Civilization and Nonviolence by Dharmanand Kosambi, 1935
The Industrial Revolution: Its Merits and Failings
As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the dominance of the middle class was established everywhere; this brought the oppressed, toiling masses a sense of relief. Trade needed peace, so that the frequent rioting and arson stopped, and farmers and artisans enjoyed the freedom to pursue their occupations in safety and security. Moreover, clever persons within this class could become part of the bourgeoisie. What a change! People—not only in countries which had the Industrial Revolution, but also in conquered countries like India—benefited from this difference. This was why all—young and old—started saying that under British rule one may tie one's gold to a stick and carry it from Kashi in the north to Rameshwar in the south! The leaders of the Brahmo Samaj even called this change Divine Dispensation.
Not much time was required to dispel this misapprehension. Within a hundred years the common folk began to see drawbacks in the new system: some people lolling in luxury, others toiling all day for bare subsistence—such was the situation within different parts of the same city. Earlier, peasants were able at least to breathe fresh air; the new slaves were not even able to do that. If you go to a working-class neighbourhood in a city like Mumbai, you get a clear idea of what the condition of workers was like some sixty years ago in countries like England and Germany, and the condition of Russian workers before their political revolution.
In former times, kings and princes squandered their money on gambling. Only a few noblemen of their own class gambled with them. But in this Industrial Age, everyone may gamble through the share market or horse races. Dharmaraj staked Draupadi when he gambled in the Mahabharata. It is true that women cannot be staked in this new form of gambling, but sometimes they suffer even more than Draupadi. It is left to one's imagination to visualize what a woman goes through when a worker loses his entire month's wages on the races, and as a result a Pathan employed by moneylenders to recover loans comes and sits at her doorstep! In this task of making gambling a terrible public addiction, the Industrial Age has succeeded well.
Workers in Europe earn at least a living wage in the form of unemployment allowance. But the torment of people in backward and conquered countries under this bourgeois rule knows no limits. A drought can kill lakhs of people crying out for food; even during times of good harvest, a large part of the masses are half-starved. One begins to feel that it would be better for such people to die than languish for years on end in such dire poverty. It is almost the reason why they are so repeatedly visited by epidemics such as influenza, cholera, and the plague. But these do not solve the problem. It is the young, able-bodied men, rather than the old and the infirm, who fall prey to these epidemics, so that the survivors are in even worse straits than they were earlier.
Although capitalist countries are more prosperous than backward countries, they are seen as being under a great threat. Among them, England and France have grabbed as much territory as possible. Germany acquired a small portion of Africa, and Germans were increasing in number. Germany could not conquer China because of the greater power of Japan and the internal feud among European nations. Naturally, Germany turned its attention to the colonies of France and England; and that was the reason for the last World War. Today, Japan is biting off more and more parts of China, and Mussolini is getting ready to 'reform' Abyssinia. This grabbing game has made amity impossible among the European nations; as a result, all nations have to be ever prepared for war. It is impossible to tell where and when the conflagration of war will be lit. These nations find themselves caught between two fears—fear of war with other nations on the one hand, and fear of the lower classes rising up in revolution on the other. How can a frightened nation or person be happy?
The Bolsheviks are not afraid of revolution because the oppressed class in Russia has especially benefited from the Bolshevik political system. At present the only country free of unemployment is Russia; all other countries suffer to some extent from unemployment. And the Russian workers know this. Even so, even Russia is not free from fear. In the East, Japan is eyeing Bolshevik territory, and in the West the whole capitalist world is against them. In this situation, instead of producing the means of comfort and convenience, the Bolsheviks are rapidly increasing their fighting equipment—especially airplanes. Trains do not run on time, so Russian mills do not receive raw materials on time; the lack of sufficient mining machinery leads to postponing coal mining. But the work of building airplanes and other fighting equipment goes on rapidly.
There seems little hope of averting the calamity of a future war. Statesmen are trying to postpone the danger, that is all. There is a story in Shanti-parva of the Mahabharata. A man was lost in a dreadful forest and could not find his way out. He began to run about in fear of wild animals such as lions and tigers. The forest contained a large well, covered by creepers and grass. While running the man fell into it, and, getting entangled in the creepers, hung in mid-air. A beehive was stuck on a tree on the side of this well, and from it honey began to drip. The man stuck out his tongue and started licking the drops! This simile applies to an extent to the European bourgeoisie. They are hanging in a tangle of creepers created by capitalism. On the one hand is the fear that the creepers of capitalism will break because of another world war, on the other the fear that the honey bees—in the form of workers in their hive of mills—will eat up the honey. Even when caught between these two fears, they continue licking the few drops of the honey of profit that drip from the hive! They are unable to see a way out of this calamity.
True Wisdom and Non-Violence
Birds and animals have some sort of knowledge, but it cannot be called true wisdom. The knowledge that evolves with past experience is called true wisdom, and it is found only in the human race. Animals such as elephants used to live in herds five thousand years ago; they live the same way today. Birds of different kinds build their nests today as they used to five thousand years ago. This means that knowledge of these animals and birds does not evolve with past experience. But such is not the case with man. He makes excellent use of his past experience. Man does not have protective devices such as horns and claws. Even so, he is capable of protecting himself by acquiring various weapons on the strength of his true wisdom. Past experience is essential in order to develop wisdom, and so is social structure. Knowledge cannot evolve with the experience of just one man. His contemporaries or successors make use of his experience, and this leads to the constant development of the wisdom of human society.
But if non-violence does not develop proportionately with wisdom, it does not yield as much advantage as it could. Suppose a tribe invents new weapons, and they utilize them to hunt and earn their subsistence. But if their non-violence, that is, compassion, does not develop proportionately, they behave with other tribes as they do with animals, that is, they kill off tribes that are weaker. In some tribes, people even eat the flesh of their enemies! In sum, wisdom is instrumental in the advancement of mankind and is thus of use; but if it is not accompanied by compassion, it can also be destructive.
This is seen even in modern human society. White people have gone to Australia and America, and almost totally massacred the original inhabitants. They have not destroyed the negroes in Africa, but have oppressed them terribly. I mentioned earlier that they caught lakhs of negroes and sold them in America. In India they were unable to reach such depths, but they did commit many atrocities in the form of exploitation of wealth. And what is the reason for all this? It is that they advanced on the strength of their wisdom, but their compassion was limited to their own countries. They could not maintain a balance between the two virtues, which is why they committed—and are still committing—these atrocities.
It would be rare indeed to find another philosopher like Karl Marx, someone with such an excellent knowledge of social evolution. But he also suffered from the narrow-mindedness of Europeans. He demonstrated scientifically that it is possible to create a very happy social collective by uniting the oppressed of the world and removing their oppressors. But he never thought of the utility of non-violence in this task. He maintained that the oppressed should collectively unite and destroy their oppressors. And the Russian Revolution has followed this same thinking.
If all the oppressed or workers unite, it will in fact no longer be necessary to kill the oppressors. But the culture in which Marx was born has a tradition which demands an adversary. The founders of Western civilization were the Greeks. Their entire culture was limited to their cities. Naturally, they were totally hostile to the people of other cities. In modern Europe this culture culminated in nationalism. People in European nations believe that an evil deed done in the service of the nation is justified. Just as the Greeks thought of other cities as adversaries, so do these nations think of other nations as adversaries. And their leaders claim that civilization will not advance without such competition. The solution to this, found by Karl Marx, is that the entire working class should unite and oppose the bourgeoisie. That is, the hostility among nations should be transferred to one between bourgeoisie and workers. Once capitalism is destroyed, this opposition will automatically dissolve. This stratagem is like removing a thorn with another thorn.
But there is a danger inherent in this stratagem: if, while removing a thorn with another thorn, the second thorn breaks and its sharp end remains inside before the first thorn can be removed, it is going to be more painful than it was. This situation has arisen today in Italy and Germany. An attempt was made to use the thorn of socialism to remove the thorn of nationalism; but extrication of the first thorn failed and the second thorn joined it.
More beneficial than advocating armed revolution to kill the bourgeoisie was Tolstoy's advice to the bourgeoisie to refrain from using weapons. This was the advice instrumental, to an extent, in the success of the Russian Revolution. The Czar was able to send people to the battlefield by force, but because the people did not wish to fight, the czarist regime automatically collapsed. If all the workers in Western countries had similarly refused to fight at the beginning of the world war, the war would have ended within a week. And the bourgeoisie in power would have automatically collapsed like the czarist regime. Had the wisdom of Karl Marx been accompanied by the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi, Western countries would not have been caught in the terrible danger of the world war.
In our country, Parshwa and the Buddha turned the current of non-violence towards the good of the masses. But it did not get into the political sphere and was, as a result, mired in a puddle of religious sectarianism. Around it grew the forest of the puranas. Mahatma Gandhi's attempt to give that current further impetus and turn it to the political sphere is truly to be congratulated. But it was obstructed midway and suffered a loss of direction. This was good, in a way, because if it had continued it would have fallen into the ditch of nationalism and proved detrimental. Only if non-violence is accompanied by the wisdom of socialists will this current turn in the right direction, and lead to the welfare of mankind.