Karl Marx whispers

Kings and Queens, Courts and Palaces, Myths and legends, Wars and Revolutions and most of all, dazzling personalities and splendid leaders of men and women, these are the pictures that we conjure when we think of remote past. While these images are colourful and fantastic, they also represent ideas and feelings that have moved people for last thousands of years. To some of us, these pictures are a source of great interest and entertainment. As we delight in them, we also try to arrange them, often chronologically. But we are not satisfied with a mere ordering of the events behind these pictures; we also explore reasons behind these events and personalities. This urge to organise our past so as to facilitate its easier understanding has given us the subject of history.

History evidently contains a story. A story that was actually enacted in the past by real and living people and also a story that was seen and observed and ideally recorded by one or more of them. When two people tell a story, sometimes the same story seems to be different. History also has this delightful quality. Different writers have interpreted the events of the past in their own way. The story of Jesus Christ is told by four apostles, St Mark, St Mathew, St John and St Luke in their own style and they have all contributed to the richness of the story. These stories combine to form the bulk of the New Testament. The French revolution as described by Thomas Carlyle is significantly different from its description by Edmund Burke.

Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister wrote history as his personal experience, Prof Irfan Habib, one of India’s greatest living historian, writes with academic rigour and scholarly depth, Tiberius Claudius, the great roman emperor was taught by famous historian Livy and wrote with unusual passion and rhetoric. One historian, who single-handedly changed the subject of history and its application to our life, is Karl Marx, the German philosopher and economist.

Karl Marx did not stop at giving his interpretation of history where he argues that economics has been the prime force behind all historical events. He inspired and continues to inspire people who are not happy with the existing state of the world. Those who are fired with the ideals of equality and justice, who are troubled by the apparent rich-poor divide and those who are willing to take a few steps forward and shape the world in their own image have always found solace in the ideas of Marx.

A few such men came together and altered the map of the world. Marx’s ideas gave birth to October Revolution, the socialist and the communist movements and a number of new states led by Soviet Union. Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883 and quite appropriately, the tombstone of Karl Marx bears the inscription “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point however is to change it”. The latter, he still whispers to the ears of youth.