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LOOKING BACK
The 20th century was a period of great political turmoil and awakening in different parts of the world. In Russia, the feudal tsars were both overthrown and executed. The country started on a new revolutionary path that promised an ideologically-motivated lean and healthy Soviet Union ready to spread its wings all across the globe. For a while, it seemed to do just that. For many leaders of the Third World, the Soviet Union was a new model and an inspiration for the colonized world struggling for independence and freedom. And then something happened without anyone seriously becoming aware of it. The new power started becoming fat. Politically, the party gradually transformed itself into a machine that was quite efficient in building a superstructure of perks and privileges for the ruling elite who developed a tendency to wallow in the new found world of wealth and privilege all in the name of the proletariat. A new class had emerged with ever-increasing fat of unquestioned power and privilege around its waistline. There was no dearth of people who saw this ugly character of increasing flatulence all the way from Milovan Djilas to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But the world of power and privilege could not feel the rise in frustration among the people. The system was simply not capable of entertaining the feedback for corrective action. And so, after 70 years, the communist model that spawned a ruling class getting fatter everyday finally collapsed without much resistance or even fanfare; it started with a bang and ended with a whimper.
Classical Marxism, despite its inherent humanism, has a tendency to degenerate into a form of suppressive fundamentalism where the survival and growth of the fattest becomes the norm.
The Chinese case is a little different. Mao being a revolutionary with a romantic trait quickly realized that the party, once it acquired power, has a natural propensity to accumulate fat in the form or privileges, corruption and misuse of power for private gain at public cost. Since the system did not allow political competition for feedback and corrective action, he hit upon the idea of “cultural revolution” and even “permanent revolution” to purge the system of fat accumulation so that it remained lean and fit in line with the conception of the new socialist man. However, the cultural revolution quickly took the form of political, economic and cultural anarchy to the extent that the whole economy was on the verge of collapse. In this process, Mao also managed to lead the country through his “ great leap forward” (reminds you of our own “frog leap forward”?) to an unprecedented famine that cost millions of lives. Ultimately, Dengism has prevailed in China. The country has made spectacular progress in the economic arena under a competitive capitalistic economic system with feedback from the market as a way of reducing the accumulation of fat. However, capitalistic model with all its emphasis on creative destruction still provides no guarantee of fitness. It has also displayed a tremendous ability to accumulate fat despite the fact that it retains the capability and flexibility for correction when the system faces a threat of survival.
Take the case of the US. It is now clearly being understood that the sub-prime crisis and the highly-leveraged derivate trading and profit making went virtually ignored in the US because the top layer of the present day capitalist system, the financiers and the bankers, were making enormous profit and rewarding themselves and perhaps the politicians as well. In this process, they were ignoring the simple proposition that a company may be able to transfer financial risk for a premium but the same is not possible for the whole economy. However, after the bust in housing market, the force of this principle was felt acutely leading to a rapid fall in consumer confidence and a general fall in aggregate demand while increasing the unemployment levels to double digit. The future challenge then is, in the words of Prof Raghu Ram Rajan of the University of Chicago, how to save capitalism from the capitalists. In other words, limiting the survival and growth of the fattest in the economy is going to remain a problem for capitalism in the foreseeable future. Probably, for this reason, banking in developed countries will become a rather boring profession since it will have to come under increasing central regulation and control in the future. The signs are already there: Even in the US, the idea that the salary of banking chief executives needs to be regulated is gaining momentum.
NEPAL IN TRANSITION: THE RISE OF THE FATTEST?
What about Nepal? It is tempting to say that since Nepal is a very poor country, the survival and growth of the fattest is of little interest. On the other hand, it is important to note that income inequality in Nepal is one of the highest in the region and this trend has gained momentum since the last few years. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of Nepali politics has been to view politics as a form of business, a new medium for enriching a few, as the move towards a capitalist mode of production gets stuck in a new form of neo-feudalism where rent seeking by those in power is becoming an all-pervading phenomena. The remedy suggested ranges all the way from Marxist fundamentalism, Maoist style, to market fundamentalism which even Adams Smith will find hard to recognize. For the present, Marxist fundamentalism in the form of Maoism has caught the imagination of some very intelligent people in the country. Like all other fundamentalist doctrine, it harps on absolutes and relies on themes like “state capture” “cultural revolution” and “permanent revolution” as the only route to a new period of political nirvana where the state will wither away and the society will enter an era of permanent bliss and affluence. The path towards this affluence is the dictatorship of the communist party where only like minded will be allowed to take part in politics. It is immaterial to the Nepali Maoists that once the party captures state power, as in Cuba or North Korea for example, politics becomes the privilege of a few with dynastic overtones. Perhaps, if people were robots and machines, such a system of politics would indeed be ideal. Robots need to be told what to do and it would be done. But human beings are more than that: They have the ability to think and question. It is this particular character of human gene that creates problems for leaders managing the “nature of truth” at any moment.
It is indeed remarkable that a doctrine that relies on a complex relational structure of reasoning known as dialectical method should suddenly find it necessary to adopt new models of dictatorship where the human mind should always look towards the “ministry of truth” to understand its own objective existence. It explains why for the Nepali Maoists truth changes everyday in the name of tactics and people become in this process nothing more than nuts and bolts in a machine that thrives on threat, extortion and deception. Such a system creates its own privileged class that sees any one questioning its intentions as a mortal enemy who needs to be suppressed in the name of the people. No wonder classical Marxism, despite its inherent humanism, has a tendency to degenerate into a form of suppressive fundamentalism where the survival and growth of the fattest becomes the norm. Of course, no Maoist leader will own any property but the party is indeed emerging as the fattest party in the nation even before it has “captured the state”.
(Writer is the leader of Rastriya Janashakti Party in the Legislature-Parliament.)
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