HARD TIMES FOR DEMOCRACY
H., I.
Freedom prevents not the proletarian from eating but the tyrant from sleeping. — EDGAR MoxtN What is the use of deluding ourselves or trying to delude others? The recent destruction of...
...This development belies the catchphrases of those authoritarians who have in sisted that in developing countries economic growl cannot coexist with democracy (and of America: professors who think that realism consists in regard ing authoritarianism as inevitable...
...Economi growth in India was deliberately shaped by Mr, Gandhi's government to nurture a class of "kulaks' or large peasant landowners in the countryside and new bourgeoisie in the cities...
...What Mrs...
...It favored a redistribution of income and more progressive modes of taxation in order to spread the gains of economic growth more equitably among the people...
...q STILL, whatever the explanation for the recent events in India, one thing is clear: for democrats throughout the world, for everyone who believes in a necessary link between freedom and progress, liberty and reform, this is a depressing moment...
...But one thing ought to be stressed, and that is the gratification we feel about the role our friends in Portugal are playing...
...bore the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws, but to give them...
...The interested reader can find it for himself...
...Take the following passage: "...the general elections of December 20 and 21...
...But the struggle for democracy—east, west, north, south—remains a crucial precondition for any effort to build a better life...
...Still, a few preliminary remarks may be helpful...
...The article continues with a long, devastating quote from Marx about Mrs...
...There is no point in my repeating what Stanley Plastrik says in his valuable first-hand report...
...Led by J. P. Narayan, the admirable septuagenarian who is a veteran of India's liberation struggle against Britain and also its most distinguished socialist, the opposition was able to gather considerable support in certain cities and 309 among the young...
...Necessarily, the Indian political opposition— amorphous, in flux, and by no means settled into conventional leftist or rightist ideologies—found itself stressing a number of critical themes...
...It would be foolish to attempt a comprehensive analysis of the situation in India...
...And the opposition stressed the need for greater democratization of the country's social and political life, so as to bring the masses into at least the beginnings of decision-making...
...It takes various forms, it speaks through various ideologies, but it remains the most poisonous thought and politics in our time...
...And not only with regard to India...
...Gandhi did was to make a political decision—brutal, vindictive, reactionary, for which the ruling clique of the Congress party must take responsibility, and not History or any other impersonal agency...
...Theoreticians of authoritarianism—or their halfshamed friends among American professors, European leftists, and conservative realpolitiker—will now join, gleefully no doubt, in seeing Mrs...
...In the last several years there has been considerable economic development in India, roughly comparable to that in China...
...Whatever the outcome of the struggle may be—and right now, it seems that the odds are about even—the Socialists in Portugal have made a contribution to the renaissance of socialism in the era of totalitarianism...
...There are times when the prospects for democracy look better, times when they look worse...
...Mrs...
...but it certainly becomes considerably harder to present that argument persuasively...
...Gandhi has "vindicated...
...Voices from India A silence of conformity has fallen upon the Indian press, yet there are ways of speaking, tricks and devices one can learn from other countries, also eastern ones, which have had longer experience still with muzzling the press...
...They will disagree only as to which variant of authoritarian ideology Mrs...
...increasing from 30 percent to 40 percent in the years between 1947 and 1975...
...Gandhi's jailing of the leaders and militants of the opposition represents, among other things, a decision to continue at all costs the line of Indian development that she had previously chosen...
...With admirable clarity, both the Socialist and Popular Democratic parties—which together received 64 percent of the vote in the recent election!—have been developing views of a kind we have been committed to in these pages for more than 20 years: the indissolubility of democracy and socialism...
...the necessity of protecting freedoms of press, speech, and assembly, not simply as "luxuries" for intellectuals but as requirements for the articulation of working-class interests...
...the view that the alliance between the Portuguese Communists and some Portuguese military represents a marriage of authoritarianism made in hell...
...It does not prove that democracy is impossible in an underdeveloped country, any more than acts undermining or destroying democracy in European countries proved that democracy is impossible in a developed country...
...Take Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte...
...We, for our part, don't believe for a moment that she has vindicated any of them—no more than Hitler or Stalin, Franco or Tito "vindicated" authoritarian thought in the West...
...The Economic and Political Weekly, a sophisticated and critical Indian journal, prints on July 5, 1975, a piece that begins: Classics broaden the mind...
...It held large rallies, it roused sentiment for a renewal of the Gandhian spirit of self-sacrifice and cooperation, it committed itself strictly to nonviolence...
...oops, no, Louis Bonaparte...
...This policy had cei tain short-range advantages in stimulating produc tion and capital formation, but it also led to growin economic disproportions between the contending classes, with the segment of the population below the poverty line (as defined in India...
...We still live in the era of totalitarianism...
...This last phrase ought to be remembered...
...Our friends there, whom we might call upon for help, are either in prison or have been forced into political retreat...
...Fascism and Communism, different yet symmetrical, remain the enemies of hope...
...If we understand this to be the central fact of 20th-century politics, we can take a somewhat longer view, beyond the dismay caused by recent events...
...But there is nothing inevitable, nothing fated by History or the Dialectic, in this decision...
...Between socialists and the left-right authoritarians there can be no intellectual compromise, regardless of what arrangements may be necessary for international peace...
...they cannot speak freely at home or write freely abroad...
...That remains the socialist idea, and no matter what the difficulties to come, it will persist...
...It mounted a campaign against the vast corruption that had come to characterize the ruling Congress party (in part as a consequence of this party having held power too long, in part as a consequence of the lucrative ties it had formed, naturally enough, with the classes to whom it had brought prosperity...
...The recent destruction of democracy in India is a severe political blow to people of our persuasion—even if that destruction proves to be only temporary...
...The most revolutionary, the most liberating idea in our time is simply the effort to link democracy—what Mario Soares has called "democracy, period"—with efforts at social change...
...The journals of the Indian opposition, socialist and otherwise, that we have recently seen try to indicate veiled criticism, but they cannot say what they really think...
...Sometimes, they also help to entertain...
...We continue to watch the struggle in Portugal with passionate interest and some hope...
...It does not, of course, invalidate our general argument that democracy is essential, not only to any possible movement toward socialism, but even for rudimentary social progress...
...Gandhi's coup as evidence that they have been right all along...
...Throughout the world, at the present moment, democracy is in retreat: which is another way of saying that socialist hopes are also in retreat...
Vol. 22 • September 1975 • No. 4
