“I must confess I do not see how any rational man can have read Popper’s critique of Marx and still be a Marxist,” the British philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee wrote in Karl Popper, an elegant introduction to Popper’s philosophy. Besides Magee’s book, the early 1970s were a prolific period for studying the seminal work of Popper, one of the most important philosophers of science in the 20th century and widely known for his staunch defence of open society. Case in point: the New York Review of Books, in its issue of May 2, 1974, reviewed as many as three books on Popper’s thought.

In his 1973 introduction, Magee was referring to Popper’s most celebrated book, Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945. In it, Popper offered cogent and rigorous arguments in describing Marx as one of the enemies of open society, a key liberal value. While Popper used his falsification method to coherently refute Marx’s philosophy of history and the resulting worldview, liberals were more alarmed by what Popper added to that. He argued that Marx had provided the blueprint for a closed society, a totalitarian regime. Popper not only found claims about having knowledge of the laws of history to be philosophically dubious, he also found it dangerous that Marx was advocating a project of making individuals subservient to the goals of a social utopia. In a way, this sought to close the many possibilities of history too. Such totalitarian current in Marx’s blueprint was a recipe for closed society, and certainly ran counter to any idea of a liberal democratic society.

Popper’s critique was so powerful that when a rebuttal was attempted by Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth (in Open Philosophy and Open Society, published in 1968), it couldn’t rise above rambling polemic. In fact, Magee’s work cites Isaiah Berlin, one of most important theorists of liberty and pluralism in the last century, as saying Popper’s work was “the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer”. Berlin also cogently criticised the premises of Marx’s theory in his 1954 essay Historical Inevitability.

Given how key theorists and defenders of the idea of open society and liberal democratic order saw Marx’s philosophy as dangerous and fraught with totalitarian consequences,  it’s strange that a section of liberals in India’s social media scene haven’t objected to him being used as a metaphor, or exemplar of their vision. In a tweet last Sunday, Kunal Kamra, a stand-up comedian whose recent activism has made him a blue-eyed boy of a section of India’s liberals, admiringly compared Kanhaiya Kumar to Marx. Kamra had campaigned for Kumar when the former Jawaharlal Nehru Students Union president contested on the Communist Party of India’s ticket from Begusarai, Bihar, in the 2019 general election. Kumar’s electoral debut ended in a comprehensive defeat at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Giriraj Singh.

What is problematic is that while responding to a backlash for his misplaced comparison, Kamra, in a subsequent tweet, could concede only differences in the life conditions and accessibility of the two, but seemed fine with Marx as a visionary metaphor. His revision was on peripheral aspects of the comparison, not the central contradiction that should concern his followers among the liberals. The inability to grasp the incompatibility between Marx’s vision and the liberal values of open society is also symptomatic of the faultlines that run through the fragile and intermittent solidarity that’s sought between the institutionalised political Left and liberal politics in the country. 

Any escape sought in the second sentence of Kamra’s tweet, which points to rewriting the manifesto for 21st century, would be a non-starter because Marx’s evolution as a theorist defines what’s more essential to his philosophical legacy, and what’s not. Louis Althusser described an “epistemological break” between the young Marx (say of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) and the more deterministic and mature Marx (say of The Capital). It’s the deterministic Marx that defined his blueprint, and any tinkering with that shouldn’t be in Marx’s name.

Even empirically, the irreconcilability of the regimes inspired by Marx’s vision or adapted versions of his vision (like Maoism in China) with the ideals of liberal democracy could be seen at different points of time in the erstwhile Soviet Union, Cambodia, and China.

Those naively fascinated by Marx, without sharing the core of his economic and social philosophy, should look for other metaphors.

Besides liberals, even the political Left in India should have problems with the metaphor of Marx being used for Kanhaiya. They have reasons for it. As a debutant in last year’s general election, Kanhaiya didn’t show distance from political figures and parties which the Left in Bihar accuses of being hostile.

The CPI had to distance itself from Kanhaiya’s campaign speech in support of then Madhepura MP Pappu Yadav (the party even underplayed it as “misunderstanding”) who had been jailed for murdering the communist leader Ajit Sarkar before being acquitted by the Patna High Court in 2013. The CPI still believes that Yadav’s involvement in Sarkar’s murder cannot be ruled out. Kanhaiya’s move was apparently to attract a section of Yadav votes, though his party was left embarrassed in the process. Interestingly, Kanhaiya and his party had no qualms about unsuccessfully seeking the support for their ally Rashtriya Janta Dal, whose former Siwan MP was one of the accused in the murder of former JNU Students Union head Chandrasekhar, who belonged to the All India Students Association, the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Though the CBI did not pursue former RJD MP’s role (he was named in FIR), the Left parties in Bihar are convinced that he masterminded the murder.

A metropolitan comedian’s misuse of a metaphor shouldn’t have occasioned commentary if it wasn’t linked to ideological naivete or even ignorance of a new generation of political apprenticeship. In being the latter, it also reveals how the blending of the iconography of the political Left and liberal politics in this country is fraught with dangers of irreconcilability. In fact, in many university social sciences courses, liberal and Marxist perspectives are taught as being contrary to each other. They are strange bedfellows.