Socialism consists not just in building
a humane society; it consists not just in the maintenance of full employment
(or near full employment together with sufficient unemployment benefits);
it consists not just in the creation of a Welfare State, even one that
takes care of its citizens "from the cradle to the grave"; it
consists not just in the enshrining of the egalitarian ideal. It is of
course all this; but it is also something more. Its concern, as Engels
had pointed out in Anti-Duhring, is with human freedom, with the change
in the role of the people from being objects of history to being its subjects,
for which all the above conditions of society, namely full employment,
Welfare State measures, a reduction in social and economic inequalities,
and the creation of a humane order, are necessary conditions; but they
are, not even in their aggregation, synonymous with the notion of freedom.
And hence they do not exhaust the content of socialism.
The conceptual distinction between a humane society and socialism comes
through clearly if we look at the writings of the most outstanding bourgeois
economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes abhorred
the suffering that unemployment brought to the working class. The objective
of his theoretical endeavour was to end this suffering by clearing the
theoretical ground for the intervention of the (bourgeois) State in demand
management in capitalist economies. He was passionately committed to a
humane society, and believed that the role of economists was to be committed
in this manner. Indeed he saw economists as the "conscience-keepers
of society".
But at the same time Keynes was anti-socialist, not just in the sense
that bourgeois intellectuals usually are, i.e. of seeing in socialism
an apotheosis of the State and hence a denial of individual freedom, but
in a more fundamental sense. He too would have seen in socialism a denial
of individual freedom, but his objection to socialism was more basic,
and expressed in the following words: "How can I adopt a creed which,
preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the
bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the
quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? …
It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe
to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and
horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values." (Essays
in Persuasion, 1931). Keynes' objection in other words was precisely to
the idea of the people becoming the subjects of history. He was full of
humaneness; but he baulked at this idea of freedom that would transform
the people, led by the proletariat, from being objects to being subjects.
Even though welfarism and socialism are conceptually distinct, there is
a dialectical connection between the two, which had, quite naturally,
escaped Keynes, and which constitutes the real Achilles heel of his theory.
It is this dialectics which explains why the bourgeoisie is so implacably
opposed to the Welfare State and why Socialists must always vigorously
fight for a Welfare State within a bourgeois society. And it is because
of this dialectics that the Welfare State cannot become some sort of a
"half-way house" where the bourgeois system can get stabilized
and stay forever: the bourgeoisie will always try to "roll"
it back, and the socialist effort must always be to defend it and to carry
it forward.
The reasons for the bourgeoisie's opposition to the Welfare State, by
which is meant here the entire panoply of measures including State intervention
in demand management to maintain full employment (or near full employment),
social security, free or near-free healthcare and education, and the use
of taxation to restrict inequalities in income and wealth, are several.
First, it militates against the basic ethics of the bourgeois system.
Michael Kalecki had expressed this bourgeois ethics ironically as: "You
shall earn your bread with the sweat of your brow, unless you happen to
have private means!" But his irony was directed against the basic
position, expressed in much bourgeois economic literature, that the distribution
of rewards by the spontaneous working of the capitalist system is "fair",
in the sense that each is rewarded according to his/her contribution,
from which it followed that any interference with this distribution of
rewards was "unfair". Hence, society's accepting the responsibility
for providing a basic minimum to everyone was contrary to the ethics of
the bourgeois system and "unfair".
Secondly, precisely for this reason, the acceptance of welfarism amounted
to "no confidence" in the bourgeois system. If it got generally
accepted that the working of the bourgeois system yielded results that
were inhumane, i.e. caused hardships that had nothing to do with any delinquency
on the part of the victims, then the social legitimacy of the bourgeois
system got ipso facto undermined.
It is the third reason however that is germane here. Welfare State measures
improve the bargaining strength of the proletariat and other segments
of the working people. The maintenance of near-full employment conditions
improves the bargaining strength of the trade unions; the provision of
unemployment assistance likewise stiffens the resistance of the workers.
The "sack" which is the weapon dangled by the "bosses"
over the heads of the workers loses its effectiveness in an economy which
is both close to full employment and has a system of reasonable unemployment
allowances and other forms of social security.
In short, resistance by the workers and other sections of the working
people gets stiffened by the existence of Welfare State measures. The
famous Bengali writer Manik Bandyopadhyay in a short story Chhiniye Khayni
Kyano ("Why Didn't They Snatch and Eat?") asks the question:
why did so many people die on the streets without food in the Bengal famine
of 1943, when within a few yards of their places of death there were restaurants
full of food and houses with plenty of food? Why did they not raid these
well-stocked places and snatch food from them to save their lives? His
answer, that the absence of nourishment itself lowers the will to resist,
has a general validity. The will to resist gets stiffened the better placed
the workers are materially; and Welfare State measures contribute towards
this stiffening.
This stiffening of the will to resist is itself a part of the transition
from being objects to subjects. Hence welfarism and socialism, though
conceptually distinct, are dialectically linked. Socialists must support
Welfare State measures, not just because such measures are humane, not
just because such measures benefit the working people, but above all because
such measures stiffen the will of the people to resist, help the process
of changing them from objects to subjects, and hence contribute to the
process of sharpening of class struggle. And since the bourgeoisie wants
precisely to avoid this, since it wants the people enchained in their
object role, since it wants them weakened, cowed down, divided, atomized,
and transfixed into an empirical routine beyond which they cannot look,
it carries out a continuous struggle for a "rolling back" of
all Welfare State measures. Even when under the pressure of circumstances
it has had to accept in a certain context the institutionalization of
such measures, its effort is always to undo them.
The fact that Keynes did not see it, and hence could not visualize the
collapse of "Keynesian" demand management under pressure from
the bourgeoisie, especially the financial interests, constitutes a weakness
of his social theory; conversely, the fact that this collapse occurred
only underscores the strength of the socialist theory that he so derided.
True, the collapse of Keynesian demand management did not occur in the
same political economy regime within which it had been introduced. It
had been introduced within a context where the nation-State was supreme,
and the area under its jurisdiction cordoned off from free flows of goods
and finance; but it collapsed within a regime where there was globalization
of finance and hence far freer flows of goods and finance. But this changed
context only provided the capacity to capital to "roll back"
Keynesianism; the fact that it wished to do so had to do with the insurmountable
contradictions that the dialectics of welfarism generated within the bourgeois
order.
The foregoing has a relevance to the current Indian context. Under pressure
from the Left during the period of the Left-supported UPA regime, a number
of measures like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme had been
adopted, against strong opposition from the leading exponents of neo-liberalism
within the government. The fact that the same exponents subsequently claimed
credit for these measures is ironical; but let it pass. Not only do they
claim credit for these measures, even while quietly whittling down many
of them (restricting the people's access to food under the guise of a
Right to Food Act is the latest, and most ironical, example of this),
but they actually use these as the fig-leaf to cover the pursuit of blatantly
pro-rich policies. The government stokes the stock market to produce overnight
billionaires; it hands over further largesse to these billionaires in
the name of "development"; but if anyone objects, the response
is: "Don't you know? We have an NREGS in place!" The welfare
measures, even as they are being whittled down, provide an alibi for doling
out largesse to the rich.
And these measures themselves are seen essentially as acts of generosity
on the part of the government. Several of these measures, like the NREGS,
are nominally rights-based, but in practice no different from the earlier
programmes whose effectiveness depended basically upon the discretion
of the implementing government. Hence, even as they provide some succour
to the poor and working people, they confirm the people in their role
as objects. And the entire self-congratulatory discourse that has developed
among intellectuals loyal to the ruling class, especially after the elections
where the Congress Party is supposed to have done well because of programmes
like the NREGS, is one that is laden with this objectification of the
people.
The stiffening of the will to resist among the people, which Welfare State
measures can bring about, has to be made practically effective through
the intervention of the Left, since the Left's agenda precisely is to
overcome the objectification of the people. The left therefore must both
act energetically for the implementation of these Welfare State measures
like the NREGS, preventing all backsliding on them by the bourgeoisie,
and at the same time use the context of the material succour provided
by such schemes to help in strengthening the resistance of the people,
in intensifying class struggle, and also in overcoming the objectification
intrinsically attached to such schemes themselves. The Left fights not
just for welfarism but for socialism, with which welfarism is dialectically
linked, but whose content is qualitatively different.