A Rational Critique of Marxism and
Communism – XVI
[M.N. Roy was never a mere
critic. As a philosopher – revolutionary he was bold enough to suggest
alternatives and travel through un-trodden paths. He had the intellectual acumen
and moral integrity to suggest alternatives. It is proposed to present ‘The
Principles of Radical Democracy’ (widely
known as ‘The
Twenty-two Theses of Radical Humanism’) below. One thesis
(No. 19) has since been modified. The revised version is the one included here.
The thesis (No.19), originally adopted by the Third All-India Conference of the
Radical Democratic Party held in Bombay from December 26th to 30th
, 1946 is given at the end separately.]
The
Twenty-two Theses of Radical Humanism
Thesis One
Man is the
archetype of society. Co-operative social relationships contribute to develop
individual potentialities. But the development of the individual is the measure
of social progress. Collectivity presupposes the existence of individuals.
Except as the sum total of freedom and well-being, actually enjoyed by
individuals, social liberation and progress are imaginary ideals, which are never
attained. Well-being, if it is actual, is enjoyed by individuals. It is wrong
to ascribe a collective ego to any form of community (viz. nation, class etc.),
as that practice means sacrifice of the individual. Collective well-being is a
function of the well-being of individuals.
Thesis Two
Quest for
freedom and search for truth constitute the basic urge of human progress. The
quest for freedom is the continuation, on a higher level - of intelligence and
emotion - of the biological struggle for existence. The search for truth is a
corollary thereof. Increasing knowledge of nature enables man to be
progressively free from the tyranny of natural phenomena, and physical and
social environments. Truth is the content of knowledge.
Thesis Three
The purpose
of all rational human endeavour, individual as well as collective, is
attainment of freedom, in ever increasing measure. Freedom is progressive
disappearance of all restrictions on the unfolding of the potentialities of
individuals, as human beings, and not as cogs in the wheels of a mechanized
social organism. The position of the individual, therefore, is the measure of
the progressive and liberating significance of any collective effort or social
organization. The success of any collective endeavour is to be measured by the
actual benefit for its constituent units.
Thesis Four
Rising out
of the background of the law-governed physical nature, the human being is
essentially rational. Reason being a biological property, it is not the
antithesis of will. Intelligence and emotion can be reduced to a common
biological denominator. Historical determinism, therefore, does not exclude
freedom of will. As a matter of fact, human will is the most powerful
determining factor. Otherwise, there would be no room for revolutions in a
rationally determined process of history. The rational and scientific concept
of determinism is not to be confused with the teleological or religious
doctrine of predestination.
Thesis Five
The economic
interpretation of history is deduced from a wrong interpretation of
materialism. It implies dualism, whereas materialism is a monistic philosophy.
History is a determined process: but there are more than one causative factors.
Human will is one of them, and it cannot always be referred directly to any
economic incentive.
Thesis Six
Ideation is
a physiological process resulting from the awareness of environment. But once
they are formed, ideas exist by themselves, governed by their own laws. The
dynamics of ideas run parallel to the process of social evolution, the two
influencing each other mutually. But in no particular point of the process of
the integral human evolution, can a direct causal relation be established
between historical events and the movement of ideas (‘ideas’ is here used in
the common philosophical sense of ideology or system of ideas). Cultural
patterns and ethical values are not mere ideological superstructures of
established economic relations. They are also historically determined – by the
logic of the history of ideas.
Thesis Seven
For creating
a new world of freedom, revolution must go beyond an economic reorganization of
society. Freedom does not necessarily follow from the capture of political
power in the name of the oppressed and exploited classes and abolition of
private property in the means of production.
Thesis Eight
Communism or
socialism may conceivably be the means for the attainment of the goal of
freedom. How far it can serve the purpose, must be judged by experience. A
political system and an economic experiment, which subordinate the man of flesh
and blood to an imaginary collective ego, be it the nation or a class, cannot
possibly be the suitable means for the attainment of the goal of freedom. On
the one hand, it is absurd to argue that negation of freedom will lead to
freedom, and, on the other hand, it is not freedom to sacrifice the individual
at the altar of an imaginary collective ego. Any social philosophy or scheme of
social reconstruction, which does not recognize the sovereignty of the
individual, and dismiss the ideal of freedom as an empty abstraction, can have
no more than a very limited progressive and revolutionary significance.
Thesis Nine
The state
being the political organization of society, it’s withering away under
communism is a utopia which has been exploded by experience. Planned economy as
the basis of socialized industries presupposes a powerful political machinery.
Democratic control of that machinery alone can guarantee freedom under the new
order. Planning of production for use is possible on the basis of political
democracy and individual freedom.
Thesis Ten
State ownership and planned economy do not by
themselves end exploitation of labour:
nor do they necessarily lead to an equal distribution of wealth.
Economic democracy is no more possible in the absence of political democracy
than the latter is in the absence of the former.
Thesis Eleven
Dictatorship tends to perpetuate itself. Planned
economy under political dictatorship disregards individual freedom on the pleas
of efficiency, collective effort and social progress. Consequently, a higher
form of democracy in the socialist society, as it is conceived at present,
becomes an impossibility. Dictatorship defeats its professed end.
Thesis Twelve
The defects of formal parliamentary democracy have
also been exposed in experience. They result from the delegation of power. To
make democracy effective, power must always remain vested in the people, and
there must be ways and means for the people to wield the sovereign power
effectively, not periodically, but from day to day. Atomised individual
citizens are powerless for all practical purposes, and most of the time. They
have no means to exercise their sovereignty and to wield a standing control of
the State machinery.
Thesis Thirteen
Liberalism is falsified or parodied under formal
parliamentary democracy. The doctrine of laissez faire only provides the legal
sanction to the exploitation of man by man. The concept of economic man
negativates the liberating doctrine of individualism. The economic man is bound
to be slave or a slave holder. The
vulgar concept must be replaced by the reality of an instinctively rational
being who is moral because he is rational. Morality is an appeal to conscience,
and conscience is the instinctive awareness of, and reaction to, environment.
It is a mechanistic biological function on the level of consciousness.
Therefore, it is rational.
Thesis
Fourteen
The
alternative to parliamentary democracy is not dictatorship; it is organized
democracy, in the place of the formal democracy of powerless atomized
individual citizens. The parliament should be the apex of a pyramidal structure
of the State reared on the base of an organized democracy composed of a
countrywide network of people’s committees. The political organization of
society (the State) will be coincident with the entire society, and
consequently the State will be under a standing democratic control.
Thesis
Fifteen
The function
of a revolutionary and liberating social philosophy is to lay emphasis on the
basic fact of history that man is the maker of his world – man as a thinking
being, and he can be so only as an individual. The brain is a means of
production, and produces the most revolutionary commodity. Revolutions presuppose
iconoclastic ideas. An increasingly large number of men, conscious of their
creative power, motivated by the indomitable will to remake the world, moved by
the adventure of ideas, and fired with the ideal of a free society of free men,
can create the conditions under which democracy will be possible.
Thesis Sixteen
The method and programme of social revolution must be
based on a reassertion of the basic principle of social progress. A social
renaissance can come only through determined and wide-spread endeavour to
educate the people as regards the principles of freedom and rational
co-operative living. The people will be organized into effective democratic
bodies to build up the socio-political foundation of the post-revolutionary
order. Social revolution requires in rapidly increasing number, men of new
renaissance, and a rapidly expanding system of people’s committees: and an
organic co-ordination of both. The programme of revolution will similarly be
based on the principle of freedom, reason, and social harmony. It will mean
elimination of every form of monopoly and vested interest in the regulation of
social life.
Thesis Seventeen
Radical democracy presupposes economic reorganization
of society so as to eliminate the possibility of exploitation of man by man.
Progressive satisfaction of material necessities is the precondition for the
individual members of society unfolding their intellectual and other finer
human potentialities. An economic reorganization, such as will guarantee a
progressively rising standard of living, is the foundation of the radical
democratic state. Economic liberation of the masses is an essential condition
for their advancing towards the goal of freedom.
Thesis Eighteen
The economy of the new social order will be based on production
for use and distribution with reference to human needs. Its political
organization excludes delegation of power, which in practice deprives the
people of effective power; it will be based on the direct participation of the
entire population through the people’s committees. Its culture will be based on
universal dissemination of knowledge and on minimum control and maximum scope
for, and incentive to, scientific and creative activities. The new society,
being founded on reason and science, will necessarily be planned. But it will
be planning with the freedom of the individual as its main purpose. The new
society will be democratic – politically, economically as well as culturally.
Consequently, it will be a democracy which can defend itself.
Thesis Nineteen
The ideal of democracy will be attained through the
collective efforts of spiritually freemen united in the determination of
creating a world of freedom. They will function as the guides, friends and
philosophers of the people rather than as their would-be rulers. Consistently
with the goal of freedom, their political practice will be rational and
therefore ethical. Their effort will be reinforced by the growth of the
people’s will to freedom. Ultimately, the radical democratic state will rise with
the support of enlightened public opinion as well as intelligent action of the
people. Realising that freedom is inconsistent with concentration of power,
radical democrats will aim at the widest diffusion of power.
Thesis Twenty
In the last analysis, education of the citizens is the
condition for such a reorganization of society as will be conducive to common
progress and prosperity without encroaching upon the freedom of the individual.
The people’s committees will be the schools for the political and civic
education of the citizen. The structure and function of the radical democratic
state will enable detached individuals to come to the forefront of public
affairs. Manned with such individuals the State machinery will cease to be the
instrument in the hands of any particular class to coerce others. Only
spiritually free individuals in power can smash all chains of slavery and usher
in freedom for all.
Thesis Twenty-One
Radicalism integrates science into social organization
and reconciles individuality with collective life; it gives to freedom a moral,
intellectual as well as a social content: It offers a comprehensive theory of
social progress in which both the dialectics of economic determinism and
dynamics of ideas find their due recognition; and it deduces from the same a
method and a programme of social revolution in our time.
Thesis Twenty-Two
Radicalism starts from the dictum that “Man is the
measure of everything” (Protagoras) or “Man is the root of mankind” (Marx), and
advocates reconstruction of the world as a commonwealth and fraternity of free
men, by the collective endeavour of spiritually emancipated moral men.
*********************************************
Thesis Nineteen before revision:
The ideal of Radical Democracy
will be attained through the collective efforts of spiritually free men united
in a political party with the determination of creating a world of freedom. The
members of the party will function as the guides, friends and philosophers of
the people rather than their would be rulers. Consistently with the goal of
freedom the political practice of the party will be rational and, therefore,
ethical. The party will grow with the growth of the peoples’ will to freedom,
and come to power with the support of enlightened public opinion, as well as
intelligent action of the people. Realising that freedom is inconsistent with
concentration of power, its aim will be the widest diffusion of power. It’s
success in attaining political power will only be a stage in that process, and,
by the logic of its own existence, the party will utilize political power for
its further diffusion until the State becomes co-terminus with the entire
society.”
(The present selection as the Critique
concludes here with M.N.Roy’s most important positive contribution.)
