[Reader-list] For Marx too, market’s boss

[OISHIK SIRCAR]

For Marx too, market's boss
- To own proletariat bible, dish out up to a lakh to US or UK

http://telegraphindia.com/1080224/jsp/frontpage/story_8942075.jsp

  JAYANTH JACOB

New Delhi, Feb. 23: Call it the market's revenge on Marx or Marx's revenge
on the market.

But if you want to possess the proletariat's bible, you'll need to put some
capital on the table and then some.

The complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels can cost up to Rs
1.5lakh and come bearing the stamp of the US and Britain, two most
potent
symbols of capitalism.

No Indian publisher brings them out — not even Leftword, which has CPM
general secretary Prakash Karat as its managing director.

Before the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet-owned Progressive Publishers
used to sell the collected works in 50 volumes for Rs 3,000, or even less
with discounts. The company wound up long ago but some old, worn-out volumes
— though usually not the complete set — can still be found at the odd
bookshop.

In Calcutta, where the communists are ruling for 30 years, it's hard finding
*Capital* Volume I, let alone the whole set, of Soviet vintage.

The London-based Lawrence & Wishart offers the Indian buyer a 33 per cent
discount on the Marx-Engels complete works but the price still comes to
£1,500 or Rs 1.15 lakh. That goes up to Rs 1.5 lakh when you add shipping.
If you want one particular volume, it costs £48, that is, Rs 3,689.

The US, the Left's enemy number one, offers a better deal. International
Publishers, New York, sells the entire works for Rs 52,840 — at just over Rs
1,000 a volume on an average — but the price of each volume differs. Volumes
37, 48 and 50 cost $34.95 (Rs 1,384) each.

Ratish Kumar of Cosmo, the English-language publishing division of Current
Books, the largest bookstore chain in communist-ruled Kerala, said: "We
don't have any stocks of the series, and because of the price only libraries
can afford it."

The last order had come from the Sree Sankaracharya Sanskrit University in
Kalady, near Kochi, two years ago. "It cost them around Rs 1.5 lakh," Kumar
said.

Russia was the theme country at this year's Delhi international book fair
but not a single stall had the complete works of Marx and Engels.

"The price is the reason for the fall in demand," said Ram Briksha of
People's Publishing House, a bookstore on the JNU campus.

PPH still has old stocks of some 24 volumes of the Progressive Publishers
edition and sells them at Rs 100 per volume with a "discount up to 10 per
cent" on offer.

Industry sources say Indian publishers don't bring out editions of the
collected works as they believe they will not find enough buyers.

Leftword manager Sudhava Deshpande said his company had no plans to bring
out the complete writings and preferred to publish books that explained the
duo's views on current issues.

As an example, Deshpande cited On the National and Colonial Questions by
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, edited by Aijaz Ahmad (Rs 325).

"With the fall of the Soviet Union, we don't have the cheap editions of the
Marx-Engels collected works. What we are doing is bringing to people what
Marx and Engels thought on various issues such as nationalism,
internationalism, etc," Deshpande said.

It's the market that rules, Marx would have been sad to learn. But then he
might be pleased that the market puts a high price not just on his head but
on his works, too.


-- 
OISHIK SIRCAR

Scholar in Women's Rights
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

60 Harbord Street
Room 016 B
Toronto, ON M5S 3L1

oishiksircar at gmail.com
oishik.sircar at utoronto.ca

416.876.7926