Technocratic elite supplanting capitalist elite?

In a span of twenty years, a deep-seated new communist model of social organisation emerged from the ruins of Russian Empire and proclaimed a world revolution. Democrats promised to impose their worldview as well. Britain and the United States were the surviving representatives of the new deal democracies which, while having experienced no governmental overthrow as such, had been metamorphosed during the twenties and thirties. In Italy and later Germany, fascist governments arose and they exhibited dynamism that also promised a new world order. Amongst the great powers, only Japan retained a semblance of adherence to traditional imperialism.

At issue among the competing ideological standpoint positions were questions such as governmental form, in which the communists and fascists endorsed a one-party dictatorship in opposition to the multi-party, rotating, rule found in the democratic countries. Fascists and democrats agreed on private ownership for the means of production while communists favoured state or public ownership. Democrats and communists accepted the principle of individual freedom (though they derived rather different conclusions from it) while fascists did not.

Long-term accommodation among the competing ideologies proved inconceivable. Outbreak of World War II produced a temporary alliance between communism and democracy for the purpose of defeating fascism. The alliance between communists and demo-crats broke down before the fighting stopped. It seemed to last only long enough to ensure that fascism was defeated and discredited.

The "allied" victory, doubtlessly demonstrated the miserably poor performance of the fascist states in comparison to the stunning efficiency achieved by democratic and communist countries. By the time the war ended there was relative clarity about the need to have either dictatorial state ownership or multi-party private ownership of the means of production in order to achieve efficiency.

There was no certainty, however, about which of the two persisting ideologies would eventually prove itself superior to the other. There could be little doubt about the fact that communist planned industrialisation in the prewar Soviet Union managed to produce the conditions necessary for the USSR to survive the fascist challenge (albeit with democratic help). It is doubtful that the democratic model could have done the same. A "cold war" broke out between democrats and communists in the wake of the devastation produced by the world war. Neither side sought a final reckoning; a neo-imperialist competition was rationalised instead.

Communist growth rates easily outpaced those of the democracies in the first postwar decade and this was reason enough to believe that communism would ultimately "bury" democracy. Early communist successes in the military, political and economic arenas proved fleeting. By the beginning of the last Cold War decade the balance had already swung grim in favour of democracies. Communist military and economic policies proved irrational and calls for the abandonment of the commitment to communism began to arise from within those states which adhered to it. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and the following year, the American president declared victory at the "end of the Cold War" and announced a "new world order".

Now the surging technological and price wise competitive industrial growth of this millennium in Asian countries like China, India, South Korea and many developing countries have become a great concern for the capitalist countries as they see a new technological elite surfacing.

The recent row of twelve state members of the European Union to curb cheap textile export from China, expressing fear of job-cut in their textile industries is an example of the technocratic elite rapidly growing in Asia.

France is already alarmed, Patrick Devedijian, French Industry Minister, said in an interview, the surging Chinese imports could cost Frances' textile industry an extra 7000 jobs this year, which is the third biggest in Europe.

To stop self deficiency by the developing countries, the rich nations are going beyond European Union, like involving WTO (World Trade Organisation) in their support by weird trade barriers that favours the rich countries at the miseries and distress of the developing countries.

Thus, this emerging new defined technocratic elite is signaling the supplanting of the established capitalist elite in wealth and power at the end of the twenty-first century -- much as the capitalists had done with aristocrats around the end of the nineteenth century.

Billy I Ahmed is a researcher