ONE important feature of neo-liberal capitalism in a third world country like India is the chasm it introduces between the working people and the intelligentsia. In the colonial period in India several members of the intelligentsia took it upon themselves to highlight the misery to which the Indian people had been subjected by colonialism; and of course many joined the active resistance against colonialism, suffering incarceration and deprivation in the process. As a result they earned the respect of the people, a respect which they continued to enjoy even after independence, during the period of dirigiste development by becoming honest and critical observers of the impact of the development strategy on people’s lives.

Pre-capitalist societies even in normal times have been characterized by a degree of deference by the common people towards the intelligentsia; this was strengthened by the role played by the intelligentsia during the anti-colonial struggle and the period of post-independence dirigisme in countries like India.

Neo-liberalism however changes this situation. It seeks to build a no-holds-barred capitalist order, where domestic monopoly capital is integrated with international finance capital, the aim being to refashion society along familiar and conventional capitalist lines. It alters the position of the intelligentsia in several ways: first, since the essence of capitalism is to break up all residual sense of community and to reduce social groups into a set of self-serving individuals, the intelligentsia too is reduced to the status of a group of individuals fending for themselves, rather than acting as tribunes of the people. Career concerns, the desire to utilize opportunities for personal advancement both at home and abroad which now open up, are made to become the major pre-occupations of even the intelligentsia.

Secondly, the social role of the intelligentsia before the pre-neo-liberal period was supported by a certain theoretical perspective that it had adopted, namely, a perspective of anti-imperialism. True, among the different members of the intelligentsia there were major differences in theoretical positions, but most of them had in common a recognition of the extant reality of imperialism; this found a chord among the people and set the third world intelligentsia apart from the dominant theoretical traditions in the west. With neo-liberalism however there is a strenuous effort to obliterate these theoretical differences and to create a consensus both in the metropolis and in the third world around only one view, namely the one that is that dominant in the west, which generally has the support of both the World Bank and the IMF; this view believes that the third world’s development can be effected not by resisting imperialism but by embracing imperialism.

With oppositional voices in the theoretical domain stifled everywhere, with the dominant voice in the west speaking the same language now as the newly sprung-up voices in the third world, not only do opportunities for employment open up for a larger segment of the third world intelligentsia in the metropolis, but its distance from the third world people becomes greater. This is because the experience of the people of the third world does not conform to the conclusions of the theoretical consensus being developed between the respective intelligentsia in the metropolis and the third world.

The role of the collapse of the Soviet Union that had provided for decades, notwithstanding all its flaws, an alternative and inspiring model, must never be underestimated in this entire process of the development of a consensus between the metropolitan intelligentsia and the third world intelligentsia.

Thirdly, the privatization, and hence commoditization that is a hall-mark of neo-liberalism, of important spheres of the economy, especially education, tends to destroy the pursuit of academic life as a critical activity. Since the objective of the private educational institutions that proliferate in the new situation is to produce students as marketable commodities, the basic purpose of education in a third world society, which must be to produce in Antonio Gramsci’s words a set of “organic intellectuals” of the decolonized people, gets completely lost. Indeed the academics engaged in these private institutions are penalized if they inculcate in their students a sense of critical inquiry; and of course student organizations and student activism are discouraged in these institutions. All this further takes the intelligentsia away from the lives of the people, corralling them into a separate world of specialized intellectual commodity production. Neo-liberalism in short detaches the intelligentsia from the lives of the people.

A few days ago a senior minister of the BJP government in West Bengal lamented the fact that Presidency College and Calcutta University which had been intellectual beacons in the country in the past, had become lack-lustre institutions. He then went on to suggest that the lost academic glory of West Bengal could be regained with the help of the private sector. The superficiality of his analysis of why West Bengal had fallen behind in academic standards is evident from the fact that he sees no connection between the starving of public funds for education and its reduction to mediocrity. He wanted to revive higher education in West Bengal (which itself was an ironic objective to have for a representative of a neo-fascist government) without spending much money from the budget!

The chasm between the intelligentsia and the people that develops under neo-liberalism has an important consequence, namely, it creates the soil for the ascendancy of neo-fascism. To be sure, there are several basic factors behind the rise of neo-fascism, above all its promotion by monopoly capital which enters into an alliance with the neo-fascists in order to retain its hegemony in the midst of the crisis of neo-liberalism; but neo-fascist propaganda against a hapless minority to generate hatred against it within the majority, as a means of dividing the people and providing a distracting discourse, would not be as effective if the words of the intelligentsia carried the same weight with the people as they had done before the neo-liberal period.

In fact neo-fascist ideas do not enjoy much genuine currency within the intelligentsia; but these ideas manage to gain some currency within the people because the anti-fascist voices within the intelligentsia, despite being the dominant ones, are not only silenced through intimidation, but also rendered relatively ineffective because of the chasm that neo-liberal capitalism introduces between the intelligentsia and the people. The loss of the credibility of the intelligentsia among the people is an important enabling factor behind the rise to ascendancy of neo-fascism.

Neo-liberalism thus prepares the ground for neo-fascism in several ways. The most important of course is the crisis it inevitably produces. With the relative size of the labour reserves in total labour-force not declining under the neo-liberal regime, indeed on the contrary increasing even when the GDP growth apparently accelerates, real wages do not rise even as labour productivity rises. (This rise in labour productivity incidentally is the reason why the relative size of the labour reserves does not diminish). This raises the share of economic surplus in output and gives rise to a crisis of over-production by keeping down consumption demand relative to output. It is this crisis which provides the setting for the corporate-Hindutva alliance, and for monopoly capital’s promotion of neo-fascism. But neo-liberalism contributes to this process in other ways too, of which a very prominent one is the general loss of trust among the people for the intelligentsia that it brings about.

Marxism is almost unique in recognizing the role of neo-liberalism in the rise to ascendancy of neo-fascism. Liberal analyses of this rise focus only on social and historical factors, but scarcely ever mention the political economy roots of the phenomenon. Not doing so however weakens the anti-neo-fascist struggle. Even if perchance the machinations of neo-fascism to perpetuate its hold over power are overcome and it is removed from power through the electoral process, as long as the neo-liberal character of the economy continues and the crisis that it has spawned persists, neo-fascism will always come back to power, as it has done in the US with Donald Trump’s re-election.

The struggle against neo-fascism therefore requires a transcendence of the conjuncture that gives rise to it, which requires in turn going beyond neo-liberal capitalism. The intelligentsia has to wake up to this fact; it has a historic responsibility to re-forge its links with the people. It is not enough just to warn them about the dangers of neo-fascism; an alternative economic agenda must be charted that takes them out of the crisis of stagnation and unemployment that neo-liberalism has consigned them to. Neo-fascism can be overcome only by simultaneously going beyond neo-liberalism.