‘Party’ institution in changing ultra-modern settings, contours of modern individual and problems of historic compromise

Anil Rajimwale

We are living in times when the urban contours are fast changing, and modern individual is becoming ultra-modern. In cities, it is the high-rise that rules the contours of the urban setting,where individuals are both crystallized as separate individual/social atoms and at the same time wired through information and communication technologies. The new means of communications makes the individual a unit unto himself/herself. People may be seen talking to themselves, while they are in fact talking to another individual on 2-G and 3-G sets that are further collapsing in size but getting more efficient and multidimensional in their functions. A whole world is with the individual: he/she connected with more and more events and discharging functions on the gadgets that converge various labour processes into similar ones. The individual is connected with the world through telephony, cameras, voice and image transmissions etc. These extensions are rapidly extending farther, and the individuals become part of the networking.

It is a world in which capitalism is entering the phase of late capitalism, with many features that do not match its traditional and existing features. The burst of means of production, and in particular of means of communication/information reveal new features in the evolution of the individual and the class. Urban conglomerates become the centre of further evolution, with agriculture definitely a small and receding accessory to the main line of evolution. This line of development has also gripped the developing economies like that of India. The event has great historical implication for the future. It is almost certain that the ‘rural’ is going out of the human civilization, culture and economy, and will survive more as a memory of the past.

The successive younger generations do not at all want to look back at the rural and the agriculture, the past of human history; the reasons are not just capitalist industry, which of course is one of the main reasons. Among the reasons are technological, informative and cultural. The rural does not fit in with electronic technology, and wherever electronics i is being used in the rural activities, it is turning them into industrial and urban ones.

Cyber-proletariat

Cyber-proletariat rather than proletariat is emerging out of the social evolution, with the workers/employees getting ‘armed’ with more and more electronic add-ons and thus being in constant contact and instant contact with the world outside. They have too many things to lose including the means of production and communication, and that is why their mental and material make-up is unlike the traditional proletarian working class and more like the middle ‘classes’ or sections.

They endeavour to become members of the middle sections of society. It has both the positive and negative aspects, which the social scientists and politicians have to take into account. The consumer-oriented individual working sincerely to earn, aims to have a better, decent, and secure life with all the facilities that modern technology and culture provides. Their ‘class’ and mass aim is different. The word ‘class’ has to be used only with reservations. It is as, in and through the individual, nuclear family and group/community that they see their future. This ‘bourgeois’ in them has strengthened, but it is. not to be confused with the bourgeois class. It is the world of separate self-satisfied bourgeois which they hope to achieve. At the same time, it would be mistake to confuse with the traditional bourgeois. These sections and their individuals have, in today’s conditions of STR/ICR, a tendency to go beyond bourgeois capitalist limits.

One should not get deflected with the word ‘bourgeois’. It is a condition of relative isolation in one’s own world, a world which is constantly intruded into by the giant corporates and big business, which is opposed even by the small and medium level capitalism. This atomized individual’s world is also the starting point of a new world beyond the present one.

The modern/ultra-modern buildings tend to separate the individuals from each other and to dehumanize them further. At the same time, the contradictory process and means of uniting them is also rapidly emerging: through wiring and networking. It is a different kind of individual and a different kind of uniting the individuals. Urban centres are a universe of universes.

These universes are being realized in form of small and big residential areas, where the modern and postmodern information makers, transmitters and simple employees and workers/engineers and persons of other professions live. When we talk of other professions, they include doctors, lawyers, teachers and others.

The working class tends to join this vast change as a working mass with new features of labour with information and service. The new working class includes features of all these classes and professions, the professions include the features of the working class.

New generations

In this great churning, the individuals carry the whole of the past, as well as the present and the future. Today it does not take much time for the future to become the present. The new generations will be armed with all sorts of electronic gadgets, and therefore be inseparable from them. The generations want to develop with self-respect, confidence generated out of new means of electronic manipulations, immediate results, end of corruption, and concrete contributions in accordance with inputs. Their identity formation takes a different path or paths, and that is more important than before.

The parties in general and those of the left in particular have to keep these fundamental changes in view in their methods and ideology of work.

Historic compromise and historic bloc/front

A social front is emerging out of these developments in the course of social motion. A front is not just a political and temporary compromise, as is generally made out to be. That may be true for limited electoral and political gains, and it has its own importance.

Otherwise too, in the course of democratic and socialist revolutions, fronts have been conceived of relatively long-duration alliances on certain common issues. 

Here we are talking of something different. Today, groups, classes and communities as well as individuals have or can come to a kind of tacit understanding on certain issues of long-term nature. They realize that if certain things are done, their interests will be met or fulfilled. Use of information, spread of internet and mobile, spread of urbanization, problems of environment, construction of metro rail, spread of culture or songs or sports and so on need certain tacit and unwritten understanding on certain things to be done, e.g.: construction of electronic installations, electricity, railways, taking up development of cities and infrastructures, observance of religion and tradition or their negation, recognize role of individuals and so on. This brings about certain commonness among groups that may be termed ‘historical compromise’, which cannot be broken despite best efforts of political parties or governments. Armed with new technology. this compromise forces or propels the social movement forward. It is a sort of combination of social motion and social consciousness of different groups.

In historical compromise, something breaks out of and is different from the intentions of superstructural institutions, which due to electronics revolution, are both losing their importance and at the same time imparting many of their functions to what went traditionally by the name of ‘base’. It is a front or compromise or agreement that the political parties and the government must recognize and act accordingly. This should be more apparent to the left parties with scientific approach. The policies formulated accordingly should be giving rise to fronts and alliances.

Culture, religion, and freedom and democracy also constitute important terrains of historical compromise. What electronics revolution has done is to enhance the historical mixing up and churning of past, present and future, leading to a crisis of identity, which often becomes more important than economic issues. It at once becomes important to rightly fill the gaps in culture, history and religion, so as to anticipate, pre-empt and roll back the reactionary forces.

Today it is the culture of electronics that is being produced and spread. There culture of the mobile (phone) and culture producing the mobile reflects the inter-penetrative dialectics. It would be a great mistake to identify culture and past only with remote periods: there is for example culture produced only yesterday, when the electronics was born. The culture of the remote past tends to dissolve in it after a certain brief period of flash. There no such thing as ‘caste’, yet there is casteism as never before.

The historic compromise is to enable changes in political and socio-economic structures consistent with the electronics revolution. The past and the present mix up rapidly, yet the right mix is to be found. The past becomes insignificant part, a receding one, of this future. While there should be full rights to be believers in God or be non-believers, western Europe with its high level of technology has already relegated God to the background.

In India we are struggling to give healthy interpretations to history, religion and personalities to let them play a progressive role in social development. The left and scientific socialism should play the role of the defender of the rights of the believers as well as the non-believers. The working masses have a right to religion, which the reaction wants to deprive them of. This is a democratic right, and we are for democracy and socialism. Socialism defends every healthy right of the people. This the historic compromise, this recognition, which meaning is already inherent in the social development. The conflict is sought to be inverted to show society is only for one religion and not for others. This deprivation of rights is the worst oppression.

The process goes hand in hand with another historical compromise of the urgent need to develop electronics and thus to reduce the sphere of god and increase that of the material means.

The modern and postmodern party of scientific socialism should expand the area of and facilitate the historic compromise and form historic bloc. This is a new function of a party of scientific orientation.

Flexible party of scientific socialism

Therefore, a left party with scientific outlook, say a communist party, cannot discharge its functions properly without being armed with this new stage of ideology. Flexibility should be the cornerstone and keyword of its function. The CPI is most suited to this function, and is highly respected as a sober party by the people.

Today, the situation demands a flexible organization, democratic mood and polity and methods, transparent dealings and sincere and open and mutual and consultative discussions on equal basis. The party and its members and leaders have to be fully tolerant. Sectarianism of allkinds has to be given up. Today, a party of scientific socialism has to be totally free of Stalinism and Maoism, (whatever the contributions of Stalin and Mao; that is another matter).

Difference and its tolerance, dissent and debates today are unprecedented result of mass churning set about by the STR and the ICR. Dissent and differences must be, have become, the rule of life. The various monopolies and shackles on theory and practice are breaking down, and concrete facts have to be raised higher levels of abstractions..

It does not at all mean a rosy picture of high ideological level; in fact the level has come down in any senses and sections. General knowledge has also suffered, and the TV also is much to be blamed for this, even while contributing to a general level of information.

The point is that we are living in an envelope of information explosion. Those who use it positively will propel the society forward.

In the cities of tall buildings of glass walls and world of electronic communications, parties of radical programs without transparency are an anachronism. New environment does not permit  this, and the new individual, even if he is a rickshawala, will not tolerate it, not to talk of the electronic programmer. The city provides a postmodern setting with buildings designed for different ways of thinking.

In the modern cities, the paths are widening, the transport is rapid and complex, buildings at once tall and transparent and forbidding, the quarters of the poor struggling to come out of the shackles,-and the electronic communications directing the life, new paths are being welded particularly by the young working people, e-ways are rapidly emerging as the dominant ways to the future which become the present in a flash, employees, professionals and so-called middle sections fuse together new ways to liberation based upon democracy.

Giant megacities and electronic networking are the future centres of revolutionary transformations already proceeding; they are also the centres of historic blocs of such changes.