The thousands of democratic socialists in the United States who have been organizing and fighting for justice in political obscurity for years likely never thought their ideas would be the subject of heated debates on prominent talk-shows like “The View” or feature pieces in such establishment mainstays as PBS and NPR. 

But—driven in large part by the persistent popularity of Bernie Sanders’ brand of politics and the recent landslide victory of self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s congressional primary—the past several weeks have seen a torrent of news headlines, television segments, and hot takes on democratic socialism’s rapid emergence into everyday political discourse, an indication that ideas previously defined as “fringe” by corporate media outlets, pundits, and politicians are quickly going mainstream.
“Democratic Socialism Surging in the Age of Trump,” reads a representative headline from the Associated Press. “Is socialism having its moment in U.S. elections?” asked the title of a recent PBS “NewsHour” segment.

Read the full story here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/07/31/socialism-rise-americans-seek-out-bold-humane-alternatives-brutality-trump-and

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August 1968, Prague. Wikipedia / Public Domain. Some rights reserved.

This is a response to Dissidents Among Dissidents by Ilya Budraitskis, a new collection of essays published in Russian in 2017 by Free Marxist Publishers. It was originally published on People and Nature. 

The “New Cold War” is the subject of the most politically compelling of the essays in this book by the Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis. He wrote it in the summer of 2014, as Russian troops streamed into eastern Ukraine to fight alongside the Russian-armed militia of the separatist “people’s republics”, and the Russian ultra-nationalists, mercenaries and volunteers who joined them.  

At that time, the existence of a “New Cold War” was already being treated in public discourse as an “obvious and indisputable fact”, Budraitskis argues — but “the production of rhetoric has run way ahead of the reality”.

To question the assumptions behind the rhetoric further, Budraitskis considers the character of the original Cold War, i.e. between the Soviet bloc and the western powers between the end of the Second World War and 1991, in the essay “Intellectuals and the Cold War”. As he writes, the Cold War was a set of “principles of the world order”, construed by ruling elites and then confirmed in intellectual discourse and in the everyday activity of masses of people.

The reality of continuous psychological mobilisation, and the nerve-straining expectation of global military conflict, as apprehended by society as a whole, became a means of existence, reproduced over the course of two generations, in which loyalty to beliefs was combined with fear and a feeling of helplessness before fate.

This proposition, that the Cold War was essentially a means of social control, in which masses of people were systematically deprived of agency, certainly works for me. I wondered whether Budraitskis knows of the attempts, made during the Cold War on the “western” side of the divide, to analyse this central aspect of it — for example, the work of Hillel Ticktin and others in the early issues of the socialist journal Critique (from 1973). Here, Ticktin wrote on the political economy of the Soviet Union, interpreting it in the context of world capitalism.

Today, the Cold War’s binary ideological constraints live on, Budraitskis argues. “The trauma of choice between hostile camps has still today not been overcome”. As an example, he quotes the reactions to Russia’s participation in the war in eastern Ukraine by, on one hand, Alexander Dugin, the extreme right-wing Russian “Eurasianist”, and, on the other, the American historian Timothy Snyder. (See here and here.)

It is undeniable that elite-controlled public forums have increasingly been dominated by the two-sided, one-dimensional discourse of the Cold War

For Dugin, the military conflict in eastern Ukraine amounted to “the return of Russia to history”. For Snyder, it was confirmation that Ukraine had finally to recognise that it was part of Europe. Dugin’s anti-Europe and Snyder’s Europe leave no room for a third way, Budraitskis asserts gloomily.

On this at least, I feel more optimistic. It is undeniable that elite-controlled public forums have increasingly been dominated by the two-sided, one-dimensional discourse of the Cold War. On the “left”, this false dichotomy has been reflected in “geopolitical” stances that base themselves on the relative qualities of imperialist blocs, and deny agency to, or sideline, society generally and social movements particularly. But those social movements exist, and there are voices in the intelligentsia that reflect them.
 

Escaping the binary

From the late 1940s, both in the west and in the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia began to be transformed “from a group that was capable simply of implementing an ideological order, to one that was prepared independently to formulate it, make it more precise and reproduce it,”
Budraitskis writes. In the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia was constrained by the state’s imperialistic and chauvinistic approach to politics. That defined not only 1960s debates such as those about the scientific-technical revolution and “socialism with a human face”, but even 1970s Soviet dissidents’ discussions of the relationship between “national” and “universal-humanist” values.

It was “self-evident”, and “required no special confirmation from above”, that a “third way” for intellectuals, that escaped the “binary structure of the East-West conflict [of states]”, was “impossible”, Budraitskis argues. The proof, for him, is that as official “Marxism-Leninism” became completely discredited in the two decades prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that collapse “could not then be understood otherwise than as the victory of one of the military-political blocs [i.e. the western one]”.

I read this passage hoping for more caveats and qualifications. I accept that the western liberal narrative about the “collapse of communism” in the 1990s became ubiquitous and overwhelming in those spaces — journalism, academia, etc — that in the west are called public opinion. But surely there were dissenting and critical strands in the intelligentsia — particularly if understood in the wider way that it used to be in Soviet times — both in the west and in the former Soviet states.

In Russia, those public spaces were taking shape, uncensored, in a new way. Immediately before and after the collapse of the USSR, Russian journalism was in its heyday, lashing out at corruption and the horror of the first war in Chechnya, before corporate control and Putin-era censorship tightened the screws. In film, the reckoning with Stalinism began, running from Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) to Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt By The Sun (1994). In literature, Viktor Pelevin’s Generation “P” (1999), magnificently, turned Yeltsin’s regime into an absurd phantasmagoria.

These are just the (perhaps rose-tinted?) memories of a western leftist who started travelling to Russia at that time. But I want to know how this rich, chaotic ferment fits in to Budraitskis’s argument.
 

The dissidents’ history

The centerpiece of Budraitskis’s book is a longer essay, “Dissidents Among Dissidents”, that traces the history of socialist trends in the Soviet dissident milieu between the mid-1950s and the Gorbachev reforms of the mid-1980s. It is a fascinating and valuable piece of work.

Budraitskis describes how a “wave of social discontent” in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, echoing the workers’ revolts in Hungary, Poland and the German Democratic Republic — from large-scale riots in Chechnya (1958) and Kazakhstan (1959) to protests and attacks on Communist party offices in Murom and Aleksandrov (1961) and culminating in the Novercherkassk rebellion (1962) — formed the background not only to the twentieth Communist Party congress (1956) and Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalinist “thaw”, but also to the emergence of the first big wave of socialist dissident groups. They were mostly made up of students and young workers in larger cities, they always met in secret, were usually isolated from each other, and their activity was almost always cut short by arrests.

In the early 1970s, the conservative wing of the Soviet dissident movement, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at its head, lurched politically to the right

There had been precursors, in the last years of Stalin’s rule, such as the “Communist Party of Youth” (formed in Voronezh in 1948) and the “Union of Struggle for the Cause of Revolution” (formed in Moscow in 1951). These student groups were soon crushed by arrests and long prison sentences. But the “thaw” of the late 1950s and early 1960s brought such public forums as gatherings in Moscow for poetry reading and discussion at the statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and a corresponding widening of political activity.
 

The meaning of socialism, then and now

In the early 1970s, the conservative wing of the Soviet dissident movement, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at its head, lurched politically to the right, and Budraitskis’s account of this was for me one of the most interesting passages.

In 1974, soon after his forced emigration, Solzhenitsyn launched a broadside against the idea of socialism in general, and the socialist dissidents particularly. One of his chief targets was the historian Roy Medvedev, who from the late 1960s, influenced by “Eurocommunism”, had advocated “the democratisation of the economy, education and structures of power”, aims that he believed could be pursued both through samizdat (illegal publications) and through official channels, including pressure on elements in the Communist party.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Heinrich Böll’s home, Germany, 1974. CC BY-SA 3.0 Dutch National Archives / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.

Budraitskis describes how tensions between Medvedev on one side, and Solzhenitsyn and the physicist Andrei Sakharov on the other, came to a head over, among other things, the wording of an appeal to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in defence of the socialist poet Pablo Neruda. Medvedev scorned a sympathetic reference to Pinochet’s “epoch of Chilean renaissance and consolidation” (which had of course been founded on the killing and torture of thousands of his opponents).

In a collection of essays From Under The Rubble (1974), Solzhenitsyn denounced “cleaned-up” Marxists whose differences with the official line were “insignificant”. He clearly had Medvedev in mind. The latter responded in samizdat that, for Solzhenitsyn, “in general there is no difference at all between the idea of socialism and its implementation in reality”; socialism had won out in countries such as Russia and China precisely because the suffering of millions of people there under capitalism had been so severe. Budraitskis writes:

For a significant part of the samizdat readership, though, these conclusions were hardly convincing. On the contrary, Medvedev’s position was considered to be comfortable and collaborationist, by comparison with the uncompromising author of The Gulag Archipelago [i.e. Solzhenitsyn].
It was precisely at this time that the dissident milieu began to see the use of Marxist language — which was completely dominant in Soviet politics and academia (where Medvedev worked) — as negative in and of itself. “In oppositional ideological discussions, Marxism was taken to be a ‘Soviet language’, which it was indecent to use.”

This issue starts, in my view, to get to the heart of the problems faced not only by Soviet dissidents, but by anyone who wants to understand socialism in the light of the Russian revolution and the Soviet experience. My fervent plea to Budraitskis would be to develop this theme further.
The underground dissident groups of the 1960s and 1970s about which Budraitskis writes, who had neither Medvedev’s privileges nor Solzhenitsyn’s fame, braved the danger of arrest and imprisonment precisely to try to recover the meaning of “socialism”. Having so inspired 19th-century workers’ movements, and the Russian workers, peasants and soldiers who made the 1917 revolution, this idea had — by the post-war period in the Soviet Union — had its meaning completely mangled. The lifeless “Marxist” prose of every school textbook was the butt of a thousand jokes. This language had indeed become indecent. I remember clearly how, when I first visited the Soviet Union, in 1990, I declared myself a socialist to militants in the newly-independent trade union movements — and they looked at me as though I had two heads. The positive connotations of the word in my naive western mind simply did not register with their life experience of “socialism”.

The socialist idea had been trashed; the meaning of words had been turned inside-out. This was the problem that — unknown to me, and probably unknown to those workers too — the dissidents had been arguing about in the 1970s. Today, in the time of the “socialist” Bashar al-Assad and the “communist” Xi Jinping, it remains unresolved.

Budraitskis’s essay on the centenary of the Russian revolution, “A Heritage Without Inheritors”, did not bring clarity to this issue. He argues that “the aim of the transition to socialism did not arise out of the dynamic of class struggle itself” — rather, it was posed as a Kantian imperative.
“The Leninist party took upon itself this moral burden: the transition to socialism in a country that was by any definition unprepared for it.” Fair enough. But what was this “socialism” that the Bolsheviks was trying to build? What was the corrosive effect of this “socialist construction” on the understanding, in Russia and beyond its borders too, of socialism as an aim?

To my mind, the search for a meaningful soul of socialism is more effectively pursued in Budraitskis’ research of the dissidents. He explains how State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin became a key text for the socialist dissidents of the 1960s. That most hopeful and democratic of Lenin’s pre-revolutionary attempts to discuss what a future socialist state might be like was — unlike many more far-sighted and utopian imaginings by 19th century European socialists and anarchists — officially published, and therefore widely available, in the Soviet Union.

The Leningrad dissident Mikhail Molostvov, who formed a discussion group in 1956 and was soon afterwards sent to a prison camp for seven years, recalled in his memoirs a worker who went around libraries, underlining in copies of State and Revolution passages calling for the regular election and recall of all officials, and for their pay to be limited to the average. Another dissident of that generation, Boris Vail, met workers in his prison camp who had been arrested after re-covering officially published copies of Lenin’s book with jackets picturing barbed wire.

These stories reminded me that Solzhenitsyn’s early novels — which, notwithstanding his lurch to the right in the 1970s, remain for me a profound contribution to my understanding of Stalinism — are full of references to these very issues. In The First Circle, he riffs on Lenin’s musings in State and Revolution about every cook being able to participate in state administration. Stalin’s thoughts, as imagined by Solzhenitsyn, were that Lenin had made
promises that turned into a rod for Stalin’s back. Every cook will be able to run the state? What on earth was he [Lenin] thinking, concretely? That every cook on Fridays won’t cook, but will go and work in the district executive office? A cook is a cook: she has to prepare meals. But directing people — that is a great calling, which can be trusted only to special cadres, specially selected cadres.

Characters in The First Circle (chapter 90) discuss the mind-bending “just inequality” (?!) that characterised the Soviet Union. In Cancer Ward, Pavel Rusanov, the personnel officer and bully who personifies the Soviet “workers’ state”, is subject to a withering denunciation by the central hero, Oleg Kostoglotov. What do you know about work, he asks, when you have such lily-white hands?

In these books, written and published both in samizdat and in the west by the end of the 1960s, Solzhenitsyn had, clearly, already broken free of the constraints of official Soviet “Marxism” and its contorted language — at a time when he had not yet developed a clearly anti-socialist ideology. Did the socialist student and worker dissidents also make such a break? Or did they, like Roy Medvedev, remain constrained in a linguistic, and therefore to some extent ideological, framework, set by officialdom? Budraitskis’ fascinating quotations from their political manifestos, many of which characterised the Soviet economy as exploitative and its political regime as hierarchical, left me wanting to know more.

Some of the left-wing dissidents saw the USSR, for all its reactionary characteristics, as a stepping-stone towards a truly socialist society

There are related questions, about the extent to which the prison camp writers, of which Solzhenitsyn was the best known, influenced the small groups of students and workers that Budraitskis has researched. To what extent did those groups integrate the camps — that in many ways were a world apart — into their understanding of Soviet society and economy? Had they read Solzhenitsyn? And Varlam Shalamov? I imagine he was far closer in spirit than Solzhenitsyn was to the left-wing dissidents — in his socialist humanism, in the way that his politics were shaped when he was young in the workers’ movement of the 1920s, and even in the bleak pessimism of his later writings.

Here too, I am looking with the eyes of an outsider, who read these books not in samizdat but in the comfort of my London home. But I am perhaps not the only western reader for whom Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov were stepping stones, and who needs to try to join these up with the stepping stones that Budraitskis is pointing to.
 

Analysis in the underground

Budraitskis’ focus on the small underground groups, who were far less visible than the internationally-known dissidents, is welcome. Those who considered themselves socialists almost all characterised the Soviet system as an exploitative one with class divisions, he explains. Revolt Pimenov, who with Boris Vail established a dissident group in Leningrad in 1956-1957, drafted theses asserting that in the USSR, “the state has become the only capitalist, the only landlord and the only thinker”. For Pimenov, Budraitskis writes, the Soviet economy was “state capitalist”; state property could not be socialised property; and state property and socialism were mutually exclusive. Another Leningrad group, organised by Mikhail Molostvov, while declaring Stalinism and Trotskyism both to have taken a bureaucratic road, nevertheless advanced a political programme that, unlike Pimenov’s, clearly saw the road ahead through reforms, advocating that “the mass of working people are brought into the management of the country”.

Some of the left-wing dissidents — if I have understood Budraitskis’s account correctly — saw the USSR, for all its reactionary characteristics, as a stepping-stone towards a truly socialist society. For example the Union of Communards, set up in Leningrad in the 1960s, entitled its main platform document “from the dictatorship of the bureaucracy to the dictatorship of the proletariat”, and included an epigraph by Lenin advocating a republic where there would be election and recall of all officials, and “no police, no army and no state bureaucracy”.

Andrey Sakharov joins Revolt Pimenov during his 1989 election campaign in Syktyvkar, Komi Republic. Source: Bohemian Petersburg.

Another significant aspect of the socialist dissidents’ politics was their internationalism, which in the 1950s underpinned their support for workers’ revolts in eastern Europe, and in 1968 for the “Prague spring”. Budraitskis underlines the role of socialist dissidents in Ukraine and other non-Russian Soviet republics, whose attempts to combine ideas of socialism with those of national liberation from Russian imperialism would stand in sharp contrast to the increasingly strident nationalism of Solzhenitsyn and other right-wing Russian dissidents.

The end of the Khrushchev political “thaw” in the mid 1960s opened a new chapter in the history of the dissident milieu. The hopes among the most reformist elements for the “self reform” of the Soviet bureaucracy had been dashed. Socialist dissidence, Budraitskis argues, continued in two parallel trends: one that worked in the dissident milieu and human rights organisations in the big cities, including prominent figures such as Roy Medvedev; the other comprising “underground socialist groups, continuing in the traditions of the ‘thaw’”.

In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, such groups appeared and reappeared repeatedly, across the Soviet Union: Budraitskis writes of groups in Chisinau (Moldova), Odessa (Ukraine), Tallinn (Estonia), Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk, Ukraine), Ryazan, Saratov, Petrozavodsk, Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) and Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), as well as in Leningrad and Moscow. “Practically all of them took positions of Marxism and ‘cleaned-up’ Leninism, considered the [Communist] party to have degenerated and the USSR to be some type or other of exploitative society.” This was the background against which the clash between Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn was played out.

The Soviet dictatorship relied heavily on controlling and limiting the flow of information (and in this respect at least can not be replicated in the 21st century), and the dissident groups worked in suffocating isolation, often learning of each other’s existence only in the prison camps. Budraitskis’ essay is the first I know of by a post-Soviet socialist to start to summarise, compare and think about their experiences collectively — something that was hardly possible at the time. I hope it will soon be translated into other languages, and that the discussion of the dissidents’ legacy will be conducted not only in the former Soviet countries, but internationally, where their heroic battles to recover the meaning of socialism from its Soviet imprisonment are no less significant.

Ilya Budraitskis comments: how circumstances defined the possibility of a “third position”
I may say that I am doubly grateful to Gabriel Levy for his response to my book: this is a review not only by an attentive and educated reader, but also by a politically engaged person, a socialist activist who almost three decades ago witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Levy’s political position helped him to evaluate that dramatic process in all its diversity and contradiction: on one hand, the atmosphere of social animation, the intensive searches for democratic alternatives to the Soviet system, the widespread mineworkers’ strikes, and the rapid growth of the independent trade unions; and, on the other, the brutal primitive accumulation, the destructive transition to the market, the mass impoverishment, and the beginning of the evolution of the post-Soviet political regime, the results of which we are still living through today, with all the consequences.

This experience gave rise to questions which, in essence, have for the past two decades not been seriously considered on the Russian left. What were the objective reasons for the collapse of “really existing socialism”? What can we, and must we, counterpose to the historical and political speculation on the Soviet legacy both by the authorities and the liberal opposition? And finally, how can we establish a relationship between our own historical continuity and the Russian socialist tradition of the twentieth century?

My collection Dissidents Among Dissidents obviously did not exhaust these questions, but I hope that it helped to pose them correctly. The texts included in the volume, including the outline of the history of the Soviet Union’s socialist dissidents, are in one way or another related to establishing the possibility of a “third position” between uncritical apologetics for the Soviet system and aggressive anti-communism.

Today, the rhetoric of the “New Cold War” — the second time it’s returned more as “farce” than “tragedy” — brings back the logic of an enforced choice between two opposing camps, a logic to which so many intellectuals in the past, from Sartre to Sakharov, were subordinated. Attempts to get away from that choice, and from the loss of political independence that it signified, were all too often seen as evasions of responsibility, as indifference to the real struggle for social emancipation or for human rights (which in the binary logic of the cold war were made to stand in opposition to each other).

In this way, the possibility of a “third position” came to be defined not as a once-and-for-all dogma, but by the force of concrete circumstances. The socialist dissidents, who criticised the Soviet regime from the left, acted under the constant pressure of these circumstances — not only repression by the Soviet regime, but also the “right turn” in the mood of the intelligentsia, so evident from the beginning of the 1970s. (The issue of the contradictory social and political character of the Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia is the subject of another of the essays in my collection.)

The collapse of the USSR resulted in the collapse of the Soviet intelligentsia as a social group, with all the consciousness specific to it. The striking cultural artefacts of the late 1980s and early 1990s that Gabriel mentioned essentially reflected this phase, of both the disintegration of the intelligentsia’s way of thinking, and the fragmentation of social consciousness in general. From the epoch of glasnost (with its bold engagement with the traumas of the past, that had previously been forbidden), the intelligentsia moved to the postmodernism of the 1990s. The other side of that coin often turned out to be dogmatic political judgments — above all, with respect to the eternal ghost of the “Soviet”, which blocked the transition of post-Soviet Russia to global modernity and “normality”. (I wrote about this in the article “The eternal hunt for the Red Man”, also in my book.)  

It seems to me that the ideas presented in Dissidents Among Dissidents may be of significance not only for Russian leftists but also in the context of current discussions internationally of the political nature of modern Russia and its relationship with the Soviet past.

Note from the author: If others wish to join this discussion, please email me with contributions, which – within the usual guidelines (see here) – I’ll be happy to publish.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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Marx’s contribution to the understanding of capitalism can be usefully seen through two profound insights that he had into this system. The first concerns the origin of surplus value. In a world of commodities where exchange between commodity-owners, among whom are also the workers, occurs voluntarily and at equivalence, without any swindle, how can surplus value arise?

The solution to this riddle that Marx discovered lies in a distinction between labour and labour-power. What the workers sell is not their labour but their labour-power, i.e. their capacity to work, which becomes a commodity, and like all commodities, has a value equal to the total amount of direct and indirect labour-time that goes into the production of a unit of it, which in this case implies what is embodied in the subsistence basket required for the production and reproduction of a unit of labour-power. Labour-power as a commodity, however, has this unique property that its use, which is the actual expenditure of labour-time, creates value. The origin of surplus value lies in the fact that the value which labour-power is made to create is larger than its own value. Even with equivalent exchange therefore, i.e. even when all commodities exchange at their values, a surplus value arises.

This profound insight has a number of implications. First, it provides a succinct and rigorous definition of capitalism, as a system of generalised commodity production where labour-power itself has become a commodity. This also means that the duality that characterises any simple commodity-producing economy, between the “thing”-aspect of entities and their relational aspect, such as use value-exchange value, labour process- value creation process, product-commodity, concrete labour-abstract labour, now becomes even more pervasive: means of subsistence-variable capital, surplus product-surplus value, and so on.

Secondly, surplus value is created in this system not in the sphere of exchange, but in the sphere of production. Since capitalist firms as commodity producers are engaged in competition against one another where the high-cost producers are eliminated over time, the pressure to cut costs necessarily takes the form of introducing new methods and new products, i.e. of continuously revolutionising the methods of production. This incessant drive to revolutionise production is what distinguishes capitalism from all previous modes of production, and it is linked to the fact that surplus value originates in the sphere of production.

Thirdly, since the ability to introduce new methods depends upon the size of the capital-unit, with larger capitals having an edge over, and driving out, smaller capitals, every unit of capital is under pressure to increase its size through accumulation. Accumulation of capital, in short, occurs because of the pressure exerted upon each unit of capital by the fact of competition within the system. But of course, even though each unit of capital desperately acts to avoid losing out in this Darwinian struggle for existence, some necessarily do lose out, because of which there is a process of centralisation of capital, i.e. the formation of larger and larger blocs of capital, which occurs over time. (This ultimately leads to the emergence of monopoly capitalism where explicit or implicit price agreements are reached among capitalists without of course eliminating competition which now takes other forms).

Fourthly, for the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists to continue, the value of labour-power must always be less than the value it creates, which means that the system must never run short of labour-power. This, in turn, requires that there must always be a reserve army of labour in addition to the active army of labour employed by the capitalists. This reserve army is created by capital accumulation itself which through the process of centralisation of capital and through the destruction of petty production, continuously pushes people into the ranks of labourers. Since the absolute size of the reserve army keeps increasing, alongside that of the active army, as capital accumulation occurs, the growth of wealth at one pole is necessarily accompanied by the growth of poverty at another.

English Classical economists had attributed the fact that wages were kept at a subsistence level to the tendency among workers to breed excessively in the event of getting above subsistence wages. This utterly repugnant idea was rejected by Marx who called the Malthusian Theory of Population, upon which it was based, “a libel on the human race”. He adduced instead the social reasons we have mentioned for wages being stuck at the subsistence level.

Fifthly, the origin of the system itself lies in a separation of producers from their means of production and a concentration of these means of production in fewer hands so that two classes of commodity-owners, one with means of production and subsistence in their hands and the other with nothing to sell but their labour-power get created and come “face to face and into contact”. This fundamental dichotomy is reproduced over time through the operation of the system itself.

Sixthly, through the continuous revolutionising of the methods of production, labour productivity increases over time. But the existence of the reserve army of labour always acts ceteris paribus to keep wages at a historically-determined subsistence level, which may at best increase slowly over time. Since wages are more or less fully consumed, while only a proportion of surplus value is, this keeps down consumption demand in the economy relative to the value of output; if all unconsumed surplus value was used for accumulation solely in the form of additions to the stock of constant and variable capital, then there would never be any problem of deficiency of aggregate demand relative to the value of output, as Say’s Law had postulated. But since accumulation can take the form of adding to money capital, the rise in the share of surplus value in the total value of output gives rise to a tendency towards crises of over-production.

Marx had drawn attention to several different kinds of crisis which could arise within the system, including through a rise in the organic composition of capital, i.e. in the ratio of constant to variable capital. But his recognition of over-production crises because of the money-using nature of capitalism, which necessarily made money a form of holding wealth, not only marked an advance over English Classical economists who had accepted Say’s Law, but anticipated by three quarters of a century the so-called Keynesian Revolution, which was developed during the Great Depression of the 1930s in order to comprehend it.

This fundamental insight into the nature of exploitation under capitalism and the fact that the system reproduces its exploitative nature and the contradictions arising from it, through its own operation, was integrated in turn into his insight into a basic characteristic of the system, namely that it is a spontaneous system.While it functions through the actions undertaken by a host of individual entities, these individuals act the way they do because they are coerced by the system into doing so. The system therefore is essentially a self-driven one, whose self-driven nature is mediated by individual actions but actions that are themselves determined by the logic of the system. Any individual who does not act in ways demanded by the system loses his or her place within it and falls by the wayside, such as for instance a capitalist who decides not to undertake accumulation. And the actions of individuals in their totality give rise to certain immanent tendencies that characterise the system, such as the tendency towards centralisation of capital, the tendency towards pervasive commoditisation, the tendency towards an expanded reproduction of the reserve army of labour, the tendency towards the expropriation of petty producers, the tendency towards the production of wealth at one pole and poverty at another; and so on.

This second insight of Marx too has a number of profound implications. Contrary to its claim that it ensures individual freedom, capitalism is characterised by universal alienation, where every economic agent is coerced to act in ways not of his or her own volition. Even the capitalist is alienated under capitalism, with no freedom to act according to own volition, but coerced to act in specific ways because of the Darwinian struggle in which all capitalists are engaged. Marx called the capitalist “capital personified”, indicating that the capitalist’s persona was simply a vehicle for the acting out of the immanent tendencies of capital.

Secondly the “spontaneity” of the system means that it was not a malleable one where any change in its economic functioning and outcome can be brought about through political intervention. Indeed the normal role of political intervention by the capitalist State is to reinforce the “spontaneity” of the system, in the sense of hastening the achievement of its immanent tendencies. But even if perchance under certain circumstances the “spontaneity” of the system is restricted through political intervention, such restriction makes the system dysfunctional, necessitating either further intervention to alter the system or a rolling back of the original intervention itself to restore the “spontaneity”.

The case for socialism arises precisely because of this “spontaneity”. If capitalism had been a malleable system where any kind of “reforms” could be successfully and enduringly carried out for making it more humane, more “worker-friendly”, more “socially responsible”, more egalitarian, and more “welfarist”, then there would be little point in arguing for its transcendence by a socialist order. But the “spontaneity” of the system prevents such malleability, makes any significant reforms in it untenable, makes “welfare capitalism” a contradiction in terms as a sustainable phenomenon, which is why it has to be transcended.

Socialism correspondingly has to be seen as an altogether different order, a non-“spontaneous” one. The difference between capitalism and socialism lies not just in the fact that the latter is associated with the ownership of the means of production by the State on behalf of society as a whole: if State-owned firms competed against one another on the market as capitalist firms do, then they would reproduce the anarchy of capitalism together with crises, unemployment and many of the immanent tendencies of capitalism. This difference does not also lie just in the fact that incomes are better distributed under socialism: that too can be undone over time if the tendency towards creating a reserve army of labour is allowed to persist. The difference lies in the fact that socialism is not driven by any immanent economic tendencies, so that the working people can consciously shape their economic destiny through collective political intervention. A socialist economy has to be one that makes this possible.

But how can socialism ever come into being if capitalism coerces all individuals to act in ways demanded by its own logic? Marx’s answer was that capitalism, despite promoting competition, fragmentation and alienation among the workers, also enables them to come together through “combinations”. This represents a rupture in the enactment of its inner logic; and this rupture, aided by a theoretical understanding that sees the system from the “outside”, i.e. from a perspective of “epistemic exteriority”, leads to praxis for socialism.

A basic difference between Marxism and liberalism is that the latter, notwithstanding all its emphasis on individual freedom, sees this freedom as being constrained only by the State or by some individuals or groups, but never by the system itself. That is because it takes all economic relationships to have been entered into voluntarily; it never recognises that individuals may have been coerced into entering economic relationships.

The coercion of the economic system which Marx highlighted, does not reside only in its acting as a constraint upon individual projects and actions. On the contrary, capitalism is driven by immanent tendencies within whose web the individual is caught. Freedom of the individual therefore, far being realised under capitalism, requires for its realisation the transcendence of capitalism by socialism which is free of any immanent tendencies. The existence of these immanent tendencies under capitalism also explains why a necessary condition for all emancipation, whether from caste or gender or ethnic or other oppressions, is the transcendence of this system. Socialism is a necessary condition for ending all oppression.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism in Capital looks at the capitalist system in isolation; its interactions with the pre-capitalist modes of production surrounding it, are not discussed, despite their obvious importance. This is curious since at the very time that Marx was working on Capital he was also reading extensively on British colonial impact on India on which he wrote a series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune. His not integrating imperialism into his analysis of capitalism was perhaps because he was pre-occupied at the time with a Proletarian Revolution in Western Europe which he thought was imminent. But in later life he turned his attention to other regions, as the prospects of a West European Revolution receded. And just two years before his death he wrote a letter to N.F. Danielson the Narodnik economist where he talked about the massive “drain” of surplus from India to Britain.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism in short must be seen as the starting point, not the end, of such analysis. The task of developing Marxism both by incorporating imperialism into the analysis, in Marx’s own context, and by examining subsequent developments, falls on later Marxist authors, which is precisely what Lenin had done. And when such filling in is done, several of Marx’s basic insights into capitalism are vindicated even more strongly.

For instance when the persistent encroachment by capitalism into the surrounding petty production economy is considered, which squeezes or displaces such producers without absorbing them into capitalism’s active army of labour, Marx’s insight that the system produces wealth at one pole and poverty at another gets immensely strengthened. In fact those who argue against Marx’s prognosis by saying that such polarisation has not occurred in lands where capitalism had first triumphed, ignore typically this dialectical relation between capitalism and its surrounding world. Marx’s insights are actually strengthened by “going beyond” what Marx had originally written.

The same is true of Marx’s revolutionary project. When capitalism is seen in its totality, incorporating imperialism, the prospects and possibilities of revolution become immensely greater; for we then talk no longer only of a proletarian revolution in developed capitalist countries but also of a democratic revolution based on a worker-peasant alliance even in countries where capitalism is less developed, with even the latter revolution proceeding in stages towards socialism. The prospects of a worker-peasant alliance which Lenin had conceptualised as arising from capitalism’s incapacity to carry forward the anti-feudal revolution in countries where it arrived late, become additionally strengthened when we cognise capitalism’s encroachment upon the economy of the petty producers, which pushes the latter into destitution and suicides even in the current highly “modern” era of globalisation.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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If there is a founding document of social democracy it is Eduard Bernstein’s ‘Evolutionary Socialism’. Written in 1899, it taught the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that capitalism had permanently stabilised; that socialism would be achieved through parliament – not the industrial class struggle – and that the working class of the 20^th century would be neither culturally homogeneous nor spontaneously socialist.

Social-democrats should stop waiting for a mega-crisis to kill capitalism, stop obsessing about mass strikes and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and make a moral case that, while capitalism had improved the workers’ lot, socialism could do it better. [i]

The stability lasted a mere 15 years, ending on the day Bernstein’s party voted for the war budget of Kaiser Wilhelm II. By 1919 the dictatorship of the proletariat was an actuality – not just in Russia but in Bavaria and Hungary. What was left of the SPD entered the first coalition government of the Weimar Republic where, on Bernstein’s advice, it resisted the attempts of its own left wing to “socialise” the economy and ruthlessly suppressed the communist left.

If there is a re-founding document of social democracy, it is Anthony Giddens’ book ‘Beyond Left and Right’. Published in 1994 it emerged, like Bernstein’s work, from a critique of orthodox Marxism. Like Bernstein, Giddens argued that the structure of capitalism had changed, creating conditions that made the old programme of state-led socialism permanently impossible. Once crystallised into the doctrine of the Third Way, in the 1998 book of the same name, Giddens’ ideas provided the ideological frame for social-democratic governments in Britain, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands, and for Bill Clinton’s second term in office.

Unlike Bernstein, Giddens never claimed capitalism had become permanently stable; instead it had become permanently mercurial in a way that was potentially benign, so long as progressive governments could take control. The task of social-democrats was to help working class people survive amid the permanent insecurity and disempowerment that globalisation had unleashed. Instead of a programme to clear the capitalist jungle, social-democracy would become a kind of survival kit.

The general crisis of social democracy is happening because the world Giddens described has vanished. The world of Trump, Putin, Erdogan and Xi Jinping is as different to the world of Blair and Schroeder as the street fights of Weimar were to the peaceful, electoral socialism of the 1890s.

Twice, then, in the space of a century, social democracy has entered crisis because its strategic project came to be based on conditions that ceased to exist. If we survey the remnants of centrist social democracy and social liberalism – Renzi in Italy, Schulz in Germany, Hillary Clinton in the USA and the Progress wing of the British Labour Party – the image that springs to mind is of shipwreck survivors clinging to pieces of wreckage.

Schulz clings to Merkel, Renzi wanted to cling to Berlusconi, but they both lost so many votes it became pointless. Hillary Clinton clings to Wall Street. Labour’s Progress wing clings to the possibility that a new, Macron-style centrist force will emerge to save it from the nightmare of the Corbyn leadership. All of them are clinging to a form of globalisation that has failed; and for the Europeans it has become obligatory to cling to the Europe of the Lisbon Treaty – even as this, too, is failing.

To renew social democracy we have to do what Bernstein and Giddens were trying to do: construct an analysis of the world we live in. Both argued from premises concerning the future dynamics of capitalism, the role of the state in the economy, and the atomisation of class structures, cultures and alliances that had prevailed in the decades before them. Significantly, both were critically engaged with, and borrowed eclectically from, the Marxist method of historical materialism – a method of no concern to the party apparatchiks who used their theories as adornments for the project of managing capitalism.

Starting from a material analysis of the world – rather than a list of policies, tactics and principles – is a tradition that got lost inside European social democracy during the neoliberal era. Neoliberalism’s ideological premise was always anti-theoretical: don’t ask why this kind of economy exists, or how long it can last – just accept it as permanent and get on with making it better.

So amid the panic – as the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) draws level with the German SPD in opinion polls, and as the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) slumps below 20% while populists and xenophobes surge – we must start by analysing the situation, not by issuing frantic demands that the word “go back to normal”.

***

If neoliberalism is broken, what exactly is the central mechanism that has failed? It cannot be that the collapse of a mere banking system has turned large parts of the population of the West against universal rights and cosmopolitan social arrangements.

Goldsmiths University economist William Davies offers two definitions of neoliberalism which explain why the world Giddens described – and fairly accurately – has disappeared.[ii]

The first is “the elevation of marked-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms”. Davies points out that neoliberalism, over time, became less about the creation of exchange-based relationships and more about the imposition of competitive behaviour in areas where no market could exist.

School league tables and global university rankings are just two examples of this – a third being the fake tendering process which has seen billions in public service contracts handed to firms like Carillion and Interserve. For Davies, it is economic calculation – not markets per se – that is being coercively forced into all aspects of life under the neoliberal system. That leads to his second, pithier, definition of neoliberalism: “the disenchantment of politics by economics”.

Neoliberalism failed because it was not a solution to the problems of the Keynesian system but, in fact, a work-around. What caused the ruin of both models was their inability to sustain both productivity and corporate profitability.

Between 1989 and 2008 growth was driven by unsustainable financial expansion, by fiscal deficits, by the rapid catch-up of Asia and Latin America, and by the expansion of the working population. In 2008 a global system reliant on financial fiction exploded. As a result, we now have a global economy kept afloat by $19 trillion of central bank money creation, by the permanent socialisation of banking risk, and where many of the advanced industrial countries exhibit the following features:
 

1. Rising inequality boosted by the surge in asset values triggered by quantitative easing.
2. Entire sectors dominated by rent-seeking monopolies.
3. A global financial elite clustered around the defence of its strategic privilege – which is to keep its wealth in offshore jurisdictions and unavailable to the tax collectors of nation states, and therefore immune to redistribution.
4. High under-employment and precarious work, as millions of people are employed in what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”; real wages failing to keep up with the rising asset wealth of the 1%; and a historically low wage share.
5. A global market that has begun to fragment along regional and national lines; the stalling of trade liberalisation treaties; the Balkanisation of finance systems and the information economy; and the beginnings of an open trade war.

There are typically three kinds of response to this situation among national political elites. The first is to try to maintain the status quo, resulting in the continued rise of inequality, continued impoverishment of workers and the lower middle class. This is the approach of Macron in France, Merkel in Germany and the liberal-conservative Remain lobby in the UK.

The second is a kind of “nationalist neoliberalism”: the attempt to deepen the coercive introduction of market mechanisms through a partial break with the multilateral global trade system. This is the intention behind the European Research Group (ERG) inside the UK Conservative Party: to scrap environmental and safety regulations, and to scrap – as Liz Truss wants – professional licensing and qualifications that are said to “suppress growth” by insisting that doctors, airline pilots or physiotherapists must be licensed and therefore difficult to replace with the precariat.

It is, in effect, “Thatcherism in One Country” – and it also forms the unacknowledged common ground between the three factions of the German right: the AfD wants deeper free market reforms but no immigration; the Free Democratic Party (FPD) wants Germany to double down on gaming the Eurosystem to let the rest of Europe go hang; so effectively does the right wing faction of the Christian Social Union (CSU) around Alexander Dobrindt who, for good measure, wants a “revolution” to roll society back to a pre-1968 social conservatism.

A third response – best illustrated in Europe by the Law and Justice government in Poland – is to break overtly both with neoliberal economics and “liberal democracy”. Law and Justice has secured a 49% poll rating not only through crass nationalism and dog-whistle antisemitism, but by daily verbal attacks on “liberal democracy” and the elites who profit from it, and by distributing significant universal welfare payments to working class people. Liberal democracy gets in the way of the real democracy – which is the will of the white, Catholic Polish people, untrammelled by such things as an independent media, judiciary and multilateral obligations. That is the message of Law and Justice.

None of these responses can remedy the breakdown of neoliberalism strategically. The problem is, however, two of them could work temporarily and locally, providing that the national elite concerned is prepared to renege on multilateral obligations to its trading partners. In the 1930s such attitudes were described as “beggar thy neighbour”. In modern parlance, it’s about being prepared to say to other countries: fuck you.

Law and Justice has placed itself on a collision course with the European Commission, while the Tory ERG wants Britain to stage a hard, confrontational exit from the EU altogether. Trump, likewise, with tax cuts that will boost America’s debt pile and a trade war over steel, is determined to deliver a revival of prosperity in the USA at the expense of its key trading partners.

Social democracy’s problem is that for 30 years it moulded its project around the priorities of the neoliberal model, and around the certainty that a multilateral global system would (a) always exist, and (b) deepen.

Both conditions have been falsified, while the neoliberal elite’s priorities are rapidly evolving to adapt to the growing power of authoritarian kleptocrats and the Mafiosi who trail behind them.

The basic problem with the Macron strategy – carry on regardless with a globalised free market – is that it cannot be done by standing still: you have to double down on the coercive imposition of competitive behaviours and values onto a population weary of being coerced. You have to renew TTIP; you have to do more privatisations; you have to go expanding the EU to the East, pulling in yet more xenophobic and corrupt national elites. If we return to Davies’ definitions (the elevation of market principles to state endorsed norms, and the disenchantment of politics by economics), we can say with certainty that these are strategies that no longer work. People have had enough of free market coercion and are prepared to “re-enchant” economic decision making with the only things that lie to hand: nationalism and xenophobia on the one hand, radical anti-authoritarianism, feminism, environmentalism and leftism on the other.
To renew social democracy, we need to stop clinging to the wreckage. Even though it was mainly window dressing for Blair and Clinton, the Third Way was a serious and coherent theory. Some of its premises survive even though, as a practical project, it is dying.

***
Giddens’ framework for radical politics in the neoliberal era consisted of six priorities. The first, to “repair damaged solidarities”, involved recognising that even the free-est market makes people interdependent. While the neoliberal right would have us stab each other in the back, people with a stiletto between their shoulder-blades will still need a hospital to go to.

Second, social democracy had to accept that instead of improved economic conditions, people would fight over “life politics” – that is for the individual freedom to behave as they please. Unequal opportunities to do so – as we are today seeing with the #MeToo movement – could, he said, be a much stronger driver of protest and radicalism than pure economic inequality.

Third, in place of solidarity there would have to be “generative politics”: social democracy had to create a space between the state and the market in which people could do things for themselves, which neither the state nor the market were capable of delivering.

Fourth, recognising that globalization would weaken the formal democracy of states, Giddens called for a democracy of self-help groups and social movements. These, it was understood, should forget trying to bend the state to their wishes – it was irrevocably under the control of corporations and destined to shrink – but they could achieve stuff for themselves, empower themselves, and boost their own emotional literacy in the process.

Fifth, the left must be prepared to rip up the welfare state. Instead of a safety net designed to protect people against “what might happen”, it had to be a kind of survival guide. The welfare state, said Giddens, was sexist, bureaucratic, impersonal and never fully eradicated poverty anyway.

Finally and perceptively, Giddens warned that a neoliberal global order would lead to violence, and that the left needed to find ways to mitigate that. When social conflict occurs in a globalised free market, Giddens said, you can’t solve it by coexisting or by separation.

“No culture, state or large group can with much success isolate itself from the global cosmopolitan order,” Giddens wrote.[iii] As a result, conflicts would lead more quickly to open violence and the left would have to be the party of dialogue not conflict.

What strikes me today about this political framework, on which Third Way social democracy was built, is its absolutism. The state would wither, the market would triumph, the welfare state would have to be abandoned, class solidarity would collapse, and individual lifestyle politics would dictate everything. This was the assumption.

But nearly 25 years after its publication all of the things that were considered already gone are still here, even in a society like Britain which became under Major, Blair and Cameron a laboratory of social atomisation. The RMT union is still able to shut down London’s Tube network; the welfare budget still makes up 34% of all state spending in the UK; market experiments in the railway system have gone badly wrong. Even at my local tube station in London, there is a union rep who defies the management instruction to wear a name badge by sporting one with the word “Lenin”.

Though Giddens never subscribed to the “end of history” thesis, the assumption underpinning his project was that markets were efficient and tended towards equilibrium and prosperity. Like Bernstein, he created a formula for coping with capitalist stability that failed to survive the return of instability.

In the hands of Blair, Clinton and Schroeder these assumptions became an excuse for venal collaboration with the interests of corporations against those of the very people who voted for social democracy. But even in their purer, academic form, Giddens’ assumptions have been negated by the political, economic and social realities of the capitalism that emerged after 2008.

The most important fact about the new reality is that, since 2008, states, regions and communities have begun to attempt to exit the system. What was deemed impossible has become the dominant trend: the desire to cancel, reverse or block globalisation. Whether it be the globalisation of workforces through migration, or the privatisation of the public realm in the name of trade liberalisation, or the impoverishment of industrial communities through offshoring.

Interestingly, the very forces Blairism assumed were spent – community, trade unionism, working class identity and of course language and ethnicity – have been factors driving this rush for the exit, both to the left and right.

As Giddens predicted, such projects are met with violence – sometimes literally as the Catalan people found out on 1 October 2017 – and sometimes via the more subtle coercion of closing a nation’s banking system, as the Greeks experienced in June 2015.

But wherever the “exit” strategy is adopted, the key institution is the one Giddens – and Blair – assumed would have diminishing power in a neoliberal universe: the democratically elected national government.

As to what is driving the desire for exit, it is primarily insecurity. All over the world, state welfare provision has been ripped up, but not replaced by any new forms of solidarity as Giddens advocated. As I wrote in the first essay of this series, one of the huge drivers of populist anger and insecurity is the enhanced fear of “what might happen”, whether it’s the possibility of the working class person falling into the under-class because they lose their highly precarious job; or a migrant occupying a place in front of you in the doctor’s waiting room; or a home-grown jihadi terrorist blowing up your children at a pop concert.

“No more change!” was the demand campaigners in Thuringia told me they heard on the doorstep, from voters who had switched to the AfD. Ludicrous as it may sound to the paid-up technocrats who still believe in neoliberalism, it is a rational desire when change brings only stress, impoverishment and anxiety – and in this case perceived competition for a limited welfare and social budget.

Practically, far from empowering those from whom the safety net was removed, neoliberal policy during the crisis became increasingly focused on coercing them, as with the scandalous disability assessments by the DWP in the UK or in the mass incarceration programmes of black people in America which boomed under both Clinton and Obama.

Finally, and ironically, it has been the populist right and radical left, together with some cosmopolitan nationalist parties and environmental NGOs, who have engaged with the task of “repairing damaged solidarities”. Blairite social democracy might have urged people to discover the new solidarities of suburban life, or the professionalised workplace or the private members’ gym,  but these were unavailable to the newly impoverished lower-strata of the workforce neoliberalism created. They clung, instead, to what was left of their old solidarities, which – as I have described in ‘The Great Regression’ – were often stripped of their progressive content.[iv]

***

That the Third Way doctrine suffered the same ultimate fate as Bernstein’s “revisionism” is no accident: both were formulated during the upswing and stabilisation phases of a global economic model. Neither could survive the model’s crisis.

Indeed, understanding that our task today is to construct a “crisis politics” – not a survival guide for the losers within a successful form of capitalism – is the first step towards a solution. In subsequent contributions I will try to spell out the details. Here, however, it important to state the broad conclusions if you accept the idea that neoliberalism is over.

First, the rise of authoritarian nationalist projects among some western elites is both logical and inevitable, given their histories. You only have to listen to the British elite’s continuous dirge of devotion to Winston Churchill to understand how powerfully the myths, narratives and traditions of national bourgeoisies guide their actions, even in the age of Davos and globalised consumer culture.

When I asked Polish progressives at a seminar last month, “why is a section of the Polish elite prepared to break with globalisation and seek nation-centric and xenophobic solutions?”, they simply shrugged and said: “that’s what they did in the 1930s”.

It is not that the globalism of the elites during neoliberalism was fake – only that, in the entire history of industrial capitalism there have been only two modes of regulation: the nation-centric one and the multilateral globalist one. Most elite groups in the world have intellectual traditions that can accommodate both, and some are prepared to reach into the dark basement of those traditions to revive the nationalist ideologies that suited their grandparents. What sections of the elites and intelligentsias of Poland, Hungary, Italy and Austria are doing now is no mystery. It’s a reversion to type.

Second, the rise of authoritarian populism and xenophobic narratives among the populations of many western democracies is – as I argued in the first essay – the result of the breakdown of a coherent narrative and of intense perceptions of insecurity. The strategy of keeping the economy on life support does not keep the ideology that underpinned neoliberalism on life support. The reward for all the backstabbing, atomisation and conformity to market individualism was supposed to be prosperity. Once that disappeared, the story became incoherent.

It follows from this that social democracy – and the wider progressive movements it must ally with – needs to construct very quickly a new narrative about how the world gets better for you, your children, your community. People want to know how life becomes less insecure, and how change becomes more predictable and manageable. Unless the left answers that question, the xenophobic right will do so.

Third, logically the new project of social democracy must be framed around a radical break with neoliberalism. What is destroying our movement is that a whole generation of social democratic leaders have tied their personal prestige and identity to an economic model that no longer works.

Schulz wanted to keep Merkel in charge forever; Renzi in Italy would rather see Berlusconi in power than admit the grievances that are driving people towards the Northern League and the Five Star Movement were real. Indeed, when I spoke to Italian social democrats before the election disaster of 4 March, it was always the possibility of being beaten by Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, not the racist FI-Lega Nord alliance, that haunted them. In Britain, the spectacle of Haringey’s Labour leader Claire Kober self-destructing amid mass popular opposition to her housing privatisation project, is a vignette painted from the same colour scheme.

To be clear: a break with neoliberalism  means a limited, reversible and calibrated retreat from some aspects of globalisation.

To salvage what is salvageable from the global system we must prevent its implosion: that means preventing the chaotic breakup of the EU, the collapse of multilateral global trading arrangements and – the ultimate threat – a spate of mutual debt defaults during which everyone heads for the exit in a disorderly manner.

Here the analogy with trench warfare holds good. If the front trench is overrun, the last person standing in it is going to get bayoneted. Better to retreat to the next trench and defend that.

This has informed my approach to Brexit. The substantive issue was always going to be: what form does the semi-detached relationship of Britain to the EU take in future. I voted Remain because the alternative – which has now transpired – was Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg constructing Thatcherism in One Country, with Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ used as a handbook.

Because people were told freedom of movement was non-negotiable inside the EU, they voted to leave it. They did not believe the assurance that “ever closer union” no longer applied to the UK – and the actions of the European Commission during the Brexit negotiations have tended to confirm that suspicion.
Given that, it is neither possible nor desirable to use intrigue and elite chicanery to override the votes of 17 million people. What is possible is to persuade them to accept a limited – and thus reversible – semi-detachment from the EU in the form of a Norway style agreement, a customs union or something in-between.

The question for Europe’s social democrats is far bigger than the one that usually greets me in seminars and one-to-one meetings, which is “how do we emulate Corbyn?”. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that UK Labour’s current recovery and dynamism is premised on the fact that, first, Britain was always effectively exempt from the Maastricht rules mandating fiscal austerity.

Corbyn’s ability to draft a post-austerity manifesto, centred on a £250 billion borrowing programme and a £50 billion tax redistribution plan, together with some limited renationalisation and a state investment bank, was an act of imagination unavailable to Renzi, Sanchez and Schulz.

On top of that, Corbyn has – correctly – accepted the result of the Brexit referendum, refusing the invitation from the die-hard Blairite right to destroy his own party by labelling a third of Labour voters deluded xenophobes.

What lesson can the rest of European social democracy draw from Labour’s success? The exact lesson they refuse to draw: which is that “retreating to the second trench” means adopting as an overt goal a revision of the Lisbon Treaty in favour of greater social justice. Europe has to be redesigned to allow state aid, nationalisations, the equalisation of social safety nets and minimum wages – removing the Maastricht criteria on debt and borrowing which mandate austerity.

A Corbyn government in Britain, and a Sanders or similarly left-led Democratic Party government in the USA, would at least have some fiscal freedom. Until they can imagine themselves operating in the same way – either collectively across an alliance of core EU countries or individually – the European social democratic parties will go on destroying themselves for the sake of Lisbon and the Bundesbank. They should stop doing so.

***

Which brings us face to face with a general principle: over the next five years the venue in which authoritarian populism and economic nationalism have to be fought is the nation state itself, and state-level democratic institutions.

Trump will be beaten at the level of Federal elections, the Supreme Court and the FBI, not the WTO or the United Nations. Orban, Kaczinsky and the Blue-Black coalition in Austria will be beaten at the level of the national cultures, parliaments, intelligentsias and the national demos – not through the authority of the European Commission and tongue-lashings by Guy Verhofstadt in the Brussels parliament (welcome though these may be).

Done intelligently, and without conceding to the rhetoric of the right, a limited reassertion of economic sovereignty is going to be key to the revival of left politics both in Europe and the USA. Indeed, if it had been done five years ago then, like a flu jab, it might have prevented the current sickness.

Working out how to reform capitalism to meet the needs of those on stagnating wages and in precarious jobs becomes easier once you accept that the place that is going to be done is national parliaments and regional assemblies. They will still have to be constrained by multilateral agreements, but they will probably look more like the flexible deals that preceded the heyday of neoliberalism, not the inflexible ones that are currently falling apart. Customs unions, free trade areas, bilateral currency pegs, an exchange rate mechanism rather than a single currency for Europe, and a two-speed structure for the EU itself – these might have to be the forms in which globalisation survives.

For social democracy, internationalism – which was rooted into its practice from the formation of the Second International in 1889 – is a strong trench to fall back on as globalism evaporates. The globalism of elites – from Mar-a-Lago to Budapest – is proving depressingly fragile; the internationalism of left parties can, given the right basis, prove much more durable.

And social-democrats will not be the sole occupiers of this second trench: liberalism, radical left, feminism and green movement have all made strong intellectual contributions to the progressive, internationalist ideology that will have to replace free market globalism.

The advantage of forcing social democratic politicians to focus on the dynamics of their own society is that in most countries they face the same demographic challenge: cultural conflict between an educated, younger workforce with liberal values and a less educated, older workforce clinging to social conservatism. It is a split between the city and the small town; between old and young; and, at its worst – as with the alt-right in America and the populist right in Poland – it weaponises gender inequality as well.

From Bernstein to Giddens, the prophets of stability socialism always focused on the atomisation of class and community loyalties, and the decline of solidarity. As early as 1899 Bernstein warned that “the precision tool maker and the coalminer, the skilled decorator and the porter… live very different kinds of life, and have very different kinds of wants”. It would be easier to unite them around race and nation than it would around pure class politics, he wrote. A century later Giddens’ entire project was premised on the idea that most social solidarities – even ethnicity and nationality, let alone class – would be atomised under the impact of marketisation and networked individuality.

It turns out that the current struggle is not between atomization versus old solidarities; it is in fact a death match between two spontaneous solidarities that can no longer coexist.

For now, wherever the authoritarian right is on the march, it is mobilising people around nationalism, racism and sexism. Yet the ideology of an educated, networked, diverse, globally focused and tolerant section of society is equally spontaneous and, in some places, stronger.

In one way, the salariat, the Millennial generation and their natural allies among ethnic minorities, women, the LGBT community have achieved what Giddens had called for: an agency born out of fear. As he wrote: “Values of the sanctity of human life, universal human rights, the preservation of species and care for future as well as present generations of children may perhaps be arrived at defensively, but they are certainly not negative values.”

Instead of a proletariat with a historic, positively-defined mission, we might have to make do with a motley tribal alliance with many missions, some of them conflicting, Giddens said.

I will return to this question of agency in a future essay, but here it is worth acknowledging how closely Giddens’ 1994 position anticipates what came to be known in the anti-globalisation movement as “One No, Many Yesses”.

The difference is, today, we have two “Noes”: no to neoliberalism and no to the xenophobic right. In turn, that limits the number of “Yeses” that are practical in the short term: yes to defending universalism, yes to mitigating climate change and yes to upholding the rule of law. That should be the terrain on which the progressive forces of humanity come together.

But social democrats should not flinch from adding one more “yes” to this list, and that is to the right of electorates to use democracy to regulate and control the market at a national level – even if this means reforming, suspending or defying the institutions through which global corporations have dictated the world’s affairs for 30 years. That is the ground on which social democracy and the radical left should converge.

The journey towards a radical social democracy will be fraught with temptations to ditch what was progressive in the era of free market globalisation alongside what’s been wrecked. In fact, studying centre left thinkers who tried to move the SPD on from Bernstein between 1914 and the early Weimar era – Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer in Austria and the workers’ control advocate Karl Korsch – I am struck by how unstable the centre ground was between Bernsteinism and Bolshevism. Every attempt by the German centre left to stabilize, humanise and democratize capitalism was outflanked by the venality of the ruling elite and the brutality of the street politics the far right adopted.

If there had been no USSR and no Leninism, could that large and vibrant movement of German workers who vacillated between the communists and the social-democrats in Germany between 1919 and 1929 have succeeded in creating a more sustainable left social-democratic pole of attraction than the one the doomed Communist Party of Germany (KPD) did? It’s an interesting ‘what if’. Put another way, in a time of crisis and breakdown, is radical social democracy even possible?

Because today there is no equivalent of the USSR, no Lenin, and a much-weakened industrial working class, we are destined to find out the answer to that question through our own practice.

Today we need a form of social democracy attuned to a period of crisis, not stability. Accepting the need for it is the first step towards achieving it.

[i] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm
[ii]   Davies, William. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society) (p. xiv).
[iii] Giddens, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (p. 19). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
[iv] “Overcoming the Fear of Freedom” in Geiselberger H, ed The Great Regression, 2017

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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SOCIALISM
 
After 1917, socialism wasno longer a theoretical concept. It became a practical reality in the USSR. It showed to the world, for the first time, that basic needs for every citizen,  housing, food security, universal free education, free medical facilities was possible. At the same time when the capitalist world was hit by severe unemployment, in socialist USSR, unemployment was completely eliminated. The USSR showed that the socialist worker’s state could defend itself against all attacks, though sometimes at a great price.
 
Dr. Ambedkarwanted a socialist constitutionfor India. Thisis  sharplyoutlined in his monograph ‘States and Minorities’, published in early 1949 as a draft constitution for India. Here he proposes State socialism, along with Parliamentary democracy, protected as a fundamental right. In defence of this radical proposal, he writes :
 
The soul of Democracy is the doctrine of one man, one value.
Unfortunately, Democracy has attempted to give effect to this doctrine only so far as the political structure is concerned by adopting the rule of one man, one vote which is supposed to translate into fact the doctrine of one man, one value. It has left the economic structure to take the shape given to it by those who are in a position to mould it. This has happened because Constitutional Lawyers ….have never advanced to the conception that the Constitutional Law of Democracy must go beyond Adult Suffrage and Fundamental Rights… (they) believed that the scope and function of Constitutional Law was to prescribe the shape and form of the political structure of society. They never realised that it was equally essential to prescribe the shape and form of the economic structure of society, if Democracy is to live up to its principle of one man, one value.
Time has come to take a bold step and define both the economic structure as well as the political structure of society by the Law of the Constitution.
 
The Constitution of India that was finally drafted with Dr. Ambedkar as Chairman was a document of consensus and compromise. Many of Dr. Ambedkar’s concerns about economic democracy found their place not as fundamental rights but as Directive principles. The socialist concept of a welfare state and public ownership of natural resources found expression in articles 38 and 39. The right to work, education, health facilities, a living wage, and social security in times of old age and incapacitation in articles 41 to 43 A.
 
But on certain fundamental principles there was no compromise- such as the principle of secularism, and freedom of religion. In States and Minorities, these are expressed succinctly and unambiguously;
 
The State shall not recognise any religion as State religion…..Every religious association shall be free to regulate and administer its affairs, within the limits of the laws applicable to all.
 
The other basic principle on which Ambedkar refused to compromise was the principle of one man, one vote irrespective of class, caste, creed or gender.
 
Apart from being the leader of the fight against caste discrimination and untouchability, Ambedkar was also an important labour leader .Of course he had serious ideological differences with the red flag leaders. These centered around the issue of methods and values in the political struggle.  Ambedkar also felt that the red flag unions neglected issues of social inequality, neglected to pay attention to the elimination of caste based exclusions within the workers such as existed in the textile mills. Ambedkar had opposed the historic 1928 textile strike of the GirniKamgar Union. But in 1938, both Ambedkar and the communists came together to organize a general strike against the Industrial Disputes Bill, which sought to make strike illegal.
 
On one important issue there was no difference- the necessity of trade unions to have a political agenda.  In an address to workers Ambedkar states:
 
“to protect purely trade union interests cannot be the only reason, why trade unions must enter politics. To confine your attention to trade unionism is to mistake the immediate task forthe ultimate goal; it is to assure that slaving for others is a destiny which the labouring classes cannot escape. On the contrary, your aim should be to replace this system of wage slavery by a system which will recognize the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. This means rebuilding of society.’
 
The Constitution of India confers democratic rights to citizens which go well beyond what was demanded by the Chartists. All adult Indian citizens have the right to vote. There are no property qualifications on suffrage.  Workers can stand for elections…
 
The working people in the unorganized and organized sectors comprise the vast majority of Indian citizens. Why have they repeatedly elected to power capitalist governments? Why is it that they have not yet voted to establish a working class government of their own? These are simple but basic questions that have to be raised and examined scientifically.
 
 
THE REALM OF AFFLUENCE
 
Can the working class shape politics?
 
The October revolution whose centenary we will observe this year is of course a definite answer to that question. But if we ask it as a scientific question we are compelled to ask more questions, for example:
 
Why has there been no workers’ revolution in Europe or North America thereafter? Why is the working class party so weak in the   world’s most advanced capitalist nation? Why did such a large section of working people vote for a capitalist billionaire like Donald Trump?
 
The task for Marxism, understood as the scientific method, is not only to analyse working class revolutions, but also to understand and contend with conservatism in the working class.
 
An important development not anticipated in the Communist manifesto is the development of what Eric Hobsbawm calls a ‘realm of affluence’ in developed capitalism. Instead of the general pauperization  of the proletariat predicted by the Manifesto, what is observed in these countries is the phenomenon of a large section of the working class achieving a  ‘middle class’ standard of living. Engels uses the term “labouraristocracy’’. Lenin argues that Imperialism engenders “super profit” for the capitalist class of a nation, which in turn allows giving the workers a petty bourgeois standard of living. Baran and Sweezy in their analysis of ‘monopoly capital’ attribute super profits to monopoly of the market by the big corporations.
 
I would like to examine the phenomenon of ‘the realm of affluence’ – from a different angle.
 
 
INEFFICIENCY
 
There has been much talk about the ‘increase in GDP growth rate’ under neoliberal economic policies. This is attributed to a supposed “greater economic efficiency” achieved due to these policies. In fact, capitalist development is characterized by growing mechanization of the production process. This results in a reduction of costs due to increase in output per unit of labour employed.
 
However, if we calculate the output per unit of energy expended in the production process, a different picture emerges, as the following few examples show.
 
Which is more efficient- a handloom or a powerloom? A handloom weaver produces about 6-8 metres of cloth in a day. A powerloom weaver produces about 72-80 metres of cloth in a day, tending four looms.  Each loom consumes about 5 kwh of electric energy.
 
The manual work humans perform can also be measured in units of energy. A human can do manual work continuously over 8 hours with a power output of about 30 watts. This means than in a day of 8-10 hours of manual labour, the human being  can perform about 240-300 watt-hours of work. One manday thusis equivalent to ¼ to 1/3^rd kwh of energy.
 
What the above figures indicate is that in handloom production about 20-25 metres of cloth is produced per kwh of energy expended. In powerloom production, about 4 metres of cloth is produced per kwh of energy expended (80 metres/20 kwh) . If we measure output per unit of energy expended, powerloom is about five to six times less efficient than handloom.
 
A similar comparison can be made between cycle transport and motorcycle, or, in earth moving between manual digging and a mechanized shovel. In each case, machine powered production process is much less efficient than manual work, when we measure output per unit of energy expended.
 
We can also compare the energy contents of food and fossil fuels by converting kilocalories into kwh, as shown in the following table:
 
Petrol            13 kwh/kg
Diesel            13.3
LPG               12.8
Ethanol           8.5
Methanol        5.5
LNG               15
Veg oil           10.5
Cereals          4.2 
Coal               8.3
 
According to David Pimentel, each year the USA uses about 200 million tonnes of oil to produce and consume 100 million tonnes of foodgrains. That is 2 kg of fossil fuels to produce and consume 1 kg of food grains or about 6.5 kwh of fossil fuel energy to produce and consume 1 kwh of food energy.
 
If the human digestive system could have digested hydrocarbons the way it digests carbohydrates, it would be irrational to do capitalist agriculture. Pumping and eating hydrocarbons would be less irrational.
 
The belief in capitalist efficiency is created because we measure cost in financial terms. Finance is a social construct arising in the context of exchange value .In financial terms, human-power energy is not cheap. If we assume a minimum wage of Rs 400 per day, human-power energy costs aboutRs 1600 per kwh. By contrast, petrol costs Rs 6 per kwh. Coal is even cheaper- about Rs 1.50 per kwh.  Electricity costs about Rs 5 per kwh.
In financial terms, human-power energy costs about 300 to 1000 times the cost of fossil fuel energy, and this is what capitalism is all about, replacing human-power energy with ‘cheaper’ fossil fuel energy through mechanization.
 
Why is fossil fuel cheap? This is only because of an irrational pricing convention. There is extensive literature on the subject of pricing of non-renewable resources in capitalist economic theory, all essentially based on a 1930 paper by Hoteling. Capitalistic pricing of fossil fuels is based on the cost of extraction, refining and transportation plus a profit mark-up. . This is as rational as  fixing the price of  a bag of foodgrains in a godown  as the cost of its transportation  from the godown to the point of use plus a profit mark-up, say about five rupees for  a 50 kg bag. With this method of pricing it is cheaper to produce wheat by burning wheat in steam engine tractors, rather than growing wheat with only manual labour. Capitalist pricing of fossil fuels thus obscurantist, because it obscures the real inefficiency of automotive machines.
 
With this flawed and irrational method of costing it costs less money per unit output to deploy machines rather than humans, though energetically speaking, machines are generally less efficient than humans. An important factor for both profit and super profit is this contrived and notional ‘machine productivity’.  A higher margin of profit can be earned by producing at a money cost less than the social average money cost of production, by replacing human labour by machines.
 
Increasing mechanization and automation, which is at the core of ‘technological upgradation’, results in higher margin of profit in the short run. It also lowers the average social money cost of production in the longer run.  This results in a constant lowering of the margin of profit as more and more units mechanize their production process..

When we measure production costs in  terms of energy, i.e. output per kwh of energy expended, it turns out that capitalism is intrinsically inefficient, perhaps the most inefficient mode of production in human history. The ‘realm of affluence’ is based on “off balance sheet creative accounting”, on fossil fuel  energy subsidy, on deprivation of our grandchildren and future generations of their entitlement in the finite stock of  non-renewable resources of the earth. The present ‘realm of affluence’ is thus predicated on a ‘realm of scarcity and hunger’ for the future. If the previous calculations are correct, and they can all be verified, capitalism is not freedom, as ideologists like Milton Friedman have tried to argue. Capitalism is a form of social vandalism based on obscurantist mumbo jumbo of bourgeois economics, a rapacious trade off of our children’s survival for  the petty consumerism of the present.

Also Read
— Can the working class shape politics?
— Human Activity and Social History: Understanding Politics and the Concept of Equality

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara in the Bolivian mountains by the Bolivian military, led by the CIA. Although imprisoned, keeping Che Guevara alive in those days of October, 1967, was a temerity for imperialism even more so in a context where they were just starting to implement their new plans for counterinsurgency and national security that resulted in military coups and military dictatorships in virtually all Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

The figure of Che Guevara has always been very controversial. Hated by the right-wing and by reactionary forces across the continent. And controversial, even among the progressive and left-wing sectors.

In those years, the left was very dogmatized, and with each thesis, a new group was formed. Each group labeled Che according to their manuals, and some classified him only as an adventurer, an idealist. After all, it was more convenient to follow the bureaucratic and peaceful tradition of some parties that defined themselves as communists. There were those who were frightened by his practice. After all, it was too much to ask of a common militant to follow such boldness. And others even misrepresented his ideas, turning his example into a mere stimulus to a false heroism unrelated to the masses, which was summed up in the thesis of Régis Debray, who argued that “it was enough that a small group of well-armed and willing men, to climb the mountains and create the focus for the exploited masses to follow them. ” It was “foquismo.”

These were definitely not Che’s ideas, not even about the military strategy of taking power. And even in his “Guerilla Warfare” manual, written from his concrete experience in the Cuban revolution, the principles of guerrilla warfare are only present as part of the mass struggle as a means, not an end in itself. In it, he also discusses the need of the various subjective, objective conditions and the correlation of forces, for its triggering.

But, being that Che was so controversial and so misunderstood regarding strategy and tactics, and having been victorious in Cuba but defeated in Congo and Bolivia, what would Che’s legacy be?

One cannot idealize Che’s image as if he were a super human. Nor dogmatize him as a single and absolute example. Nor exorcise it, reducing him to a myth. Che represents the synthesis of a revolutionary historical period of our continent. His ideas, his ideals, and his practice formed the symbolism of the feelings and the practice of a whole revolutionary movement, of various popular organizations in Cuba and throughout Latin America.

Therefore, when referring to it, it must be borne in mind that he has become a political reference because he represents a synthesis of the historical experience of various Latin American peoples.

And perhaps his figure was as strong as a synthesis, because, as historians and contemporaries say, Che was one of the few revolutionaries who managed to live intensely, coherently and daily, everything he thought.

“My father, – said Aleidita in a statement -, “sought to live every day coherently with what he thought.”

And it is in this consistent, everyday practice that one finds Che’s greatest legacy for the present generation of idealists and revolutionaries.

Briefly, one can identify ten great values that would represent Che’s legacy in the history of Latin America.

1. Humanism
Man should be the main objective.

Your well-being, your self-improvement as a being that seeks to perfect itself, that seeks happiness, that seeks to live in a just society. The struggle, the party, the guerrilla, are always interpreted by Che as means. The aim is to achieve a society of free and fraternal men. That is why, even after taking power, in Cuba’s case, there was an endless struggle for the construction of a different society. In this Guevarian humanism, Marx’s ideals are deepened, and the more generous view of the main objective of a social revolution is restored. Contrary to the practice of some leftist parties, which have transformed the conquest of power, the control of the state and the strengthening of its organization in an end in itself.

This humanism is also present when he defends the idea that what makes a person a “true revolutionary” is when that person moves permanently by a deep feeling of love for his peers.

2. Rebelling Against any Social Injustice
This phrase has become a principle of practice for any revolutionary. Che argued that the practice of any person claiming to be revolutionary should be enough indignation to rebel against any social injustice felt against any human being anywhere in the world or under any circumstances.

In this principle, the fundamental idea of ​​social relations conceived by Che is present. The sense of equality and justice. And, at the same time, the rebellion and the courage to encourage all individuals to seek equality, rebelling against any situation of injustice. This view breaks the individualistic conception of caring only about oneself or one’s friends. And it breaks with the illusion that to be revolutionary, it is necessary to have theory, to be in a revolutionary organization. Take pride in dogmas and symbols and forget about everyday practice, where, at any moment and in small things, one can be a great revolutionary as we fight against these injustices. Against these situations of oppression that classist societies and capitalism produce.

3. Latin-Americanism
The idea of ​​the Latin American identity of the peoples who inhabit this continent, despite the cultural and ethnic differences, have been present since the struggles for independence. Quite often Simon Bolivar is mentioned, and especially Jose Marti. These ideals are present in many literary works, in political speeches and party programs, in all the countries of the continent. But surely, Che’s figure was the bluntest expression of this character, by his life example.

History reserved for him the opportunity to be born in Argentina, to have traveled the continent by land and to have gotten to know its illnesses more closely. To fall in love with the cause of all the Latin American peoples. Thus, he was able to devote himself with the same passion in Guatemala, in the preparation of the Granma, in Mexico, in the mountains of Cuba. In the revolutionary government, on the UN platform, and on the Bolivian highlands.

His life put into practice the ideas of Martí. And it consolidated this Latin American spirit. Because it has contributed to the understanding that the causes of the people’s social problems in different countries are the same. That the imperialist role of the United States oppresses all. And that the solution, in the long run, will unite all in a similar, Latin American path. An isolated country won’t be able to build a just and fraternal society in Latin America by itself. Even in the case of the victory of the Cuban revolution, one should note the sacrifices imposed on the Cuban people by the North American siege and the recent infeasibility of other revolutions in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

4. The Missionary Spirit
The missionary spirit present in Che’s ideas and practice is based on the feeling of solidarity, not adventure. Che used to say that “the most beautiful quality of a person is the feeling of solidarity.” And it was with this feeling that he preached the missionary spirit. Get rid of everyday tasks, of the easiness of organized life. And be willing to give up this easiness and go to other places, other villages, and even other countries. Contribute in some way, with humility, so that other people can live better. This missionary spirit took him to many places. But always with the same feeling of solidarity. Never to teach, to give orders, to impose. Or take some personal advantage.

This feeling of solidarity is what has stimulated thousands of Cuban revolutionaries to contribute with their knowledge, with their goodwill, in the field of healthcare, of techniques, with other peoples, in almost every continent.

5. The Spirit of Sacrifice
The spirit of sacrifice was not a moralistic, false, or religious discourse, to seek paradise in eternal life. Not a masochistic deviation. But it was part of life. The worst task, in any job or mission, was assumed by Che. And he preached that every militant, that every revolutionary should assume this obligation for himself. With these values, one would have enough morality to serve as an example to the all of the people and the construction of a different society.

6. The Example of Work
Work has always been seen by Che as the transforming force of men, as the basis for building all wealth in society. But above theoretical and philosophical concepts, his legacy is to have practiced the basic idea that “no one can ask another to do something without doing it first.”

That’s why, on many occasions, he was the first to do the tasks, the first to start doing the job. First, he tried to do it himself, and just then he would ask if others could also do it and move on.

This spirit is present in Che’s enormous contribution to the organization of mass work, in the form of task-forces, where the entire adult population was called to engage.

This same spirit was present in the political planning and in the debates with Cuban workers and Cuban society in the process of building socialism. It shows that a more just society, with better well-being, is not built with discourses, or only ideals, but that it depended, fundamentally, on the increase in the production of goods, of commodities, of wealth. And that would only be possible with much work. That is, a more advanced and more just society would only be achieved with more work from the present generation, to build a more dignified future for future generations.

7. The Dispossession of Material Goods
Che held the most important positions in the Cuban state. He was Minister, President of the Central Bank, took part in countless international delegations representing the Government and the Cuban people. He could have settled in the positions and the quiet life that his trajectory assured him.

When he said goodbye to his children, he was careful to point out that he left them no material goods, and hoped that the revolutionary state would guarantee them the same welfare and education that it should guarantee to all the children of the people.
His habits were simple and modest. Almost Franciscan.

And this spirit of the person that does not cling to material goods as if they were the only source of happiness, was present in his preaching.

It counteracted the need of man to have access to knowledge, cultural goods, education and a life of solidarity and equality as the basis of happiness. Goods related to the basic needs of man are fundamental. But the practice of individualism, of selfishness, of the accumulation of goods as ostentation of social differentiation would undermine morality needed for the construction of a more just society.

This principle is also based on the practice stimulated by Che, of voluntary work. He saw in voluntary work, carried out in the time off, on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, a way of practicing this detachment for material things, and the way of practicing concrete acts of social solidarity. He also believed that the great concrete problems of Cuban society would only be possible to resolve more quickly if there were a donation, a greater surrender of all in the carrying out of voluntary unpaid work.

8. Belief in the Power of the Masses
The popular force and transformative capacity of the organized masses are present in every political thought of Che. Even in the theorizing of military strategies, contrary to the diffusion “foquismo,” Che preached that the revolutionary victory would only be possible if he could organize a true popular army, of the whole people.

The deviations of putchtism or the heroism of a small group that could free the people were never present in his ideas.

This same conception is present by allying the force of the masses with the spirit of sacrifice and voluntary work. And so, many efforts were made to solve concrete problems of the population. From public cleaning, the construction of popular housing, to the cutting of sugarcane and the defense of the motherland, when Cuba, for example, was invaded by military forces organized by the United States in the famous episode of the Bay of Pigs, and in 72 hours, with the mobilization of all the people in arms, managed to defeat and arrest all the invaders.

9. The Relationship of Leaders x Masses
The daily practice of Che’s example also brings an important legacy as to how he related to the masses. He defended and practiced the necessary bonding of the leaders with the masses. He was always among them. And he tried to listen to their yearnings, problems, difficulties, and criticisms of the revolutionary process.

He had an essentially anti-bureaucratic, anti-cabinet, anti-avant-garde, anti-director practice. Avoiding and fighting that an organized core of the party could know everything about the people and choose the best way for it. Being always in the midst of the people was the best way to make fewer mistakes.

10. The Education of Cadres
The experience of building socialism, the experience of the people’s administration of a revolutionary state under conditions of underdevelopment, led Che to devote much thought to the need for the education of cadres. There are many reflections recorded in speeches, articles, essays, on this issue. He saw the need to educate cadres as vital for the revolutionary process. And again, it manifests its connection with the popular force, in defending the idea that a policy of cadres was a policy necessarily directed at the masses. So that the masses, especially the youth, could form as many people as possible as revolutionary militants, within the technical and political needs. But, above all, that with a political, moral and cultural development, they represented the practice of values of the new man that would serve as an example to the whole mass.

He argued that the cadres should be highly disciplined. Technically prepared, with a passion for the study and scientific knowledge. Willing to tackle any task. With capacity to analyze the problems and their causes, and with enough creativity to seek a solution. But, above all, he should earn respect for the workers and the people, for his example and his affection and dedication to his peers.

In this way, people would become examples, and by way of example, they could be called revolutionary cadres.

Conclusion
The figure of Che Guevara is still so present in our midst, fundamentally because of the legacy that he left us. The living situation of the peoples of Latin America has not changed. The productive forces developed. But the social and concrete problems of our people continue.

It is up to the popular organizations that claim to be revolutionary to reflect on this legacy. Look for the universality that exists in it, regardless of the social category, the environment or the country in which it operates.

Believing in Che’s legacy does not mean to copy strategies or tactics of power grab used in Cuba or Bolivia. Each country, each people, each situation will have its own strategy and tactics, determined by objective, subjective conditions and by the correlation of forces. To believe in Che is, above all, to feed the possibility of revolution permanently. To make the revolution every day. By our practice, by the permanent encouragement of the trust in our ideals, and by the certainty that it is possible to defeat the oppressors (internal and external) and that one day we will build a more just and fraternal society. And certainly, as Martí and Che Guevara dreamed, Latin American.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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It cannot be an accident that Jeremy Corbyn launched what may be his one and only general election manifesto in the city of Bradford. One of the forerunners of today’s Corbyn-led Labour Party was the Independent Labour Party (ILP). It was a full-blooded left wing party, founded in 1893 in Bradford. And, Keir Hardie, the ILP’s first leader and founder of the Labour Party, has frequently been cited by Corbyn as one of his inspirations. 

Both Hardie and the ILP were very strong advocates of workers’ rights, having emerged from the then nascent union movement. Corbyn, a former full-time officer of one of the forerunner’s of the biggest union in Britain, UNISON, is equally a very strong advocate of workers’ rights. This shows up in the publication today of Labour’s general election manifesto.

Among the most significant of the pledges in the manifesto on rights at work are:

• All workers equal rights from day one, whether part-time or full-time
• Banning zero hours contracts so that every worker gets a guaranteed number of hours each week
• Ending the use of overseas labour to undercut domestic wages and conditions
• Repealing the Trade Union Act 2016 and rolling out collective bargaining by sector
• Guaranteeing unions a right to access workplaces to represent members
• Raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage
• Ending the public sector pay cap
• Instituting a maximum pay ratio of 20:1 in the public sector and companies bidding for public contracts
• Banning unpaid internships
• Abolishing employment tribunal fees
• Giving self-employed workers the status of workers
• Setting up a commission to modernise the law around employment status
• Creating a Ministry of Labour with the resources to enforce workers’ rights

These pledges are essentially a replication of A Manifesto for Labour Law by the Institute of Employment Rights in June 2016, devised in conjunction with labour law academics to promote healthy policy for workers.

Labour’s worker problem

The socialist left has often argued that Labour has failed to inspire the loyalty of workers, and union members especially, by being insufficiently radical. Consequently, the argument goes, there was less than a compelling reason to vote for Labour. Along with pledges to bring the water industry, railways, Royal Mail and some energy companies back into public ownership (which should reduce pressure on workers’ wages and conditions), this cannot be said to be the case this time round. 

Some have criticised Corbyn’s Labour for giving into the allegedly vested and backward interest of unions. As Martin Kettle of the Guardian argued, “union power is not the same as workers’ rights”.

At one level, this is a valid point. With only around a quarter of workers now holding union membership, workers cannot rely on unions any time soon to be able to effectively defend their rights and interests. 

But when one recognises that the implementation of workers’ rights has always needed the help of unions because they are the only sizeable independent organisations with the resources to do so, this point loses its force. Unions inform workers of their rights and help them apply them. Plus, unions have always helped more than just their members because employers apply the gains of union negotiated deals to all employees. 

Wider significance

But focusing on the union aspect blinds critics to the actual significance of Labour’s manifesto. This is that, compared to what the Tories are proposing, Labour prioritises collective rights over individual rights so that workers can act together to advance their interests. Labour’s manifesto recognises that the workers are stronger together, echoing a fundamental belief of Karl Marx that the condition of the freedom of the individual is the condition of the freedom of all.

Indeed, without collective rights in law, especially with regard to the right to strike, any collective bargaining can easily end up being merely collective begging.

The most obvious case in point concerns the right to sectoral collective bargaining, which Labour has emphasised in its manifesto. In Britain, companies in the same sector compete primarily against each other on the basis of their labour costs. Hence, there is a competitive advantage to cut wages and conditions as the principle route to profitability. 

But by providing a statutory basis to sectoral collective bargaining, all companies in a sector would be compelled to furnish workers with the same minimum terms and conditions. No longer would they compete on labour costs in a “race to the bottom”. And, their attention would turn to improving productivity through investment in technology and training. 

With stronger collective rights, applied and enforced with the help of unions, both unions and workers’ rights would be immeasurably strengthened. Time will shortly tell whether Labour’s manifesto will help it regain the support of working class voters. Or whether Theresa May’s pitch to be the workers’ friend will gain sufficient traction. 

If Corbyn is successful, it will be a fitting tribute to the heritage of Bradford. It was here that an almighty 19-week strike at the city’s Manningham Mills textile factory by some 5,000 workers over wage cuts in 1891 gave a big spur to the founding of the ILP. It will also have been fitting that Labour launched the manifesto at the University of Bradford given that it started out life in 1832 as the Bradford Mechanics Institute, an organisation designed to help working class people gain the necessary skills for the ever changing world of work.

This article was first published on theconversation.com.
 

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Win or lose, his campaign has captured the imagination of an American electorate that still dreams of a more equal society
 

The Conversation

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has handily beaten Hillary Clinton to win the New Hampshire primary – and after being dismissed as more or less an ideological sideshow when it first began, his campaign has become an unlikely but remarkable movement.

With the Republican Party in a seemingly unstoppable rightward spiral, as the likes of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump dominate its race, the seemingly unexpected rise of as such a proud left-wing candidate as Sanders might seem inconsistent with every trend in recent American politics. At the beginning of the race, he was unknown to many voters outside his home state of Vermont. He is also the Senate’s only self-proclaimed socialist, a label that many once thought would make him utterly unelectable.

But Sanders’s support for “democratic socialism” hasn’t just been surprisingly popular: it’s rapidly changing the way America perceives socialism and all it stands for.

A major strength of Sanders’s campaign is an economic argument against income inequality. This message is at the heart of Sanders’s self-described democratic socialism, but the “revolution” he’s advocating isn’t a Marxist seizure of the means of production; it’s a democratic political uprising.

But this in itself is hardly anything new by the standards of American politics, even at the presidential level.

Right place, right time
Sanders has explicitly placed himself in the tradition of liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The comparison is apt indeed: FDR’s liberalism was not only “socialist” by the standards of realigned American politics, providing the foundation for modern liberalism and the foil for modern conservatism. His conservative opponents in the inter-war years labelled him a “socialist” for his bold initiatives to combat the Great Depression and revive the country from economic collapse.

The Sanders-FDR affinity even extends to specific policies. Sanders regularly cites the Glass-Stegall Act and social security, two of the 32nd president’s better-known initiatives, and Sanders frequently references both during debates, town halls, and stump speeches.

By linking himself to FDR, Sanders is betting that the American public will accept his proposals as anything but radical. In fact, the big government solutions he offers to voters are popular with the American public, as is his brand of socialism in general. And yet, this is largely overlooked by his opponents on both sides. Programs such as social security and Medicare have been portrayed as “socialist” by some, yet are both “very important” to many Americans across the political spectrum.

This is all testament to the fact that socialism runs deep in America, and that broadly socialist ideals have proven their appeal many times.
American socialists have been elected and become noted national figures before. Look back to early-20th century Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which elected the first “sewer socialist” mayor in America, Emil Seidel, in 1910. Seidel was also Eugene Debs’s running mate for the Socialist Party in the 1912 US presidential election.

But we need not look a century back to see American socialism in full flower, provided we look in the right place. We could point to the US military – a massive government-owned programme that provides its workers with social benefits for higher education, housing, and specialised, dedicated healthcare.

So various of socialism’s core ideas live on in America’s most visible institutions. And yet, the Democratic Party has backed mostly economically moderate candidates for the past four decades. All the while, Sanders has been articulating this worldview, first as mayor of Burlington, Vermont then from the US House of Representatives and now the US Senate.

So why are he and his brand of out-and-proud socialism suddenly looking so viable? His groundswell of support from younger voters perhaps reflects that more of them view socialism favourably than view it unfavourably. But his success reflects something deeper besides.

A substantial proportion of voters across the political spectrum, and not just younger ones, believe that the status quo is not working for them and that government needs to do more to remedy this – including by redistributing wealth via taxes.

America is primed to find Sanders’s call for “political revolution” appealing. His economic argument offers a chance for actual change, not just hope. His call for bold action to make government work for the middle class, rather than against it, appeals to many struggling Americans, and while his brand of socialism truly marks him as an “FDR liberal”, that isn’t the warning label it might have been before the 2008 financial crisis.

It remains to be seen if he will garner enough support to overcome first Hillary Clinton, then the conservative GOP presidential candidate – but win or lose, it is clear that his campaign has captured the imagination of an American electorate that still dreams of a more equal society.

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January 1, 1959
Fifty seven years ago, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled from the national capital as the rebel forces of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara closed in. This historic occasion marked the end of a brutal, pseudo-imperialist regime, which was replaced by the revolutionary, guerrilla fighters headed by Castro.  For fifty seven years, the Cuban republic has remained a socialist state, defying all the attempts by its looming neighbour to interfere.
 
Amidst great public support, Fidel Castro, the first President of Cuba, addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1960. We reproduce extracts from the speech which was centred on denouncing Colonialism and Imperialism in all kinds and forms, and empowering colonial states to fight for their freedom. 
 
Excerpts:
Now, to the problem of Cuba.  Perhaps some of you are well aware of the facts, perhaps others are not.  It all depends on the sources of information, but, undoubtedly, the problem of Cuba, born within the last two years, is a new problem for the world.  The world had not had many reasons to know that Cuba existed.  For many, Cuba was something of an appendix of the United States. Even for many citizens of this country, Cuba was a colony of the United States.  As far as the map was concerned, this was not the case:  our country had a different colour from that of the United States.   But in reality Cuba was a colony of the United States.
 
How did our country became a colony of the United States?  It was not because of its origins; the same men did not colonise the United States and Cuba.  Cuba has a very different ethnical and cultural origin, and the difference was widened over the centuries.  Cuba was the last country in America to free itself from Spanish colonial rule, to cast off, with due respect to the representative of Spain, the Spanish colonial yoke; and because it was the last, it also had to fight more fiercely.

How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people, stay in power unless it is by force?  Will we have to explain to the representatives of our sister republics of Latin America what military tyrannies are? 
 
Spain had only one small possession left in America and it defended it with tooth and nail.  Our people, small in numbers, scarcely a million inhabitants at that time, had to face alone, for almost thirty years, an army considered one of the strongest in Europe.  Against our small national population the Spanish Government mobilized an army as big as the total forces that had fought against South American independence.  Half a million Spanish soldiers fought against the historic and unbreakable will of our people to be free.
 
For thirty years the Cubans fought alone for their independence; thirty years of struggle that strengthened our love for freedom and independence. But Cuba was a fruit — according to the opinion of a President of the United States at the beginning of the past century, John Adams — it was an apple hanging from the Spanish tree, destined to fall, as soon as it was ripe enough, into the hands of the United States.  Spanish power had worn itself out in our country.  Spain had neither the men nor the economic resources to continue the war in Cuba; Spain had been defeated. Apparently the apple was ripe, and the United States Government held out its open hands.
 
How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people, stay in power unless it is by force?  Will we have to explain to the representatives of our sister republics of Latin America what military tyrannies are?  Will we have to outline to them how these tyrannies have kept themselves in power?  Will we have to explain the history of several of those tyrannies which are already classical?  Will we have to say what forces, what national and international interests support them?
 
The military group which tyrannized our country was supported by the most reactionary elements of the nation, and, above all, by the foreign interests that dominated the economy of our country.  Everybody knows, and we understand that even the Government of the United States admits it, that that was the type of government favoured by the monopolies. Why?  Because by the use of force it was possible to check the demands of the people; by the use of force it was possible to suppress strikes for improvement of living standards; by the use of force it was possible to crush all movements on the part of the peasants to own the land they worked; by the use of force it was possible to curb the greatest and most deeply felt aspirations of the nation.
 
That is why governments of force were favoured by the ruling circles of the United States. That is why governments of force stayed in power for so long, and why there are governments of force still in power in America. Naturally, it all depends on whether it is possible to secure the support of the United States.
 
Source: Excerpted from the speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 1960. For the entire text of the speech visit:  http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1960/19600926.html
 
 

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The BJP coalition government wants to change the Constitution. But why? On this, the BJP is obscure. The coalition partners, who used to be vocal in their pre–coalition incarnation, are silent. There is little indication about the need for or the area of change. There is no White Paper. No document. Even the constitutional changes proposed in 1976 during the Emergency were preceded by a long eclectic, anonymous, unsigned document which provoked a sitting judge, Justice Krishna Iyer, to demand that someone claim ownership of the illegitimate child. White Papers are not unknown to the BJP. They published an embarrassingly communal White Paper on Babri Masjid in 1993 which some of us were pained to read to the Supreme Court in the Babri Masjid proceedings. This time the BJP is silent.

There is to be constitutional change. But, for whom? And, for what? Are these changes to benefit the BJP? Are they to benefit the coalition partners? Are they for the nation? Are they really about constitutional changes? Or are they about governance? Or, is all this to be left to Justice Venkatachaliah who is to head the commission? We do not even have the benefit of a statement from the government, or a debate in Parliament.

We do have some glimpses about what the changes may be about. The first glimpse was about a possible switch to the presidential system. This has been in the air for some time, but acquires vitality in today’s electoral context. The BJP has failed on three occasions to get a single party majority — in 1995, 1997 and 1999.

Like Mrs. Gandhi in 1976, it feels that if it fields a directly elected President it might win. Yet, we think that the presidential system is a self–fulfilling prophecy. As in the US in 1992 and many other occasions, there could be a paralytic situation between the legislature and the President. With 200 years experience, the US could handle this crisis. In India, the 50 years of mal–experience suggests that we cannot handle it. Political capital will be made about confrontation to precipitate paralysis.

This is also true of the second glimpse of proposed change which vouchsafes continuity of the government in power (in our case, the BJP) unless there is a positive vote of no-confidence and a viable alternative. The requirement of a positive vote of no–confidence is no problem because that is how the system functions. Thus, Mrs. Thatcher was defeated on major policy matters on 21 occasions and the Narsimha Rao government was defeated on TADA and the Patents Bill in 1995 without yielding to a resignation.

However, a guaranteed term in the absence of an alternative government for three, if not five, years may deal with the problem of frequency of elections, but it does not deal with the problem of paralysis between the executive and the legislature. In fact, the interposition of a viable alternative will increase suitcase bribery from which the legislators will have criminal immunity after the Supreme Court’s judgement in the JMM case (1998).

The third glimpse of what is possibly on the agenda appears to relate to the electoral process. The BJP feels that despite a decline in the popular vote, it can command a greater proportion of the popular vote. But, in order to do this it needs to alter the electoral system. To its rescue comes a report of the Law Commission which seeks to run Indian democracy on German lines. The presence of independent candidates is seen as a nuisance.

So, Indian democracy is proposed to be run through political parties. Independents are out. It is not clear how new parties will come into being. More significantly, the Law Commission’s proposals suggest that the size of Parliament be extended by about 100 members to reflect the popular vote for particular parties. The Law Commission’s proposals were criticised. But, Justice Jeewan Reddy is adamant that he has found the German and cosmopolitan elixir which will cure Indian democracy.

He has a penchant for new ideas within an overall statist approach. Thus, on the bench he virtually nationalised technical education in 1993, provided for a limited judicial review of President’s Rule with awkward results by approving President’s Rule for states where there were no problems and has, recently, veered the Law Commission to support the revival of TADA. He is to be on the Commission on the Constitution. We do not know whether he is overtly committed to re–structuring India’s democracy on German lines. We know he is passionately committed to his own final reports on electoral change.

Fourth, there is the BJP’s agenda of silencing the President. In 1979, the Constitution was amended to give formal recognition to the power of the President to refer back matters for re–consideration by the Cabinet. The BJP were not happy when President Narayanan used this power to refer back the government’s decision to impose President’s Rule in Bihar in 1998. Nor have they been happy about some of the President’s pronouncements. But, both in general parliamentary practice, as well as due to the provisions of Art. 78 (which give the President the power to obtain information), the President has the duty to advise, encourage and warn.

As Justice Krishna Iyer, explaining the parliamentary system in Shamsher’s case (1973) put it: the President is not, and was not intended to be, a cipher. Indeed, it would be sad and inimical to governance if he became that.

Fifth, there is Ram Jethmalani’s agenda about bringing accountability in judicial appointments and misdemeanours by the higher judiciary. In the Third Judges case (1998) — provoked by a reference suggested by Attorney General Soli Sorabjee and perforce, Mr. Jethmalani and others — the judges have purloined and virtually taken over the system of appointment of judges. This has led to awkward results. Judges rejected by previous collegiums have found acceptance by recent ones.

Mr. Jethmalani and others (no less myself as a little inconsequential voice of a student of this process) feel a proper National Judicial Commission is required. No less, the ‘acquittal’ of Justice Ramaswami by a block Congress abstention in 1992 and Justice Venkatachaliah’s internal report that judges publicly accused of wrong behaviour cannot be denied work has led to a situation that judges of the higher judiciary cannot be disciplined; and, do not always exercise self–discipline. Here, there is a specific need for re–examination. But, one does not have to review the whole Constitution simply to deal with this.

Sixth, there is a fear that the Union may want to rewrite Indian federalism and the panchayat system to centralise power. We already have the Sarkaria Committee Report (1987) which has lain fallow for many years. Do we need another Commission? Surely, a White Paper on Sarkaria is overdue before we venture nebulously into yet another Commission?

Seventh, one of the great dangers faced by India is the lumpenization of its governance. This is startlingly affirmed by the Vohra Committee (1995), which expresses the concern of the major security agencies that India ‘s governance is run by thugs and hoodlums at every level of governance. This is a problem of governance and politics. Its needs examination; but not necessarily under the aegis of constitutional review.

Eighth, India’s democracy is imperfect and stunted in its rigour. It is a matter of tribute that the people of India have discerningly evolved the right to throw out their rulers from time to time. But, apart from this aspect of electoral democracy, Indian democracy is weak and lacks both the discourse and accountability to make it work in a strongly democratic way.

Information is not available. Reports on grievous atrocities and corruption are not dealt with. But, these are all matters of governance and of making democracy work. If the political parties want, they can include less, or no, thugs in the electoral process. When Mr. Jethmalani wanted to evolve a new democratic system of information–on–demand, he was shot down by the Cabinet secretariat.

These are all matters of governance. This is equally true of the ninth area of general — albeit not BJP concern — that social justice is denied to most Indian’s, especially the 350 million living below the absolute poverty line.

Finally, there appears to a somewhat arbitrary celebratory millennial and golden jubilee view that a review must take place after 50 years of the republic which coincides with the advent of a new century. There is a difference between reviewing aspects of governance and arbitrarily reviewing the fundamental law simply because 50 years have passed.

In the light of all this, it is understandable that the proposal to review the Constitution is looked at with suspicion. But, there is another reason to fear a sweeping proposal of this nature. It will open up Pandora’s box. As soon as one speaks of a general constitutional review, innumerable demands for change will be made. We have only to read the debates of the Constituent Assembly of 1946–49 to realise the nature and sweep of demands. We were lucky to pledge these demands to peace in 1949. I doubt whether we will be so lucky now. If India would even try to draft a new Constitution today, we would not succeed. We have not even been able to put through the Bill for Women’s reservation. Israel was not able to evolve a consensus for an agreed Constitution in 1949 or thereafter. Pakistan’s Constitution took 8 years to evolve (1947–56); and, that too, after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved in 1954! Since then in Pakistan as also in Bangladesh, constitutions have constantly been usurped into breakdown. The Constitution and constitutional change should not be treated as a political toy.

India’s Constitution has a theory of change. In 1973, a Supreme Court judge put it very elegantly when he said that a Constitution was not in a state of ‘being’ but ‘becoming’. The Constitution catered for adjustments and adaptations. This is what made our linguistic States possible. The Constitution also invited a re–examination of its working and strengthening of its democratic processes. Examples of this include the Anti-Defection Amendments (1985) and the Panchayat Amendments of 1992. There was a cap on changes of the basic structure by the Supreme Court in the Fundamental Rights case (1973). But, it is not clear what the basic structure is. In the Bommai (1993) and the Babri Masjid case (1995), the Court declared that secularism is part of the basic structure. In both the 1973 case and thereafter, judicial review has been declared part of the basic structure.

Presumably, democracy is part of the basic structure, but it may not follow that a particular form of democracy is part of the basic structure. ‘Socialism’ — in terms of social and distributive justice — may be part of the basic structure; otherwise the Constitution is meaningless for the millions living unequally, generation after generation, in penury below the poverty line. Yet, intimations of the ‘basic structure’ should not frighten us into not making Indian democracy and the rule of law more workable.

The contemporary proposal to review the Constitution began life as a political proposal to achieve political results. Justice Venkatachaliah’s interventions may have provided some focus. What we seem to fail to do is to make the vital distinction between constitutional reform and governance.

The governance of a nation requires constant re–examination — even more so the governance of a nation like India which has an imperfect democracy, is overrun by lumpen elements and which has failed to provide social justice to the bulk of its people. But to invite a general constitutional review has ‘Pandora box’ implications. India’s Constitution was devised for a complex civilisation. Neither the Constitution nor plans to change it should lend itself to usurpatory appropriation — least of all to suit the agendas of political parties.

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7  No, 56, Debate

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