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.
