Bamboozled by the twists and turns of politics which at one moment lift them up with sizable number of seats in Parliament and in the very next sees them plummet down to just one and a shrinking base,the left had held numerous dialogue sessions with friendly observers to see with their eyes the faults and failures that might have led to the crash.
What has happened then to their famed access to the master key to success,the Dialectic?They used to be confident that in spite of setbacks they can always bounce back to score unforeseen triumph.In stead it looks that they themselves are on the verge of getting swept out of the stage of world history.
So what has happened?Back in the 1960s there were Soviet theoreticians like Eugene Varga who every now and then used to claim the end of world capitalism was close at hand.The ringing voice began to sound less and less resounding and by eighties of the twentieth century had begun to sound like a whisper.Thanks to my known differences with local CPI(M) at that time,I used to receive unsolicited the CIA sponsored journal PROBLEMS OF COMMUNISM.Though I ignored them at first after some time curiosity forced me to take a cursory look.To my honest surprise I found the articles scholarly,factually rich and nuanced and rigorous.They combed the available archival and current documentary evidence thoroughly for any sign of cracks even if hairline and buckling under pressure.
I found nothing like that on the other side of the fence.The available Soviet literature on the economy and politics of the West offered plenty of factual detail,but all meant to fit into and uphold a pre-conceived scheme of inevitable decline in days ahead.
The common people were also fed on such childish verbiage until they were shocked by lifting of travel restrictions and opportunity to visit the West and see with their own eyes signs of unimaginable prosperity and generally high living standards.
A British veterinary surgeon who had no political axe to grind was put in charge of several scores of Yorkshire pigs transported to Soviet Russia on board a cargo ship.When the ship docked at the port of its destination he decided to have a look around though he had no visa.Strolling along he was pleasantly surprised to find no trace of sullen people with slave-like demeanor eking out life in squalor,though very few imposing buildings or soaring highways or posh cars around.He ventured into a middle school.and luckily found himself on the corridor in front of a class where English lessons were being taught.He befriended the teachers who were delighted to find a foreigner in their midst.Soon they entered into a stormy but friendly debate on the condition of the working class in Britain.While the teachers insisted they must be half-starved and living in slums the bewildered visitor reported that though a native he had never seen such scenes in his country.At that point a grim-faces policeman turned up.and politely and firmly escorted him back to the ship.
Thus though in the West the dedicated scholars had better knowledge of the real conditions of Soviet Russia while ordinary people were fed staple propaganda on herds of poorly fed rabble but brutally disciplined by red czars,in the West contrary to the mythical fables in the minds of ordinary folks,scholars had policy-makers had access to much more reliable knowledge accumulated by patient research. (I don’t mean here the absurd fantasies of well-produced pseudo-scholarly volumes authored by experts in phony erudition and duly acclaimed in New York Times and Washington Post.)
I should like to add to such puzzles the weird decision of Chinese party chiefs during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ to black out the news of man’s first landing on the moon.After all it had been a remarkable human achievement, in the same league as Gagarin’s first human incursion into space. Such had been the antics that passed as standard exercise in materialist dialectic.Obviously this is not only idiotic but also dangerous as it elided a sound understanding of reality.
Can one attribute such an attitude to the founding fathers of Marxism,as bourgeois propagandists bawl out routinely in seminars and conferences? Hardly.For what every serious bourgeois scholar has conceded is the impenetrable web of rich complex and rigorously checked data in the pages of the magnum opus,CAPITAL.The general argument is solidly based on such data and its organic parts are in the form of independently composed and cross-checked branches of the same.All exceptions are conceded and every counter-argument taken care of.An intellectual accomplishment ranking with the likes of Einstein’s work on Relativity and Aristotle’s works as a whole.
The focus of the above account should not be missed.Far be it from my intention and competence to belittle the contribution of Indian Marxist scholars in different fields.What is on issue here is the failure or reluctance of Marxist parties to put knowledge of dialectics to good use. We need to travel back in time to understand the importance of dialectics in the arsenal of reason.How else but by tracing its origins and history.
The introduction of formal logic had been one of the greatest creative accomplishments in world history.Man learnt to use his mind as an instrument of knowledge by organizing the symbols he had made up in abstraction from real life.But such words tended to proliferate and transform spontaneously giving rise to myths and fables.Philosophers like Socrates insisted on holding them down to one meaning throughout a discourse and Aristotle used such rigorously bound words to proceed from one proposition to another in such a way as to expand,restrict or clarify their meaning; thus increasing available stock of knowledge under the light shed by reason.
That helped the systematic pursuit of exact science including Mathematics.In an equation for example X always means one thing and one thing alone.This enabled man not only to grasp a proposition clearly but also to arrive at a different more complex and richer proposition by using different conventional procedures. The trouble however was that while formal logic enabled Aristotle and his followers over generations to organize facts observed and searched out into systematic forms like sciences of biology,botany, medicine, astronomy and so on.
Its deficiency came to light when after the decline of the European middle ages for example it was found by people like Francis Bacon that unless the basic concepts manipulated by formal logic were underpinned by investigation and knowledge of the real,material world,formal logic alone could lead man astray into equatorial jungles of fantasy.He proposed his famous ‘four idols’ as antidotes or filters that purified discourse of .
The triumphant progress of sciences since the Enlightenment when enhancement of useful and fertile human knowledge came to be pursued according to plan is too well-known to bear repetition here.But during the peak of this period further clarification and refinement of the nature of human knowledge was achieved by the tremendous intellectual efforts of one man,Immanuel Kant.He laid out in clear perspective the area of what can be known,however vast its extent by science,and what apparently lay beyond its reach.For ever and ever.Such clarity made a profound impression on generations afterwards. Wittgenstein for instance always left room for a realm of knowledge beyond language and reason. GWF Hegel,however, remained unconvinced.He was phenomenally erudite for his time and inclined against any postulate beyond the grasp and scrutiny of reason.The fault,he thought,lay in formal logic itself.
While Kant’s model of human acquisition of knowledge figures the human mind standing outside and apart from the surrounding world(The learned word for the science of studying this process is ‘epistemology’),a successor, GWF Hegel questioned this very abstraction as a root cause of divergence from real knowledge.
The mind does not stand outside the world but is an integral part of the world,and it also interacts with the surrounding world which in turn actively reacts upon the mind.Secondly it is a mistake to think or conceive of the things under observation as static and stable.They are not.In the process of interaction they undergo constant change.For the world is not an assemblage of things.It is an all-embracing process.A thing changes so much during the interaction that eventually it evolves and transforms into another.The given way in which change takes place is through contradiction inherent to the process of being.Dialectic is the learned word for it.
Every entity,even if purely mental, is a product of two components in contradiction that generates the tension that is its life.As the contradiction grows over time the dynamic equilibrium that is its life or vitality gives way to first a sharp conflict, and then it develops into a different and more developed, richer but different entity.The usual formula is THESIS->ANTITHESIS->SYNTHESIS.All significant development that promotes growth is cast in this mode of becoming.It must be kept in mind however that such a process is also taking place in the mind of the observer or scholar watching the change.It is neither mind-free,nor only mental.
There are three precautions and warnings that must be heeded in the use of this general method of acquiring knowledge of the real world.
First the contradiction is not complete negation.Both components——whether of an idea,or of a concrete entity or a social system—indissolubly belong together,and thus are vital parts of one dynamic being that is also a process.
Secondly,the sublimation of both parts in the new-born synthesis is not elimination of one by the other.It has got to be a new growth,not a mechanical combination of both but one in which qualities of both contribute to a new and richer,more developed organic substance.
Thirdly the climax of the inner tension has an inherently violent character,though it need not necessarily be lethal.The process at its peak shakes up all the constituent organs of both components.In the matter of social order it is revolution, though not necessarily wild and sanguinary.When revolution is aborted or short-changed the temporary aberration is fascism.
There is thus no guarantee that a revolutionary situation will bring about progress.Unless properly grasped and worked upon from within its positive potentiality might collapse.Thus Marx and Engels conceive also of the possibility of ‘mutual ruin’ for both contending parts e.g.classes. Looking at the past history of the use of dialectic to grasp and actuate development and revolution we may watch with dismay and cold horror the numbers of times it boomeranged.
Mao tse-Tung( Pronounced in the typical Indian way it reportedly sounds closer phonetically to the Chinese word than Mao ze-Dong) had been driven by his passion for changing the stagnant and moribund Chinese society to a pulsating modern socialist one. So he seems to have hit upon the magic formula for uninterrupted growth through a universal and unqualified application of the Dialectic.Whereas his fundamental and most prominent contribution had been his discovery of the basic contradiction of semifeudal,semicolonial China of which he had a long,intimate and profound knowledge,his later ventures into trabsforming China in a matter of a few decades into a vibrant socialist China were more hazardous,less firmly based on study of facts and more given to speculative forays.The results had been economic disasters and social chaos.The use of school-children as vanguards of revolution,periodic use of the army to restore order after cycles of chaos and the general confusion in the minds of the masses as to the correct way forward were far less scientific than his admirers would admit.But Teng shiao-Ping’s eventual triumph and the spiraling of the economy and politics to state capitalism had been the inevitable if unenviable consequence of such playing with dialectic.
Consider the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution when high-school students laid down that Shakespeare was bourgeois junk and fine art works of the past mirrors of feudal decadence.All the fine heritage of Chinese civilisation would have been destroyed had not curators and other mature connoisseurs risked their lives to protect them.
The mistake lay in the short-cut in dialectics,the neglect of the fact that class struggle does not,cannot mean total annihilation of everything the ruling-class in its heyday had created.They remain part of our rich human heritage which broaden and refine our perception and understanding of our life in the world.This was far better understood by Lenin who studied dialectics anew in the LOGIC by Hegel after the October revolution.Hence firmly held that the contributions of bourgeois society were not to be thrown into the scrap-heap,but ‘critically assimilated’,which one cannot do with a blunt denial of its worth.
We find similar mishaps galore in the history of socialism.Though Stalin must be credited with the creation of some kind of socialism that brought unquestionable rise in standard of living, leisure benefits, education and culture to vast numbers of working people(until the horrors of the devastating Nazi onslaught and America’s flat refusal to lend scarce capital for mammoth reconstruction, pulled Soviet Russian masses down once again to a level quite below that of West Germany and France prospering under the Marshall Plan),the costs in terms of restrictions on human freedom and creativity produced a crude and crippled socialism.
Stalin did not seem to have realized that however potent, dialectic is no magic spell to ensure irreversible progress.The constraints of a capitalist economy continued to work in a veiled manner holding back desired and expected progress.Working people became less than masters and more like cogs in a vast bureaucratic machine.And it was high treason to say it was so.And in America despite a succession of crises capitalism seems to have patented a solution by enunciation of a doctrine of renewal through technological innovation and a crass acceptance of severe human costs.
The signally unscientific character of the use of dialectic in building a system leaning more on the will of a single ruler and the mechanical discipline of a vast army of bureaucrats in party and administration in the end created an economy and state running on coercion and violence. Stalin justified it by ruling that the more society progresses towards socialism the more vicious, ferocious and violent the class-struggle grows.This provided the fig-leaf for continuing coercion and violence.
Khrushchev eased things a bit and people were able to breathe a little freely,but a product of the same system he could not re-orientate or reform it.The successors who tried later simply reversed course and marched back towards capitalism.And the socialist shell burst asunder under pressure from explosive capitalist forces.
Stalin’s deviation from science was seen in his patronage of Lysenko who fuelled his fantasies of miraculous rise in agricultural production by promoting use of the soil like a petri-dish of a lab,oblivious of its rich organic content produced by complex bio-chemical processes, and the genetic heritage of plants which had a part to play.This kind of support to environmentally engineering wholesome yet fabulous growth had ultimately led to the banishment of the foremost geneticist of Soviet Russia Vavilov,to Siberia and a disastrous drop in yield.The poor man had written a small popular book extolling the achievements of Soviet science on the eve of his deportation to a camp.
Dialectic thus became a substitute for sustained hard study and led to dependence on facile magical formulae.Marx would never have supported such pedantic exercises in place of real and sustained rigorous study of facts fully aware of danger from bias.
Coda:
The Indian Communists have worked extremely hard,made monumental sacrifices,in an unequaled devotion to ideals and principles.But since the leadership itself did not engage itself in the kind of study mentioned above but delegated it to scholars and intellectuals, busying themselves in strenuous organizational work, a rich dialectical understanding of their life’s work would seem to have eluded them.The scholarly work of party intellectuals however worthwhile came to them as dead facts which could not animate their knowledge and generate insights.In course of time they gave up thinking on their own and began leaning too heavily on the lead of either the Soviet or the Chinese party.If I may be allowed to speak my mind,perhaps with colossal impudence,they have been adrift.
Time today to parties to shake their heads of lethargy and diffidence,apply themselves to studying the given realities of Indian economy,society and politics,make this knowledge their own through practice and discussion and revitalize the struggle for true liberation of Indian masses.People are astir everywhere.But where are the Communists?
Addendum:
It might seem that I only propose serious academic research as a hallmark of dialectic.By no means.The basic concepts of the argument have to be dialectical.For instance a society is to be thought of as an entity unified and divided by classes in greater or lesser conflict.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
