Context:

• The below article deals with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ideas of socialism and the negatives of capitalism.
• The author believes that country like India, which is plagued with various social problems, need socialism rather than capitalism today.

Key facts:

• May 5, 2018 marked 200th birth anniversary of Karl Marx, German Philosopher, revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist.
• Marx is known for his popular work – The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital.

Ideas of Marx and Engels:

• Marx was not like other philosophers who interpreted the world in various ways; he made it a point to change it.
• Marx questioned the role of religion in society and contributed to his desire for social change.
• Marx and Friedrich Engels laid the formulations for the theory and practice of scientific socialism. They applied dialectics to the study of human society and human consciousness.
• They strove for the liberation of humanity from all forms of discrimination and exploitation.
• They argued that Parliament should be used as a forum to articulate the concerns of the working people.
• Marxism as a science, as an ideology, and as a methodology keeps demonstrating its relevance every day.

The march of capitalism and its limitations

• After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, some proclaimed that there was no alternative to neoliberalism.
• Since then, the so-called triumphant march of neoliberal capitalism has seen many hurdles. For instance, 2008 financial crisis.
• The worst victims of this march of capitalism and its consequent crises have always been the disadvantaged sections.
• This shows the presence of class conflict in society.
• The vulnerabilities of the disadvantaged are a creation of capitalism itself.
• Neoliberalism has led to unprecedented inequalities and disparities.

Indian context:

• In India, liberalisation of the economy was initiated on the premise that the seemingly socialist and centrally planned economy had outlived its utility and that private ownership and market forceswould efficiently replace public sector undertakings and provisions.
• Such an opening up of the economy was also tried in other parts of the world with only one consequence — unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and a marked shift in the actual centres of power.
• Crony capitalism soon made fast inroads into the policymaking and inequality increased.

According to Credit Suisse Research Institute’s Global Wealth Report,

• India is the second most unequal society in the world
• 1% of the Indian population owns 51.5% of the wealth in the country
• Top 10% own about three-fourths of the wealth
• On the other hand, the bottom 60%, the majority of the population, own 4.7% of the total wealth

Public education and health are the worst hit by capitalism

• Education spending by the Centre has been showing a downward trend.
• Instead of expanding higher education horizontally (to more far-flung areas of the country) and vertically (to the disadvantaged sections of society), the Central government is allowing the Higher Education Financing Agency to allow the private sector to dominate the education sector and make higher education a distant dream for the deprived classes.
• Similarly, in the health sector, the government has chosen private insurance companies and private healthcare lobbies as its partners, effectively taking away the attention from public healthcare infrastructure and its upgradation.

Conclusion:

In a country like India, which is plagued with social problems such as widespread poverty, a deepening agricultural crisis, a very high unemployment rate, and abysmal health indicators, giving away public sector assets to private players and shifting the discourse away from realising socialism could prove fatal for a vast majority of the population.

India is doing badly on many parameters — nutrition, peace, human development, and press freedom — while a section of the media is celebrating improvement in the Ease of Doing Business Index, rather than Human Development Index.

In other words, ensuring that people live a decent life is subordinate to ensuring that business becomes easier for crony capitalists.

Providing employment to the youth, providing remunerative prices to farmers, ensuring social justice to the marginalised sections, and creating a conducive environment for the overall development of society should be the major focus of the government.

However, the government has presided over the gradual undermining of constitutional institutions, the giving away of national assets to the private sector and the increase in violence against minorities.

Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… [where] oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”

It is the duty and the responsibility of socialism to carry on that struggle for humanity, and to bring politics back to where it belongs — to the people. Only by saying a big ‘no’ to brutal capitalism and by following what the Constitution envisages in its Preamble — social justice — can we remedy the problems that we face today.