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50 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL ACTION
liament fifty years ago with regard to the maintenancost of the British Empire.
Modernization and Modernity
By modernity we mean the superstructural incorporation of a partial life-style of the modern metropolis and then percolating such culture or commodity orientation to the less fortunate sector. But all this happens without any significant structural change or changes in production factors or production relations. The same is true about urbanization and urbanity. Today in most villages there has spread a transistor and nylon culture (urbanity), say, in West Bengal ; though, by the latest census there has been absolutely no change in urbanization. In the erstwhile colonies (ie., Asian, African and Latin American countries), there is thus a great difference between modernization and modernity. In the case of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, South Vietnam and Sri Lanka the modernity has been a certain amount of westernization-that also not an Industrial West but a Feudal West-a cross brand of neon signs and Coco-Cola culture, drinking alchohol, visiting night-clubs and cabre or a more polished English diction.
We have however delineated all these cautions about 'modernization' to emphasize the obvious that the constraints to modernization are not all internal or modernization is not an uninterferred indigenous process but is very much affected and manipulated by the overpowering system of Neo-colonialism. Moreover, unless we distinguish between modernization and modernity we shall run the danger of perpetuating the existing alienation between the elites and the people, between the structural and superstructural, and even in our own selves.
Meaning of Modernization for the Third World
The distinction between ideal meaning and actual meaning tends to confuse the real issues by bringing in unnecessary subjectivity into the concept. And yet it is highly fashionable in some sectors to try to understand the social workings of the so-called underdeveloped societies in terms of this very process. As a matter of fact the term 'modernization' is so misleading that it can be and has been construed by the Imperialist Countries as 'joining hands with capitalism' knowing all the time that they themselves are putting formidable obstacles in the path of modernization of the aspirant countries. It is a sad irony of history that the cause of non-modernization is often upheld as the goal of modernization. On account of all these twists and ambiguities it is advisable to understand modernization not as being like U.S.A. or W. Germany or Japan or this country or that country but to limit the scope relative to the specific country one is talking about. It is much more important therefore, that modernization should mean the transformation of the entire social struc
