Socialism
consists not just in building a humane society; it consists
not just in the maintenance of full employment (or near
full employment together with sufficient unemployment
benefits); it consists not just in the creation of a
Welfare State, even one that takes care of its citizens
''from the cradle to the grave''; it consists not just
in the enshrining of the egalitarian ideal. It is of
course all this; but it is also something more. Its
concern, as Engels had pointed out in Anti-Duhring,
is with human freedom, with the change in the role of
the people from being objects of history to being its
subjects, for which all the above conditions of society,
namely full employment, Welfare State measures, a reduction
in social and economic inequalities, and the creation
of a humane order, are necessary conditions; but they
are, not even in their aggregation, synonymous with
the notion of freedom. And hence they do not exhaust
the content of socialism.
The
conceptual distinction between a humane society and
socialism comes through clearly if we look at the writings
of the most outstanding bourgeois economist of the twentieth
century, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes abhorred the suffering
that unemployment brought to the working class. The
objective of his theoretical endeavour was to end this
suffering by clearing the theoretical ground for the
intervention of the (bourgeois) State in demand management
in capitalist economies. He was passionately committed
to a humane society, and believed that the role of economists
was to be committed in this manner. Indeed he saw economists
as the ''conscience-keepers of society''.
But at the same time Keynes was anti-socialist, not
just in the sense that bourgeois intellectuals usually
are, i.e. of seeing in socialism an apotheosis of the
State and hence a denial of individual freedom, but
in a more fundamental sense. He too would have seen
in socialism a denial of individual freedom, but his
objection to socialism was more basic, and expressed
in the following words: ''How can I adopt a creed which,
preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat
above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with
all their faults, are the quality of life and surely
carry the seeds of all human achievement? … It is hard
for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western
Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first
suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion
which has changed all his values.'' (Essays in Persuasion,
1931). Keynes' objection in other words was precisely
to the idea of the people becoming the subjects of history.
He was full of humaneness; but he baulked at this idea
of freedom that would transform the people, led by the
proletariat, from being objects to being subjects.
Even though welfarism and socialism are conceptually
distinct, there is a dialectical connection between
the two, which had, quite naturally, escaped Keynes,
and which constitutes the real Achilles heel of his
theory. It is this dialectics which explains why the
bourgeoisie is so implacably opposed to the Welfare
State and why Socialists must always vigorously fight
for a Welfare State within a bourgeois society. And
it is because of this dialectics that the Welfare State
cannot become some sort of a ''half-way house'' where
the bourgeois system can get stabilized and stay forever:
the bourgeoisie will always try to ''roll'' it back, and
the socialist effort must always be to defend it and
to carry it forward.
The reasons for the bourgeoisie's opposition to the
Welfare State, by which is meant here the entire panoply
of measures including State intervention in demand management
to maintain full employment (or near full employment),
social security, free or near-free healthcare and education,
and the use of taxation to restrict inequalities in
income and wealth, are several. First, it militates
against the basic ethics of the bourgeois system. Michael
Kalecki had expressed this bourgeois ethics ironically
as: ''You shall earn your bread with the sweat of your
brow, unless you happen to have private means!'' But
his irony was directed against the basic position, expressed
in much bourgeois economic literature, that the distribution
of rewards by the spontaneous working of the capitalist
system is ''fair'', in the sense that each is rewarded
according to his/her contribution, from which it followed
that any interference with this distribution of rewards
was ''unfair''. Hence, society's accepting the responsibility
for providing a basic minimum to everyone was contrary
to the ethics of the bourgeois system and ''unfair''.
Secondly, precisely for this reason, the acceptance
of welfarism amounted to ''no confidence'' in the bourgeois
system. If it got generally accepted that the working
of the bourgeois system yielded results that were inhumane,
i.e. caused hardships that had nothing to do with any
delinquency on the part of the victims, then the social
legitimacy of the bourgeois system got ipso facto undermined.
It is the third reason however that is germane here.
Welfare State measures improve the bargaining strength
of the proletariat and other segments of the working
people. The maintenance of near-full employment conditions
improves the bargaining strength of the trade unions;
the provision of unemployment assistance likewise stiffens
the resistance of the workers. The ''sack'' which is the
weapon dangled by the ''bosses'' over the heads of the
workers loses its effectiveness in an economy which
is both close to full employment and has a system of
reasonable unemployment allowances and other forms of
social security.
In short, resistance by the workers and other sections
of the working people gets stiffened by the existence
of Welfare State measures. The famous Bengali writer
Manik Bandyopadhyay in a short story Chhiniye Khayni
Kyano (''Why Didn't They Snatch and Eat?'') asks the question:
why did so many people die on the streets without food
in the Bengal famine of 1943, when within a few yards
of their places of death there were restaurants full
of food and houses with plenty of food? Why did they
not raid these well-stocked places and snatch food from
them to save their lives? His answer, that the absence
of nourishment itself lowers the will to resist, has
a general validity. The will to resist gets stiffened
the better placed the workers are materially; and Welfare
State measures contribute towards this stiffening.
This stiffening of the will to resist is itself a part
of the transition from being objects to subjects. Hence
welfarism and socialism, though conceptually distinct,
are dialectically linked. Socialists must support Welfare
State measures, not just because such measures are humane,
not just because such measures benefit the working people,
but above all because such measures stiffen the will
of the people to resist, help the process of changing
them from objects to subjects, and hence contribute
to the process of sharpening of class struggle. And
since the bourgeoisie wants precisely to avoid this,
since it wants the people enchained in their object
role, since it wants them weakened, cowed down, divided,
atomized, and transfixed into an empirical routine beyond
which they cannot look, it carries out a continuous
struggle for a ''rolling back'' of all Welfare State measures.
Even when under the pressure of circumstances it has
had to accept in a certain context the institutionalization
of such measures, its effort is always to undo them.
The fact that Keynes did not see it, and hence could
not visualize the collapse of ''Keynesian'' demand management
under pressure from the bourgeoisie, especially the
financial interests, constitutes a weakness of his social
theory; conversely, the fact that this collapse occurred
only underscores the strength of the socialist theory
that he so derided. True, the collapse of Keynesian
demand management did not occur in the same political
economy regime within which it had been introduced.
It had been introduced within a context where the nation-State
was supreme, and the area under its jurisdiction cordoned
off from free flows of goods and finance; but it collapsed
within a regime where there was globalization of finance
and hence far freer flows of goods and finance. But
this changed context only provided the capacity to capital
to ''roll back'' Keynesianism; the fact that it wished
to do so had to do with the insurmountable contradictions
that the dialectics of welfarism generated within the
bourgeois order.
The foregoing has a relevance to the current Indian
context. Under pressure from the Left during the period
of the Left-supported UPA regime, a number of measures
like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
had been adopted, against strong opposition from the
leading exponents of neo-liberalism within the government.
The fact that the same exponents subsequently claimed
credit for these measures is ironical; but let it pass.
Not only do they claim credit for these measures, even
while quietly whittling down many of them (restricting
the people's access to food under the guise of a Right
to Food Act is the latest, and most ironical, example
of this), but they actually use these as the fig-leaf
to cover the pursuit of blatantly pro-rich policies.
The government stokes the stock market to produce overnight
billionaires; it hands over further largesse to these
billionaires in the name of ''development''; but if anyone
objects, the response is: ''Don't you know? We have an
NREGS in place!'' The welfare measures, even as they
are being whittled down, provide an alibi for doling
out largesse to the rich.
And these measures themselves are seen essentially as
acts of generosity on the part of the government. Several
of these measures, like the NREGS, are nominally rights-based,
but in practice no different from the earlier programmes
whose effectiveness depended basically upon the discretion
of the implementing government. Hence, even as they
provide some succour to the poor and working people,
they confirm the people in their role as objects. And
the entire self-congratulatory discourse that has developed
among intellectuals loyal to the ruling class, especially
after the elections where the Congress Party is supposed
to have done well because of programmes like the NREGS,
is one that is laden with this objectification of the
people.
The stiffening of the will to resist among the people,
which Welfare State measures can bring about, has to
be made practically effective through the intervention
of the Left, since the Left's agenda precisely is to
overcome the objectification of the people. The left
therefore must both act energetically for the implementation
of these Welfare State measures like the NREGS, preventing
all backsliding on them by the bourgeoisie, and at the
same time use the context of the material succour provided
by such schemes to help in strengthening the resistance
of the people, in intensifying class struggle, and also
in overcoming the objectification intrinsically attached
to such schemes themselves. The Left fights not just
for welfarism but for socialism, with which welfarism
is dialectically linked, but whose content is qualitatively
different.
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