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HomeIndia PoliticsMarxist Economist Of Global Fame Dr. Paresh Chattopadhyay Is No More

Marxist Economist Of Global Fame Dr. Paresh Chattopadhyay Is No More

By Bibek Sen

Dr Paresh Chattopadhyay, arguably one of the most well known global Marx scholars, passed away somewhat unnoticed. In Canada recently, Marxist and left-liberal newspapers and magazines seem to have already forgotten his contribution to Marxian Studies. Not even EPW that carried scores of his pathbreaking papers on Marx published any obituary. Notwithstanding all these, Marxian academia and posterity will remember him as a crusader against distortion of Marx in the same breath with Maximilien Rubel, Cyril Smith and others of their stature.

It is an undeniable fact that the 2nd Russian Revolution of November 1917 and Bolsheviks inspired several generations of revolutionaries all over the Globe. The impact of Bolshevik Revolution was more than the French Revolution. On the other hand, it created more divisions among the revolutionary movements, caused more bitterness and bloodshed among the revolutionaries in distant lands where no Russian Bolshevik ever set his foot. After the Khrushchev revelation, economic crises and subsequent changes, namely the so called Glasnost and Perestroika and eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union it became evident, except to the fanatic Stalinists, that something was seriously wrong with the Soviet Experiment.

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It was our habit, in the 80s and 90s, some kind of intellectual sterility too, to put the blame either on Stalin, or Khrushchev, or Brezhnev and then on western conspiracies for the colossal failure that was Soviet Union.

Some of us went ahead, they blamed Marx and accepted the TINA syndrome, There Is No Alternative and found solace in liberal democracy with flourishing Multinational companies and asked, in a Popperian sense, for welfarism, tax reforms, regulating the market mayhem through policies to be enacted and enforced by Lawmakers promoted by the global capitalist class and elected by the people who are regularly slaughtered by the MNCs and their pet Govts.

Dr Paresh Chattopadhyay brought us back to the burning question. Instead of searching the reasons outside, he delved inside the Soviet Society, Politics and Economics. He didn’t invent some new measuring scales, but used Marx to understand the Soviet failure. But to use Marx himself he reinvented an old, forgotten Marxian tradition, of critical criticism and instead of losing his vision in a forest due to the trees, he saw the whole not as several dichotomised categories, but as interdependent moments, true to his intellectual upbringing as a student of Marx, Dr Chattopadhyay brought back the ‘Marxian’ dialectics in Marxist literature.

The Russian Revolution never abolished the State, State apparatus – the bureaucracy and the Supreme leader, Market, Capital, Money as a means to create surplus value and Wage Slavery. During the first few months and then during the bitter civil war money became almost valueless putting some leaders like Trotsky in neurotic euphoria that market had abolished itself. Once normalcy came back new currencies were printed and market started to function. Czar was replaced by the Hammer and the corn ears.

It is true that most of the capital in the form of factories and farms, machines and mines were all confiscated by the Govt and were run either by the Govt or by a Co-op society. It was considered by the bolsheviks as abolition of private property. But it is not a fact in the Marxian sense.

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Dr Chattopadhyay reminds us that Capital is not a thing as it is perceived by Economics taught in our universities. Capital is a social relation and not limited to individual ownership. Any social accumulation used to exploit the primary producers creating surplus value towards the perpetuation of the very class system under which it works is Capital. The Leninists abolished Capital in a juridical sense, from individual ownership it fell into the hands of a class, a New Class, the nomenklatura.

While doing this exercise Dr Paresh Chattopadhyay brought before us the essential finding of Marx, his analysis of Capital as a social relation. This relation is not abolished when a state is declared socialist, when a group of men proclaiming themselves Marxists assume power or erstwhile capitalists are all killed or exiled.

A polyglot Dr Chattopadhyay rediscovered Marx for us from his original texts lost in deliberate or inadvertent, inadequate translations. A complete, unedited Marx project was shelved when David Riazanov was silenced by Stalin. This unfinished work was taken up by a committee, International Marx Engels Foundation, of which Paresh Chattopadhyay was an inalienable part. He wrote the opening article on the Communism of Marx and Engels in the Oxford Handbook of The History of Communism.

We were fed with Leninist ideas of two stages of communism, of workers inability to change the society, of state capitalism as Marx’s Socialism. Paresh Chattopadhyay opened our eyes that Leninism is a complete vulgarisation of Marx.

But what I personally think his best service to Marx and revolutionary ideas is his dialectics. Born and educated in a class divided, consumerist society, infected with bourgeois philosophy of science and Leninist myopia we are accustomed to see things in a truncated manner. Dr Chattopadhyay pointed before us this error, the political and economic issues of Soviet model were not independent of each other and had complete dependence upon the philosophical conception of Bolshevism. In Marx the categories are interdependent and economic relation plays the pivotal role to determine the politics or ideology of a class of men in a certain time (Marx was against all ideologies). An Economic system is a Complex system with its own inherent laws and consciousness. A few changes in nomenclature can’t change the structure of a Complex System. What Dr Chattopadhyay says is a reestablishment of Marxian Dialectics.

Emancipation of the working class would be achieved only by the working people themselves and the society Marx envisioned would be a society formed out of a free association of individuals.

We would always remain indebted to Dr Paresh Chattopadhyay, our dear Pareshda for his contribution to Marxian studies.

Dr Chattopadhyay did his graduate studies from Calcutta University and earned a state doctorate in French Classical Political Economic Thoughts from Sorbonne University, the work brought him close to Charles Bettleheim. He was Professor of Economics at Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Emeritus Professor at the University of Quebec, visiting Professor at Universities of Paris and of Grenoble. Though. most of his last fifty years, he was teaching in foreign universities, he was in touch with the developments in India and contributed to EPW regularly on crucial issues related to Marx and Marxism.

Paresh Chattopadhayay was involved in the project of Marx Engels Historisch Kritisches Woerterbuch and Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He wrote only four books, The Marxian concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience(1994); Marx’s Associated Mode of Production (2016); Socialism and Commodity Production (2018); and Socialism in Marx’s Capital (2021),. He was a regular contributor to several scholarly journals. A resident of Montreal he used to visit Calcutta often to meet his friends and members of Calcutta Marx circle . He lost his wife and only child in a sad accident decades ago. He was in his early 90s at the time of his demise. (IPA Service)

Bibek Sen is an active researcher on Marx and Marxism. He is presently the Principal, Institute of Cooperative Management for Rural Development, West Bengal

The post Marxist Economist Of Global Fame Dr. Paresh Chattopadhyay Is No More first appeared on IPA Newspack.

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