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Tag: Karl Marx

  • Karl Marx, Socialism and Africa

    In the auspicious remembrance of the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (5th May 1818-May 2018), it would be pertinent to reflect on his work, its impact on the historical trajectory of mankind and re-evaluation of contradictions of the contemporary world system and even to examine the historical context of Africa’s current dilemma. One of Marx’s authoritative biographer, the Latvian-born British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin wrote of Marx’s theory as “ the most powerful among the intellectual forces which are today transforming the ways in which men act and think” .

    Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland. His parents, Heinrich and Henrietta were of Jewish origin but accepted Protestantism nominally, to enable Mr Heinrich to practice law. The family was reported to be reasonably well off, but not very wealthy. Marx was admitted to study Law in University of Berlin but later switched to study Philosophy at the University of Bonn.

    Marx’s work consisted essentially in laying bare the laws in the development of society, but especially the capitalist society, which he praised for its monumental achievements in technology and social forms, but whose existential contradictions underlines its transitional nature in the society’s trajectory.

    However, after the collapse of the former USSR, the first proletarian State, founded on the authority of Marxian Socialist scientific theory, Marxism in Europe, America and even the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America has had less political appeal. But, the contemporary wreckage of deepening  capitalist crisis, especially with its backlash of the rise of right wing extremist populism in the industrial West and deepening misery in Africa has rekindled interest in the study of Marx and the scientific theory of socialism.

    In Africa, the absence of theoretical rigour, social and historical contextualization which are dispassionate tools of scientific interrogation of facts have undermined policy outlines, rendering them hollow and inappropriate for the urgent needs of transformation and modernization of Socio-economic and political frameworks of the region. The essential contents of contemporary policy outlines in Africa is regrettably deficit in the grasp of the existential reality, which Amilcar Cabral, Africa’s most rigorous theoretician characterized as “the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social and historical reality of each of our countries,” and stressed his conviction “that any national or social project of change, which is not founded on adequate knowledge of this reality runs grave risks of poor results or of being doomed to failure.”

    And for those who would scorn theoretical rigour as unnecessary abstraction and distraction, Cabral was convinced that “if  it is true that a revolution or  a social change project can fail, even though it be nurtured on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet successfully practiced Revolution without revolutionary theory.” The tragic trajectories in Africa of poverty, misery conflicts and political exclusions are essentially derived from the theoretical lethargy of acute deficit in political and economic imaginations.

    Scientific socialism, originally contributed by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels is even a key victim of the cascading waves of anti-intellectualism in contemporary African official political establishments, where the straitjacket of received wisdom of policy packages, sometimes handed down from outside is canonized as true gospel of redemption.

    It is the misunderstanding that Socialism was first and foremost, a political ideology and a totalitarian one for that matter, a regime type and even a strategy for class warfare that feed the popular misconception that it has failed in its birthplace of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR, and therefore allegedly unsuitable and even unmentionable in the current discourse about the future of Africa and even Nigeria.

    However, Socialism or more specifically Scientific Socialism, chiefly the work of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, elaborated further in another social context by Vladimir Lenin, was before any  other thing else, a scientific investigation of laws of social progress, exploring the forms of its evolution  and the context of existential facts and reality which interacts to produce the specific context of social relation and the means of securing the material condition of its existence that both recreate and transforms it.

    Marx and Engels did not invent these laws but discovers their trajectories across all human forms, despite of place and time. These laws which agglomerates the diverse tapestries of the existential material base, in objective terms corresponds to the forms of social relations and political organization  in specific social and historical context .

    Many people claimed that Marx envisage socialism in more advanced capitalist countries of the West than the backward Russia, where it actually occurred in 1917. However, what Marx envisaged is actually less important, than what he discovered as the laws governing the progression of society, unhindered or unaffected by the wish, preference of anyone, including himself.

    The scientific theory of socialism, extrapolates many political conclusions but its value is the rigour of it scientific interrogation of social realities, derived from general principles.

    The credibility of Marxism and its eternal universal value is laying out the critical theoretical infrastructure which illuminates the road map that constantly search for questions – calling into questions where others only see ready-made answers and vulgar evidence. Writing in the forward of first volume of Das Kapital, Professor Enerst Mandell pointed out that Marx’s principal aim was to lay bare the laws of motion which govern the origins, the rise, the development, the decline and the disappearance of a given social form of economic organization and not seeking universal laws of organization. And in fact, the essential thesis of Das Kapital is that no such law exist.

    Marxism is not a scheme of political project or economic organization of any particular place and time but basically a scientific theory to unmask and interrogate social forms in any particular state of historical development. The conclusion of each particular stage is not valid for all times and all circumstances. The profound theoretical universal insight of Marxism – Leninism bears fruit in economic and social organization, when interrogated to the specific condition of historical context and existing situation. The Communist Party of China has been particularly adroit in this synthesis and has produced an awesome economic success and social progress that the world has never seen before.

    The Communist Party of China has consistently affirmed its abiding faith in the scientific and eternal value of Marxism Leninism as its practical guide. Building Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the advanced development of Marxism-Leninism in the particular context of China’s existential reality. The Party avows that without Marxism Leninism, it would never have found the path to advance on the road of its core national priority of modernization and inclusive development.

    At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in October, last year, its general secretary, also the President of the country, Xi Jinping re-affirmed that the party “must uphold the four cardinal principles – keeping unswervingly to the path of Socialism, uphold the people’s Democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist party of China and Marxism – Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

    With China’s national aggregates reaching unprecedented height, President Xi Jinping reported to the historic congress that now “China champions the development of a community with shared future for mankind and has encouraged the evolution of a more inclusive global governance system.

    China’s confidence in strutting inclusive globalization comes against the backdrop of the retreat of the foremost capitalist and imperialist hyper-power to the shriek cry of “America first”.

    The Marxist Theory of Scientific Socialism is a vast ideological resource, open to innovation, constant development and enrichment. The intellectual depth, rigour and discipline necessary to understand and interrogate Marxism and even appreciate its theoretical and scientific ramifications is more extensive and can unravel the myth of Africa’s economic lethargy and political paralysis.

     

    • Onunaiju is director, Centre for China Studies, (CCS) Utako, Abuja.
  • ‘Karl Marx, He dead’

    ‘Karl Marx, He dead’

    I take the title of this essay from a passage in one of 20th century’s most controversial, if seminal, novels. Chinua Achebe called the author of Heart of Darkness “a thorough-going racist.” He might be right about Joseph Conrad. But Achebe ironically owes his inspiration from the Polish-born English novelist for his popular work, Things Fall Apart. Heart of Darkness paints Africa as the “night of first ages” famished for the civilising light of Europe. But the novel’s darkest creature is a white man, who milks and tyrannises over the Africans to enrich Europe with all its smug morality. His name is Kurtz, and he eventually dies of his own barbarous entrapment.

    One of his African victims gloatingly announces his passing in the memorable phrase: “Mistah Kurtz: He dead.” That phrase, with its many-layered meanings, haunted the American literary imagination about a century later. Critic Richard Gilman borrowed it when he panned the decline in the prowess of the playwright Tennessee Williams who could no longer match the sublimity of his earlier plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, Glass Menagerie, etc. Gilman titled his literary obituary of one of the best playwrights of the 20th century thus: “Mistuh Williams, He dead.” If Conrad’s Kurtz was real in fiction, Gilman’s Williams was unreal in non-fiction.

    Last weekend at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, I thought I inhaled a decomposing Karl Marx. It was during a fete for Professor Biodun Jeyifo at his 70th birthday. It was a two-day affair of intellectual fare, bonhomie, introspection and trips back into the past. It was a crowd of Marx disciples, from Governor Rauf Aregbesola, to Playwright Femi Osofisan, Arigbede, Femi Falana, Edwin Madunagu, Odia Ofeimun, Dipo Fashina. Of course, Professor Jeyifo, fondly called BJ, stands out as one of the most articulate of that tribe ever born. A few attendees like yours truly and Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi have been inoculated against Marx.

    But the BJ fete only revealed the unflagging zeal of the faithful. In one of the sessions, I titled my contribution, “BJ: A Marxist in a post Marxist world.” Of course, some of the panelists, including Ofeimun, objected, arguing that Marx was alive and well. But mine was still a tribute to BJ’s staying power. As a public intellectual he has tried to pursue his creed without cant or doctrinaire obsession. His column, first in The Guardian and now in The Nation, has continued to pursue his belief.

    But the crucial revelation of the weekend was the talk by Edwin Madunagu. He kept the audience spell-bound when he took his listeners back to the mid-1970s. It was a time when young Marxists formed a commune in a Southwest community. They made it a collective. Their goal was to ignite a revolution in Nigeria. They cast their lots together and formed common cause with the Agbekoya folks. These young men sacrificed their vital years brainstorming, plotting and living on spare resources. They had to surrender their earnings to the common pool, like the Christians in the Acts of the Apostles. Madunagu tells the story of how he was singled out as a mole, and he had to be held as prisoner to BJ as he was being investigated. He noted that so grave was the air that they had the means “in the next room” to end their lives. Madunagu, who turns 70 in May, still betrays that “babyish” innocence not only in his relationships but also in telling the tale of those boisterous years.

    His exculpation lay with his wife of about four months who was to answer questions confidentially in a form and it had to be sealed in an envelope. The wife, who was present at the telling last weekend, viewed with awe. She was learning of the import of what she wrote for the first time, according to Madunagu. The mathematician, who became a well-known columnist in the feisty days of The Guardian, said the collective eventually freed him of all charges.

    BJ who had been taciturn on this subject also confirmed Madunagu’s story and described himself as his warder. BJ narrated how the commune experience endangered their family lives. Tension bustled in his home with his African American wife who was puzzled at the comings and goings of BJ’s comrades. Once BJ told her that it was better she did not know much about them. One of the members, BJ noted, once asked the commune to dispose of his wife and children in order to free him for the revolutionary work. The commune cautioned him. Another member slept off in any of their brainstorming sessions unless the topic was how to overthrow the Nigerian state with arms struggle, beginning with the American ambassador.

    I told myself that this was one other reason why we should study our history in schools. Too many puzzles and mysteries. This story bears comparison with the pre-Menshevik, pre-Bolshevik Russia. The custodians of these vital narratives are in their hoary years, and no one has put down the ins and outs of this tale to enrich our self-knowledge as a people.  For the great things said about BJ, his prowess as a thinker, his ideological subtlety, his plebeian lifestyle, his passion and empathy as a teacher, the best authority on Soyinka, etc, what struck me most was his audacity as a man. Lean, tall, urbane and without airs, BJ’s revolutionary story was unknown to me other than his duels in ASUU, his leadership role in the left to enthrone an egalitarian society. But those were halcyon times in comparison with the risk they took. They might have been rounded up by the military and executed for treason.

    BJ himself said, with irony, that they did not expect to outlive 40. We need to know what stories inspired them. Did they also take something from the fervour of the American founding fathers? When the commune life came to an end, Madunagu told the villagers who asked for his forwarding address. He gave them his full name. It was then they asked, what Ijesha name was Madunagu? He had blended so irretrievably with the community. He spoke Yoruba like locals, ate their food, dressed like them. He was a perfect example of the death of alienation. The locals shed tears as he left town.

    As I told Kunle Ajibade, who paid a glowing tribute to BJ as a teacher, the risk of BJ and company recalled Soyinka’s third force exercise in the tempestuous hours before the civil war. I also thought their commune died just like Christian communalism in Aiyetoro, a sad narrative revisited recently by The Nation’s writer Seun Akioye. They, however, did not eat up their own flesh in the mould of William Golding’s chilling novel, The Lord of The Flies. But how did the commune end? What was their day-to-day life? Why did they have weapons with them? What pacts did they sign, if any? Etc. We need to know. Only a tome of a narrative can document this for history.

    So, for such a revolutionary as BJ, he must have watched with denial as communism fell. The 2008 economic crash brought Marx from the dead. Some young American Marxists found solace in a novel, Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel. For BJ though, he is no more the romantic of mass movement and the cliché the dictatorship of the proletariat. He is Marx the physician but not Marx the priest; Marx becomes a good tool for diagnosis. But the solution? No. Not because he does not believe it, but it is becoming less likely with the Trojan called capital. That is what I mean by denial. Playwright Eugene Ionesco once accused Jean Paul Sartre of silence over the Gulag in Russia. Raymond Aron, Sartre’s friend, and nemesis of Marxists, also said the famous Marxist philosopher and playwright acted as though Soviet invasion of Hungary did not happen. BJ’s is not denial as self-deceit or conceit, but as a realist. If you specialise in Soyinka and Achebe, you absorb something of their nuanced essences.

    At 70, still energetic, BJ is one of the great lights of his generation anywhere in the world. We still need him around.

  • Inter-faith dialogue and national question

    Inter-faith dialogue and national question

    Karl Marx famously considered religion as the opium of the masses. By this, he meant that religion serves an ideological purpose which the elites, especially in modern industrial societies, deploy to further their dominance over the workers who are oppressed and suppressed for the sake of capital. As opium, religion serves two sinister purposes for the elites. In the first place, it deadens the senses of the people to their oppression. Religion therefore provides sites and insights that enjoin us all to obey authorities. More importantly, it becomes a tool which a self-serving segment of the elites that qualifies to be tagged the unscrupulous leadership core, employs to further their diabolical designs which, in most cases, are contrary to the noble objectives of building a nation into a space where citizens can collective work together under a national banner. In this context, it takes little reflection to see that religion would in that sense be antagonistic to the noble design of building a nation of individuals who belong to different faiths. On the contrary, the dream of nationhood is often stalled by the very elites who ought to be at the forefront of national sentiments and nation-affirming values. One of those values, of course, is inter-faith dialogue.

    Among other things, human beings are religious beings; we all have an inner spiritual core which longs for transcendence. This longing derives from the nature of the world and its mysteries. We have been blessed with the senses and with rationality that enables the glories of scientific observations and experimentations. With these instruments, we have been able to pluck the heavens and the firmaments; we split the atom and unravelled its significance; we have battled diseases and plagues in their various horrific manifestations; we have travelled to the outer spaces and revealed Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and even Pluto in its cold nethermost part. Yet, science has failed to exhaust the mysteries of the world; science has failed to dim man’s longing for transcendence. There is no surprise therefore that the great Albert Einstein proclaims loudly that ‘Science without religion is lame.’

    When we therefore enshrine the fundamental human right to religious expression in our constitutions, we recognise that every individual has the right to seek an understanding of these mysteries in whatsoever way s/he deems fit. Religion constitutes a framework for perceiving the beauty and the vicissitudes of a strange and dazzling universe; religion is a shock absorber for human beings who are only a grain of sand in the universal scheme of things. We have been told that when we die, the universe hardly notices. Yet, our faiths assure us that we matter in the cosmic order. We are not just infinitesimally inconsequential. Religion allows us to reach beyond ourselves. It allows us to reach into the dark void of the unknown, and the dim penumbra of our experiences. With faith, we face our fears and personal demons.

    Martin Luther King, Jr. places his hand on the essence of religion when he remarks that ‘A religion true to its natures must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.’ At the centre of any worthwhile religion therefore is a deep spiritual awareness of our lives as a conduit for the intervention of a transcendent force in the betterment of the world and the lives of fellow humans. When religion therefore pierces the mysteries of the universe and of life, the knowledge it bequeaths is supposed to radiate our lives in the glow of the supernatural characters and virtues—love, kindness, empathy, compassion, hospitality, understanding, prudence, courage, justice, hope, etc.

    Nigeria is constitutionally a secular state. And secularity decrees that church and state must be separated in such a manner that the state and its functionaries do not promote any specific religious affiliation. However, in practice, Nigerians are deeply religious people, and this is demonstrated by the proliferation of so many places of worship and religious festivals that the state recognises. This would seem to imply that the hope of definitely and constitutionally excising religion from the affairs of the state may be a pipe dream that does not coincide with reality. And the reality is simply that the state has to deal with religion both in its private and public manifestations. We employ religious rhetoric in our political speeches, the second stanza of our national anthem is a clear religious invocation to the Almighty, and beyond any doubt, religion affects our national affairs.

    If properly tempered, therefore, religion portends some unique possibilities for secularity. Yet, our collective experience seems to suggest that citizenship and spirituality don’t mix. Religion, contrary to the modernisation theorists, has been resurging back into human affairs for a while now. And its basic point of confrontation is the secular state. In its fundamentalist form, religious awakening challenges our initial hypothesis that a spiritual person will make a good citizen. In fact, for the fundamentalist, a good religious person is one that undermines a state as long as such a state is not running on the specific precepts of a specifically revealed Scripture. The fact of terrorism seems to underscore the sceptical statement of Karl Marx that religion is nothing more than an elaborate opiate that points people’s attention to the heavens and a God they cannot see, but unfortunately indoctrinate them into a somnambulist state that ensures that their backs are turned to their fellow humans and citizens they can see and relate with. Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish writer, beautifully summed up the unfortunate situation: ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.’

    In its atavistic form, the modernisation theorists would be right to argue that religion doesn’t deserve any worthwhile role in national and secular affairs. These theorists argue that religious atavism will wither away as we become more civilised and modern. They have been proven both wrong and right. Religion has refused to wither away; and it is still violently atavistic. It instinctively fuels hatred rather than love and compassion in us towards fellow citizens, and it challenges our secular foundation. The fundamental question therefore is: Why can’t we see eye to eye in the name of the same God? Why does spirituality excite violence rather than compassion? We will proceed at this point to attempt to answer this question.

    If, as Jonathan Swift prophetically remarked many decades ago, ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another,’ then we can begin to imagine how religious hate can ignite a national combustion within Nigeria’s plural existence. If spirituality does not enhance citizenship, then the alternative could only be a volatile situation that pits Nigerians against one another in violent religious frenzies. Unfortunately, we have our present predicament as a very sad testament to the negative resurgence of religious fundamentalism. The Boko Haram insurgence, and the many other religious violence that had preceded it, only reveals that religion is not yet suitably fitted into our secular framework in Nigeria in spite of all our religious rhetoric and invocations to a Supreme God of Creation who is supposed to direct our noble cause.

    When a man slaughters another in the name of God, what is at stake? What could possibly make a man call on a God of peace and compassion and yet be so brutish and violent? Why is inter-faith relationship and dialogue seemingly impossible, especially in Nigeria where three religions must necessarily coexist? The three major religions that seem to have the reserve of volatility are Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The three are Abrahamic in the sense that they all have their root in the Scriptural sojourn of Abraham.

    The rhetoric of religious absolutism is: You’re either for us or you are against us. It is therefore not difficult to see how such an antagonistic religious prism would generate enough hatred that would inevitably draw Nigerians away from the hope of a shared national value. Religious absolutism breeds intolerance, spiritual ego, a closed and fanatic mind and a fundamentalist perspective that insist that if you don’t join this religion, you die! The Boko Haram insurgence is the latest manifestation of fundamentalist thinking that Nigeria has generated; it may not be the last. And so, we are forced back to the two cogent points we raised in the first part of this series. The first is that religion has more in stock for humans beyond its present negative use. The second point is that religion ought to make a person a good citizen of a country. These two points are cogent if we are to make any head way with the project of national integration and development in Nigeria.

    The best argument for inter-faith dialogue in Nigeria is actually a simple one: We are all Nigerians, and we all rise or fall together in spite of our different religions. The Boko Haram insurgence is actually not favourable to Muslims and Christians. We are all under fundamentalist fire. By this fact, it implies that as Nigerians we all have an overriding interest in speaking to one another in a bid to provide the framework for a viable coexistence. The alternative, as Boko Haram is teaching us presently, is nationally unpalatable. To be truly spiritual, we all have an obligation to reproduce heaven in Nigeria. Heaven is reciprocal affection for the other person as a human creation of a humane God.

    Inter-faith dialogue therefore begins from the necessity of spiritualising our existence as Nigerians. This essentially requires that we secularise the religious values central to each religion and transform them into civic virtues. Islam springs from a fundamental ‘Submission to the will of Allah,’ and Christianity implies the followership of the ‘Prince of peace.’ The traditional religion prides itself on its non-violent and humanist foundation. All three further pride themselves as the repository of cardinal virtues that make for spirituality—love, compassion, mercy, hospitality, temperance, justice, prudence, diligence, kindness, humility, etc. It is not difficult to see how these virtues can become civic. Civic virtues are those behaviour, temperaments, attitudes and habits that are critical for the survival of any community. They include: trustworthiness, reciprocity, friendliness, politeness, cooperation, political participation, honesty, brotherhood, and so on.

     

    • Dr. Olaopa is Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Communication Technology, Abuja.

  • A charade of a pilgrimage

    SIR: Religion is supposed to be a private affair between man and his creator. In Nigeria, it has assumed a dimension that will rattle the German Philosopher Karl Marx. A pilgrimage in a decent clime is supposed to be a private affair at the expense of whosoever can afford it.

    The pilgrimage led by President Goodluck Jonathan with an entourage of seven governors, eight ministers including the embattled Aviation Minister, Princess Stella Oduah, three members of the National Assembly and some presidential aides all at taxpayers’ expense, is obscenity at its apogee.

    Must the name of God be so mocked! I was even surprised that the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN)’s President, Ayo Oritsejafor was also in the presidential entourage.

    The GEJ government will probably go down in history as one of the most profligate in history. It has failed so many moral tests and has lost its nexus with the citizenry. The zenith of the insult to the collective intelligence of Nigerians was the presence of Princess Stella Oduah in the delegation. The propaganda being peddled in the press that GEJ snubbed her in Israel is most laughable! This is worse than the falsehood which Squealer peddled in the classic ‘Animal Farm.’

    The practice of squandering scarce public funds by public office holders in the name of pilgrimages should be totally condemned by well meaning Nigerians. GEJ should concentrate on tackling the hydra headed monster of corruption. It is not about seeking Jesus Christ in the Upper Room and where his body was buried. Jesus Christ is in every Nigerian and the President is supposed to inspire hope and not worsen their problems. God will not come down from the sky to solve problems. He uses people to accomplish his purposes. GEJ has the responsibility to salvage whatever is remaining of his administration’s credibility.

    By the way, wouldn’t the officials be entitled to estacode for this trip that has no direct impact in the lives of the common man? Isn’t this an indirect way of perpetrating corruption? What then is the use of extolling the external aspect of religion while neglecting the inside which is core?

    • Sola Ademiluyi

    Lagos

  • Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and socialism

    They are two of the most towering intellects of our contemporary age. They are both Germans. One is a foremost physical scientist, the other a path-breaking social scientist. At the turn of the century in Y2000, they were adjudged the most influential intellects of the last millennium. I refer to Karl Marx and Albert Einstein. In an opinion poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2000, Einstein emerged as the pre-eminent intellectual of the millennium with Marx coming a close second. Yet, they belonged to two different worlds. Karl Marx demonstrated unprecedented insight into the inner workings and internal contradictions of capitalism while Einstein is noted for his revolutionary scientific findings on the nature and evolution of the universe. Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883 and Einstein from 1879 to 1955. In Y2000, I personally cast my lot with Marx as man of the century. His scholarship had cast a shadow on virtually every sphere of knowledge in our student days. Little did I know that there was a significant confluence between the thoughts of Marx and Einstein on the contentious of socialism.

    Einstein developed the general theory of relativity that won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. Karl Marx was a first class philosopher, sociologist, economist and revolutionary intellectual. Yet, both thinkers were of kindred sociological and ideological affinity. I refer here to a unique article by Einstein in the very first edition of the ‘Monthly Review’, a Marxist magazine published in May 1949. By the way, Monthly Review, a unique magazine that has been associated over time with such great Marxist thinkers as Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, Harry Magdoff and Samir Amin to name a few, is still being published today. It analyses politics, society and economy from a radical Marxist perspective even if is not doctrinaire in its approach to ideology. This magazine, which can be accessed free of charge online, is surely not where one would expect to find an article by Albert Einstein. But the great physicist’s article in its maiden edition is titled ‘Why Socialism?’, it is an article in which Einstein undertakes a penetrating critique of capitalism, which even at that time was in the throes of another of the cyclical crises that have become a permanent feature of this mode of production and makes a compelling case for a planned, socialist economy. Given the current crisis in which capitalism is embroiled worldwide, the views of Einstein in this article are still of abiding relevance.

    Since he is a natural and not a social scientist, Einstein begins by asking if it is “advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism”. In other words, should economic issues be left strictly to economists who supposedly have the requisite scientific and technocratic knowledge to tackle such issues? Einstein’s answer after examining the character of economics as a scientific discipline and the inability of science to determine ethical ends like socialim is that “we should be on guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society”.

    Having settled this issue, Einstein goes on to examine the biological and social nature of man and the implication of these for the organization of society. In opposition to the assumptions of neo-classical economics that society comprises isolated, atomistic individuals each pursuing his or her selfish interest and that an invisible hand will magically regulate the free market in the collective interest, Einstein contends that the society is superior to the individual as the latter can only exist within the context of the former. In his words, “The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society – in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence – that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labour and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society”.

    Implicit in this perception of the relation between the individual and society is Einstein’s opposition to the excessive individualism characteristic of capitalism. Thus, he laments that “Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. Denouncing the ‘economic anarchy’ of capitalist society, Einstein contends that “The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depression. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labour and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before”.

    In the light of the collapse of communism and the world wide triumph of neo-liberalism, is Einstein’s advocacy for a planned, socialist not now anachronistic? Surely not. In the first place, capitalism itself remains severely in crisis plunging millions across the world into poverty and misery despite the ever increasing affluence of a tiny minority. With the technological attainments of humanity, the level of global poverty is inexcusable. Even more interestingly, Einstein with remarkable prescience had as far back as 1949 identified the problems that would confront any effort to build a socialist society and these were the very factors largely responsible for the ultimate collapse of the communist bloc decades later. In his words, “The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy assured?” The inability of the communist states to successfully solve these problems is responsible for the current global triumph of capitalism.