Give Gandhi a Chance

By: Michael N. Nagler

You can find another version of this article entitled “Economic Crisis or Nonviolent Opportunity? A Gandhian Approach to Financial Collapse”  at Waging  Nonviolence.

It was on a Tuesday night and I was just turning in when the phone call came: my son Josh had rear-ended a van on Highway 101 and was being readied, in shock and pain, for major surgery.  Seems that a private company with a franchise to transport inmates out of California’s prisons, already overcrowded in the late eighties, was so hard pressed to make ends meet that the drivers had gone without sleep for over twenty-four hours, on No-Doz.  Unwilling to stop to get the van badly needed repairs, they had lost power and turned off the lights (!) in order to save battery as they attempted to drift across three lanes to exit the road.

Privatization — aka profiteering — is very real for me whenever I watch Josh get around on his reconstructed hip.  What this mindless drive for profit has done to criminal justice and “defense” can be the subject of another article; let’s focus now, as our economy buckles under the strain, on the meaning of that drive itself — and an alternative every one of us should know about.

First of all, what’s an economy for?  The real purpose of an economic system is to guarantee to every person the fundamentals of physical existence (food, clothing, shelter) and the tools of meaningful work so that they can get on with the business of living together and working out our common destiny.  This was Gandhi’s vision, among others’.  Now, as we continue to pursue an intoxicating greed that in the end can never satisfy a human being, and the results become more and more obvious, we cannot afford to ignore him in this sector any more than we can ignore his spectacular contributions to peace and security.

For Gandhi, whose thinking on the subject matured in his classic treatise, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (1909), our economic system is driven by an inherently endless multiplication of wants. We will never know real prosperity — which must be based on the recognition that we are more than producer/consumers — until we shift the whole thing onto another basis entirely, the fulfillment of needs. These needs are physical, to be sure, but also and more importantly social and even spiritual.  They therefore go beyond what we consider the domain of economics proper; but getting that physical basis right is a good foundation.   What, then, are the principles of what has come to be known as Gandhian economics, and how could we implement them?

Arguably, the most revolutionary feature of this system is that in it the relationship of a person to material goods (or, for that matter, any talents they can deploy) is one of trusteeship. This concept, borrowed from English law, is the nonviolent equivalent of ownership: people regard themselves as trustees of their possessions for the good of their respective societies, rather than as owners for their own real or symbolic benefit (when you have more than you need, you are trying to impress others or yourself with your own importance). Wherever this relationship obtains — and clearly it is first of all a psychological, and only then a legal phenomenon — greed would find it difficult to get a purchase.  We would no longer over-consume, no longer surrender our responsibility to corporations as the most efficient instruments for overconsumption and accumulation, no longer need to fight wars over inessentials (or even staples, as there would be enough to go around), no longer ravish the planet in a vain search for happiness — the prospect is giddying.  The trick, of course, is how to bring about this shift.  Reeducation at this depth is not easy, but it is any day easier than trying to redistribute wealth and stop overconsumption and exploitation while so many people still feel that happiness is something they can buy  and there is not enough of it to go around.  No revolution, however violent, has managed to dispossess the wealthy of their wealth against their will; but there are extremely wealthy people like George Soros and some others who have cheerfully redistributed it when the concept of trusteeship took hold.

Trusteeship, like much of Gandhi’s thinking, falls in line with the wisdom delivered by scriptures East and West, that we are really not the owner of anything.  Indeed it needs no scripture to tell us this, since the stark fact of life is that all we think we own can be taken away by any number of contingencies — and, let’s face it, will be so taken by the final contingency of death.  Trusteeship, however difficult to achieve, liberates us psychologically from the existential insecurity that is driving us into this dead end of competition and greed.

Other features of Gandhi’s scheme are (material) simplicity, localism (svadeshi), the sanctity of “bread labor” (a phrase he got from Ruskin), and nonviolence towards others and the earth itself.  All came into play with his stellar program of spinning homespun cloth (khadi, or khaddar) that gave employment to otherwise idled millions (sound familiar?), united the country in a vast network of growers, spinners, weavers, and buyers, and, almost incidentally it seemed, broke the hold of the British Raj in India.

Today many experiments that could potentially provide one or another piece of this program are doing very well, thank you, around the world: community farms, local currencies, “transition towns” and so forth.  One thing that would certainly help them coalesce into a real movement, making them a visible alternative to the ‘multiplication of wants’ economy that’s collapsing around our ears, is a voluntary shift to trusteeship carried out by individuals at their own pace in their own applications.  And what’s not doable about that – provided we stay clear of television long enough to repossess our minds?

Economist David Korten has advanced a brilliant three-part strategy to change the economy: 1) change the defining stories of the mainstream culture. 2) Create a new economic reality from the bottom up, and 3) change the rules to support the values and institutions of the emergent new reality.  Gandhian economics in general, and trusteeship in particular, would be a major enabling condition, working as it does within consciousness itself, for these great changes.

It gets clearer every day that the role of progressives now is to provide a “safe haven” – a plausible, attractive alternative – for every sector of the current system which is undergoing a potentially terrifying collapse: security, education, healthcare, and of course the economy.  Gandhi had an eye-opening contribution to offer for all of these areas, and what we’ve just sketched out would be a great place to start.