Socialism of the Future / Future of Socialism

Com. Parmeswaran said that he did not want to speak on the future of socialism since it implies the survival of the 20th century experiments through tactics to revive it without envisaging any substantial change in the understanding of socialism. He said that his interest lay in speaking about socialism of the future because it implies substantial changes in the earlier understanding, a difference from the socialism of the past. The reason he said was that he had been in a socialist country for three years when it was socialist. In the years 1962 to 1965, in Moscow where he was a doctoral aspirant, he said that he intuitively felt that something was wrong.

During his life in the USSR he found that socialism in that society was on the verge of disintegration. He said that he found that instead of expanding and broadening the base of democracy there had been a continuous contraction of the same. In the early 60s he began discussing the problems with communist friends when he found that most of them were quite candid about their knowledge of all the problems and said that they were trying to change things but they failed.

He found that their concept of development was not very different from that of capitalism in America and consequently they were always anxious to catch up with America. If anything went wrong there was no force to correct it and corruption took over. He found that Marxism-Leninism was a compulsory subjects for university students who learnt it just as just a subject to study and pass an examination. Marxism Leninism was not a tool for shaping their lives and society, it was not a philosophy, it was a subject. He described the changes in the country and its final disintegration as “painful but not unexpected or shocking”.

Some people raise a question is that the same socialism that was there in the Soviet Union? Is that not already discredited. One of the things which he found was that the concept of development in the old socialist countries; did not accommodate the concept of sustainability. Though Marx and Engels have written a great deal about the issues of the interrelationships between man, society and nature none of it found realization in their scheme of things. He said that a society which asks for more and more natural resources which are limited cannot be socialistic cannot, maintain socialism for long because the natural resources will be depleted and there are not enough natural resources to sustain the rising level of consumption. He said that since he came back and joined the KSSP (Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parisad) and the CPI(M) of which he continues to be a member for the last 32 years, his has bee to fight for socialism.

He said that he considers justice, security, progress and sustainability as cardinal aspects of a future world -call it socialism, call it by any other name. But justice demands social control on the resources. So, one of the elements of the basic elements of socialism is the element of justice. The use of the state as a method of controlling resources on behalf of the people has shown that things can degenerate. So it has to be another form of social control. According to Com. Parmeswaran the best conceptual way of social control is seen in Gandhian literature. He gave the example of local government, local societies, local production, as opposite to globalisation.

Local needs can be controlled by local societies, small societies. He opined that very large mega enterprises cannot be controlled by local societies. So there should be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of local societies. How the local community is to be related to the larger community, to the national community, to the global community requires much more study. Security needs of people have to be met, security needs of self, children and grandchildren have to be taken care of, for human beings according to him are three generational beings.

Progress, he said, does not mean exponential increase in consumption. He suggested two indices of progress. One is called the physical quality of life index. Another called the spiritual quality of life index. He used the phrase spiritual quality of life purposefully to say that spiritual qualities are not the prerogative of religion. They are the prerogative of society. Sustainability he argued should be considered for millions of years. He said that solar energy should be the basis for society, for there is no other energy source, which will last for millions of years. So it can be called solar democracy or solar communism or solar socialism.

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