours( average saudi manhours) of food , 0.2 manhours of clothing, 1.3 manhours for clothing and feeding dependents, 0.2 manhours educational expenses ( divided over the whole of his career) which his family had spent and which he owes them now, 1.5 manhours of many other expenses. In all 4 Saudi manhours has gone into making Shaji capable of working 8 saudi manhours. We had equated 1000 zamil manhours( 1400 saudi manhours ) to K dollars. Likewise 4 saudi manhours will be equated to 4 K / 1000 dollars = 0.004K dollars and that will be Shaji's exchange value of a day.

If the act of buying Shaji's labour power is an ideal transaction he will be bought at 0.004K dollars per day wage. If the supply of engineers are less than demand, then he may be over-priced and bought at 0.005K dollars or more. If the supply is more than demand he may be under priced and bought at 0.003K dollars. In that case he will eat less and become unhealthy. For the puroses of a simple analysis let us consider that he ( his capacity to work productively ) is bought at its actual value of 4 saudi manhours. and he works for 8 saudi manhours ! He defies the law of thermodynamics. His output is more than the input. He creates surplus value at a rate of 100 percent which is appropriated by Zamil's owner.

The original capital which Zamil advanced for buying means of production and labour power and surplus value created in the intercourse between labour and means of production is realised by Zamil when his products are sold off. This enhanced capital he uses again to buy more means of production and more labour power, this cycle continues. This is the process of accumulation.

There are many capitalists..there is competetion, there is augmentation of one capiatlist's capital with another's., there is anarchy in production, overproduction, crises, and empirical limits beyond which Capitalist accumulation cannot proceed. And since it cannot but accumulate, it cannot but destroy itself. From metropolises to colonies it can export its crises , but when colonies too are saturated where will it go ? And what about the antithetical class which capitalism has created ? Will it not mature again for another October ? Will it not search and find the weakest link of the new chain ?

Needless to say Capitalist economy is quite complex .... Marx did not describe everything in it completely, all features of capitalism had not unfolded even during his life time..he had extrapolated much of future of Capitalism with stunning brilliance...but that does not cover everything. Later Marxists from Lenin to Prabhat Patnaik are adding to the body of Marxian political economy. However to understand the fundamental dynamic of Capitalism one has to look through Marx's looking glasses before going elsewhere.

I will now stop by saying -as I warned in my previous mail- that Marx spent much of his live lifetime comprehending Capitalism. I chose to explain Surplus value because that, I think, is the fulcrum of political economy. There are very important discussions about Commodities and Money before reaching at surplus value, and there are very important teachings that follow it.But if one is allowed to give only one lecture , then it should be a lecture on surplus value. That is what I did.

Wheel is silly and simple once it is invented. Surplus value is also simple. But that Karl Marx discovered it is what makes him Karl Marx. Engels said Surplus Value in Economics and Class Struggle in History are Marx's chief theoretical contributions. And Class struggle is what I will have to touch slightly in the next mail which is about K.N. Raj's second point- materialist conception of history.

Lesson 1

For some introductory passages about Marxist theory, my first impulse was to look in Frontline archives for an old article by K N Raj and send that to you. But to my disappointment I found that Raj's article is older than Frontline archives. That was condensed form of his lecture at Kerala University. I liked the simplicity of his description when I first read it. And I was emboldened to recommend that article to many because in the very next issue of Frontline, EMS Namboothiripad wrote an article praising Raj's essay and filling an important aspect of Marxism which Raj missed.

Raj had outlined four aspects of Marxism quoting a western academician whose name I don't remember now. (1) A new method of analysis namely the dialectical method. ( 2 ) A new concept about history according to which the changing material conditions of social life is the core of the history of human civilisations (3) A rigorous and critical analysis of Capitalist mode of production. and (4) An unflinching commitment to Socialism.

Beyond this listing I do not specifically remember anything from Raj's essay ( I really wish if I had that article with me here). So I will write some of my own rough understanding below each of these four sub-headings. Then I will come to what EMS added to this four pronged description.And along with EMS I will of course bring a passage from Aijaz Ahmad who is an object of my intense admiration nowadays.

I will start from the fourth point and go backwards. Socialism was a popular idea well before Marx entered the political theatre of Europe. Three names are very famous. Charles Fourier, Saint Simon and Robert Owen. I do not know much about these fellows. Owen was English . The other two were French I suppose. I do not know for sure. After writing this I will search for their details in the internet! They were deeply committed to the principle of equality and were sympathetic to the working class who were living in wretched conditions. They tried to practically develope ideal communities where profit was shared among workers. They put forward models of socialist societies where every individual will work for the common good of society and society will take care of every individual equally. Marx and Engels were of course very respectful to these Socialists but said their programmes were just wishful thinking and in the real world of real politics and economics, their models cannot survive. Theirs was Utopian Socialism , said Marx. And Marx along with Engels put forward alternate postulates which they claimed is Scientific Socilalism.

The departures in Marx's concept of Socialism from Utopian concepts should be elaborated a little. In the Utopian thinking, every one in society sincerely wants to end human misery ( which is very true; who would be happy to see a child starving? ) So, it is just a question of putting in place the proper system of production and social life. One has only to prove the practicality ( first in small scale ) of running industries without exploitation and then everyone will embrace these systems because every one wants to end human misery!! Marx brought out the extrinsic and intrinsic weakness of Utopian Socilaism. The extrinsic one is easier for us to grasp. Let us take up that first.

The present way of production and distribution operates within a set of specific class relations. These relations cannot be wished away because the STATE as a manifestation of these class relations and as a perpetrator of these class relations is the most forceful reality of society. Let me talk a little about state here which will in fact be an overlapping with the discussions under subheading two. For theoritical beginners ( not for non-theoriticians of Vasai Road who actually confront the various forms of state power - formal and informal ones like Bhai Thakur, Times of India, Karishma Kapoor etc. etc. ) , the force of STATE is difficult to understand in its present form with its class content disguised by formal democracy and formal free speech rights. But think of our old caste society. If Robert Owen wants to establish a system where Brahmans and untouchables (unseeables is the correct term at least in Kerala) will toil together in the field and share the produce equally, his plan is not going to work. There is a king and kingdom and god and temple which will have to be demolished with force. In built in the present economic mode is an irreconcilable conflict of class interests. Marxian agenda for Socialism is linked to the programme of Class war with its strategies and tactics.

The intrinsic problem of Utopian Socialism is the actual organising of production. One has to understand what capitalist production is fundamentally and propose the alternative. The correction to Capitalist misery cannot just be "division of profits" among workers. Marxist solution envisages an end to production as an excercise in profit making. Instead, the marxist idea is that society will collectively estimate its needs and then produce them collectively in a planned way. These sentences of mine are provocative, I know. One might be jumping to conclude that Marx's socialism is also Utopian ! What else do the experiences of Russia's planned economy and of China introducing "production for profit" in to its society, prove ? If you are also reaching the same conclusion I will honour you by calling you a keralite. i.e. the mediocre intellectual ( kalakaumudi weekly category ) who knows everything about Marxism but has not read any marxist text.

Of course there are many open questions in Marxian economics. Prabhat Patnaik has not proclaimed the end of history! But before taking up these open questions thrown up by the years after 1917, we have to read what Marx wrote about division of labour /commodities / exchange / profit / surplus value / wages / accumulation/ markets / competition / centralisation / primitive accumulation etc. In short we have to read Capital and then Lenin's treatises on imperialism and subsequent witings in Marxian economics. I said in the previous mail itself that I am a neo-convert to reading. I just completed a rough reading of Capital Vol-1. I will just cite from Vol-1 an interesting poser and go over to the next subheading( may be in the next mail ) . To the people who argued against collectively determining society's needs and planning production accordingly , to those who said that demand and supply rules will ensure that every one's needs will be met automatically, to believers in the regulatory capability of markets, Marx asked: why don't you let market rules operate inside your production units also ? The bigger your corporation more intensely you plan, don't you? When Chemtex had 100 employees there was no planning department. When it had 700 employees there arised a very big planning department. Now they are introducing "Microplanning"-that is daily planning instead of weekly plans.

Consciously organising the system of production and distribution according to the collective will of the society without one being exploited by another ( one's surplus produce not being cornered by another ) , in short the socialist aspiration is an important ingredient of Marxist theory. There is a pamphlet by Engels: "Socialism: Scientific and Utopian" in which there is some discussion about constructing Socialism. But compared to the large volumes critiquing Capitalism the writings about Socialism are few in Marx-Engels writings. At least that is what I think. When Lenin actually begins to construct Socialism he is handicapped not only by lack of previous practice to refer but by lack of theory too!!

In this mail I have just scratched one small corner of "Socialism" in Marx-Engels literature.

In the next one I will tell that Marx spent most of his time in comprehending Capitalism and will talk little about Surplus Value and then keep quiet.

In the third mail ( about historical materialism ) I will quote some passages from Marx's short preface ( which became more famous than the book itself ) to A contribution to Critique of Political Economy written in 1959. This book is the foundation on which his Capital ( Vol-1 ) came out 8 years later is built. Along with quotations from "preface" I will insert my explantions also.

In the fourth mail I will write about dialectical materialism -state the three laws of Hegel and talk a little about Marx's romance with Hegel etc.

In the fifth mail I will bring in what EMS added to K. N. Raj's presentation.

All this I will be doing not very happily, but with the discomfort of a semi-literate talking big things. In between writing this mail, I wrote a short mail to Preethy in which I have called you a 'rascal' for making me work on this theory affair ! But there is defenitely a benefit. At this moment of February 24, I am being made aware like never before of how under-read we are.