1. abolish an inherently unjust division, the division of society by accident of birth into haves and have-nots
2. make society’s institutions for producing and distributing goods and services function to meet their needs, which would mean meeting everybody’s needs, because everyone would be a worker
3. fully develop the forces of production to meet needs better. 

    Karl Marx emphasizes the last of these three. He defines capitalism as a form of society whose wealth appears as a vast collection of commodities, that is to say, of goods produced for sale. Socialism would be a form of society where goods are produced for use. There would be no unemployed people or resources withheld from production, because their owners speculate that later their prices will rise. The only limit put on the development of the forces of production would be the exhaustion of human needs and wants, except perhaps some limits set by a desire to preserve the environment for future generations, or by other altruistic desires the collectively self-interested workers might have. A hold on production imposed by lack of consumer purchasing power would cease to be an obstacle. Hence, the classless society would also be the one capable of the most rapid and complete development.

    Advocates of capitalism argue the contrary:³ a class-divided society is required for development. An upper class must exist, which does not live hand-to-mouth, so it will be able to save. Without savings, no investment occurs, and without investment, no development happens. The purpose of investment is to take out more money than was put in; in other words capital accumulation. Given an undeveloped and, therefore, poor society, the lower class must work for low wages, because otherwise there could be no upper class with enough revenue to accumulate capital. This last point is not usually made in these terms. Instead, because owners of the means of production can usually pass on wage increases to consumers as higher prices, and because they can, if they choose to do so, shut down their operation and establish a business elsewhere, the argument for low wages takes different forms. Wage increases are inflationary, which makes the nation less attractive to mobile capital.

    There is a second way to think about achieving a classless society. One might think in terms of starting with a class-divided society in which there is an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class. The middle class grows by whittling away at the privileges of the upper class, both through voluntary whittling accepted by members of the upper class who choose to restrict the statutory prerogatives of the upper class to own many things and to do as they please with them. More people come to enjoy the benefits of property ownership as the concentration of wealth decreases. Meanwhile, the marginal members of the lower classes, which often includes people with: felony criminal records, addictions, mental illness, disabilities, chronic unemployment, and those without housing, or skills—are integrated into the disciplines and benefits of organized social life. Working people acquire the status of stakeholders in their particular firms and in the wealth of society as a whole. Workers are made secure by pensions and by health care benefits, and made powerful by invitations to participate in lifelong education and in governance at every level. When the upper and lower class dissolve, everyone will be middle class and, thus, we have a classless society. Introducing the idea that the middle class, instead of or in addition to the working class, might be the universal class, which will usher in the classless society, involves some conceptual shifts away from the criterion used in the two-class model of society stated above. Recall that the criterion for class membership in that model is whether one owns the means of production.

   It is awkward to use the ownership criterion to adjust the two-class model to provide a conceptual slot for a third class. The best one can do is to distinguish part of the owning class as petit bourgeois: the owners of mere small means of production. In place of the neat binary disjunction—owns or does not own means of production—there is a quantitative continuum of the amount of means of production owned. Thus, at some cutoff point, a person’s assets become too small to make that person a member of the haute bourgeoisie and that person is defined as a member of the petite bourgeoisie. Then there is the question of motivation. The very definition of the proletariat as not owning the means of production implies that its members are dispossessed, frustrated, and unsatisfied. They are defined as: people who have a motive for changing the status quo. The middle class, defined according to the ownership criterion as: people who own something but not much, can be expected to be, at least, partly satisfied with the status quo. The growth of the middle class might, thus, be, as often viewed, an insurance policy for capitalism, assuring that socialism will never come about because fewer people will find it to be in their interest to bring it about. For this second way to a classless society, one must ask why and whether anybody would want to whittle away at the privileges of the upper class, or incorporate marginal people into the benefits of society, and why anybody, except for the working class itself, would promote the security and the empowerment of the working class. Mainstream social science show part of what it might mean to define a middle class. Some speak of socio-economic status (SES) as a surrogate for class. Educational attainment as well as income and wealth are counted. Apart from SES, many studies measure quantitatively and/or depict , in the ethnographic sense, a variety of characteristics that can plausibly be called markers of class.⁴ Such studies counter all tendencies that privilege ownership of the means of production as the single criterion for mapping social class. They show that whatever criterion one uses there are people in the middle who are not at either end.
   
     If the two-class model is as simple and clear as anything gets in social science, and if empirical research shows social reality to be complex and confusing, a middle class model seeks to precipitate back out of the world’s complexity and confusion (without losing the insights of the two class model) another criterion which is (relatively speaking) simple and clear. This can occur by associating the idea of middle class with the related idea of middle class values.
   
     In the 18th century, England had a middle class (or at least a fragment of a class large enough to produce a literature), which was self-defined by its values. They were the Whigs whose claim to be the rightful governing class of England was founded on the idea of self-ascribed virtue. The boundaries that separated the middle class from the allegedly dissolute aristocracy and the dissolute masses were moral boundaries. In that environment, the Methodist movement was one that sought to uplift the working class into the middle class by teaching a method for acquiring virtue, and by providing a faith community of brethren who upbraided each other when someone transgressed. In sociology, the locus classicus for associating a middle class with adherence to norms is the work of Emile Durkheim. He claimed that his empirical studies showed that anomie was produced by the easy life of the upper classes and by the hard life of the lower classes, as contrasted with the life of the solid middle.
 
    What the concept of middle class values means in the many cultures and global hybrids of today is a long story I am not prepared to tell.⁶ It suffices to assert that good historical and sociological reasons exist for including the idea of conformity to conventional norms in the mix of indicators used to define who is in what class. What psychologists of moral development call post-conventional moral judgment might be considered as well. To simplify: the middle class is the ethical class.

   If one could grant that a class can be identified by a set of socio-economic indicators that includes looking for a relative absence of the Durkheimian normless state, then it remains to ask whether such a class can be motivated to change the status quo. An important part of this remaining question asks whether ethics can be a dynamic force to change the course of history. Enter Gandhi.

     Tariq Ali firmly advocates of the first of the two ways mentioned here to conceive of achieving a classless society. He belongs to a revolutionary socialist subset of those who propose to achieve a classless society through working class power. He holds rather specific political beliefs mainly associated with the tradition founded by Leon Trotsky. The revolution will come through the revolutionary action of the working class. That class will learn the necessity of revolution from its own experience of class struggle. The end of the desired process must be democratic because without democracy the workers would have no power. It must be a deeper democracy than the familiar bourgeois representative democracies, including besides parliaments and parties also strong independent trade unions and works councils in which the workers themselves direct the operations of the enterprises.

    Ali gives us a consistent series of explanations of why revolutionary mass action by the working class so far has usually failed. The mass action of students and workers in France in early 1968 might have overthrown the system if a collaborationist Communist Party had not opted for a mere one-day general strike instead an indefinite general strike. The Party then struck a deal with President De Gaulle in which capitalism was allowed to survive in return for increased wages and benefits. ⁷ Likewise, the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile might have survived in 1973 if the more audacious elements of the left had been allowed to arm the workers. In late 1968, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the democratization of Czechoslovakia might have survived if President Dubcek had called for mass revolutionary action by the working class, instead of foolishly believing that he could compromise with the Russians. Ali remarks that Allende and Dubcek faced essentially the same choices. Later in 1974-76, the Portuguese revolution might have succeeded if it had relied on mass mobilization instead of tamely submitting to the ballot box victory of the social democrat Mario Soares. The working class in Britain is ready for revolutionary socialism, but is betrayed by a so-called Labour Party, which is intent on proving to the ruling class that it can keep the workers in check better than the Tories. In Iraq and Syria, the Ba’athist Party had the potential to be a revolutionary socialist party, but it degenerated in both countries into the tool of a few power-seeking families and cliques. The continuing inability of the Arab world to resist foreign capitalist domination is a series of self-inflicted wounds, brought about by its internal divisions.

   Tariq Ali’s views on all of the above are shaped by his readings of Leon Trotsky’s and Isaac Deutscher’s accounts of the betrayal of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinization of Russia. ⁸ The pattern is similar in Tariq Ali’s works of historical fiction, which concern the fall of Islamic civilization in Spain, and Sala-al-Din’s success in driving the Christian crusaders from Jerusalem in 1186. Force is the ultimate arbiter; unity is the key to having superior force. The victories of the Christian barbarians are blamed on divisions among the Muslims. The worst enemies of the cause of the Believers are the self-seekers who collaborate for gain with the enemy. Sala-al-Din spent most of his career as sultan fighting the collaborationists among his own people, always with the ultimate purpose, which near the end of the book he achieves: retaking Jerusalem. Fitting the pattern, India might have gone socialist if it had not been for Gandhi.

[quotes or paraphrases from Ali

Within Tariq Ali’s worldview, Gandhi can only be understood as a spoiler. To portray Gandhi to Ali as a messenger who embodies a message which, if understood, would make a good society possible, it would be necessary not only to complete the historical record by bringing into evidence other things.

 [?] Gandhi said and did, but to change Ali’s worldview. [?] Notoriously, a person’s worldview is formed by the thoughts and experiences of a lifetime. Rather than try to engineer a quick conversion, I think it better to offer a contribution to a dialogue of worldviews in which alternate ways of viewing the same facts enter into conversation with one another. No one will convince anyone else quickly.
 
      Like Leon Trotsky, in the same country and nearly in the same time period, Gandhi’s mentor Leo Tolstoi was sickened at heart by the terrible suffering of the lower classes, and by their terrible repression at the hands of the upper classes and the state. Like Tariq Ali, Tolstoi was an educated scion of an aristocratic family, who became a partisan of the dispossessed. His analysis of the causes of oppression, and his strategy for social change, were somewhat different than Tolstoi’s.

     Tolstoi recounts his experience conversing with soldiers and officers aboard a troop-train bound to kill and torture poor peasants accused of rebellion. The troops were ordinary people who thought they were doing their duty, though deaf to the voice of conscience and unclear of thought. They were mostly members of the lower class deployed to inflict terror upon fellow members of their own class, motivated not so much by an opportunity to vent savage instincts as by blind obedience to conventional authority.

     In Tolstoi’s analysis (as in Marx’s), the upper classes delude themselves into believing that their privileges are caused by a divinely ordained natural order and/or by the laws of economic science. For Tolstoi, the real cause of privileges of the upper class and of the corresponding oppression of the lower class is violence. Tolstoi was himself born into a military caste, whose raison d’etre was conquest and the defense of conquests made by one’s ancestors. Like the characters in Tariq Ali’s historical novels, Tolstoi was born into a world where social structure was created by brute force and reinforced by lies.

    The solution to the problem—truth and nonviolence—follows from the analysis of its causes. Truth will unite the oppressed and bring the oppressors to face the reality of what they are doing. Ruling out violence as a legitimate way to resolve conflicts will—and no other way will—change social structures. Refusing to obey orders when they are contrary to conscience will dissolve the principal cause of the oppression of the poor.

   Tariq Ali’s worldview is not as different from Tolstoi’s as might first appear; Ali is not, in general, an advocate of violence. The revolutionary action he does advocate is, mostly, in the form of mass demonstrations, general strikes, electoral campaigns, education, the relatively peaceful takeover of factories and other buildings, and the building of alternative institutions to create the new society in the shell of the old. Where other means are open, war is not the people’s means of struggle. War is regularly forced upon the workers by a ruling class that often resorts to military violence when it is unable to retain power by legitimate means. When civil war comes, Ali wants military force to be on the side of the workers, not on the side of reaction.

     Like Tolstoi, Ali believes that truth will unite the oppressed and unmask the ideologies of oppression. He does not believe that the truth was finally revealed, by Marx to render superfluous the critical search for truth by independent scientists and scholars after the revolution. He agrees, in this respect, with David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper that truth is always tentative, and that the best guarantee of anyone’s claim that a theory is true is the freedom of everyone else to refute it if they can. In Ali’s vision of a democratic socialist society, freedom of speech and the press, and other liberal freedoms are preserved and deepened, without the tyranny of money over the media, politics, and the academy, which currently makes a mockery of liberal values.

     For Tolstoi truth (not all truth, but truth) is found in the message of Jesus Christ, regarded not as a set of mystical beliefs but as a practical guide to life. Similarly, Gandhi found truth in his social gospel version of Hinduism and in what might be called his ecumenical spirituality. Ali will have none of this. Ali complains that in India secularism has come to mean accepting all religions when it ought to mean accepting no religion.

   Tolstoi’s worldview suggests an alternative reading of Tariq Ali’s basic texts, Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed and Isaac Deutscher’s The Unfinished Revolution. The Stalinization of Russia can be read as a story about hypocrisy and violence. One can assert that the antidote to the Stalins of the world—slow but more certain than any other—is truth, nonviolence, and conscientious disobedience.

    Tolstoi’s analysis of the causes of social oppression might have been true even if it were the case that all appeals to conscience are fruitless. It could be that social structure has always been determined by violence and lies and always will be. The validity of Tolstoi’s analysis does not depend on whether he is able to offer a hopeful alternative. Then again, Tolstoi’s proposed solution—to live a life of truth and nonviolence as a contribution to improving society—requires the premise that ethics can have some efficacy as a cause of historical change.

    In 1900, Tolstoi’s concept of ethical politics could have been regarded as a speculative theory, although, even then, historical research would have disclosed numerous precedents for it. After Gandhi put Tolstoi’s principles into practice in South Africa in 1914-16, they became unified as a tested theory. It and variants more or less akin to it have been tested since then in enough places at enough times that the reports of them fill many volumes. The fall of the Soviet dictatorship in 1989 had more to do with Tolstoi’s principles than Trotsky’s.

   Therefore, at this point in history, no doubt should exist that rational ethical appeals and nonviolent methods, in general, can have important impacts on historical events, which include the influence upon major institutional changes. In the light of the proven power of nonviolence, we have to take another look at the series of failures to achieve democratic socialism by the revolutionary action of the masses that Tariq Ali has analyzed. I shall add to this reconsideration, failures to build social democracy and responsible capitalism, which might have resulted, if they had continued long enough in, what I have called, achieving a classless society by the second way. If ethics works, then why is the world today mired within neo-liberalism and irresponsible globalization?

    The tendency of Tariq Ali’s explanations, some of which were mentioned above, is to say that socialism fails because the workers are let down by their leaders. This is not just a trend in the data that Ali has discerned in the data by the logic of induction. The structure of modern society, that which Karl Popper calls its situational logic, plus the conceptual lenses Ali uses to view modern society, create a gestalt in which the failure of revolution caused by the failure of leadership recurs as a pattern of power: capital has more power: labor has less power. For the workers to gain power, they would have to unite in revolutionary action. They do not do so because, at crucial moments, their leaders make the wrong choices.

    But the Gandhian has a different worldview, which if right, means that factors beyond power play a role, or, at least, power as narrowly conceived. Truth and nonviolence can also change society; however, the dismal historical record shows that a classless society cannot come about either by the first way, the second, or any other way. The revolutionary socialists fail, either because they, in fact, do not bring forth a revolution or they bring a revolution that does not lead to the desired free and democratic classless society The Gandhian way also fails; the social democrats have either failed or have become so indistinguishable from conservatives that their success brings a classless society no closer. Still, I am not against consoling oneself by taking note of the good news and genuine social progress that can be found here and there in the history of the twentieth century and in what has so far transpired of history of the twenty-first; but, I do think that more explanation of failure is needed. Ali’s explanations and Tolstoi’s are not wrong, but they are also not a complete list of the explanations of the persistence and intensification of class divisions.

    High upon the full list obstacles to the transition to a classless society, one must place what might be called the functional requirements of the system. As noted, advocates of capitalism point out that someone [the owner class] has to save and invest; and, inflation must be kept in check. The international competitive position of the nation must not be allowed to erode via capital flight or exports priced above what foreign buyers will pay.

   The systemic imperatives imposed by the functional needs of a modern society will vary little by changing the ownership of the means of production. Tariq Ali writes about the negotiations between Czech technocrats and Russia in the 1968 crisis:

    The technocrats and Moscow tended to agree on one aspect of the economy: they both saw the choice (though not in these words) as being between: 1) bureaucratic centralization or, 2) the market economy. They deliberately ignored the third and Marxist choice, namely: the transferring of all power to a nationally elected congress of workers’ councils that would make the final decisions regarding planning and investments. ⁹

    Ali explains that the councils would consider the advice of professional economists and then make the final decisions. There is no doubt, however, that the professional economists would have advised that somehow there had to be saving and investment, that inflation had to be kept under control, and international competitiveness maintained. They would have pointed out that the worker-controlled factories in Yugoslavia went into debt and failed because they had to keep costs low enough and sales high enough to turn a profit, just like capitalist firms.

   The need to comply with the functional requirements of the system remains—even when ownership changes hands—because the system is a circulation system, not just a production system. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the systemic imperatives of circulation are neutral, far from it. Nothing triggers capital flight so much as a threat of nationalization. With a few exceptions, the global market acts as a homeostatic mechanism that reacts negatively to transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor, thus restoring society to its normal practice of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. Efforts to do without the market and coordinate the overall economic processes of a society through political control of the system, trigger another threat: what Friedrich von Hayek called “the march down the road to serfdom”. ¹⁰

   In practice, a socialist-leaning government that stays sincere in not giving up to merely manage capitalism and still seeks ways to move toward a classless society is limited by the need to comply, day to day, with the functional requirements of the system. Globalization narrows the options, even more, as national governments find that decisions are out of their hands, now being made by international markets, by the WTO, and by the IMF. The systemic constraints may be overshadowed in the public mind by the more spectacular obstacles to social change, like military intervention by the U.S., but they are very real. In the context of trying to move toward a good society even in the face of the systemic imperatives that govern the system, the philosophy of Gandhi again becomes a valuable resource. Yes, he showed in practice that ethical action could change history; however, he also showed, as is less known and less understood, the arbitrary and ethnocentric character of the constitutive rules of modern economic society. He thought outside the normative framework that governs homo economicus. He not only thought outside it, he deliberately lived outside it. For this reason, his way of thinking and acting inspires those influenced by him today to think outside the box. In our times, when the options appear to be narrowing day by day, the example given by the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi widens the options.

In the next chapter, I will write about Vandana Shiva, a wonderful Gandhian woman who, as we speak, widens the options.

Notes

1. These three are Marx’s "holy trinity" which he conceived as portions of the surplus value extracted from labor. [Cite Marx] In the model here assumed it is not necessary to assume that the ultimate source of property income is exploited labor; it could also be a rent from property, where property is itself conceived as itself a factor of production that generates value.
2. Cite Freire. I will also use the term workers to mean people, as the term people, at times, refers to workers, peasants, and whoever looks oppressed.
3. Cite Kuznets and/or someone else
4. Cite some studies. Apart from the two ways to a classless society mentioned here one might imagine a society where machines did all or most of the work, and all the people shared ownership of the machines. In this case, the upper class would be the universal class ushering in a classless society where everyone’s income was rent, interest, and profit. J. P. Narayan thought along such lines at one point, as did Fourier and Saint Simon.
5. The point here is that empirical studies show that there are ample reasons for having conceptual categories in which to put people whose scores are moderate on class measures. It should also be noted that there are in fact fewer and fewer people to put in those categories. Neoliberalism has brought with it a dramatic decline of middle class status in many countries. (Cite studies)
6. Cite article in Gandhi Marg, and Chapter 13 of DSD, and other works that might be found.
7. Cite Ali.
8. Trotsky, Deutscher, and remarks of Ali about them.
9. Tariq Ali, 1968 and After: Inside the Revolution. London: Blond and Briggs, 1978. p. 42.
10. Von Hayek and another distinguished Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, showed that the tendency to lose political freedoms when planned economies replace market economies is a threat inherent in the logic of the situation. Although there are ways to avert and solve the problem, it cannot be solved simply by weeding out psychotic personalities like Stalin and Hitler, or simply by putting people like Tariq Ali—who believe in freedom—in charge of the process.

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IV. Tariq Ali

 update: 8/23/08     

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