“Freedom from the first cotton colonisation was based on liberation through the spinning wheel. Gandhi’s use of the charkha and the promotion of khadi was both a form of resistance to the British monopoly on cloth and a reminder that it was in our hands to make our own cloth again. Freedom from the second cotton colonisation needs to be based on liberation through seeds.”
* Vandana Shiva
On almost 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 most “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 most 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.
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>
