Q 9, It is said that Marxism envisages the movement of history as taking place independent of the will of the actors. Are things pre-ordained then? Does it mean that the subject has no initiative of its own and must simply follow the rules of the objective world? Beyond philosophy, at a social level, is it the material world of economics which determines everything?

THE basic principle of Marxism is dialectics; its view of the universe is based on the premise that yes, there are objective laws which determine the course of history. But the subject is not powerless before them. One basic law of dialectics is the transformation of 'quantity' into 'quality' – the process by which things change their form, by which 'water' turns into 'gas' if heated upto a certain degree of temperature and a small political party, into a big force. A small party is made big by the efforts of thousands of men and women. But when it actually happens, there is a leap which surprises these very men and women. It is their creation and vet goes beyond them. Their subjective efforts set into motion an objective law. They determined this course of advance and were in turn determined by the latter.

Similarly, the same general laws of economics produce entirely different results in the developed and underdeveloped parts of the world. The 'iron laws' are subject to their own zigzags – the economic base of a system determines its societal and political superstructure, 'but only in the last instance'. Economy is affected profoundly by political shifts and balances which in turn are often influenced, not only by culture, legal system etc, but its own inner laws. In India, the reigning political crisis has its independent dimension embedded deep in the nature of its ruling political elite. In fact, much of the economic troubles are a result of the particular 'choices' made by this political elite. At a later stage, determinism becomes irrelevant as many philosophical and semantic divisions, created during the bourgeois age commensurate with the division of labour, are finally transcended in communism.