Safdar B.
1.
Right’s Intentions.
On
August 15, 2014, in his Independence Day speech, Modi announced his decision to
scrap the Planning Commission (PC). The time and place could not have been more
ironic. The PC was one of the jewels of the state capitalist planned economy
which was set up after independence under Nehru [1]
partly due to the progressive bourgeois democratic spirit of the independence
movement and partly due to conviction on the part of the Indian big bourgeoisie
that state support and planning was needed for the unhindered development of
capitalism in India and for the creation of conditions in which capitalist
plunder can thrive. That Modi saw it fit to do away with perhaps the only relic
from the Nehruvian past on an Independence Day itself and from the Red-Fort is
above everything a message. It is a message to the corporate plunderers that he
is fairly and squarely aligned with them on economic matters. Moreover, it
sends a clear signal that he is strong enough to take outright bold decisions
and to dismantle all edifices of state intervention. Modi wants to show
corporate India that he can demolish all road blocks [2] to
capital’s unlimited exploitation, whether it be in the form of state
institutions, other regulatory mechanisms or in the form of bargaining power of
the working class.
It
is in this context that two other legislations mooted by the Modi government have
to be seen as connected to the scrapping of the PC. The first one is the new
government’s efforts to water down the environmental clearances needed for
corporates [3].
The second is the far reaching reforms that Modi is looking to make to the
labour rules [4]. These three policies spell out the far
right’s economic and political agenda clearly: full freedom for the corporate
capital to plunder at will, all state mechanisms hindering this ‘freedom’ to be mowed down, all environmental regulations which ‘slows’ this growth to be
relaxed or done away with; the worker discontent which shall obviously result
from such free plunder to be first ‘outlawed’ and then, if necessary, brutally
crushed by a combination of state force and far right propaganda. This is
exactly why corporate India love Modi; this is exactly why big business always
prefers far right governments rather than conservative bourgeois ones like
those headed by the congress. Their German counter parts even loved and
actively supported the fascist experiment before it went horribly wrong, after
which they put on their moral and philanthropic face to mourn the dead.
So
here are Indian bourgeoisie’s top three reasons to love Modi:
1. He will remove all road blocks – the ‘state’ ones and the ‘natural’ ones
2. He
will keep the workers (those eternal trouble makers) on a tight leash.
3. If,
in spite of this, a crisis erupts (which is sure to happen given the chronic
instability of capitalism’s neo-liberal avatar), or as and when the discontent
among the toilers mount and threaten to boil over, he shall use all the cadre
and ideological power of the ‘Parivar’ to channel this along national
chauvinistic (Pakistan as the eternal enemy) or along communalistic (Muslims
are to blame) lines. After a few thousands lose their lives, everything shall
continue as before.
It
is regarding this last point that the appointment of Amit Shah as the BJP
president acquires added importance. It is very important for the far right to
keep their organizational core intact and ready to unleash religious and ethnic
hatred the moment it sees excessive ‘red’. Given his past record in Gujarat,
Amit Shah is the best candidate, apart from Modi himself, who can oversee this
drive. His efforts, just after his appointment, to stir up communal frenzy in
Uttar Pradesh [5]
on the eve of the bye elections, points
to the road that he intends to take. The situation is in fact ‘inch perfect’
for bourgeois plunderers.
What
does Modi want from them in return? Unquestioned allegiance, of course.
Magnanimous financial and ideological support to further his already strong
personality cult. This was already in full swing during the election campaign.
We saw how the corporate media bolstered the ‘Modi brand’ with a barrage of
ideological propaganda. And further, complete support for the Parivar’s
saffronisation drive in society, education, politics and daily life. This is
highly beneficial to the bourgeoisie as it directly aids the efforts mentioned
in the third point above. So, what we see here is a division of labour
between the far right feudal enthusiasts and the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie to be given complete freedom in economy and the feudalists to be
supported and promoted in politics and social life. Our corporate CEOs have
even invented a phrase for this two way street: “Business with Indian Values”.
They complement each other, cover for each other. The far right soaks up and
diverts all social and political class discontent (or crushes them, if needed);
the capital promotes total far right hegemony in the social and cultural sphere
which translates into political dominance.
2.
Left’s Reaction
The
scrap has drawn obvious flake from the left. Such critiques have identified
this act correctly as the surest indication of Modi’s heavily corporate leaning
economics. But many of such critiques also show a distinct streak of nostalgia
for the ‘planned’ economy and the PC. Even as eminent an economist as C. P.
Chandrashekhar chose to remark that [6] “…
India’s planners served as the conscience-keepers in a market driven
environment that privileges profit and power.” This nostalgia has its roots in
the conviction among many on the left that the PC was designed and acted as
some sought of a counter weight to the blind accumulative drive of the Indian
bourgeoisie; a ‘welfare’ angle is ascribed to the planned phase of the Indian
political economy and to the PC. Such convictions force many on the left to see
the progressive thinning of the role of the PC in the post-reforms era and then
its eventual scrapping by Modi as constituting a radical break in the stand of
Indian bourgeois politicians and policy makers. This drift away from ‘strong
state interventions’ and planning is touted as anti-people (which it is!) and
in the process, the planning and state interventions that characterized the
early phases of post-independent Indian capitalism gets painted in shades of
‘welfarism’. Proletarian revolutionaries, as opposed to sentimental petty
bourgeois economists and historians, have to understand the thoroughly
bourgeois character of the ‘planned’ phase in India’s economic history and
appreciate the fact that the PC was always a bourgeois tool and nothing else.
Such an analysis based on the class nature and motivations of the PC would help
us to clearly see that the scrapping of the PC does not constitute a break at
all, it epitomizes the smooth continuity of bourgeois strategy. A keen understanding
of this continuity will enable Marxists – Leninists to understand not only
Modi’s act in its concrete historical context but also the PC’s proper place in
our history, its class affiliations and the role that it played in India’s
bourgeois development. It will also help us to understand better the objective
economic and social conditions that rendered the PC irrelevant to the Indian
bourgeoisie and eventually led to its wrapping up.
First,
we have to understand what prompted a planned economy and a PC in the first
place; was it an intense desire on the part of the Congress to keep Indian
capitalism on a tight leash, or was it the philanthropic spirit of Indian
capitalism to make sure that the benefits of the growth gets evenly distributed
(as the coolie writers of the Tatas and the Birlas seems to imply)? No way.
There were much more direct class reasons behind such a move.
The
primary motivating factor for such a move was the Indian bourgeoisie’s keen realisation that in a country such as India which was
still reeling in semi-feudal antiquity and which was ravaged by 150 years of
colonial plunder, capitalism’s classic avatar based on unhindered competition
and a non interventionist state will not work. The basic infrastructure and
other pre conditions which are essential for the consolidation of capitalist
growth like heavy industries, extensive network of roads and railway lines,
huge investments in mining and in extraction of oil and natural gas will have
to be developed at a rapid pace and the Indian bourgeoisie, in spite of their
emergence as a strong group by the 1940’s, still did not command enough
resources to carry out a plan of such scale [7]. Heavy
investment in these basic infrastructural areas was seen as extremely important
by the Indian bourgeois for making the Indian indigenous capital more or less
self sufficient and not dependent on imports from colonial powers. So, the
‘Bombay Plan’ [8],
which was the bourgeois blue-print for India’s development, conceded that “...
in executing a comprehensive plan for economic development, especially in a
country where the beginnings of such development have yet to be laid, the state
should exercise ... a considerable measure of intervention and control.”
Bourgeois theorists and leaders were in agreement regarding the need for
proactive state intervention and investment; they realised that if capitalism
proper was to have unhindered growth in India, a ‘planned phase’ of capitalism
was necessary. There was consensus among international bourgeois theorists also
that the new economies emerging out of the shadow of colonialism needs to close
the gap between them and the advanced capitalist world and that this cannot be
achieved by capitalist market mechanisms. The World Bank later characterised
the dominant economic thinking of that time as follows [9]:
“It was assumed that in the early stages of development markets could not be
relied upon, and that the state would be able to direct the development
process.” As Chris Harman has remarked, “Just as Keynesianism was
dominant within bourgeois economics in the advanced countries at the time, so
statist ... doctrines were hegemonic when it came to the third world.”
So, it is very clear that the state interventionist
‘planned’ phase was seen by the Indian bourgeoisie as a necessity; it was
thoroughly in line with the class interests of the bourgeois. And it is very
important for the revolutionary Marxists to understand that the bourgeois, even
in the 1940s, envisaged this ‘planned’ economy as just a phase of capitalist
strategy. They wanted the state to utilise the popular euphoria generated by
independence and progressive struggles to build all the pre requisites with
social labour and tax money and to progressively withdraw as the situation
becomes ripe for capital to take over complete control. Thus it should be seen
that the planned phase was always meant to be transcended by free flowing
non-interventionist capitalist plunder. As the Bombay Plan stressed, “... if
later on private finance is prepared to take over these industries, state
ownership may be replaced by private ownership.” This is the Bombay Plan
loosely anticipating the current disinvestment drive. So, scrapping of PC
was always part of the grand bourgeois plan, even at the time when it was
constituted.
There was another very important reason behind Indian
bourgeoisie’s interest in having a planned phase of development, one which was
intimately connected to the Keynesian economic doctrine which was prevalent in
advanced bourgeois circles in the post world war era. In a ravaged country like
India where the economic situation of the majority of the population was
abysmal, free market capitalism, even if it proved capable to hold itself up on
the production side, would face enormous hurdles on the demand side. At the
time of independence, the bourgeois realised that the extent of the ‘home
market’ in India is way below that needed to sustain a successful capitalist
economy. What is the point in Indian capitalists producing enormous amounts of
diverse commodities if the population lacked the buying power to absorb these
commodities and to realise the surplus value hidden in them? The lack of home
market and demand would paralyse capital’s growth even before it had started.
Indian capitalists realised that only the state can, by resorting to ‘welfare’
policies in the field of education, health, personal hygiene and by massive
investments in basic industries which would generate huge employment
opportunities, enhance the buying power of Indian population and thereby
sustain capitalist enterprises. Massive state public welfare measures in the
field of education, health and public distribution system were supported by the
Indian bourgeoisie not because of ‘humane’ considerations or because of their
‘socialist’ credentials, but based on cool economic facts. They knew that
capitalist plunder cannot be instituted without necessary ‘subjective’ factors
put in place like a properly trained workforce and a population with buying
power.
This support for state planning and welfare measures,
even when it was based on a pragmatic understanding of their class interests,
gave Indian capitalists the opportunity to identify themselves with the
progressive nature of India’s struggle for freedom and its bourgeois socialist
nature. They jumped on to the Nehruvian bandwagon with catch phrases like
welfarism, equitable distribution, progress and democracy, in the process
making sure that the ‘welfare’ intentions of the radical bourgeois wing of the
Congress stays well within the limits of capitalist system. The Indian
bourgeoisie made a conscious effort to hide the class nature of the proposed
planned economy and instead projected it as a ‘socialist’ measure aimed at
common good and thus identified themselves with the progressive tenants of the
freedom struggle. As Aditya Mukherjee remarked: “A casual reading of the Bombay
Plan would give the impression that the motive was to introduce what could be
called a ‘welfare state’, though within the capitalist structure. The public
sector is throughout defended on grounds of increasing the standard of living
of the people, effecting an equitable distribution, public welfare and so on.”
It points towards the stupendous success of this bourgeois camouflage that the
planned phase is even now thought of in these terms and state withdrawal is
seen as a break with this ‘welfare’ phase rather than its logical continuation.
3. The Way
Forward
We have seen that the Planning Commission and the
planned ‘welfare’ phase of our political economy was not meant at all to tame
the advance of capital, it was meant to facilitate such an advance, to develop
all the objective and subjective conditions needed for the power of free
capital to assert itself. It thus emerges that the scrapping of the PC, far
from signifying a break with the state interventionist phase of Indian
capitalism, is the logical continuation of it. Could the Congress wrap up
the PC? No. It is important to understand why. Congress is a conservative
bourgeois party which clearly understands that the Indian capitalists have
acquired the financial and political clout needed to ‘replace state ownership
with private ones’, as the Bombay plan predicted. It also knows that the
Keynesian welfare policies, which acted as the international backdrop for a
planned economy in India, have been ruthlessly replaced by neoliberal free
capital. For the last twenty five years, it was the Congress who had worked
tirelessly to ensure that the transition to free capitalist plunder is as
smooth as possible. They have been busy dismantling every edifice of the
planning phase under the able leadership of Manmohan and Montek Singh
Ahluvalia. But still they could not have wrapped up the PC. This is because it
would be politically catastrophic to the Congress to shed their ‘progressive’
image which is exactly what they would be doing if they wrap up the PC. In
reality, the Congress has long since obliterated all its progressive bourgeois
affiliations which it had, even though in small measures, under Nehru and has
become an outright reactionary bourgeois party. But politically, they still
work hard to keep their Nehruvian progressive image and this prevents them
being 100% loyal to the corporate capital and sometimes hold them back from
taking ‘strong economic decisions’. The Indian corporate capitalists have found
in the past decade that the legacy of the freedom movement and its progressive
traditions still cast a pale shadow over the Congress. This is a hindrance. So
the corporate bourgeoisie wants India to be led by a political entity which
does not bear the weight of dead generations. The best option would have been a
neo liberal conservative Thatcher type party that endorses free market
capitalism ideologically and politically. In the event of its absence, as in
India, corporate capital’s best bet would be to prop up an entity with feudal
class affiliations which, in order to consolidate its hold on the social,
political and cultural sphere is ready for compromise in economic matters with
the neo liberal side. Such a feudal class party would, because of its class
affiliation, be against all progressive bourgeois tenets of India’s freedom
struggle including the planned phase of economic growth. So it will have no
ideological blocks to cast aside all remnants of this era, including PC, and to
usher in free capital. The BJP’s and the RSS’s efforts after coming to power to
identify themselves and to prop up the Gandhi – Vallabhai team as the real face
of Indian freedom struggle and to demonise Nehru is the clearest indication of
this. It is precisely because Gandhi and Patel constitute the conservative
bourgeois side of the freedom struggle with which the feudal sympathisers have
many agreements whereas Nehru symbolises its radical bourgeois side which they
detest.
What was the reaction of Indian communists to the
proposal of a planned phase of capitalist growth? Bipan Chandra has suggested [10]
that Indian Marxists was favourable to such a move at the eve of independence
and that they did not mount any opposition to it. Was this because the Indian
revolutionary left failed to understand the class nature of the ‘planned’
phase? Were they blinded by the progressive rhetoric of the bourgeoisie into ascribingsocialist credentials for this move? Did they have any utopian notions
regarding this planned phase’s capacity in resolving, even in a limited sense,
the contradictions immanent in capitalist growth? The answer to these questions
has to be a categorical No. Indian revolutionary left correctly understood the
class nature of the post independent state. For all the radical and progressive
rhetoric of the Indian bourgeoisie, they had no intention as a class to take
the bourgeois revolution to its most radical conclusion. As in almost all
societies where the bourgeois – democratic revolution was consummated after the
appearance of an independent proletarian class, the Indian bourgeoisie also saw
the total destruction of all the remnants of the feudal order as detrimental to
their class interests. In Leninist terms [11],
this was nothing but the bourgeoisie’s inability or unwillingness to complete
the democratic revolution. Indian Marxists accurately captured this when they
characterised the Indian state as a class alliance of the bourgeoisie and the
landlords. This alliance found its political expression through the
conservative right wing of Indian National Congress (INC) led by
Gandhi-Patel-Radhakrishnan which wanted to preserve most of the remnants of the
feudal past. Such an alliance and its political strategy of carefully bogging
down the democratic revolution was extremely detrimental to the nascent Indian
working class. Lenin expressed this fact in the Russian context in 1905 itself [12]:
“... the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the
further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia the
working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient
development of capitalism. The working class is, therefore, most certainly
interested in the broadest, freest, and the most rapid development of
capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which hamper the
broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of absolute advantage to the
working class... That is why a bourgeois revolution is in the highest degree advantageous
to the proletariat... The more complete, determined, and consistent the
bourgeois revolution, the more assured will the proletariat’s struggle be
against the bourgeoisie and for socialism”.
It is against this background that the Marxists’
reaction to the planning phase needs to be seen. Far from seeing state planning
as a socialist measure, Indian revolutionary left clearly understood the bourgeois
nature of such an exercise which was tailor made to make Indian capitalism
stronger. But they also understood that in a country like India on the eve of
Independence, which was still characterised predominantly by feudal economic
and social relationships and which was ravaged by 150 years of colonial
plunder, what was needed was exactly unhindered growth of capitalism capable of
sweeping away all the filthy feudal remnants of the past eras which still clung
on to the Indian social order. From the stand point of the revolutionary
proletariat, such progressive growth of capitalism was the need of the hour. At
independence, urban India possessed an independent working class which had
played a very important part in the anti imperial struggle especially during
1945-47 when the struggle turned militant. Based on such participation, some
authors have commented that the proletarian class and the Communist party
should have attempted to impose their hegemony on the struggle and should have
guided the struggle towards socialist aims. Such a conclusion stems from the
complete lack of understanding about the class nature of India’s anti imperial
struggle. The class nature of a movement is not determined by the numerical
strength of the classes participating in it, rather it is determined by the
prevalent economic and social conditions and the state of the growth of
productive forces. It is very clear even to the casual observer that neither
the objective nor the subjective conditions of a socialist revolution were
existent in India at the eve of independence. The conditions were only ripe for
a bourgeois – democratic revolution aimed at the growth of capitalist economic
relations and liberal democratic freedom. Historians who have admonished Indian
proletariat’s inability to channel the freedom struggle in socialist directions
do so under the impression that all that is needed to make a socialist revolution
is to establish hegemony of socialist ideas; they disregard the foundational
economic requirements and thus their comments can only be seen as idealist
gibberish. The communists’ strategy of strengthening the democratic revolution
was thus the correct one and it had two main reasons, one objective and the
other subjective. Unhindered growth of capitalism would make the contradictions
of capitalism much more acute and visible and this alone would deepen the class
antagonisms in the society thus making the direct class struggle between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie unavoidable, i.e., it will make all the
objective conditions needed for revolutionary class struggle a reality. Such a
growth in the planned phase would provide the political freedom and cultural
maturity needed for free organisation of revolutionary elements and the
building of a class conscious vanguard of the working class, or in other words,
such a climate of political freedom and progressive democratic spirit would
provide the opportunity to the revolutionary party for building all subjective
conditions needed for revolutionary class struggle.
In the sixty odd years after independence, predictions
related to the objective conditions have all materialised. Indian bourgeoisie
have attained maturity and are in full command of the state apparatus so much
so that they feel that the planning commission’s duty of strengthening Indian
capitalism is complete. Their alliance with feudal remnants is preserved and
constitutes perhaps the biggest obstacle in the path of building revolutionary
consciousness among the toilers because the working class is still fragmented
in the name of religion, caste and other feudal elements. But, on the subjective
front, the Indian left has comprehensively failed in its duty in building a
class conscious revolutionary proletarian movement. The hope that bourgeois
freedom and parliamentary democracy will provide the perfect background against
which to build all the subjective elements needed for revolutionary class
struggle in a society in which the contradictions of capitalism is becoming
more and more evident, has not materialised. The extent by which the left
parties have drifted away from the revolutionary path can be gauged by looking
at the platform on which it contested the recent parliamentary elections and Lenin’s conception of a vanguard party’s approach to parliament and
elections [13]:
“The important thing for us is not to get seats in the Duma by means of
compromises; on the contrary, those seats are important only because and
insofar as they can serve to develop the political consciousness of the masses,
to raise them to a higher political level, to organise them, not for the
sake of philistine happiness, not for the sake of ‘tranquillity’, ‘order’ and
‘peaceful [bourgeois] bliss’, but for the struggle for the complete
emancipation of labour from all exploitation and all oppression. Only for
this purpose, and only to the extent that they help us achieve it, are seats in
the Duma and the whole election campaign important for us”. Lenin’s
approach to bourgeois elections were revolutionary to the core[14]:
“The Social Democratic Party needs a platform for the elections to the fourth
Duma in order once more to explain to the masses – in connection to the
elections, on the occasion of the elections and in the debates on the elections
– the need for, and the urgency and inevitability of, the revolution”. For
Marxist – Leninist parties, bourgeois political freedom, unhindered capitalist
growth, parliamentary democracy and elections based on popular franchise etc
are all important only for one reason that they offer the possibility of
organising the revolutionary vanguard, nurturing the growth of their class
consciousness and for reiterating the fact that proletarian revolution is the
only solution. They have no utopian notions regarding the bourgeois
parliament’s or state’s capacity of bringing relief to the ‘poor’ nor do they
fight elections on such a platform. Instead of converting representative
institutions and elections into platforms for revolutionary propaganda, the
Indian left has drifted in the direction of seeing the possibilities of
bringing ‘welfare’ using these institutions. Correspondingly, during elections,
they put advocate pro-poor policies and try to expose the corporate leaning
nature of bourgeois parties, commit themselves to secularism when others are
spitting communal venom. These are petty bourgeois platforms and not Marxist –
Leninist ones. So instead of utilising the planning phase of Indian capitalism
for organising the vanguard and educating the toiling class about the
inevitability of revolution, the Indian left was caught in the ‘welfarist’ web.
Instead of ruthlessly exposing the institutions of bourgeois democracy and the
class nature of the bourgeois state, the left, in its everyday political
pronouncements, put the blame on pro-business and corrupt politicians thus
giving the impression that capture of seats or power in representative
institutions can bring about change.
The scrapping of PC gives us clear indication that the
Indian bourgeoisie is all set to unleash the most predatory form of capitalism
with the militant might of fascist right wing as their insurance against any
unrest among the toilers. Indian left, which has failed in the planned phase
of projecting the ‘actuality of revolution’, has a huge historical duty now.
Only a militantly organised proletariat which is conscious about the urgency of
revolutionary question and which can lead all the toiling sections of society
against the bourgeois – feudal alliance can save this country from barbarism.
It is the duty of the Indian Marxist left to be in the vanguard of this
struggle. It has to shrug off its welfarist and parliamentary slime. This is
not an easy task in view of the large number of petty bourgeois and
bureaucratic elements which has infiltrated its ranks. But once the ‘actuality
of revolution’ is back as the main platform of the left, such elements will
quickly understand that their careerist agendas will not be served by
associating with a genuinely revolutionary movement and will jump off the left
wagon. This is the only way to cleanse and to reinvent revolutionary left in
this country.
[1]
Sometimes
wrongly termed Nehruvian ‘socialism’.
[2] Even
‘symbolic’ road blocks like the PC; it had long since lost any power to tame
capital’s advance.
[3]
“Clearance Mela”, Frontline, Vol. 31, No. 18, pg. 43.
[4] “Recent
changes in labour laws”, Anamitra Roychowdhury, EPW, October 11, 2014.
[5] "Saheb's Man", Frontline, Vol. 31, August 8, 2014.
[6]
“Un-planning, Modi Style”, Frontline, Vol. 31, No. 18, 2014.
[7] “Indian
capitalist class and public sector, 1930-1947”, EPW, January 17, 1976.
[8] Among the
signatories of this plan, put forward in 1945, included such leaders of Indian
bourgeoisie like J. R. D. Tata, G. D. Birla and Purishottamdas Thakurdas.
[9] From
World Bank’s World Development Report, as quoted by Chris Harman, “Zombie
Capitalism”.
[10]“India’s
Struggle for Independence”, Bipan Chandra et al., Penguin India, 2000.
[11] In view
of such unwillingness, Lenin argued in 1905 that the proletarians have the duty
of leading the democratic revolution and of making sure that all its radical
and progressive potentials are realized in spite of a wavering and treacherous
bourgeois class, see Lenin’s pamphlet ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the
Democratic Revolution’.
[12]
Lenin, ‘Two
Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’.
[13]
Lenin Collected Works, Volume 11, ‘Attitude of Parties to Duma Elections’.
[14]
Lenin Collected Works, Volume 18, ‘Platform of Reformists and Platform of
Social Democrats’.
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