Radical
Humanist Philosophy has been presented as Twenty –two Theses in the form of aphorisms by M.N. Roy
probably in the model of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach.
Humanists start their quest from a concrete reality – the individual. This starting point – the existence of the individual human being as the reality precedes any theory or ideology regarding his life, welfare and destiny. What Radical Humanists want to stress is this: any theory or ideology that suppresses the reality, nature and functions of the individual as individual cannot be accepted by Humanists. Any social theory that discounts the basic element of society – the individual human being – is bound to fail. Hitler created a National socialist Party. In fascist parties individuals are said to have no unique importance save as the cogs in the wheels of their inhuman organizational structure. We have by now realized that communism too failed because of this negation of individual freedom. Capitalism, because of its undue importance to profit motive, creates a condition detrimental to the majority of the populace – not only workers, its ethics being anti-humanist, it ultimately harms even all other weaker capitalists. Whatever be the labels being used, we do not have pure socialism or capitalism anywhere in the world. No country has an economic system in which unbridled freedom for the entrepreneur is guaranteed. Even the militant communist countries have given in to forces of capital. This situation of the contemporary world drives thinking people to pessimism and illusory solutions. Rationalist and humanist movements everywhere have some good-natured idealists who want to divert the movement towards propagating and practicing their collectivist political ideologies. In fact, many humanists and rationalists were communists, previously. Radical Humanists and particularly M.N. Roy have the unique distinction of putting the entire theory and practice of communism and Marxism to rational analysis even while remaining within a Marxist party and continuing as leaders and activists of a Marxist party. M.N. Roy’s ideas expounded through the discussions are indispensable reading for any humanist who still holds strong sentiments or weak convictions regarding socialism or communism and wants to correctly assess what a humanist’s approach to these economic theories could possibly be. True to their conviction, the Indian Radical Democrats disclaimed themselves as a political party and decided to work as individuals on the basis of ‘The twenty two theses of Radical Humanism’.
My conviction is that Roy’s ideas furnish essential guide lines for creating a New Renaissance movement.
I.
The Twenty-two Theses of Radical Humanism
Thesis One
Man is the archetype of society. Co-operative
social relationships contribute to develop individual potentialities. But the
development of the individual is the measure of social progress. Collectivity
presupposes the existence of individuals. Except as the sum total of freedom
and well-being, actually enjoyed by individuals, social liberation and progress
are imaginary ideals, which are never attained. Well-being, if it is actual, is
enjoyed by individuals. It is wrong to ascribe a collective ego to any form of
community (viz. nation, class etc.), as that practice means sacrifice of the
individual. Collective well-being is a function of the well-being of
individuals.
Thesis Two
Quest for freedom and search for truth constitute
the basic urge of human progress. The quest for freedom is the continuation, on
a higher level - of intelligence and emotion - of the biological struggle for
existence. The search for truth is a corollary thereof. Increasing knowledge of
nature enables man to be progressively free from the tyranny of natural
phenomena, and physical and social environments. Truth is the content of
knowledge.
Thesis Three
The purpose of all rational human endeavour,
individual as well as collective, is attainment of freedom, in ever increasing
measure. Freedom is progressive disappearance of all restrictions on the
unfolding of the potentialities of individuals, as human beings, and not as
cogs in the wheels of a mechanized social organism. The position of the
individual, therefore, is the measure of the progressive and liberating
significance of any collective effort or social organization. The success of
any collective endeavour is to be measured by the actual benefit for its
constituent units.
Thesis Four
Rising out of the background of the law-governed
physical nature, the human being is essentially rational. Reason being a
biological property, it is not the antithesis of will. Intelligence and emotion
can be reduced to a common biological denominator. Historical determinism,
therefore, does not exclude freedom of will. As a matter of fact, human will is
the most powerful determining factor. Otherwise, there would be no room for
revolutions in a rationally determined process of history. The rational and
scientific concept of determinism is not to be confused with the teleological
or religious doctrine of predestination.
Thesis Five
The economic interpretation of history is deduced
from a wrong interpretation of materialism. It implies dualism, whereas
materialism is a monistic philosophy. History is a determined process: but
there are more than one causative factors. Human will is one of them, and it cannot
always be referred directly to any economic incentive.
Thesis Six
Ideation is a physiological process resulting
from the awareness of environment. But once they are formed, ideas exist by
themselves, governed by their own laws. The dynamics of ideas run parallel to
the process of social evolution, the two influencing each other mutually. But
in no particular point of the process of the integral human evolution, can a
direct causal relation be established between historical events and the
movement of ideas (‘ideas’ is here used in the common philosophical sense of ideology
or system of ideas). Cultural patterns and ethical values are not mere
ideological superstructures of established economic relations. They are also
historically determined – by the logic of the history of ideas.
Thesis Seven
For creating a new world of freedom, revolution
must go beyond an economic reorganization of society. Freedom does not
necessarily follow from the capture of political power in the name of the
oppressed and exploited classes and abolition of private property in the means
of production.
Thesis Eight
Communism or socialism may conceivably be the
means for the attainment of the goal of freedom. How far it can serve the
purpose, must be judged by experience. A political system and an economic
experiment, which subordinate the man of flesh and blood to an imaginary
collective ego, be it the nation or a class, cannot possibly be the suitable
means for the attainment of the goal of freedom. On the one hand, it is absurd
to argue that negation of freedom will lead to freedom, and, on the other hand,
it is not freedom to sacrifice the individual at the altar of an imaginary
collective ego. Any social philosophy or scheme of social reconstruction, which
does not recognize the sovereignty of the individual, and dismiss the ideal of
freedom as an empty abstraction, can have no more than a very limited
progressive and revolutionary significance.
Thesis Nine
The state being the political organization of
society, it’s withering away under communism is a utopia which has been
exploded by experience. Planned economy as the basis of socialized industries
presupposes a powerful political machinery. Democratic control of that
machinery alone can guarantee freedom under the new order. Planning of
production for use is possible on the basis of political democracy and
individual freedom.
Thesis Ten
State ownership
and planned economy do not by themselves end exploitation of labour: nor do they necessarily lead to an equal
distribution of wealth. Economic democracy is no more possible in the absence
of political democracy than the latter is in the absence of the former.
Thesis Eleven
Dictatorship
tends to perpetuate itself. Planned economy under political dictatorship
disregards individual freedom on the pleas of efficiency, collective effort and
social progress. Consequently, a higher form of democracy in the socialist
society, as it is conceived at present, becomes an impossibility. Dictatorship
defeats its professed end.
Thesis Twelve
The defects of
formal parliamentary democracy have also been exposed in experience. They
result from the delegation of power. To make democracy effective, power must
always remain vested in the people, and there must be ways and means for the
people to wield the sovereign power effectively, not periodically, but from day
to day. Atomised individual citizens are powerless for all practical purposes,
and most of the time. They have no means to exercise their sovereignty and to wield
a standing control of the State machinery.
Thesis Thirteen
Liberalism is
falsified or parodied under formal parliamentary democracy. The doctrine of
laissez faire only provides the legal sanction to the exploitation of man by
man. The concept of economic man negativates the liberating doctrine of
individualism. The economic man is bound to be slave or a slave holder. The vulgar concept must be replaced by the
reality of an instinctively rational being who is moral because he is rational.
Morality is an appeal to conscience, and conscience is the instinctive
awareness of, and reaction to, environment. It is a mechanistic biological
function on the level of consciousness. Therefore, it is rational.
Thesis Fourteen
The alternative to parliamentary democracy is not
dictatorship; it is organized democracy, in the place of the formal democracy
of powerless atomized individual citizens. The parliament should be the apex of
a pyramidal structure of the State reared on the base of an organized democracy
composed of a countrywide network of people’s committees. The political
organization of society (the State) will be coincident with the entire society,
and consequently the State will be under a standing democratic control.
Thesis Fifteen
The function of a revolutionary and liberating
social philosophy is to lay emphasis on the basic fact of history that man is
the maker of his world – man as a thinking being, and he can be so only as an
individual. The brain is a means of production, and produces the most
revolutionary commodity. Revolutions presuppose iconoclastic ideas. An
increasingly large number of men, conscious of their creative power, motivated
by the indomitable will to remake the world, moved by the adventure of ideas,
and fired with the ideal of a free society of free men, can create the
conditions under which democracy will be possible.
Thesis Sixteen
The method and
programme of social revolution must be based on a reassertion of the basic
principle of social progress. A social renaissance can come only through
determined and wide-spread endeavour to educate the people as regards the
principles of freedom and rational co-operative living. The people will be
organized into effective democratic bodies to build up the socio-political
foundation of the post-revolutionary order. Social revolution requires in
rapidly increasing number, men of new renaissance, and a rapidly expanding
system of people’s committees: and an organic co-ordination of both. The
programme of revolution will similarly be based on the principle of freedom,
reason, and social harmony. It will mean elimination of every form of monopoly
and vested interest in the regulation of social life.
Thesis Seventeen
Radical democracy
presupposes economic reorganization of society so as to eliminate the
possibility of exploitation of man by man. Progressive satisfaction of material
necessities is the precondition for the individual members of society unfolding
their intellectual and other finer human potentialities. An economic reorganization,
such as will guarantee a progressively rising standard of living, is the
foundation of the radical democratic state. Economic liberation of the masses
is an essential condition for their advancing towards the goal of freedom.
Thesis Eighteen
The economy of
the new social order will be based on production for use and distribution with
reference to human needs. Its political organization excludes delegation of
power, which in practice deprives the people of effective power; it will be
based on the direct participation of the entire population through the people’s
committees. Its culture will be based on universal dissemination of knowledge
and on minimum control and maximum scope for, and incentive to, scientific and
creative activities. The new society, being founded on reason and science, will
necessarily be planned. But it will be planning with the freedom of the
individual as its main purpose. The new society will be democratic –
politically, economically as well as culturally. Consequently, it will be a
democracy which can defend itself.
Thesis Nineteen
The ideal of
democracy will be attained through the collective efforts of spiritually free men
united in the determination of creating a world of freedom. They will function
as the guides, friends and philosophers of the people rather than as their
would-be rulers. Consistently with the goal of freedom, their political
practice will be rational and therefore ethical. Their effort will be
reinforced by the growth of the people’s will to freedom. Ultimately, the
radical democratic state will rise with the support of enlightened public
opinion as well as intelligent action of the people. Realising that freedom is
inconsistent with concentration of power, radical democrats will aim at the
widest diffusion of power.
Thesis Twenty
In the last
analysis, education of the citizens is the condition for such a reorganization
of society as will be conducive to common progress and prosperity without
encroaching upon the freedom of the individual. The people’s committees will be
the schools for the political and civic education of the citizen. The structure
and function of the radical democratic state will enable detached individuals
to come to the forefront of public affairs. Manned with such individuals the State
machinery will cease to be the instrument in the hands of any particular class
to coerce others. Only spiritually free individuals in power can smash all
chains of slavery and usher in freedom for all.
Thesis Twenty-One
Radicalism
integrates science into social organization and reconciles individuality with
collective life; it gives to freedom a moral, intellectual as well as a social
content: It offers a comprehensive theory of social progress in which both the
dialectics of economic determinism and dynamics of ideas find their due
recognition; and it deduces from the same a method and a programme of
social revolution in our time.
Thesis Twenty-Two
Radicalism starts
from the dictum that “Man is the measure of everything” (Protagoras) or “Man is
the root of mankind” (Marx), and advocates reconstruction of the world as a
commonwealth and fraternity of free men, by the collective endeavour of
spiritually emancipated moral men.
* Though he
himself did not elaborate Thesis by Thesis, some books are available which try
to explain the important aspects as well as help clarify possible ambiguities:
a. Prof.
R.L.Nigam’s ‘Radical Humanism of M.N.Roy An Exposition of his b. 22 Theses,
Indus Publishing Company, New
Delhi, 1988,
c. Justice VM
Tarkunde’s book on Radial Humanism
d. G.D.Parikh’s ‘Essence of Royism’ are
important.
e. ‘New Orientation’
a. Prof. R.L.Nigam’s ‘Radical Humanism of M.N.Roy An Exposition of his b. 22 Theses, Indus Publishing Company, New Delhi, 1988,
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