Essay on Sarvodaya and Marxism – The first thing that leaps to the mind when we compare Sarvodaya and Marxism is a wide gulf in psychological and ethical atmosphere between them. Sarvodaya moves in the world of traditional ethics, traditional in all civilization, Eastern and Western. It follows the path of peace and non-violence.
It appeals to ‘daan’ (charity), ‘yajna’ (sacrifice), ‘yog’ (pathway of salvation) and ‘dharma’ (social morality and religion).
Marxism is unfortunately committed to violence and ruthless application of force for ushering in the new society of Communism. This is Marx’s famous theory of midwifery of violence for bringing the new order to birth.
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This brings up to the second point of difference between these social gospels. Marxism concentrates its attention on class and has but little regard for the individual. Sarvodaya builds from the individual.
Sarvodaya is a pathway for individuals to work out their salvation through a regulated life of self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice.
This difference of approach between Marxism and Sarvodaya leads naturally to a further characteristic difference between them in political arrangements. Marxism has been irrevocably committed to centralization or nationalization of all economic activities.
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It is tied up with this policy because of its central doctrine of class war and class oppression by the owners of property who run the State in their own interest. Hence the only way of removing the rule of property owners was through the expropriation of property owners and nationalization of all capital.
There is no aspect of life over which the Marxist State does not seek to exercise control. It introduces slavery in body, mind and soul, and enforces it by a terror and indoctrination odious in the extreme.
Sarvodaya has a horror of such a culmination. It, therefore, insists on decentralization of State power as well as economic power. This is the secret of Gandhiji’s stress on village economy.
Even with regard to the fundamental value of freedom, Sarvodaya is a safer guide, for Marxism ends up with the dismissal of personal freedom as a ‘bourgeois prejudice’ while Sarvodaya insists on freedom first and last as the oxygen of human life.