* Vandana Shiva 

On aljost every page of Vandana Shiva’s writings, there are accounts of anti-life disasters driven by the inherent dynamic of capitalism, that is to say, by imperatives of a system whose dynamic is buying cheap and selling dear. In pursuit of profit, genes are patented. To raise prices, seeds are tied to herbicides so that neither the seed nor the herbicide will produce a crop without the other; consequently both must be purchased from the same multinational corporation. To create something else to sell, water is privatized. To create more commodities that can be profitably marketed, both indigenous knowledge and the findings of research scientists are redefined as somebody’s intellectual property, as --for similar reasons-- several hundred years ago, land was redefined as somebody’s real property. And so on and on and on…… The dynamic of the system overrides ethics and ecology.

I have to be careful with the word “dynamic.” I do not want to give the impression that I think economics is like mechanics. The founding sin of mainstream (more or less Walrasian) economics is to treat processes governed by social norms as if they were functional relationships between dependent quantities. I want to exorcise that founding sin, not compound it. Nevertheless, I find it useful to say that the modern world has a characteristic dynamic, that it consists of buying cheap and selling dear, and that Gandhi put into practice a different dynamic. The economic law that man must buy in the best and cheapest market was criticized by Gandhi as one of the jost “inhuman” among the maxims laid down by modern economists. (1) 

“Paradigm” is another word I have to be careful with. Many people speak today of “paradigms” and of the need for a new one, and jost of them claim to use the term in a way justified by Thomas Kuhn’s demonstration of the importance of what he called paradigms in the history of the natural sciences. (1A) I use the tern paradigm not to refer to any economic model or theory, but rather to the legal framework of capitalism which I, my co-author Joanna Swanger, and (we would claim) Karl Marx, see economic theories as presupposing. (2) Thus only the word “paradigm” is new to these pages; the concept has been there whenever I have written of the imposition of the property and contract concepts of European commercial law on India by the British. This dominant paradigm frames today’s common sense and defines the work of accountants and managers as well as economists. 

I do not want to give the impression that a paradigm shift at the level of economic theory would change the world. It is the other way around. Mainstream economics is part and parcel of the pouvoir en place. In Wittgensteinian terminology, the academic disciplines are language-games that are functional parts of the way modern society organizes human action, and human interaction with the biosphere. The reason why the lessons to be learned from Gandhi’s practical work promoting the spinning of cotton khadi are today even more crucial than those to be learned from his writings is that we today lack methods for changing the world even more than we lack proof that the emperor wears no clothes, and even more than we lack visions of what a better world would be like.  

In this connection Mark Latham, the Leader of the Labor Party of Australia has astutely observed: “A common Left response to the emergence of global capital has been to denounce market forces by associating the recent period of reform with ‘economic rationalism.’ The use of this term commonly points to a vanguard of academics and financial interests who have secured a realignment of government policy towards free market forces. It is suggested that strategies of so-called economic rationalism have released undesirable, globalised, market trends. In practice, however, changes to markets have driven changes to public policy, not the reverse. As ever, events have had a much greater impact on policy than has political theory.” (3) 

If indeed, the causal powers that move recent history are found more in markets than in political theories or in governmental policies, than it is important to ask how the bad influences of markets can be curbed and their good influences encouraged. I propose to pursue that question by looking at Gandhi’s practical experiences promoting cotton spinning and other local economic activities, which he promoted as part of a general philosophy of ethical economics.  

Vandana Shiva is not a person who thinks that the solution to all problems is to have fewer markets and more government planning. Sometimes, indeed, she seems to join the chorus of those who say that the policies of Jawaharlal Nehru failed because they were too socialist, or too statist, or too prone to equate socialism with statism. She condemns, “… three decades of agricultural policy during which this sector was made a state monopoly and run on massive debts and subsidies while ignoring all the ecological imperatives of sustainability.” (4) Salvation lies, in part if not in whole, in giving private individuals and local communities material incentives for contributing to the common good, as is implicit in this passage: “Because farmers and local communities did not have any control over trees which they might plant, either they did not plant at all, or when coerced to plant did not maintain or care for them. In this way many community woodlots planted with great physical effort resulted in little gain.” (5) 
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For Shiva, while excessive statist bureaucracy might be called the problem, or part of the problem, globalizing capitalism is certainly not the solution. The solution is a decentralized, ecologically sustainable, and ethical economy along Gandhian lines. The solution is certainly not simply the simple withdrawal by the state from the role it formerly played as regulator of the economy. The latter, the current neoliberal wave of privatizations and budget cuts, is indeed the proximate cause of several current disasters – which include, to extend a bit the list started above, renewed famine and threat of famine, the extinction of the biodiversity on which the future of life depends, poisoning the soil, a wave of farmer suicides……. Granting that liberalization of a constructive kind is needed, Shiva condemns the kind of liberalization that is actually happening. More specifically, she condemns the following set of policies, not so much as separate policies, but as elements of the implementation of a coherent malevolent philosophy: 

---free import of fertilizers, and deregulating the domestic fertilizer industry 

-- removing restrictions on how much land a person can own 

-- removing subsidies for water, electricity, and credit 

-- deregulating the production of wheat, rice, sugar, cotton, and oilseed 

-- downsizing the system for providing food security for the poor 

-- removing controls on markets, traders and processors 

-- removing subsidies to cooperatives 

-- abolishing the general ban on futures trading 

-- abolishing inventory controls 

-- abolishing selective credit controls on inventory financing 

-- treating farmers’ cooperatives on an equal footing with the private sector (6)  
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Shiva grants that the technocrats who are taking measures such as those just listed have correctly diagnosed the cause of India’s agricultural problems, insofar as the cause was Nehruvian statism. They have prescribed the wrong cure. They have prescribed free trade. 

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Their prescribed cure is neither logically consistent nor sincerely proposed. Their so-called “free trade” abrogates a great many freedoms, including among others the freedom of farmers to save seeds from their own plants in order to sow them the following season. Nor are their neoliberal policies a sincere effort by the Government of India to serve the interests of the people of India. They are a surrender to the power of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United States Government, all of whom act in the interest of multinational corporations. 

But I will not focus initially on Shiva’s account of the logical contradictions of so-called free trade. Nor will I focus on her account of the amalgam of technocratic ideology, political and military power, and global movement of investment capital that cements into place the present disastrous course of world history. Instead, I will focus on what the study of Gandhi’s experiences can contribute to guiding the alternative course that Shiva proposes.. Although her writings follow a consistent pattern across a wide range of issues, I will outline here specifically her proposal for an alternative approach to food security: 

--women-centered household food security: 

-- high nutrition per acre (as contrasted with the profit per acre criterion of agribusiness) 

-- internal input agricultural practice to reduce debt and the cost of purchased inputs 

-- increased use of drought resistant varieties to reduce ecological vulnerability 

--organic methods to improve soil moisture and reduce water demand 

-- diversity of crops to ensure balanced nutrition throughout the year 

-- use of farmer-saved open pollinated seeds 

-- local community food security: 

-- establish community grain banks 

-- procure locally so that local producers’ livelihoods are protected 

-- cut storage and transport costs 

-- focus on culturally appropriate foods for the area 

-- use locally procured grain for food-related programs of state and central governments, such as food for work schemes, school meals, primary healthcare centers…. 

-- in case surplus exists after meeting local needs, the village grain banks should sell to the states and central government 

--in case of local scarcity, the village grain banks should receive from states and center 

--the community food banks should have the right to tax to support their activities (7) 

Shiva proposes complementary policies at the state and central government levels to support the household and community approach to food security just outlined.  

Her proposals are recognizably Gandhian in their emphasis on local self-sufficiency, and in supporting production in households. (8) They are similar to those made by other advocates of green and local economies such as Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, E.F. Schumacher, and others. (9) She differs from non-Indian green economists in more frequently acknowledging her debt to Gandhi, which is to be expected, since in the rest of the world it is possible to think about deliberately encouraging local economies without recalling Gandhi, but not in India. 

Given the similarities among the various calls for locally centered and relatively self-sufficient economies (by the way, none of the green economists is a fanatic who would prohibit all long distance trade), it follows that an objection against one is an objection against all. One of the jost obvious and important objections is that Gandhi’s schemes that promoted village level self-sufficiency, although they did a lot of concrete good for many individuals, ultimately failed to transform the system. It is important to analyze why they failed in order to determine whether local self-reliance is a hopeless cause; or whether it could be made to work by correcting Gandhi’s mistakes, or by trying again in more favorable circumstances.  

Gandhi first thought of cotton-spinning in 1908, but it did not become an official program of the Congress until 1921. He conceived it as a way to provide work, and therefore food, for India’s semi-starved millions. jost of them were agricultural smallholders or laborers who had no work for four to six months a year. Spinning was a logical choice for a make-work program because India grew its own cotton; because spinning was easy to learn how to do; because it required very little capital; because it could be done at odd hours in between household chores and farm chores; because it contributed to meeting a basic need, because it could help liberate India from dependence on British cloth and drive out the British by cutting their profits; and because it was a tradition which, although it had vanished, had left traces. For hundreds of years before the British came, villagers had earned a livelihood by combining agriculture with spinning and other crafts. Modernization destroyed the crafts by producing cheaper and often better goods in factories. Without cottage industries to supplement earnings from agriculture, the masses were reduced to semi-starvation and to despair. 

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Gandhi always said that if any other craft could be found that would better serve the function of providing sustenance for the masses, he would promote it instead of promoting spinning cotton to make thread. He in fact founded in 1934 [verify date] an All India Village Industries Association, which promoted other crafts, as a complement to the All India Spinning Association (A.I.S.A.) which he had founded in 1925. 

Spinning was a make-work program. But it was more than that. It was also a means to drive the British from India. On this point Gandhi was a bit of an economic determinist; he reasoned that when the British no longer found being in India profitable, they would leave. (10) They made more profit selling cloth than anything else. If Indians would not buy their cloth, then the British could not sell it. Thus the campaign for khadi clothing had two sides: persuading the villagers to spin the yarn for it, and persuading patriotic Indians to buy it and wear it. Cloth made in Indian mills stood somewhere in the middle of the equation, not as good as homespun, but not as bad as imported. In any case, Gandhi reasoned that the Indian mills alone could not drive out the British, because they did not have sufficient capacity to produce all the cloth India needed. 

Cotton-spinning was a make work program and it was a means for driving the British from India. But it was still more than that. It was the germ and the working model of the better world of the future, of the world where dharma would reign once again, as dharma had reigned in a partly imagined and partly historical earlier period of Indian history. Gandhi wrote, “It is the greatest delusion to suppose that the duty of Swadeshi begins and ends with merely spinning so much yarn anyhow and wearing khadi made from it. Khadi is the first indispensable step towards the discharge of Swadeshi dharma towards society. … Swadeshism is … a doctrine of selfless service that has its roots in the purest ahimsa, i.e. love.” (11) 

Gandhi once illustrated the point that spinning promotes cooperation, by describing what he called “the working of a typical centre. “ At the central office is collected seed cotton for spinners. The cotton is ginned by ginners perhaps at the centre. It is distributed then among carders who re-deliver it in the shape of slivers. These are now ready to be distributed among the spinners who bring their yarn from week to week and take away fresh slivers and their wages in return. They yarn thus received is given to weavers to weave and received back for sale in the shape of khadi. The latter must now be sold to the weavers –the general public. Thus the centre office has to be in constant living touch with a very large number of people irrespective of caste, colour, or creed. For the centre has no dividends to make, has no exclusive care but the care of the jost needy. The centre to be useful must keep itself clean in every sense of the term. The bond between it and the component parts of the vast organization is purely spiritual or moral. A spinning centre, therefore, is a co-operative society whose members are ginners, carders, spinners, weavers, and buyers –all tied together by a common bond, mutual goodwill, and service. In this society the course of every pice can be traced aljost with certainty as it floats to and fro. And as these centres grow and draw the youth of the country who have the fire of patriotism burning brightly in their hearts and whose purity will stand the strain of all temptation, they will, they must, become centres for radiating elementary knowledge of hygiene, sanitation, domestic treatment of simple diseases among the villagers, and education among their children suited to their needs.” (12)  

Having described the “typical centre” he then wrote that the time was “not yet” and that “The beginning indeed has been made,” as if acknowledging that what he had been describing had been not so much typical as ideal. I think it is clear that what Gandhi actually described was not an empirically existing khadi center, but the working of a khadi center that updated and restored the reign of dharma as it had existed in the ideal Indian village of the past. The key feature of the ideal khadi centre is its lack of conditionality. Instead, the norm is unconditional service to others. The pice (the coin) “floats to and fro”; but the dynamic that drives the ginner, the carder, the spinner, the weaver, and the buyer is not buying cheap and selling dear. Like the medical doctors in Plato’s Republic who treat patients for the sake of health, not for the sake of money, the ginners in Gandhi’s “typical khadi centre” gin cotton because ginning cotton is their function in the community. 

The ideal khadi center is (or is a central institution of) a true community in the sense given to the word “community” by Daly and Cobb. (13) In a true community: (i) Membership contributes to self-identification. (ii) There is extensive participation by its members in the decisions by which life is governed. (iii) The community as a whole takes responsibility for meeting the needs of the members. (iv) This responsibility includes respect for the diverse individuality of its members. 

The key item is the third. The community cares for the members. The processes of exchange are shaped to serve the ends of use.  

Against Gandhi’s swadeshi ideal, and against any proposal for true community, a common objection is that it runs contrary to human nature. It allegedly expects people to be sentimental altruists, when allegedly the fact is that people are rational egoists. But dharma is not sentiment. It is norm. To be sure, in a sense, in Max Weber’s terminology, Gandhi is proposing to turn back the clock so that people are no longer modern in the sense of instrumentally rational, but traditional in the sense of being governed by customs. (governed by Wertrationalitat instead of by a Zweckrationalitat that drives them to maximize personal payoffs). But it is hardly open to a Weberian to argue that it is contrary to human nature for people to be governed by conventional norms. According to Max Weber, jost people have been so governed, in jost societies, for jost of history. (13A) Indeed it can be argued that even now people are governed by what Weber called customary norms; it just happens that the customary norms expect people to be rational egoists. Emile Durkheim’s theory that modern individualism is itself the product of a modern conscience collective provides a good fit to the empirically observed facts. (14) Therefore, modern economic rationality is not categorically different from Wertrationalitat. It is a particular kind of customary norm.  

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Nor does serving one’s neighbors lack a Zweck. The Zweck, the goal, for Gandhi, is self-realization, as distinct from self-aggrandizement. “While the economists, ever since Adam Smith, preach that everybody doing what he wants will benefit rich and poor alike, the economics of Gandhi is based on a spiritual conviction that by serving the poor we do what we ourselves really need. Self-realization, as against self-aggrandizement, is the ultimate human need.” (15) 

Further, the rules governing a Gandhian economy can be formulated, not as sentiment, but as rational decision rules, as has been done by the Gandhian economist Amritananda Das as follows: 

“First, let us note that the behavior of individuals within a socio-economic collaborative micro-group is marked by avoidance of economic options by which an individual within the group can improve his economic situation at the expense of the group or without sharing the gains (at least partly) with the group. Second, the group tends to shelter and protect its weaker members from external difficulties and threats, by both sharing of goods and the sharing of work responsibilities. Third, any policy which enriches the group as a whole gets preference over policies which affect part of the group in one way and another part in the opposite direction. Fourth, leadership within the micro-group devolves on the individual(s) who show particular skill in promoting the group interest and who lead in self sacrifice in the interest of the group. Finally the group tends to display a strong community of tastes and a preference for group-oriented leisure and recreational activities. 

“Quite clearly, such behavior is incompatible with the model of acquisitive-individualist rationality. Yet, there is no reason for regarding such behavior as irrational.” (16) 

If we are convinced by Das that Gandhi’s social experiments were not irrational, and if we are further convinced that his proposals were not contrary to human nature, then we must search further for an explanation of why they did not catch on, spread, and transform society. My suggestion is that the explanation of Gandhi’s failure is the incompatibility of cotton spinning and other similar schemes with the dynamic of the dominant paradigm. If my explanation is true, then (without a paradigm shift) Vandana Shiva’s proposals for food security will fail for the same reasons that Gandhi’s projects failed. 

Admittedly, my explanation is abstract. Admittedly, it sounds like bla bla and gobbledygook if one does not already before reading it have a clear idea of what I mean. Please be patient. I will draw on Gandhi’s concrete experiences with the khadi movement in an effort to make the abstractions concrete. I hope to be able to pour easily understandable meanings into the empty containers designated by the concepts “dynamic” and “dominant paradigm.” If I succeed, then the reader will understand clearly why Shiva’s writings defending indigenous cultures and advocating women’s perspectives, and her attacks on “the monoculture of the mind” at an epistemological level, are not just frosting on the cake. They are practical necessities. Her food security program will not work without the cultural changes she advocates. Although Gandhi ultimately failed, he too knew that a different dynamic was needed, and he worked hard to practice and to preach one. (17) That is why Gandhi counts as a pioneer of an approach to peace and justice that in principle would really work. It could be followed, and if it were followed it really would bring peace and justice into existence, in India and around the world. 

In its early days Gandhi justified khadi with what he regarded as a slam dunk argument. In India there were tens of millions of laborers with nothing to do for much of the year. The cost of labor –jost obviously in the case of home spinners and weavers who made cloth for their own use—was therefore in a sense zero. India’s climate made it easy to grow cotton. Hence the cost of raw material –again jost obviously when the villagers grew their own—was therefore small. A spinning wheel is a very inexpensive piece of capital equipment. Therefore, khadi is a way to get something aljost for nothing. Its major input has zero cost, and its other inputs are so cheap that their cost can be approximated as zero. Similarly, Gandhi argued that if khadi replaced the sixty crores (tens of millions) of rupees spent annually to import cloth, then India’s net gain would be sixty crores. Giving work to idle hands created a large fund for poor relief. Remarkably, the particular means chosen for poor relief would, in its ordinary daily operations, deposit the bulk of the sixty crores of rupees directly in the pockets of the poorest of the poor. 

To be sure, from the first Gandhi enjoined what he called “sacrificial” spinning as a virtue and as the practice of a religious duty. “Sacrificial” spinning was done by middle and upper class people for free, without pay, in order to set a good example for the poor (following the sociological principle that people tend to emulate those whose social standing is higher than their own), and in order to increase the stock of available yarn. Sacrificial spinning was also supposed to calm the nerves and to purge the soul of disorderly passions. But among religious duties sacrificial spinning had the distinction of being an obligation deduced from a premise that asserted a particular relationship between cause and effect. It was a duty to spin because it was a duty to alleviate the suffering of the semi-starved masses. It was also a duty to spin in order to bring about Swaraj, self-rule for India, which, in turn, would open the way to more alleviation of the suffering of the semi-starved masses. The empirical premise of the theological conclusion was that spinning would in fact cause the effects desired. 

An empirical difficulty standing between the recommended intervention, spinning, and the expected effect, money in the pockets of the poor, was that it was hard to sell khadi because it was expensive. According to the argument outlined above, one might expect khadi to be cheap, because the inputs required were, according to the argument, virtually costless. But it turned out in practice that khadi was more expensive than mill cloth. (18) The poor people who made it could not afford to wear it. The only way to sell it was to persuade consumers who could afford it to pay more for coarser cloth. 

It should not be surprising that manufactured cloth is cheap and of high quality. The dominant paradigm, i.e. the legal framework that governs the global economy, provides for commercial freedom. It organizes market relationships through the principles of the law of contracts. Nobody has to pay more for coarser cloth. The dynamic implicit in the paradigm drives the entrepreneur to seek the jost cost-effective way to produce cloth. What common sense calls inevitable technical progress is therefore guaranteed by the paradigm and its dynamic. Whatever the state of the art may be in any given branch of business, it must necessarily be a technique that makes the product at a cost that allows it to be sold at prices that attract buyers. 

Vandana Shiva’s proposals for local democratic control of the food supply will not escape the dynamics of the paradigm that ensnared M.K. Gandhi’s proposals for local democratic control of the cloth supply. Somebody will be tempted to buy up grain supplies where they are cheap and sell grain where it is dear. Somebody will be tempted to sell food not to those who are jost hungry but to those who have the jost money to pay for it. Somebody will be tempted –as Vandana Shiva is well aware—not to sow grain at all, but to plant their fields in orchids to be exported and sold to the society elite of the first world. There will be demands like those of Cobden and Bright in England in 1830 to cheapen the price of food for the city masses by selling it at free competitive prices that drive the small producer --and the producer who pays fair wages to labor-- to the wall. There will be a tendency –the same tendency Fernand Braudel identified as a key to the modernizing process that produced capitalism in the 15^th and 16^th centuries—to equalize the price of grain across all markets. This tendency will tend to aggregate under the control of big capital the localities and bio-regions that Shiva’s plan had dis-aggregated in order to form true communities with food security guaranteed by local self-reliance and fraternal outside help when needed. (18A) 

Gandhi’s response to the inability of khadi to compete in the market with mill cloth was to appeal to the conscience of the consumer. “Humanity does not search for low prices in a spirit of bargain. The humane in people even in purchases seeks opportunities for service, and therefore wants to know first not the price of the article of purchase but the condition of its producers, and makes purchases in a manner that serves the jost needy and jost deserving.” (19)  

Thus Gandhi was a forerunner of today’s conscious consumer movement, which promotes fair trade coffee, community supported agriculture (CSA’s), and shopping for a better world. A culture shift. Perhaps the germ of a paradigm shift. But this does not justify –one must be careful to add— the sectarian conclusion that all of today’s conscientious consumers are or should be Gandhians. Some are Presbyterians. Some are Buddhists. Some (as in my case) are Roman Catholics. Some are Anarchists. Some are New Age people who practice transcendental meditation. …. etc. etc. It has been plausibly argued that Gandhi’s philosophy forms a coherent whole, so that his economics is grounded in his view of human nature. (19A) But one need not accept his view of human nature to practice his economics. Not everyone who pays a higher price for goods produced by socially responsible firms is, like Gandhi, following the path of karmayoga set forth in the Bhagavad Gita. With equal coherence people can transcend the dynamic of the dominant paradigm starting from different premises.  

The need for a culture shift to orient consumers toward ethical spending is paralleled by the need for a culture shift to orient entrepreneurs –or whoever decides the location of economic activity—toward ethical investments. Gandhi advocated locating production operations in the decentralized rural settings where jost of the people of India lived instead of concentrating production --and therefore employment-- in urban conglomerations. This issue relates to what Gandhi called swadeshi. Neighbors first.  

To illustrate the problems of decentralizing, I will temporarily leave khadi. I will enter the somewhat different context of the fate of Gandhi’s ideas in independent India after his death. I will follow Gunnar Myrdal’s account of the failure of attempts to spread small productive enterprises throughout India.  

Promoting small scale and decentralized industry in post-independence India fitted in well enough with the government’s plans for economic development, partly because something had to be done to keep people employed until the new jobs expected from industrialization materialized (an expectation which, with the benefit of hindsight, we know to have always been a mirage). Thus with a high degree of calculated ambiguity designed to bring dedicated Gandhians into the same consensus with hardnosed modernizers, and including everyone else in between, India’s five year plans, especially the third one, all called for promoting small enterprises in rural areas. But, Myrdal points out, whatever might have been the initial degree of sincerity of the planners, “…not only has small-scale industry sought out the big cities but various government support schemes have been adjusted to this trend, often in the face of clear programmatic declarations in favor of dispersion and rural industrialization. In general only the cities can offer industrial enterprises easy access to markets, manufacturing facilities, and external economies.” (19B) 

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Thus the problem with bringing work to people instead of forcing people to migrate to cities to find work was similar to the problem selling khadi. Decentralizing did not pay. Somebody would have to provide a subsidy to make it profitable to operate workshops at inconvenient locations. The dynamic that drives entrepreneurs to do what pays tends to swell the already overcrowded cities and to impoverish the already impoverished countryside. A better society –such as the sort of society Gandhi and Shiva propose—would decentralize production. But on the road between actually existing society and that better society there are many forks. At each of those forks people face their immediate problem, such as the problem of the would-be entrepreneur who wants to locate in a place where she or he can jost profitaby buy the required inputs and jost profitably sell the products. Shiva (who is a research physicist) demonstrates convincingly that in terms of net physical benefits, and in terms of net physical costs, humanity and the biosphere would fare incomparably better in the kind of society Gandhi envisioned. But the better society never comes, because at each fork in the road people take the turn that leads back to actually existing society. 

Gandhi saw the need for a different dynamic and proposed one. Swadeshi is usually discussed in connection with urging consumer preference for local goods. Thus Gandhi wrote, “Rule of the best and cheapest is not always true. Just as we do not give up our country for one with a better climate, but endeavor to improve our own, so also may we not discard swadeshi for better or cheaper foreign things. Even as a husband who being dissatisfied with his simple looking wife goes in search of a better looking woman is disloyal to his partner, so is a man disloyal to his country who prefers foreign-made things though better to country-made things.” (20) But swadeshi has the wider implication of an obligation to act for the good of the community. As applied to those who make decisions about where to locate business, ““Employers are to exhaust first whatever pool of local and unemployed workers there is before hiring more suitable labour from other towns or regions. Similarly, the workers would be more reluctant to leave a local employer in spite of more attractive job offers elsewhere. In short, economic agents living together in a community, region, or country, should first and forejost explore all possibilities to do business with each other before going outside in order to get a better deal. Swadeshi demands the sacrifice of utility for the sake of loyalty.” (21)  

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Thus swadeshi implies a paradigm shift in the sense that Thomas Kuhn gave to the term. The problem is reframed as a problem about loyalty. Something happens that is like a gestalt shift, like neural reprogramming; it changes the formulation of questions and answers. (22) At every fork in the road, people make the choice that is best for the community. Instead of seeing a property-controlling entrepreneur freely wandering the world shopping for the jost profitable place to site an operation, through the lens of the new paradigm there appears a community deliberating on how best to meet its needs with its resources in a sustainable relationship to its environment. The identity of the actors changes. The context that gives meaning to the discourse changes. 

A good part of the need for a paradigm shift, not just a change in policy or a new economic model, comes from two reluctances. The first is the reluctance of consumers to pay more for inferior goods. A second is the reluctance of entrepreneurs to forego potential profits by running businesses in the countryside and hiring local people. Given that one needs to be able to see the world differently to propose a conceptual framework in which it would seem at all likely that these and other similar reluctances could be overcome, Gandhi was the man for the job. He was an outsider to modern economic society, quite capable of seeing the world differently. He came from a rural backwater town; his mother was a deeply religious woman who could not read; he grew up in an extended family packed into the rambling rooms of a single large house. Early in his life the vision of restoring ancient India as it was supposed to have been before the British conquest gripped his imagination. He was qualified as few highly educated people were to think outside the box. What appeared to be impossible to modern common sense appeared to be possible to Gandhi. On his return from South Africa in 1915 [verify date] he spent a year touring Indian villages, listening to the people, seeing how they lived. He was uniquely qualified to connect a vision of another possible world to a close empirical study of observed facts. 

But I have not finished my account of the paradigm shift I attribute to Gandhi, and I have so far left his swadeshi, or communitarian, paradigm in a non-functional form. A moment’s thought will show that the two reluctances described above quickly morph into impossibilities. Over a certain range the conscientious consumer can buy union label garments and eschew sweatshops. Beyond that range, there is not enough money in the consumer’s pocket. Over a certain range, an entrepreneur can cut profits in order to put community values first. There is even a considerable upside range over which businesses can make money being local, green, and socially responsible. (23) But beyond a certain point, businesses could only site operations at inconvenient locations, raise wages and incur other social costs by operating at a loss, in which case they could only remain in business until their capital was exhausted. (Gandhi acknowledged this point and held that business owners, as trustees, should take no more for themselves than the workers got, and that they should operate at zero profit rather than pay less than a living wage, but that they were not obligated to operate at a loss.) Similarly, over a certain range putting more money in the pockets of the poor allows them to get a larger share of the available goods, but there is a point –easily reached in India—where the money demand for wage goods exceeds the physical capacity to produce them. Similarly, too, over a certain range of population densities, traditional peoples can feed themselves sustainably generation after generation using traditional technologies. But in today’s densely populated world it takes scientists like Vandana Shiva to figure out sophisticated ways simultaneously to feed everybody and to preserve the soil for future generations. (Gandhi acknowledged this problem also. He advocated migration from the densely settled areas to sparsely areas.) 

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Such largely physical impossibilities plagued Gandhi’s khadi experiments, especially in the 1930s and early 1940s. Khadi grew slowly. In two decades the movement organized spinning in perhaps 13,000 villages. The number was big enough to make Gandhi the C.E.O. of the largest nonprofit in India, but too small to transform India’s estimated 700,000 villages. Since the Congress required that its members wear khadi, the movement had a captive market of people who bought its products as a way of paying dues. But it was undercut even in its captive market by unscrupulous manufacturers who made mill cloth indistinguishable from khadi and passed it off as the real thing at a lower price. Imports of British cloth declined, but not because of competition from indigenous homespun yarn. The British lost out mainly to competition from Japanese mill cloth. (24) In 1935 Gandhi himself had a crisis of conscience. He realized that he was running sweatshops. At the extremely low productivity of hand spinning, poor workers were making two pies an hour. (25) A living wage would be an anna per hour, or eight annas per day for an eight hour day. He had the same excuse that other people who run sweatshops have: if the spinners did not have the work that the A.I.S.A offered them, they would have no work at all. Women were standing in line seeking opportunities to make and sell homespun yarn even at the miserable wage of two pies an hour. In 1935 Gandhi decided that this excuse was not good enough. After a series of solemn meetings, the A.I.S.A. decided, at Gandhi’s insistence, to pay a minimum wage of three annas a day, as a step toward eventually reaching a living wage of eight annas a day. They knew full well that they could not sell khadi at the prices that the minimum wage would force. They also invited another problem which soon materialized Unscrupulous shops sold cloth made from yarn that was indeed homespun, but it was produced by “private producers” who paid less than the A.I.S.A’s minimum wage. 

Sales fell at the new higher prices. One of Gandhi’s responses was to put more emphasis on home spinning, which he called self-sufficing khadi. (26). Instead of selling yarn, the villagers would make spin and weave for their own use, and thus become less poor because they would save the money they otherwise would have spent on store-bought mill cloth. But even the home spinners had to buy cotton to make their yarn from, for which purpose they had no money, or else grow their own cotton, for which purpose they generally had no land. Then they would have to pay a weaver to weave their yarn, for which purpose they also had no money. (27)  

The frustrations of the later days of the khadi movement revolved around a central fact: the extremely low productivity of spinning yarn by hand with an old-fashioned spinning wheel. Even with an inexhaustible supply of labor regarded as zero cost, and even with volunteers committed to love and service, there was no way to overcome poverty without producing cloth more efficiently, and also rice, wheat, lentils, and other basic goods. 

In the face of the frustration of Gandhian alternatives, and indeed of any alternatives that collide with the dynamic of the dominant paradigm, it is easy to conclude that capitalism is the only possibility. This conclusion appears to follow from the premise that poverty cannot be overcome without increasing productivity, coupled with the premise that productivity cannot be increased without offering material incentives to the owners of resources. Gandhi’s experiments with primitive technologies can be consigned to the dustbin along with the 20^th century’s myriad other unsuccessful attempts to deviate from the dynamic of the dominant paradigm. Thoughts such as these governed India’s switch to a Green Revolution strategy in agriculture shortly after Nehru’s death in 1964. It is true that India had no choice, since President Johnson of the USA had threatened to cut off food aid, leaving India to starve, unless it adopted policies promising larger profits to larger landholders with greater resources and more modern attitudes toward technology. But, quite apart from American pressure, which has been described as “leaning on an open door,” many Indians had already concluded that Gandhian and Nehruvian policies were not working, and that capitalist agriculture was the only viable path. Similarly, India took a neoliberal turn in 1991, again with no choice, since it desperately needed support from international lenders, and could only get it by accepting economic orthodoxy. Again, quite apart from the pressure, the logic seemed to many irrefutable: India could not overcome its economic stagnation that was lowering the masses into ever greater depths of misery unless it could produce efficiently, and it could not produce efficiently without liberalizing markets and allowing investors to reap higher profits. 

What these and other similar volte faces have in common is that they give up on idealism. They decide to live with the frequently observed empirical facts that business grows, investment in technology grows, efficiency grows, and productivity grows when profits grow. The social price that must be paid to get a larger harvest is that property owners get a larger share of it, while the propertyless become even more powerless than they already were. 

If Gandhi’s message is identified with the spinning wheel, then it must be admitted that he offers no solution to the problem of increasing production. But if his primary message is taken to be dharma, and his primary critique of modernity that it is adharma then he does offer a solution. People who follow dharma will increase productivity, and devote the necessary resources to achieving that objective. They will seek simultaneously to achieve other objectives, such as dignity and independence for workers, and respect for all the living plant and animal forms that share the planet with humans. They will do these things for the same reason they do everything else: because it is the right thing to do. Quite apart from Gandhi’s decades-long obsession with spinning wheels, there is a non-capitalist way to increase productivity built into his ethic: live simply, work hard, study every problem methodically and scientifically, serve the community. ( 27A) This formula for personal conduct does not circumvent the need to make capital investments in order to increase productivity. It does suggest that the process of stewarding the investments need not be guided by greed. Not does it imply a world without markets, where nobody buys and sells. It does imply, to use Karl Polanyi’s distinction, a world without Markets, a world where markets are embedded in and accountable to social institutions, rather than the other way around. (27B) 

Dharma is duty. For someone else, an ethic of duty might be a conservative ethic. Not for Gandhi. His synthesis of tradition and liberalism exposes dharma to constant reconsideration in the light of truth. It is my duty to constantly seek to determine what my duty is. All institutions are questioned, especially property. Thus Gandhi writes: “Real socialism has been handed down to us by our ancestors who taught: ‘All land belongs to Gopal, where then is the boundary line ? Man is the maker of that line, and he can therefore unmake it.’ Gopal literally means shepherd. It also means God. In modern language it means the State, i.e. the people. That the land today does not belong to the people is too true. But the fault is not in the teaching. It is in us who have not lived up to it.” (28) If Gandhi’s message is identified with dharma, then the spinning wheel was only an experiment with truth with mixed results, while its underlying principle, if consistently applied, would result in people cooperating, sharing, and working together to do whatever needs to be done to make the world work for everybody without ecological damage.  

Gandhi’s principle is a tautology. If every person did her or his duty in a well-organized society, then all needs would be met, insofar as meeting them was not prevented by natural obstacles beyond human control. A = A. Duty done equals duty done. Duty done equals the deeds required by duty performed. In a well-organized society, when the deeds required by duty are performed, all of its institutions are functional and not dysfunctional. Everything depends on answers to moral questions: How do we discern in the light of facts what should be done ? How do we educate ourselves and others to acquire the discipline and motivation to do joyfully what we should do ? What should be the community’s response to trustees who do not act as trustees, but instead put self above service ? (29) Concerning this last question, Gandhi gave different answers: Sometimes he called for patience and for the gradual nonviolent conversion of the thief. Sometimes he said that property owners who do not faithfully discharge their duties as trustees of their wealth should be legally compelled to do so by laws defining and governing their duties. Sometimes he said that as a last resort their property should be taken over by the state. This last solution, however, only postpones the problem, since it raises the new question how to ensure that public servants faithfully discharge their duties to the public. Whatever the answers to these questions may be, when the members of a community are engaged in asking them, and in seeking answers to them, it is a sure sign that they have shifted to a new paradigm.  

Although skeptics might doubt that Gandhi’s vision of a society guided more by ethics than by buying cheap and selling dear could possibly be brought into existence, nobody would deny that it would be desirable to have such a society if it could be brought into existence … except ….. perhaps ….. thinkers like Amartya Sen.

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Footnotes 

*Vandana Shiva and Afsar H. Jafri, “Seeds of Suicide: The Ecological and Human Costs of Globalisation of Agriculture,” in Vandana Shiva and Gitanjali Bedi (eds), Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security. Delhi: Sage, 2002. p. 183. (This work is cited hereafter as Food Security) 

(1) Gandhi quoted by A.M. Huq, in Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz (eds) Essays in Gandhian Economics. Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985. p. 169. See also footnote 17 below. 

(1A) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. 

(2) See generally, Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, Dilemmas of Social Democracies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (forthcoming). 

(3) Mark Latham, Civilising Global Capital. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 37. 

(4) Vandana Shiva in Food Security, p. 12 

(5) “National Conservation Strategy Action Plan for the National Policy on Natural Resources and the Environment.” Volume II. Addis Ababa: National Conservation Strategy Secretariat, 1994. p. 7; quoted with approval by Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy. Boston: South End Press, 1997. p. 99. 

(6) Vandana Shiva in Food Security p. 13 

(7) Vandana Shiva in Food Security pp. 470-72 

(8) “If an enterprising baker puts up cheap bakeries in our villages so as to replace household kitchens, the whole nation, I hope, will rise against such an enterprise.” M.K. Gandhi, Young India July 17, 1924, reprinted in M.K. Gandhi, Economics of Khadi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1941. p. 89. (cited hereafter as Economics of Khadi) 

(9) Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (eds.), The Case Against the Global Economy; and for a turn toward the local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996; Herman Daly and John Cobb Jr., For the Common Good: redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994; Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution. Boston: Little Brown, 2000; the essay by Helena Norberg Hodge in Food Security cited above; Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale New York : Coward McCann, 1980; Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia. New York: Bantam Books, 1977; Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity. New York: Bantam Books, 1982; Hazel Henderson, The Politics of the Solar Age. New York: Doubleday, 1981; Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row, 1973; Warren Johnson, Muddling Towards Fragility Boulder: Shambala Books, 1981; Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet. New York: Doubleday, 1978; E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. New York: Harper and Row, 1973 

(10) Gandhi believed that the global economy was such that if India and China refused to be exploited, the West and Japan would have to change. Economics of Khadi pp. 187-89. 

(11) Economics of Khadi, p. 372. 

(12) Economics of Khadi , p. 177. 

(13) Daly and Cobb, cited above in footnote 9, p. 172. 

(13A) That nascent capitalism was for a long time a minority movement in a world largely governed by traditional customs is a point made by Fernand Braudel, e.g in the work cited below in note 18A. The opposite argument, that since human nature evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of living in small tribal bands, it is modern individualism that is out of synch with human nature, is made in Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. New York: Bantam, 1995. See generally Stephen Boyden, The Biology of Civilisation: understanding human nature as a force in nature.. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004. 

(14) Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press, 1984. (first French edition 1902) 

(15) Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz, “Introduction” to the book they jointly edited, Essays on Gandhian Economics. Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985. p. 16. 

(16) Amritananda Das, Foundations of Gandhian Economics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. p. 121. 

(17) Gandhi described the dynamic of modern capitalism, buying cheap and selling dear, as one of the jost inhuman of the laws declared by economists. A.M. Huq, in Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz (eds) Essays in Gandhian Economics. Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985. p 169, Gandhi’s mentor John Ruskin wrote: “…there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, ‘buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest’ represents….” John Ruskin, Unto this Last quoted by Huq on the same page. Gandhi goes on, in the passage to which Huq refers, to say: “Nor do we always regulate human relations by any such sordid considerations. …It would be sinful for me to dismiss a highly paid faithful servant because I can get a more efficient and cheaper servant although the latter may be equally faithful. The economics that disregard moral and sentimental considerations are, like waxworks that, being lifelike, still lack the life of living flesh. At every crucial moment these new-fangled economic laws have broken down in practice…. We lost when we began to buy our clothing in the cheap markets of England and Japan. We will live again when we appreciate the religious necessity of buying our clothes prepared by our own neighbors in their cottages.” Young India October 27, 1921; reprinted in M.K. Gandhi Economics of Khadi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1941. pp. 60-61. 

(18) Richard Gregg argued that the high cost of khadi is only apparent. Richard Gregg, Economics of Khaddar Madras: S. Ganesan, 1928l, He is certainly right to say that its return per rupee of invested capital is higher than that of manufactured cloth, since the amount of capital invested in khadi is so small. He would more generally be right if a Pigovian tax could be imposed to internalize Gregg’s general principle that “.., when broader social and psychological factors are considered, the slower implements are probably better…” (p. 87) But the principle that decisions ought to be based on true costs all things considered is even colder comfort today than it was when Gregg wrote, since today it is even harder for stationary governments to compel footloose capital to internalize social costs. Gregg argues, correctly in principle, that money prices distort real costs physically measured. See Richard Gregg, A Philosophy of Indian Economic Development. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1958. pp. 54-69. Similarly, Shiva advocates evaluating agricultural performance in a way which favors small farmers who intensively cultivate their plots, by measuring calories and protein produced per acre. But at this point in history the dynamic of the dominant paradigm, not the engineering criteria of Gregg or Shiva, governs agriculture. Therefore decisions are made on the basis of short term money profits per acre.  

(18A) “Every time there is a decentering, a recentering operates, as if a world-economy could not live without a center of gravity, without a pole.” Fernand Braudel, La Dynamique du Capitalisme. Paris: Flammarion, 1985. p. 90 (my translation) 

(19) M.K. Gandhi, Harijan November 2, 1935, p. 300. reprinted in J.S. Mathur and A.S Mathur (eds.) Economic Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Allahabad: Chaitanya Publishing House, 1962. pp. 166-67. (cited hereafter as Mathur and Mathur) 

(19A) Mark Lutz, “Human Nature in Gandhian Economics,” in Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz (eds), Essays in Gandhian Economics. New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985. pp. 27-53. 

(19B) Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama. volume II. New York: Pantheon, 1966. pp. 1221-22. 

(20) M.K. Gandhi, Young India, May 30, 1929, p 183, reprinted in Mathur and Mathur page 554. 

(21) Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz, “Introduction” to the book they jointly edited, Essays in Gandhian Economics. Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985. p. 14 

(22) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, third edition 1996 (first published 1962) p. 204, p. 140. 

(23) There are many examples of making money being green in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution. Boston: Little Brown, 2000 

(24) M.K. Gandhi, Economics of Khadi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing Co., 1941. p. 381, p. 391. 

(25) Id. p. 456. 

(26) Id. p. 478. 

(27) Id. pp. 483-85. Another of Gandhi’s responses was to call for a “science of khadi” which would raise productivity. Of course, productivity had already been raised by textile mills. 

(27A) “…the Gandhian ethic of simple living and hard, methodical and organized work in the service of the community, can be utilized to provide the motivation to wordly asceticism in a socialist framework. He [Dr. Milton Singer] anticipates that future students of social science will have to study ‘the Hindu Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism.’” Amritananda Das in Essays in Gandhian Economics, cited above note 21, p. 152. He refers to Milton Singer, “Cultural Factors in India’s Economic Growth,” in B.F. Hoselitz (ed) Agrarian Societies in Transition. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1956. 

(27B) Suresh Desai, “The Role of Price System in Gandhian Economics,” in Essays in Gandhian Economics, cited in note 21 above, pp. 128-142. 

(28) M.K. Gandhi, Harijan February 1, 1937, reprinted in Economics of Khadi, cited above, p. 510. A similar idea is found in another ancient Hindu text the Srimad-Bhagavatam, “Men are entitled to regard as their own just what would suffice to satisfy their hunger. Whoever would appropriate more to himself is a thief, and should be punished as such.” Quoted by A.M. Huq in, “The Doctrine of Non-Possession; its challenge to an acquisitive society,” in Essays in Gandhian Economics, cited in note 21 above, pp. 79-80. Gandhi’s many discussions of trusteeship are critiques of the idea of property too. “…I understood the Gita teaching of non-possession to mean that those who desired salvation should act like the trustee who, having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” M.K. Gandhi, quoted by Hug, also at p. 80.  

(29) “Service above Self” is a motto of Rotary International.