Swarajya, October 5, 1963
Between ourselves, honest voter, these private monopolies created by the pernicious system of permits, licences, quotas and controls (to be extended now even to foreign capital which voluntarily comes into the private sector) make the Congress Party's rich friends richer, and the poor poorer. It is a close conspiracy; we have a battle between money and liberty, between dharma and atheism, between freedom and communism clothed in Congress robes.
Will the industrial worker, the landless farm-worker, the unemployed mass of our people who are occasionally hired for farm-work but let loose after the work is over, will these and the other poor people of our land benefit by socialism communism or any form of total State-managership of life imposed on the nation?
This is the issue for the poor man on whose ignorance and credulity the political cliques of the Left bank on. He is no doubt easy gudgeon for their propaganda, wherein goal is confused with the means employed. The goal acts as the carrot to get the donkey to accept the slave-driving policy of Statism. It is the business of the honest patriot and the true philanthropist to make the poor understand the truth as to what these demagogues offer to them in place of freedom and orderly progress.
If socialism or communism were just a short-term affair like dividing the spoils of a single raid on property, of course the poor can hope to gain and secure something by joining in the adventure. But it is not a single adventure and the division of spoils of that adventure. Socialism aims at nationalizing all industries and agriculture, and all property and trade. It is a permanent way of life and governance, under which national output is to be organized. It will not end with a day’s loot or a year’s. It is something which will radically change how the nation is to produce all the things we want. Under the socialist or the communist scheme of production men will have to work under the orders of the State or the ruling party bosses, not for producing something for oneself as we now do but for the State. There will be no personal incentive for work. The management will necessarily be a bureaucracy or it will be farmed out to State-controlled corporations or licensed individuals chosen by the State, or the party-bosses. The result will be what we see in officially supervised co-operative farming or State-managed factories. Indeed, it will be worse, because the defects will be nationwide and the supervision reduced in inverse proportion to the total bulk that is to be supervised. Total production will undoubtedly be reduced. Even if tax-raised capital is invested in liberal measure and improvements in production are effected, apart from the burden of taxes thus created and apart from the unemployment that must result from mechanizations involved in the improvements, the total net production will be less—much less—than what could be expected under private enterprise and management.
Are the poor not interested in the total production? Will they not be affected if there is deterioration as explained above? Of course, they are interested and they will greatly suffer by the deterioration in total output. If the total national production is reduced, it is that reduced output that has to be shared in by all the people as the result of such a ‘socialist pattern’ of economy. Not merely do we lose freedom, not only will trade unionism disappear into State-control, and with it the collective bargaining supported by trade unionism, but every worker will find real wages going down both in rural and urban employment. Wages of any kind can go up only with increased production. The State can do many things to make the payment look big, but with the prices going up and the currency’s real value going down, real wages in a socialist regime will go down.
Smaller output will lead to scarcity and higher prices. Let the poor prick up their ears and put straight questions. Will total national production, industrial and agricultural, increase under total or partial public management? Can production go up without the incentives which are not available under socialism? Have not communist countries, including Soviet Russia, been gradually reintroducing the profit system in a round-about way in the name of ‘material incentives’? Will such half-hearted and weak incentives do, in the place of the incentives we know, under which farmers and industrial installations produce with a sense of total ownership? If production is not stepped up, can higher wages or a better standard of life come into being? The question is, not who are the better fellows, but which is the better system. Socialism is not the immediate sharing of the spoils of a robbery, but new conditions of life we and our children must accept permanently—life under the thumb of a party in power, which it will not be possible to replace except by violent revolution.
