There is a huge wave of rightist ideologies carpeting the world. There is a right of centre government in India, following BJP’s phenomenal victory and leadership of an extreme rightist Modi ; UKIP in the UK successfully spread a ‘rightist’ air which resulted in the populace demanding an exit from the supranational union. Germany, Japan, quite possibly with LePenn in France, Venezuela, Poland, Denmark and Hungary; all are showing an inclination towards the political and cultural right wing. The most substantial evidence though, is the victory of the carpetbagger right-winged Trump.
Not just in politics, even in the economic sphere, a rightist mindset seems to have set in. There’s increasing apprehension and scepticism regarding globalization which apparently has failed to do all that it initially promised. There is a huge global slowdown, foreign trade is at very low levels, even India’s both exports and imports have fallen. An increasing call for promoting domestic production and manufacturing is almost like rekindling of the century-old Swadeshi movement.
It won’t be totally wrong to call this a resurgence of old thought.
-Theoretically and practically, there seems to be again a rising support for slightly autocratic regimes, as is evident from the trends in franchise across the globe, since extreme liberal forms haven’t succeeded in delivering economic growth.
-A very relevant instance of this would be the re-emergence of terrorism driven by conflict in religious ideology. This sort of violence and retrograde thought in this century is indeed making world peace putrescent. The world is moving ahead so why at all, have such tendencies emerged again?
Over time, people have lived in a system and when burdened with its shortcomings, called for a revolt to institutionalize another. The pros of the newer alternative have almost always outweighed its shortcomings in the minds of people and with time, it succumbs to fate similar to that of its predecessor. Years ago, Marx explained this phenomenon with the theory of Dialectical Materialism.
Masses outraged with suppressive Feudal Lords revolted to establish laissez faire, equal opportunities for all and boom; capitalism broke the chains of feudalism. But oh, the relatively richer ones absorbed all the power and the gap between the classes only widened more with the passage of time. They were tired of years of oppression, strict labour laws and a class struggle, when Marx and Engels gave the idea of a society with no-class divide, centralisation of means of production, rule of the proletariat, public welfare and equal wage distribution and there they go embracing communism. But poor thing was also subject to manipulation by the ones in power, subject to jobbery and blotched by restrictions on dissent and free opinion and there we are, bringing the damn thing down again. So, now we have a new kind of system which is a farraginous mix of features of all other systems, resulting in its own set of pros, cons, contradictions, scope and limitations.
We are a microscopic unit of an infinite universe. We have limitations in resources, space-reach and life-span. Universal laws apply to each and every constituting unit, corresponding to its composition and structure. In such a world, trends and ideas are bound to resurface.
Man has over millennia evolved and adapted to survive in the changing climatic and geographical conditions. So does our thought. They are generated in specific situations, shared for a while and buried as we move on to newer ones more suitable for newer conditions.
Institutions we find just suitable right now, may yet not be the answer to an open-ended political thought process. Some trends may have resurfaced; some might stay, some we might do away with, indicative of ‘the circle’ being completed. Life cycles are similar to business cycles. Be it fashion styles, prose writing, art, political theories or cultural mindsets, all are bound to complete a cycle wherein they develop, reach a peak, fall out of favour and die down slowly. Interestingly, this applies to such life cycles themselves and they repeat themselves in evolved and varied forms. We might be disappointed with certain developments presently but again, it’s a transient world.
No comments:
Post a Comment