Page 139 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

Where socially necessary and agreed on by all then, changes in property
relations could be voted into existence by popular democratic consent.
But this would clearly be the exception and is not at all the ideal being
proposed. The reasons for this are both economic and political. Economic
in the sense that there is no confidence in traditional Marxist analyses
which argue that lasting social and economic improvements require
socialization of the means of production. Although not explicitly dis-
cussed, there is a kind of common-sense Anglo realism that this has sim-
ply proved itself unworkable and is somehow beyond the pale. This,
indeed, seems to have been a lesson silently drawn from the dismal
performance of state socialist economies and their eventual collapse.
Nowhere is their any sign of a yearning for social forms of property own-
ership unless where technical or some other necessity makes this com-
pelling. It is simply taken for granted that ‘everybody’ knows now that
this does not work and is economically a non-starter.
But there are also political reasons for the adherence to the ideal of a
local economy composed of privately owned small and medium-sized
enterprises. The reason is that the IFG group is resolutely committed to
the preservation of liberal notions of personal autonomy and parliamen-
tary democracy. They take it for granted that such systems have demon-
strated that they are indispensable for personal freedom and democracy
of any kind, including the communitarian one. Although there is much
lamentation of external cultural penetration and of the need to preserve
community culture, there is no suggestion whatsoever that the commu-
nity is characterized by some kind of Geist or Rousseauian ‘general will’
which supersedes the simple aggregation of the will of individuals. IFG
thinkers (at least those steeped in the Anglo tradition) are well aware
where that line of thinking leads politically. An interesting question that
this chapter cannot explore is whether this civil society liberal commu-
nitarianism is shared by the Asian members, especially those inspired by
Swadeshi or some concept of an ideal Malay community uncontaminated
by the materialistic West. 13
They likewise understand instinctively that socialization of the relations
of production and the resort to central planning and an administered
economy, necessarily have political consequences. Economic administra-
tion requires strata of administrators and political power necessarily
accrues to these groups simply in the normal course of the discharge of
their administrative duties. It is therefore taken for granted that small
and medium-sized property ‘regulated’ largely by the market is a neces-
sary precondition for the individual political freedoms and personal
autonomy which is obviously very highly valued in this group. What this

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