This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s ‘Das Capital’, and I was invited by the Guyana Peace Council, Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union and the Cheddi Jagan Research Centre to make a presentation, “How to translate Capital into meaning for one’s life” at a seminar held last Saturday at National Library in Georgetown. The above are essentially PPP-associated organisations, and while the PPP’s hierarchy knows quite well my antipathy to anything Marxist/Leninist, they are also aware that I hold that the works of Karl Marx himself contain a vision of humanity that is worthy of our consideration.
Karl Marx was an Enlightenment thinker for whom human autonomy, not material wealth was foremost. For him, the human being should be an active participant in the making of history. My position is that his vision as expressed in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844, when he was about 24,
