Transcription
In this session, we try to unravel M.N. Roy's political ideas, particularly his pioneering ideas on radical humanism. One always asks the question: why and how a communist like M.N. Roy could reject the Communist philosophy and adapt something totally different, totally new? And maybe in his ideas, something which was just trying to present an alternative, both in ideas and practice, to the flavor of fear of communism and the practice of socialism.
Before I do that, I would just read a few lines from M.N. Roy himself: "When as a school boy of fourteen I began my political life, which may end in nothing, I wanted to be free. Independence, complete and absolute, is a newfangled idea. The old-fashioned revolutionaries thought in terms of freedom. In those days we had not read Marx; we did not know about the existence of the proletariat. Still, many spent their lives in jail and went to the gallows. There is no proletariat to propel them; they are not conscious of class struggle; they did not have the dream of communism; but they had the human urge to revolt against the intolerable conditions of life. They did not know exactly how those conditions could be changed, but they tried to change them anyhow. I began my political life with that spirit, and I still draw my inspiration rather from that spirit than from three volumes of Capital or 304 looms by I end the coalition. No, that is the sum and substance of Roy's moving over from communism into something in later termed as radical humanism."
In the earlier lecture, I talked about Roy being dissatisfied with the course of movement conducted by the Congress party led by Gandhi, or having failed to radicalize the Congressmen around him. He founded the Radical Democratic Party, and that was in 1946. In two years' time, almost in 1948, at the Radical Democratic Party conference, he presented the idea that the party should be dissolved and replaced by an association whose main objective would be to propagate radical humanist ideas and to take part in social service activities. With that aim in mind, he wrote Principles of Radical Democracy in 22 points, or known as 22 theses. This 1948 conference of the Radical Democratic Party not just dissolved itself, but at the same time adapted Roy's 22 theses on Principles of Radical Democracy, which go by the shorter name of Radical Humanism.
I mean, this 22 theses. Roy gives ideas on his concept of man, the importance he gives to the individual, the ideological and organizational shortcomings and failures of socialism, both as an ideology and as a system. His ideas are dreams of how to construct, how to establish a radical democracy in India in which there will be no political parties as such. Also, his ideas on the nature of the economy this India could have, and his major point about radical humanism he makes in the final, or the twenty-second thesis. Here he says that radicalism starts from the dictum that, quote, "Man is the measure of everything," or, quote, "Man is the root of mankind," unquote.
So Roy's radical humanism thinks about a universe whose centre is man, whose centre is a morally and spiritually strong, morally and spiritually educated man who seeks freedom in the fullest sense of the term—not just freedom from material want, freedom from poverty, from scarcity, from sickness, but also spiritual freedom which would elevate that individual to a higher plane and transform an individual into a human being. With that aim in mind, first of all, Roy tried to free, in his ideas and radical humanism, tried to free individuals from two kinds of control. One was the control which he found to be exercised by the political parties of individuals, and second was the control exercised by the all-powerful state over the individual in the name of the collectivity, which he found both in fascist Germany as well as in socialist Soviet Union. In both the cases, he found individuals missing, and that individuals become just an obscure, anonymous part of the larger whole, controlled by forces which are not in his or her hands.
In liberal democracy, actually there are two political models to start with in his time. A state could either adapt a liberal democratic model, following the Anglo-Saxon practice, or adapt the socialist model, following the Soviet practice. And actually, that was the dilemma faced by the newly independent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, collectively known as the Third World. Each world, and each of them had before them two models: either the bourgeois liberal democracy, parliamentary democracy, or presidential democracy of the Anglo-Saxon U.S. model, or the socialist system model as presented before them when Soviet Union—what are we—the model. Both were controlled by political parties. In the Soviet model, the single party, the Communist Party; in the liberal democracy, there's, at least on paper, a number of particular parties. You know, political parties apparently work with the intention of bettering lives of the individuals; they work in the name of the individual, but in their working, they ultimately come to be controlled not by the individuals they represent, but by a small coterie of people, with elites, a scientist Robert Michels has termed as the iron law of oligarchy. So ultimately, the party was representing actually not the individuals or their interests, but the interests of the small section of the people who led the party, controlled the party, and this section was bent on acquiring political power, or to be more specific, governmental power, through elections or through revolution. And once in power, their only objective was to stay in power, and occasionally they paid lip service to the needs of the individuals.
In a socialist system, or in a fascist system, the individual was submerged in the collective ego, either of the class, as in a socialist system, or of the nation, as in a fascist or Nazi system. The individual could not be found anymore. And if man is the centre of everything, then none of these systems can provide man with the kind of life he is aspiring to have. He might be free from material wants, as in a socialist system, but not having much of political freedom. He might be having political freedom as in a liberal democracy, but none of these are actually the freedom he was wanting to have, or actually elevating him from his real status.
So radical humanist ideas of Roy: a Dr. Bird society which is centred around men, whose primary objective would be, whose primary responsibility was the moral and spiritual elevation of its members through education. There is an ideational part of it, and the practical side. Here, I suggested, though that does not occupy much space in his 22 theses. And, in one thesis, number 18, he was specific about how, or what shape, the state would take under radical humanism. Now Roy was totally against political parties; we have discussed that. He'd even dissolved his own child, the Radical Democratic Party, and took up his pain against political parties and for party-less democracy. He thought the demos took a back seat, and the party came to the front. So he thought about a kind of highly decentralized political system, guided and directed at the grassroot level by people's political committees, totally at the grassroot level. And these people's political committees would be elected; the members are elected on the basis of population by the people themselves, without any party affiliation. And this people's political committees, at every region or area, they would ultimately form the national parliament through election from among themselves. And this national parliament would be given all the powers. And that does have some similarity with the Supreme Soviet model as found in Soviet Union. The legislature was given the sole constitutional power. In every socialist system, there is no question of separation of powers between the legislature, the executive, and judiciary; no question of sharing of power in the three organs. And and and that place, at least in in that area at least, is a clear sign of influence of the socialist model on Roy, making the national parliament the Supreme body, to be directed and guided by people's committees at the grassroot level.
The economy will be on two parallel lines: the political, at the very base, people's committees; at the apex, the national parliament. Same with the economy. There will be producers' cooperatives at the ground level, at the grassroots level, I came to the people's particular committees. And this producers' cooperative will ultimately form a pyramidal structure, rising with each level. And this isn't still made by these cooperatives: what to produce, how to produce, where to sell, how to procure everything. So, in that sense, neither the individual bourgeois, the individual businessman, the individual corporate chief could own the state economic establishment, nor a socialist state would be in total control of the economy, as in Soviet Union or China or in any socialist state for the system. But a decentralized polity, paralleled by a decentralized economy, and nowhere there's any central control in that sense of the term. Roy thought that perhaps this is the way of insuring individual freedom. If, in, if in the political arena, if the political arena, the individual can choose the best among themselves to be members of the local political committees, they can choose the best among themselves to be members of the national parliament without any, any idea, without any thought, without any consideration for party interests, the national parliament would ultimately be composed of the best possible individuals committed towards preserving and enlarging individual freedom. If, in the economy, it is neither corporate control nor state control, people as producers with the free, they can decide their mode of production, they can decide what community they will produce, and all things connected with production and exchange. And thirdly, there will be a universal system of education whose aim would be to spiritually and morally strengthen the individual. So it is radical in the sense that the inter-objective was to penetrate each and every area, in every nook and corner of the society. In that sense, it could be compared to any socialist system.
Error: Humanists, in the sense that in a socialist or—though they may not be uttered in the same grid, on the same sentence, but the spacing of the argument, that whether be in a socialist system of the Soviet model or a fascist system of the German or Italian model, the individual took a back seat. Class or nation was the collective ego, and everything was concentrated; everything was the total importance given to this collective entity, the collective ego. M.N. Roy, who is basically an individualist—he's talking about his fourteen years of age—I just read his writings and from which he talked about freedom. So, in that sense, he was an individualist, concerned with nothing other than individual freedom. And this man, though he went through an interregnum of communism, could not really accept the total dehumanized control of a very powerful Leviathan-like state. Leviathan is a term made popular by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and Leviathan is the imaginary representation of a huge sea monster, highly powerful, having too much strength, before which human beings felt helpless. And this Leviathan state, Roy hated, and he found this Leviathan state during its existence in in the Soviet Union or in fascist Germany. He could not accept that kind of control. He will accept a centralized structure in which individuals play just their part, just as a huge machine: the different parts play their roles, but they do not have any independence of their own. You can think of any huge machine, and this is revolting to him. The state should not take a backseat; the individual comes to the forefront. Like the abstract individualism of the boards of philosophy: each one for himself, and let the devil take the hindmost; nor the all-submerging, the submergence of the individual into the collective ego of class or nation; but a delicate balance, a delicate balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the society. And this delicate balance, perhaps Roy tried to find through teaching men, teaching individuals how to maintain that balance within himself. He's, after all, in M.N. Roy's universe, man was the centre of the universe. And if there is this balance in the individual mind between the need for individual enrichment as well as the equally important need for collective, or the improvement of collective life, only then, perhaps, in entirety, a society can progress, keeping both the interests of the individual and the interests of society in mind—not submerging one into the other. We have the individual, not the state, in control. The other is the individual, or the state taking a backseat. And this was Roy's ideas known as radical humanism, which tried to present an alternative, an alternative to the bourgeois insistence on an abstract individual and the Marxist insistence on the all-powerful state and all-powerful class. And that is the originality of M.N. Roy's thinking, which you can still be collected.