So, these Chinese/Indian/Mexican workers would not unite with American workers against all American capitalists. In this game, a section of American capitalists aligns with Chinese, Indian or Mexican workers while competing with American capital producing in US with US labour in the same products (like steel, cars, cell phones, software). Some workers in some countries are gaining jobs and incomes at the expense of some others. So, along with the conflict of interest between the wage-earning workers and the profit-earning capitalists within a firm, there exist many kinds of tensions between different types of labour and capital.Ī competitive fight goes on between labour in low wage countries (such as China, India, Mexico) and labour in high wage countries (such as the US, Japan, the EU) through international trade and migration. There is no such thing as homogeneous labour and capital. There are some very good reasons why all the workers of the world will not unite, in their self interest, against all the capitalists of the world. This clarion call to the workers of the world to unite against capitalists, the common enemy of the working class, was one of the most appealing political slogans of all time.Īt the same time, this is where Marxism made the mistake in understanding the evolving reality. The sentence, translated in English goes like this: “Workers of the world unite, for you have nothing to lose but your chains”. I would only focus on a single line written by Marx (jointly with Engels) in Communist Manifesto which best summarises the most popular message of Marxism in all parts of the world. I will not try to analyse the causes of this decline here. No doubt, the popularity of Marxist ideology has gone down even in those countries and states. At the height of his influence, people believing in Marxist ideology, in some form or the other, ruled in Russia (the largest landmass in the world), China (the most populous country of the world), most of Eastern Europe, some parts of Asia (the so-called CIS countries which were once parts of USSR Vietnam, North Korea and three states in India through multi-party democratic elections) and Latin America (Cuba, Venezuela). Karl Marx, arguably one of the most influential social and political thinkers of all time, was born 200 years ago.
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