a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Gandhi is the exemplary figure for the strategy and the philosophy of non-violence—an exemplary figure world-wide and within the transnational peace movement. And the figures who were exemplary for him –particularly the great exponents of compassion and human solidarity who were the originators of universalist religious traditions– are invoked when he is invoked, so non-violence is now associated with opposition to the fundamentalist religions that abuse the ancient teachers. No thoughtful person can now confuse the compassionate, forgiving figure of Jesus with militant, proselytizing fundamentalist Christianity. Although few people have come to the practice of non-violence by Gandhi’s route, through asceticism, and few practice non-violence with the rigor and “no exceptions” commitment he demanded of himself, his life and political work stand as the guiding ideal– the challenging ideal—for all who hope for a non-violent politics.

For Gandhi himself, non-violence was also central to his economic thinking –or, rather, he did not separate his political thinking and his economic thinking. But this unity has not had the same kind of exemplary influence. In the domain of economics, he does not spring to mind. People know that he was an ecologist, in advance of the word as Rachel Carson defined it. That is, he recognized the interdependence of all living beings and repudiated the idea that human beings should rule over nature and exploit it to serve their purported needs and purposes. Being respectful of nature required, he thought, restricting human needs to what is basic for life and health (and disease prevention) –vegetarian food, simple shelter, hygiene—and he valued the manual and craft activities that supply these needs, advocating that there be no hierarchy of activities or professions in which laboring was located at the bottom. In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote about the revelation he had had while reading John Ruskin’s Unto This Last two years before he made his ascetic vow in 1906. Ruskin (“a poet who can call forth the good latent in the human breast”) had taught him: “That a life of labor—the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman—is the life worth living.”

In turn, Gandhi taught his Indian followers to take back from British expropriation their economic activities –their agriculture, their spinning and textile manufacture; to set up local or village collective farms; to resist British land and resource imperialism; to strike for decent wages and conditions when they had to be employees. His serve-the-poor, anti-poverty campaigns were not, he insisted, socialism, but the necessary precondition for any truthful and non-violent socialism. As he told a group of students who came to interview him: “But for heaven’s sake do not set out to establish any ism. The first step in the practice of Socialism is to learn to use your hands and feet. It is the only sure way to eradicate violence and exploitation from society. We have no right to talk of socialism so long as there is hunger and unemployment and the distinction between high and low amongst us and around us…The prince and the peasant will not be equaled by cutting off the prince’s head…One cannot reach truth by untruthfulness; truthful conduct alone can reach truth…” Gandhi’s socialism, unlike any imagined in the Marxist tradition, was pre-capitalist rather than post-capitalist. He imagined a kind of rolling back of capitalism to a simpler form of production, in which laboring and working would be valued activities.

For many European progressives during Gandhi’s lifetime, his critique of capitalist imperialism seemed anachronistic or archaic, or just an Indian or Hindu version of the Romantic back-to-naturism of Ruskin and the other British vegetarians and communitarians and theosophists. What had it to do with workers living in metropolitan squalor, oppressed in factories, or dispossessed in rural poverty? In a 1948 review of Gandhi’s autobiography, George Orwell, for instance, appreciated Gandhi’s courage and incorruptibility –“compared with other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind”–but dismissed his “medievalist program [which is] obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country.”

In the 1960s, Gandhi’s greatest influence as a political exemplary figure was in America, specifically in Martin Luther King, Jr and, through him, on the Civil Rights Movement. King’s assassination in 1968 galvanized the debate within the Movement about whether non-violence should or could be the guiding ideal in a country so organized around guns, KKK-like militias, wars, and assassinations of domestic leaders and revolutionaries in client states. That debate, of course, carried over into the student anti-war movement. But no one in the American non-violence tradition connected it to Gandhi’s economic views.

In the 1970s Gandhi the economic theorist and organizer did have a renaissance when the critique of capitalism associated with the British economist E.F. Schumacher’s book “Small is Beautiful” was taken more seriously, particularly among environmentalists, and not dismissed as a “medievalist program.” But there was no political support for ”small is beautiful” in “bigger is better” America, no nascent Green Parties as there were in Europe. At that time, while the Cold War was still in full force, questions about how political matters and economic matters relate or should relate could hardly be asked outside of the framework set by the Cold War itself. American discussion focused on two extreme possibilities: Capitalism and Communism. Basically, the two meant: a “free market” economy more or less self-regulating and thus not needing –or only being hindered by– state regulation, and an economy not only regulated but planned by the state, Soviet-style.

A glance at the daily newspaper is enough to remind us that this simple-minded framing is alive and well, the very tea of the Tea Party, while Green Party-type efforts to think outside the frame get no hearing. So I think it is worthwhile to look at it critically, bearing in mind the question that I raised some blog posts back about Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth: is there a more political way to take up the critique of capitalism as unsustainable that is coming now from a new breed of economists? Or, to put the matter another way: is there a more political way to think about the four pillars that the international Greens recognize –the economic, the social, the basic democratic and the non-violent? (I’m reading a good deal on the history of the Greens now as the annual convention of the Green Party of Canada is happening here in Toronto next week –and I will write about that soon.)

I’m going to consider “political economy” over the next few blogs, but want to make several observations, by way of preface, about how “the political” and “the economic” domains have been distinguished conceptually since the era when the science of economics was born –which is the era when capitalism as an economic system was first recognized in its novelty and analyzed. The raison d’etre of the science of economics was to analyze capitalism, and having done so, either to praise it or to damn it.

Because capitalism has been around for some two hundred years –as long as post-revolutionary America—and because, in the post-War period it has become, in one variant or another, the economic system of some eighty percent of the people on the planet, it is hard to appreciate now how baffling it was to the first economists. In books many times thicker than the one that explained the evolution of all living beings, Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (1859), the classical economists tried to compass how capitalism worked. They assumed it must be like a machine, with parts or elements and laws of motion, although its motion looked for all the world like something impossible: perpetual motion, perpetual growth, perpetual change, whirling dervish speed of change. Money invested led to commodities manufactured which led to money in profits that could then be invested, and on and on, in bigger and bigger amounts of money, commodities, production and distribution processes, and markets. Nothing like this had existed as long as economies were assumed to be for supplying necessities and the material ingredients of culture. That is, as long as economies were assumed to exist for assuring survival, stability, and a world recognizable from one generation to the next, a basis for life, not the purpose of life. Capitalism was a system endlessly growing itself and changing everything, including the technologies through which it changed everything and itself.

That was startling enough, but even more startling was that no one was in charge of this growth machine, no one declared its purpose or its limits. Parts of it were commanded –employers commanded workers in production places, factories and farms—but no one commanded “the market” where buyers and sellers met. Mechanisms internal to the market like “the law of supply and demand” were supposed to maintain it and keep its exponential growth from flying it right off its rails or from devouring absolutely everything in its path. It was supposedly in the “self-interest” of all who owned property to accumulate relentlessly without descending into the competitive war of all against all that relentless accumulation required. All the economists recognized that capitalism had as one of its inevitable growth effects that it endlessly grew inequality between those with capital and ownership of the means of production and those with neither. But no one knew how to eliminate this side-effect or get self-interested people to be interested in it.

Various wishful scenarios were imagined in which the capitalist machine did not overheat and explode or periodically break down or drive a huge portion of the population into poverty while it raised the standard of living of the rest. Perhaps an “invisible hand” (in Adam Smith’s phrase) would guide the machine, in the absence of a commander from the political realm. Or perhaps the machine would breakdown definitively so a new and better system could replace it, one in which the conflicts stemming from private ownership of the means of production would not appear. (This, of course, was the wish informing the four stout volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital, the first of which appeared in 1867.)

Capitalism became a kind of Rorschach blot –a dynamic and metastasizing one—in which economists saw (or, as a psychoanalyst, I would say onto which they projected) perfectability or monstrosity or both. The economy they were observing in its emergence was unprecedented, and unprecedentedly unpredictable. We have inherited all their wishful readings of the thing, but also some new post-Soviet Union features of the thing itself that make it even more challenging –and shocking—to read. We have inherited their way of thinking about what an economy is and ought to be and how “the political” should or should not try to control “the economic.” But thinking in the other direction, about what politics is and ought to be and how “the economic” is and is not growing so large and so pervasive that it is controlling politics –for that, we hardly have an exemplary figure.

[Note, please enter your email under SUBSCRIBE on the homepage if you wold like to be notified when a new post goes up.]