Populism in its broader sense creates a kind of crisis within the architecture along party lines; For instance, the Marxist Communist Party in India, since its inception in the early 20th Century, has adhered to a flexible code, The Party Line; necessarily meaning handling the regular affairs of the party by adhering to collective decision making, exercised by high rankers of the party, usually legitimised by the Party Constitution and Statutues, A wholly Marxist approach which may or may not match the psyche of the masses. The MCP talks about Redistribution of Land, Equal Earning Rights, Spirit of Indigenous Industries and rejects Foreign Investment, Abolition of the Concept of Private Property, Abolition of discriminatory practices on the basis of Caste, Creed, Gender, Race and Ethnicity, and believes in the idea of State as unified entity, having diversity in every corner.
Populism, today is not all about what Churchill said during the Great Patriotic War, it has extended its domain over much of today’s life. Public opinion when amounts to political pressure, compelling politicians to serve their interests, for nothing but political mileage, can be termed as populism. The MCP terms this as mass line, which was anciently derived from the Chinese Communist Party, which was incidentally Mao’s flagship ideology, as public policy is influenced by interest groups, this can be broadly categorised as Mass line.
Now, on to the crisis situation, predominantly in the theoretical sense. Marx is of the opinion that party line, when followed to the letter, usually doesn’t coincide with the masses (mass line), later advocated by Mao Tse-Tung, telling that power concentrated in the hands of the few, makes the system more despotic than democratic.
No comments:
Post a Comment