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 Master of Arts
POLITICAL SCIENCES (MAPS)

MPS-01
POLITICAL THEORY

Block – V
Understanding Text Structures

UNIT-17 LIBERTARIANISM
UNIT-18 MARX, LENIN AND MAO
UNIT-19 LUKACS, GRAMSCI AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
UNIT-20 SOCIALISM
UNIT 17 LIBERTARIANISM

Structure

17.1 Introduction
17.2 What is Libertarianism?
17.3 Political Theory of Libertarianism
17.3.1 Individualism
17.2.2 Individual Rights and Liberty
17.3.3 Civil Society
17.3.4 Political Economy and the Problem of Redistribution
17.3.5 Rule of Law & Limited Government
17.4 Critical Evaluation
17.5 Summary
17.6 Exercises

17.1 INTRODUCTION

With the rise of liberalism as a theory of welfare state in the twentieth century, its
functions increased manifold. It was during this transformation that the state acquired
its present all pervasive form. However, the fight for classical liberalism was not
given up. After the Second World War an important contribution to the theory of
liberalism was made by theorists whose allegiance lay with early classical liberalism.
This new movement which became popular in the USA and England in the 1960s is
known by the name, Libertarianism. Many libertarian texts have been written by
people who only know North American political culture and society. They claim
universal application for libertarianism, but it remains culture bound. The libertarian
movement received large scale academic attention with the appearance in 1974 of a
book Anarchy, State and Utopia by the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. The
work achieved great acclaim for its brilliance of argument and was frequently
bracketed with Rawls’s. A Theory justice. It influenced the Thatcher/Reagan
administrations of the 1980s. Etymologically, libertarianism means free will or free
advocacy of liberty. It is the most radical form of individualism and advocarcs pure
capitalist economy, as the surest expression and defence of 'individuality. In political
theory, it answers once again the fundamental question i.e. what are the legitimate
functions of the state - in a radical way. Holding the liberty of the individual as
sacrosanct libertarianism asserts that welfare measures can lead to a collectivist state.
Here one can ask: if the liberal principle have been rooted in American and English
political culture, then why has this new term come into use. According to Martin
Masse, this is because liberalism since the end of the 19th century has taken up a new
1
meaning, which is not at all compatible with the defence of individual freedom.
While in the U.K., the so-called liberal parties are only a little more moderate than the
socialists parties in their inclination to use state power, in the United States, a liberal
was considered a le A winger who advocated wealth redistribution and supported a
big government that interferes everywhere in peoples" lives; a government that tries
to solve all real and imaginary problems by taxing and spending and creating
bureaucratic programmes for each good cause. In short, today's liberalism aims at
creating a tyrannical state that does riot hesitate to trample on individual Freedom in
the name of an unattainable collectivist utopia. This type of liberalism has nothing to
do with classical 1iber.alism. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is inspired by former
periods of liberal progress but after one century during which collectivist and
totalitarian ideologies have dominated, they realized that classical liberalism was not
strong or principled enough to stem the rising tide of statism. They are more coherent
or some may say radical than traditional liberals in their defence of personal liberty
and market economy and in their opposition to state power. Libertarian scholars have
shown that it is the decentralized action of the individuals who pursue their own ends
in a free market which makes it possible to create and maintain this spontaneous order
to bring prosperity and to support the complex: civilization in which we live.

17.2 WHAT IS LIBERTARIANISM?

Much political and moral philosophy over the past three centuries has concerned itself
with human liberty. 'The philosophical outlook on politics known as libertarianism
takes this ideas to its extreme, proposing to make liberty, the only interest that a state
may properly have with respect to its citizen:

The libertarian philosophy has been propounded by a number of scholars, prominent

among them are F.A. Hayek, liar1 Popper, Talmon, Milton Friedman, I. Berlin, M.
Rothbard, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand. Taking liberty as the u1tinlate value, it asserts
that in order to protect liberty, a society must have strong private property rights, a
free market arid minimal government. Some writers haves termed libertarianism as
'freedom'. The best wily to understand the various terms is to know what libertarians
believe in. In a few words, libertarianism believes that individual freedom is the
fundamental value that must underlie all social relations, economic exchanges and the
political system. Essentially libertarians preach freedom in all fields including the
right to do what one wants with one's sown body insofar as one does infringeon the
poverty and equal freedom of others. They believe that voluntary cooperation
between individual in a free market is always preferable to coercion exerted by the
state. They believe that the role of the state is not to pursue goals in the name of the
community. The state is not there to redistribute wealth, 'promote' culture', support'
the agriculture sector or 'help' small firms, but should limit itself to the protection of
individual rights and let citizens pursue their own goals in a peaceful way.
Libertarianism supports the formal equality of each and all before the law, but it

2
worries little about the inequalities between the rich and poor, inequalities which are
inevitable and can be reduce only by encroaching on personal freedom and by
reducing overall prosperity. For them the best way to fight poverty is to guarantee a
system of free enterprise mid free trade and to let private charity initiatives which are
more effective and better justified morally than state programmes of wealth transfer,
come to the rescue of those in need. Libertarians believe that the only way to ensure
the maintenance of personal freedom is to guarantee the inviolability of private
property and to limit as much as possible the size of the government and the scope of
its interventions. They do not trust the state in protecting individual liberty.

Libertarianism is opposed to collectivist ideologies of all types, be it of the left or

which right which stress the primacy of the group, nation, social class, sexual or
ethnic group, religious or language community etc. They oppose all whose purpose is
to regiment individuals in the pursuit of collective goals. They do not deny the
relevance of these collective identities, but claim that it is up to the individuals
themselves to determine which group they wish to belong and contribute to. It is not
for the state or for institutions that derive their power from the state to impose their
own objectives in a bureaucratic and coercive manner.

Thus, libertarianism rejects the main political developments of the 20th century; that
is, the sustained growth in the size of the state and the range of its interventions in the
private lives of the citizens. It is the only one that demands and works for radical
change, a drastic reduction of the size and role of the state, they are the only ones who
value individual freedom, above all else. More and more people realize that
libertarianism constitutes the only alternative. The libertarian movement hardly
existed in the 1960s but really took off in the Unites States in the early 1970s.
Whereas collectivist philosophies and Keynesian economics used to dominate
academic life, recently there has been a revival of interest in classical liberalism and
free market economy throughout the world. After a century of eclipse, classical
liberalism in its libertarian off spring is becoming an influential philosophical
doctrine and movement in the 2lst century.

Like all philosophical movements, libertarianism is varied, containing several schools

and sub-groups and one will find no. unanimity about its theoretical justifications, its
goals or the strategy that should be adopted to reach them. Mainly, there are two
types of libertarianism and each has its own answers to the queries. One group, the
anarchists or also known as ‘anarcho-capitalists' advocate the complete
disappearance of the state and privatisation of even the basic functions mentioned
above. This goal may appear extreme or ridiculous at first sight, but it is based on a
theoretically plausible argument. It is for example, easy to imagine that one could
replace provincial state or municipal police forces (with the corruption, abuses of
power, the incompetence and favouritism which usually characterize them all and
often with impunity) with private security agencies. These would make profits only in

3
so far as they really protect citizens and fight real criminals. Anarcho-capitalists use
the same type of arguments to support the privatisation of the army and the courts
which would leave nothing for a state to do. Private firms would then provide all the
services that individuals might need in a pure free market. In a context where public
spending now accounts for almost half of all that is produced, where government con
adopt law after law so as to increase their control over our life, a more realistic
libertarian goal is simply to reverse this trend and fight for any practical advance of
freedom and any concrete reduction in state tyranny. The other branch is known as
'miniarchists’ who maintain that government may appropriately engage in police
protection, enforcement of contracts and national defence, foreign relations, justice,
the protection of private property and individual rights. All remaining functions
should be privatised. In the context of a very decentralized federal state, libertarians
accept, however, that local authorities can intervene in other fields and offer various
types of social and economic arrangements in so far as dissatisfied citizens can easily
move to other jurisdictions. Definitely not included, according to miniarchists, is the
power to tax, even to secure money for the functions just mentioned,

The question arises: why the libertarians endorse these views so sharply at variance
with most political theory? Firstly, libertarians hold an extremely strong doctrine of
individual rights, particularly the right of individuals to acquire and hold property.
Their concept of property rights and freedom of contract excludes welfare rights,
since claims to these rights require in the libertarian view compulsory labour of some
on behalf of other. Secondly, libertarians believe that the operation of an unrestricted
system of laissez faire capitalism is the most desirable social system. People
unfettered by state compulsions would be likely to establish this sort of economic
system and it is all for the best that they do. We shall study all these aspects in detail
in the next section.

17.3 POLITICAL THEORY OF LIBERTARIANISM

It is claimed that the key concepts of the political theory of libertarianism have
developed over many centuries. The first inklings of them can be found in ancient
China, Greece and Israel; they began to be developed into something resembling
modern libertarian philosophy in the work of such seventeenth and eighteenth century
thinkers as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas
Paine. In the twentieth century, they were reinvented by neo-liberal thinkers such as
Michael Oakeshott, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick etc. While these
scholars have given a new intellectual impetus to the libertarian movement, a growing
concern for personal autonomy has provided personal ground for the sowing of the
idea. Some of the important concepts of libertarian theory are as follows:

4
17.3.1 Individualism

While the libertarian ideal of individualism has certain family resemblance with the
neoclassic defence of capitalism, anarcho / individualism and classical liberalism, it is
reducible to none of these. Libertarianism can only be understood against the
backdrop of the emergence of totalitarianism and the modern welfare state since the
1930s .Libertarians see the individual as the basic unit of social analysis. Only
individuals make choices and are responsible for their actions. Libertarian thought
emphasizes the dignity of the individual, which entails both rights and responsibility.
The progressive extension of dignity to more people -to women, to people of different
religions and different races- is one of the great libertarian triumphs of the western
world.

Libertarianism represents the most radical form of individualism, sort of outright

anarchism. Along with it, it exalts the pure capitalist economy as the surest
expression and defence of individuality. Nevertheless, the near anarchism of some
libertarian doctrines have prompted the expression 'annrcho-capitalism. However, the
libertarian defence of capitalism would legitimise a degree of economic equality that
true anarchists could not abide. The works of Ayn Rand are a leading expression of
the libertarian ideal of individualism, even it' it sometimes takes an extreme and
occasionally unrepresentative form. A brilliant novelist, she developed the libertarian
ideal both in fictional works and polemical essays. Utterly rejecting any theological
notions or ideas that rank the community over the individual, she held that the
individual is the basic unit of society, the prime focus of moral concern and the sole
source of human creativity. According to her, the root cause of our modern troubles is
the philosophy of altruism, a moral position that effectively destroys the supreme
value of 'individuality. Altruism - the notion that man should place the welfare of
others above his own- is the root of all evils and not money. Indeed, money is
cherished as the just reward and fair estimation of the individual's inherent
excellence. For Rand, altruism is a vice and selfishness is a virtue, though selfishness
does not mean a petty snvelling self-indulgence but accepting full personal
responsibility for one's life and fate. Altruism is the villain of the piece because it
plays upon the morbid guilt feelings of the donor and keeps the recipient in state of
childish subservience. Neither party can develop a mature confident outlook on life
which should culminate in a fair and equitable and truly voluntary exchange of goods
and services. The ethics of altruism always gratuitous; it preaches that someone has a
prescriptive right to a free ride on someone else's back. According to this theory, the
notion that one person should sacrifice himself for the sake of another is radically
evil. It is an affront to human dignity and an open invitation to prefer death over life.

5
17.3.2 Individual Rights and Liberty

Central to libertarianism is the claim that the individual should be free from the
interference of others. Personal liberty is the supreme moral good. Hence, one’s
liberty can justifiably be restricted only if he consents to the restriction. Any other
restriction, including taxing incomes for the purpose of redistribution is unjust. In
other words, the libertarians couch their theory in the language of rights. Each
individual has natural negative rights - to at least life, liberty and property. NU one
can justifiably harm him, restrict his freedom, or take his property, i.e., no one can his
rights without his consent. Moreover, these are general rights; they apply, so to speak,
against the whole world. And since rights invariably have correlative duties, all the
people in the world have the duty not to interfere with the rightholder's life, liberty
and property. Each person possesses these rights simply by virtue of his humanity -
he does not have to do anything to obtain this moral protection. The possession of
rights does not depend upon the consent of others. They are essential moral
constituents of personhood. They are not granted by the government or by the society;
they are inherent in the nature of human beings. It is intuitively right that individuals
enjoy the security of such rights; the burden of explanation lie with those who would
take these rights away. libertarian theorists often move back and forth between talk of
negative rights and talk of' liberty. This, according to Hugh La follettee, is because
they ultimately see rights and liberty as equivalent or because they hold a theory of
rights which is grounded in personal liberty. There are no circumstances in which the
negative general rights can be justifiably overridden in which one's liberty can be
justifiably limited without his consent for example, A's right to properly (or life or
liberty) can never be overridden for the benefit of others (to satisfy, the alleged
positive rights of others). 'A' can choose to charitably give his property to someone or
he can voluntarily give someone a positive right to his property. Nevertheless,
morally he cannot be forced -either by legal sanctions or moral rules to give up his
life, liberty or property. This moral/legal prohibition insures that an individual’s
liberty cannot be restricted in any way without his consent.

In the context of rights, what is important to note is that libertarians make a

distinction between negative and positive rights. For example, take the general right
to life; in its negative version, it says that only others must not kill (or take the life of
) the right holder’s but in its positive it would also require that others do something to
help save the rightholder's life if it is possible for them to do so. The importance of
this distinction is that the liberatarian holds that people have no basic positive rigl1t.s-
that all positive obligations have to be in some way assured or undertaken by the
obligated individual i.e. by promising that he will perform the indicated action.

Thus, we see two important features of libertarianism. First the primary purpose of
the negative general rights is the protection of individual liberty, to ensure that no
one's life is restricted without his consent. Or as Nozick puts it: 'side constraints

6
(which are equivalent to negative general rights) upon action reflect the underlying
Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they cannot be
sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. (these
constraints reflect the fact of our separate existences)'. They reflect the fact that no
more balancing act can take place among us. Secondly, the libertarian holds that a
sufficient reason to reject any alleged moral rule or principle or distributive justice is
that such a rule or principle restricts someone's freedom without his consent. Hayek,
for example, argues that we should reject plans to expand governmental roles since
such expansion necessarily undermines individual liberty. And Nozick's primary
objection to Rawls is that Rawls', twa principles restrict individual liberty without
consent.

As mentioned above, much political and moral philosophy over the centuries has
concerned itself with human liberty. However, the philosophical outlook on politics
known as libertarianism, take this idea to its extreme, proposing to make liberty the
only interest that a state may properly have with respect to its citizens. Libertarianism
takes liberty as our sole right (this is also called 'deontological libertarianism*)
against considering liberty as the sole value to be promoted by the government and
the individual. The point of malting liberty a general right is to prevent the
government from forcing people to do things. According to it, our sole fundamental
right is the right to liberty, all other rights are subordinate to that- they are either
special cases of that one or derived from it directly or indirectly.

Just like the concept of negative rights, libertarianism also emphasizes the negative
aspect of liberty i.e., liberty as absence of' imposition by other people, specifically
those impositions that are caused by their intentional actions. In this version, each
person is to be entitled to do as that person likes, or judges best, except only when his
or her action would impose on others would interfere with the intended desired
courses of action of someone else or (if this is different) damage that person, in the
sense of' doing what that person did not want to be done with or to his or her body or
mind. It is as Hobbes called it 'absence of external impediments' or 'seeking peace';
that is, of' not 'making war' on others; or as Locke termed it 'not harming them in
respect of 'life, health, liberty or property'; Kant's version of 'acting only on maxims
that can coexist along with freedom of the will of each and all'. These have been
echoed in the contemporary American philosopher John Rawls’ formulation of a
liberty principle that 'each person participating in a practice, or affected by it has an
equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for
others'. What is important in all these versions is that the emphasis is on the negative
liberty; people encounter each other and in doing so they are to refrain from actions
that would cause the other person harm, danger, disease and the like. Any other action
are permissible whether or not they have the effect of ‘maximising’ something. Again
coercion and they condemn it along with overt the force. Liberty is the absence of
obstacles, imposed costs; the coercer does a cost on his victim.

7
The natural baseline: to which libertarians appeal for liberty is our body. The
libertarians hold that we ought to make anyone's liberty into a right; that is, we ought
to make it the case that imposition or proposed impositions against anyone's liberty is
a ground for taking action to rectify or prevent them, and that is what the libertarian
principle does. This right is equivalent to the right of self-ownership. Each person
would be regarded as 'owning himself' in the same straightforward sense as that in
which we can own all sorts of things such as cars and footballs; namely, being able to
do what one wants to with the self in question; at the same time, one is riot able to do
that with others; rather, their willingness or consent must be established before one
may do things with others.

And last but not the least, why would people value liberty'? For the libertarians,
liberty is not another good like peanut butter or a car, it is rather a necessary condition
of action, in the sense that if we do x, it has to have been the case by definition that
nothing prevented us from doing it. Liberty is the condition of being able to do
whatever it is, the liberty to do which is in question. In other words, it is not really up
in the air whether liberty is a good thing or not. Liberty is us good as whatever can be
achieved by acting. According to libertarians, liberty is not a value, it is it condition
of action.

17.3.3 Civil Society

A great degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and flourish.
It is easy to assume that order must be imposed by a central authority, the way we
impose order on a collection or a football team. The great insight of libertarian social
analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the action of thousands or
millions of individuals who coordinate their action with those of others in order to
achieve their purpose, over human history. We have gradually opted for more
freedom and yet managed to develop a complex society with an intricate
organization. The most important organization in human society - law, language,
money and markets - all developed spontaneously without central direction. Civil
society is another example of spontaneous order, the associations within civil society
are formed for a purpose, but civil society itself is not an organization and does not
have a purpose of its own. The associations we form with others can make up what
we call civil society. Those associations can tale an amazing variety of forms -
family, churches, schools, clubs, fraternal societies, condominium associations,
neighbourhood groups and the myriad forms of commercial society such as
partnerships, corporations, labour unions and trade associations. All these
associations serve human needs in different ways. Civil society may be broadly
defined as all the natural and voluntary associations in society. Some analysts
distinguish between commercial and non-profit organizations, arguing that business is
a part of the market and not of civil society, but according to Bauz, the real distinction

8
is between associations that are coercive i.e. the state, and those that are natural or
voluntary- everything else. Whether a particular association is established to malte a
profit or to achieve some other purpose, the key characteristic is that our participation
in it is voluntarily chosen. It should be noted that the associations within the civil
society are created to achieve a particular purpose but civil society, as a whole has no
purpose. It is the undersigned, spontaneously emerging result of all those purposive
associations. These associations give people connections with other people. No one of
them, however exhausts one's personality and defines one completely. In this
libertarian conception, we connect to different people in different ways on the basis of
free and voluntary consent. Ernest Gellner says that modern civil society requires a
‘modular man'. Instead of a man who is entirely the product of and absorbed by a
particular culture, modular man 'can combine into specific purpose, adhoc, limited
associations, without binding himself by some blood ritual'. He can form links with
others which are 'effective even thought are flexible, specific, instrumental,' and as
individuals combine in myriad ways, community emerges; not the close community
of the village or the messianic community promised by, say for example, by marxism,
national socialism and all fulfilling religions, but a community of free individuals in
voluntary chosen associations. Individual do not merge from community, community
emerges from individuals. It emerges not because anyone plans it, certainly not
because the state creates it, but because it must. To fulfil their needs and desires,
individuals must combine with others. Society is an association of 'individuals
governed by legal rules or perhaps an association of associations, but not one large
community, or one family. Membership in a group need not diminish one's
individuality; it can amplify it, by freeing people from the limits they face as lone
individuals and increasing their opportunities to achieve their own goals. Such a view
of the community requires that membership be chosen and nut compulsory.

17.3.4 Political Economy and the Problem of Redistribution

Libertarianism claims that the only economic order that respects individual freedoms
the free market. To them, the free market is an example of freedom in action. At the
heart of the free market is the voluntary bilateral exchange. If two parties exchange
some goods voluntarily make some contract voluntarily, then so long as this does not
involve the violation of another's rights, no one has the right to interfere in it.
According to libertarians, the free market is the sum of the voluntary exchanges and
contracts going on in a society, nothing more and nothing less. Any distribution that
occurs in the operation of a free market is therefore, just since at no stage has
anyone's right been violated and all the exchanges were voluntary. For example,
Hayek proposed that the rules of conduct in a society are evolving; that they survive
because they are useful and help that society survive. The market, he believed, had
survive the test of time, in that the most successful societies were market based in
some way. The market is superior to other economic systems, since it handles human
ignorance by passing information in coded form through the price mechanism which

9
indicates areas where profits could be made and resources efficiently used. It does all
this and allocates resources without being predicated on any specific goals or
assuming what the goals of the people are. It also facilitates freedom, in that for it to
work, there need to be rules demarcating 'protected domains' for each person where
no other has the right to interfere.

The market arises from the fact that humans can accomplish more in cooperation with
each other than individually and the Sach that, we can recognize this. If we were a
species for whom cooperation was not more productive than isolated work, or if we
were, unable to discern the benefits of cooperation, then we would not only remain
isolated and atomistic, but as Ludwig Von Mises explains, 'each man would have
been forced to view all other men as his enemies, his craze for the satisfaction of' his
own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his
neighbours’. Without the possibility of mutual benefit from cooperation and the
division of labour neither feelings of sympathy and friendship nor the market order
itself could arise. Those who say that 'humans are made for cooperation, and not
competition' fail to recognize that the market is cooperation.

Many people accept that markets are necessary, but still feel that there is something
vaguely immoral about them; they feel that markets lead to inequality or they dislike
the self- interest reflected in markets. Markets are often called 'brutal' or 'dog-eats-
dog'. But 1iberbrinns believe that markets are not only essential to economic
progress, but that they are more consensual and lead to more virtue and equality than
government coercion. This is done through: i) information and coordination, ii)
prices, iii) efficiency in production, iv) technological innovations, and v) competition.
Firstly, markets are based on consent. No businessman sends an invoice for a product
not ordered. No business can force anyone to trade. Businessmen try to find out what
is required by the consumers. Whatever is produced is done so in response to or in
anticipation of consumer demand, since the only way in which the producers can
maximize his own position is by selling his goods to the consuming population. But
where do they get the information? It is not in a massive book. In the market
economy, it is not embodied in orders from a planning agency. Secondly, this vital
information about other peoples' wants is embodied in prices. Prices do not just tell us
how much something costs at the store. The price system pulls together, all the
information available in the economy about what each person wants, how much he
values it and how it call best be produced. Prices make that information usable to the
producer and the consumer. Each price contains within it information about consumer
demand and about costs of production, ranging from the amount of labour needed to
produce the item to the cost of labour to the bad weather on the other side of the
world that is raising the price of the raw materials needed to produce the good. The
information that prices deliver allows people to world together to produce more. The
point of an economy is not just to produce more things. It is to produce more things
that people want. Prices tell all of us what other people want. The price system

10
reflects the choices of millions of producers, consumers, and resource owners who
may never meet and coordinates their efforts. Although we can never feel affection
for or even meet everyone in the economy, market prices help to world together to
produce more of what everyone wants. Unlike a government which at best takes the
will of the majority and imposes it on everyone, market uses prices to let buyers and
sellers freely decide what they want to do with their money. Thirdly, competition
between producers ensures that the most efficient ones to supply the consumer market
since only they will be able to produce goods cheaply. The consumes, in maximizing
his economic welfare, purchases only at the lowest available price. Fourthly, since
producers can improve their economic position by expanding their market, each
producer will be in constant competition with others. Seeking to expand one's market
can be accomplished only by reducing prices (price competition), and this can be
achieved only by reducing production costs via technological innovations. The
system automatically generates technological change and development and lastly, the
market system is highly competitive. As explained above, it is precisely through
competition that it can be found how things can be produced at the least cost, by
discovering who will sell raw material or labour services for the lowest price. Any
interference with fire competition between economic units will defeat the system's
ability to provide automatically the advantages described above. Also rapid and
smooth shifts of labour and capital must be possible from one industry to another.
People are motivated by material well being and by economic gain. Hence, to the
extent that they are deprived of economic incentives, the market mechanism will
break dawn or seriously compromised as a basis for allocation of' goods and service.
The basic question according to libertarians, is how to combine all the resources in
society including human effort to produce the greatest possible output which will
satisfy, people most. It is through competition to attract new customers that this
coordination is generated. It is possible that many firms may not do well and could be
out of business. 'This, according, to libertarians, is the ‘creative destruction' of the
market. Harsh as the consumers’ judgement may feel to someone who loses a job or
an investment, the market works on the principle of equality. In a free market no firm
gets special privileges from the government and each must constantly satisfy
consumers to stay in business. Thus, far from inducing self-interest, as critics charge,
in the market place the fact of sell. interest induces people to serve other. Market
reward honesty because people are more willing to do business with those who have a
reputation for honesty. Markets reward civility because people prefer to deal with
courteous partners and suppliers.

Apart from defending market freedom and limitations on the use of the state for social
welfare policies, libertarians are opposed to any redistributive taxation scheme. It
believes that redistributive taxation is inherently wrong, a violation of people's right.
People have a right to dispose of their goods and services freely. As Nozick put it,
'people have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without
violating their rights). So strong and far reaching are these rights that they raise the

11
question of what, if anything, a state and its' officials may do'. 'This has been best
explained by Robert Nozick in his famous entitlement theory.

The central theme of the entitlement theory is that ‘if’ we assume that everyone is
entitled to the good they currently possess (their holdings) then a just distribution is
simply whatever distribution results from people’ free exchanges. Any distribution
that arises by free transfer from a just situation is itself just. For the government to tax
these exchanges against anyone's will is unjust, even if the taxes are used to
compensate for the extra cost of someone's undeserved natural handicap. 'The only
legitimate taxation is to raise revenues for maintaining the background institutions
needed to protect the system of free exchange i.e. the police and the justice system
needed to enforce peoples' free exchanges. 'This entitlement theory is based upon
three principles: i) the principle of transfer i.e. whatever is justly acquired can be
freely transferred, ii) the principle of just initial acquisition i.e. how people come to
own things initially, which can be transferred according to the first principle, iii)
principle of rectification of injustice, i.e. how to deal with acquisitions which are
unjustly acquired or transferred. To given an example, if I own a plot of land, the
principle of transfer tells me to engage in any transfer wish. The principle of
acquisition tells me how the plot initially came to be owned, and the principle of
rectification of justice tells me what to do if the first two principles are violated.
Taken together if peoples' current holdings are justly acquired then the formula of just
distribution is form each as they choose, to each as they to each as they are chosen.

Nozick gives two arguments as to why the claim of people entitlement should be
accepted: i) free exercise of property is more attractive, and ii) property right lies in
‘self- ownership’. The first argument i.e. free exercise of property is more attractive;
it is that if we have legitimately acquired something, we have absolute property rights
over if. Then we can freely dispose it off as we see fit, even though the effect of these
transfers is likely to he a massively unequal distribution of income and opportunity.
Given that some people are born with different natural talents, some peop1e will be
amply rewarded while those who lack marketable skills will get few rewards. Due to
these under searved differences in natural talents, some people will flourish while
others will starve. These inequalities are the result of unrestrained capitalism. Though
he admits thtat it seems unfair for people to suffer undeserved inequalities in their
access to the benefits of social cooperation, but the problem is that people have rights
over their incomes. As he says, 'no one has a right to something whose realization
requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have rights and
entitlements.' 'The second arguments is the principle of 'self-ownership'. By this
Nozick means that people should be treated as 'end-in-themselves. The heart of
Nozick theory is that 'individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group
may do to them (without violating their rights)'. Society must respect these rights
because they reflect the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not
merely means. 'They may not be sacrificed or used for the achievements of others'

12
ends, without their consent'. Because we are distinct individuals with distinct claims,
there are limits to the sacrifices that can be asked of one person for the benefit of
others. Libertarian society treats individuals not ‘as instruments or resources’ but as
‘persons having individual rights with the dignity this constitutes.' In short
entitlement theory believes that recognizing people as self-owners is crucial to
treating people as equal, and only unrestricted capitalism recognizes self-ownership.

17.3.5 Rule of law & Limited Government

Libertarianism is not libertinism or hedonism. It is not a claim that 'people can do

anything they want to and nobody else can say anything'. Rather, libertarianism
proposes a society of liberty under law, in which individuals are free to pursue their
own lives so long as they respect the equal rights of others. The rule of law means
that individuals are governed by generally applicable and spontaneously developed
legal rules, not by arbitrary commands; and that those rules should protect the
freedom of individuals to pursue happiness in their own way, not aim at any
particular result or outcome.

To protect rights, individuals form governments, but government is a dangerous

institution. As stated above, libertarianism arose as a reaction against the social
welfare state. Hayck in his book The Road to Serfdom’ warned that the adoption of
welfare/socialist policies would bring totalitarian government in the long run. Any
tolerable future for the western civilization would demand that the socialist ideas be
abandoned and classical liberalism may be restored once again. Like early liberals, he
considered the state the greatest enemy and any interference with the right to private
property as an assault upon the rights of the individuals. On the economic side,
Milton Friedman suggested that competitive capitalism promotes political freedom
because it separates economic power from political power and in this way, enables
one to offset the other. Another writer Ralf Dahrendorf complained that the welfare
state produces the iron cage of bureaucratic bondage and to a great extent repeated the
traditional liberal attitude of suspicion towards the government and the state. As lie
writes, "there is no such thing as benevolent government. Government is an
unfortunate necessity. It is always and by definition liable to encroach upon the
individual liberties. More than that, there is a need for less government'.

A more powerful definition of the libertarian view of the minimal state has been
developed by Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick talks
about the state in the context of individual rights. Following the tradition of John
Locke, Nozick speaks of prior and inalienable rights of the individual possessed
independent of society. I-le says that rights are the property of the individual and are
so strong and fir reaching that they raise a number of basic questions such as what, if
anything, the state may do? How much mom do individual rights leave for the state?
What is the nature of the state? What are its legitimate function and what is

13
justification? The state, according to Nozick, should be a minimal state, limited to the
narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contract
and so on. Any more extensive state will violate the person's right not to be forced to
do certain things and as such would be unjustified. "The minimal state is inspiring as
well as right'. What is important is that the state must not use its coercive apparatus
for the purpose of getting same citizen to aid others, and prohibit activities of people
for their own good or protection.

Since Nozick strongly believes in the rights of the individuals, he seriously considers
the anarchists' claim that he monopoly of use of force by the state may violate the
individual's rights and hence, the state is immoral. Against this claim, Nozick argues
that the state will arise from anarchy even though no one intends this. Individuals in
the state of nature would find it in their interest to allow a 'dominant protective
agency' to emerge which would have de facto monopoly of force and could constitute
a state like entity. The formation of such an entity, if done in an appropriate way, may
violate no one's rights, i.e. if it does not go beyond its legitimate powers of protection,
justice and defence. Justifying the minimal state, he categorically asserts that liberty
must get absolute precedence over equality. He opposed the policies of progressive
taxation and positive discrimination and asserts that realization of liberty should not
be inhibited by the policies of the government in providing public health care,
education or minimum standard of' living. He argued that those who own wealth may
voluntarily adopt some redistribution. He is against any redistribution of property by
the state because it may transgress the liberty of those who have property. For
Nozick, the state is no more than a night watchman, protecting the inviolable rights of
the citizens. He asserts that the welfare notihn which advocates that it is the society
which allocates resources is not only wrong, but illegitimate because there is no such
thing as 'society' except in the minimal sense of being an aggregate of individuals.
'There are only individual people with their own individual lives' and society is no
more than the sum of its individual components, State intervention means
appropriation of both ‘one’s resources and ‘one’s self'. And 'seizing the results of
someone's labour is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry
on various activities. If people force you to do certain work or unrewarded work, for a
certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purpose your work is
to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from
you makes them a part –owner of you; it gives them a right in you. Thus, the welfare
stab is a threat to liberty and independence of the individuals because individual is the
sole owner of himself and he talent.

Mow far is the non-interventionist, minimal and market dominated concept of

libertarian state justified? Nozick's views are based on certain inalienable: rights of
the individual, possessed independent of society. However, a feature of the modern
state is that it has recognized a range of individual rights which were not recognized
by ancient Greek or medieval society, rights are socially and historically constituted.

14
In fact, the rights which Nozick defends are actually those rights which were
historically specific to the market and were defined and constituted in the context of
capitalist relations. They were neither natural nor prior to the state. Secondly, if the
resource allocation is to be done by the market, it cannot be equal because in a
capitalist society, the market also privileges some groups over others within the
system of production and exchange. Hence the idea of a free and sovereign individual
choosing what to do with his resources is a myth. Nozick's account of the minimum
state fails because it contains no theory of taxation. For this season, other libertarian
scholars insist that taxation be according to general rules, uniformly applied, for
example, Hayek and Friedman have argued that only a system of proportional
taxation is fully consistent with the 1ibertarian requirements, Proportional taxation
would prevent the imposition of redistributive taxation on wealthy and unpopular
minorities and would thereby, remove a major area of arbitrariness from public
policy. They advocate that the taxation policy be governed by general rules so that
governments are prevented in their service activities from curbing economic freedom
in subtle and covert ways.

In short, the concept of limited government propounded by the libertarians

acknowledges the state a permanent necessary evil, in doing so, it exploits the
insights of philosophers such as Adam Smith. As Hayek admits, there is a
spontaneous order in social life, but qualifies that insight with the recognition that the
spontaneous process of society can only be beneficial against a background of legal
institutions in which the basic liberties are guaranteed for all. The libertarian concept
of the state eschews no less firmly the revisionary conception of government as the
guardian and provider of general welfare, empowered to act on its own discretionary
authority in the pursuit of the common good - a conception whose reality is
everywhere that of a weak government, prey to collusive interest groups and
incapable of' delivering even the security in enjoyment of basic liberties which is the
state's only title to authority.

17.4 CRITICAL EVALUATION

Libertarianism has been criticized on criticized on many grounds such as its theory of
rights, nature of liberty, role of the state, political economy, problem of redistribution
of resources etc. let us have a look at these:

 Some libertarians argue that we are born with set of rights - the rights to life.
Liberty and property which must be respected. But the question is why these
rights and not others'! The libertarians answer is that they are essential to
allow people to lead their own lives, that they reflect the imperative to treat
peoples as ends in themselves and not merely as a means to some ends and
that they recognize the separateness of individuals. But this does not answer
the question of why these rights are natural. According to Hammerton, there is

15
 no reason to believe that the rights are natural, pre-existing rights independent
of the laws of a society.

'There is no doubt that treating individuals as ends in themselves is good. One can
also agree that people cannot plan ahead effectively if they cannot rely on being able
to keep their possessions. However, one can also argue that providing people with the
necessary resources for survival is also consistent with respect for others. If a person
has no shelter, no job, no money, then one cannot plan effectively since one is subject
to the decisions of others to the extent that one cannot even be certain of survival.
Hence, to give enough resources to lift oneself out of the predicament helps on both
the counts: of treating one as an end and in enabling one to plan effectively. This can
be done by taxing the rich which the libertarians do not like. But if you do not do this
and let the poor go hungry, you are also violating the principle and claiming in effect
that allowing people to keep every last penny of their money is more important than
preventing someone from starving. The simple points is that in a libertarian society
those without any property are unfree - they cannot act without other people helping
them and allowing- them to use their property - unless you view freedom as the
freedom to act within your rights. However, since it is the rights themselves being
discussed here, the libertarian cannot fall back on this view of freedom to defend
those rights. In short, the libertarian view as to what are legitimate rights cannot be
accepted.

Critics also do not accept the libertarians definition of freedom as absence of

coercion'. If we take this definition of freedom, then the amount of freedom a person
has is the extent to which they act without being coerced to do (or not to do)
something against their will. In a libertarian society, one cannot (legitimately) do
anything with another's property if they do not want you to, so your only guaranteed
freedom is determined by the amount of property you have. This has the consequence
that someone with no property has no guaranteed freedom, and that the more property
you have, the greater is your guaranteed freedom. In other words, a distribution of
property is a distribution of freedom, as the libertarians the themselves define it.
Thus, taking this definition of freedom and a belief in the free market together the
libertarians are saying that the best way of 'promoting freedom is to allow same
people to have more of it than others, even when this may lead to some having very
little freedom or even none. In other words, thought the libertarians want everyone to
have an equal sphere of guaranteed freedom, yet the market does not give everyone
such a sphere and does not guarantee anyone any freedom at all. Again taking
property from someone definitely restrict one's freedom in some way, but all societies
restrict peoples' freedom in some way and libertarians themselves accept some
restrictions on freedom - such as the restrictions of not violating other peoples'
property rights. In fact, there is no harm ill taxing the wealthy in order to prevent the
poor from starving since the resulting restrictions of freedom on the wealthy can be

16
very small indeed. In short, libertarians need a way of defining freedom in such a way
as to dissect it from the distribution of property.

Libertarians also define liberty as the 'absence of the initiation of force'. Again this
definition also does not help much. Force can be initiated in order to protect properly
rights, and property rights can be violated without initiating force (i.e. copyright
violations). Libertarians who use this definition cannot claim, as they would like to,
that they are always opposed to the initiation of force. This amounts to saying that
you are allowed to act within your rights without anyone initiating force against you.
However, this leads us back to the consequence of your property rights determining
the extent of your guaranteed freedom. What cietermit.les freedom is what the
legitimate rights of an individual are. Given the libertarian claim that the right to
property is absolute, Freedom and properly become one and the same. Hammerton
calls this 'Propertarianism'. Moreover, non-coercion is not the absolute good: other
values override it. For instance, other things being equal, it is not wrong to secure
justice by coercion. And when the alternative to coercion is non-innovation, then
coercion to secure innovation is also legitimate. Libertarians say that they believe in
political freedom. But even to simply enforce the principles of Free market. the
apparatus of a state would be necessary – an army to prevent invasion, a police force
to suppress internal revolt and a judicial system. Most 1ibertarians go much further
they want a libertarian regime, a political system. Some of them have written
complete and detailed constitutions. But like any state, a libertarian state will have to
enforce its constitution - or it will remain a proposed constitution. Even if the state is
founded on Mars, someone else with different ideas will probably arrive sometime.
'The libertarian constitution might work in a freshly established 1ibertarian colony,
inhabited only by committed libertarians. But sooner or later, there will be an
opposition perhaps resolutely hostile to the founding principles. States which fail to
enforce their own political system against opposition will ultimately collapse or
disappear. If libertarian states want to survive in such circumstances, they will use
political repression against their internal opponents.

Anti-statism is a central element of libertarianism, but it rests on no foundations

other than the libertarian principles themselves. Often libertarians suggest that the
state is inherently wrong. But even if they say it explicitly, it is simply their belief,
that is all. By its nature, the state uses coercion of the type that libertarians oppose,
but that is not inherently wrong either. In return, the stale can end coercion of the type
that libertarians tolerate and welcome, especially in the free market. And the state is
almost by definition the only means of implement large scale change and innovation
in society - as opposed to simply letting market forces shape the future. The
fundamental task of the modern liberal democratic state is to innovate. To innovate in
contravention of national tradition, to innovate when necessary in defiance of the 'will
of the people' and to innovate in defiance to market forces and market logic. Apart
from the protective functions, the state acts as the final arbiter of disputes with the

17
highest authority to avoid endless arbitration processes. Many libertarians seek partial
or total privation of the tasks being done by the government at present, but that is not
the only issue. Paradoxically, to enforces such privatisation of' the state would require
the exercise of state power by libertarians, and a functionally libertarian state.

Critics of libertarianism also claim that the redistribution of wealth is not wrong.
Libertarians argue as if it was self-evidently wrong to steal the legitimately owned
property of the rich and give it to the poor. For example according to Nozick, the
most important right is the sight over oneself- the right of self- ownership. It mans
that 'what one owns and what is own are one and the same and the whole person'.
That is, if I own myself, then I own my talents and also what proceeds from my
talent. Hence, the demand for redistribution taxation from the talented to the
disadvantaged violate self-ownership.

However, the egalitarians like Rawls believe that though a person is a legitimate
possessor of his talent, still talent is a matter of brute luck. Hence, the right over talent
does not include the right to accrue unequal rewards from the exercise of those
talents. Those who are naturally disadvantaged have a claim on those with
advantages. 'The talented only benefit from their talent if it also benefits the
disadvantaged. Others believe that redistribution of wealth is inherently good; infact,
it is a moral obligation of the state, Excessive wealth is there to be redistributed the
only issue is what is excessive. And, of course, this may lead to coercion, but it is still
not wrong, not wrong at all.

The libertarian view that the liberal welfare programmes by limiting property rights
unduly limit peoples' self-determination is also not accepted by the egalitarians.
Redistribution programme do restrict the self-determination of the well-offs to a
limited degree. But they also give real control over their lives to people who
previously lacked. Liberal redistribution does not sacrifice self-determination for
some other goal. Rather, it aims at a fair distribution of the means requireti for self-
determination. The libertarian view allows undeserved inequalities in the distribution
which ham those who need help in securing those conditions.

Malting a difference between the libertarian image and the libertarian reality, one
critic has pointed out that: i) they believe in non-coercion and non -initiation of force,
while in reality libertarians legitimise economic justice by refusing to define it as
coercion or initiated force, ii) they depend upon tile moral autonomy of the
individual, while in reality libertarians demand that the individual accept the outcome
of the market forces, iii) it believes in political freedom, but some form of libertarian
government imposing libertarian policies on non-libertarians would be necessary, iv)
libertarians condemn existing states as oppressive, while at the same time they use the
political process in the existing states to implement their policies, and v) they boast of

18
the benefits of libertarianism, but they claim the right to decide for others what
constitutes a 'benefit'.

As mentioned in the beginning, libertarianism is a part of the Anglo-American liberal

tradition in political philosophy. Infact, it is a legitimation of the existing order,
atleast in the United States. All political regimes have a legitimising ideology which
give an ethical justification for the exercise of political power. It is not a
revolutionary ideology in the sense of seeking to overthrow Fundamental values of
the society around it. In fact, most US libertarians have a traditionalist attitude
towards American core values. Libertarianism legitimises primarily the free market
and the resulting social inequalities. Libertarianism is a legitimation for the rich.
Also, libertarians are conservative; they are not really interested in the free market or
the non-coercion principle or limited government as such, but in the is effects.
Perhaps, what libertarians really want is to prevent innovation, to reverse social
change, or in some way to return to the past.

17.5 SUMMARY

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which has appeared in the last 20-30 years in
the United States. This is the political philosophy which has been at the heart of the
so- called 'New Right' which influenced the Thatcher/Reagan administrations in the
1980s. Its important exponents are F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Karl Popper,
Talmon, I, Berlin, M. Rothbard, Robert Nozick etc. its key concepts are as follows:

Individualism : Libertarianism sees the individual as the basic unit of social analysis.
Only individuals make choices and are responsible for their actions. It emphasizes the
dignity of the individual which entails both rights and responsibility.

Individual Rights: Because individuals are moral agents, they have a right to be
secure in their life, liberty and property. These rights are not granted by the
government or by the society, they are inherent ill the nature of human beings. It is
intuitively right that individuals enjoy the security of such rights, the burden of
explanation should lie with those who would take rights away.

Spontaneous Order: A great degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to

survive and flourish. The great insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in
society arises spontaneously, out of the action of thousands of individuals who
coordinate their action with those of others, in order to achieve their purposes. The
most important institutions of human society such as language, law, money and
markets - all have developed spontaneously, without central direction. Civil society is
another example spontaneous order, the associations within the civil society are
formed for a purpose, but civil society itself is not an organization and does not have
a purpose of its own.

19
Free Markets: 'To survive and to flourish, individuals need to engage in economic
activity. The right to property entails the right to exchange property by mutual
agreements. Free markets are the economic system of free individuals and they are
necessary to create wealth. Libertarians believe that people will be both free and more
prosperous, if government intervention in peoples' economic choices is minimized.

Minimal state : to protect rights, individuals form governments. But government is a

dangerous institution. Libertarians have a great antipathy to concentrated power. They
want to divide and limit power and that means especially, to limit the government
generally through a written constitution enumerating and limiting the power that the
people delegate to government. Limited government is the basic political implication
of libertarianism. The state should be limited to the narrow function of protection
against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contract etc. Any more extensive will
violates a person's right not to be forced to do certain things and as such would be
unjustified.

Natural Harmony of Interests: Libertarians believe that there is a natural harmony of

interests among peaceful productive people in a just society. One person's individual
plans – which may involve getting a job, starting a business, buying a house etc - may
conflict with the plans of others, so the market makes many of us change our plans.
But we all prosper from the operation of the free market, and there are no necessary
conflicts between Farmers and merchants, manufacturers and importers. Only when a
government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure, do we find
ourselves involved in group conflicts; pushed to organize and contend with other
groups for a piece of political power.

Peace: Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. 'They understood
that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and
economic life and put more power ill the hands of the ruling class - which might
explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace. Freemen
and women, of course have often had to defend their own societies against foreign
threats, but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful
productive people on all sides of the conflicts.

In short, libertarianism contains the standard framework of modern thought i.e.

individualism, private property, capitalism, equality before law and minimal state.
However, it applies these principles fully and consistently far more so than most
modem thinkers and certainly more so than any modern government.

20
17.6 EXERCISES

1. Explain in your own words the meaning of libertinism.

2. Write an essay on civil society.
3. Discuss individual rights the context of liberty.
4. Critically examine the problem of redistribution.

21
UNIT 18 MARX, LENIN AND MAO

Structure

18.1 Introduction
18.2 Karl Marx (1818- 1883)
18.2.1 Alienation
18.2.2 Historical Materialism
18.2.3 Class War
18.2.4 Surplus Value
18.3 V. I. Lenin (1870-1924)
18.3.1 Party as Vanguard of the Proletariat
18.3.2 Democratic Centralism
18.3.3 Imperialism
18.3.4 Weakest Link of the chain
18.3.5 Spontaneity Element gives way to Selectivity of Time and Place
18.4 Mao Tse-Tung (Now Mao Zedong) (1893-1976)
18.4.1 Peasant Revolution
18.4.2 Contradictions
18.4.3 On Practice
18.4.4 United Front and New Democracy
18.5 Summary
18.6 Exercises

18.1 INTRODUCTION

For over the last two hundred years, Liberalism has been the most dominant stand it
political philosophy. In its carliest incarnation, which is now called classical or
negative liberalism (as distinct from its later versions as welfare or positive liberalism
and neo-libera1ism) it stood, more than anything else, for individual liberty. While as
a political doctrine it was a defence of certain inalienable natural rights of the
individual, in its economic dimension it stood for laissez faire or free-market
economy. Because of these twin postulates of liberalism, it soon became the
economic philosophy of capitalism aimed a t protecting and promoting the interests of
the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class. While on the one hand, it led to the
concentration of capital in a few hands, on the other, it culminated in the alienation
and exploitation of the proletariat (the working class). As a result of this negative fall

22
out, liberalism became a target of attack from different quarters, The most virulent
and systematic attack on classical liberalism and laissez faire economics came from
Karl Marx, who went so far as to assert that the working class could be redeemed
from its alienation and exploitation only by the revolutionary overthrow of the whole
capitalist order. Because of the highly polemical nature of his political, social and
economic philosophy, the marxian ideas soon acquired the character of a powerful,
anti-liberal, political ideology which has popularly come to be known as socialism or
communism. In fact, for about the last one hundred and fifty years, liberalism and
marxism have emerged as the two major contending ideologies each criticising,
denigrating and attacking the other. In this whole process, the theory and practice of
liberalism as well as marxism have undergone several changes. So much so that many
of the original marxian formulations have been enriched, adapted arid even modified
by the various post-Marx marxists. In this respect, the contributions of V. I. Lenin and
Mao Tse Tung (now Mao Zedong) have been most seminal and noteworthy. This unit
is aimed at familiarzing you with some of the most significant aspects of marxism,
particularly with the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Mao.

These three have been the most prominent theoreticians of marxism, each of whom
has, in his own unique way, dominated the minds of millions of men and have
changed the face of the world during the twentieth century. While Marx laid the
theoretical foundations of this change, Lenin and Mao successfully modeled their
respective societies - the erstwhile Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China -
by adapting the principles and postulates of Marxist theory to the conditions
prevailing in their countries. In the process of doing so, they have enriched the
marxist theory and practice by adding various new dimensions and by offering
diverse interpretations to the original marxian formulations. Let us briefly look at the
contribution of each of them.

18.2 KARL MARX (1818-1883)

Born at Trier in Germany in 1818 (May 5) Marx studied law at the University of
Bonn and later at the University of Berlin where lie got attracted to the young
Hegelian movement which was highly critical not only of the Prussian Government,
but also of Christianity. Because of his association with this anti-government
movement, his career options in university or government were virtually closed.
Therefore, he took to journalism and became the editor of Rheinsche Zeitung (1842).
Here, he began writing radical articles on economic issues criticizing the
government’s economic policies. The Prussian rulers were annoyed at his views and
ordered the closure of' his newspaper. Feeling suffocated in Germany, Marx migrated
to France in 1843. During his stay at Paris, he came into contact with the French
socialists and began to organise the migrant German workers. It was also at Paris that
Marx wrote his first major work Eonomic and philosophical Manuscripts popularly
known as EPM(which was written in 1844 but was first published in 1932). The

23
central concern of this work is alienation. It was also during his stay at Paris that he
met Friedrich Engels who became his lifelong friend and benefactor. However,
because of his revolutionary ideas Marx was expelled from France as well in 1844
and (along With Engels) he moved to Belgium. During his stay in Belgium, spanning
over three years, Marx, got involved in a serious study of history which led him to
propound his famous theory of historical materialism or materialistic or
interpretation of history. This theory is contained in the first joint work of Marx and
Engels titled, The German Ideology. Like EPM even this work was not published
during Marx's life time. Around this time, he joined the Communist League, which
was an organisation of emigrant German workers. When the league held its
conference at London in 1847, Marx and Engels were assigned the task of writing a
Communist manifesto. It was the publication ofi this work in 1848 which led to a
wave of workers revolutions in Europe, more particularly in France. Marx's analysis
of these revolutions is contained in two works: The Class Struggle in France and the
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In 1848 Marx returned to France and from
there to Germany where he again started the publication of his earlier newspaper,
Rheinsche Zeitung. Like its earlier stance, the paper was highly critical of the
Prussian Government and it was again closed down by the authorities. In 1849 (May)
Marx moved to England and stayed at London till his death in 1883.

Marx's 34 years stay in England is marked by two changes in him. Firstly, he moved
gradually but decisively from Philosophy to Economics. Unlike alientation which is
the central theme of EPA, Marx now got engrossed in the analysis of the phenomenon
of exploitation (see T.R. Sharma, "Karl Mars: From Alienation to Exploitation",
Indian Journal of Political, Vol. 40 (No. 3) September, 1979, Pages 339 ff). He
devoted his attention to serious economic questions like wage labour, capitalism and
surplus value. Secondly, he was as much involved in writing serious treatises as in
leading the workers' movements in Europe. He was not merely an arm-chair
theoretician critical of capitalism, and its exploitative nature but also a revolutionary
and an ideologue of communism. His most incisive work in this direction was a
massive manuscript titled "Grundrisse"(Outline) which he wrote around 1857 but
which came to light only in 1939. An abridged version of this work is contained in his
.A Preface to value and laws of capital accumulation are contained in his three
volume magnum opus Capital whose first volume came out in 1867 and the
remaining two volumes were published by Engels after Mars's death.

Marx's stay in London was also devoted to organising the British and French workers.
In 1864 he (along with others) set up the first major organisation of workers of
Europe which was named "International Working Men's Association (popularly
known as Communist International). It remained active up to I876 and its brightest
hour was in 1871 when it succeeded in setting up the Paris Commune. The workers of
Paris captured hic city and ruled it for nearly two months. Marx’s Civil war in France
written in 1871 is an elaboration of the aims anti-working of the Paris Commune.

24
After 1870, Marx was mostly reacting to various political developments which were
taking place in Europe. He was critical of those communist who were supporting state
socialism of Lassale. This criticism is contained in his Critique of the Gotha
Programme (1875).

18.2.1 Alienation

As pointed out above, Marx in his early years was attracted to Hegelian idealism, but
under the influence of Feuerbach lie embraced communism of the humanist variety
which he articulated in his EPM. He criticized capitalism because it leads to the
alienation of labour. It is only in communication that human being will be redeemed
from this phenomenon. Alienation is a very complex concept. Sometimes it is equated
with such concepts as estrangement, objectification and reification. To put it in
simple words, it implies De-humanization or the loss of self.' The worker in a
capitalist order works in a mechanical manner and does not derive any pleasure from
his work. His labour becomes a commodity which he must sell in order to survive.
Thus, lie gets alienated from his work. He is also alienated from the product of his
labour, from his fellow workers and from the natural world. Marx argued that in a
capitalist society, the worker is alienated from the product of his labour because it
does not belong to him belongs to somebody else (the capitalist). The competitive
nature of capitalism also alienates the worker. In essence, the worker is alienated
from his creative potentialities that are characteristic of his species being. Marx
advocated that it is only in a communist society that man will return to his real self as
a free creative agent and the work will no more remain monotonous activity. Private
property is the product and the consequence of alienated labour and, therefore, its
abolition will lead to redemption of man from his alienated state.

18.2.2 Historical Materialism

In the History of ideas there are three main explanations of how the human societies
have developed over the ages - the spiritualist interpretation, the idealist interpretation
and the materialist interpretation. According to the first, all developments in human
history are due to divine dispensation or God's will. According to the second, it is the
ideas that constitute the motor of human history. In other words, it is the
developments of ideas that lead to corresponding developments in all the domains of
human activity. The idealist interpretation is associated mainly with Hegel (a German
thinker who preceded Marx). According to the third, which Marx expounded, all
developments human history are due to changes in the material conditions of life. In
this unit, we are concerned only with the third, i.e., the materialist interpretation
which inverted the Hegelian idealist interpretation. In the idealist interpretation it is
the mind which is primary and matter secondary; while according to Marx's
materialist interpretation, it is matter which is primary) and the mind secondary. The
doctrine of historical materialism constitutes the core of Marxian writings. It is the

25
main theme of Marx's German Ideology. It seeks to explain all historical events in
terms of changes occurring in the mode of production. The changes from primitive
communication, from slavery to feudalism, from feudalism to capitalism and from
capitalism to socialism and communism are all explained in terms of' changes in the
material conditions of society and in the lives of individuals. The mode of production
consists of the forces or means of production (land, labour, capital, machine tools and
factories, etc.) and relation of Productions: salve-master, serf-baron, proletariat-
capitalism. The economic structure of each society which is constituted by relations
of production is the real foundation of the society. It constitutes the base on which
rises the legal, political and ideological. Super-structure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness. This was quite the opposite of the Hegelian
assertion that consciousness determines existence.

Marx’s theory of historical materialism is also dialectical, Marx borrowed the

dialectical method from Hegel who had described all the historical changes in terms
of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis in the domain of ideas. An idea (thesis), according
to Hegel, gives rise to a counter-idea (anti-thesis) and finally their contradiction is
resolved in a synthesis. This synthesis itself acquires the status of a thesis and gives
rise to its anti-thesis which is again resolved in a synthesis and the process goes on. It
is important to note that whereas Hegel had applied the dialectical method in the
domain of' ideas, Marx applied the dialectical method in explaining the material
world. As such while the Hegelian position is characterised as dialectical idealism,
that of Marx is known as dialectical materialism.

18.2.3 Class War

The mode of production or the way social production is organised in a society and the
way instruments of production are used for such production determines social,
political, legal and ideological character of society. At a certain stage, the forces of
production out-grow (develop) beyond the relations of production and get out of tune
with the existing relations of production which fetter (hinder) the former's growth.
'This contradiction (opposition) between the forces of production and relations of
production leads to a class .war, i.e., a war between the class which owns the means
of production and the class which owns only labour power. Class war, according to
Marx, has been the most prominent and recurring feature of all human societies. In
the Communist Manifesto, Marx - Engels wrote, "the history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles; freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord
and serf, guild master and journey in a word, oppressor and oppressed...". When this
class war reaches a high water mark, and contradictions become intense, it is resolved
through a social revolution which ensures newer and higher relations of production
corresponding to the forces or means of production. But in due course, the forces of
production again outgrow the relations of production again necessitating a social
revolution. This process goes on. A marked feature of a class-based society is that

26
antagonism contradiction arises due to divergent economic interests. In order to
defend its class interest, the class owning the means of production establishes its class
rule. "No antagonism, no progress" asserted Marx. You can see from the above
argument that Marx's contention is that the state in a capitalist society is a vehicle of
class rule. It follows from this argument that if classes are abolished and a class-less
society comes about, then the state will become redundant and gradually it will wither
away.

18.2.4 Surplus Value

Another important theory that Marx enunciated is the theory of surplus value. It is
with the help of this concept that Marx explained the whole phenomenon of
exploitation in the capitalist society. To put it in simple terms, surplus value is what is
normally called profit. Marx's argument is that the worker produces social objects
which are sold by the capitalist for more than what the worker receives as "wages".
Thus, the worker is not paid for the whole of his labour (or labour power) that he
spends in producing the social commodities. Some part of his labour is appropriated
(or stolen) by the capitalist. The theory of surplus value is rooted in the labour theory
of value i.e., that value of a commodity depends on the amount of labour spent in
producing it. In other words, surplus value arises because some part of the worker's
1abour is not paid to him. Marx further argued that it is only in class based societies
that surplus value exists because the bourgeois class exploits the proletariat. The
bourgeoisie consists of those who own the means of production (land, capital and
factories, etc.), while the proletariat consists of those who own nothing but their
labour power which they must sell in order to survive. As the surplus value increases,
the worker gets paid less and less. As pointed out above, this gives rise to a sharp
contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which is resolved finally in
a proletarian revolution. 'This revolution will bring about the demise of capitalism.
The state power will be captured by the proletariat. After the capture of state power
by the working class, Marx visualized a brief period of dictatorship of proletariat. It
is during this dictatorship that the society would usher socialism (where each will
work according to capacity and get according to work) and finally, communism
(where each will work according to capacity and get according to need Thus,
communism viewed by Marx as a class less society associated producers.

Communism or Marx was a society which revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat

would bring about after capitalism is overthrown. It will also undertake positive
abolition private property and the abolition of private ownership. In a communist
society, there will neither be exploitation nor alienation. Communism for Marx is the
return of man to himself from his alienated condition. It is marked by abolition of
classes in society. This can only be done by the proletariat by establishing its control
over the means of production. Once the society becomes class-less, the state will no
more be required. The capitalist state is a managing -0mmittee of the bourgeoisie

27
because it facilitates the exploitation of one class by another, herefore in a classless
society, the state will become redundant and it will wither away. Such conditions,
according to Marx, existed in ancient times in the tribal societies.

18.3 V.I. LENIN (1870-1924)

Born at Simbirsk in 1870 (April 22) Lenin had normal schooling. However, when he
was taking his final school examination at the age of 16 his elder brother (Alexander)
was charged of conspiring to kill the Tsar (King in Russia was known as Tsar) and
was sentenced to death by the Tsarist regime. Despite all the trauma that this event
brought to Lenin, he secured the highest possible marks in the school examination.
After school education, he joined the Kazan University. It was during his stay at the
University that Lenin began taking part in the various student agitations which
ultimately led to his expulsion from the University. Thereafter, he involved himself
fully in revolutionary activities and soon became the leader of the Marxist group at
St. Petersburg. He was arrested in 1895 by the Tsarist regime and exiled to Siberia. It
was here that he wrote his first major work -Development of Capitalism in Russia
(1899). In this work, he described how capitalism was growing in Russia during its
initial phase. In 1900 he migrated to Geneva and joined Plakhanov's revolutionary
group. He also started editing a paper named iskara in which he launched an anti-
Tsarist campaign. In 1902, he wrote his second important work - what is to be done
which deals with party organisation. In 1916 when the first world war had reached a
very grim stage, Lenin produced his most incisive work Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism wherein he analysed the phenomenon of imperialism. In October
1917, he assumed power in Russia. By doing so, Lenin earned the credit for the first
successful Marxist revolution and that too, in a capitalistically less developed country
like Tsarist Russia where feudalism was deeply entrenched. Soon after the success of
this revolution, Lenin started suffering from frequent strokes. His ill health forced
him to gradually withdraw from the active governance of the Soviet Union. However,
during the few years that lie lived after the success of his revolution, he laid the
foundation of a socialist state which his successor, Joseph Stalin, developed into a
super power in a short span of time.

18.3.1 Party as Vanguard of the Proletariat

'There are several seminal contributions of Lenin to Marxist theory and practice. In
his Development of Capitalism in Russia, he tried to offer an interpretation of Tsarist
Russia in Marxist terms. He argued that there was a large wage-labour class in
Russia. However, he expressed the view that this wage labour class was not fully
conscious of its exploitation. He further added that only the industrial proletariat
(factory workers) was capable of articulating the grievances of this whole class in the
revolutionary direction. This could be done only by transcending local economic
grievances and narrow trade unionism. For this, there was a need of a national level

28
political organisation. Only such an organisation could raise the level of political
consciousness of the worlters by transforming the wage labour class into a
revolutionary proletariat class capable of staging a successful revolution. Lenin
indeed tried to do so in actual practice, The biggest task for him was to create a
working class in Russia which was conscious of its exploitation. This in his view
needed a communist organisation, but he realized that the autocratic Tsarist regime
would not allow any such organisation to operate openly. The only alternative was to
operate underground in a clandestine manner. In short, the problem for Lenin was
how to do these twin tasks: (i) creating a national level organisation of Russian wage
workers and (ii) raising their level of political consciousness. The Leninist strategy on
these two issues is contained in his What is to be Done. In this work, Lenin argued
that in conditions prevailing in Russia there was need of a Communist Party which
could act as a Vanguard of the Proletariat. (Stalin further elaborated this idea when
lie argued that a working class without a Communist Party was like an army without
the General staff). Lenin did not only emphasise the need of such a Communist Party
in Russia, he also added that this vanguard party should consist of or at least be led by
whole time professional revolutionaries. Only then a successful revolution could be
brought about. You must have noticed that by malting this argument Lenin departed
from the original Marxian position. In fact, the task which Marx had assigned to the
proletariat class in staging a successful revolution got transferred to the Communist
Party as the vanguard of this class. Lenin's vanguard thesis was criticized by several
of his contemporaries, particularly by a Polish Marxist Rosa Luxembourg. She argued
that this would place the working class in tutelage of the party. She also pointed out
that due to Lenin's vanguard thesis, the workers would lose all their initiative and
become mere tools in the hands of the party. While she did not altogether deny the
need of a well organised party and the role of able leadership in its functioning, she
asserted that it would kill or at least blunt the self-emancipatory efforts of the working
class.

18.3.2 Democratic Centralism

Having made the Communist Party as the vanguard of the proletariat, Lenin
advocated a certain type of organizational structure for the party. His thesis is
popularly known as 'democratic centralism'. To put it in simple words, democratic
centralism consisted of two elements: democracy and centralism. It meant that the
hierarchical structure of the Communist party should be such that each higher organ
of the party should be elected by the lower organ and all the party matters should
initially discuss freely at all the levels of the organisation, from the lowest to the
highest. However, once a decision has been taken by the highest organ it should be
imposed strictly on all the lower organs and all of them must abide by it. While
theoretically democratic centralism has democracy as well as centralism, in actual
practice the party became less and less democratic and more and more centralized.

29
Like his vanguard thesis, Lenin’s views on democratic centralism were also criticized
by several of his contemporaries.

18.3.3 Imperialism

Marx in his analysis of capitalism had argued that in the task of over-throwing
autocracy and feudalism, the bourgeoisie plays a revolutionary role and brings about
democracy and capitalism. This is called the bourgeois democratic revolution'. It puts
the bourgeoisie into power. Under the rule of the bourgeoisie capitalism would
develop further. Finally, it would reach a stage where the class contradiction between
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would become very sharp. This would create
conditions for proletarian socialist revolution which would mark the demise of
capitalism. This prediction of Marx, however, did not prove true and the development
of capitalism in Europe did not lead to proletarian socialist revolutions. Lenin tried to
explain why the Marxian prediction about the proletarian socialist revolutions and
demise of capitalism had not come true. Mow had capitalism received a lease of life.
Mow had capitalism failed in its historic mission? Lenin in his Imperialism The
Highest Stage of Capitalism tried to explain his lease of life which capitalism in the
west had received. Capitalism, in his view, had grown so much that raw material and
domestic markets in the capitalist countries were not enough to permit its further
growth. Therefore, it had become necessary for these countries to find raw material
and new markets for investment in Asia, Africa and South America. Thus, capitalism
was exported from Europe. It had acquired a monopolistic position and had become
reactionary. Due to colonization of Asia, Africa and South America, capitalism had
acquired parasitic position. Thus, capitalism had reached its highest stage
(imperialism) and had exhausted the historical mission of creating conditions for a
proletarian revolution in different capitalist countries. However, capitalism in its
imperialist manifestation had created conditions for a socialist revolution at the global
stage.

18.3.4 Weakest Link of the Chain

The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in a capitalistically under-developed country

like Russia in 1917 raised two new problems for Lenin. The first problem was to
reconcile and interpret this revolution in Marxian terms. Lenin did so by inventing
'the weakest link of the chain' argument. It meant that Tsarist Russia where capitalism
was not yet fully developed constituted the weakest link of the imperialist chain and
strategically it is quite appropriate to break the chain at its weakest rather than at its
strongest point. In fact, this whole idea is also implicit in Marx. Marx had argued that
with the development of capitalism, the bourgeoisie becomes stronger and stronger.
But it also gives rise to its equally powerful gravediggers i.e., the proletariat class.
The bourgeoisie cannot grow strong without leading to simultaneous growth of the
proletariat. So in societies where the bourgeoisie is strong, the proletariat is also

30
strong. Similarly, where the bourgeoisie is weak, the proletariat is also weak. The
Leninist argument was that the capitalistically advanced countries of Europe
constituted the strongest point of the imperialist chain; while Tsarist Russia
constituted the weakest link.

The second problem or Lenin was more serious. Since the revolution had occurred in
Tsarist Russia where capitalism was still unripe, the problem was to draw a plan for
building a socialist state. The problem got further compounded because Marx in his
writings had given a very sketchy picture of the socialist stage and had not explained
in detail how a socialist society would come about. The Capitalism State, according
to Lenin, emerged as an organ of class rule. It was a special organisation of force and
violence fix the exploitation of the working class. This capitalist state had to be
replaced by a socialist state. In his State and Revolution, Lenin offered some outlines
of his strategy to built such a socialist state in Russia. He argued that the bureaucratic
military state was to be replaced by soviets modelled on the lines of the Paris
Commune. Moreover, he did not subscribe fully to the Marxist notion of withering
away of the state. Instead, he begrit1 to argue that during the transitional phase the
communists could be use the state apparatus to achieve their and economic goals. It
meant that it may be necessary to five with a mixed economy for sometime (private
and public sectors could co-exist) till the public sector is strong enough to take over
the task of socialist reconstruction. Only then the possibility of withering away of the
state would be there.

18.3.5 Spontaneity Element gives way to Selectivity of Time and Place

As pointed out earlier, Lenin assigned the task of staging a successful proletarian
revolution to the communist party as the vanguard of the proletariat. 'This amounted
lo some deviation from the Marxian position. Marx had expressed considerable Faith
in the revolutionary potential of tile working class. But in Lenin's argument, the
spontaneity element inherent in Marx gave way to selectivity of 'time and place.
Lenin was critical of the view expressed by the Mensheviks (minority faction in the
party) that revolutionaries should wait for the development of spontaneous
revolutionary action of the masses. He argued that without strong leadership from
outside its ranks, the working class could never rise beyond trade unionism. He
considered such trade unionism reformist rather than revolutionary. It amounted to
saying that the leadership of the Communist Party would decide where and when the
revolution is to be attempted. In other words, the agenda of revolution would be
decided by the party and not by the workers. This view of Lenin was criticised by
some of his contemporaries, particularly Rosa Luxemberg. She argued that since the
decision about time, place and strategy of the revolution was to be decided by the
Communist Party, the spontaneity element of a revolution which is inherent in Marx
would give way to selectivity of time and place. This, she further added, would blunt
the self-emancipator efforts of the working class.

31
18.4 MAO TSE-TUNG (NOW MAO ZEDONG) (1893-1976)

Born at Shaoshan in Hunan province of China in 1893 (December 26) Mao is the
second Marxist revolutionary (Lenin being the first) who brought about a successful
revolution in a backward country like China. Moreover, lie did so primarily with the
Help of the peasantry - a class which, Marx thought, had no revolutionary potential.
Even Lenin had not placed much faith in the peasant class. Mao, like Lenin, was both
a practitioner of Marxism a also its theoretician. After a little formal education, he
joined the army of Hunan province during the 1911 revolution led by Kuomintang (
KMT), a bourgeois nationalist party of Sun Yat Sen. Soon after the success of the
KM'T revolution, he moved to Changsha (Capital of Hunan) and later lo Peking
(Now Beijing) . It was here that he came under the influence of the radical Marxist
leader Li Dazhao who arranged a job for him in the university library. However, he
left the job and returned to Changsha and became active in the Communist Party of
China (CPC). Between 1921-25, he organized the mine workers. He also travelled to
various parts of China which gave him a first hand impression about the exploitative
conditions under which the Chinese peasantry was reeling at that time. This was a
period of cooperation between the KMT and the CPC. However, tension between the
two began to develop when the CPC, pressed for agrarian reforms which were not
acceptable lo the KMT, because they were bound to adversely affect the interest of
the KMT members many of whom were landlords. By 1927, the relations between the
KMT and the CPC became so bitter that the KMT decided to hit at the communist.
After this break between the KMT and the CPC, Mao was asked to organize a
rebellion of Hunan peasants. During the course of this rebellion, Mao wrote his first
major work – Analysis of Clauses in the Chinese Society. Here, he identified the
various strata of Chinese peasantry- small, marginal, middle and the big peasant and
the revolutionary potential of cach of them. He highlighted the contradiction between
the peasantry and the feudal lords. He argued that in the Chinese condition the
peasantry was going to be the vanguard of the evolution, unlike Tsarist Russia where
revolution was led by the proletariat. He also identified the strata which could be
reliable and vacillating allies in a peasant led revolution. He attempted the Harvest
Uprising of peasants in 1928, but the uprising was crushed and Mao had to flee along
with his supporters to Chingkangshan (now Jingangshan) mountains. From these
mountains, Mao's party started its guerrilla warfare tactics, By this, Mao became the
originator of guerrilla warfare within the marxian revolutionary framework. By these
tactics, the CPC was able to capture various parts of South-cast China. It set up a
number of peasant Soviets in the captured areas. These successes of the CPC in rural
China however, were not according to the policy laid down by the Communist
International, which had been advocating that the revolution must begin from the
urban centres. The urban centered revolution, Mao thought, was bound to fail in
China because there was a very small proletariat. 'Therefore, he continued his

32
guerrilla warfare tactics in the rural areas. The KMT tried to crush these guerrilla
attacks and encircled the areas where peasant Soviets had been set up.

Finally, the KMT armies drove out the revolutionaries who took shelter in the north-
west hills of China, This escape became famous as Mao's Long March. This also
made Man the undisputed leader of the CPC, a position which he maintained his
death. Mao's stay in the north-west (Yanan Province) was the most fruitful period for
the CPC. It was here that Mao began an extensive study of Marxist philosophy. Mao
is believed to have written two serious pieces during this period; one titled "On
Practice" and the other called "On Contradiction", both of which were published after
the success of the Chinese revolution. In the 1940s, he gave a blue-print of the future
Chinese Government titled "New Democracy" (1 945). During 1942-43, Mao
consolidated his position in the CPC by eliminating all his possible potential rivals
through a rectification campaign. He also advocated a strategy of mass mobilization
of peasants which is known as Mao Mass-line. Here, he took a highly nationalist
posture against the Japanese invasion and tried to organise the Chinese people around
the national sentiment. He also refined his theory and practice of guerrilla warfare.
The threat to Chinese security during the second world war again brought the KMT
and the CPC together. When the cooperation between the two finally ended in 1949,
Mao became the head of the Chinese state which began to be called the People's
Republic of China (PRC). During the course of reconstruction of the Chinese society,
Mao gave a nod el different from the one envisaged by Marx in his writings or the
one attempted by Lenin in the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, Mao gave his famous
call of "Let Hundred Flowers Bloom" which allowed different viewpoints in the CPC
to be expressed freely and openly. Later, he attempted collectivization of agriculture
followed by a call for a Great Leap Forward to bring about quick transition to
communism China. These attempts of Mao did not fully succeed, which generated
some resentment and even opposition to Mao's management of the economic agenda.
Mao tried to fight this opposition on an ideological plank and gave a call for a
Cultural Revolution in 1966. This was an attempt at re-charging the revolutionary
zeal of the CPC cadres. He remained wedded to this idea till his death in 1976
(September 9).

18.4.1 Peasant Revolution

While the Marxist Leninist legacy greatly influenced him, Mao is a great innovator in
his own right. He modified Marxism Leninism by relying heavily on the peasantry's
revolutionary potential. It needs to be reinembered that Marx has treated the
peasantry with some degree of contempt. For the most part, peasantry for him was
conservative and reactionary; it was no more than a bag of potatoes unable to make a
revolution. Even Lenin had relied mainly on the proletariat in the urban centres of
Russia for mass insurrections and had not placed much faith in the peasantry's
revolutionary potential. Mao's jrndamental contribution, therefore, was to bring about

33
a successful revolution in China mainly with the help of the peasantry. More than
anything else, his revolutionary model became relevant for several Afro-Asian
peasant societies. Secondly, Mao in his cultural revolution phase drew some lesson
from the course of post revolutionary reconstruction in the Soviet Union and warned
(like Milovan Djilas) against the emergence of the new bourgeois class who were
beneficiaries of the transitional period. In other words, Mao was aware that the party's
top hierarchy could itself become a new class. Mao used this argument to side-line his
rivals in the top echelons of the CPC.

18.4.2 Contradictions

In Marxist theory, the main vehicle of all changes in society is contradiction. Mao
further elaborated this idea. For him, contradictions or the unity of opposites (thesis
and anti-thesis) leading to a higher level and transforming quantity into quality
(synthesis) was the fundamental law of historical development. But he did not fully
endorse the Marxist position on contradiction. it may be mentioned that Marx, in his
writings, seems to have used the terms contradictions and antagonisms most
interchangeably. However, Lenin began to distinguish between the two. He expressed
the view that contradictions would remain even in a socialist society, but antagonisms
would not. Mao immensely enriched the debate. In his famous essay titled "On
Contradictions (1937), he formulated the notions of nntagol7isiic contradictions and
non-antagonistic contradictions. According to him, antagonistic contradictions are
those which can be resolved peacefully. In his 'On Correct Handling of
Contradictions' (1957) Mao further elaborated this view. He argued that the
contradictions between the peasantry and the proletariat were non-antagonistic; the
contradictions between the peasantry and the proletariat on one hand, and the petty
bourgeoisie on the other were non-antagonistic; the contradictions between the
peasantry, the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie on the one hand and the national
bourgeoisie on the other were non-antagonistic. Contradictions between the various
communist parties were non-antagonistic, but contradictions between the Chinese
people and the compradore bourgeois were antagonistic. Contradictions between the
socialist and the capitalist camp were antagonistic. Contradictions between colonial
countries and imperialism were antagonistic. He also argued that at any one point of
time, one contradiction becomes the principal contradiction whereas the other
contradictions become minor. Further, he argued that even a principal contradiction
has a principal aspect and several minor aspects. For example, in the era of
imperialism the contradiction between the imperialist camp on one hand and the
socialist camp and colonial countries on the other, a principal contradiction and
contradiction between the Soviet Union and the US was a principal aspect of this
principal contradiction. However, he also added that which contradiction is to be
treated as antagonistic and principal and which as minor and non-antagonistic or
which aspect is to be treated as principal would be contingent on relative historical
tactical considerations.

34
18.4.3 On Practice

This elaboration of contradictions led Mao to expound his epistemology or theory of

knowledge. In his famous essay titled, On Practice (1973) Mao argued that all
knowledge of the real world comes to us through concrete investigation and empirical
analysis. He was opposed lo mere book learning or initiative theorizing. For example,
if one wanted to understand the Chinese society, then one must understand its class
structure, its pattern of land ownership and the impact of imperialism on the local
economy of China. Theory without continuous reference to empirical reality would
become a mere dogma. However, he visualized two stages in the understanding of
empirical reality: The Perceptual stage, and The Conceptual Stage. At the perceptual
stage, we only get the impression of reality through our senses. This sense perception
has to be compounded into conceptual knowledge. For example, when one looks at
the empirical reality of rural China, it is only the perceptual stage of knowledge. But
having seen this reality, one has to understand it in terms of different stratas of
peasantry: landless, marginal, small, middle and big farmers etc., that is the
conceptual stage.

18.4.4 United Front and New Democracy

Mao realized that the peasantry in China was not strong enough ta win the
revolutionary struggle against imperialism and feudalism. Therefore, it was necessary
to seek the help of the other classes of Chinese society. It was in this context that Mao
emphasized the concept of a United Front. It was seen as an alliance between
different partners who had some common interest like opposition to imperialism. The
nature of such a United Front would depend on the historical situation. Its object
would be to pursue the resolution of the principal contradiction. Such a United Front
strategy was employed by Mao by establishing the alliance of Chinese peasantry with
the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and even the national bourgeoisie. It also
intended the non-party elements among the Chinese intellectuals. The United front
had to be a broad alliance of the Chinese people against Japanese imperialism and
western powers.

In pursuance of his United Front strategy, Mao gave a call in 1940 for a new
democratic republic of China. It was to be a state under the joint dictatorship of
several classes. In 1945, lie proposed a state system which is called New Democracy.
While the united front consisted of an over whelrning majority of the Chinese people,
the leading position in the alliance had to be in the hands of the working class. It
meant that the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie would not only be
partners in the United Front, they would also be partners of the ruling alliance, but
they had to be only junior partners. He called such a state as the 'People's Democratic
Dictatorship'. It was a combination of two aspects – democracy for the people and

35
dictatorship over the 'enemies of the people' or the 'running dogs of imperialism'. In
concrete terms, it meant that the Chinese democratic state would incorporate the
peasantry, the working class, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie in the
ruling alliance. In doing so Mao deviated from the classical Marxist notion of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, he combined Marxism and nationalism.

18.5 SUMMARY

In this unit, we have discussed the founder arid two prominent advocates of Marxism:
Marx, Lenin and Mao. We have discussed Marx's theory of alienation, historical
materialism, surplus, value, class war and revolution. Broadly, Marx's views on the
state, dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist society are also mentioned. This
is followed by a discussion of Lenin's ideas on party organisation and democratic
centralism, his theory of imperialism and his views on the nature of the post-
revolutionary state. Lenin's views about selectivity of place and time of revolution as
against the Marxist view about spontaneity are also discussed. Finally, Mao's views
about classes in the Chinese society, his notion of peasant revolution, his views on
contradictions and new democracy are discussed. Maoist notion of antagonistic and
non-antagonistic contradictions is an important contribution to the Marxist theory. In
addition to it, his advocacy of 'let hundred flowers bloom' and 'great leap forward' is
also discussed.

18.6 EXERCISES

1) What is the main intellectual contribution of 'early' Marx? How does 'early'
Marx differ from 'later' Marx?
2) What is materialistic inter pretation of history?
3) What is Lenin's theory of Party Organisation?
4) What is Lenin's analysis of imperialism?
5) Describe Mao's analysis of classes in the Chinese society.
6) What has been Mao's contribution to the theory of contradictions?
7) Comment on Mao's notion of New Democracy.

36
UNIT 19 LUKACS, GRAMSCI AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Structure
1 9.1 Introduction
19.2 Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)
19.2.1 Rejection of Dialectical Materialism
19.2.2 Denial of Lenin's Vanguard Thesis
19.2.3 Relation of Subject and Object
19.3 Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
19.3.1 Notion of Hegemony
19.3.2 Role of Intellectuals
19.3.3 Philosophy of Praxis
19.3.4 Relation between the Base and the Super-Structure and the
Notion of Historic Bloc
19.4 Frankfurt School (Or Critical Theory)
19.4.1 Opposition to all Forms of Domination
19.4.2 Critique of Orthodox Marxism
19.4.3 In Search of Emancipation
19.5 Summary
19.6 Exercises

19.1 INTRODUCTION

In the previous unit, we have discussed the main ideas of the three prominent
advocates of Marxism: Marx, Lenin and Mao. As indicated earlier, all the three have
contributed not only to tile Marxist theory, but have also made significant
contribution to revolutionary practice. This is particularly true of Lenin and Mao. In
this unit, we propose to discuss another three major streams which have enriched
Marxist theory. These are associated with Lukacs (a Hungarian), Gramsci (an Italian)
and the Frankfurt School (Germany). It is important for you to remember that their
contribution is more to theory than to revolutionary practice. It is also useful to bear
in mind that besides these three, there are several others like Trotsky, Plekhanov,
Stajanovic, Althusser, Kolakowski and Poulantazas etc. who have also contributed to
the theory of Marxism. Similarly, many others including Che Geuvara, Regis Debray,
Frantz Fanon etc. have contributed a great deal both to the Marxist theory as well as
to revolutionary practice. However, in this unit the discussion will be limited only to
Lukacs, Grarnsci and the Frankfurt School.

37
19.2 GEORG LUKACS (1885-1971)

Georg Lukacs was born at Budapest (Hungary) in 1885 (April 13). After graduating
from Budapest University, he studied at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg. He
had diverse interests, During the first phase of his life, even while he was studying he
devoted considerable time to literary criticism. In this field, his early works are Soul
and Form (1910), History of Development of Modern Drama (1911), Aesthetic
Culture (1913) and the Theory of Novel (1916). His initial inclination during this
period was towards ethical idealism. Plato and Hegel seem to have considerably
influenced him in this respect. Gradually, he was attracted by Marxian philosophy
and within a couple of years he got intensely involved in the communist movement of
his country. He joined the Communist Party of Hungary and became the Education
Minister in 1919 in the short-lived Communist Government. After the fall of the
communist regime, he was tried by the new Hungarian Government and sentenced to
death. He fled from Hungary and spent nearly 20 years in Austria, Germany and the
Soviet Union. It was during his stay in Austria that he wrote his most seminal work -
History and Class Consciousness. This is the most important work of Lukacs and it
has influenced a large number of Marxists. In fact, the Student Movement in France
and in other countries of Europe in the 1960s is said to have been inspired by this
work. The Frankfurt School was also influenced by him. He returned to Hungary in
1945 to become a professor of Aesthetics at the Budapest University. Here, he got
actively involved in political activities and consequently, became a target of serious
criticism. In 1956, in the wake of de-Stalinization, he became the Minister of Culture
in the Communist Government of Imray Nagi in Hungary for a few months. After the
fall of this government, he was deported to Romania but he returned in 1957.
Thereafter, till his death in 1971 (June 4) lie was engaged in writing philosophical
and literary works.

19.2.1 Rejection of Dialectical Materialism

You would recall that Marx had predicted that when contradictions in capitalism
would grow, it would be overthrown in a revolution by the proletariat. However, it
was noticed during the twentieth century that this prediction of Marx did not come
true and capitalism continued to grow despite its periodic crises. It was a problem for
all post-Marx Marxists to explain as to why capitalism was not coming to an end. In
the previous lesson, we discussed that Lenin's explanation was that capitalism was
still surviving because it had reached its highest stage of imperialism which was the
last stage of capitalism. Lukacs, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School offered other
answers to explain this phenomenon. Lukacs argued that for the overthrow of
capitalism, the mere existence of the proletariat class was not enough as Marx had
argued; this proletariat must also acquire revolutionary consciousness. He was critical
of the view that Marxism was like physical sciences. He criticized Engel's argument

38
that human behavior was governed by dialectical laws. He also criticized Engels for
applying dialectics to the social world, because the interaction of subject and objet in
the social world is not the same as in the natural world. He went on to say that
thought does not merely mirror or reflect the physical world sans mental activity. He
rejected the Marxian theory of dialectical materialism. Likewise, Gramsci questioned
the very Marxian view that the economic base determines the ideological political
superstructure. He tried to explain how one class maintains its hold on the other. He
argued that the rule of one class over the other does not depend merely on the
economic and physical power, it depends on the ability of the ruling class to impose
its social, cultural and moral values on the ruled. Thus, while Lukacs emphasized the
role of consciousness instead of material forces, Gramsci highlighted the role of
cultural aspects instead of the economic base determining the super structure.

Lukacs carried out a philosophic revisionism of Marxism. He questioned several key

aspects of Marxism, Leninism. He attacked historical materialism which is the very
basis of Marxism. He argued that it was vulgar Marxism to say that a set of economic
laws will determine whether the situation was ripe for revolution or not. He asserted
that material conditions in themselves cannot change history. Socialist revolution is
not a consequence of sharpening of just contradictions of capitalism. It is only when a
class becomes conscious of these contradictions that revolutionary change occurs,
Thus, he emphasized the creative role of human consciousness. In the previous unit, it
was pointed out that according to Marx, it is the sharpening of contradictions between
the forces or means of production and relations of production that leads to changes in
society Lukacs reversed this argument. He asserted that contradictions between
means and relations of production (which is a objective fact) cannot itself bring about
any change in society, unless there is a human subject (proletariat class) which grasps
this contradiction. To put it in other words, Lukacs did not accept the basic Marxian
position that matter isprimary and mind secondary. Mere fact that there is
exploitation and alienation of the proletariat class is not enough to bring about a
revolution; rather it is only when the proletariat class becomes conscious of this
alienation and exploitation that revolution would take place. Thus, Lukacs took a
semi-Hegelian or quasi Hegelian position. It almost amounted to saying that mind is
primary and matter secondary. In fact, Lukacs seems to agree with the Marxian thesis
of Feuerbach that the essential element in historical evolution is not contradiction, but
proletariats awareness about this contradiction which it acquires when engaged in
resolving it. Further, the proletariat's consciousness about this contradiction is not
direct, but only through its having experienced alienation. Lukacs, argument is that in
the social world (unlike the natural world) there are no objective historical laws
which are not subject to human control.

39
19.2.2 Denial of Lenin's Vanguard Thesis

The above position of Lukacs also amounts to a denial of Lenin's thesis about the role
of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the proletariat, because he maintains that
such revolutionary consciousness will not come to the proletariat through some
internzediary, but directly by experiencing alienation and exploitation. Consciousness
in this way does not remain a super-structural category as in Marx. In Lenin's position
as stated in What is to be Done ( I 902), the proletariat can acquire revolutionary
consciousness (awareness about the need to overthrow capitalism) only by relying on
outside elements (professional revolutionaries) who have a clear awareness of
historical evolution which the proletariat cannot have on its own. The Communist
Party, in Lenin's argument, represents a suitable mechanism for imparting such
revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat; but for Lukacs the proletariat must
acquire this consciousness about its class position without any outside help. To a
question as to how the proletariat will acquire such revolutionary consciousness,
Lukacs' response was that it would come through Workers' Councils and not by the
party organisation as Lenin had maintained.

19.2.3 Relation of Subject and Object

In classical materialism, consciousness is considered a mere reflection of reality and

the only valid category is totality which can be grasped by the dialectical method
alone. Lukacs calls it the "reflective" or copy theory of knowledge which apprehends
a false objectivity. This is a very complex argument of Lukacs. He is saying that to
stop at the reality of a mere object is to grasp only at the appearance of things.
According to him, the revolutionary praxis of the Proletariat enables it to have. a new
and higher form of consciousness. When the proletariat begins to see that in
capitalism, it has become a mere commodity or a mere object, it ceases to be a mere
commodity and a mere object. It becomes a subject (agent of change).Thus,
comprehension of this reality enables it to change this reality. Lukacs further argued
that object and subject (being and consciousness) are not related to each other as .base
and ,super structure, but co-exist in a single dialectic. In other words, while Marx had
argued that it is the material conditions of society which change history, according to
Lukacs consciousness is not a simple reflection of the process of history, but it truly is
an agent by which history may be transformed. While consciousness is a produrct of
material conditions, it is also the driving .force by which material conditions may be
changed. While the orthodox Marxian position states that the proletariat's conditions
of existence determines their consciousness, Lukacs maintains that the proletariat's
consciousness would change their conditions of existence. Thus, consciousness is the
most decisive factor in the self-liberation of the proletariat. It is through the
acquisition of revolutionary consciousness that the proletariat transforms itself from a
'class for itself', from an object of history to a subject of history.

40
19.3 ANTONIO GRAMSCI (1891-1937)

Gramsci was born in a poor family in Sardina which was the poorest region of Italy.
His father was arrested for embezzlement when Gramsci was a small child and
sentenced to five years imprisonment. In his absence, the family lived in utter poverty
because of which Gramsci suffered physical deformity and became a hunchback.
After some elementary education, Gramsci started working in an office. In 1911 he
won a scholarship and joined Turin University. At Turin, he noticed that there was a
lot of difference in the standard of living in the rural areas of Italy and its cities.
While at the university, he got associated with the Italian Socialist Party. By and by
he was attracted to Marxist ideas. He was also influenced by Corce's emphasis on the
role of cu1tur.e and thought in the development of history. It was this idea of Corce
which provided the historical framework within which Gramsci carried out his
adapiation of Marxian ideas. In 1914-15 he attended a series of lectures on Marx
which made him particularly interested in the problem of relation between the base
and the super-structure. He began to engage himself in the workers' movement. When
the Italian Communist Party was founded in 1921, Gramsci became one of its
founding member. Soon, he became its General Secretary and was also elected to the
Italian Parliament. He was arrested in 1926 in the wake of the rise of fascism and
remained imprisoned till his death. During his prison life he wrote on several topics.
These writings were published later as Prison Notebooks. It is these Notebooks of
Gramsci which made him a great theoretician of Hegelian Marxism (along with
Lukacs). His other major work is Modern Prince and other writings.

19.3.1 Notion of Hegemony

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and Modern Prince and Other Writings deal with diverse
issues of politics, history, culture and philosophy, but in this unit we will refer to only
some of them: his notion of hegemony, his views about the role of intellectuals, his
philosophy Praxis and his analysis of relations between the base and the super-
structure. Out of ail these, his notion of hegemony is considered to be the most
significant and original contribution of Gramsci. In the previous unit, it was pointed
out that in all societies there are two classes: the class which owns the means of
production and the class which owns only labour power. The class which owns the
means of production establishes its rule over the class which owns labour power and
exploits it. Thus, in the Marxian scheme, the capitalist state is the managing
committee of the bourgeoisie, which facilitates and legitimizes the exploitative
processes in the society. It is the economic power (or the ownership of means of
production) that enables the ruling class to remain in power. Gramsci contested this
Marxian position. He argued that the ruling class maintains its domination in diverse
ways including the use of force, use of its economic power and the conqent of the
ruled. in other words, the bourgeois class maintains its domination not merely by

41
force, but in several nun-coercive ways. Two such non-coercive ways prominently
come out in his writings. One of them is the ability of the ruling class to impose its
own values and belief systems on the masses. Gramsci argued that the ruling class
uses various processes of socialization to impose its own culture on the ruled. The
ruling class attempts to control the minds of men by imposing its own culture on them
in several subtle ways. So, culture hegemony of the ruling class is the basis of its
ruling power. Secondly, he argues that the ruling class does not always work for its
narrow class interest. In order to maintain its ruling position, it enters into
compromises and alliances with other groups in societies and creates a historic bloc.
It is this strategy of creating a social bloc which enables the ruling class to get the
consent of the ruled. You will notice that this argument of Gramsci is completely at
variance with the orthodox Marxian position in which the class rule of the bourgeois
is justified on the basis of its control of means of, production. In other words, in the
Gramsci an argument the role of ideas and culture become central instead of the
economic factor. Secondly, Gramsci's explanation of dominance of the ruling class in
terms of its compromise and alliances with other allies underplays the orthodox
Marxian position in which the state is viewed merely as the managing committee of
the bourgeoisie. So much so that Gramsci also suggested a system of alliances for the
working class to enable it to overthrow the bourgeois rule. He emphasized the need
for creating a historic bloc.

19.3.2 Role of Intellectuals

Here a question arises as to how does the ruling class establish its hegemony in
society? Gramsci argued that it does so with the help of intellectuals. But he added
that intellectuals could also play a significant tole in the revolutionary transformation
of society. He argued that intellectuals provide a philosophy for the masses so that
they do not question the ruling position of the bourgeoisie. In this respect, Gramsci
talked of two categories of intellectuals: and organic intellectuals. The former largely
refers to those who think that they are not linked to any class. In this sense, they are
independent. Organic intellectuals on the other hand, are those who are actively and
closely associated either with the ruling class or with the masses. 'Those who are
associated with the ruling class chum out ideas, which helps in legitimizing the rule
of one class over the other. Those who are associate with the masses work for and
provide leadership to bring about revolutionary change it society. Such intellectuals
emerge from within the working class.

19.3.3 Philosophy of Praxis

Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks that his philosophy of praxis is a reform and a
developed form of Hegelianism. For him, philosophy of praxis is interaction of theory
and practice. In Marx's writings, praxis refers to creative and self-creative activity
through which human beings create and change their historical universe and

42
themselves. It is activity specific to human beings and it differentiates them from
other beings. It is a mix or rather interaction of theory and practice in such a way that
theory enriches practice and practice enriches theory. Marx had discussed the notion
of praxis in his These on Feuerbach. Gramsci treated Marxism as the philosophy of
praxis. He was himself involved in practical revolutionary activity. Gramsci
maintains that man can affect his own development and that of his own surroundings
only in so Far as he has a clear view of what possibilities of actions are open to him.
To do this, he has to understand the historical situation in which he finds himself and
once he does .that, he can play an active part in modifying that situation. The man of
action is the true philosopher and the philosopher must of necessity be a man of
action. Gramsci holds the view that man does not enter into relations with the natural
world, just by being himself a part of it, but actively by means of work and technique.
It is only through historical awareness and understanding of historical circumstances
in which man finds himself that he can remake his surroundings and remake himself.

19.3.4 Relations between the Base and the Super-Structure and the Notion of
Historic Bloc

It was in 1914-15 when Gramsci attended some lectures on Marxism that he got
interested in the problem of relations between the base and the super-structure. You
would recall that Marx had expressed the view that no society can undergo any
transformation till necessary and sufficient conditions for such transformation are
already there. One form of society cannot be replaced by another, unless it has
developed all forms of life which are inherent and implicit in its economic
relationship. In the Critique of Politica1 Economy, Marx had stated that "no social
order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have
developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material
conditions for their existence have matured in the womb of old society". For Marx,
the economic order of society constituted the base and the political order constituted
the super structure, The nature of super structure depended on the nature of the
economic base. Gramsci modified this Marxian position. He talked of a historic bloc.
The historic bloc for Gramsci was a situation when both objective and subjective
forces combine to produce a revolutionary situation. It is a situation when the old
order is collapsing and there are also people with will and historical insight to take
advantage of this situation. The union of base and super-structure, material conditions
and ideologies, constitute the historic bloc. In other words, even when the material
forces have reached a point where revolution is possible, its occurrence would depend
on correct intellectual analysis in order to have a rational reflection of the
contradictions of the structure.

For Gramsci, dialectics means three things:

i) interaction between the intellectuals (party leaders) and the masses;

43
 ii) explanation of historical developments in terms of thesis, anti-thesis and
synthesis;
iii) the relation between the sub-structure and super-structure.

In vulgar Marxism, the super-structure i.e., ethics, laws, philosophy, art and the whole
realm of ideas is directly conditioned by the economic system, by means of
production and exchange. Material conditions determine man's consciousness'
Gramsci criticized this view. Like Lukacs, he argued that revolution and preparations
for it would involve profound changes in the consciousness of masses. Dialectics in
the physical world are different from dialectics in society. In physical nature, it is the
backlash of physical forces but in society, it is a moment in which men contribute to
becoming a deliberate force in the dialectical process. Thus, it is the moment when
sub-structure and super-structure interact on each other to produce a historic bloc.

You must have noticed that there is a lot in common between Lukacs and Gramsci.
Both emphasized the role of cultural and philosophical factors in understanding
historical materialism of Marx. Both brought out the element of Hegelian idealism in
Marx. Both attached greater importance to consciousness than to material forces.
Both saw the relationship between the base and the super structure in a new light.

19.4 FRANKFURT SCHOOL (OR CRITICAL THEORY)

Frankfurt School refers to a group of philosophers who were together at the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research during the 1920s and 30s. Prominent members of the
school were Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, Eric Fromm, Neumnn and Herbert
Marcuse. All of them, one way or the other, contributed to the Marxist theory. Of
course, there were differences among them on many issues, but there is some
common streak which emerges from their writings. Their view also came to be called
Critical Theory. 'They were all critical of all forms of domination and exploitation in
society. They were also critical of they Stalinist variety of socialism. They argued that
Marxism was not a closed system. They are more concerned with cultural and
ideological issues than with political economy which is the core of orthodox
Marxism.

19.4.1 Opposition to all Forms of Domination

At the very outset, you must understand the context in which they wrote and the
issues which bothered them. They wrote in a period which was marked by the rise of
Nazism (in Germany) and Fascism (in Italy). Moreover, the rise of Stalinism in the
Soviet Union with its totalitarian thrust was a cause of serious concern for them. They
were also aware of the failure of communist movements in western Europe. They
were critical of all ideologies because ideologies do not offer a true account of reality.

44
They were particularly critical of those ideologies which attempt to conceal and
legitimize systems of exploitation and domination. Through critical analysis of such
ideologies, they wanted to trace the hidden roots of domination them. By doing so,
they tried to create true consciousness among the masses and prepare them for
revolutionary action. Thus their goal like Marx is revolutionary transformation of
society, but in a different way.

They were critical of cultural and social philosophies and practices which aim at
offering a false escape from monotonous everyday life under capitalism, or' which
advocates the idea that inequalities are not man-made, but natural or have come from
God.

19.4.2 Critique of Orthodox Marxism

The Frankfurt School tried to offer a critique of some of the notions of orthodox
Marxism which had acquired repressive and authoritarian intent in the Soviet Union.
Some of them even went to the extent of saying that Marxism is not adequate to
explain trends like bureaucratization. Like Lukacs and Gramsci, they also questioned
the Marxian doctrine of historical materialism which tries to explain all stages in
historical developments in economic terms. They argued that it underplay the role or
human subjectivity. In fact, they tried to show that this 'determist' thrust (economic
base determining everything) was the result of Marx's acceptance of positivist
methodology of natural sciences. Moreover, the contradiction between forces and
relations of production may not have similar results in all societies. It will depend on
how people view these contradictions and how they try to resolve them. History is
made by the situated conduct of partially knowing subjects. Therefore, for
understanding any historical situation, it is essential to comprehend the interplay
between socio-economic structure and social practices.

19.4.3 In Search of Emancipation

The central concern in the writings of the Frankfurt school is domination and
authority. They argued that in liberal as well as socialist societies, domination and
authority are justified in the name of reason which they call instrumental rationality.
In fact, it is the result of the application of the positivist methods of natural sciences
to social sciences. In natural sciences, we study the physical phenomenon with a view
to control and regulate it, but in human sciences the object of study of society should
not be to control and regulate human beings, but to emancipate them from all sorts of
bondages. All socio-cultural practices in western as well as eastern societies are
aimed at stablizing the system of domination. In this sense, you can treat the
Frankfurt School as the advocate of a counter-culture. They are also critical of
authoritarian family structures and the socialization processes in education. They
stand for sexual liberation as well. They are critical of the processes by which public

45
opinion is manipulated by political pal-ties and through market research and
advertising agencies.

19.5 SUMMARY

In the foregoing pages, we have discussed three major streams in Marxism which
have been witnessed during the twentieth century; those associated with Lukacs.
Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. While they do differ with each other in matters of
detail, there are some common elements in all the three of them. For example, they
underplay the Marxian doctrine of historical materialism where the economic base
determines the super-structure. Instead, they emphasize the role of human
consciousness and will (Lukacs) and cultural aspects (Gramsci and Frankfurt School).
All the three attempt to explain why bourgeois rule and capitalism have not been
overthrown as Marx had predicted. Why is it that despite the existence of a large
proletariat class in several societies, revolutionary change has not occurred? In their
search for answers to these questions, they found that the mere existence of the
proletariat class is not enough for a revolution to occur; this proletariat class must
acquire the necessary revolutionary consciousness. They also found that ruling
classes are able to maintain their hegemony and domination by various subtle
methods like imposing their cultural nouns, their beliefs and values on the masses. It
is the responsibility of intellectuals to guide the masses in this respect. They also
explained how and by what methods the authority structures of domination are
legitimized in order to ensure stability of the system.

19.6 EXERCISES

1) What is the main contribution of Lultacs to the Marxist theory ?

2) What did Gramsci mean by hegemony'? In what way did lie modify the
orthodox Marxian position?
3) What is meant by the Frankfurt School? What critique of liberal and socialist
societies did it offer?

46
UNIT 20 SOCIALISM

Structure

20.1 Introduction
20.2 The Doctrine of Social Progress, Individualism and Capitalism
20.3 Socialism: Meaning and Early Strands
20.4 Karl Marx and Socialism
20.5 Critiques of Marxism and Democratic Socialism
20.6 Exercises

20.1 INTRODUCTION

In this unit, we will discuss the following issues: What is it that calls forth the need
for socialism? And, what is socialism? Socialism s a set of doctrines or a cluster of
ideas and a political programme that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. It
arose out of a revolt against bourgeois property. Property in all "civilized" societies
has been considered sacred. (Exceptions were 'primitive’ communities also known as
tribal.) In bourgeois society, it loses it sacredness but gets, a new type of sanction; it
now becomes an inalienable right. (Inalienable is anything which cannot be separated
from the person, something entrenched with the individual.) What then are the
implications of property rights as inalienable?

One main objective of the state is taken to be to ensure the liberty of property. Right
to private property has been regarded, by much of the liberal theory, as the key to
liberty of the individual and to the pursuit of his happiness. To John Locke, the father
of liberal view of society, right to "life, liberty and property" is a natural right and
human beings enter into a contract to create a state for the protection of this right.
From then on, through Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham and the modern proponents
of capitalism (which now has taken an aggressive posture under globalisation in our
times) the institution of private property has been politically sacrosanct and an
essential of social progress.

20.2 THE DOCTRINE OF SOCIAL PROGRESS, INDIVIDUALISM AND

CAPITALISM

The doctrine of social progress is predicated on the assumption that the perusal of
(rational) self-interest by every individual will over a period of time, even if
temporary set backs have I to be faced, lead to social good. This means that general
social welfare will be the result of individual maximization of interest. This

47
prevailing view of the new man was well captured I by Alexander Pope in the
following verse:

'Thus God or nature formed the general frame

And bade self-love and social be the same.

We all know Adam Smith's of quoted maxim of the "invisible hand." Everyone is not
only a maximize of self-interest, but is an infinite appropriator and an infinite
consumer of goods of every kind. Property is the measure of man and in a capitalist
society, whichever way one looks at it, all routes converge on property and through it
the individual's pursuit of his happiness. What we get, as a picture of man under such
a social arrangement is an egoistic person, dissociated from all other individuals and
all by himself in a space called the market place.

This extreme individualism is best captured in the words of John Locke, the father
philosopher of liberalism. He says, the state exists to promote civil interest and "civil
interest call life, liberty, inviolability of body, and the possession of such outward
things as Money, Lands, Houses, Furniture and the like." ('A Letter Concerning
Tolerance'). He then argues that "Though the earth . . . be common to all men, yet
everyman has a 'property' in his own 'person'. This nobody has a right but himself."
(Two Treatises of Government, Ch.: 'Of Property'.) It is clear in the above statement
that bourgeois property is exclusively individual and that it legitimates the exclusion
of others from it. (In feudal property, other members too had entitlements on the fruits
of property) In this view of things, these is no sense of an individual's social
obligation to others or of sharing in the benefits of a social system in the creation of
which people cooperate together. In any complex system, even property is the result
of the common exertions of people, but its possession is always exclusively private.
The common good is identified with the individual good. The individual good is each
man for himself. The state has the function to ensure that those who succeed in
acquiring property have full protection.

All the means of production (land, factory, raw material, tools and instrument and
such other things which go into the production of necessities of life & other goods) in
such a society are privately owned. And these get, as history shows, concentrated in
fewer and fewer hands as capitalist production is based on (increasing) accumulation.
This has two very important consequences for society. First, all decisions about
investment choices -which commodities to produce and in what quantities - is
determined by a small group of people who own these means of production. Whether
the commodity is socially beneficial or not is not the main consideration. What
determines the investment choices is whether effective demand can be created. In
other words, profitability of goods is the sole consideration in the making of choices
about investment. Whether luxury cars will be produced when there is a crying need

48
for buses -public transport - is left to be decided by the profit motive of the individual
entrepreneurs; same is the case whether guns or bombs should have precedence over
the urgent need to have a hospital or a school. Production in society is without any
plan and often can be of a wasteful nature; expensive fatless potato chips can score
over the need for cheap bread which ordinary people may badly require. Distribution
following from the above investment choices for wrong kind of commodities goes on
regardless of social need or urgency of one who can pay.

Secondly, such an economic system or mode of production creates a class freed from
social and legal obligations to perform labour. This is the class of capitalists. It stays
out of the labour process and imposes the burden of productive labour on the rest of
the society. So we have a large part of society, a majority, who live solely on their
wages which in turn are determined by the cost of reproducing the labour power of
the person as well as the demand and supply of labour. We, thus, find that the
capitalist society is sharply divided between those who own the capital and other
means of production and those who have nothing but empty hands and sell this labour
power under conditions which are loaded against them. Just look around the world to
see the truth of this statement.

A society with such a class division cannot respect the person who labours. One who
labours is dispossessed as he just survives on the wages he receives. Property and
possession is the basis of esteem. All the economic privileges, social predominance
and prestige are with those who own the means of production, the capitalists. All of
these social assets are means to and provide immediate access to political power. That
is why the bourgeoisie in capitalist societies have rightly been called the ruling class,
the class with the power to determine the main features of any capitalist society. In
sum, we can say that class determines the structure of society, which in turn
conditions the values, attitudes, actions, and the overall articulation of any
civilization.

So when we talked in the beginning that socialism has been a revolt of sorts against
bourgeois property, it was not just property per se, but the entire system of production
and government that the bourgeois pro1,erry gives rise to and imposes on the rest of
the society.

20.3 SOCIALISM: MEANING AND EARLY STRANDS

What is the shape that this revolt takes; in other words what is socialism? In the early
decades of the nineteenth century, the common elements of what was emerging as the
socialist outlook were falling in place. There grew the

.... Conviction that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth and unbridled

competition was bound to lead to increasing misery and crises, and that the system

49
must be replaced by one in which the organisation of production and exchange could
do away with poverty and oppression and bring about a redistribution of the world's
gilts on a basis of equality. (Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism)

Early socialism did not grow into any clear-cut doctrine, but a set of values and
beliefs held together by the view that private ownership of production should be
replaced. But there was no unanimity about "replaced by what." There were common
currents of thinking that some or other form of common ownership of productive
property should be the basis of social organisation of society.

Socialism is not against property per se. For example, owning a flat or a refrigerator
or driving in one's own car does not militate against the spirit of socialism. All these
are consumable items. When socialism talks against the private ownership of
property, it means such properly, which is productive and yields profit, or rental
income; that is, the private ownership of mans of' production. Early socialists thought
that property is theft. This comes to mean that the owners of means of production
cheat the workers - the direct producers - of whatever. production which takes place
over and above the wages paid to them. This denial of what they produce is theft. The
accumulation of this theft is property in the form we see it in our societies. Being a
theft it is mora1ly unacceptable. So it must be abolished and as a form, private
ownership must be converted into one or another form of common ownership.

The later socialists did not consider property as a theft, but viewed it as the
appropriation and accumulation of the surplus value that the worker produces. This
process is built into the labour process, which produces goods for exchange in the
market. It is, therefore, internal and structural to the capitalist process and this is also
instituted in law and is therefore, legal. So it cannot be theft, but is exploiting and
nevertheless remains, from a normative point of view, illegitimate and unacceptable.
Therefore, they agreed with the early socialists that it must abolished and common
social ownership instituted. This common notion about the unwelcome nature of
private ownership of the means of production and following on that, the idea of one
or another form of common ownership is what unites the socialists, anyone who
agrees with these views is a socialist, whatever else their differences. This common
outlook is well summed up in the following words. Socialism is:

"That organisation of society in which the means of production are controlled, and the
decisions on how and what to produce and on who is to get what, are made by public
authority instead of by privately-owned and privately managed firm.(Joseph A.
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.)

Within these broad agreements, it is the differences about (a) how does one replace
capitalism and (b) what exactly is the version of social ownership, which, create so
many different schools of socialism. There is finally the all important question of how

50
does one arrive at socialism; in other words, who will bring it about. In looking at
these questions, we will know the different versions or schools of socialism.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, two important features changed in
the way people related to the world. The French revolution put into the shape of
political agenda, the theories of Enlightenment and it furthermore, enthroned the
value of equality (and fraternity) as of the same importance as liberty and thus,
egalitarianism became a creed with the masses. The second momentous development
was the fast emerging working class all over western Europe in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution, a class large and growing in number but living in deep misery.

Early socialism grew as a popular movement with a festive play of ideas. The earliest
of the voices were those of Robert Owen (1771-1858), Saint - Simon ( 1760-1825),
Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Proudhon (1809-65) and many lesser figures. But it
was only with Karl Marx (1818-1883) that a general theory of socialism emerged
which could rival those of Adam Smith or Ricardo about capitalism. The ideas and
prescriptions of these men were very different, but there was a general accent, which
was common. An emphasis on social as against individual, cooperation as against
selfishness or egoism, cooperative activity as against competition; they all agreed
private ownership and market competition is bad for common good and that inspite of
large increases in production, there has been no social progress. Social progress as
society-wide happiness can come about only with the removal of the criteria of profit
and its replacement by a system of rewards based on moral adequacy of claims.

Robert Owen was the first to use the word Socialist in 1827 in his Cooperative
Magazine. He was a self-made Scottish Cotton Manufacturer who believed Industry-
Factory could work as the liberator of mankind from poverty and ignorance. This
could happen only if, as he showed, production is organised on cooperative principles
and not on competition. He carried on many experiments in cooperative organisation
of production. On a nationwide scale, only the state could do it. He also believed that
human nature could be transformed, if environment could be reconstructed. In this
reconstructed environment, education would be a powerful conditioning influence.
He also advocated the formation by public authorities of "villages of cooperation" to
put the unemployed to work. He looked at cooperation not merely as a better
alternative to competition in production, but also looked at it as a way for moral
improvement of human beings. Owen was also a strong advocate of the right to work.
He addressed memorials to the heads of states of Europe in 1817 urging them to
implement his new proposals so that an 'age of plenty' could be ushered in for the
human race. He ideas caught the imagination of the working classes in Britain who
moved on to build popular movements around his ideas leading eventually to the
formation of trade unions which in his times, were considered illegal.

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A different socialist vision emerged from Charles Fourier who came from a merchant
family made impoverished during the French Revolution. Waste, inefficiency,
boredom, and inequality of modern work appalled Fourier. His main interest was in
making work pleasant and adjusted to the character of the individual. Therefore, he
found division of labour unacceptable because it broke up work into minute repetitive
operations. Unlike Robert Owen, he did not believe in the efficacy of big industry.
Work should be concentrated in the countryside and small shops in towns where
family life can be lived in communities and where all can know each other. Work can
be varied and enjoyable only if competition is eliminated and organised in
cooperatives of small producers. Goods should be well crafted and good to look at
and made to last. He, therefore, opposed large industry, which he felt threatened
individuality and the pleasure of work. He was a spokesman of the fast dwindling
craft manufacturers who conceived and executed work all by themselves, unlike in
modern industry where conception and execution of work is separated from each
other.

Saint-Simon was, in contrast to Fourier, a man of science, industry and large

administration. He was Rousseauian in spirit in that he believed the common man of
work to be good, honest and virtuous. He disliked both aristocrats (corrupt) and
scholars (arrogant) may be because he came from an impoverished junior branch of
an aristocratic family. He was all for people's causes. He fought in the American War
of Independence and strongly supported the French Revolution. Like Owen, he was a
great believer in science, technology and Industry. The nineteenth century, he foresaw
as the era of science and industry from which will follow the unity of mankind and
the prosperity of (wo)man. But in contradiction to his distrust of scholars as arrogant,
he believed that social reconstruction should follow the advice of what he called
luminaries' - a learned elite. They must work towards the redesigning of social
institutions with the aim of moral, intellectual and physical improvement of the
poorest who also happen to be the most numerous class in society. In all of this, the
state has to play a central role. The state must find work for all because all are capable
of and want to work. What made him a socialist was his conviction that there is room
only for one class in society, the workers. Wages should be according to one's
capacity to work Tor the good of society. The non-workers are layouts and should be
weeded out. Through state control of education and propaganda, the state should seek
to bring about harmony.

Another very important figure among the early socialists was Proudhon. He was the
one who explicitly referred to property as theft and also had a very polemical
argument with Marx on the nature of property and poverty. He wrote a book called
Philosophy of Poverty to which Marx replied with Poverty of Philosophy, pointing to
the inadequacies of his philosophical convictions. One central concern of Proudhon
was the importance of liberty of the ordinary people. He thought that the greatest
obstacle in the way of realisation of liberty is inequality. So we can say that equality

52
was sought by Proudhan as a precondition of liberty and in that sense, he is in tune
with modern radical ideas. An equalitarian ethos, Proudhan believed, can only be
achieved in a classless society, but he shunned the idea of classwar for social change.
Voluntary agreement of the working people should lead the way towards a classless
society. He advocated a nationwide system of decentralised workers cooperatives,
which can bargain with one another for mutual exchange of goods and services. At
the apex, constituent assemblies of these cooperatives should define the nature of the
state, which in effect meant that the bourgeois oppressive state will cease to be.

It is clear from the exposition of the views of the four leading exponents, there were
many lesser ones too, that 'early socialism', was not any kind of theory, but a festive
play of ideas against capitalism and all that it represented. Many of these ideas are
still around us, in different garbs and exercise considerable influence. Marx was both
critical and appreciative of these' writings on socialism. He critically referred to them
as purely "Utopian" in character. What is utopian about these, for Marx? There is,
first of all, no conception of "revolutionary action."

What are the forces within the, capitalist society who will fight to replace it and how
they will fight? Instead what we have, secondly, is an assortment of vague and diffuse
ideas. All the early socialists were sceptical of class struggle waged by the working
class. They all talked of, as we have seen above, voluntary agreements, change of
heart, propaganda and practical carrying out of social plans, personal inventive
actions, small experiments expanding into society-wide activity, even while all agreed
that tile working class is the most suffering class, but that the entire society be
convinced through peaceful means of the need to replace capitalism without
distinction of class. Marx thought that it would be impossible to bring about socialism
by such means. But he appreciated the contribution of these writers. He thought that
by these "instinctive yearning for the reconstruction of society, these early thinkers
had succeeded in creating an atmosphere in favour of socialism. Moreover as Marx
remarked in the Communist Manifesto, these ideas became 'valuable materials for
enlightenment of the working class'. So Marx's attitude was one of criticism without
being dismissive as happened with many later Marxists.

20.4 KARL MARX AND SOClALISM

Marx's importance in the history of the struggle for socialism lies in the fact that he
was the first man who could propound a theory of socialism, which could, as noted
earlier, rival and stand on all equal footing with the theory of capitalism developed by
Ricardo and Adam Smith. Marx did not simply propound a theory in the old style, but
developed a doctrine which unified, or at least so he claimed, theory with practice
such that theory could guide practice and practice could rectify the errors in theory. In
short, what Marx did was to build up a theory of revolutionary action identifying the

53
class, which will carry out the revolutionary task of replacing capitalism with
socialism.

In a general Historical theory of, in what has now come to be known as historical
materialism, (a) why and how human societies change, and (b) what further changes
are in store for human society, Marx showed that historical change is neither
accidental nor a result of sheer will; that it has laws which are dialectical.
Contradiction is the essence of dialectics. This contradiction is not logical (like
incompatibilities in an argument) but an inner attribute of reality. Social reality is
more discernibly marked by this inner contradiction. (In contradistinction to logical,
let us call contradiction, in Marxian view, as ontological.) This fact of contrary pulls
or oppositions within a reality impels a movement in reality. In other words, society
changes because of its inner contradictory pulls towards evolving stages. Like in
other earlier stages (feudalism for example), so in capitalism, it is its internal
contradictions which propel it towards change into something else. How? (What are
dialectics and their laws and the exact working of this, etc. we have discussed in
another unit on Marxism.)

Every mode of production (sum total of forces and relations of production) gives rise
to two classes, in perpetual opposition to each other. One is the ruling or the
exploiting class and the other is the oppressed or the exploited class. The constant
conflict and opposition between these two classes to get the better of the other is class
struggle. Marx remarks in the very beginning of Communist Manifesto that “The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. He then goes on
to remark:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature:
it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting
up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other:
Bourgeoisie and proletariat. (Manifesto)

So, one pole of the Marxist structure of theory is class struggle.

It was in term of this that Marx had concluded after a very detailed study of the
capitalist mode of production (in Capital, Vol.1) that contradictions within it would
go on intensifying leading to increasingly intense struggle between the capitalists and
the working class. This would give rise to a revolutionary consciousness among the
workers and teach them that only a takeover of power from the minority of capitalists
could create conditions to free the working class from exploitation and lead to the
emancipation of society.

All this sounds neat, and on the face of it, is persuasive too. But it begs the question.
What needs an answer is; why should the contradiction intensity so much that the

54
proletariat will feel compelled to overthrow the bourgeois rule and institute its own in
place of that? There is an elaborate answer for this in Marx, which is what makes
Marx claim that his system is scientific. (But it is not easy to summarise, still an
outline is required to complete the answer.)

This then takes us to the second pole of Marxian analyses. which looks at the future
of class struggle from the view point of the process of accumulation of capital and the
rate of exploitation. These two are internally related to each other. There is first the
appropriation of surplus value (S.V.) from the labourer. The labourer who is given a
wage is paid at the cost of reproducing his labour power, that is, what it costs to buy
the subsistence goods for living. In other words, the labour power of the worker is
bought in the same way as any other commodity, say iron or cloth or whatever else is
needed to produce further goods, i.e. at the cost of its production. So labour power is
like a commodity among other commodities. It has been established that he
reproduces that much of value in 4/5 hours of work, whereas a worker normally
works for 8/10 hours. The extra hours of work that he puts in is the basis of additional
value that he produces which is appropriated by the capitalist. This Marx calls
exploitation, a 'built-in structural and relational feature of capitalist production, which
has nothing to do with cheating or theft. It is legal and necessary for capitalism.

Such a process goes on along with improvements in the technical means of

production. Over a long period of time, the cost of machinery and other fixed capital
known as Constant Capital (C.C.) becomes more and more expensive in relation to
the cost of hiring labour power- referred to as Variable Capital (V.C.). In other words,
in the overall (composition) of capital, there is an increase in the relative importance
of C.C. vis-a-vis V.C. This goes on as the capitalism mode of production progresses.
This Marx shows leads to the centralisation of capital; that is, the ownership of capital
gets into fewer and fewer hands, the big fish eating the small ones, as we popularly
hear. This Marx further shows leads to a fall in the rate of profit. To compensate for
this the capitalist tries to intensify exploitation, which means he tries to increase the
rate of exploitation and this is resisted by the workers. This results in the
impoverishment of the working class in relative as well as absolute terms vis-a-vis the
capitalist. This Marx demonstrates will necessarily lead to greater and greater class
struggles leading eventually to the overthrow of capitalist and the capture of power by
the workers. That is why Marx could say in the Manifesto that "What the bourgeoisie
therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers." The first stage of the
working class rule in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat which
prepares the way for the establishment of socialism which then paves the way for
communism - the stage where everyone works according to capacity and takes
according to need; the world of choice.

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20.5 CRITlQUES OF MARXISM AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

At the end of the unit it is important to look at a two way challenge to Marxism that
emerged at the end of the 19th century. This took the shape, during the course of the
20th century, to evolutionary or "democratic" socialism. (Many other versions like
Guild Socialism and Syndicalism and so on are also there, but we will not deal with
these as these are by now unimportant and can also be easily read in any chapter on
socialism in a standard theory book).

When the workers' revolution did not take place, as Marx had foreseen that it soon
will, there emerged strong reservations about Marxism as a body of doctrines. One
who expressed this in systematic terms was a long time German Marxist Eduard
Bernstein. In a book entitled Evolutionary Socialism, lie elaborated a wholly different
route to and tactics for achieving a socialist society. The other line of development
took shape not because revolution did not come about, but because a large group of
British Socialists had intrinsic reservations about Marxism. They thought that some of
its goals and methods and tactics will result in authoritarian, despotic politics. They
took exceptions to goals like the dictatorship of the proletariat, class warfare, violent
overthrow of capitalism etc. To further an alternative way-of achieving socialism
together with strengthening democracy, leading socialists formed themselves into a
Fabian Society in the middle of the 1880's and this version eventually came to be
known as Fabian Socialism. Important names within this tradition are Sydney and
Beatrice Webb, G.D.H Cole, Bernard Shaw, Laski, Tawney, and many others.
(Remember that some leading Indian nationalist leaders lead by Nehru during the
Freedom Struggle were deeply influenced by this current and which after
independence gave birth to in the middle of 1950's to the idea of "Socialist Pattern of
Society.")

Bernstein argued that the wages of workers are not falling but are, relatively rising
because the rate of profit is not, as Marx argued, declining and therefore, the expected
impoverishments of the workers and the consequent uprising will not come about.
Rather, the workers would get more and more integrated into the capitalist system.
Hence, the need is to work within the capitalist system by accepting its institutional
framework of parliament, elections, open political activity and thereby, striving to
improve the condition of the working class. The class of workers has already become
the majority and by proper organisation, it is now possible to win a majority in
parliament and strive towards socialist ideals. In short, they declared that there is no
need for revolution. (This viewpoint came to be termed, in organised Marxism, as
'revisionism' and 'reformism', a pejorative way of referring to those who abdicated
their responsibility of working for the revolution.)

56
Through the different routes, these two critiques of Marxism came to similar
conclusions, which can be stated as the core tenets of "democratic socialism". Four of
these deserve a mention. First, socialism is not as Marx thought a historical necessity
or inevitable but a moral need for the good of humanity. Humanity can realise its
potential only within a radical egalitarian ethos. Far this to happen, people will have
to be won over for socialism and parliamentary majorities gained by carrying political
education among the masses. It is, theretore, important to realise, secondly, that in a
transition to socialism it is not only the working class, but the entire people who will
play a part; working class as the predominant part of the world will no doubt be
strategic. But middle classes too can be imbued with socialist ideas and can play a
major role .in building public opinion.

'Thirdly, the route to socialism will not be through a violent rupture, as Marx thought,
but would be by a gradual ascent. In this, by degrees, through closely interconnected
legislative measures, the structure of socialist economy can be put in place. Equal
opportunity of effective participation in the running of the state, cooperation rather
than competition, equality to fully develop human personality and similar other
values will become norms of society. And, lastly, the state will remain an institution
of strategic importance. Through a series of nationalization measures, the state will
ensure that the private ownership of the means of production will be socialised; that
is, different forms of state and cooperative ownerships in industry and public services
like health care, education, electricity, railways, etc., will be instituted. Everybody
will thus have equal access and entitlement to goods and services. That is how the
planned economy of public ownership of the means of production together with the
deepening of democracy and freedom of intellect will be the way for the
emancipation of humanity.

Socialism is no simple, monolithic doctrine like Soviet communism was. It represents

a variation upon variation, a multiplicity of viewpoints but, as we have seen, sharing
some core assumptivns and presuppositions. One such presupposition is that every
human being is capable of making an equal contribution to the common good and this
can only be done when human beings exert together for common welfare. Socialism
is a special form of democracy which extends the idea of freedom from civil and
political rights to equal claims on economic wellbeing and social status and this can
only be achieved when human beings cease to be egoistically competitive as under
capitalism. So long as capitalism is there with its exploitation and disregard for
human dignity in favour of efficiency of production and market equilibrium, the
yearning for socialism will be there; the revolt against bourgeois property will not
come to an end.

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20.6 EXERCISES

1) Explain what is socialism.

2) Write an essay on the doctrine of social progress in the context of
individualism and capitalism.
3) Discuss two early trends in socialism.
4) Discuss Karl Marx's Theory of socialism.
5) Examine the critiques of Marxism.
6) Describe the salient features of Democratic Socialism.

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