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)