April 22, 2012. ‘Chintan Vichaar Manch’, commemorating birth anniversary of Lenin organized a talk on ‘Socialist Experiments of the twentieth century, Capitalist Restoration and Problems of Socialism’ at Gandhi Sangrahalaya, Patna. Abhinav Sinha, editor of the renowned hindi magazine ‘Muktikami Chhatron-Yuvaon ka Aahwan’ was the speaker on the occasion.
Talk:
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1990, the entire bourgeoisie wallowed in hysteric shrieks, proclaiming the ultimate victory of capitalism and liberal bourgeois democracy. The hired hack of Rand Corporation, Francis Fukoyama contended that liberal bourgeois democracy is the best that the humanity can hope to achieve and therefore capitalism is the ‘end of history’ and rational-choice making liberal bourgeois individual is the ‘last man’. However, in 2005 when Fukoyama visited New Delhi to deliver a lecture he conceded that capitalism is faced with a grave challenge, and that is Maoism! Apparently, he was obliged to eat his own words and liberal bourgeois democracy now did not simply seem to him the end of everything. The recent years have shown it even more
clearly.
Now, it is a cliché to say that the entire capitalist order is tangled in the most serious crisis after the Great
Depression of the 1930s. Everyone knows it. Capitalism looks far from being victorious and healthy. Working masses in even the advanced countries are on the streets against the vagaries, chaos and anarchy of the capitalist economy and society; Eurozone is submerged in the mire of Sovereign Debt Crisis which is only the continuance of the Subprime Crisis which originated in the last days of 2006 in the US and then took the entire global financial system by storm. In fact, the growth rate of the world economy has not even touched the mark of 3 percent since the collapse of the Dollar-Gold Standard in the early-1970s. Clearly, the capitalist world is in a perpetual mild recession which breaks into serious economic crisis at certain intervals. These intervals are becoming increasingly shorter and that demonstrates that Imperialism is even more decadent, moribund and parasitic than the times of Lenin. However, there are broadly three kinds of responses to this crisis. One is the emergence of popular and spontaneous anti-capitalist movements all around the world, especially in the advanced western capitalist countries and relatively less-developed countries of Europe, like Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc. These movements are spontaneous reaction of the masses of these countries against the poverty, unemployment, homelessness, etc. These protests have evoked a lot of enthusiasm in a section of the intelligentsia and academe. These intellectuals and academicians are uncritically celebrating these spontaneous upsurges and hope that these rebellions will automatically lead towards a better world. Then there are intellectuals and thinkers who claim that the Socialist experiments of the 20th century showed that the project of Marxist Socialism has failed and ended in a catastrophe, and that we need to go beyond the Marxist communism. Intellectuals like Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, etc. argue that there is a need for a so-called ‘new kind of communism’, which has moved beyond Marxism! Some say this openly (like Badiou) and some say it the other way round (like Zizek), while claiming their allegiance to the revolutionary Marxist theory. Intellectuals like Aijaz Ahmad and Prabhat Patnaik too are delighted on these upsurges, however, they too believe that the Soviet Socialist experiment as well as the Chinese Socialist experiment have become obsolete things of the past. For them, either reverting back to the 'bourgeois welfare states' or the so-called Bolivarian alternative of Latin America can be the only practical political proposals today! CPM, in its recent 20th Congress has talked about a 'new kind of Indian Socialism'! This political innovation too can be seen in the same light. Though Trotskyites are different in their ideological and political stances and manouvres, they, too, are trying to revive themselves in the heat of the crucible of these spontaneous
anti-capitalist protests.
The third type of response is that of the ML revolutionaries around the world. The ML revolutionaries around the world are submerged in the mire of hopelessness and pessimism. The source of this pessimism lies in their own dogmatism, incorrect ideological understanding and programmatic position, and the lack/ absence of a dialectical understanding of the failure of the Socialist experiments of the 20th century. These ML revolutionaries have found a new ray of hope in these movements. Most of the ML revolutionaries of India also, are uncritically celebrating these anti-capitalist movements out of their own sense of depression, frustration, pessimism and hopelessness. Then there are various kinds of anarchists, nihilists, even right-wingers who are part of these spontaneous upsurges. The anarchists are most active political component of the present anti-capitalist protests. They had been hoping that these anti-capitalist protests will prove the validity of their political arguments, especially, when even the Marxists and post-Marxists are discrediting the Socialist experiments of the 20th century. However, they were doomed to an anti-climax, as, sooner than expected, the Occupy Wall Street movement dispersed.
So we are faced with a peculiarly difficult scenario. On the one hand, it has become clear as daylight that the
capitalist system and the liberal bourgeois democracy are not working. People around the globe are taking to streets against this predatory system. The claims of ‘end of history’, ‘end of ideology’, etc. have been put to their proper place, that is, the dust bin of history. Imperialism has become even more fragile, hollow, parasitic, moribund and decadent in the age of Globalization and is persisting because of force of inertia. And yet, it seems that there is no viable alternative to the capitalist system! The spontaneous popular movements against the vagaries of global capitalist system have clearly failed to provide any alternative, any scientific, practiceable utopia. The Marxist revolutionaries have no clear-cut understanding of the Socialist experiments of the 20th century, their successes and failures; there are post-Marxist thinkers who believe that there is a need for non-Marxist communism; other left intellecuals have, mostly, nothing left in their minds. In such a scenario, everyone who believes that there is a need for an alternative and there can be an alternative, needs to ask himself/herself some questions. Is there any viable alternative to capitalist system?
What were the successes and failures of the Socialist experiments of the 20th century? Why did they fail? Do we really need to go beyond the Marxist Communism as some speculative vagabond “philosophers” have claimed? What are the problems of Socialism? Can we really organize the revolutionary redemptive activity of the working class, in the words of Walter Benjamin, in the 21st century within the framework of Marxism? These are the questions that all of us need to answer, every person who is still committed to change and who is not swept away by ideological speculations and ruminations of the “free-thinkers”, who do not believe in the ‘end’ of everything, who can still dream; who are not signatories of political and ideological skepticism and disbelief.
With Revolutionary Regards,
Chintan Vichaar ManchPatna
