‘Marx gave the message of love and peace’

KARACHI: Karl Marx gave humanity the message of love, peace and brotherhood. Marxist principles are most called for in a set-up dominated by hatred and antagonism.

These views were expressed by noted leftist intellectual Dr Aalia Imam at a seminar held under the aegis of the Progressive Writers’ Association on Saturday evening.

The seminar was held to mark the 200th birth anniversary of thinker and reformer Karl Marx.

“Marxism is no dogma. According to the Marxist theory, a society where moral values are not forced from above but rather are the product of the evolution of collective good and consideration by one segment for the values of the other is a harmonious society, an ideal society,” said Dr Imam.

She further said, “If you are not against imperialist powers, you always live in darkness and underdevelopment and a condition of slavery, slavery to ignorance and poverty.

“Our biggest enemy is the imperialist forces that trade in weapons, thus reaping a bonanza, making nations fight each other, and creating disruption, resulting in misery for the masses and mass destruction, both between nations and within nations.”

“Give land back to the peasants and the factories back to the workers,” she said.

Quoting Marx, Dr Imam said, “It is not moving that is important, but the direction you’re moving in.”

She said that the oppressed classes must unite to throw off the yoke of slavery.

She credited Allama Iqbal as the only thinker to have come up with the ways to achieve the Marxist principles of socio-economic justice. “Iqbal pointed to the Russian Revolution in this regard,” she said.

Anum Paras of the Progressive Youth Alliance, in her highly erudite discourse, said, “Today, even after 200 years, we are taking guidance from Marx despite what the antagonists of socialism may say. They tell us that socialism is dead, but that is just not so. Socialism will exist as long as glaring economic disparity and social contradictions are there, as long as workers who are the backbone of any society continue to be exploited and made to live in misery, as long as peasants are treated as lesser beings and cannot partake of the produce of the sweat of their brows,” she said.

In capitalism, she said, the worker was not enabled to use the products he had produced, and the peasant could not consume the produce that had been produced by the sweat of his brow. Today, she said, capitalism engendered competition which implied big fish eating the smaller ones, implying elimination by big corporate multinationals of the smaller ones.

Masroor, a student from Hyderabad, said that Marx mediated to resolve the contradictions within society.

Sartaj Khan, a research scholar, said, “You cannot establish egalitarianism in a capitalist state.” Capitalism, he said, was the source of imperialist wars which caused mass untold misery among humans and mass destruction.