revisiting the present

Therefore, the fact that the government is the biggest capitalist, the main banker, the greatest employer, and the ultimate refuge or ineffable solace of the bootlicking intelligentsia makes for only a formal, superficial, difference. The main question to ask is: what special class-interest does this government serve?

that was written in 1954. i wrote this two years ago:

government is the landlord with the largest surplus landholding. goverment is the tycoon who owns ships, planes, buses, trains, trucks and cars. government is the businessman who runs factories, mills, mines, quarries and souvenir stores. government is the investor with interests in healthcare, hospitality, travel & leisure, financial services, energy, food processing, warehousing, insurance, armaments, telecom, construction and housing, infrastructure and information technology.
would you like to do business with him ? (who wouldn't, right ?)

do the two statements, broadly, seem to describe similar situations? the problem is this (from the same article as the first one):

The solution for India, of course, would, be socialism, which alone can create a demand rising with the supply, a solution which can be utilised not only by advanced countries but by backward countries ( as China is demonstrating) , and without which planning is futile.

now after 1954, the government seemed to have heeded his advice to a significant extent and tried a vast number of measures to socialise india: efforts to control landholdings, nationalizing private banks and companies, restricting foreign capital (much, much more than earlier), restricting local capital, investing in 'food, agrarian production, re-division of land, employment, education,' etc., so what provoked me to write the second para, which resembles the first one so much, fifty years later?

the problem is also this: the first author, if he were alive, would repeat what he'd said in 1954. we haven't socialised enough:

In fact, the Five Year Plans mentioned above are self-contradictory in that they are obviously inspired by the great successes of Soviet planning without, however, taking any account of the necessity of socialism to the achievement of these successes: effective planning cannot leave the private investor free to invest when and where he likes, as is done in India, nor can its main purpose be to assure him of profitable opportunities for the investment of his capital.

and so on. and add : i told you so. except he didn't tell us so - what he'd predicted was this:

All these factors together, however, will not prevent rapid disillusionment at promises unfulfilled, nor the inevitable mass protest against hunger, the ultimate Indian reality. There may come a time when the Indian army, officered by Indian bourgeois and aided by a transport system designed for an army of occupation, may not suffice.