Comment on the view that socialism in the 21st century may be reborn as anti-capitalism. (UPSC CSE Mains 2014- Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
Some of the key assumptions of 20th century socialism were perhaps not valid in the political economy of 21st century India. In what seemed like a reinterpretation of some practised Marxist tenets the means of production must be “socially-owned” but not necessarily “state-owned”.
Socialism, as applied in the USSR and other centrally-planned economies has gone and will not be revived. It is also crucial to note, that Marx himself deliberately abstained from specific statements about economics and economic institutions of socialism. Or even about the concrete shape of communist society, except that it could not be constructed or programmed. All that Marx said was that the “jagged rhythm of capitalist growth” would produce periodic crises of overproduction (called recession in today’s parlance), which would sooner or later prove incompatible with a capitalist way of running the economy. In some ways, this has proved prophetic as most Western capitalist economies of 20th century vintage are currently having to inject massive doses of social welfarism to sustain further capitalist progress. Massive future public spending on healthcare, etc is at the heart of the political economy debates in the United States, for instance.
The way most of our public sector companies have been run to the ground since the 1970s shows how the old socialist institutions have degenerated. The key challenge for the Congress party, which ushered in economic reforms in the 1990s, is how to invent new institutions that adequately meet the challenges posed by the process of globalisation.
At the heart of this process is to create new frameworks that enable a smooth transition from state-led economic activity to empowering people to participate in broad-based wealth creation. Only this endeavour will ensure a genuine public ownership of wealth in a decentralised manner.
In the 21st century Marxian context, instead of depending on state-led institutions to deliver, it is imperative that new socially inclusive, market-based projects are put in place. India’s political economy is unique in the sense that nearly 50 per cent of its 470 million employed are self-employed. Today big businesses have a free run and face no entry barriers to wealth creation. But the millions of small self-employed face myriad controls imposed by a heartless bureaucracy, a vestige of 20th century socialism. We cannot have a reasonably decentralised and socially-owned means of production unless the self-employed, who dominate the economy, are released from the vice-like grip of an insensitive state apparatus.
The world of the twentieth century had fixed geopolitical and ideological frontiers, whereas our age is characterized by vague and confused frontiers in all domains. The twenty-first century left will be anti-capitalist. It will radically question the dominant socio-economic system that is in the process of exploiting the humanbeing.
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