Gandhi vs. Lenin
by S.A. [Shripad Amrit] Dange
1921
Printed by S. V. Lalit at Loksevak Press, Govardhan Building, Bombay No. 4,
Published by the Liberty Literature Co., 434, Thakurdwar, Bombay No. 2.
We shall not give the Govt. assistance to collect revenue. We shall not assist them in carrying on the administration of justice. We shall have our own courts, and if time comes, we shall not pay taxes."
-- Lok. B.G. Tilak. in 1906
CONTENTS.
• My own Foreword
• Chapter I: Introductory
• Chapter II: Society of Today: The Class War
• Chapter III: Gandhi vs. Lenin
• Chapter IV: "The Armed Blow"
• Chapter V: The Indian Revolution
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
MY OWN FOREWORD.
Every book must have a preface or a foreword; and that preface must be from a well-known writer or a ‘leader’ standing high in public-favour. These are the first principles of publishing a book in our days. If we analyse prefaces to publications of our times, they fall into the following classes: The preface (1) containing a eulogy of the writer’s abilities to write on the particular subject in hand and pleading the necessity of such a book on that particular subject, (2) containing a summary of the subject-matter of the publication and one or two paltry suggestions, (3) containing an impartial judgement on the book by a man, who knows the subject very well and showing the descrepancies, if any. A good book with the 3rd kind of preface is a rarity now-a-days. Hack-writers, wishing to sell cheap, far and wide meet us at every book-stall with glaring placards, mentioning with great care the name of the preface or foreword-writer, who in ninety cases out of hundred is some demagogue assuming the airs of a patriot-leader in the politics of the day. The public seldom knows the troubles the poor writer has to undergo, to procure for their benefit, a foreword from some 'great leader,' with the key or stamp of whose name, he wishes to enter the regions of public favour. He has to introduce himself through several other less great leaders, satellites of the centre planet. ‘The Big Boy’ sometimes does not even know that his person is so well guarded by his faithful ‘crooks’. After introduction the poor preface-procurer, has to flatter the ‘great leader,' saying in the usual line, that he is the only one capable of giving any opinion on the subject and that the public would like to hear his views and that etc., etc. Then the ‘great leader,’ all smiles, condescends to go through the book once. For some days, the poor writer waits dreaming that the book is being gone through. He returns to hear that on account of pressure of work, (of course public work because a ‘leader’ has no time to visit the race-courses and the speculation bazaars, at least openly,) he could not find time.* [I know of a well-known professor, a Marathi scholar, who could not find time to write a preface, until he or rather the time was paid for it!] But he would be glad to do it very soon. If the writer relying upon the words of that honest man has advertised the time, when the work was to be out, he has to express his regret that on account of ‘unforeseen circumstances the publication was delayed.’ After all these troubles of coming and going to the 'great leader’s’ house, sending in visiting cards, (for even in a leader’s house, men must not enter without sending in their names, like a Hindoo! Lok. Tilak was not a ‘well-bred leader’ for peasants could go and speak to him without 'announcing’ themselves!) the public gets some lessons in patriotism, the new spirit in the nation, their birthrights and fighting the battle of liberty to death and so on. [Now-a-days every writer must mention at least once the Khilafat and the Punjab wrongs!] The readers, dazzled by the strong wording and high notions, never dream that the whole thing, over the signature of the great man that they are reading, has been written, not by himself, but by his learned private secretary, specially paid and maintained for this purpose!1 [Many capitalists and money-leaders of Bombay have their speeches, written by their private secretaries, who are sometimes bar-at-laws, and deliver them in currency committees and industrial conferences!] By this I do not mean that all publications are such. What 1 mean is simply this, that if a foreword is to be a mere eulogy of the author or a summary of the subject-matter to follow, it is better that the book should be without any foreword, because the reader can very well know both the writer and the summary, after reading the book himself. However a novice in the line of writing has to suffer these hardships. Let us remember that Johnson suffered much more before he became Dr. Johnson!
Now I will begin my own true foreword. I thought of writing this booklet, when at the beginning of the N.C.O. movement our opponents began to discredit it, by pretending to find signs of Bolshevik activity in the movement and thus kill it. The public knew very little of the Bolsheviks beyond some fables, created by news-paper booming. Seeing this I thought of writing this booklet, to show the extreme contrast between the methods of N.C.O. activity and the Bolshevik plan, to accomplish their ideals. There is not much literature, available for such a work, on the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks; because our Government takes great care to guard the gates of India against the entry of authentic literature on the subject. What has been allowed to enter, is written by men who hate the Bolsheviks and are of imperialistic tendencies. In such a situation, it is difficult to write with confidence on the subject. However my purpose will be served, if the booklet gives at least an idea of the elementary principles of the great movement in Russia and of the hypocrisy of those who would class N.C.O. with Bolshevism, if my countrymen come to recognize the magnitude of extremism to which we will have to go in our struggle for emancipation and to expect and be ready for Government Terrorism, a veritable greater Ireland on the Indian soil!
My foreword is finished. I am sorry, at the end 1 cannot add the author’s script to mention and thank some kind friend for having read and corrected the proofs of my book, as is the custom; for I myself had to do the work!!
Bombay,
April 1921.
S. A. DANGE.
Chapter I: Introductory.
"The Earth is of God and it cannot be accursed.”
-- Mazzini.
Acquisitiveness, vanity, rivalry and love of power! When the great massive genius of the Macedonian Conqueror lay silent in Babylon, perhaps Aristotle in his philosophic mood might have murmured, “Acquisitiveness vanity, rivalry and love of power, what wert thou, but a mixture of these, that now thou dost thus lie there in dust!” When the dormant fire in the huts on the Arab sands blazed into flames, what else but these moved them to put the unbelievers to sabres. The Golden Rule of Haroun-al-Rashjid or the days of devastation by the nomadic hordes of flying Zenghiz Khan were ruled by these and these only. Nothing but the volcanic irruptions of these seething elements in the human mind fill the most interesting and busy periods of History. Discord in the harmonious rule of the world is the headline of History. Peoples of the world possessed no written history so long as there was harmony. The day when they did the first thing that could be written as history, was the day of the irruption of these elements, a clay of discord in the House of God!
Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy arc the symbolic measurements that read to you the gradual extension of the Kingdom of these Imperial Majesties, acquisitiveness, vanity, rivalry and love of power. When then kingdom extended only over one mastermind in a nation, there was Monarchy. When many, many such master-minds became participators in the rule of tyranny and came under the sway of these fascinating, skin-beautiful hydra-heads of the disfigured sides of human mind, there was Aristocracy. And last of all, when a sufficiently large number became bondsmen to these governing instruments of crime, a number sufficient to drown the voice of God within man, by its cheers of joy for the attainment of what they thought to be the heavenly form of life, under the sun and beyond the sun, it was called the advent of Democracy. So,
Monarchy: All not-freemen except one.
Aristocracy: Most not-freemen except a few.
Democracy: Majority not-freemen except a powerful minority. Such was and such is the position of the contending masses in their struggle towards the realization of the ideal of mutual association and unhampered life of individuals. As long as oppression was centred in one head and one hand— as long as there was Monarchy — the struggle for emancipation was not a hard one, which is clearly exemplified by the comparative ease, with which even mighty monarchies were overthrown in the ancient past. But as soon as the ranks of oppression began to be recruited from the proud intellectuals and the so-called chosen of the people, as monarchy became seconded actively by aristocracy, the struggle for emancipation became still more hard. The common citizen, looking with hatred and awe to the palacial manors of the chosen grinders of the people and ground down under the systems of forced labour1 [In France and Veth in India.] and taxation2 [The Aristocrats were exempted from taxation in France and the Ministry of Turgot and Necker failed because they advocated taxation for all without exception. It was one of the causes that led to the Rev. in 1789.] for the benefit of the upper or heavenly, head-born3 [The Brahmanical class.] classes, whether in India or in Europe, lost all faith in himself and came to consider himself to be born for nothing but labour, fruitless for himself, fruitful for his chosen grinders. The individual was reduced to the state even below that of a hunting-beast, so much so that once in France there existed a law authorizing a Seigneur, as he returned from hunting, to kill not more than two Serfs and refresh his feet in their warm blood and bowels1. [Carlyle’s Fr. Rev.] From slaves of the monarchs to serfs of the seigneurs or the chosen higher, in the icy zones of Europe, men’s faith in the higher law and higher ideals, became chilled, while the hot imaginative mind of the Indian under the sun, losing all hope in the present matter-of-fact life, became resigned and pessimistic and sat, with eyes turned towards heaven, considering salvation in death or in the rejection of worldly life2. [Especially the school of Sanyasism in Hindu Philosophy and the school of Hinayanas in Buddhism.] Until at last it took the whole life of Luther, Rousseau and Voltaire, to teach man to consider himself as man, to reveal to the famished individual that he was the sovereign of his destiny and of his life. “They recovered to humanity its lost little-deeds.” This was a revelation of good as well as evil. The individual was sovereign! Ah! Then why shall he not conquer and be free! Monarchies with their guilded thrones, and Aristocracies with their chateaus built of the hunger and curses of the poor, tumbled down. The individual was free and was sovereign! But it was the beginning of evil too. Possessing no ideal but the negation of a lie, negation of subjection to the chosen few, and not being given side by side, the ideal of subjection to the Higher Law of God, to life of common good and association, the individual strove only to suppress the lie! But when it was suppressed, what remained? The whole daemonic nature of man remained,— hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilization: a spectacle new in History3 [Carlyle’s Fr. Rev.]. The individual thinking only of his rights and never of duties, substituted himself in the place of those whom he had overthrown, with the difference that where there were the chosen few, there came the many from the common file, but still participators in the continuation of the same criminal rule of oppression. As the ranks of oppression began to be filled from the oppressed themselves, the struggle became still more hard and bitter. Under Democracy people found that they themselves being participators, were oppressors of themselves. The nobles, Sirdars and aristocrats of the old order, were followed in the new one by capitalists and entrepreneurs. Liberty for the individual was recognized a little but liberty for other nations was denied. Whole nationalities began to subject others to slavery.
The initiation of the second stage of emancipation of the individual from the rule of the privileged or the rise of individualism in Europe began with the French Revolution. The very heart and centre of the rights of man suffered from ebb and flow, on account of the vile plotters of authority, who read their doom in the new age. Metternich and his associates stemmed the tide of the consciousness of the individual, for some time, until at last came the year 1848, the year of revolutions and constitutions, after which people saw many from amongst themselves in the high throne of democracy. It seemed as if the days of tyranny were over, thanks to the French Revolution and the all-leveling campaigns of the Corsican conqueror. The peoples dined over the constitutions and democracy waved the banners. They thought themselves happy and free and forgot the pains that slavery inflicts on man and newly thought of conquests, of putting others in slavery. They had been taught ‘‘everyone for himself,” “here on earth and nowhere else.” With such doctrines, digested and turned into flesh and blood of their life, their ideal of life became “acquisitiveness, vanity rivalry and love of power.” History had begun with these Crooked Four. And after centuries of toil and blood-flow of martyrs, what was the result, what change? The result and change was that the executive power in the dominion of these Crooked Four was transferred from monarchs and aristocrat-slave-owners into the hands of many of the slaves themselves, who exulting in the change of hands, became sergeants of these devilish elements in their turn.
As such in their zeal they turned for conquests and conquered India, Africa, Persia and other principalities of the East. But we are chiefly concerned with India and its evolution under these newly emancipated slaves and slaveowners of the civilized order.
India with her water-tight compartments of the divisions of her peoples into classes, had evolved a philosophy and an Indian mind, which had fully realized and imbibed the principles of that philosophy. And this philosophy was specially and thoroughly efficient to maintain and promote the spirit of that particular form of social division. It was nothing but the Hindu philosophy and view of life that had maintained the class divisions of India, in their origin designed to maintain and facilitate a division of social labour1 [Mr. B. G. Tilak on caste system in India.], but in later stages becoming obsolete and oppressive.
The doctrine in Hindu philosophy, that the whole development of the human race, and course of events, was pre-arranged by God, and the individual was nothing but an instrument in the fulfilment, in the practical realization of this pre-arranged plan of the universe, made the individual a firm believer in the doctrine of fatalism. This led Indians to find the cause of every calamity, of every good as well as evil, of every injustice, in their preordained destiny, before which they thought their potent energies to be powerless to achieve anything which apparently seemed to be against the mysterious settled course of events. And they judged of this opposition of events, or their favourableness, not from any plausible causes, but from omens, from predictions of astrologers, mahants and fakirs. Such methods abound in societies where individuals, having lost faith in their subjective energies, seek revelation of the predestined course in objective signs and utterances. Another principle, a necessary corollary to the first, was that of contentment. Since the individual was unable to change or undo anything, as everything that was was there according to an already settled plan, what was the use of struggle? In contentment they must live, in submission to the lot that had fallen to them according to their destiny. The natural result was that men became inactive, less struggling, and less persevering1 [The Sanskrit proverb that the Dakshinatyas are enthusiastic at the beginning well illustrates this view.]. And moreover, this habit of mind was helped by the comparative easiness with which Nature yielded to the Indians the necessaries of life. The Indians formed a character of accepting the existing order of the day without demur, and of submitting to the miseries that arose from the obsolete and oppressive forms of the social order in which they found themselves born. In full accordance with the principle of contentment, and the pessimistic view of life, they were never interested in the pursuits of gaining mastership over the forces of Nature, to add to the ease of life by inventions, or explorations, or exploitations, unless it became absolutely necessary for a decent upkeep of life. For all these virtues (!) the Europeans naturally compliment us, since it is to their advantage, and necessary for their existence in India, for these virtues of living on few necessaries of life, of law-abiding nature, of aversion to rapid and radical changes or revolutions. Perhaps these very virtues have become at this stage in Indian politics very much detrimental to our own interests!
In spite of all this, what saved the Indians from the deteriorating and pernicious effects of such doctrines was their extreme faith in God and Religion. Only that marvellous faith, the most distinguishing feature of the Indian character, saved them from the complete extinction of their race, or decay from within due to immobility.
And Indian History shows that if ever there have been great struggles, they have been for that faith and that Religion which the Indians cherish. If ever true Hindu States of the people have been built by the people, and not by ambitious monarchs, they have been built for the protection, preservation, and promulgation of that faith and Religion. The Buddhist Empires, and the Maratba Revolution, clearly testify to that.
Such principles made the Indians indifferent to the miseries of the social order, which sometimes became so oppressive that great minds had to overthrow or modify them, as in the days of Jnaneshwar or Tukaram. However, the character of divinity created behind these divisions,1 [Geeta.] and often misunderstood in the real sense, supported them, and the serfdom or the bondage to the higher classes continued to grow in India, while the same was being destroyed in the European world. So it was that when the aggressive spirit of Europe began to extend its activities, it found easy matter for subjugation in India. The struggle for conquests was between the acquisitive spirit of the Whites, and the governing powers of the Indian principalities. The masses in India were immersed in themselves, and never thought of the foreigner. They had seen many such coming and going, guests for a while.
But the new guest showed no signs of ceasing to be a guest with the dinner of spoils he had received, as others had done. But when the economic drain, the grinding of the new master began to pinch the stomachs of the masses, they began to search for the cause. But instead of finding and striking at the root of the evil, they retired into themselves and still more cut down their necessities, murmuring that it was God’s will, and that it was their fate that was to be blamed!
But it was now time for the masses of India to awaken to the new spirit that was coming from the Whites of Europe, and either to assimilate it, or reject it and give it a death-blow. But the Indians, with their want of faith in their power, without subjective consciousness, were unable to do anything of this kind. And as Rousseau and Voltaire were required to spend a whole life in teaching the individual his rights to freedom and sovereignty to make the individual conscious of his latent powers, so the whole life of the great genius of Tilak was required to make the Indians feel that they had a right to individual freedom as everybody else had, and that it was their sacred right and duty to fight for the accomplishment of that freedom.
With the advent of the European conquerors in the land, and the subsequent permanence of their rule, the system of jurisprudence introduced by the new rulers possessed much of the spirit of the European systems, though through thoughtfulness, and as a measure of policy, much of the necessary character of the old systems of law prevalent in the customs of the people was retained by the new rulers. Yet the vast change was that the divisions of the social whole into classes, possessed no credit with the rulers, who naturally disregarded them in the promulgation of law. The principle of these immemorial divisions lost its sanction and support of the temporal power, though they continued to exist on the support of the so-called religious sanction, and the habitual obedience of the people.
The new foreigners could not claim to be more civilized than their conquered subjects, if civilization meant refined virtues, and character, and mental qualities of high order. The only thing in which they could claim superiority was their mastery over the forces of Nature, their artful and ingenious science of mechanism: Evidently the people showed no love or loyalty of that nature, which the Marathas of the type of Jadhaves showed towards the Moghuls. These white foreigners had come to exploit the country for the aggrandisement of the personal interests of the members of their race, and the collective interests of their nationalities. Naturally they fostered a system of education designed to turn out, generation after generation, men with a spirit that considered itself always subservient to that of the foreigners, men who found themselves vastly separated from the masses of their countrymen in sentiments and in character. This cleavage between the intellectuals and the masses was to the advantage of the rulers, who found in the intellectuals obedient servants to them, helping and supporting their tyrannical, life-sucking system of government. This was the greatest danger that India had to face at the end of the 18th century. A peasantry that numbered 80% of the population, wringing its hands on account of scarcity, due to the wealth-drain caused by an ingenious system of taxation, and a class of intellectuals who only, in any country, can lead the masses, and show them the roots of evil, estranged from the masses, a class of intellectuals unable to understand their sentiments and character; thus was the dangerous situation of India when the Genius of Tilak began to work to stem the tide of the increasing evil.
With an all-comprehensive genius, a true hero in the Carlylian sense, he started the campaign of speaking boldly and vigourously, of criticizing the iron rule of tyranny, and of claiming it as his right to speak out what he thought, and to speak it direct. He suffered the consequences of this. But his suffering was necessary to shake the masses from their somnambulism; and he was successful. It set them thinking, which revealed to them the source of all their trouble. They followed their saviour implicitly. He became a joining link between the intellectuals and the masses. Through him the intellectuals came to realize their duty, and to lead the masses, and love them. The yawning cleavage was filled up. He taught the masses their individual rights to freedom, to free speech, to be left alone in their land, and not to be exploited for the sake of foreigners. His efforts made India conscious of the outside world, and brought her in level with the ideas that were governing the forces in the new world. But India’s faith in the higher Law and Religion was not corrupted by the new ideas of individual rights, as was the case with the nations of Europe. This very fundamental characteristic raised the fighting Genius of Tilak to the high pedestal of divinity itself.
Thus the Tilak period was one of consciousness of rights. And History shows that such consciousness walks hand in hand with a simple and sincere demand of constitutions. France demanded constitution of Louis XVI, who gave it but it “would not walk”. Italy demanded it of Prince Albert, Russia demanded it of the Czar and got the worthless Duma. Hungary did the same and got the blow of Metternich. So almost everywhere in the earlier stages of assertion of rights, constitution — fighting has been the first step. And History also shows that at the appearance of this step, repression has been the resort of tyrants. Such typical scenes as happened in France can be met with in the history of every people fighting for liberty. “Dreary, languid do these (masses) struggle in their obscure remoteness, their health cheerless, their diet thin. For them in this world rises no era of hope; hardly now in the other,— if it be not hope in the gloomy rest of Death, for their faith too is failing. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed! A dumb generation; their voice only an inarticulate cry; spokesman in the King’s Council, in the world's forum, they have none that finds credence. At rare intervals they will fling down their hoes and hammers, and to the astonishment of thinking mankind, flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless, get the length even of Versailles, Turgot is altering the corn-trades, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is dearth real, or were it even "fictitious,” an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so on the 2nd of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do here at Versailles Chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present, as in legible hieroglyphic writing, their Petition of Grievances. The Chateau gates must be shut, but the King will appear on the balcony and speak to them, they have seen the King’s face; their Petition of Grievances has been if not read, looked at. For answer, two of them are hanged on a new gallows forty feet high, and the rest are driven back to their dens for a time!”
The people going to the bureaucrat's palace in the capital Delhi in the April days of 1917, and the answer of guns to them— certainly a better and speedy remedy than a new gallows forty feet high — and the exploits of Dyrisim in the Punjab are the best reproductions of the French scenes, and the necessary accompaniment to constitution-fighting. Without such scenes, excitement and subsequent progress are impossible.
Besides this, the Tilak-period had produced another great thing. The leader of the peoples had also his treasure of independent philosophy. By his life and his masterly treatise on the Geeta, he put before the people, with an authority which he alone possessed, a new conception of man's actions. He saw the dangers arising from the pessimistic philosophy, and he changed the vision. The people of India are always in a mood to accept anything that came from a religious source. Geeta was the only source through which anybody could speak to the people. With forty years of study, and experience of action according to the Geeta, he revealed to the world, and to India in particular, the underlying principle of continuous Karma, without egoistic covetousness for the fruits of it, continuous Karma for the realization of divinity in man. By his living example, he taught to the Indians their duty of dedicating life to the service of Humanity without egoism. The people, who had been fed over doctrines of inaction, or Sadhuism, gradually changed their vision, and believed him. Most important of all was this conquest, of destroying the people's pessimism, and making them hopeful about the future, in struggle while serving humanity. The "Tilak-Period of Rights” taught the Indians, “The Earth is Of God, and it cannot be accursed.”
India is modernized. That is what we Indians are today. Upon modern India of Tilak, a Mahatma is making his experiments of new methods of winning liberty. The modern systems of fight initiated by Tilak are suspended, and the quite new methods of Tolstoyan school are being tried to win freedom. History is repeating itself. Struggle is followed by repression, repression is mostly followed by success of the people. Now martyrdom is weltering in blood. But in this land of the Buddhas, the tree of Liberty shall not be watered by the blood of despots. How long, Oh! Lord!
CHAPTER II: Society of To-day: The Class War.
We have seen that the peoples of many nations left behind them the stage of individual bondage to the higher and privileged classes and the rise of Individualism was the product of the struggle. We saw India modernised in the Tilak period in the first twenty years, of the twentieth century and we now find ourselves struggling to overthrow the foreign Yoke, as the first result of the appearance of Individualism amongst us.
We said India is modernized. And we further say that in it lies her life as well as her death. How?
The modernization of India is being carried directly on the European lines of progress. Naturally if the progress of events in Europe results in the happiness and well being of that people, the same type of progress perhaps may result in the happiness and well-being of our people too. And if it causes misery and death to them, it will do so in our land also. We say perhaps because the civilization of one people, may not cause the well-being of another too, as it happened to the original natives of America and Australia, to whom the coming of the civilization of the Whites was a signal for the destruction of their races, though in some cases the destruction was brought about by a well-planned scheme of extermination, and not by the introduction of the new civilization. But what causes misery and death to a number of human beings in one place causes misery and death to another set of human beings in another place, if exceptional circumstances are left aside. A race of Eskimos from the polar regions would not flourish happily in the Indian climate as one of Negroes or Chinese would; but a number of human beings made to live in dense-packed cities and filthy houses, would certainly suffer from their pernicious effect, whether they be Eskimos, Indians or Chinese. The simple reason for all this seems to be that the forces of destruction and death work more uniformly than the forces of development and culture. So we will try to see what this new progress means to Europe and to us, whether it means life or death to Europe and life or death to us also.
Side by side with the work of emancipation of the common people from oppression, an industrial revolution took place in Europe, with which every student of history is quite familiar. This industrial revolution introduced the age of mechanism of our days. The whole course and standard of life of all communities, in which this revolution appeared, underwent vast radical changes. The old science of economics— though practically there was no such complicated science as now exists, — would not serve the purposes of the new social order that was ushered in by the revolution. Machinery-inventions made large scale production an easy possibility. But this large scale production, of course, necessitated huge investments in machinery plantations, which brought into existence a class of men who could make such investments, the class of capitalists. Mechanical production and output far superseded that of the home industries and village or guild-industries of the Medieval Ages. The ruin of these industries threw the old independent guild-labour-hands out of employment and thus brought them to the feet of the capitalists, who could propose their own terms to the labourers. The labourers could do nothing but offer themselves to these new masters on their conditions. This age of mechanism brought two changes in the life of the people. Machinery plantations could employ at one and the same time and place large numbers of labourers. The seats of such plantations became overflooded with population, chiefly composed of the labouring masses. The worsted condition of these masses on account of want of education as well as want of money and facilities for development made such city-life still worse. Labour hands that before lived in their villages, lost all their independence, the healthy condition of surroundings and the moral environments of open village life. On the other hand, the possibility to carry on unlimited production through machinery in a very short time, gave to the capitalists means of making vast profits, which intensified the feelings of acquisitiveness, vanity, rivalry and love of power. This made them disregard the condition of the labourers that they employed, and whom in course of time they began to consider as another piece of machinery. The old lords, serfs and slaves were abolished; but new kinds of lords and Slaves came into existence, without those obnoxious titles, under the name of capitalists and wage-earners. Monarchs waging wars for personal interests and whims, in the name of patriotism, ceased to exist. But a new monarchical class, that of capitalists, with their various titles of ‘Silver-Kings’ and ‘Copper Kings,’ with their executives of speculators, commission agents, exporters and importers, began to drag nations into wars, wars for their capitalistic interests, for capturing markets and countries to sell their goods. They worked out the labourers for hours like lifeless machines, produced vast quantities for the people of other nations, and in order that this surplus product be sold, they made wars. But why all this trouble? Why should the Manchester capitalist try to clothe the whole of India who can, and who could, if left alone, do without this philanthropy of these new slave-owners? Why could they not be content with clothing their own men abundantly and cheaply [produced]? And after all this competition and wars, who were to be benefited and happy? The labourers, who had toiled and suffered hardships? No! Not at all! The whole wealth, thus obtained by starving the labourers at home and ruining labourers abroad, through competition, went to satisfy the lust of the capitalists. The labourers were men as much as the capital-owners were, but these monsters had their lusts to be satisfied, had vain ambitions of being called men of millions. These monster-heads began to corner the wealth and land of the world, while the labouring masses suffered of want and hunger. Political parties and state mechanisms with their sham of democratic representations were dominated by their purses. Thus becoming masters of the political wheel, which alone is competent to effect reform in society, they could suppress the cry of lessening the miseries of the working-class.
Thus society of our times has come to be divided into three classes; “The capitalists that is the possessors of the means and implements of labour, namely lands, factories, ready money and raw material; contractors that is the heads and initiators of labour, commercial men, who represent or ought to represent intellect and the working men, who represent manual labour.” The capitalists have become the masters of the new slaves, who are not given the rights of human beings even. “Time for education, intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free play of his bodily and mental activity— moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labour, Capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it, where possible, with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of bodily power to just so many hours of torpor, as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour, which is to determine the limit of working day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour power, no matter how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be, which is to determine the labourer's period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour power that can be rendered fluent in a working day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility. Capital extends the labourer’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life time."1 [Karl Marx: Capital I, p. 249.]
Such intensity of the evil of the new system has generated a bitter hatred of the working classes towards the capitalists. To wrest from them more wages, shorter hours of work, strikes have become the order of the day. But such puissant methods do not move the capitalists, since in days of dearth of work, they being well-to-do and well-fed can afford to wait, while the poor labourer, living in a hand-to-mouth condition, has to yield and submit to worse conditions.
Such is the course of events in Europe, where society is daily faced with the problem of capital and labour, and the thoughtful of that community are scratching their heads to solve the problem.
We have seen India modernised and her industrialization is vehemently urged and carried on. Naturally her industrialization will be accomplished and is being accomplished on the lines of European systems. When this is done, surely, all the evils of European industrialism, all the methods of class-war between capitalism and labour, will rear their breeding here in our Society too.
Our country at present is suffering from the greatest danger of being impoverished to the last farthing and the last grain of corn by the avidity of European capitalists, assisted from within by our own men, and helped in their devilish designs by an oppressive foreign government. The impoverishment is being carried on quite methodically and constitutionally, which in the case of private persons would have amounted to ingenious robbery and homicide, not amounting to murder, by processes of slow starvation. The 200 millions of our peasantry are reduced to a level of want and suffering by heavy taxes, which are squandered in paying foreign military contingents,1 [In the budget for 1921-22, Rs. 66 croros i.e. 51 p. c. of the total receipts are appropriated for military and in this it must be remembered that the European Jack-boot is paid 4 times more than the Indian Sepoy. Perhaps the Luxurious Moghul soldiers of Aurangzeb’s camp required much less!] maintained for the so-called defence of the country from the frontier tribes, who perhaps never think of India, but really maintained to shoot down patriotism2 [Sir William Vincent's speech in L. A, clearly reveals this motive.] and in pensioning monstrous crops of European civilians, who are the worst possible lot in the whole governing system, and who turn traitorous to the interests of India, after grazing abundantly with their kith and kin on her golden-pasture-lands, as soon as they leave her shores.3 [Lord Curzon and Lord Sydenham are the best examples to illustrate this.] Another method of impoverishing is the continuous export of Indian corn to feed European countries, for which they pay us back by prohibiting our emigrant settlers from lands where our men had suffered hardships to clear the land of marshes and cultivate it.4 [As in South and East Africa.] Government declares scarcity in one part of India, and from another part exports corn to other nations,5 [When scarcity was declared in Kaira district, 1.5 million tons of wheat, 1.9 millions tons of rice were exported from India. Govt, complained for want of transport tonnage while 40,000 waggons wore engaged in simply transporting coal. Foreign machinery must be first fed before starving Indian human beings!] the whole profiteering business being carried by European contractors and capitalists. Our peasantry sells the corn for the high prices offered in order to satisfy the lashing tax-collector, and turns to extract from the land more produce, which in course of time will deprive our cultivated areas of fertility, and cause still greater scarcity. This system of causing dearth finds a somewhat similar parallel1 [Such parallelisms between the Fr. peasantry before the Revolution and ours are not of our own making. Vaughan Nash says in his "The Great Famine," referring to the rigorous collection of land revenue, "cold comfort this for people, who are brought as low as the peasants of France before the revolution, who have ruin and hunger as their daily portion, while plague and cholera stand over them ready to strike. To them appears the Govt. of the British Empire in the likeness of the Broker’s man."] in French history before the Great Revolution. We will quote a few lines. "In the meantime, in contrast with this life in high places, poverty and misery had increased among the people, and most markedly among the cultivators of the soil, to a degree that would appear incredible if we had not at hand the testimonies of men of all class, men who were more than moderate in their views. (Perhaps those very men are born amongst us to-day in our Moderate camp!) Speculators, seconded by Government, and the more covetous courtiers, traded on this misery, and had organized what was termed by contemporaries the Pact of Hunger. By a series of market operations, the whole corn of the country was exported, and when the premium paid on exportations had been received, the whole stock was accumulated in Jersey and Guernsey and other depots and sold again, when the needs of the people had reached their greatest extremity, at very high prices, as though it had arrived from America.”2 [Fr. Revolution. Mazzini p. 278.] If the hunger-stricken peasantry of France answered this by the Reign of Terror, were they to be blamed? And yet William Pitt and his liberty-loving (!) England bribed other nations to kill this France!!
The fourth method of impoverishment is the industrial development of India, which instead of benefiting us, intensifies our poverty, a phenomena quite peculiar to India. Indians clamour for the development of their resources. The Government, with paternal love, condescends to do that. Industries that yield vast profits are undertaken, not by Government, but by European capitalists. And the whole profits from them thus are poured into the pockets of White capitalism. Indian labour, and India’s resources, are exploited, not for her people, but for foreigners. The railway companies, tea, jute and other plantations, mining concerns, shipping companies, and such others, yearly drain from India her wealth in the shape of dividends to the share-holders, 99% of whom are European capitalists. Where these are not benefited, industries are neglected, and to add to the misery, the people are blamed for not advancing capital for the construction of their own industries. Someone has said in London, “You may have either flourishing industries, or a flourishing bureaucracy; but never both.” We certainly want the first; necessarily we must destroy the other? The two are mutually exclusive!
And the fifth method is Government’s systematic gambling with regard to the currency. Indian merchants are prohibited to import Gold from foreign countries, where they have exported their goods, but they have to pay in gold for their imports. Gold flows out of India, and instead we are given pieces of paper, and nothing but paper; consider them worth a farthing, or a thousand; after all the peasant cries in despair, “I have sold my life, my corn; and what have I got? Printed paper!” Our gold reserves lie locked in Ireland for White capitalism to grow fat over it, and we are fed on printed paper. What wonder if one day we rise to find India bankrupt?
Besides this impending danger of national impoverishment and bankruptcy, we have to face another one, that of the evils of industrialization appearing in our society, and becoming our inherent scourge, as it has become of the Europeans. Political emancipation is the remedy for the first danger, and we are struggling for it with methods which we will notice in the next chapter. But even when we become politically free, how are we to avert the dangers of modernization, the dangers of the class war, between capital and labour? Because even the class war is showing its head amongst us. The introduction of factory industries is drawing off more and more of our harassed peasantry to the factory plants in large numbers, and to take to the life of slavish wage-earners. Large populated areas in industrial towns well exhibit to what level of life our wage-earners are being reduced. Our society has already begun to breed the class of capitalists, which is the source of so much evil in Europe. When the cost of living rose extraordinarily high in times of war, the Indian capitalists showed as much implacableness towards the demands of starving Indian labour as the European capitalists did. White capitalists can at least be excused on the ground that it is in their very nature and breeding to behave so towards the Indians. And who are the Indian capitalists? Most of our trade, foreign and inland, is centred in the hands of the Shethias of the Gujrathi community, the Marwaris, the Parsis, and the Bohras. Allied as their interests are with the foreign Government, and foreign capitalism, these capitalist communities of our Society are naturally opposed to our attempts at emancipation. And they in their turn exhibit all the greediness, idleness, cruelty, luxurious and demoralized life, consequent upon capitalism in every form and in every country. The capitalist landholders ruin the middleclass-man by cornering large land-areas, and then charging exorbitant rentals for the tenants1. [Charging high rentals had reached to such a high pitch of madness that in Bombay, a special Rent Act had to be enforced. But it has not proved very much effective.] Some of them make a sham of starting industries for public benefit, and under that pretext oust the peasantry from their holdings with the help of a despotic partial government.2 [The ambitious capitalists, the Tatas, have proposed to supply electricity to Bombay Mills, for which they want to acquire lands by ousting the peasantry of Mulshi Peta lands in Poona Distr. The profits of mills go to millowners and profits of these works will go to the Tatas because 90 p. c. of the shares are held by their own circle! A fine public interest!]
Thus the Indian Capitalists are doing three sins. They support the foreign despotism over us. They demoralize and ruin the peasantry, and the wage-earning classes of our Society. Doing this, they support and feed the capitalists of Europe, and thus help the cause of misery of the workers of that continent also.
So we have to think of two things. How to throw off the foreign Yoke? With what methods? And then how to destroy [the] evil of capitalism amongst us, which is making fast progress, and will double its speed when we are politically free. Mahatma Gandhi has put forth his methods of working out the destruction of these two monster diseases. Gandhism aims to cure Society of modern industrialization and modern civilization. At the same time, Bolshevism is working with the same view in Russia and in European Society. Since both the systems are working with a view to find a solution for a common evil, common to all nations, and since both, fortunately or unfortunately, are born practically in the same era, we propose to compare and contrast these two systems of philosophy and action, and try to see their efficiency to arrive at the desired results.
