Collected Works of R.P. Saraf (Volume 6)

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अब आप अंग्रेजी में आर.पी.सराफ की संकलित रचनाएं (खंड 6) को नीचे दिए गए लिंक पर क्लिक करके खोल सकते हैं:

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The writings in the 6th volume of Collected Works of R.P. Saraf had been authored and published in the magazine the Internationalist Democratic Viewpoint during April 1986 to March 1988. These were the formative years, a phase between the second and the third Party Congresses of the Internationalist Democratic Party (IDP), which had been transformed from the Proletariat Party in India by Mr. Saraf and his comrades after parting company with Marxism-Leninism.

Mr. Saraf, like his comrades at that time, were confronted with a very complex and painstaking task of reviewing their entire conceptual knowledge and then improving it by discarding those concepts which did not conform to facts and by upholding those ones which had been sufficiently proved by facts. In this review, they followed the method of conducting repeated studies to step by step obtain a more accurate picture of reality, both natural and human. Ultimately, the IDP under Mr. Saraf’s leadership adopted a new, comprehensive document which summed up its entire conceptual knowledge concerning Nature and Human Society.

As regards the concept of Nature, Mr. Saraf maintained that it comprised of a multitude of divergent phenomena which are interconnected with one another in a certain way, each characterized by its specific quantity and quality and existing in two forms—the corpuscular (i.e., having a mass) and the wave (i.e., having no mass). These divergent phenomena were in constant interaction with one another through alternating mutual unity and mutual struggle—giving rise to continuous minor quantitative and qualitative alterations in every phenomenon and, at a critical point, leading to the transformation of every phenomenon into another (through mutual unity or mutual struggle).

As regards the concept of human society, he held it as Man’s social organization which existed as a part of the universal organization of Nature and which moved and changed due to a two-sided interaction—that between the organization of Nature and the organization of Mankind and that within the human social organization between its different social units. The organization of Nature (concerning human society) denoted the entire non-human phenomena which came into contact with Mankind. Among the natural phenomena, there were two broad types—that whose methods of organization and operation were known to Mankind (e.g., water, land, machines, etc.) and that whose methods of organization and operation were yet unknown to mankind (e.g., earthquakes, space, etc.). The former was known as scientific-technological mechanism which was used by Mankind in its entire activity. The organization of Man denoted the entire mankind having a complex social organization with its varying theories and practices.

As regards the relationship between Nature and Man, Mr. Saraf viewed it as the relation of interaction between them through their mutual unity and mutual struggle—wherein each, in turn, plays the primary role—leading to continuous changes in both of them. Since the origin of Man, there had existed and operated (through varying social theories and practices) four broad types of scientific-technological mechanism. These were: the food gathering and hunting, pastoral (or animal husbandry), agricultural and industrial. Each of the scientific-technological mechanisms was characterized by its specific technological means and objects and its products along with its related division of labor. 

As regards the concept of contemporary human society and its current phase, he formulated that it had been an industrial formation as it was characterized by an industrial scientific-technological mechanism, its related social division of labor and industrial classes. Arising around 1600 AD, it had passed through four social phases—(a) Handicraft industrialism up to the end of the 18th century; (b) Light machine industrialism in the 19th century; (c) Medium machine industrialism from 1901 to 1945; and (d) Heavy machine industrialism, 1945 onwards—each of which differed from the others in regard to certain changes in their respective scientific-technological mechanisms, social divisions of labor and classes.

He also kept in view many specific features of the current phase, the more important among them being: in the scientific-technological mechanism, the principal direction of development was partial automation; in the social division of labor, there was a high degree of the concentration of capital, domination of privately owned corporations in the West and of state owned corporations in the East, separation of managerial functions from the ownership, increase in labor productivity, a decrease in the movement of capital to the less developed countries and an increase to the developed countries, an increase in the proportion of industry and decrease in that of agriculture in the world gross output, formation of two bourgeois war blocs, NATO and Warsaw, and the emergence of two economic groupings led by the US and Russia respectively, the formation of UN and some other international agencies, etc.; in the class structure, three new classes had come up of in the world as a whole, namely, the international specialist or technocratic class, the international skilled working class and the middle strata. Among the old industrial classes, a new state industrial bourgeoisie (Russian style) has emerged alongside the old Western private industrial bourgeoisie; the workers in the productive industries are decreasing, while those in the service industries are increasing.

From the above-said changes, Mr. Saraf inferred that the movement of national capital was becoming more and more international and concentrating on a world-scale. This had brought forth many new problems. The main ones were: (i) Exploration of space and oceans, (ii) Depleting natural resources, including energy fuel, (iii) Lagging food supplies in relation to increasing world population, (iv) Increasing poverty, malnutrition and inequality in the world, (v) Increasing developmental gap between the LDCs and the developed ones, (vi) Threat to man’s survival from the growing ecological pollution, and above all (vii) Danger to human existence from nuclear war—a danger emerging from the rivalry of the two superpowers, the US and Russia, for gaining world domination. That was why these problems had become the subject-matter of international summit meetings of the heads of various states and why they constituted standard items on the agenda of UN and its numerous specialized and regional bodies.

Seeing no possibility of getting these problems solved in the near future, he concluded that while those problems were global in nature and demanded a global solution, the various nation-states, each of which strived to gain the maximum for itself, could offer only various national solutions. But none of these solutions had been able to solve a single global problem in the post-1945 period. And more importantly, the two superpowers, the US and Russia, each of which strived to use these problems in achieving its aim of world hegemony, were the biggest saboteurs in their solution. This showed that the ruling national capitalist classes and national capitalist state parties controlling the nation-states in general and the two superpowers in particular were the roadblocks in further social development.

On the basis of above analysis, Mr. Saraf concluded that conforming to the movement of the internationalization of capital, a proper solution of the above-said global problems lay in the establishment of an international democratic center for managing the international movement of capital. That is, the establishment of a world democratic state with the nation-states as subordinate units. The main task of this state and its various agencies would be to establish the democratic control of the masses over political, economic and cultural processes from the lowest administrative units to the state and international level. But such a solution was quite unacceptable to the existing more than 160 nation-states and their respective industrial national capitalist classes and national state parties which had been managing the movement of their national capitals. Obviously, the said classes and parties, especially those of the US and Russia, constituted the chief obstacles in the establishment of an international center for managing the movement of capital and hence without removing them from state power, the process of the development of an international center could not be completed.

Accordingly, he advocated to mobilize the people behind the slogan of a world democratic state by explaining its relation to the solution of their local, national and global problems. Such a movement had to be carried out by all means, each of which depended upon the concrete conditions in each area. As the leadership of the movement would have to be in the hands of the international state party of the newly emerging specialist class, therefore the IDP was constituted.

As a result, during this entire period of nearly two years, Mr. Saraf focused on IDP’s plan for mass movement. Besides writing commentaries on almost every mass issue, national as well as international, he also came out with such editorials as “Popularize Party’s Plan for India’s Democratization,” “Reshaping India’s Unfair Electoral Process,” “Key Points in Our Present Mass Explanation” and “Question of Building a National Alternative in India.”  In order to build many class and mass organizations, he scripted Draft Programmes and Constitutions of such mass bodies as the Internationalist Democratic Front, Internationalist Front against Reactionary Wars, Internationalist Democratic Workers Federation and Internationalist Democratic Students Front.