But at a terrible human cost. However, I do agree with you that it was Marx who brought to the fore the issue of this terrible exploitation of the vast majority of the human population through the misuse of capital designed entirely to produce profit for the handful and not for the labourers who produce the means of such profit. However, I feel Marxism's great shortcoming is in providing for a human model for bringing about the revolutionary socioeconomic transformation which it proposes. Perhaps, Marx had well considered the problem and could only arrive at this conclusion that it would have to be by violent force for the forces of capitalism pitted against this proposed transformation were, in alliance with the powers of the exploitative machinery of the state, equally violent. This was the jigsaw and it could not be resolved in the then prevailing conditions during Marx's lifetime.
But Bertrand Russell had long after, in reviewing Marxism, said that such a violent recourse for bringing about human good would not be necessary in the future as science evolves and develops resources so abundantly that all of humanity would be possible to care for that would allow them all a decent means of earthly survival. The abandonment of socialism in the strictest economic sense by all communist countries is in itself a vindication of the truth espoused by Russell to that effect. China and Russia have both gone the capitalist way -- not that I vouch for the brutality of the capitalist system but that I am merely stating historical facts -- and prospered in varying degrees. Socialism in its purest motivation and means has, thus, failed and led to the triumphant re-arrival of capitalism in these countries which has belied the expectation of die-hard communists and sent them to despair.
That Marxism has in its theoretical aspects contributed largely to the development of welfare economics in otherwise capitalist countries like Britain and a host of other nations cannot be denied but, in so far as its application in revolutionary terms is concerned, it has been the most violent system that had reduced a third of the counties of the world to despotic, barbaric regimes that sent whole populations to living the lives of slaves at the point of the barrel of the gun that snuffed their lives out whenever the slightest dissent to the official governmental line was voiced. Surely, such a system is better dead and gone, although, witnessing the persisting trends of capitalistic exploitation the world over, it remains to be seen whether the ghost of Marxism is yet to resurrect in the form of a newer earthly incarnation in the future.
Written by Sugata Bose
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