Swarajya, August 1, 1964
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.
The verbal jugglery of prefixing to socialism a deceptive adjective and calling it ‘democratic socialism’ can make no difference to the substance of the matter. Whether the total control of the soulless State over the thinking and feeling individual is in the net result profitable to the nation is the issue, even ignoring the question of freedom and happiness. State-management does not make for efficiency. It does not bring into being any inspiration. It furnishes no incentive. It does not therefore make for any national progress.
If the individual is concerned with profit, he is also concerned with what brings in such profit, viz., more attention to be bestowed and more efficiency, and fresher initiative to the put into the business, all which contribute to greater production. Whether it is ‘democratic’ or ‘communist’ the resulting product, viz., State-control, is the same. And it is good or bad according to its effect on the quantum and quality of production. It is good or bad according as it enlarges or curtails the sense of participation, and happiness, among those who toil for the result.
The jugglery of words in democratic socialism is political strategy. It connotes no venation in the policy adopted to bring about production. It remains what it was: Statism. If what is really aimed at is a fair mixture of private enterprise and State-capitalism, it is a different matter. There is no meaning in calling the mixture democratic-Socialism.
The question then would be how much of one and how much of the other is put in and which way the selection is made and apportioned.
No one denies the need for some State enterprises, or for some regulated direction of the national effort. What is objected to is the obsessions caused by the doctrinaire approach, which have been the curse of this past decade. No one denies the need for greater and swifter production, which is the precedent condition for fuller employment. Whether this quicker and greater production can be achieved by a well-directed effort at facilitating the expansion of individual initiative and private management, or by employing the bureaucracy working under State or Central Governments, is the question. Punjab and Madras give the answers of experience. Private initiative and management produce abundantly and well. Bureaucratic enterprise is snail-pace and bureaucratic management is fatal.
State-capitalism is the cause of our heavy taxation and the high prices that make life miserable; and whatever may be the theory, in practice it is a failure, wherever attempted. The corruption that has darkened life in India has been directly produced by the State-controls that have been put into action as a result of the policy of State-capitalism. State-capitalism plus State-controls have ruined the morality of the nation at all levels. It has ruined the standards of a political organization which once commanded universal respect. The Congress which was once the object of unqualified admiration has become an almost universal target of contempt. Its present status and ‘successes’ depend not on its present social or moral reputation but on the governmental power it has seized and its enjoyment of privileges arising from State-capitalism and controls. People fear it. Once people admired and loved it. This admiration and love are no longer there, except in the memory of a few people who remember the old days.
Can an attempt to run all the productive and distributive activity of 450 millions through one single business firm managed by a company of politicians—the Central Government of India— ever succeed? This is what is sought to be done one way or another by the socialist doctrinaires and bigots in Delhi. An attempt to run such management, even in a small country, must fail. In India which is so big and so heterogeneous, where politicians are more ignorant of business matters than the politicians of Western countries, how could it ever hope to succeed?
Apart from the efficiency of management, how can the total happiness of the nation be ever served by a system where instead of being motivated by each individuals own desires and ambitions, the people engaged in production are driven by external command and pressure? Slavery and compulsory labour are contradictory of happiness by reason of the inherent laws of human nature. The aim of the present policy-makers in New Delhi is to develop all national activity into that of a single leviathan-corporation whose managing agency consists of a club of politicians, untrained and incompetent in business affairs. The workers in this leviathan-corporation and its factories will not be free workers. They are bound soon to become slaves as in Russia and China. They will soon lose what is called the right of collective bargaining, because citizens cannot bargain with a sovereign State which, when it has taken over the business of capitalists, will be more cruel than any capitalist.
With all its admitted defects and dangers, free enterprise and a competitive free economy give freedom to consumers and producers, and workers, which cannot be had under State- capitalism. Even in the great universal sovereignty of God, there is the grand illusion of free will, which is the essential basis of happiness as well as of a sense of moral responsibility. Where there is no room for free-will there can be no sense of responsibility and no happiness. What even God would not take away in His really totalitarian rule, the Congress Party seeks to do away in the administration of the country which is sought to be kept going as a democratic concern. Whether this taking away of free-will is called ‘democratic socialism’ or given any other charming name makes no difference. It makes national happiness impossible. It makes for the slave-State which can be tolerated temporarily by citizens, only under the actual pressure or machiavellian delusion of terrible enemies abroad.
