Buzzwords are inalienable ingredients of political discourse. Phrases direct and are then redefined in the process of mass mobilization. Once upon a time, leaders of Nepali Congress held aloft ideals of democratic socialism. Unlike in Marxism, where socialism is merely a rung on the ladder to utopia, the adjective was central to the principles of the party. American sociologist Daniel Bell captured essence of the concept in his famous book End of Ideology (1960) and pointed out that a near consensus had rendered intellectual contestations superfluous. He listed issues of concurrence: “The acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.”
Reaganomis of the 1980s challenged fundamental premises of welfare state ideal and mixed economy model. The Bell prognosis was finally buried under the avalanche of neo-conservatism in the 1990s when Francis Fukuyama declared that history had ended with the victory of economics over politics. Expatriate political entrepreneurs that parachuted into Kathmandu after the success of People’s Movement in 1990 brought along ideological baggage of free-market fundamentalism into Nepal.
For a while, NC stalwarts continued to chant the mantra of democratic socialism even when they pursued policies of libertarianism, privatization and globalization with the fervour of neo-converts. The duplicity has since been dumped for good. These days, pursuit of prosperity is the rallying cry of the once socialist party that continues, however, to hold on to the membership of Socialist International.
Other than NC, the two parties of the Big Three League in the Constituent Assembly swear by the Prophet of Communism. Based upon ‘objective analyses’ of history of capitalism and future of dialectical materialism, Karl Marx expounded principles of social and political change that would intensify class struggle, pave the way for dictatorship of the proletariat and final emergence of a classless society. Ideas were central to the formulations of Marx and Engels.
Lenin transformed Marxism into a radical creed where only the revolutionary leadership of the vanguard party knew what was good for the working class. Leninism came to be defined by Bolshevik justice administered to ‘class enemies’. Conceptual cannibalism has been intrinsic to communism. Stalin fused ideologies of Marx and ardour of Lenin to create a centralised state under the complete control of the supreme leader and called his canon ‘Marxism-Leninism’. Founding principles of Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) are inherent to its name. Activities of CPN-UML cadres in Youth Association of Nepal (YAN) or shenanigans of its various front organisations in businesses and trade unions draw their inspiration from Stalinism.
In early years after restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990, UML tried to live by tenets of Marxism-Leninism but dumped them with alacrity once party leadership found that free-market fundamentalism was more lucrative for the vanguard, whole-timers and party sympathisers. Despite adopting Marxist rhetoric and Stalinist strong-arm tactics whenever it suits them, neo-tsars of Balkhu Palace complex are fully committed to politics of prosperity.
It has become sacrilegious to question market supremacy. Understanding its rise may help bring the debate back to relevance of democratic socialism.
Coming from a peasant background, Mao Tse Tung had found the lure of vengeful violence irresistible. He declared menacingly that political power grew out of the barrel of a gun. Ruthless purge of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and strident anti-intellectualism helped Mao establish himself as the last Great Emperor of the Middle Kingdom.
The UCPN (Maoist) began an armed insurrection in the mid-nineties in the name of the Great Helmsman. Once the Headquarter, which is a person rather than a place in Maoist ideology, discovered that political power actually gushed out of the ballot box, it dumped Mao and embraced Deng. Dengism is now the official policy of the party that still retains the name but is keener on foreign investment and free trade than national industries and sufficiency economy.
Political fronts of former Panchas, Madhesh-based parties and minor factions of Marxist, Leninist and Maoist apparatchiks differ on almost all contentious issues such as forms of governance, bases of federalism or place of religion in politics but are united in belief that unregulated economy is the way of the future. It appears that there is national consensus over inescapability of the prosperity paradigm. It has become sacrilegious to question the consensus over inviolability of market supremacy. An attempt to understand its rise, however, may help bring the debate back to the relevance of democratic socialism.
FUNDAMENTAL FAITHS
Bewildered by anger, belligerence and coarseness of Thatcherism in the early eighties, a European cartoonist depicted a student standing aside the road asking every passer-by: “Can you lend me a paradigm?” As lenders of last resort, Americans responded to the request of the Old World with the idea of politics of prosperity. After the Thatcher-Reagan Era, the ideology came to be known as the Washington Consensus.
Operational elements of Washington Consensus are straightforward. Developing countries desirous of credits from international lending agencies must cut fiscal deficit, reduce taxes, remove subsidies, float interest rates, eliminate import tariff, privatise state enterprises, deregulate market, actively seek foreign investment and ensure property rights. It is understood that all such measures ultimately help advance interests of the global capital that has no nationality but mostly pays its taxes to governments of the First World. Philosophical moorings of the prosperity paradigm are somewhat more complex.
The ‘politics of prosperity’ phrase was born in the aftermath of First World War when three consecutive American presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover—chose to assist businesses have a free run of the economy. Its roots lay in the Progressive Era of US politics that had begun in the 1890s and had galvanised the middleclass into promoting prohibition, curbing corruption and modernising economy. Three ideas that emerged during three decades of unprecedented growth in the US continue to be chased by countries looking for miraculous solutions to their economic problems.
Fordism emphasised intensification of division of labour, increased mechanization and economy of scale in manufacturing industries. It helped Henry Ford make a fortune but he also raised wages to a level where his labour would be able to afford his cars. Ford believed in welfare capitalism. Taylorism was supposedly a ‘Scientific Management’ technique based primarily on time-and-motion studies and performance-based wage system. Like his Soviet admirer Lenin and Stalin, Frederick Taylor considered workers too stupid to comprehend complex processes and believed in making them mere cogs in giant manufacturing and servicing machines. Like Ford, Taylor too believed that poor sods manning conveyor belts deserved to be paid adequately.
Taken together, Fordism and and Taylorism nurtured what came to be called conspicuous consumption: When there was no higher goals to pursue, buying expensive products and services became the only way of announcing one’s arrival in life. Thorsten Veblen had coined the phrase to depict the obsession of the leisure class, but consumption fetishism consumed the working class as well. With enormous resources at its command and relative seclusion from torments of the rest of the world, the US had become strong enough by the Second World War to intervene simultaneously and decisively in European and Pacific theatres of conflict. The time was ripe for a new ideology.
In the 1950s, a Russian émigré propounded a theory that came to be called variously as the Manifesto for Psychopaths, the Marxism of the Rightwing and the Creed of Cruelty. Ayn Rand named her ideology Objectivism, perhaps to spite Marxist notion of objectivity, but she argued for the supremacy of selfishness in all human endeavours. For protagonists of her fanciful tales in Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, greed was good, altruism evil, empathy a weakness, and compassion irrational while state was an agent of destruction. The paradigm of prosperity was now complete, as Objectivism became a scientific worldview underlying theories and methodologies of building a market-led society.
Milton Friedman was one of Rand’s cronies who ridiculed the doctrine of social responsibility saying that it was subversive to the capitalist system. Another acolyte was Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the US from 1987 to 2006, who believed that the ‘greed’ of the businessperson was an unexcelled protector of the consumer and that unregulated capitalism was a ‘superlatively moral system’. Post-1990 Nepali politicos have adopted these values with unsettling consequences.
FURY OF INFERIORITY
It is said that if data were tortured long enough, it would admit almost anything and support the position of whichever ideology is in power. Spinmeisters in the service of capitalist class have created interesting myths about reduction in poverty in the country. Few care to point out the cost that the society has paid for whatever little gains that were obtained from inflow of remittances. If at all poverty has come down, free-market fundamentalism had very little to do with it. In relative terms, fewer people in less time have made more money from market economy over last two decades than anytime in the history of Nepal since the Lucknow Loot in 1857 and the tributes that fleeing nobility of Indian plains paid to the Gorkhali court for political asylum in its aftermath. The result has been predictable: Chronic corruption, persistent instability, pervasive lawlessness, and rampant violence.
Supporters of NC fell for the fatal charm of militarism when they had no political principle left in their hands to face the Maoist challenge. Socialists of yore withdrew into religiosity or chose to stay aloof. Defeatism became the hallmark of NC leaders. The UML turned into a bureaucratic generator running a giant machine of interconnected networks of foreign-funded NGOs, transport syndicates, commercial cartels, land mafia, and various other interest groups in hydropower, forestry and foreign employment rackets that thrived with the help of its infiltrators in administration and strong-arm tactics of front organisations in student, youth and trade union politics. Maoists became, well, Maoists: Destroying everything with little or no idea about how the society and polity of a country precariously placed between two biggest countries of the world was to be rebuilt.
Reinvention of political economy of democratic socialism may not offer a complete answer, but it deserves to be tried simply because no viable alternative appears on the horizon.
cklal@hotmail.com
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