Thursday, August 4, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Fresh Graduates: Are There No Openings?
Many fresh graduates complain that they have to suffer a lot when they start looking for jobs after they complete their education. The Pakistani youth have been facing this dilemma for quite some time now and the situation seems to be deteriorating with each passing day. The global recession has further aggravated the situation as millions became jobless and as a result, fresh graduates have to face tougher competition.
There is no need to despair however, if you are a fresh graduate and just started looking for a job. According to ROZEE.PK statistics, plenty of jobs open up for fresh graduates but the candidates far outnumber the capacity of these job openings. However, as a fresh graduate you need to be well prepared and able to leave a good impression on the employer in order to get a job.
Many candidates complain that job interview is a later step as they do not even get calls for interview despite applying for various openings. Therefore, we have compiled a list of things you need to take care of in order to make sure that you at least get the call for an interview.
Checklist For The Job Hunt
As soon as you finish your degree, the first thought on your mind is to get a job. This would be a lot easier if you started working on some of these tips during the final year of your education. Go through all the pointers and see what you can do in each arena to enhance your job search.
Choose Your Career
When we choose which subjects we wish to study most of us think that we have determined our career path and have nothing to worry about in the near future. As a result, when the fresh graduates hit the job market they have no orientation of which industry suits their requirements and often end up choosing a wrong line. Even if you have studied a specified course, there are many different industries where you get a job. Many times the fresh graduates miss good job opportunities because they have no idea of some of the niches that are available to them.
It is best that you go to a career counselor, or if you do not have such a facility, you can always turn to the Internet for help. Do a thorough research on the kinds of job opportunities that are available for your specialties and apply to all of them.
Maintain your network
In order to find a job right after college you should maintain an active network of teachers, colleagues, and other acquaintances. They can improve your chances of getting a job in interview by recommendations or simply by forwarding your CV to the relevant departments. The stronger you network, the better are your chances of securing a job interview.
Social Networking Websites
Nowadays, social networking websites have become and effective medium for finding jobs. More than that, maintaining a professional profile on these social networking websites is becoming more and more essential as now employers have developed a tendency to look at the profiles of the job applicants to make sure that they are choosing the right person.
Application Process
The most trying and testing phase of the job hunt is dropping off CVs at various places and waiting for the call for an interview. Some people believe that the higher number of applications they submit; the greater are their chances of succeeding. Such candidates are much mistaken, as this does not have any positive effect on your job search.
The best way is to find the jobs that are relevant to your field and expressly want a fresh graduate. It is important that you focus your energy on fruitful prospects rather than wasting time in wild goose chase.
Customize Your Resume
One of the most important things one has to keep in mind is to customize your resume for each job that you apply to rather than sending a generalized CV to all openings. The objective for each job should be modified and the skill set for every job should be different. Catering to the requirements of the employers is necessary so put more emphasis on skills that are of value to the specific employer.
Prepare an impressive cover letter stating the reason for your applying to the job and the things that make you perfect for it. Address it the employer and attach to the CV. The cover letter should be brief and concise. Make sure there are no typing errors or spelling mistakes in the cover letter or the CV as the employer will send your application straight to the bin if he sees one.
Lastly, make sure that you include all the important projects and assignments that can show the employer what your capabilities are since you do not have any prior experience to show what you can do for the employer.
Lower Your Expectations
One of the mistakes that the fresh graduates make is that they hope to get the dream job right away. These unrealistic expectations make it harder for the candidate to get the job. Asking for a pay scale that is not in accordance with you skills is also a common mistake. As a fresh graduate, you need to lower your expectations and be ready to work for less pay as all you need from the first job is the valuable experience. Once you get the experience, you will be able to ask for the pay scale according to your expectations and the employer will be more willing to accept.
Prepare well for the interview
Once you get an interview call for a job, you need to be well prepared for the interview session. Do your research and practice a lot to make sure that you do not make any huge mistake when you appear for the interview. Dress appropriately and follow the interview protocol that has often been discussed in the ROZEE.PK articles.
Freelance Work
While you are looking for a job, it is a great idea to work as a freelancer as there are many such opportunities available in the market. Not only will this help you financially but also give a boost to your CV as you can mention the freelance work you have been doing to fill the time between your graduation and the interview. This shows the employer that you are someone who makes the best of things and does not believe in wasting any time.
All these tips can help the fresh graduates in getting a job if followed with persistence and patience. It is easy to feel discouraged and get disheartened if one fails to get the job for a prolonged period of time. However, if you keep on trying and improving yourself in the time being, sooner or later your luck is bound to change.
There is no need to despair however, if you are a fresh graduate and just started looking for a job. According to ROZEE.PK statistics, plenty of jobs open up for fresh graduates but the candidates far outnumber the capacity of these job openings. However, as a fresh graduate you need to be well prepared and able to leave a good impression on the employer in order to get a job.
Many candidates complain that job interview is a later step as they do not even get calls for interview despite applying for various openings. Therefore, we have compiled a list of things you need to take care of in order to make sure that you at least get the call for an interview.
Checklist For The Job Hunt
As soon as you finish your degree, the first thought on your mind is to get a job. This would be a lot easier if you started working on some of these tips during the final year of your education. Go through all the pointers and see what you can do in each arena to enhance your job search.
Choose Your Career
When we choose which subjects we wish to study most of us think that we have determined our career path and have nothing to worry about in the near future. As a result, when the fresh graduates hit the job market they have no orientation of which industry suits their requirements and often end up choosing a wrong line. Even if you have studied a specified course, there are many different industries where you get a job. Many times the fresh graduates miss good job opportunities because they have no idea of some of the niches that are available to them.
It is best that you go to a career counselor, or if you do not have such a facility, you can always turn to the Internet for help. Do a thorough research on the kinds of job opportunities that are available for your specialties and apply to all of them.
Maintain your network
In order to find a job right after college you should maintain an active network of teachers, colleagues, and other acquaintances. They can improve your chances of getting a job in interview by recommendations or simply by forwarding your CV to the relevant departments. The stronger you network, the better are your chances of securing a job interview.
Social Networking Websites
Nowadays, social networking websites have become and effective medium for finding jobs. More than that, maintaining a professional profile on these social networking websites is becoming more and more essential as now employers have developed a tendency to look at the profiles of the job applicants to make sure that they are choosing the right person.
Application Process
The most trying and testing phase of the job hunt is dropping off CVs at various places and waiting for the call for an interview. Some people believe that the higher number of applications they submit; the greater are their chances of succeeding. Such candidates are much mistaken, as this does not have any positive effect on your job search.
The best way is to find the jobs that are relevant to your field and expressly want a fresh graduate. It is important that you focus your energy on fruitful prospects rather than wasting time in wild goose chase.
Customize Your Resume
One of the most important things one has to keep in mind is to customize your resume for each job that you apply to rather than sending a generalized CV to all openings. The objective for each job should be modified and the skill set for every job should be different. Catering to the requirements of the employers is necessary so put more emphasis on skills that are of value to the specific employer.
Prepare an impressive cover letter stating the reason for your applying to the job and the things that make you perfect for it. Address it the employer and attach to the CV. The cover letter should be brief and concise. Make sure there are no typing errors or spelling mistakes in the cover letter or the CV as the employer will send your application straight to the bin if he sees one.
Lastly, make sure that you include all the important projects and assignments that can show the employer what your capabilities are since you do not have any prior experience to show what you can do for the employer.
Lower Your Expectations
One of the mistakes that the fresh graduates make is that they hope to get the dream job right away. These unrealistic expectations make it harder for the candidate to get the job. Asking for a pay scale that is not in accordance with you skills is also a common mistake. As a fresh graduate, you need to lower your expectations and be ready to work for less pay as all you need from the first job is the valuable experience. Once you get the experience, you will be able to ask for the pay scale according to your expectations and the employer will be more willing to accept.
Prepare well for the interview
Once you get an interview call for a job, you need to be well prepared for the interview session. Do your research and practice a lot to make sure that you do not make any huge mistake when you appear for the interview. Dress appropriately and follow the interview protocol that has often been discussed in the ROZEE.PK articles.
Freelance Work
While you are looking for a job, it is a great idea to work as a freelancer as there are many such opportunities available in the market. Not only will this help you financially but also give a boost to your CV as you can mention the freelance work you have been doing to fill the time between your graduation and the interview. This shows the employer that you are someone who makes the best of things and does not believe in wasting any time.
All these tips can help the fresh graduates in getting a job if followed with persistence and patience. It is easy to feel discouraged and get disheartened if one fails to get the job for a prolonged period of time. However, if you keep on trying and improving yourself in the time being, sooner or later your luck is bound to change.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Grooming Leaders to Handle Ambiguity
How would you identify the up-and-coming leaders in a company about which you knew nothing? You'd likely start by pinpointing the executives who control the most employees or revenues. You might give bonus points to relatively young mangers. If you had consulting DNA you might create a sophisticated ratio combining the span of control and age to identify the leader in the horse race to be the next big boss.
You are working off a simple hypothesis that's right in almost every company — that size matters. Power flows from financial contributions and legions of employees. You groom leaders by giving them progressively larger, more challenging opportunities.
This approach seems logical. The bigger the business, the more it matters to a company's near-term performance. And certainly, larger businesses tend to be more complex. Tomorrow's leaders surely need to be able to deal with complexity!
But I wonder if companies might be approaching leadership development the wrong way. It's pretty clear that tomorrow's leaders are going to face the "new normal" of constant change. It is no longer enough to be an operator that can master today's complexity. You have to be prepared to deal with tomorrow's complexity, "black swan" events, sudden shifts in the basis of competition in your industry, competitors springing up around the globe, and more.
I've never run a multi-billion dollar company, but I'm willing to bet the difference in complexity between managing $1 billion and $10 billion in revenues, or 1,000 versus 10,000 employees isn't that great. In other words, giving up-and-comers more responsibility helps them to refine skills they already have, when what they need to do is to develop the capability to flexibly respond to unanticipated challenges.
A related challenge is that size-matters-grooming companies can find it hard to convince talented managers to work on new growth initiatives. After all, those initiatives typically start small, both in terms of headcount and revenue. Managers with their eye on their next assignment naturally want to work on projects that will "look good" on their internal resume.
Perhaps it is time to rethink this approach. Instead of giving up-and-comers larger assignments, consider intentionally giving them smaller, more ambiguous ones. Have them crack into a new geographic market. Ask them to lead the development of a completely new business model. Force them to think creatively about how they will access or assemble the resources to solve the challenge.
Facing highly ambiguous challenges will help managers develop a set of tools that prepare them for the uncertainties they will increasingly encounter as they ascend up the corporate ladder.
Shifting from size-matters to ambiguity-matters development requires rethinking other key assumptions. Most companies, for example, look to what a manager has achieved to assess their performance. But in ambiguous circumstances with uncertain outcomes, you need to look at how a manager has acted. Sometimes you can do everything right and forces beyond your control lead to "failure." I'll write more about this topic in a future post.
I'd love to hear additional thoughts about ways in which you are grooming leaders to be ready for the known — and unknown — challenges that lay ahead. How is your company responding to this challenge?
You are working off a simple hypothesis that's right in almost every company — that size matters. Power flows from financial contributions and legions of employees. You groom leaders by giving them progressively larger, more challenging opportunities.
This approach seems logical. The bigger the business, the more it matters to a company's near-term performance. And certainly, larger businesses tend to be more complex. Tomorrow's leaders surely need to be able to deal with complexity!
But I wonder if companies might be approaching leadership development the wrong way. It's pretty clear that tomorrow's leaders are going to face the "new normal" of constant change. It is no longer enough to be an operator that can master today's complexity. You have to be prepared to deal with tomorrow's complexity, "black swan" events, sudden shifts in the basis of competition in your industry, competitors springing up around the globe, and more.
I've never run a multi-billion dollar company, but I'm willing to bet the difference in complexity between managing $1 billion and $10 billion in revenues, or 1,000 versus 10,000 employees isn't that great. In other words, giving up-and-comers more responsibility helps them to refine skills they already have, when what they need to do is to develop the capability to flexibly respond to unanticipated challenges.
A related challenge is that size-matters-grooming companies can find it hard to convince talented managers to work on new growth initiatives. After all, those initiatives typically start small, both in terms of headcount and revenue. Managers with their eye on their next assignment naturally want to work on projects that will "look good" on their internal resume.
Perhaps it is time to rethink this approach. Instead of giving up-and-comers larger assignments, consider intentionally giving them smaller, more ambiguous ones. Have them crack into a new geographic market. Ask them to lead the development of a completely new business model. Force them to think creatively about how they will access or assemble the resources to solve the challenge.
Facing highly ambiguous challenges will help managers develop a set of tools that prepare them for the uncertainties they will increasingly encounter as they ascend up the corporate ladder.
Shifting from size-matters to ambiguity-matters development requires rethinking other key assumptions. Most companies, for example, look to what a manager has achieved to assess their performance. But in ambiguous circumstances with uncertain outcomes, you need to look at how a manager has acted. Sometimes you can do everything right and forces beyond your control lead to "failure." I'll write more about this topic in a future post.
I'd love to hear additional thoughts about ways in which you are grooming leaders to be ready for the known — and unknown — challenges that lay ahead. How is your company responding to this challenge?
Monday, June 21, 2010
From Marx to Mao to Jintao
Tags: Olympics , China , communism , Karl Marx , capitalism , materialism
Turning Historical Materialism on Its Head
The world's eyes are focused on China today as Beijing plays host to the 2008 Summer International Olympics Games. News reports suggest that China has made the most impressive arrangements ever for these Olympics, with an architectural wonder, the “Birds-Nest” Stadium, presenting an awesome backdrop
to the games. It is estimated that China has spent $36 Billion in preparation for this spectacular extravaganza. Most of the construction work was contracted out to private construction companies: several thousand families belonging to the Chinese proletariat class were forcibly evicted from their homes when they came under the hammer of demolition squads, often with little or no compensation. All this was done under the watchful eyes of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China. One wonders what Marx would have thought of such a development.
Karl Marx was a scientific historian. His study of history went beyond mere chronicling of various empires and kingdoms; it encompassed the historical evolution of societies. His study of history of diverse societies led him to the famous theory of historical materialism. Karl Marx found some underlying similarities in how social, economic and political relations develop in societies during various stages of their development. The theory, which he called “the materialist conception of society”, downplayed the importance of individuals and pointed to the inevitability of historical processes. According to him:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”
Historical materialism is the basis on which the communist parties of the world formulated their agendas and platforms. Marx postulated that human beings enter into economic relations to produce goods and services needed for their survival and they do so through a division of labour. However, his concept of the division of labour was different from that of Adam Smith in that he said that some people in the society owned the means of production, which would include the tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, human knowledge and abilities in terms of using these means of production: Who owns these means of production and the relationship between the owners and others in the society depends upon the stage of development of the society. Marx identified the following main stages which a society has to go through:
1. Pre-historic communist society, in which people in a tribe shared means of production as well as what they produced, somewhat like what happened within an extended familiy in India in the rural society;
2. Ancient society, based on master-slave relationship, with the master owning the means of production and slaves doing all the work;
3. Feudal society, in which feudal landlords owned the land and landless peasants worked for the feudal;
4. Capitalist society, which Marx described as a huge progress over the previous systems, but was still unjust and untenable. In this society, “the capitalist class privately owns the means of production, distribution and exchange (e.g. factories, mines, shops and banks) while the working class live by exchanging their socialized labour with the capital class for wages.”; and finally,
5. Communist Society, in which everyone will contribute according to one’s ability and will receive according to one’s needs. In such a society, there will be no need for a state and so, the state shall wither away.
According to Marx, there was a historical inevitability to this process of societal evolution, which could not be tampered with through individual intervention. Each stage of production carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. However, intervention could expedite the destruction of the capitalist stage through a transitionary Socialist Society, where the working class proletariat will form a dictatorship in which the state will own all means of production and distribution.
Marx believed that the industrially developed countries of his time, Germany, England and maybe, France were sufficiently advanced in their stage of capitalism that they were ripe for intervention by workers’ parties. His Communist Manifesto, prepared with his English collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was primarily aimed at the workers’ trade unions in Western Europe.
History, however, took a somewhat different turn, when the Communist Party of Russia became the first workers’ movement to usher in a communist revolution. Marx did not think that capitalism had fully developed in Russia; he wrote in a letter to a Russian:
“If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction - she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.”
Vladimir Lenin did not wait for his country’s capitalism to ripen and led a successful revolution against the czarist Russia to hurl in the first dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Soviet Communist Party. Under the leadership of Lenin and, later, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union showed that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be successfully used to expedite the transformation of a society from a semi-feudal to an industrial stage. Thus, Marxism was transformed into Marxism-Leninism.
If the Bolshevik revolution made the first dent in Marx’s postulates of historical materialism, then Mao Ze-dong made an even more serious dent in it when he proposed to the Second Communist International that he wanted to lead a peasant struggle to bring in a revolution in China. He was opposed in this by the international communist establishment, including the stalwart Indian communist M. N. Roy, who was involved in the working committee of the communist Party of China. According to the established Marxist orthodoxy, China was still a feudal society and it had to go through a capitalist phase before it would be ready for a communist revolution. However, Mao disagreed and started his Long March, which ended in the successful establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Now, the Marxist-Leninist doctrine came to be known as the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrine and served as the blueprint for many a revolutionary struggle in the developing countries of the world.
But if Lenin and Mao showed that the stages towards a proletarian revolution could be leaped, developments in the two countries since their revolutions have also shown the limits of what a peasant-proletariat dictatorship could accomplish. Soviet Russia made spectacular progress in military and scientific achievements but its industrial progress stalled after initial progress, especially in the production of basic and heavy industries. The state planning process, however, proved too rigid and inappropriate to provide adequate signals for the allocation of resources to produce the quantity and quality of goods and services sought by the society. When Gorbachev introduced his glasnost in the 1980s, it was an admission that the old system had broken down and new ideas were needed if the Soviet Union were to compete with its capitalist rivals. The glasnost ultimately led to the break-up of the Soviet Union and degenerated into a chaotic free-for-all capitalism, until it was brought under some discipline by Vladimir Putin.
Developments in China have been even more dramatic. Communist China under the leadership of Mao Ze-dong successfully threw away the yoke of feudalism. The Chinese society was transformed within a generation from a feudal-serf relationship to one of a classless society which leveled rich and poor alike. The process was expedited by the Great Leap Forward, also known as Cultural Revolution, though at a very high cost to the society in terms of loss of human capital and personal hardships. Nevertheless, during this period, China took giant strides towards emancipation of the underclass including women, universal literacy and public health.
The aftermath of the Cultural Revolution brought in a new thinking in the Chinese communist leadership which realized that, while the revolution succeeded socially, the society had to pay a huge economic cost and suffer human miseries, including famines and starvation. This new thinking was articulated by Deng Xiapong, who led the Chinese Communist Party from late 1970s to early 1990s. He introduced what he called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. The socialist market economy and economic reforms introduced by Deng laid the foundation for China becoming a part of the global economy. Since then, China has experienced rapid economic growth of 10 per cent annually with a growth in per capita income of over 8 per cent. In other words, a Chinese on average has been doubling his income every nine years. China is now the world’s third largest economy, after the US and Japan and the second largest in terms of purchasing power parity.
Both Russia and China, especially China, have turned Marx’s theory of historical materialism on its head. Instead of using a mass revolution to expedite a transition from a capitalist to a communist stage, they have used the revolution to move fast from a feudal to an industrial society, bring about a revolutionary change in the class divisions in the society and induced rapid improvement in human development in terms of education and health. These are a pre-requisite to a fast take-off for an economy. In doing so, they have also shown that dictatorship of the proletariat precedes rather than succeeds Capitalism.
The experience of Russia and China has now become an almost universal model for communist parties in other countries: Vietnam is closely following the Chinese model and so, to some extent, is Buddha Bhattacharya in West Bengal although he is working in a completely different political set up. It appears that the last holdouts of Communism, Cuba and North Korea, are also beginning to slowly open up to these new ideas.
In adapting a different path than shown by Karl Marx, Russia and China have also demonstrated the downside of following a capitalistic road map. When China embarked upon a market-based economy, Deng famously said that “for China to progress, some Chinese will become rich faster than others”. This has proven to be an understatement: while poor in China and Russia may not have become poorer, the rich have certainly leaped ahead a lot faster. The China that Mao bequeathed was poor but equal; the China of Hu Jintao is a lot richer but also a lot more unequal, both in terms of individuals as well as in terms of differences between its advanced provinces and the hinterlands. The market economy may be the right mantra for growing the economic pie; it is not a solution to removing poverty or widening gaps between rich and poor, which can ultimately lead to a destabilisation of a society.
Turning Historical Materialism on Its Head
The world's eyes are focused on China today as Beijing plays host to the 2008 Summer International Olympics Games. News reports suggest that China has made the most impressive arrangements ever for these Olympics, with an architectural wonder, the “Birds-Nest” Stadium, presenting an awesome backdrop
to the games. It is estimated that China has spent $36 Billion in preparation for this spectacular extravaganza. Most of the construction work was contracted out to private construction companies: several thousand families belonging to the Chinese proletariat class were forcibly evicted from their homes when they came under the hammer of demolition squads, often with little or no compensation. All this was done under the watchful eyes of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China. One wonders what Marx would have thought of such a development.
Karl Marx was a scientific historian. His study of history went beyond mere chronicling of various empires and kingdoms; it encompassed the historical evolution of societies. His study of history of diverse societies led him to the famous theory of historical materialism. Karl Marx found some underlying similarities in how social, economic and political relations develop in societies during various stages of their development. The theory, which he called “the materialist conception of society”, downplayed the importance of individuals and pointed to the inevitability of historical processes. According to him:
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”
Historical materialism is the basis on which the communist parties of the world formulated their agendas and platforms. Marx postulated that human beings enter into economic relations to produce goods and services needed for their survival and they do so through a division of labour. However, his concept of the division of labour was different from that of Adam Smith in that he said that some people in the society owned the means of production, which would include the tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, human knowledge and abilities in terms of using these means of production: Who owns these means of production and the relationship between the owners and others in the society depends upon the stage of development of the society. Marx identified the following main stages which a society has to go through:
1. Pre-historic communist society, in which people in a tribe shared means of production as well as what they produced, somewhat like what happened within an extended familiy in India in the rural society;
2. Ancient society, based on master-slave relationship, with the master owning the means of production and slaves doing all the work;
3. Feudal society, in which feudal landlords owned the land and landless peasants worked for the feudal;
4. Capitalist society, which Marx described as a huge progress over the previous systems, but was still unjust and untenable. In this society, “the capitalist class privately owns the means of production, distribution and exchange (e.g. factories, mines, shops and banks) while the working class live by exchanging their socialized labour with the capital class for wages.”; and finally,
5. Communist Society, in which everyone will contribute according to one’s ability and will receive according to one’s needs. In such a society, there will be no need for a state and so, the state shall wither away.
According to Marx, there was a historical inevitability to this process of societal evolution, which could not be tampered with through individual intervention. Each stage of production carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. However, intervention could expedite the destruction of the capitalist stage through a transitionary Socialist Society, where the working class proletariat will form a dictatorship in which the state will own all means of production and distribution.
Marx believed that the industrially developed countries of his time, Germany, England and maybe, France were sufficiently advanced in their stage of capitalism that they were ripe for intervention by workers’ parties. His Communist Manifesto, prepared with his English collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was primarily aimed at the workers’ trade unions in Western Europe.
History, however, took a somewhat different turn, when the Communist Party of Russia became the first workers’ movement to usher in a communist revolution. Marx did not think that capitalism had fully developed in Russia; he wrote in a letter to a Russian:
“If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction - she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.”
Vladimir Lenin did not wait for his country’s capitalism to ripen and led a successful revolution against the czarist Russia to hurl in the first dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Soviet Communist Party. Under the leadership of Lenin and, later, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union showed that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be successfully used to expedite the transformation of a society from a semi-feudal to an industrial stage. Thus, Marxism was transformed into Marxism-Leninism.
If the Bolshevik revolution made the first dent in Marx’s postulates of historical materialism, then Mao Ze-dong made an even more serious dent in it when he proposed to the Second Communist International that he wanted to lead a peasant struggle to bring in a revolution in China. He was opposed in this by the international communist establishment, including the stalwart Indian communist M. N. Roy, who was involved in the working committee of the communist Party of China. According to the established Marxist orthodoxy, China was still a feudal society and it had to go through a capitalist phase before it would be ready for a communist revolution. However, Mao disagreed and started his Long March, which ended in the successful establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Now, the Marxist-Leninist doctrine came to be known as the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrine and served as the blueprint for many a revolutionary struggle in the developing countries of the world.
But if Lenin and Mao showed that the stages towards a proletarian revolution could be leaped, developments in the two countries since their revolutions have also shown the limits of what a peasant-proletariat dictatorship could accomplish. Soviet Russia made spectacular progress in military and scientific achievements but its industrial progress stalled after initial progress, especially in the production of basic and heavy industries. The state planning process, however, proved too rigid and inappropriate to provide adequate signals for the allocation of resources to produce the quantity and quality of goods and services sought by the society. When Gorbachev introduced his glasnost in the 1980s, it was an admission that the old system had broken down and new ideas were needed if the Soviet Union were to compete with its capitalist rivals. The glasnost ultimately led to the break-up of the Soviet Union and degenerated into a chaotic free-for-all capitalism, until it was brought under some discipline by Vladimir Putin.
Developments in China have been even more dramatic. Communist China under the leadership of Mao Ze-dong successfully threw away the yoke of feudalism. The Chinese society was transformed within a generation from a feudal-serf relationship to one of a classless society which leveled rich and poor alike. The process was expedited by the Great Leap Forward, also known as Cultural Revolution, though at a very high cost to the society in terms of loss of human capital and personal hardships. Nevertheless, during this period, China took giant strides towards emancipation of the underclass including women, universal literacy and public health.
The aftermath of the Cultural Revolution brought in a new thinking in the Chinese communist leadership which realized that, while the revolution succeeded socially, the society had to pay a huge economic cost and suffer human miseries, including famines and starvation. This new thinking was articulated by Deng Xiapong, who led the Chinese Communist Party from late 1970s to early 1990s. He introduced what he called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. The socialist market economy and economic reforms introduced by Deng laid the foundation for China becoming a part of the global economy. Since then, China has experienced rapid economic growth of 10 per cent annually with a growth in per capita income of over 8 per cent. In other words, a Chinese on average has been doubling his income every nine years. China is now the world’s third largest economy, after the US and Japan and the second largest in terms of purchasing power parity.
Both Russia and China, especially China, have turned Marx’s theory of historical materialism on its head. Instead of using a mass revolution to expedite a transition from a capitalist to a communist stage, they have used the revolution to move fast from a feudal to an industrial society, bring about a revolutionary change in the class divisions in the society and induced rapid improvement in human development in terms of education and health. These are a pre-requisite to a fast take-off for an economy. In doing so, they have also shown that dictatorship of the proletariat precedes rather than succeeds Capitalism.
The experience of Russia and China has now become an almost universal model for communist parties in other countries: Vietnam is closely following the Chinese model and so, to some extent, is Buddha Bhattacharya in West Bengal although he is working in a completely different political set up. It appears that the last holdouts of Communism, Cuba and North Korea, are also beginning to slowly open up to these new ideas.
In adapting a different path than shown by Karl Marx, Russia and China have also demonstrated the downside of following a capitalistic road map. When China embarked upon a market-based economy, Deng famously said that “for China to progress, some Chinese will become rich faster than others”. This has proven to be an understatement: while poor in China and Russia may not have become poorer, the rich have certainly leaped ahead a lot faster. The China that Mao bequeathed was poor but equal; the China of Hu Jintao is a lot richer but also a lot more unequal, both in terms of individuals as well as in terms of differences between its advanced provinces and the hinterlands. The market economy may be the right mantra for growing the economic pie; it is not a solution to removing poverty or widening gaps between rich and poor, which can ultimately lead to a destabilisation of a society.
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