Tags: Olympics , China , communism , Karl Marx , capitalism , materialism
Turning Historical Materialism on Its Head
The world's eyes are focused on China today as Beijing plays host to the 2008 Summer International Olympics Games. News reports suggest that China has made the most impressive arrangements ever for these Olympics, with an architectural wonder, the “Birds-Nest” Stadium, presenting an awesome backdrop
to the games. It is estimated that China has spent $36 Billion in preparation for this spectacular extravaganza. Most of the construction work was contracted out to private construction companies: several thousand families belonging to the Chinese proletariat class were forcibly evicted from their homes when they came under the hammer of demolition squads, often with little or no compensation. All this was done under the watchful eyes of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China. One wonders what Marx would have thought of such a development.
Karl Marx was a scientific historian. His study of history went beyond mere chronicling of various empires and kingdoms; it encompassed the historical evolution of societies. His study of history of diverse societies led him to the famous theory of historical materialism. Karl Marx found some underlying similarities in how social, economic and political relations develop in societies during various stages of their development. The theory, which he called “the materialist conception of society”, downplayed the importance of individuals and pointed to the inevitability of historical processes. According to him:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”
Historical materialism is the basis on which the communist parties of the world formulated their agendas and platforms. Marx postulated that human beings enter into economic relations to produce goods and services needed for their survival and they do so through a division of labour. However, his concept of the division of labour was different from that of Adam Smith in that he said that some people in the society owned the means of production, which would include the tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, human knowledge and abilities in terms of using these means of production: Who owns these means of production and the relationship between the owners and others in the society depends upon the stage of development of the society. Marx identified the following main stages which a society has to go through:
1. Pre-historic communist society, in which people in a tribe shared means of production as well as what they produced, somewhat like what happened within an extended familiy in India in the rural society;
2. Ancient society, based on master-slave relationship, with the master owning the means of production and slaves doing all the work;
3. Feudal society, in which feudal landlords owned the land and landless peasants worked for the feudal;
4. Capitalist society, which Marx described as a huge progress over the previous systems, but was still unjust and untenable. In this society, “the capitalist class privately owns the means of production, distribution and exchange (e.g. factories, mines, shops and banks) while the working class live by exchanging their socialized labour with the capital class for wages.”; and finally,
5. Communist Society, in which everyone will contribute according to one’s ability and will receive according to one’s needs. In such a society, there will be no need for a state and so, the state shall wither away.
According to Marx, there was a historical inevitability to this process of societal evolution, which could not be tampered with through individual intervention. Each stage of production carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. However, intervention could expedite the destruction of the capitalist stage through a transitionary Socialist Society, where the working class proletariat will form a dictatorship in which the state will own all means of production and distribution.
Marx believed that the industrially developed countries of his time, Germany, England and maybe, France were sufficiently advanced in their stage of capitalism that they were ripe for intervention by workers’ parties. His Communist Manifesto, prepared with his English collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was primarily aimed at the workers’ trade unions in Western Europe.
History, however, took a somewhat different turn, when the Communist Party of Russia became the first workers’ movement to usher in a communist revolution. Marx did not think that capitalism had fully developed in Russia; he wrote in a letter to a Russian:
“If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction - she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.”
Vladimir Lenin did not wait for his country’s capitalism to ripen and led a successful revolution against the czarist Russia to hurl in the first dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Soviet Communist Party. Under the leadership of Lenin and, later, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union showed that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be successfully used to expedite the transformation of a society from a semi-feudal to an industrial stage. Thus, Marxism was transformed into Marxism-Leninism.
If the Bolshevik revolution made the first dent in Marx’s postulates of historical materialism, then Mao Ze-dong made an even more serious dent in it when he proposed to the Second Communist International that he wanted to lead a peasant struggle to bring in a revolution in China. He was opposed in this by the international communist establishment, including the stalwart Indian communist M. N. Roy, who was involved in the working committee of the communist Party of China. According to the established Marxist orthodoxy, China was still a feudal society and it had to go through a capitalist phase before it would be ready for a communist revolution. However, Mao disagreed and started his Long March, which ended in the successful establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Now, the Marxist-Leninist doctrine came to be known as the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrine and served as the blueprint for many a revolutionary struggle in the developing countries of the world.
But if Lenin and Mao showed that the stages towards a proletarian revolution could be leaped, developments in the two countries since their revolutions have also shown the limits of what a peasant-proletariat dictatorship could accomplish. Soviet Russia made spectacular progress in military and scientific achievements but its industrial progress stalled after initial progress, especially in the production of basic and heavy industries. The state planning process, however, proved too rigid and inappropriate to provide adequate signals for the allocation of resources to produce the quantity and quality of goods and services sought by the society. When Gorbachev introduced his glasnost in the 1980s, it was an admission that the old system had broken down and new ideas were needed if the Soviet Union were to compete with its capitalist rivals. The glasnost ultimately led to the break-up of the Soviet Union and degenerated into a chaotic free-for-all capitalism, until it was brought under some discipline by Vladimir Putin.
Developments in China have been even more dramatic. Communist China under the leadership of Mao Ze-dong successfully threw away the yoke of feudalism. The Chinese society was transformed within a generation from a feudal-serf relationship to one of a classless society which leveled rich and poor alike. The process was expedited by the Great Leap Forward, also known as Cultural Revolution, though at a very high cost to the society in terms of loss of human capital and personal hardships. Nevertheless, during this period, China took giant strides towards emancipation of the underclass including women, universal literacy and public health.
The aftermath of the Cultural Revolution brought in a new thinking in the Chinese communist leadership which realized that, while the revolution succeeded socially, the society had to pay a huge economic cost and suffer human miseries, including famines and starvation. This new thinking was articulated by Deng Xiapong, who led the Chinese Communist Party from late 1970s to early 1990s. He introduced what he called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. The socialist market economy and economic reforms introduced by Deng laid the foundation for China becoming a part of the global economy. Since then, China has experienced rapid economic growth of 10 per cent annually with a growth in per capita income of over 8 per cent. In other words, a Chinese on average has been doubling his income every nine years. China is now the world’s third largest economy, after the US and Japan and the second largest in terms of purchasing power parity.
Both Russia and China, especially China, have turned Marx’s theory of historical materialism on its head. Instead of using a mass revolution to expedite a transition from a capitalist to a communist stage, they have used the revolution to move fast from a feudal to an industrial society, bring about a revolutionary change in the class divisions in the society and induced rapid improvement in human development in terms of education and health. These are a pre-requisite to a fast take-off for an economy. In doing so, they have also shown that dictatorship of the proletariat precedes rather than succeeds Capitalism.
The experience of Russia and China has now become an almost universal model for communist parties in other countries: Vietnam is closely following the Chinese model and so, to some extent, is Buddha Bhattacharya in West Bengal although he is working in a completely different political set up. It appears that the last holdouts of Communism, Cuba and North Korea, are also beginning to slowly open up to these new ideas.
In adapting a different path than shown by Karl Marx, Russia and China have also demonstrated the downside of following a capitalistic road map. When China embarked upon a market-based economy, Deng famously said that “for China to progress, some Chinese will become rich faster than others”. This has proven to be an understatement: while poor in China and Russia may not have become poorer, the rich have certainly leaped ahead a lot faster. The China that Mao bequeathed was poor but equal; the China of Hu Jintao is a lot richer but also a lot more unequal, both in terms of individuals as well as in terms of differences between its advanced provinces and the hinterlands. The market economy may be the right mantra for growing the economic pie; it is not a solution to removing poverty or widening gaps between rich and poor, which can ultimately lead to a destabilisation of a society.
