Gandhi’s solution to the problem of simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption is not a sentimental humanitarianism. It is not sentimental because it is about duty, not about feelings. It is not a humanitarianism because it is primarily about serving family and neighbors, not about trying to serve all of humanity at once. Gandhi wrote, “Pure service to one’s neighbors can never, from its very nature, result in disservice to those remotely situated. ‘As with the individual, so with the universe,’ is an unfailing principle, which we would do well to take to heart.” (7) Gandhi locates the problem not at the level of the legally constituted relations of ownership at the level of production, nor at the level of interruptions of the flow of money in the circuits of buying and selling, but at the level of personal morality and interpersonal relationships. Gandhi’s viewpoint is, in principle, the most fundamental of the three, because production relations and circulation relations are subsets of interpersonal relations.

Over the years, Jayaprakash Narayan came to see the paradox of poverty in a world where there could be enough for all more and more as Gandhi saw it. J.P. was never tempted by the theory that the supply of labor and the demand for labor would come to a satisfactory equilibrium if only the free market were left alone to work its magic. Nor was he ever tempted to believe that poverty could be abolished without making any changes in the ownership of the means of production. He came to believe, instead, in “new values and ideas …so chosen that they have a direct bearing on some major social problem and their acceptance and practice are expected to lead to a solution of that problem and incidentally to a radical change in society.” (8) His evolution away from Marx was an evolution from Marx to Gandhi, much to the delight of his wife Prabhavati, who had been a Gandhian all along. (9)

By 1959, Narayan was echoing what Gandhi had written in 1909: “Modern industrialism and the sprit of economism that it has created, a spirit that weighs every human value on the scales of profit and loss and so-called economic progress, have disintegrated human society and made man an alien among his fellow men. Not only has the community been disintegrated, even the family is languishing in the West, and the mother, the woman, who was the centre and soul of the family, is losing her womanhood.