Bailouts cannot rescue capitalism
Excerpts from a lecture 'Relevance of Marx's Das
Kapital in modern world' :
Wasantha Ramanayake
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Professor Desmond Mallikaarachchi addresses the gathering.
Picture by Saman Sri Wedage.
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Periodical granting of stimulus packages or the bailouts could not
rescue capitalism as correctly predicted by Marx as early as 1864,
Peradeniya University Prof. Desmond Mallikarachchi said at the launching
ceremony of the Sinhala translation of Karl Marx's Das Kapital at the
Colombo Library Auditorium on Thursday.
Delivering the keynote address at the launching ceremony of the
Sinhala translation of the first volume of the three volume masterpieces
of Karl Marx's Das Kapital by Senior Journalist and Daily News Editor
Jayatilleke de Silva, Prof Mallikarachchi said that capitalism could not
prove Marxism wrong but it could only prove itself wrong over and over
again. "The capital itself is the barrier to Capitalism," he said.
He said even after 142 years of its publication Das Kapital has not
been proved wrong.
"Das Kapital faced challenge of the century and a quarter but yet to
be proved wrong," he pointed out. Das Kapital was the Marx's greatest
contribution to the Marxist literature, Prof. Mallikarachchi said.
"Marx was the greatest intellectual and humanist ever to have lived,
because there are humanist and there are intellectuals but Marx was
both," he said.
He said that from the age of 18 until his death in March 13, 1883 he
committed his life to the liberation of the working class. "At the death
of his colleague and friend Frederic Engels doubted whether any man of
the calibre of Marx would be born again.
He said that the Marx should not be regarded as a philosopher or a
sociologist or a 'system builder' as Plato or Aristotle did. He said
that anyone who is studying sociology is called a sociologist and
philosophy a philosopher.
He said that on that basis it was unfair by Marx to call him a
philosopher or a sociologist since he went further preaching the social
revolution on behalf of people. "Therefore, Marx was a humanist and a
social revolutionist," his task was to change the existing social order
and without that change the very survival of the future generations
would be at stake.
He said that Das Kapital is scientific but not in the sense of
Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin of Species as it showed the way
for workers to liberate themselves from being exploited.
The Professor outlining his boyhood said that Marx obtained his PhD
when he was just 22 years.
He could handle eight languages with equal fluency. Marx is not
someone who came from heaven and wrote Das Kapital, he said. Marx traced
the origin of capitalism from the development of various modes of
production, he added.
He said that a serious study of Das Kapital would show how human
relationships had been devastated by capitalism.
The professor appreciated the effort of the translator in translating
the work into Sinhala.
He said that the English edition of Das Kapital has been translated
by a group of translators. He regarded the work as a nightmare for any
translator as it contained enormous difficulties such as quotations from
different languages and footnotes but author de Silva managed it alone.
The professor also pointed out that it was in Marx's Das Kapital that
human thinking became economic for the first time.
"Human thinking had been religious, educational and even ethical but
it was in this work that human thinking became economic for the first
time," he pointed out.
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