“Looking back, it seems clear that he [Gandhi] had already begun to lay the foundations for his future course of action. But the significance of what he was doing was entirely lost upon me, as perhaps upon many others.” --J.P. Narayan, 1957 [*]
In 1936 Jayaprakash Narayan (also known as J.P.) wrote, “The answer will be found in the origins of unemployment under capitalism. What do we find there ? We find that production has been curtailed ruthlessly; factories are lying idle; credit is frozen; warehouses are glutted. At the same time we find people who are in dire need of all the things that are locked up in warehouses or wantonly destroyed by the State and the capitalists. On the one hand, there is said to be overproduction; on the other, an appalling underconsumption.
“Can there be anything more contradictory than this ? Yet it is one of the most persistent characteristics of capitalism. It is clear that in a world where the vast majority of people live in dire need there can be no overproduction. All that can be produced today, and a thousand times more, can be consumed without any difficulty. But, then, where is the rub ? The rub is in the fact that the poverty of the people , their lack of purchasing power, does not allow them to buy the goods that are lying idle or being dumped into the sea or thrown into the bonfire. The purchasing power of the great majority of the people in capitalist countries comes from the wages they receive; and the latter are kept down as low as possible by the capitalists so that their profits may be the highest possible. Thus a vicious circle is drawn. The capitalist goes on manufacturing goods so that by selling them he may draw his profit, at the same time he restricts the consuming power of the community by his policy of wages. Naturally, there is maladjustment between production and consumption; and he periodically finds that he has produced ‘too much.’ Then he restricts production and throws his workers out of employment.
“Now, it should be clear that if goods were produced for consumption and not for the profit of a few, all that was produced would be consumed. There would be no limit to the purchasing power of the people except the supply of good itself, because ‘wages’ would represent under those conditions the sum total of consumption goods produced. Overproduction would arise only when the needs of the community have been satisfied, and these, as I have already indicated, are almost insatiable. Restriction of production and de-mechanization would not be necessary till that point has been reached.” (1)
Narayan wrote in the depths of the world depression of the 1930s, and in the following pages other references will be made to it. However, there are always involuntarily unemployed people, many with unsatisfactory employment, a great deal of underutilized capacity, and many unmet needs that could be met if underutilized resources were mobilized to meet them. In what follows the depression of the 1930s is to be understood as a convenient and dramatic symbol standing for social arrangements that are always dysfunctional, even when there is no depression.
