Why do ethnic parties, who break away from socialist parties to champion ethnic causes, form new parties and call themselves “social democratic” or “federal socialist”? What is its relevance to ethnic emancipation? None. Socialism rose against exploitative capitalistic structures of industrialism while social democracy has roots in evolutionary socialism and primarily arose to emancipate people, not from ethnic exploitation, but from exploitation by the market. Social democracy is the best political ideology we have today that balances hegemony of the market (capitalism) with the hegemony of the state (socialism). However, Janajati parties are not it. They are more like European far right parties such as the British National Party (BNP), for whom “race” (British indigenous is the most crucial aspect of nationhood. But at least the BNP clearly says what it stands for, instead of using a Marxist façade.
The disjoint between political rhetoric, ideology and quality of their actual policies is so widespread that it has become a norm. After all, who is not using such a facade Guess what the latest political line adopted by the UCPN (Maoists) is. It is to start a capitalist revolution. Really, comrades? Of course, communism requires the material base of capitalism, but they knew this before starting the revolution, right? If it is simply about economic growth and not about sharing the fruits of capitalism equally, what makes them Marxist and not followers of Hayek, the free market political scientist? After all, economic growth can be jobless (no job increase), ruthless (only for the rich) or futureless (unsustainable). Capitalism by itself is not enough.
And it was the Maoists who made the CPN-UML a laughing stock by announcing that the “real” communists had now arrived, so why vote for the fake communists? But even a cursory review of Maoist social policies (or lack thereof) confirms that they are not quite “real”. I am not simply talking about the signing of BIPPA but lack of any substantive, universal rights based services established for the poor and the working class since the rebels came to power. The Bhattarai government has instead promoted scattered NGO-type “awareness” programmes. Remember how he himself went to clean the rivers and streets of Kathmandu with gloves and brooms, and said that if only the behaviour could be changed, Kathmandu would be clean? Not so, comrade. Leftists don’t believe in only behaviour change. They believe in structural change. And no, I don’t think Kathmanduites want to take on a cleaner’s job. Keeping our house clean is our duty, keeping the streets clean is the duty of the appropriate agencies of the government (not the prime minister) through a functioning waste management system.
Moreover, if it was simply about market liberalism, the Nepali Congress (NC) was on the right path. Not that this was in line with its own ideology, which apparently is democratic socialism (socialism through democratic means). I say apparently because it may have been slightly socialist under BP Koirala (policies such as abolition of the “birta” system in the 1950s were indeed revolutionary), but he is long gone and his successors are the most neo-liberals of our political bunch. The NC alone is responsible for liberalising everything when it came to power in the 1990s. And I am not only talking about Bansbari shoes, but social services such as health and education, which should at least be protected in democratic socialism.
A while back, Ram Sharan Mahat had written an article entitled “Road to prosperity” which was eerily similar to Hayek’s “The road to serfdom”, both of which praise capitalism’s inevitability for progress. Ironically, Hayek is against the creation of the welfare state and is a neo-liberal while Mahat’s NC attends the Socialist International together with the British Labour Party, an advocate of the welfare state. Moreover, the NC’s social policies look like 19th-century poor laws which preceded the welfare state.
The UML, on the other hand, is supposed to uphold the principles of socialism. As a party that introduced old-age allowance, child grant and housing assistance, the UML can claim some social-democratic legacy. But while this started a “better than nothing” social policy in Nepal, it is not even residual in nature, let alone, being comprehensive and universal, and still comes under liberal poverty reduction strategies.
Ironically, the only real socialist appears to have been king Mahendra, be it centralisation and expansion of free education, reformation of the Muluki Ain (Civil Code) for caste equality or land reform. What can be more socialist than putting a ceiling on landholding, and hence taming the biggest source of capital itself? But his dynasty was toppled to usher in “socialism”. While this does not mean that the monarchy should be recalled, it is important to discern between rhetoric and policy.
So we have a situation where our country’s political parties are dominantly “left” in name (about 75 percent of the Constituent Assembly seats were won by these socialist or communist parties) but overwhelmingly “right” in their policies. In the article “Right way” (TKP, January 25), Gyawali has urged the right (monarchists) to make its voice heard in the midst of domination of the left. I would argue that the monarchists are ultra-right conservatives and that the so-called left parties are in fact “right”.
In the book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama has stated that free market liberalism has triumphed. Ironically, that appears to be the case in Nepal. But this is not necessarily true in the West, whose own liberal capitalism has been transformed into a welfare state based on social democracy and welfare capitalism. As Chomsky says, the West preaches liberalism to the rest of the world and destroys them while continuing to have radical state intervention in its own economy. Contrary to mainstream misconception, capitalism has not defeated socialism, but instead has been tamed by it, and for good. Hence the ideological war, in fact, has ended in the West with some form of welfare capitalism the only game in town. Nepal’s attraction to the “left” is not only understandable, but desirable. But for real impact, the parties need to either change their ideology or their policies. Not doing so, before the next election, is political fraud.
Khadka is a PhD candidate at Monash University, Australia
Posted on: 2013-02-28 08:39 , Ekantipur, Nepal
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