Corrigendum and Clarification - Mainstream, July 27, 2019

After the publication of the last issue of Mainstream (July 20, 2019), Sankar Ray, who wrote the tribute to Santosh Rana (“A Naxalite of a Distinctive Strain†—pp. 29-30), sent the following letter to the weekly’s editor:

“I did not describe Paresh Chattopadhyay as a ‘Marxist’ scholar but a ‘Marx scholar’. The two are mutually different. Most of the scholars associated with the international project for publishing the complete works of Marx and Engels—The Marx-Engels-Gesamt-ausgabe or Mega—in 114 volumes from the Amsterdam-headquartered Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung under the International Marx-Engels Foundation or IMES do not describe themselves as Marxists.

“Marx himself cautioned Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde, the two top French socialist leaders, after a meeting of the First International in 1881 in chaste French: ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste. (If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.)’ This reflected Marx’s irritation he felt at the silent endorsement of the prefix ‘Marxist’ by Lafargue and Guesde.â€

So the second sentence of the last para of the tribute to Santosh Rana on page 30 (Mainstream, July 20, 2019) should read: “Eminent Marx scholar Paresh Chattopadhyay in an e-mail to this scribe (Sankar Ray—editor)....â€

This error is regretted.      —Editor