Deepak Lal: Socialism and liberty

The suppression of political and civil liberty is an essential part of socialism of various kinds.

The public interest litigation (PIL) filed by an NGO challenging the 1976 insertion of "socialism" in the Preamble of the Constitution, and the 1989 amendment of the Representation of the People Act making it incumbent for political parties to pledge allegiance to socialism, brought back many mixed memories. In 1973, I spent a year at the Planning Commission helping Lovraj Kumar set up a Project Appraisal Division. At the time I was a child of my Indian background and education in the PPE school at Oxford: a social democrat, a Keynesian and a believer in planning (albeit through the price mechanism). That year turned out to be a formative year: making me question both my previous assumptions about the benevolence and public spiritedness of bureaucrats and politicians, and the very intellectual basis for planning and government intervention.

It was also a formative year for India. After her "Garibi Hatao" election and victory in the Bangladesh war, Indira Gandhi turned leftwards, promoting the policies advocated by many Communists and fellow travellers in her coterie: nationalising mines, banks and the wholesale grain trade. It seemed that the Fabian socialist nirvana her father unsuccessfully sought to promote was at last to be delivered. But, as with so many of her actions, appearances could be deceptive, as the Left soon found out with her declaration of the Emergency in 1975. (Raj Thapar's excellent memoirs provide a vivid account of the raising and dashing of these socialist hopes.) The 42nd Amendment, passed during the Emergency, was partly window dressing, to appease the disillusioned Left and a potential instrument to thwart her political opponents "" a purpose achieved by her successors with the 1989 amendment's requirement for every political party to swear allegiance to socialism.

The Supreme Court has rightly allowed this 1989 amendment to be challenged by the PIL, which claims it is "a grave breach of the liberty provision of the Constitution". But, its summary rejection of the plea to declare that socialism is not part of the "basic structure" of the Constitution has prevented it from discussing the relationship between socialism and liberty, which Dr Ambedkar, the father of the Constitution, saw clearly in opposing the inclusion of "socialism" in the Preamble. He said: "If you state in the Constitution that the social organization of the State shall take a particular form, you are, in my judgment, taking away the liberty of the people to decide what should be the social organization in which they wish to live."

Revealingly, the Chief Justice in dismissing the petition to delete "socialism" from the Preamble, stated: "Why do you take socialism in a narrow sense defined by the Communists? In a broader sense, socialism means welfare measures for the citizens. It is a facet of democracy. It hasn't got any definite meaning. It gets different meaning in different times." This raises a number of points.

First, words do matter. If a word has no definite meaning it has no place in a Constitution. Second, socialism does have a meaning. All the various socialist sects share a belief in egalitarianism. The major difference between the Communist and Fabian versions is that, the former seeks to promote egalitarianism by socialising the means of production, the latter by seeking to socialise the results of production. Third, there is an alternative set of political beliefs, classical liberalism, which promotes liberty but eschews egalitarianism. It, however, accepts the need for the State to help the deserving poor and to finance merit goods like health and education for those unable to pay for them (see my Reviving the Invisible Hand). This is close to the Chief Justice's definition of "socialism". But he seems confused about the two different political philosophies, which both accept "welfare measures" but with different ends. Socialists wish to promote equality, classical liberals liberty. Classical liberals eschew socialists' egalitarianism because (as Nozick demonstrated) "equality" conflicts with "liberty". As he wrote: "The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults" (Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 163). Fourth, egalitarianism as a moral belief is part of the cosmological beliefs of the monotheistic religions, and not part of those set of moral beliefs, including Hinduism, which accept what Louis Dumont called Homo Hierarchicus (see my Unintended Consequences). Fifth, socialism is a modern instrument of control of the Predatory State.

This last point needs some elaboration. It is now well recognised that the suppression of political and civil liberty was an essential part of the Communist version of socialism. But it is equally true in a different form of the softer variety of social democracy. Fabian socialists have always been in favour of the Nanny State, because as Douglas Jay memorably stated, "The gentlemen in Whitehall know best" what is in the housewife's interest. This strand of socialism has now taken a new lease of life in England, with many socialist thinkers advocating State interference in the previously protected private sphere on the grounds of aiding the virtuous half of a postulated divided individual self. In support, using Mill's arguments against slavery (in On Liberty), they claim that he would not have objected to this form of paternalism in the private sphere as going against his principle of liberty. This of course is a complete travesty of Mill, who explicitly discussed and dismissed similar paternalistic arguments against the use of alcohol and opium (see FT.com for Feb-Mar 2007 for an article by Amartya Sen, my letter in response and subsequent letters on the smoking ban in England).

This new social paternalism is a continuing attempt by socialist thinkers to amalgamate notions of "negative" and "positive" freedom. As noted in an earlier column ("Freedom versus Liberty", August, 2004), this arises from the ambiguity in the word "freedom", which as it implies not having obstacles placed in the way of individual actions, allows confounding being free to do something with being able to do it. It is therefore unfortunate that the rejection of the PIL's plea to remove "socialism" from the Constitution's Preamble has prevented our highest court from the essential debate about socialism and liberty.