The communist movement was perhaps the most intellectualised in history. It is, therefore, not surprising that, since its demise, it lives on in the sphere of thought and culture. The mountains of books on theory and polemics left behind by it are still being added to.

One of the welcome effects of this renewed intellectual stirring is the resuscitation of the works of some outstanding socialist thinkers — Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, to name only a few — which had been either rejected or down-played by the Moscow bureaucrats playing the high priests of a global revolutionary movement, which they
neither understood nor could they guide.

Nagi's book under review is also an attempt to re-interpret the socialist theory, to spread its message wide.
Its first chapter is about Rosa Luxemburg, the fiery Polish-German revolutionary, who first took on Bernstein and then Kautsky, not sparing even Lenin, neither Marx himself. She was murdered in 1919 by the fascist Kapp gang, together with Karl Liebknecht.

Lenin defended the principle of 'democratic centralism' against her critique but, all his life, held her in high esteem.
Her name was put on the Column of Honour of world revolutionaries built in Moscow and Lenin quoted an old Russian couplet in her praise 'Betimes the eagles down swoop and 'neath the barnyard fowl fly, But barnyard fowl with outspread wings will never soar amid the clouds in the sky.'

Stalin apparently did not like her independent thinking. Her works, therefore, practically disappeared during his rule. One can safely assume that, if she had lived longer and sought refuge in the Soviet Union upon the Nazis' coming to power in Germany, she would have, in due course, been shot after 'confessing' to having, all her life, been an agent of fascism and imperialism.

Dr Nagi has isolated her main revolutionary theories, thus making them generally available in an easy form.
For example, he lucidly explains her thesis of 'socialism or barbarism', later popularised by Trotsky. He says it did not mean that, if capitalism was not overthrown, there would be a reversal to barbarism. It meant that, if the proletariat failed to attain socialism, mankind would face a catastrophe.

In modern language, it meant that capitalism had exhausted its historical possibilities, as witnessed by two world wars and world-wide economic depressions. If it did not cede place to socialism, mankind would find itself in an increasingly self-destructive situation.

Che is, of course, the permanent hero of our times. Nagi too has captured his synthesis of thought and action in a few pages.

The pieces on the end of the Soviet Union are instructive, especially the analysis of the counter-revolutionary role the bureaucracy, led by Gorbachev, played in it.

But it does not study the connection between the failure of the Soviet workers to take over the management of production and the ultimate restoration of capitalism there.

It was as a result of this historic failure of the workers that the Soviet Union never emerged from state capitalism.
Nagi also mentions the excellent point that the transfer of power within the Soviet communist party to the Stalinist faction was actually its passage from one class to another. This meant that its transfer back would require an armed struggle which would be possible only in a new revolutionary situation.

As E. Mandel put it 'In order to establish his dictatorship, Stalin had to physically destroy Lenin's party.'
Nagi welcomes the peace between the Maoist guerrillas and the bourgeois parties in Nepal. But the central fact here is that the guerrillas have failed to destroy the Nepali army and, in addition, have disarmed themselves. Therefore it is now the existing state which will decide important political matters.

The Maoists can influence the government decisions but within its bourgeois logic. The decisive factor in their decision to give up armed struggle was probably their failure to establish themselves in the plains, where the bulk of the country's population lives. Anyway, the Indian army would have intervened to thwart any attempt at a revolutionary change in the Terai.

Here we also have an interesting piece on the dialectics of physics, which Nagi added to his Urdu translation of Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-criticism'.

His various pieces on our First War of Independence show how close an interest Marx and Engels took in the event. Their sympathies were with us but Marx said clearly that South Asia could guard its independence only if it took the capitalist path and industrialised itself.

The book is a compendium of the latest theoretical positions on the socialist movement, with descriptions and comments relating to the struggles of today.

And for good measure, Nagi has added a very nice piece on Faiz, whose mellifluous language has so obviously influenced Nagi's own mode of expression. It is obvious that he would have been as successful in belles-lettres as he has been in medicine and dialectics.

Socialism ya Barbariat

By Dr Saulat Nagi

Fiction House, Lahore
240pp. Rs200