DEMOCRACY, MARXISM AND GANDHISM

By PROF. N. RAJAGOPALA RAO

(Kanara College, Kumta)

I

Despite the rich and varied development of social and political theory in the West, from Aristotle to Stalin, the western nations are fast heading towards inescapable disaster. Struck in the morass of incomplete ideology, the West today is rendering itself incapable of effectively resolving the present impasse in political theory and political practice. That the ferment of the western world has not really settled down since the Revolution of 1789 is quite clear. It is a fact that the ideals of the French Revolution, even after a century and a half, remain in the dreamland of human aspiration. From Jacobinism to Stalinism, varieties of political theory and technique were urged to secure liberty and equality: the twin demands of the French Revolution. But neither the liberal thought of Bentham and Mill nor the dialectics of Marx and Engels took the nations of this planet any nearer their ideals than when the Statue of Liberty was vainly worshipped by enraged Parisians. The failure of the western nations to cast aside theories of nationalism, national sovereignty, balance of power and such other related aspects of 19th century political organisation, notwithstanding their colossal achievements in industry and technology, is recognised as the fundamental error in the western State System. The world is divided into two camps: Liberal Democracy and Communism, each opposing the other, each contending for more power, and more world domination. It is also a fact that, however slight, the balance of initiative and advantage, at this moment in 1959, leans towards Communism.

Communism is the natural culmination of western political thought. Marx’s penetrating and searching analysis of social and political development led him to the important conclusion that the history of all existing societies is a history of class struggle. This idea is found suggested in the writings of Aristotle, and more than suggested in the political and economic tracts of the 18th and the early 19th centuries in Europe. In fact, the struggle concept is one of the dominating principles of European Civilisation. In earliest times, Heraclitus, Lycurgus and Plato were all upholders of the idea of social struggle as the inexorable law of social development. What needs to be emphasised is that the concept of class struggle was always accorded an important place in western political analysis, though it was left to Karl Marx, the founder of Scientific Communism, to point to class struggle as the key unlocking the cardinal truth of human history. Marx demonstrated the fallacy of the transcendental unity and supremacy of the State as proclaimed by Rousseau and by the German Idealists. The State, instead of representing the lasting interest of all its citizens, and instead of expressing the General Will, embodying the highest and the only real interest of the entire nation, by conforming to which alone is the nation’s true freedom realized, is, Marx pointed out, animated only by class consciousness, class schism and class antagonism. The unity claimed for the State is a ficticious unity, as the State is not functioning for, and on behalf of, a single society with similarity, if not unity, of interests. The State functions in a society consisting of classes and groups with opposing interests. There is almost nothing of substance that gives unity to the conflicting interests of the clashing strata. The exclusive possession of the means of production by but a few reduces the State to a mere instrument to maintain the property and the privileges of those few. The State, far from being the apogee of common interests, becomes a convenient system of perpetuating class interests, proclaiming all the time what but seems, and is not, the total unity of society. Marx, rejecting the idea of the unity of society or the State, substituted for it the idea of the unity of the interests of each of the classes in society or in the State. Class Consciousness, signifying the innate interests of the class to which the proletariat belongs, is characteristically analogous to the General Will, save that the latter is related to the interests of the nation and the former is related to the interests of a class within the nation. Like the concept of the General Will, Class Consciousness, though it may not necessarily be all the actual, dominant, shifting and detailed strands of consciousness of the proletariat, is that core of consciousness of the working class which reveals itself when, in the struggle for power, it comprehends the common interests of that class. The proletariat must be forced to see its true interests, and be guided to act promptly in order to realise those interests. It is to stir the class consciousness of the proletariat, to fan their discontent, and to organise the working class, that Karl Marx enunciated the doctrine of the leadership of the elite and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The community has to pass through a period of probation, as it were, under proletarian dictatorship which undertakes to sweep away the mental attitudes, the ways of living and thinking, the customs, the traditions and the moods fashioned and sanctified by the Bourgeois State; and this prepares the people for a very significant transformation thereafter when the State ceases to exist, and a classless and Stateless socialistic society is ushered in.

These teachings of Marx, dating back to the period of surely developing contradictions within capitalistic societies, when there was poverty and wealth, squalor and opulence, under-employment and, over-production, added to the seething discontent of the masses, accumulated during long years, the spark needed to blow up traditional values and traditional social order. Even as Rousseau was the force behind the French Revolution, Marx was the force behind the revolutions in Russia and China. If Rousseau’s General Will was the philosophical basis of Italian and German dictatorships, Marx’s Class Consciousness was the philosophic basis of the totalitarianism of Russia and China. The State is naked Power: desired, captured, put to use, whether by capitalists and their political supporters for the benefit of capitalists or by the proletariat and its political supporters for the benefit of the proletariat. The objective is similar. The ruthlessness is similar. There is a group within a magic orbit of power in the political society. There is a group outside it. The two are at war.

In recent years, the flames of Communism are spreading far and wide. The air is foul with its din and smoke. Liberal Democracy failed to meet Communism effectively on the ideological plane or to present a definite programme on the plane of action to secure to its citizens equality of opportunity, equal justice, and equal distribution of wealth. Liberal Democracy failed to evolve an alternative theory of social and political organisation, eschewing the traditional concept of the State which leads to disunity and war. If the truth must be told against a background of accumulating armies and piled atomic weapons, much of the social and political thinking of the West since the Russian Revolution is indifferent, half-hearted, paralysed by fear, pathetically militant or pathetically pacifist, never positive. Liberal Democracy which is at once a competent philosophy and an adequate technique of action has yet to evolve. The West cannot achieve the new synthesis if it accepts class conflict as a fundamental feature of social organisation till such unforeseeable time as the State withers, or if it accepts the fate till then as a mere repository of coercive power vested in one or other conflicting group. The West has not seriously questioned these basic assumptions or their inexorability. Alfred Cobban had this in mind, I believe, when he referred to the decline of political theory in recent decades. The West’s political theory ceased to be either creative or synthetic. Therefore, Communism won many adherents even among the intellectuals in the West.

Communism would have conquered the whole of S. E. Asia if it had not met in India a powerful opposition in Gandhism. Gandhism is a name one could give to the body of principles expounded by Mahatma Gandhi, and interpreted and sought to be practised by his followers in India. Gandhism arrested the spread of Communism in India and in S. E. Asia. Gandhism does not deny the existence today of the basic fact of social conflict on which Marxism built its theory. But it viualises that the conflict is not inevitable, and that it should, and can, be resolved differently. It accepts the ultimate social objectives and the honest basic impulses of Communism. It vetoes violence and dictatorship. In essence, it connotes a fundamental method rather than a whole dogmatic theory. It has helped to wean Indian intellectuals as well as India’s illiterate masses from the lure of international communism It has driven the Administration, with Jawaharlal Nehru at its head, to seek to combine what may compendiously the styled socialistic or communistic ends with what may compendiously be styled Gandhian means. It has helped India, even in the face of Kerala, with a Communist Government in a corner of India, to be comparatively free from the fear of Communism, whereas the United States of America, protected from communistic indoctrination by two oceans, are in the grip of the terror of Communism. America, with its stake in the world, has no doubt a great deal to lose by the spread of Communism. But India encircled, India infected, Gandhiji’s India, India with its faith in spirit and not in matter, has a great deal to lose too by the spread of Communism. The danger at any rate, is nearer, more imminent.

II

There is a striking similarity between Marx and Gandhiji in their diagnosis of the sickness of modern society. The ideal state of society contemplated by them is also almost similar. There the comparison ends. In the very methods they employed to arrive at their conclusions we find a fundamental difference. The Capital was the achievement of a keen academic mind spending long years in London among books. It reveals deep schalorship and a trenchant analysis of history. Hind Swaraj was the achievement of a deeply religious mind, written during a voyage from London to South Africa. It reveals a deep intuitive moral sense and the courage even as a nation to live or die by it.

On many an occasion Gandhiji called himself a socialist. In 1939 he expressed his faith in socialism in these words: “I desire to end Capitalism almost if not quite as much as the most advanced socialists and even communists.” Regarding his ideal of a free and equal society, he remarked: “My ideal is equal distribution. But, so far as I can see, it is not to be realised. I, therefore, work for equitable distribution.” Gandhian socialism owes its inspiration to Gandhiji’s intense passion for social justice, and to his never-failing idealism. Gandhism has the imprint of a highly developed soul receiving light and strength from a world beyond mortal ken. That world insists on truth and non-violence. Karl Marx worked out socialism by applying the dialectical method. Dialectical materialism involves, and leads to, violence. It is a force divorced from the practice of truth: in any event, not wedded to it. Above all is the complete rejection by Gandhism of the class antagonism upheld by Marxism as permeating the whole social fabric. Gandhism substitutes the principles of class harmony and class co-operation for the Marxian postulates of class division and class war. It should not be understood that Gandhism ignores the most obvious factual reality of class distinctions in our society today. Rather, it is profoundly alive to the existing divisions in society, and to the urgency of abolishing both privilege and poverty. It is Gandhiji’s view that, if we recognise the fundamental equality of the capitalist and the worker, we should not aim at the destruction of the former. “It can easily be demonstrated,” he says, that the destruction of the capitalist must mean destruction in the end of the worker, and no human being is so bad as to be beyond redemption, no being so perfect as to warrant his destroying him whom he wrongly considers to be wholly evil.” Consiousness of class distorts the individual personality. Class War regiments society. Proletarian rulers have to be ever vigilant against the return of the Bourgeois. All the organisational patterns based on violence are necessarily authoritarian. Democracy, on the other hand, is compatible only with a non-violent social order. If it is not by struggle, it may be asked, how else can class inequality be removed? Gandhiji’s knowledge of law, and, more, his study of the Bhagawat Geeta, enabled him to formulate the theory that all property is trust, and that its should be so treated by all owners of property. This concept of property is found sprinkled across the mythological and the Arthashasthra literature of ancient India. The Bhagawata exhorts mankind on that basis. “He who collects more than he needs is a thief.” “All land belongs to Gopal.” The theory of Dana supports the view that all property is trust. To the Marxist who views property as exploitation and accumulation of surplus labour value, the trust theory of Gandhiji and Vinobaji appears to be unscientific and opposed to human nature. Herein is disclosed the primary difference between the Gandhian and Marxian ways. To Marx, human nature, unless it is institutionally controlled and governmentally directed, is basically wicked. Marxism arose in an area of the world in which ideas of the Original Sin and of the Fall of Man are the warp and the woof of the tradition of civilization. To Gandhiji, born in the Land of Shankara and Ramanuja, Man is a spark of the Universal Spirit. Man is innately good. If man is not innately good, society is but a confusion of egoes. If man is not innately altruistic, if man is incapable of self-sacrifice, social organisation and social order are inconceivable. How this innate social goodness of man was to be touched and worked upon was the practical political problem set to himself by Gandhiji. He believed and relied upon the innate nobility of the human heart to respond to the call to love fellow human beings and to work for their physical, mental, moral and spiritual, uplift.

III

Even in the modern monolithic State, the individual and the Government are tragically estranged. Under the Liberal Democratic State System no less than under the Communist State System the individual is rendered ineffective and kept helpless. The purges and the secret police in dictatorships are the more malignant manifestations of the same sad system which puts down the individual and leaves him with no satisfactory rights against the State. The liberal theory of the State, though it concedes the primacy of the individual, is, in the context of the rapid development of industry and technology, unable to prevent Authority from brushing aside the refinements of the individual conscience from over-riding individual liberty as of no serious consequence. Even the mere Administrative State means a diminution of individual freedom. Bureaucracy can be worse than tyranny. So important a person as the Prime Minister of India finds a compelling need to rebuke Indian Bureaucracy and its stupid ways again and again. Should the individual candidly feel that the State is pursuing a wrong end, following a wrong policy, attempting things in a wrong manner, how then should he conduct himself? How then should he re-define his relations with the State? The democratic theory attempts to answer these questions by broad and vague generalizations which proclaim but do not satisfactorily formulate or delineate the so-called superior rights of the individual. The dissatisfaction arises in working the democratic technique which stresses that democracy is an inflexible process and that aggrieved individuals should attempt only constitutional methods to change the decisions of the State by capturing the seats of authority rather than by defying and disobeying Authority. This is to say, in brief, that the citizen can attempt a re-statement of his relations with Authority only by the exercise of his vote.

The parliamentary technique of election, debate and discussion is so far the only known way of organising democracy. But no one who is aware of the organisational weaknesses of democracy, the ignorance of the electorate, the lapses of political parties and the mediocrity of legislatures, expects mere democracy to deliver the goods. The wide gulf between profession and practice, between the ideal and the real, leaves mere democracy not just suspect but condemned. Democracy can be just as tyrannical, and just as oppressively disregardful of the individual, as any of its opposite number. Democracy is inevitable. But it needs more than mere democracy to save even the mere political man.

Here it is that, between the State and the Individual, Gandhism assists us to avoid the horns of a dilemma. The individual is of pivotal value. He is the source and the centre of all authority. The State and the Government derive their very existence and their power from him. A State or a Government can hardly exist even for a while without the cooperation of its people, its members, the individuals. Each individual has the right to cooperate with the State as well as not to cooperate, to non-cooperate. Individuals offer their cooperation when the State acts justly and fairly, and advances their good. They withdraw their cooperation when it acts unjustly and unfairly, and hinders their progress. They non-cooperate. When the State goes wrong the State must be reformed by moral pressure, by non-violent non-cooperation. The history of the struggle for Indian freedom, between 1918 and 1947, was the history of the application of the principle of non-violent non-cooperation, of negative response, to the claims of Authority. World History records no similar instance of the withdrawal of cooperation with the State History’s only alternative to acquiescence was armed revolt. It is well stated by Dr. Datta, an eminent interpreter of Gandhism, that the edge of political consciousness should be kept sharp, and that the government of a people should be kept straight, by means of a judicious operation by the people of the twin principles of cooperation and non-cooperation. The exercise of the right of franchise is but once in a fixed number of years. The exercise of the right to cooperate or non-cooperate is from day to day. Judiciousness in the operation of this double-edged weapon comes out of an evolving morality both in the individual and in society, culminating in the true spiritual freedom of both.

There is a measure of truth in the observation of our Vice-President, Dr. Radhakrishnan, that the liberals failed because they were not sufficiently socialistic, and that the communists failed because they were not sufficiently democratic. It must, however, be stated that, even if liberalism admits socialism as part of its philosophy, as it has been compelled to in recent years, it cannot avoid the innate inadequacy of liberalism as a political philosophy. Neo-liberalism of a pragmatic, un-spiritual kind attempted a synthesis of the complex material needs and interests of the community and the equally complex moral needs of the individual. Neo-liberalism, savouring of Green, Hobhouse, Barker and even Laski, failed to inspire men, because, as Shri K. P. Mukherji observes, it did not attempt the fusion of the social and the spiritual elements in man. The religious impulse and content in liberalism have dried up. No political philosophy which does not receive its élan vital from the richer and truer springs of religion in man can aspire to be synthetic, complete and perennial. We need an integrated political philosophy which encompasses the individual as well as the society of Individuals, which does not ignore the individual the moment it creates its own concept of an all-powerful State, which recognises Man as more than Man, which gives full validity to the ultimate reality of Spirit as against the immediate reality of Matter. Politics, so viewed, becomes an aspect of religion–in its sense of a progressively evolving morality. Our acceptance and our application of defined political standards in life is possible, and is justifiable, only on the sure base of a higher metaphysics which supports and keeps alive our moral and our political beliefs as correlated beliefs.

Gandhian socio-political theory is undoubtedly the first great attempt in recent history to synthesise Liberal Democracy and Communism. Gandhism is democratic inasmuch as it advocates conversion instead of coercion even in Satyagraha, emphasising man’s rationalism and man’s altruism, and appealing to the best in him. It is communistic inasmuch as it passionately demands the emergence of an egalitarian, classless society. The hedonistic calculus and the economic determinism of communism are ruled out by faith in the progressive role of the human spirit. Sheer determinism is ruled out by faith in the purposefulness of human effort. In such a scheme of thought, consciousness and being are not related to each other in the way Marx conceived them to be related. A philosophical differentiation between liberalism and communism is impossible within the scheme of occidental values, which covers both liberalism and communism: the refinement of liberalism being a mere rationalisation of the common concept of man’s hatred and greed. Man does not only hater. He also loves his kind. Man is not only greedy. He also loves to share with his kindred. Mutuality, cooperation, and love are as much man’s character as greed and hatred. They are his deeper character, more surely than exploitation and class consciousness.

Underlying the political theory of democracy from the time of John Stuart Mill is the thesis of the contradiction between the Individual and Society. Underlying the communist theory from the time of Karl Marx is the thesis of the antagonism between the Class and the State. Whether it is the Individual vs. the State or the Class vs. the State, the State is different from both, the State is ruthless power, and the State is morally vulnerable. In the one, it is an unavoidable evil. In the other, it is an exploiter. Every act of the State is followed by a mark of doubt and interrogation. The concept of duality as regards the State and the Individual, or as regards the State and the Class, is not conducive either to stability or to progress. It is the kind of approach which encourages strife and the spirit of grab. On the other hand, in a society where the individual either cooperates cheerfully or non-cooperates non-violently the seeming opposition between the individual and society is not there. Social living becomes a thrilling adventure in the effort to discover the true individual in each of us, composed of layers of consciouseness which are each in accord with the other, and with all of which the coming social order is in complete accord. There can then be no opposition between true individual interest and social restraint. In a society increasingly based on truth, non-violence and love, the striking of the mean between individual freedom and social restraint does not present any serious difficulty. In fact, each individual can say, “I am Society, I am the State.” Each individual can say, “I shall mould Society. I shall mould the State. I shall make them what I am or what I desire, if need be, even by non-violent non-cooperation.” In the language of Gandhism, “Individual freedom can have the fullest play only under a regime of unadulterated ahimsa.” Murder makes the Bren Gun or the Atom Bomb our Lord and our Ruler, and Hitlers and Stalins, not to mention minor local despots, will continue to shame the surface of the globe.

Today, the real issue in the world is not, as many think, between Communism and Liberal Democracy. The issue, on which hangs the fate of this planet, is between morality and expediency in political life, between religion and irreligion. The world’s despair must continue unabated till morality and politics achieve unity in action. Gandhiji lived and died for such unity in political action. His great legacy to mankind is the only political philosophy which can save the world from the evils of International Communism. It is also the only political philosophy which can achieve what International Communism seeks in the ultimate to achieve. Mere democracy, without more, is an outmoded political concept.

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