The following is an interview with PRADIP BAKSI, an independent Marx scholar based in Kolkata. He has translated and edited some of the notes and manuscripts of Karl Marx on mathematics and on the history of land relations in India. He has also written on Marx’s study of some of the natural sciences and technologies of his time. The interview was conducted by SANKAR RAY, a senior journalist based in Kolkata.

Sankar Ray [SR]: What are your views on the relevance of Marx for India today, in the context of the financial crisis continuing since 2008, a certain renewal of interest in Marx’s Capital and, of late in Piketty’s Capital for the 21st Century?

Pradip Baksi [PB]: Despite the echo of the title of Marx’s famous book in the title of Piketty’s bestseller, the latter is an exercise within one of the currently fashionable strands of Marx-innocent political economy. In contrast Marx’s Capital is a part of an unfinished and incomplete program of critique of political economy, proposing a continuous reconstruction of it as a science.

While marshalling a very large and interesting dataset on growing inequality within contemporary capitalism, Piketty proposes to make that inequality bearable through taxation within future capitalism, and thereby holds a brief for that very capitalism. Marx, it is true, left his critique of political economy incomplete and unfinished, but he never held any brief for capitalism.

The ongoing financial crisis has triggered some interest in these two books in some quarters. This financial crisis and this interest may or may not last long. I do not wish to speculate about that. The questions of relevance or otherwise of Marx for India, and for the rest of the world, however, are questions of a different order. Continue reading An Interview on the Continuing Relevance of Marx →