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 most 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 almost 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.