On Marx

More important than Karl Marx's specific contributions is his method of critique and his method of understanding the social reality. While the ones who know Karl Marx as prophet of communism and hence 'kufr' and the so-called Marxists who have reduced Marxian thinking to an orthodoxy won't get the relevance of Marx's thinking to any set of historic circumstance; the Marxist method of ever-evolving analysis remains potent.

Delineating his contribution to theory of value, alienation, expropriation, mode of production and production of social relations as function of material conditions as were expounded by him may come across anachronistic to some but these still are guidelines--as they were meant to be--for the most cogent analysis of as dehumanizing and as exploitative (and ever-changing too) a system as capitalism.

Capitalism never cease to exist and so thus Marxism, or the Marxist analysis of capitalism and of providing an alternative. Capitalism today is an oppressive reality rooted in a specificity of history and material conditions of this age and Marxism as an open-ended critical framework has also evolved (or should evolve?) to counter it. Marxism was never irrelevant and it never will be.

Marxist theory is always a work in progress and even after 200 years Karl Marx is working and is enabling men to create their own history.