130 years after Marx, is Marxism still relevant?

Sukumaran C. V.

March 14^th, 2013 is the 130^th death anniversary day of Karl Marx. As the unabated greed of corporate capitalism destroys all the sustainable ways of living and ruins Mother Earth by making climate change fiercer and fiercer, we have to seek alternate ways to stop the further degradation in order to sustain life on Planet earth. To save the Earth and the flora and fauna including the humans from eternal doom, the corporate greed for the natural resources is to be strictly stopped. We have to stem the devastation of the Environment and the subaltern people. Can Marxism provide the theoretical framework to usher in the much needed paradigm shift? 

Marx shaped his theory and methodology at a time when science and its laws were seen as the only proper means to understand all phenomena—natural or social. Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy (1830) reflected the first strong influence of the laws of natural sciences in the study of society. Like Comte, Marx was strongly influenced by science and throughout his writings, especially after the epistemological break which is said to have happened in 1845, we can see his stress on scientific socialism. Just like the bourgeois social and economic theories, Marxism too established universal laws on social relations and tried to predict the future course of the human ‘progress’.
But in the pre-1845 Marx, especially in the 1844 Manuscripts, strong Romantic components are discernible. The pre-1845 Marx is called ‘the immature Marx, the philosophical anthropologist who is still an ideologist rather than a true scientist’ by the scientific Marxist school. 

The lack of a certain kind of methodology of its own is one of the salient features of Romanticism. In literature it can be seen as a revolt against methods—the rules and laws of classicism. As a social movement it expressed the disillusionment of a class whose dominance and privileges were being eroded by the emerging bourgeois ethics. In this sense Romanticism is a reactionary tendency which looked backwards. But by focusing its attention on the elements which were sidelined or marginalized by the homogenizing structural methodologies of the post-Enlightenment era, Romanticism gave birth to democratic pluralism and helped the people to see beyond the structural methods like classicism, positivism, empiricism and even Marxism.

Marxist methodology was and is predominantly structural and therefore, like positivism, Marxism also neglected the heterodox nature of human life and societies. Marx was trying to change the bourgeois society which was a creation of the Enlightenment, not by negating the Enlightenment, but by using the emancipatory potentials of the Enlightenment itself. The Romantics were on the contrary rejecting the Enlightenment by preferring the pre-Enlightenment communitarian ethos. Marx criticized the bourgeois social order because the bourgeoisie, which had played a ‘progressive role’ in history, became a hindrance to the further progress of humankind towards an egalitarian and 'class-less' social system. Marx’s quarrel was not with the Enlightenment, but with the bourgeois class which exclusively appropriated the fruits of the Enlightenment.

Both the bourgeois social order and Marxism which opposed it drew their strength from the same source—the positivism of Enlightenment. This grievous fault led to the sidelining of the subaltern communities, the females and the Environment by both the liberal democracy and Marxism. Sustainable development was not a concern of the Enlightenment ethics of ‘progress’ and such progress (of both capitalism and 'Communism') ultimately led us to climate change. 

In the age of the reification and alienation of human beings, which happened as a result of the bourgeois appropriation of the Enlightenment possibilities of human welfare to entrench its own hegemony over nature and society, Romanticism provided leverage for a break-through into a subject-sensitive modernism as distinct from the objective modernity of the bourgeoisie.  

Marxism inherited much of the positivist-objective tendency of bourgeois modernity by rejecting romanticism as feminine and ineffectual. It is the Frankfort School of thought—the Critical Theory—which tried to infuse the romantic urge into Marxism for having a subject-sensitive modernity as distinct from that of the objective modernity of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie and classical Marxism. Even if Romanticism originated as a (reactionary) revolt against the universalizing objective methodologies of post-Enlightenment era, it stressed the need to give attention to the heterodox nature of human life which can’t be fully explained and grasped only through objective structural methodologies. 

But Marxism, just like the bourgeois democracy, refused to enrich itself by its inability to be receptive towards the issues of gender, environment and the subalterns; and therefore, 130 years after Marx, when the world faces the imminent collapse of industrial civilization due to its byproduct called climate change, Marxism fails to offer an alternate methodology to save the world. Marxism can only do it by creatively negotiating the issues of sustainable development and gender.