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)