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| Sunday, 31 October 2004 |
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Holding aloft the red banner Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
The behemoth of globalisation might be bestriding the world and President Bush might be inviting a possible Armageddon but Communism is alive if not exactly kicking in some quarters at least. The dirges to the death of Socialism and Communism and the paeans of praise at the triumph of liberal democracy might after all have been premature. Two events recently went some way towards confirming this truth. One was the spirited attack on American foreign and domestic policy launched by Bill Van Auken, an American socialist at a press conference in Colombo and the other the more diplomatic but no less critical comments by the Cuban Ambassador in Colombo on America's economic blockade of her country. Comrade Van Auken was introduced as the presidential candidate of the American Socialist Equality Party at next month's election which prompted the natural question of why he was not campaigning back home. He replied that he had no illusions of occupying the White House but wished to make use of his candidature as a platform for mobilising world opinion against the policies of the Bush administration particularly vis-a-vis Iraq. He had already visited Britain and would be visiting several other countries, he said. Van Auken's presence would have evoked among Marxists of an older age nostalgic memories of American Marxism for although now polarised between the Republicans and the Democrats there was a time when there was a vigorous socialist tradition in this bastion of capitalism. It is true however that American socialism did not exert much of an influence on Sri Lanka's Left movement the local firebrands looking for inspiration to Britain, the USSR, China and even Yugoslavia. This is something of an irony because in America too it was the Trotskyist school which was dominant in the socialist movement just as in Sri Lanka where the parliamentary strength of the LSSP made it at one time the most powerful Trotskyist party in the world. However except for Philip Gunawardena who learnt his Marxism at the feet of Scott Nearing at Wisconsin University no major Sri Lankan socialist leader has emerged from the womb of American socialism. Cruel joke Chief among the protagonists and propagandists of American Trotskyism were the intellectuals grouped round the 'Partisan Review' which sprang from New York the epicentre of American intellectual life. Political intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills and Dwight Macdonald, literary critics such as Lionel Trilling, imaginative writers such as Mary Macarthy and James T. Farrell exerted a powerful influence during this period when political ideas mattered and were taken seriously unlike today when everything is treated as relative and reduced to its lowest common denominator. However there was a cruel joke in store for American Trotskyism. The beginning of the Cold War ensured that their implacable hatred of Stalinism (certainly not unjustified in the light of Stalin's suppression of all opposition in the Soviet Union) would arraign America's Trotskyists on the side of movements such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom which were later found to be CIA fronts. In later years it created horror in respected British and American intellectual circles when it was discovered that the magazine 'Encounter' for long a fount of radical and avantgarde respectability, had actually being founded with CIA money. If the Cold War and the hostility between the Trotskyists and the Stalinists put paid to any hope of a socialist advancement in the USA there have been other brief flickers of hope. In the 1960's large numbers of university students mobilised themselves against American foreign policy in the face of their country's relentlessly fought war against the peasants of Vietnam. Not merely the campuses of the USA but also those of France. Germany and Britain virtually went up in flames. It was even thought for a brief bright moment that the French students would be able to bring their indomitable President de Gaulle to his knees. But the student movement failed to get the support of the working classes who were largely grouped round their traditional parties and it was easy for the State to move in with its juggernaut. The rest is recent if rather melancholic history. President Gorbachev's restructuring of the Soviet Union which emphasised greater political openness at the expense of real economic reforms ensured the collapse of the Soviet state and the consequent dissolution of the Warsaw bloc. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down but looking at the proliferation of the post-Soviet republics and the burgeoning nationalism which propels them one can be pardoned for wondering whether the effort was worth the candle. Has there been real economic advancement in the countries which once belonged to the Soviet bloc or only an illusion of bourgeois democratic freedom? Facade of affluence On the other hand as Bill Van Auken pointed out the facade of capitalist affluence in the USA only conceals a bleeding social fabric. Neo-capitalist economic policies which seek to disengage the state from social sectors such as health, education and transport and the all-purpose panacea of privatisation can well increase the immiseration of the working class and the poor in countries such as Sri Lanka. Conversely the same neo-capitalist policies pursued by Third World regimes at the behest of the wisemen of the World Bank and the IMF only serve to widen the gap between the rich and the poor in these countries and enthrone a vulgar new parvenu class who have made a quick buck through questionable business practices. Soviet Union The removal of the Soviet Union from the international landscape has ensured on the other hand the unchallenged hegemony of the United States. Britain still nursing the wounds caused by the loss of Empire has been reduced to play an even more craven role as underling to the US ironically enough under a Labour Government. Even as American braggadocio grows apace the space for political debate shrinks in US politics. The televised debates between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry almost appear as litmus tests of who possesses the greater sex appeal. There is a great paucity of ideas not merely in US politics but all over the political world. In this bleak landscape Cuba alone stands out as a beacon and a bastion encircled though it is by American hostility and undergoing great privation as the result of the American economic blockade but pluckily fighting back as even the ranks of Tuscany have had to concede. But can any other country take the Cuban road? China for example has opted to experiment with capitalism in its own enigmatically characteristic way although keeping its political system as tightly closed as ever. In a world of overarching capitalism there is little prospect of a socialist revolution although the Bill Van Aukens of this world will bravely keep the red banner flying. The historical accident, of course, was that the first Communist revolution occurred not in an advanced industrialised country as Marx had expected but in a backward feudal social order such as Russia. Likewise in China. On the other hand in capitalist countries such as Germany, Britain and the US the economy far from contracting bred a new class of workers who could aspire for a middle-class life-style, a concept known as embourgeoisement by later Marxists which led the late C. Wright Mills to write his classic work 'Whitecollar Society.' As the prospect of the workers overthrowing the capitalist system receded the youth sought to take their place but these dreams too were dissipated in the retreat of 1968. The result is that capitalism remains very much a reality although in most liberal western democracies the harsher edges of capitalism are softened by social welfare measures. But apparently countries such as Sri Lanka are not permitted any such luxuries. We have to swallow the bitter pill of privatisation or perish in the name of the great god of globalisation. Not for us Mr. Blair's Third Way. But does that mean that the world has to be handed over on a golden platter to Uncle Sam and that Mr. Francis Fukuyama is correct when he talks of the End of History. Methinks not. There is still prospects for the revival of a genuine social democratic movement. |
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