Hope may have been shattered, but certainly not lost

Virendra Kumar Singh

The most despicable crimes in the history of mankind, they say, relate to communists. The very idea of communism is believed to be spurious. It is a dreadful dream not to be achieved and if achieved even in semblance, not to be sustained in the real world. It is demeaning, hateful and hence worth drowning in the abyss of the forgotten sea of knowledge. The capitalists and politicians, religious leaders and liberal rationalists, idiots and intellectuals, moralists and lumpens all line up everywhere together in opposition to ideas and institutions of communism. Communism has been / will be the last criminal ideology to haunt the mankind. It is a curse of idea, an evil. It kills freedom and creativity in us. At most, it can only convert society into animal farm. The list of such pejorative epithets against communism is ad nauseam. The implicit purpose of inventing and enlarging the constituency of hate against communism is to guard people from their moral and political fall. Yet, the matter of truth is ever harder they try, heavier it proves.

Paradoxical though it may seem, the opponents of communism, too, do not find much disagreement with what it intends to achieve. This is true also because there is nothing in communism which is not already talked about and thought of. Yet surprisingly, the opponents seem to lose their sanity when they happen to deal with similar ideas of communism. The hate or a sense of loss of reason and wisdom grips the anti-communists so intensely and disturbingly that they often conveniently fail to keep their own homes in order.  Before the idea of communism germinated and sprouted in every nook and corner of the world, history has seen all that the anti-communists abhor about communism. You talk about equality and liberty and chances are you will be dubbed as communists.

The hate against communism emanates from the fact that it is not just a bundle of ideas which can be discussed, debated and put under the carpet at will. It is more than a mere idea. It is not confined to scholastic discourse only. It is like a live cartridge. You cannot play with it like the way a child plays with a toy. It empowers and prompts its possessor to do the needful. Just knowing it is not enough. To be able to fathom it, you need to cherish it. But you can cherish it only when you sincerely seek to deconstruct your socialized being and look for a new dream tangent to context and time. The opponents often drag our attention to the extinction of socialist states of U.S.S.R. and other east European countries from the globe. They pile up innumerable cases and incidents to prove that what happened over there was immanent and inevitable. Socialism for them is dead and whatever remains of it today is rotten and stinking. It is in the interest of the world to cremate the dead body. Erroneously, they believe that the death of socialism as a political system implies the death of socialism as an idea. They have killed only the former; the latter continues to haunt them even in their drams. They know in their hearts that the idea of socialism is not dead; that it will resurrect and refine the political system it has temporarily lost.   

This is not to say that what we had in the name of socialist states was the epitome of socialism. Instead, it will be safe here to say that the first experiment with socialism has failed to the chagrin of its protagonists. But, it will amount to effrontery if one concludes from it that subsequent experiments to translate ideas of socialism into institutions of socialism will be axiomatically self-abortive and waste of love’s labor.

I often wonder if the opponents have not been puritan in their approach to communism. Their simple tool to assess and analyze communism has been to compare the real with the ideal. The gaps, wherever they may find them, are then used to denigrate the idea itself. One fault line between the real and ideal is considered enough to reject both. But are we not aware of other failed experiments of ideas? Did the liberal democracy get established in one go? Has it not changed its colors and parameters since its inception in 1789? The tale of religion is also not different. The very fact that mankind has been and is witness to emergence of new religions proves that religion has failed time and again to live up to its promises. Emergence of every new religion is a testimony to the fact that it has abandoned its past to be able to experiment with the new.

Surprisingly, they do not seem to give such concession while analyzing communism. For instance, a state can tolerate myriad forms of crimes, ideas and perversions but not the idea and institutions of communism. When a Hindu declares himself a god, he is not charged for blasphemy by seers. This is true for other religions, too. The facts of fission and fusion which are found operative in the realm of religion clearly indicate that finality is a well nigh impossibility in the history of ideas. It shapes and reshapes itself to conform to the changing and emergent situations.

What separates communism from other ideologies and institutions is that it does not entertain dualism between its propositions and actions. In contrast, the bourgeois democracy is seemingly a bastard system, according to Max Weber. It does not believe in what it says; nor does it do what it promises to do. At best and worst, liberal democracy is just pretentious. The fragmented notion of equality – formal and substantive – itself reflects the dualistic character of bourgeois democracy. All are equal before law in democracy and before god in religion. Both law and religion give preference to formal over the substantive. The poor and the rich are unequal in every substantive context, but the law and god remain blind to this sphere of inequality.

This is not to argue, however, that in believing and conceding to the idea of socialism I am also believing and conceding to all that the historically existing institutions of socialism have done. What these socialist institutions were up to in their respective countries is no longer a secret. The dictatorship of the proletariat established in these countries to usher the humanity in era of stateless and classless society instead throttled the process of transition from socialism to communism. Mere abolition of the institution of private property was not enough to effect this transition.

Historically speaking, the institutions of power and private property have always been symbiotic. They are like evil twins. Just as the institution of private property begets power, the institution of power gives birth to private property. The techno-legal notion of private property under capitalism was substituted by a system of preferential and differential user rights to possessors of power under socialism. Power flew from party and walked on with cadres. People who had chosen to stay away from both party and cadres were as marginalized as proletarians of capitalism. Every voice of dissent was crushed brutally. It was wrong indeed on part of the socialist states to have ignored the fact that the power, too, can cause inequality. The state, after all, is nothing but the institutionalization of power itself. The use of power of the party to dismantle the political institution of state is seemingly highly complex and an improbable proposition. The party of the proletariat was to empower the people, but what it eventually did was just the opposite. Party and the state became synonymous for all practical purposes. Cadres replaced the bureaucrats and officials of the old regime. Power of state grew exponentially and benefitted the cadres immensely. This happened in spite of knowing fully well that the institution of state is trained to prompt, promote ad sustain status quoism. It manages contradictions of the system in most subtle manner. It has managed contradictions of the bourgeoisie and socialism with equal efficiency and prudence. Tragically, the state was never as powerful it was made under socialism.   

Similarly, I do no subscribe to the belief that the character of class struggle will inevitably be violent. Far from it, I believe that the idea of violent class struggle is thoroughly inconsistent with the wisdom of the age. Yet, I do not share the sense of pessimism and sadism which inform the opponents of socialism. In spite of their limitations, the socialist states could achieve what was hitherto considered unattainable. With the abolition of the institution of private property, the evils of hunger, beggary, prostitution and vagabondism became passé. Access to quality health and educational services by all enable people to lead a healthy and dignified life. The unprecedented high agricultural growth (over 17% annual growth rate) in the erstwhile USSR from 1917 to 1924 ensured a collective victory against hunger not only for the people of USSR but also for the majority of east European peoples.       

The other limitation of socialist states relates to belief and wisdom that treated accomplishments of 1917 or 1949 as fait accompli. We know that every system evolves through stages, shapes and reshapes its destiny and course of journey to be able to cope effectively with emerging realities. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched with much fanfare in 1967 in China by Mao lost its way in the beginning itself. The selective targeting was allowed to acquire the status of standard principle. A campaign which aimed at updating and synchronizing the ideological edifice of society with the new mooring and worldview of socialism was allowed to be run and supervised by cadres of doubtful credentials. They themselves did not understand the significance of this project of cultural reconstruction. Purifiers were seldom found being purified themselves. I do not intend here, by any stretch of imagination, to mean that the agenda of supplementary Cultural Revolution was misplaced or overemphasized by Mao. Political revolution alone cannot suffice the purpose of socialism.  

Socialism after all is a worldview in the first place. It is meaningful only in its totality. You fragment it and you lose it. No other worldview has stirred us as comprehensively as socialism. It challenged all that preceded it: politics, culture, morality, and economy. It is akin to law of nature; albeit with necessary qualifications. The highest naturalization of wo(man). But no worldview will have any meaningfulness for us unless it is comprehensively understood, fully internalized and honestly pursued with. stage of communism will witness the humanization of nature and In other words, we need to realize the spiritual contours of socialism.