Students' Struggle, the organ of the Students' Federation of India has been carrying a section roughly titled, "The book that inspired me". Economist Venkatesh Athreya recently wrote in the section, how Das Kapital inspired him.
It happened almost, but not quite, by accident. I had completed my bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from a ‘prestigious’ Indian Institute in 1969 and had, to every one’s surprise, chosen to pursue doctoral studies in Economics at a U.S. university. The student movement against the US aggression in Viet Nam was developing powerfully at the university where I had enrolled for my Ph.D. But the courses I had to study as part of my doctoral programme in Economics did not provide any explanation for such important questions as to why the world’s most powerful nation was engaged in a war of aggression against a tiny third world country. It was then that I stumbled upon a study group negotiating Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. You may wonder why this is even worth a mention when the book under reference is a very difficult book on Economics written in the 1850s and 1860s, which many think is obsolete and irrelevant. But I had by this time realized that mainstream Economics offered no credible explanation of the unjust world we lived in, and I was willing to join the study circle. The next six months changed my life entirely.
I read Das Kapital in English, and the first time as part of a study circle of ten persons, most of whom were doctoral students at the university from various social science disciplines. At first, I found I had to read the text very carefully, as each sentence was significant in a different way each time I read it. Slowly, I realized that the manner of Marx’s argument was relentlessly logical, and I began to enjoy the book a great deal, as an engineer with an inclination to analytical argumentation. As I read the book over and over again over the next several semesters of my stay in the university, I began to see something else in Capital. Even in translation, Capital read like poetry! So immense was Marx’s scholarship, apart from his acute grasp of political economy arising from his basic theoretical framework of dialectical and historical materialism, that the pages of Capital, in the middle of abstract argument, would be enlivened by an apt quotation from Shakespeare or Goethe! The other striking aspect of Marx’s style of writing was the sharp sense of humour, with devastating sarcasm marking his references to some bourgeois economists like Nassau Senior and Jeremy Bentham who were apologists for the capitalist system.
What did I, an engineering graduate trained in mathematical economics, learn from Capital? First, I learnt that to understand a society and its dynamics, one needed to look at it in historical perspective. Second, the basic determinants of the dynamics of a society lay in the manner in which the means of production were owned and the relationship between the direct producers and the means of production. Third, the capitalist mode of production in essence is based upon (i) a separation of the direct producers (working people) from the means of production and their transformation into free wage labourers at one pole, (ii) the transformation of the means of production into the private monopoly/property of a class of capitalists at the other pole, and (iii) the logic of relentless pursuit of profit on private account, with all production taking place on private account for sale in markets with a view to profit. Marx demonstrates that this profit-driven system is necessarily expansionist, both in terms of geography and in terms of the range of activities that can be brought under the drive of profit. To read the discussion on the circuit of capital as well as the last part entitled ‘the modern theory of colonization’ in the first volume ofCapital is to understand the inherently globalizing nature of capitalism. After all, if the sole goal is profit, why should the pursuit of it be confined to one part of the world or only one set of activities? If making money is the name of the game, why not make it in any manner possible, be it running a factory or a self financing college or worse! Surely, business ethics is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms! Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production and its inherent logic enables one to understand colonial expansion and what Lenin later called the system of imperialism with its global expansion and colonization and enslavement of people all over the world.
Marx’s analysis in Capital brings out the contradictory nature of capitalism as an economic system. On the one hand, both the competition among capitalists and the struggle between the class of capitalists and the class of workers leads to constant mechanization and automation of production, leading to the rapid development of society’s productive forces. On the other hand, these very processes, which are part of the pursuit of profit, limit the growth of consuming power in society by creating increasing unemployment and limiting wage increases over time, and by dispossessing producers in pre-capitalist sectors/ economies. Periodically, this contradiction between the rapidly growing producing power of capitalist society and the much slower growth of consuming power, results in a demand crisis, with massive amounts of goods and services remaining unsold and large numbers of people thrown into the ranks of the unemployed. Capitalism being an unplanned and anarchic system, sectoral imbalances can also lead to overall economic crisis. Thirdly, in so far as technological progress is also unplanned at the systemic level, the rise in productivity does not always keep pace with the increase in the underlying investments that make the technological progress possible, leading to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall now and then. All these and other factors historically have made the capitalist system prone to large fluctuations in output and employment, causing immense misery to working people. Besides, the competition among capitalists and rivalry among capitalist nation states on a global scale led, in the 20th century, to two global wars resulting in misery for millions of people and massive profits for a handful of large corporations. Currently, the world is in the midst of a global recession, whose predicted recovery is unlikely to make any dent on unemployment until 2011.
The current global crisis of climate change has brought into sharp focus the wasteful ways of the global capitalist system driven by relentless pursuit of profit and the accompanying disregard for the environment and the fate of future generations. It was Marx’s Capital that boldly proclaimed the historically inevitable demise of the capitalist mode of production in the face of the apparently triumphant march of capitalism across the globe that seemed self-evident to defenders of the capitalist system in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century experience showed that vast numbers of people across the world, both in the industrially advanced countries and in the colonized countries, were ready to revolt against the inequities of the capitalist system. The first decade of the present century has once again highlighted the inability of the capitalist system, despite enormous advances in science and technology, to solve the basic problems facing humanity, including the rather modest goals of food, shelter, clothing, education and health for all. Marx’s analysis in Capital, and his prognosis of the system of capitalism promoting the accumulation of wealth at one pole and misery at the other, remains relevant and inspiring.
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