Declinism

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the centuries of `-isms’. After the (French) Enlightenment idea that man can shape his social and political future through conscious action, that found its practical demonstration in the French Revolution, -isms of various flavor got traction. Although in existence since well before the age of Enlightenment, the term `capitalism’ was used to describe the existing economic order only in 1850 by Louis Blanc, which is a good sixty one years after the French Revolution. Just three years before this, with the publication of the Communist Manifesto, socialism and communism had been added to the political lexicon. These concepts were further established by the publication of Das Kapital in 1867. There were, in addition, anarchism (Bakunin et al.), nationalisms of various flavors (civic nationalism of England and France versus cultural nationalism of Germany, Poland and Italy) etc. The political vocabulary, evidently, was rich.

This indicates that there were a number of options available. Once the central premise, that man can shape his political future by conscious action, is accepted, one needs a definite plan of action, or a political program to work along. Depending on the kind of future one envisaged, there were a number of different ways to build a program guided by various -isms.

Opposed to that era of competing political theories, we are living in an age of an apparent lack of alternatives. There is no alternative, TINA, to quote Margaret Thatcher (albeit, changing the meaning slightly) who coined the term in the 1980’s. This is a rather sad predicament to find ourselves in, as we are living in an age of profound social and political changes the likes of which have not been seen in a few centuries. One thing that can be said definitively about the current epoch is that the old order is crumbling. The capitalist order, or world system as Wallerstein calls it, is in existential crisis. Concurrent with that crisis, many institutions of liberal democracy are also in crises. To be sure enough, even the institution of nation state is in crisis. Given the scale of social upheaval, it is a pity that there are no alternative ideas of political organization on the horizon. No alternative political ideas means there are no concrete action plans for consciously shaping the future.

Given this lack of political ideas, let me introduce an idea that I would like to call decline-ism, or declinism. I borrow the word from Morris Berman (who calls himself a declinist as far as his analysis of the US and its global empire is concerned), and elaborate my ideas around it. Declinism, unlike isms of the earlier two centuries, does not call for immediate political action, much less gives a recipe for a political program. Rather, it calls for temporary inaction and critical introspection. It puts value on the courage of hopelessness, as Slavoj Žižek puts it. But it is not to be confused with despair. Despair comes with a negative connotation. Declinism encourages a positive state of mind. It calls for a realization of the fact that there is no grand scheme in history, `there is no deep logic to the unfolding of time’, historically speaking, notwithstanding what Michael Ignatieff may wish for. There is no direction in history, ‘history is on nobody’s side’ as Wallerstein put it. Since there is no grand scheme, and no particular direction in history, one has to fight one’s own battles standing on one’s own convictions. There isn’t going to be any help from either any greater moral force, or any natural direction of events. Therefore, one has to accept facts for what they are, that our present socio-economic formation at the global level is declining, it is terminally ill, and try to analyze and innovate from there.

What compels me to make such an ominous declaration? Well, it’s not me. A whole spectrum of economic experts have been saying that capitalism ‘has now come to a dead-end’. This includes the British commentator and Editor of Channel 4 News Paul Mason. In his book Postcapitalism Mason identifies the crises of present-day neo-liberal capitalism. He traces its decline not to any political revolt waged by the left, but, ironically in spite of FB and Goolge, to abundance of free information. Then there are Samir Amin, the Egyptian-French economist, John Smith, the Rutgers Economist, Richard Wolff, Harvey Davis, Immanuel Wallerstein, and our own Prabhat Patnaik. One must add to the list the flamboyant Slavoj Žižek. Patnaik says, ‘… capitalism at the moment has run out of options. It is yet to become clear how it will come out of this.’ Davis and Wolff essentially agree. Wallerstein and Žižek have more ominous predictions. Wallerstein predicts ‘the next 30-40 years will be hell’.

Now that a number of leading present-day thinkers agree that capitalism is in terminal decline, let us try to understand what else is in concomitant decline. In decline is the liberal democratic order, as I already mentioned. Žižek thinks we are moving from a liberal democratic to an ‘illiberal democratic’ era with the present crisis in capitalism and its institutions. Rise of China, Russia and similar illiberal powers definitely does not bode well for liberal democracy. The reasons for decline of the liberal order are perhaps embedded into the ideas of Enlightenment itself, as Pankaj Mishra has argued at length in his book Age of Anger. But let me not go that far back in time. I will confine the discussion to more recent events.

It would be wrong to assume that the simultaneous decline of capitalism and liberal democratic political order is an indication that the former fostered the latter, or that capitalism can function only in a liberal democracy. Far from it. Some of the most efficiently functioning capitalist economies today are political autocracies. Take the examples of China, Malaysia and Singapore and you will get the point. Facts are more curious than that. Liberal democracy is on the decline precisely because of the form of capitalism that has been practiced globally over the past, roughly, four decades. 

Fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was a déjà vu moment for the proponents of unfettered free-market and liberal democracy. It was The End of History for Fukuyama and his ilk, and the world became flat for Friedman. The human civilization had reached its final point in evolution, Fukuyama proclaimed, and it was a matter of time before the institutions of liberal democracy spread all over the world. Roughly thirty years later, we are analyzing the reasons for its decline (and possible eventual demise in some more time).

So what happened in the intervening period? Turns out, TINA was a dangerous path to tread. As long as there were two ideologies, free-market capitalism and soviet-style socialism counter-balancing each other (though the two may not be fundamental opposites as is often made out) both survived. After the fall of socialism, instead of free-market capitalism becoming the economic order, and liberal democracy the associated political order, the world is seeing nation states trying to re-introduce protectionist measures, the beginning of a trade war as a consequence, and a good part of it (including the US, messiah of the ‘free world’) is already in grip of authoritarian rule.

In order to understand what happened in the intervening period, one does not have to go very far. Just getting out of one’s upper-/middle-class comfort zone and looking around, pretty much anywhere in the world, is enough. A lot has been written and said about how the middle class collapsed in Britain and the US, how that has lead to Brexit and the rise of Trump. So let me write, in very plain words, how I saw the world around me change.

Past nearly three decades of neo-liberal economic policies have seen investments in education, healthcare, public utilities going down over time. This started in the 1990’s. Till that time it was  generally accepted that government of the day had a responsibility to make sure that children go to school, teachers get paid, the health centers function and so on. To what extent these things really worked can be discussed, debated, but so long as there was a social-political consensus that these are the responsibilities of the government, one could hold it responsible. One could build politics around these issues. In 1991 Manmohan Singh as the finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government initiated neo-liberal economic policies. We started hearing that the government cannot bear these responsibilities any more in such a large and populous country like India. This was an excuse to open up these sectors for private profit. So there was mushrooming of private schools, colleges and universities with little control over the quality of education they imparted, or the amount of money they extracted. In fact, in my opinion, letting education and knowledge to be exploited for private profit is the single-most destructive step a society can take for its long-term survival as a civilized entity. It cannot be missed that this was intimately related to the crisis and decline of capitalism. As the old form of industrial capitalism was not as profitable, in its greed, the (global) capitalist class is in constant lookout for monetization and privatization of ever newer aspects of our lives. If opening up the business of education for making profit was not enough, arrival of reality TV opened up our very personal emotions as well for private profit.

So, affordable education slipped out and continues to slip out of the hands of common people. In this context let me narrate a story which is remarkable for its poignancy. We had a security guard working in our organization whom we knew for years. He was one of the most trusted and dependable ones. We could leave our children under his observation and trust him for their safety on their way to and from school. Like everybody else, this fellow also put his child in some local ‘English-medium’ school. And the problem started there. First he started borrowing from people to pay the school fees. But, obviously, it was not possible for him to pay back all that he borrowed. So this process was bound to fail. And the next thing we knew he was arrested by the police for carrying a consignment of illegal arms. Just think of the ordinary people around you—the maids, the taxi drivers, the rickshaw pullers, the vegetable vendors—one medical emergency, and their lives are ruined. thewire.in reported (April 14, 2018) that ‘An overwhelming 70% of healthcare expenses in India are met by out of pocket expenditure by the individual, due to which about 7% population is pushed below the poverty threshold every year.’

In addition, there is an agrarian distress that is going on for nearly three decades now. I will not go into statistics, for they are singularly ineffective in conveying the pains and sufferings of flesh-and-blood human beings. It is enough to recall that scores of farmers have committed suicide over this period. First it started in regions where the soil is not so fertile, and rain is scanty. But lately, it has spread to the fertile Gangetic plains as well. Recently I learnt that many state governments have made it a policy to push people towards the towns and cities, because, the argument goes, so many people cannot be sustained on agriculture. This is a blind imitation of similar policies followed in many European countries when they were industrializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with little appreciation of the fact that disaffection these caused is having social consequences even today. On a more practical note, it is fool-hardy to think that we will be able to repeat that model of ‘development’ in the twenty-first century in this late phase of capitalism. This is what Mishra writes on the issue in Age of Anger:

… the Economist said that, on the basis of IMF data, emerging economies – or the “large part of humanity” that Bayly called the “long-term losers” of history – might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the west. In the Economist’s assessment [in 2014], which pitilessly annuls the upbeat projections beloved of consultants and investors, the last decade of rapid growth was an “aberration” and “billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have expected just a few years ago”.

This brings us to the next level of problems. Displaced people, separated families, broken communities, shattered lives. People may be pushed out of their natural dwellings either due to lack of economic opportunities, or simply to make way for ‘developmental projects’—highways, industries, dams or whatever. These people, pushed to a life of anonymity in an alien town or city, lose whatever dignity they had in their traditional surroundings. Not all newcomers to the urban areas are necessarily as desperate though. There is a section of the landed class who decided to move to the newly ‘developed’ urban centers simply because agriculture is not profitable enough any more. This class, with huge sums of money in their hands, living in swanky new apartment complexes and gated communities, do not know what a civilized urban existence is. Displacement from the traditional ways of life, even if partly voluntary, leads to a loss of sense of meaning and purpose of life. All this shows up in bizarre crimes that crosses all limits of rational understanding: burgeoning rape cases associated with almost psychopathic violence on the victim, school kids shooting and stabbing each other just to get an exam postponed, school students threatening or beating teachers and so on. 

Aiding these pathologies is the easy availability of digital technology. Research has shown that excessive use of digital technology reduces our empathy. And for sure, addiction to smartphones reduces real face-to-face human interactions. As a result, we get isolated into our individual ‘electronic cocoons’ failing to empathize with the sufferings of anyone else. Remember the days when the death of mine workers in Chasnala elicited discussions and artistic expressions of solidarity with the working people. I think that kind of a large-scale communal solidarity is impossible in today’s atmosphere when, seeing someone dying on the road or drowning in water, our first reaction is to record it on our smartphones.

Getting to the theme of neo-liberalism, it has led to an enormous amount of suffering—both material and spiritual—of common people. I would even argue that spiritual suffering is not confined to the ordinary and the marginal alone. Everyone is affected by it. A drive for accumulation of endless wealth at the expense of everything else can only be a poor substitute for a communal way of life where meaning and purpose is derived more from social and familial bonds, responsibilities and obligations.

In this mature stage of neo-liberalism, thus, we have lost all that bonds a healthy human society together (with all its imperfections that need constant working on and improvement). This has been a real loss indeed. Associated with a lack of an alternative political idea, we are at a stage where we do not know what to do. Most of us know intuitively that there is a deep problem. Some know more consciously, analytically, its reasons and forms. But none of us has an alternative. Do I keep doing the same things that has brought us to this predicament, hoping that, providentially, I and my progeny will somehow be saved? Do I take a radically new course? What is that? There are no easy, straight-forward answers. Individual action is going to be of no real consequence anyway.

Standing at this critical juncture, I believe the first thing we should do is to accept that things are not going to improve in the short run. Even if you make a killing at the bourses, even if you get the next promotion in quick time, even if you win a great award, life is going to get worse, overall. The water that you drink, and the air that you breathe are going to get more polluted, the food that you eat will contain more and more chemicals that are harmful for you. Jobs are going to disappear. The idea of full-time jobs with associated benefits leading to a secure life with your loved ones are going to disappear. Education, particularly higher education, is going to get more expensive in most countries. I can go on. But the point should be clear by now. Our kids are going to have to live much worse lives (rotten ones in all likelihood) than us.

This realization, and understanding that our civilizational structure is collapsing, is to be at the core. It is crucial to realize that one or two elections (in countries where they still take place and have meaning) are not going to make any difference. We are in the midst of a great historical change. So building ‘resistance’ here and there is also not going to alter the course, though mass protests on specific issues will to play some role in shaping things, and to bring in some semblance of morality and sanity in public discourse. [Recent outrage at the Kathua and Unnao rape cases are examples of that]. But being keenly aware of the fact that we are going down, understanding and analyzing the reasons why we are going down, are going to help us in the long run. Once this phase of rapid change, when the capitalist order of the past few centuries, after its culmination in neo-liberalism, crumbling under its own pressure, gets over, may be we will have learnt some lessons. (Though I am not confident that this phase will pass without a serious collapse of the existing human civilization given the damage we continue causing to our environment). We have to develop, as Yogendra Yadav says, a ‘cultural tool-kit’  that helps us understand, and ride out (if we survive it), this phase. This cultural tool-kit must include our attempts at finding new meanings in life that goes beyond the dominant ideas of our present-day techno-commercial civilization which only glorifies mindless consumption. Among other things, it must search for a new science that, unlike our present-day science, goes beyond a mechanistic, reductionist interpretation of the natural world; a science that proclaims not `I think therefore I am', but ‘I think and feel, therefore I am’; a science that looks for ways to exist harmoniously with nature rather than constantly looking for ways to manipulate and exploit it for comfort, convenience or profit. We must reinvigorate arts and literature to explore questions about inherent values of human life. We must look for new spirituality and morality that explore man’s position in the cosmos with an open mind; spirituality and morality that explore with renewed vigor how man can co-exist with nature and his neighbors. We must look for modes of politics that constantly keep the welfare and a meaningful life of dignity of the many at its center. Its fealty should be to these core principles rather than to replacing one power structure with another. This is what I call ‘declinism’.