Scholars around the world shall have a unique Christmas gift The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism

m (OHC). The book, enriched with 35 papers, has been edited by Steve Smith, professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence and currently senior research fellow at the All Souls College, University of Oxford. In the preface, Towards a Global History of Communism, Smith says ingenuously that, Communism was the twentieth centurys most idealistic political experiment, yet major Communist regimes evolved into some of that centurys most bloody tyrannies. At the peak of its influence in the 1970s, states purporting to espouse Communist principles (Leave aside the question of whether they were in any genuine sense Communist) governed about a third of the worlds landmass. Throughout the colonial, post-colonial and underdeveloped worlds millions viewed such states with sympathy for having apparently broken with the injustices and inequalities of capitalism and big-power politics. But Smith thinks the Communist experiment was finished in contrast to what a doyen among Indias political theorists, Dr Randhir Singh, thinks: that the collapse of the oncemighty Soviet Union didnt mean the defeat of Marxism but the fall of official Marxism. Small wonder then that Bloomberg News carried an opinion piece by George Magnus, captioned Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy. According to Magnus, The spirit of Marx has risen from the grave amid the financial crisis and subsequent economic slump. ...Todays global economy bears some uncanny resemblances to the conditions he foresaw. The most theoretically significant paper is written by Prof Paresh Chattopadhyay, an outstanding Marx scholar, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Communism. Belonging to the Subcontinent and part of the teaching staff of the Department of Political Economy at Quebec University, Chattopadhyay is a member of the workshop (werkstatt) of the ongoing project of a 15-volume Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism under the sponsorship of Institut Fur Kritische Theorie, InkriT, Berlin. Prof Chattopadhyay has the advantage of being comfortable with the French, Russian, German, Russian and Italian languages, something that helped him study the texts. After reading the first draft, Smith wrote candidly Your erudition across the range of Marxs writing and in various languages is staggering and I learned a great deal that I didnt know before. Among others who contributed to the invaluable treatise in the theoretical section on ideology Marx and Engels in German Ideology warned the proletariat against ideologies and ideologues, arguing that in all ideology, men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura are Lars T Lih (Lenin and Bolshevism), Kevin McDermott (Stalin and Stalinism) and Timothy Cheek Mao and Maoism). Chattopadhyay takes up cudgels for the validity of Marx and his works, The proletariat is the bad side of the present society, and history moves by the bad side, as Marx

reminded Proudhon in 1847. Marx and Engels, he reminds, enunciated that the consciousness of the necessity of a profound revolution, the communist revolution, arises from this class itself. Communism indeed is the beginning, and not the end of human history. But the top brass of Indian communist parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India, and various Maoist groups of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and other so-called Marxist parties such as the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India have been lukewarm to the idea of this Oxford publication. The reasons are not difficult to guess. Chattopadhyay is ranked among top Marxist scholars such as Maximilien Rubel, David Borisovich Riazanov (who discovered shelved texts like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, Holy Family, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Grundrisse), Anton Pannekoek, formulator of Council Communism, and Charles Bettelheim author of the four-volume Class Struggles in the USSR. Chattopadhyay has to his credit seminal works such as The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience and papers like Myth of Twentieth Century Socialism and Two Approaches to Socialist Revolution: Marx Versus Lenin and Trotsky. Agonising as it may seem to those generations that gravitated to Marx through Lenins works, Lenins distortions of Marx did considerable damage to the possibilities of a proletarian revolution. For instance, Marx never stated that socialism is the lower stage of communism, but conceived socialism, communism, republic of labour, cooperative society, society of free and associated producers as interchangeable and synonymous. Lenins formulations namely, socialist state or commune state are brazen deviations from the fundamentals of Marx and Engels. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery, Marx categorically stated in theCritical Notes on the Article: The King of Prussia and Social Reform. Lenin himself stated in his The State and Revolution that state and freedom are mutually exclusive. Not only Chattopadhyay, but Cyril Smith, Marcello Musto and other Marxist scholars who studied Marx and Engels in the original have stated unhesitatingly that all the so-called socialist states were actually capitalist states. The attraction of the upcoming book for scholars particularly Marxist scholars not adhering to the Leninist tradition is irresistible. The first task before them and prosperity is to present Marx in the Marxist way. The writer is a Kolkata-basedcontributor. Email: sankar.ray@gmail.com