While in IIM Calcutta, I was walking along Chowringee Road one day, when I came across a street seller of old books. Without wasting time and opportunity, I at once delved into the book sellers collection for I was sure I would definitely find something of my interest in his lot. The literary culture of Kolkata is well known, after all it is the city of the Bengali intellectual, and it was always my desire to try to take away at least something from it during my time at Joka. Visiting old book stores in College Street and elsewhere and going through their vast and myriad collection was one way I was trying to do that.
Coming back to the book seller on Chowringee Road, I was not disappointed, for I saw some very old books, including some from the Soviet era. There was a very nice comic book (a propaganda book from the western point of view) about the heroics of Stalin! I think I brought that and then gifted it to a friend who really wanted it. There was another book which I kept for myself, and perhaps a well known classic in itself. It was Friedrich Engels, the father of communist theory according to Wikipedia.org, and his classic book - Socialism - Utopian and Scientific, published in 1880.
While today socialism is readily associated with communism which in itself is a very negative word, thanks to the slow and steady demonization process initiated by the US and its allies against the Soviets, socialism does not begin and end with the USSR. In fact, there are a lot of good points in communist and socialist theories that this world would do well to inculcate and follow. I do not claim to be an expert on any social or political theory, but I do know that my education in second year at IIM Calcutta further opened my eyes to the highly unequal and unjust world we are living in, and how this injustice is only strengthening itself.
The Americans have for long, actually throughout the last 60 years, have propagated open economies, global trade, no barriers, and that governments have no business doing business. Of course now that the rest of the world is slowly catching up to the American version of "globalization", they suddenly start preaching protectionism and job creation. Of course, their global corporations have entrenched themselves into every economy across the world on this American claim that its good for them; I mean what better example to show the world than the great American dream. The third world paid for it but unfortunately is slowing taking its economic destiny into its own hands.
This is matter for another post, but coming back to Engels, there were a lot of good points he made which are relevant even today. The common man is at the mercy of the market, and in most cases, the market is not a friend. Just like the Americans used the "American way of life", and the IMF and World Bank, to force many small nations to adapt capitalist policies that would effectively take away the control of their economies from their own hands, economic liberalization today uses its own posterchilds to drive home the point that its good. In India for example, people have made lots of money in the stock market, we all know that, but what the media will rarely mention that less than 5% of this country's population actually has money in the stock market. In the end, the common man is still affected by the price of onions, so what is all the economic modernization we are talking about then?
The book has some very deep writing, and it will be impossible for me to recall even half of it without reading it again, but there are certainly a few mental notes I remember taking after I read the book, or a really long essay in three parts.
For example, he writes that when the freedom to property was brought about in England, while protecting the common serf from the feudal master, turned into something totally different, though of the same color. Now they lost their properties to bigger landowners and capitalists. This is historically correct that with the advent of the industrial revolution, the British society underwent a monumental upheaval, with the money in control of the new rich, the "bourgeois manufacturers".
While to Marx and other great thinkers such as Owen and Fourrier (who Engels writes about in the first part of the book), socialism was a utopia that had its roots in the minds of modern man, Engels said socialism really was an inevitable outcome of a struggle between classes. Even today, do we not talk about the struggle between the haves and have nots? Is it any different? I think not, other than that it has taken a more global scale and incorporated issues such as gender and race. Engels does talk about it in fact, saying the economies and countries that can't stand up to the industrial onslaught are bound to be cast aside.
In 1880, Engels was talking about the economic cycle that we are all familiar with today. He said that every ten years economies will fall under the weight of their own production. We are taught today that economic cycles are a part and parcel of the system, nobody actually questions the need to be a system which sees such a debilitating and devastating cycle repeated as if at clockwork.
Now my question is - do we have to follow the economic system that we are following? The world thrives on the images of success enjoyed by a small percentage of the population, while the majority of this world's individuals are breaking their backs to earn for themselves and their families. Nobody talks about them. My belief is that the world, the way it is right now, is unsustainable. For most of the world, unfortunately, it may be a case of nothing gained and nothing lost. For the small percentage of the world with the high capital and resource consumption, well, they certainly will realize that the earth's running out of resources, and the developed world will realize that the third world is more and more unwilling to share their resources with the former for their gratuitous consumption.
Coming back to the book seller on Chowringee Road, I was not disappointed, for I saw some very old books, including some from the Soviet era. There was a very nice comic book (a propaganda book from the western point of view) about the heroics of Stalin! I think I brought that and then gifted it to a friend who really wanted it. There was another book which I kept for myself, and perhaps a well known classic in itself. It was Friedrich Engels, the father of communist theory according to Wikipedia.org, and his classic book - Socialism - Utopian and Scientific, published in 1880.
While today socialism is readily associated with communism which in itself is a very negative word, thanks to the slow and steady demonization process initiated by the US and its allies against the Soviets, socialism does not begin and end with the USSR. In fact, there are a lot of good points in communist and socialist theories that this world would do well to inculcate and follow. I do not claim to be an expert on any social or political theory, but I do know that my education in second year at IIM Calcutta further opened my eyes to the highly unequal and unjust world we are living in, and how this injustice is only strengthening itself.
The Americans have for long, actually throughout the last 60 years, have propagated open economies, global trade, no barriers, and that governments have no business doing business. Of course now that the rest of the world is slowly catching up to the American version of "globalization", they suddenly start preaching protectionism and job creation. Of course, their global corporations have entrenched themselves into every economy across the world on this American claim that its good for them; I mean what better example to show the world than the great American dream. The third world paid for it but unfortunately is slowing taking its economic destiny into its own hands.
This is matter for another post, but coming back to Engels, there were a lot of good points he made which are relevant even today. The common man is at the mercy of the market, and in most cases, the market is not a friend. Just like the Americans used the "American way of life", and the IMF and World Bank, to force many small nations to adapt capitalist policies that would effectively take away the control of their economies from their own hands, economic liberalization today uses its own posterchilds to drive home the point that its good. In India for example, people have made lots of money in the stock market, we all know that, but what the media will rarely mention that less than 5% of this country's population actually has money in the stock market. In the end, the common man is still affected by the price of onions, so what is all the economic modernization we are talking about then?
The book has some very deep writing, and it will be impossible for me to recall even half of it without reading it again, but there are certainly a few mental notes I remember taking after I read the book, or a really long essay in three parts.
For example, he writes that when the freedom to property was brought about in England, while protecting the common serf from the feudal master, turned into something totally different, though of the same color. Now they lost their properties to bigger landowners and capitalists. This is historically correct that with the advent of the industrial revolution, the British society underwent a monumental upheaval, with the money in control of the new rich, the "bourgeois manufacturers".
While to Marx and other great thinkers such as Owen and Fourrier (who Engels writes about in the first part of the book), socialism was a utopia that had its roots in the minds of modern man, Engels said socialism really was an inevitable outcome of a struggle between classes. Even today, do we not talk about the struggle between the haves and have nots? Is it any different? I think not, other than that it has taken a more global scale and incorporated issues such as gender and race. Engels does talk about it in fact, saying the economies and countries that can't stand up to the industrial onslaught are bound to be cast aside.
In 1880, Engels was talking about the economic cycle that we are all familiar with today. He said that every ten years economies will fall under the weight of their own production. We are taught today that economic cycles are a part and parcel of the system, nobody actually questions the need to be a system which sees such a debilitating and devastating cycle repeated as if at clockwork.
Now my question is - do we have to follow the economic system that we are following? The world thrives on the images of success enjoyed by a small percentage of the population, while the majority of this world's individuals are breaking their backs to earn for themselves and their families. Nobody talks about them. My belief is that the world, the way it is right now, is unsustainable. For most of the world, unfortunately, it may be a case of nothing gained and nothing lost. For the small percentage of the world with the high capital and resource consumption, well, they certainly will realize that the earth's running out of resources, and the developed world will realize that the third world is more and more unwilling to share their resources with the former for their gratuitous consumption.
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