by Gaurav Ojha
Karl Marx! wherever you are, come down and see for yourself that only your old bearded picture hangs on the walls of political parties as if you have always been old and never young, but what about your young portrait? Maybe socialists, communists, and revolutionaries assume that your younger face appears excessively immature for your ideas. Besides, rather continually, your illustrious bread confuses us to believe without any logical analysis of your ideas that it is still possible to envision an impossible situation somewhere far further down the road where all of us human beings are free, same, together, and equal.
Karl Marx, just as you appear in your old breaded portrait, you are like our dead father, and as your children we are free to cherry-pick your ideas according to our comfort and self-interest, and contentedly ignore those that contradict our position. For example, socialists and communists in Nepal have all agreed that capitalism is a highway for achieving their socialist dreams and they are ready to agree more with each other if the capitalism they want is preferably more corrupt and crony.
Karl Marx, even for dogmatic followers your dreams are too dangerous to achieve. Hence, your followers and zealots have converted your thoughts into something like opium with narcotic effects to help us two-legged mammals get so high that we repeatedly forget we don’t have wings. Hence, as the gravity of reality pulls our hopes down, our aspirations topple and turn into yet another disaster and we are left with nothing but dust and only dust. Karl Marx, you are the prophet of ill-fated, marginalized, discriminated, different, in minority, and left out and it has been blasphemous to think contrary to your thoughts, and those who dare to stand on the opposite side of your thoughts are frames as reactionary, fascist, greedy capitalist, politically incorrect, supremacist and socially regressive. Therefore from old to new, all the Nepalese political parties want to reframe you as their own. Everybody wants you on their side so that they can distribute everything for free to everybody. And, when a political commentator concludes that each and every unresolved social or political problem is a government failing and frames a particular class of people as its root cause invariably stands on the left side of Karl Marx.
Moreover, in every intellectual debate and discussion in South Asia your Karl Marx ideas that stick together all the assessments, analysis, and evaluations about our current political and socio-economic condition as glue, without referring to your assumptions about the state, government, economic divisions, ideology and critical orientations each and every intellectual thought inside Kathmandu falls into pieces.
Marxism is too much into us, for all the intellectuals even those who are against socialism, Karl Marx is the reference. However, none of the political parties in South Asia can underestimate Karl Marx, after all, it’s so easy to win elections by becoming left, by reminding voters that they have been left out, by exposing all negatives of what is happening right now and by constantly resonating false promises of radical transformation, without acknowledging what we have achieved so far and how far we can move ahead with what we have. Oh! Karl Marx, we want our share of welfare and freebies from the state to blame the government for everything.
Karl Marx, you proclaimed that after the triumph of the communist revolution we would all be equal regardless of our caste, creed, ethnicity, gender, economic class, and other social divisions, but Karl Marx what about the blood wasted in the torturous process of cutting and hitting by hammer and sickle to bring all of us into same shape and size, for the redistribution of wealth Karl Marx, your ideas can transform each of us as oppressed, discriminated, mistreated and marginalized, see in the proportional representation system of Nepal, how many of us have been left out.
Karl Marx, you complained that philosophers before had only contemplated and you wanted to change the ways of the world and turn things up, down, and around. But, Marx, what happens to your revolutionary ideas, when all the dialectics of history (thesis-antithesis and synthesis) fall apart and join again together for yet another continuity of the past Karl Marx, your ideas have become a standard criterion to divide us into the categories of center, center-left, far-right, reactionaries, revolutionaries, socialists, and conservatives, strangely in Nepal even when the left is so left from the right/ right is so wrong from the left, both left, right and center can come together to serve each other’s self-interest. They get your message right; you called for all the working human beings to unite. And, Karl Marx, you would be surprised that your proclaimed followers and dogmatic; warriors in the forest for ten years in Nepal are busy assimilating with democrats, republicans, and also with those who want kings back in the nation just to win the election.
Karl Marx, you are a romantic poet disguised as an enlightenment thinker, you were too rational about human beings, but the human beings we know are different from what you thought, we are contrarians, creative, impulsive, partially evolved, dominating, selfish and more importantly we don’t want to lose our chains. Karl Marx, the most referenced thinker, you have brainwashed us with your ideas to demand something impossible, you are still the reason for hippies, theorists, revolutionaries, poets, and activists to think that it is possible to live without private ownership, to explore different approaches and methods for either overcoming social and political barriers that divide and discriminate us, to dream of those days when we shall all be free and equal and to assume that we the greedy, impulsive, shortsighted, selfish genes can become sustainable and unite together for a greater and virtuous cause beyond our individual self-interests.
More importantly, even as byproducts of gross misappropriations, Karl Marx your thoughts are the intellectual foundations for identity politics, diversity, and multiculturalism. Besides, whatever shall be our fate on this planet earth as long as the human mind survives, we the wretched, discriminated, and oppressed shall never let go of your dream, we will hang you on the walls and think with our thoughts, till the great dissolution Karl Marx irrespective of whether your ideas become thick or thin, you will be remembered.
About the Author:
Gaurav Ojha is a writer from Kathmandu, Nepal.