Acceptance Speech for World Marxian Economics Award (I)

Abstract

June 17, 2016Mr. President, Dear friends of World Association for Political Economy (WAPE), Dear participants,Allow me first to congratulate winners of Award as well as winners of Prize. It is a big honour for all of us. It is indeed for me a great honour to open this session with my speech.Our association does a good work. It considers in best scientific tradition all major challenges which working classes and oppressed peoples are facing in our contemporary world, that of late and aggressive imperialism. It does it in a way which promotes spirit of all peoples' internationalism. Today more than ever such a spirit is needed.I consider myself as a Marxist rather than a Marxian, even if qualification of Marxian has become widespread, particularly in last decades. Marxian sounds to me as name of an academic school of thought, along with others, all of which claim to understand world, its economy and its politics. Marxism is far more than that. It claims simultaneously to understand world, our capitalist global world at each stage of its deployment, and provides tools which make it possible for working classes and oppressed peoples, i.e., victims of that system, to change it. Marxism does not separate theory from practice; Marxist praxis associates both. Marxists try to understand world through processes of action to change it. You do not understand first through a process of academic research developed in isolation and then after eventually try to modify reality by making use of theory. No. Marxist praxis is a process which involves simultaneously theory and practice, mobilising all ordinary people, working classes and oppressed nations. While you progress in your struggles, you understand better reality that you are fighting against. The common enemy of working classes and oppressed peoples is capitalism. The final target of their struggles is to replace by communism; communism being understood as a higher stage of human universal civilisation; not as capitalism without capitalists, i.e., not simply a new mode of production more efficient and less unjust for majorities.That is my understanding of being Marxist. That is my understanding of what is our political economy; not a new and better economics, but historical materialist understanding of modern world, which is a capitalist world; an understanding of challenges and identification of best tools to conduct struggles for communism. Those thoughts and strategies for action associated to them, i.e., political economy, need to be constantly developed and reformulated in accordance with evolution of capitalism.The road to communism is a long road, a very long road. Victorious struggles permit achieving revolutionary advances-I say revolutionary advances and not the revolution that would permit an immediate and fast transition to communism. Revolutionary advances create conditions favourable to eventual further revolutionary advances. Those successive advances-let us call them socialist steps ahead-are necessarily unequal from a country to another. …