HVK Archives: Refuge in cynicism
Refuge in cynicism - The Telegraph
Sham Lal
()
15 May 1997
Title : Refuge in cynicism
Author : Sham Lal
Publication : The Telegraph
Date : May 15, 1997
The revolution made by VI. Lenin gave up the ghost in 1991 with much less agony
than that suffered by the old woman in the opening scene of Ingmar Bergman's
horrifying Cries and Whispers. The engine of the Maoist revolution in China was
put in reverse gear within a few years of the great helmsman's death, with the
country's top leaders trying hard to forget having ever talked of painting the
East red. Even the heirs to the ascetic Vietnamese leader who would have felt
sore seeing radical chic youngsters from bourgeois families in an affluent Europe
using his name as a totem as they intoned "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi-Minh" - now play host to
multinational executives from the United States and Japan without betraying the
least sign of any ideological discomfort.
How do these and other quirks of current history - including the different points
at which many former socialist societies have arrived in their arduous journey
back on the road to capitalism, the new vogue for market philosophy and the punch
acquired by the globalization process - fit into the scheme of dialectical
materialism? It does not matter much whether they do or do not. The point is,
the Marxist complex is not any easier to get rid of than the Freudian hang up.
The logic behind worldwide changes in the balance of ideological, economic, social
and technological forces will continue to be debated for a long time. Even most
old hands at the game have yet to grasp the full implications of what has
happened. Irrespective of their place in the ideological spectrum, none was quite
prepared, on the factual or even theoretical level, for the crazy turn taken by
events. The biggest surprise is the way that what remains of communist outfits
far away from the scene of the new convulsions have accepted, without too much
anguish, the collapse of what they had all along sought to sell as models of
development to their own people. They do not think they owe an apology to those
they bamboozled or explain even to themselves the reasons for what happened.
Sensing something dreadful had transpired for which their canonical texts had no
valid explanation, communist parties in India have sought refuge in cynicism with
the same ease with which they once found pat answers to all perplexing questions
in the catechisms of their creed. That is why the main worry of men like
Harkishen Singh Surjeet today is how to manipulate the differences between their
bourgeois, petit bourgeois and lumpen allies in the United Front to their own
advantage.
It does not matter that the gain is often no more than a gift of a Rajya Sabha
seat from Mulayam Singh Yadav or a place in the government of the former prime
minister, H.D. Deve Gowda to one of Surjeet's proteges. Even their conservative
allies know the communists' bark is all too often worse than their bite. Few made
such threatening noises over the budget proposals as they Yet all they got for
their pains was a patient hearing from the finance minister, P Chidambaram, and
not even a sop to save their face.
Unlike Indian left groups, post-communist societies have to cope with the
distressing legacy of a totalitarian past, one party monopoly of power and a
command economy These brought about a complete divorce between costs and prices
and between demand and supply, creating conditions for widespread technological
obsolescence. Such societies cannot afford the luxury of hunting with the radical
hound and running with the free market hare. A vivid idea of challenges they face
can be had from Post-communism, a book in which Leslie Holmes - an academic
teaching at an Australian university - provides an up to date account of their
trials and tribulations.
Proliferation of political parties has added to the confusion over policy making
in most of these societies. The disappearance of a protected market for their
often shoddy goods has led to a sharp decline in industrial production and a sharp
rise in prices. Though the upgrading of technology in hundreds of plants calls for
huge investment, the requisite resources can neither be mobilized at home nor
secured from abroad. That the time of the transition has coincided with a
recession in western Europe has only confounded their difficulties. So painful has
been the transition for some of these countries that it has even bred nostalgia
for the bleak old times. Times when, despite low purchasing power and chronic
shortages, there was a job for every adult and a security net, however modest, for
the old, the sick and the needy Even so, few want a return to the totalitarian era
or an economy lagging behind those of their more prosperous neighbours in the
West.
The author aptly calls the period immediately following the liberation one of
"dream" and that of coming to grips with the new realities one of "rude
awakening". It is only now that some of these countries- barring the republics
that once constituted the former Soviet Union and the defunct Yugoslavia - are
beginning to feel the worst is over and they are at last on the way to a slow
recovery.
The prospects for the immediate future do not look too bright. Return to power of
former communists in free elections in Poland and Hungary does not worry many
people. That some speak a language more akin to that of social democracy
indicates their changed perspective. A yet more telling sign of new thinking is
their anxiety to join North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
As for evidence of economic recovery, it is pertinent to remember - starting from
a very low base after six years of continuous decline in the gross domestic
product - it will be long even before they reach the pre-1989 levels of production
or consumption. This is not surprising since the transition from capitalism to so
called socialism in the wake of the October revolution was equally painful. It
took the Soviet regime almost a decade to reach the level of production of 1913.
It is idle to speculate whether Mikhail Gorbachev could have saved the Soviet
Union by taking a leaf out of Deng Xiaoping's book to make the economic transition
to a market economy without allowing so many skeletons to fall out of communist
cupboards to undermine the regime's legitimacy But all such questions belong to
the ifs and buts of history Perhaps the untenable degrees of political alienation,
economic stagnation and technological obsolescence in the former Soviet Union by
1985 ruled out Chinese style solutions. Reasons for Gorbachev's fall and the
break-up of the Soviet Union, with party bosses at every level watching the
unfolding drama in eerie silence, can be understood only in terms of the
contradictions between an overcentralized and overbureaucratized system and the
high levels of innovative entrepreneurship and creative initiative demanded by the
ongoing technological revolution.
To go further back into history, the revolution's end lay in its very beginning.
Contrary to what Karl Marx thought, the upheaval took place not in a developed
capitalist country but in a backward peasant society Far from giving workers a
sense of power, it turned into a more ruthless instrument of primitive
accumulation. The regime's extremely repressive character was no freak
development. It was the direct result of its desperate need to extract surplus
from both workers and peasants and choke every voice of protest or dissent through
terror. Finally, the intolerable burden of the nuclear arms race with the US
pushed the Soviet Union into a terminal crisis.
There is an element of bitter truth in the way some Chinese, in what looks like an
obscene joke at the expense of Marx, claim his sanction for the transition back to
capitalism. How could they make a success of socialism without first completing
the unfinished capitalist project? they ask. The spectacular record of the special
free market zones, despite the widening regional and individual income
disparities, merely drives home their point.
The path taken by China may be right or wrong. What distinguishes the Indian left
is its lack of a clear sense of direction. Communist leaders here lean on small
bourgeois outfits to secure a foothold in some of the poorest as well as
industrially advanced states where they are conspicuous by their absence. Having
had no revolution of their own, they have at least been spared the misery of
having to mourn its demise.
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