Delivering the Jean Paul Sartre Memorial Lecture on the third day of the five-day International Conference on Marxism in Patna, eminent thinker Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on Monday said, “we should not only interpret Marxian philosophy but also try to change it.”
She also mentioned that Marx and Engels too had said in 1872 itself that the Communist Manifesto has become outdated.
Taking potshots at corporate financing under her “How Can We Use Marxism Today?”, Ms. Spivak, University Professor, Columbia University, USA, also said that the problem with development efforts aided by corporate funds is that they report good results, hide bad ones and the good results are often based on bad evidence.
Giving examples from rural West Bengal, Ms. Spivak said some of the school buildings built under UNDP funds were never used for schools but for cowsheds. “Students never went to those schools except during advertised visits by officials who were responsible for using funds”, she said while adding that there was no system to know whether students had the right background to receive education in the way it was provided to them.
“We must understand that to be equal is not to be the same… we can make Marxism relevant for us by developing ourselves into folks who not only know how to regulate capitalism but also to contain it,” she added.
‘China’s capital a product of socialisation’
Delivering the Rudolf Hilferding Memorial Lecture, Cynthia Lucas Hewitt, Associate Professor, Morehouse College, Atlanta US, under the topic “Karl Marx’s Prescient Theory of Centralization of Capital, Crisis and an Africentric Response”, said that China’s economic progress is a good example of synthesis of Marxism and centralisation of capital.
She said that China’s capital, unlike that of some of the Western economies of today, is not a product of slavery but of socialisation. Also, unlike them, China’s capital has not been acquired through colonialism and rabid militarism. Analysing International Monetary Fund’s Financial Access Survey (FAS) data, she tried to show how accurate was Marx’s projection of the global saturation of the capital, its relationship in expansionary cycles and the inevitability of contradictions. She also looked at possibilities of African countries which can follow alternatives to Eurocentric revolutionary processes.
Other notable speakers on the third day of the conference included Andrew J Douglas, Associate Professor, Morehouse College, Atlanta, US, who delivered the Frantz Fanon Memorial Lecture on ‘King, Marx and the Revolution of Worldwide value’; Julio Boltvinik, Professor, El Colegio de Mexico, who delivered the Gyorgy Markus Memorial Lecture on ‘Developing Marx’s Critical Theory: Two Lines of Thought’; Ajit Sinha, Professor, Azim Premji University, Bangalore, who delivered the Piero Sraffa Memorial Lecture on ‘My Sraffa’.
Miguel Vedda, Professor, the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, delivered the Bertolt Brecht Memorial Lecture on ‘Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx as Essayists: On Genesis and the Function of the Critic Intellectuals’, Riccardo Petrella, Professor Emeritus, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, delivered the Oskar Lange Memorial Lecture on ‘ Marxism and the Commons: The New Challenges for the Humanity’.
The end of the proceedings on the third day was marked by the release of the book ‘Another Marx’ authored by Marcello Musto. The book was released by Lord Meghnad Desai.
