A Socialist Deepavali

Suppose private lights were substituted in Deepavali by an organizational illumination managed by the State. Imagine Government doing it alone, doing it grandly, doing it everywhere. It would be splendid, some may say. But there would be no joy among the people as they have during Deepavali of the old-fashioned type. There might be much illumination outside but no illumination inside the hearts of men, women and children as they have now. Socialist Deepavali may be a ‘progressive’ idea but our folks knew better than that. They wanted every individual to do it independently and enjoy it. An electric switch in the Governor’s Bhavan in Bombay might light up the city at once and all over and no private effort would be wanted to be wasted on Deepavali except of course by workmen in setting up the bulbs and wires and in the power-house to see to the current. It would not be Deepavali, however bright the city may be.

     There is now a world-wide citizen-laziness, a tendency to pass the responsibility to government. To give up responsibility in favour of the State is attractive and easy. And if a plausible economic doctrine is found to support that surrender, it becomes all the more easy. It takes even the shape of a conscientious lining up with modern progress! State-capitalism, an order of governance in which capital is gathered, not from the voluntary savings of diligent public-spirited individuals, but collected by coercion in the form of taxes—or which is the same thing found through public loans or borrowings from abroad, for the liquidating of which taxes are levied—is the surrender of the individual’s proper function to the State. The State is a mystic name. In actuality, it is the bureaucracy established by the government. The whole scheme and philosophy of what is called socialism is this surrender of individual responsibility to a bureaucracy. “We shall not worry about things: it is now the Government’s business” is nothing but a shirking of responsibility. Want of confidence in oneself and leaving things to an organization whose working is its own concern, and freedom from one’s own personal responsibility, this is the essence of socialism.

     Individual freedom together with its inherent obverse, individual responsibility, is not something the government gives to the people. The government gets the powers which we give it, and if we surrender everything without reserving anything for ourselves, we have to beg of it for permission and licences thereafter to exercise a little of that freedom which was our own before we surrendered it. It may be even permissible to give up freedom, but it is a crime to discard the connoted responsibility except where you are incompetent to bear the burden. Yet this is the creed which is called modern and progressive and is supposed to attract youth and all generous-minded people. In truth, however, it is a new edition of the old tribal order of precivilized days, when the people entrusted everything to the chief of the tribe, called him god and followed him implicitly. The State takes the place of the chief of the tribe and this organizational god works through a dictator or a clique or a class and they hold all power, and relieve the people of all responsibility. If corruption follows power and incompetence and things go wrong, a new dictator comes in and the same tribal philosophy continues with a change of chiefs. Surely, this is not adding up the energy and the talents of the citizens which democratic life seeks to do, but the destruction of talent, incentive and energy, and a reversion from freedom and responsibility to slave status and slave labour. Citizenship means a share of the total concern. The ‘happiness’ involved in the no-concern mentality of slave-status is not a civilized form of happiness. Yet this is the reality behind the benefits of socialism. An organization cannot have all the required qualifications and energy to fulfill the sum-total of the tasks of all the citizens. It can only constitute itself as master and call upon the citizens to work as slaves. This is the inherent limitation in the entrusting of the rights, the powers and the responsibilities properly belonging to people as individuals to the organization called the State, a mystic entity like the idol in a temple. The only task of the citizens in such an arrangement will be mutual wrangling and competition to find places in government. Politics will take the place of honest work. Instead of every one being a worker competing with one another in efficiency, speed and output, every one becomes a political careerist competing with other power-hungry citizens. The competition that makes industry flourish will be transferred from its healthy field to politics and transformed into unhealthy and unproductive rivalry.