Marxism needs to be rethought, reconstructed and reimagined to suit modern times, said professor Peter Beilharz from Curtin University, Australia, while delivering the E.M.S. Namboodiripad Memorial lecture here on Wednesday. The lecture was the concluding event of a five-day international conference on Karl Marx.
“Capital production assigns everything an exchange value, whether it is a commodity or love, sex, landscape or beauty, but it is the sociability of the individual, rather than possessive individuality, which enables her to have a peaceful coexistence with her surroundings,” he said.
Answering a question from the audience, Prof. Beilharz said, “Marxian utopia is not different from utopia that everyone seeks to achieve... The tendency to turn Marx against Marxism, something which gained currency after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, is unnecessary and should be avoided.”
AI effect
Delivering the Paul Lafargue Memorial Lecture at the conference organised by the Asian Development Research Institute, Kevin M. Sanders, vice-president, People Programme International and Palmer Institute, U.S., said: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself and this is exactly what the capital production is doing through the decades for maximisation of profit by means ethical and unethical, legal and illegal.”
Barbara Harriss-White, emeritus professor, Oxford University, in her special address on ‘Petty production and India’s development’, said: “Petty commodity production is a theoretical problem for those who attempt to theorise capitalistic development.”
