Centrally planned economies only generated endless shortages, abysmal quality owing to lack of market discipline and deep discontent
The most fascinating aspect of Marxism and the entire intellectual and revolutionary political movement it spawned, of exceptionally brilliant protagonists, is the illustration of the dangers of transformative radical socio-political ideas and programmes. They produce mind-bogglingly destructive agendas in the hands of clever and, often, morally upright people. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.
There need be no doubt that Marxist intellectuals were some of the brightest people ever assembled in history since the galaxy of stars of ancient Greece, from Socrates and Plato to Aristotle and many more. Without any doubt Marxists like Rosa Luxembourg, Vladimir Lenin himself, the great Hungarian theorist Gyorgy Lukacs and Joseph Stalin as well as Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, etc, were formidable intellectuals. They provided exceptional insights into a host of issues in the political economy and society but the question remains exactly to what purpose. The class analysis of human affairs, from ancient Greece and feudal Europe to the modern world, indubitably identified an important fault line in all forms of historic social and economic organisation.
However, many aspects did not fit easily into this overriding explanatory independent causal variable of class and the specific mode of production associated with it. For example, the idea that art and literature are always a class phenomenon, especially strongly asserted in Stalinist Russia, could not explain the timeless themes of great art and literature which were transcendental and universal, addressing themes of life, love, disappointment and death.
Yet, the sheer intellectual skill and creativity of Marxists is illustrated by the formidable French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. He sought with astringent brilliance to address the underlying epistemological issues, arising out the orthodox materialist interpretation of societal dynamics, by asserting the primacy of productive forces as the underlying explanation. But his arguments were not entirely convincing since there was still a need for key first premises of Marxist certainties to be asserted rather than demonstrated empirically. As an aside, it might be avowed that, in many ways, Christianity was the ultimate underlying unspoken inspiration permeating the Marxist desire to resolve all fundamental problems of human existence on a durable basis through radical change.
Marxism mistook one, albeit, lasting truth about society, the polity and the economy, the historical universality of class conflict, as the sole ontological truth and espoused a totalising future vision of society to overcome it. It became the basis for a single factor analysis of society that was neither intellectually satisfactory or compelling in accounting for the complexity and contrariness of human activity. On a practical level, a central dilemma posed for communist parties was the paucity of class consciousness required for revolutionary action to transform society. It was lacking even in circumstances of mass factory organisation that ought to have especially catalysed it.
In the modern world, the decline of factory production in single large sites and the rise of more geographically dispersed service sector employment in Western societies has only compounded the problem of inadequate class consciousness although sectarian group interests do prevail. The explanation provided by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci for the lack of class consciousness on the basis of ruling class ideological hegemony could account for it but did not provide a plausible programmatic antidote to it. In the final analysis, the attempt to reorganise society with the intention of abolishing class resulted in a horrific programme of social engineering but the hope of abolishing socio-economic differentiation proved futile.
The Leninist solution to a lack of political consciousness was the pre-eminence of a communist party of committed cadres and leaders to represent class interests since the working class was not yet ready to self-consciously perform its historic class duty. But it proved self-defeating in both the Soviet Union and Maoist China. It only resulted in endless and bloody internal disputes within communist parties over the correct policy, for personal power and unparalleled brutality to impose party authority over society. As already observed, many of these supposedly revolutionary ideas of socioeconomic transformation paralleled the original Christian conception of a just society of equals in the eyes of the Almighty!
In the end, the idealistic project failed to overcome the innate hierarchical stratifications in society. Social and economic differentiation merely reappeared in different guises and the communist programmes of total transformation only caused havoc and mass deaths. The worst examples are the catastrophe of Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s and the Maoist Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s in which tens of millions perished in mass killings and famine. The communist programme of planning the economy centrally through social ownership also failed since it was intrinsically unable to determine the critical issue of relative prices necessary for production to match supply with demand.
Centrally planned economies only generated endless shortages, abysmal quality owing to lack of market discipline and deep discontent. In the process, by destroying efficient markets that bring economic advance and growth the Soviet system failed to generate the growth necessary to compete with Western capitalism. In 1991, the Soviet Union conceded defeat in the contest with the capitalist West and abandoned central planning and its defensive military perimeter to the west in Europe it could no longer afford to fund and sustain.
In China too aggressive capitalism was implanted by the Communist Chinese Party during the 1980s that turned China into one of the most unequal societies in the world despite raising living standards generally. At the same time, the CCP retained its totalitarian hold on the Chinese polity and society by espousing nationalism and corporatism in a one-party state that paralleled fascism in 1930s Europe. The very attempt to enforce a vision of comprehensive societal perfection under communism had necessitated prodigious brutality because, as the great Immanuel Kant once observed, “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”!
The case of Marxism in India barely merits comment because most Indian Marxists only had modest familiarity with its intellectual oeuvre and, in any case, made decisions to accord with diktats from Moscow and the convoluted ideas of Chairman Mao, later exposed as a power -crazed mass murderer and sexual predator. Indian Marxist academics are, with some rare exceptions, intellectually pretty mediocre. A few, with claims to intellectual proficiency, are akin to medieval priests in monasteries defending their religion against all odds, with mental gymnastics to pose improbable superficial formulations.
One of the few interesting and self-taught Marxists, the late Indian MN Roy, was to abandon his so-called Marxism in favour of what was clearly a vision inspired by a Hindu social perspective. Much of India’s communist leadership, from EMS Namboodiripad to Jyoti Basu, were cynical opportunists who have only left behind a legacy of a tragic wasteland. Adding insult to injury, contemporary vote bank political compulsions in India have turned Indian communism into supine and shameless creatures of Islamic obscurantism.
In a similar vein to the original Marxist critique of class society and its intolerable injustices, important later modern thinkers, like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, brought about veritable intellectual revolutions. The first highlighted the ubiquity in the exercise of power in virtually all social interactions and institutional settings and the second brilliantly exposed the innate hidden compromised meanings in the formulation of ideas through language. But both implicitly ended up only espousing all-pervading doubt and rejection of the validity of existing norms and any foundational status accorded to them.
The problem with such acute insights is that they militated against the very legitimacy of all hierarchy and order in society. Yet, it’s a truism that without order there is no freedom. None of this should be taken as an unequivocal vindication of the merits of the supposed alternative of capitalism, private property and markets and the idea that nothing can supersede and improve on them. Capitalist societies also suffer huge problems of chronic economic instability, staggering inequalities, extraordinary levels of personal alienation and individual mental health problems, as the stark reality of the US illustrates graphically.
At best, one can guardedly acknowledge the difficulties in abolishing private property altogether, with all the associated problems of violence required to do so and the issue of incentives that bedevil the absence of private ownership in other social forms of ownership. What can be asserted with a degree of confidence is that although private property and capitalism, in its many forms, competitive, oligopolistic, etc, may not be an historically immutable phenomenon for all time to come, markets, through which transactions take place, are logically innate to all organised societies.
In conclusion, it is to be noted that various forms of socialisation of economic resources are now the norm in most market economies. Government spending on common needs and purposes reaches anything up to half the national GDP. Quite clearly, such forms of socio-economic organisation, called ‘social democracy’, are the modern orthodoxy that sustains markets by instituting the social cohesion on which they depend. Yet, ‘social democracy’ is not unproblematic either because it apparently does not resolve the innate cyclical instability of capitalist economies and only ends up creating unsustainable levels of national debt responding to it.
However, such contemporary social democratic arrangements become possible when a societal consensus has come into existence to support it. In the end, it all depends on private conscience to acknowledge mutual interests and forbearance in recognition of a shared fate. This is something Hindu sages understood millennia ago, about how the transformation of individual inner motivations are needed to underpin a well-governed dharmic order.
The writer taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed are personal.
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