is marxism dead?

production of useful things increases the number of useless people.... karl marx

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before we discuss marx, we ask, is marxism dead?



with the dissolution of soviet russia, everyone thought that marxism was all but dead.



it was argued at that time (1987), that marxism is not dead, but the experiment to implement marxism in russia, is dead.



then came the limited economic  liberalization  of communist china. here, party democracy model has continued its existence, but capitalism has become  the state model for economic management.



other smaller countries followed suit and finally capitalism emerged the winner.



so when the times of india put up this marxist quip in their daily thought slot, i was a bit surprised. dailies of the type of  the times of india, do not waste their pages on redundant polemics.



god knows in what contest the comment was first remarked. in the current scenario, the quip speaks for  the wasteful life of people used to the leisure afforded by growing technology.



relevance of the quip could have been established if the uselessness of humans were to be indexed, much like how google indexes its pages, and then, the value-trends were to be  measured against techno-rise.



personally, i do not feel that technology  has diminished human enterprise.



marx was witness to the birth pangs of industrial revolution. his views were based on  production and distribution model of societies affected by the disruption of the old order. he wanted to enforce equality between the privileged and the non-privileged, through  state mechanism. anarchy was the ultimate goal of human evolution.



case of the current generation is different from what marx described over a hundred years ago, sitting in  the london library. we are now well through the revolution; the heat and dust kicked off by the industrial revolution is already settled.



new issues have cropped up now. new people are attending to these problems with a new sight and new vigor. this is the endless pursuit of an intelligent existence, which refuses to be driven by the forces of evolution alone and would like to have their own say in the matters normally attributed to god' will.



in fact, it is a dog-eat-dog situation now. the state no more takes it upon itself to equalize disparity between mass fragments, forcibly by controlling production or by controlling markets. we see the reversal of trends in india too. subsidies are slowly disappearing, state support is diminishing by degrees.



a process started in 1990, after the liberalization speech of dr manmohan singh, the then fm and now pm, in the parliament, is now coming to its logical conclusion.



today, the collective wish of markets decides what is useful and who is useless. the dividing walls among nations are falling apart, and every one is feeling the heat of liberalization. but there is no going back from here. there shall be no soviet union again. no forced controls. no marxism.



useless things have no place here!