Our Topsyturvy Socialism

Sweden is generally believed to be the best example of successful socialism. But there are few nations in the world that rely more on free enterprise, its motives, its methods and its management, in the matter of production, than Sweden which is classed as a completely socialist State. The creative end and the consumption end are two very different points in national economy. The following figures given by an expert columnist prove this fact. We can see in these figures the extent to which private ownership dominates in prominent areas of industry and trade at the creative end:

Percentage of Ownership of Industry

* State 10.2 per cent, Municipals 51.5 per cent.
- Courtesy: Freeman (January 1966)

     Swedish socialism not only trusts private citizens to be in charge of production but also provides large room for incentive and rewards for the private citizens that produce and distribute.

     The advice of the Yugoslav Ambassador in India, Dr. Uvalic, which was reproduced in SWARAJYA of March 5, does not therefore stand alone to prove that natural laws are respected by the sensible and successful socialists of Europe. Sweden’s policies reinforce the Yugoslav Ambassador’s plea of the inevitability of private and personal interest for successful production. His statement about his own country is the best form of advice an ambassador of a foreign nation can give to us.

     Where the State refuses dogmatically to trust citizens and banks on its own bureaucracy, failure and futility follow. Incidentally the phrase ‘public enterprise’ is a misnomer. It is State enterprise, involving official management and bureaucratic apathy as to results, that Swatantra is up again. The ‘public’ are the people, and not the State. The Swatantra Party is against management of production and distribution by salaried officials guided and controlled (and hampered) by partisan politicians.

     In Sweden the line is drawn between the massive welfare programmes of the State at the consumption-end of the economy and freedom at the creative end. Devices eventually to bring about the Welfare State are common both to Socialist Sweden and Capitalist countries. But both America and Sweden can prosper only to the extent that the State allows the free citizen and the free market to function. So is the case for us in India also.

     There is convincing evidence, to use William Henry Chamberlin’s words, to show that State economic planning ends either in tragedy or futility, tragedy when the planning is compulsive, futility “when it has no teeth in it”. If the State concentrates all political and economic power in its own hands, tragedy is the result. When planning is an exercise in exhortation and depends on a chain of ‘ifs’, the planning ends in futility as in the case of our so-called land reforms in India. Here is a story about collective farming told by Winston Churchill in his great book.

‘Tell me”, I asked, “‘has the stress of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of the collective farms?”

This subject immediately aroused Marshal Stalin.

“Oh, no,” he said, “the collective farm policy was a terrible struggle.”

“I thought you would have found it bad,” said I, “because you were not dealing with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.”

“Ten millions,” he said, holding up his hands. “It was fearful. Four years it lasted.”

“I record as they come back to me, these memories, and the strong impression I sustained at the moment of millions of men and women being blotted out or displaced forever.”

     The war which Stalin waged against a considerable section of the Russian people themselves, to enforce collective farming, was according to his own confession more bitter and terrible than the great struggle with Hitler. That collective farming was a higher form of agriculture was the firm belief of Stalin and this was automatically adopted by the Indian Congress leaders at Nagpur. They gave a different name to it, as ‘collective’ had by then become a word of bad repute. But the idea was identically the same. And this brought the Swatantra Party into being

     One cannot be sure that the bosses of the Indian Congress Party have yet given up this wrong belief taken over from Stalin. The smashing up of the larger farmers through “ceiling laws” resulted in a tragic fall in the supply of essential food grains to the urban markets that kept the industrial and administrative workers going. Realizing that so-called cooperative farms proved impracticable, our pinchbeck Stalins are now thinking of organizing joint-stock companies to run agricultural production. Driving out the big lawful owners, they seek to bring in new big owners who have no sympathy with peasants or land-labourers and who are just speculators without any of the virtues associated with rural life.

     After fifty years of the Soviet regime, Russia is saved from hunger by repeated big purchases of grain from the individual farmers of the US, Canada, and Australia. Equally appalling results as in Russia have been registered in terms of human death and suffering from the communist rulers of China attempting to impose collective farming on its peasants. And now we know about the Chinese purchase of wheat from capitalist countries.

     From Soviet Russia and its satellite countries come news of attempts to graft the profit-motive and market-pricing system on the communist bureaucratic system. This is a mule, very different from the honest horse. The effective virtue of free economy rests on the element of ownership, and the motivation and powerful incentives such ownership releases. No such dynamic forces will come into operation where ultimate ownership and authority rest in the State and in the hands of anonymous groups of bureaucrats.

     Eminent economists are convinced that central State planning for production based on insufficient knowledge and theoretical reasoning, without the actual experience that such production demands, must lead to fatal failure. The Planning Commission should be disbanded along with its huge establishment. A non-official Production Council covering both industry and agriculture should take its place, to be constituted by recognized unofficial Chambers of good standing, of industrialists, of leaders in commerce, of agriculturists, and others. They should formulate national plans of production for such a limited number of years as may be found suitable for each type of production, and carry them out, on the strength of their own self-determined resolutions, obtaining from Government whatever legislation they require from time to time for efficient execution of their plans. All matters which are now dealt with by the Planning Commission and which would not be covered by this arrangement of a non-official National Production Council should be dealt with by the Central Cabinet itself with such ad hoc assistance as it may require and call for.

     Sweden and Yugoslavia teach us plainly that production cannot be left to the mercies of ownerless socialism. The general welfare and help to those that need and deserve it is common ground and it rests on production. Our ruling party’s topsyturvy socialism has proved both futile and tragic owing to infantile imitation without pondering on realities and the laws of human nature. Let us hope that what Dr Uvalic said about Marshal Tito’s country and the policies followed there, will have a salutary effect on our Government and bring about a healthy disillusionment among the people beguiled and misled by the Congress bosses whose eyes are bent more on their own power and its perpetuation than on the country’s problems.