Gandhiji said that the most important lesson of the Gita was to engage in work without any consideration whatever of the fruits of the work.

Do your work.

You have a right to your work. But you have no right to the fruits of your work. This is the central Gandhian economic organizing principle. Work without regard to its fruits.

Work without engaging ourselves with the fruits of the work disengages the means from the ends. It moves our focus from ends to the means. Our upbringing, our society teaches us to focus on our ends. What will you be when you grow up is a common question we were asked as children. But regardless of what you will or will not be, how are you going to conduct your self right now, today, is a not a question we were asked.

What are you going to do rather than where are you going. What are you doing rather than what are you doing this for? See the difference? If I am focused on where I am going, my destination, my end, then I am likely to adopt any means possible to get to that end.

By focusing only on the means, on what I do, with no regard to the ends whatsoever, I am in a position to examine my work simply in its own light, not as a duality. I am doing this because I want that. A duality such as this can easily disintegrate into I have to do this repellent thing, A, because then I will have this wonderful thing, B.

But surely you can see that A, what you do, is wrong, your conscience says.

Can't you see I am doing this awful, horrible, degrading thing, A, only so as to enable me to get to B, this sublime state I am looking forward to, you answer.

How do you feel about what you do? your work? probes your conscience.

Oh absolutely awful! And everyone else I know is engaged in work that they hate. But we do it because we have our sights on the end which is beautiful, you reply.

How can a series of awful nows in succession lead to a beautiful then? This is what your conscience would ask you if you would but listen to it. This is what Gandhiji asks when he challenges us to create a new economics. Gandhiji said that means and ends are convertible terms. Therein lies the vital clue to the development of a Gandhian economics.

Means and Ends are convertible terms -- Gandhiji

Ram, Allah, and God are convertible terms -- Gandhiji

I am interested in the means used by man in the making of the ends. I am interested in economics and religion. From the two statements made by Gandhiji I draw the implication

Religion and economics are convertible terms.

What does this new statement mean? What does it mean to say 'religion'? Is it not to say that there is history, a personal history that links us to the past through our parents and grand parents and community? That there is more to life and to that chain of lives than meets the eye? That the physical world, the world of commodities is necessarily simply a subset of a much larger scheme?

And then economics. What does that mean anymore? Is it that markets, the acts of buying and selling, are but a subset of the larger act of living? That an embedded economics requires that we relinquish the fiction that working life involves so-called factors of production churning out commodities?

Modern economics says, make sure property rights are well-defined and free markets work great.

We reject property rights and replace them with trusteeship. The idea is that none of us can own nature-given resources or the fruits of the labor of so many. We can only act as trustees and thus act in the interests of everyone in society.

We do not accept property rights and so we do not accept free markets.

Gandhiji said that means and ends are reversible terms. Capitalism is based on the idea that each person pursuing his or her own greed will lead to harmony for society. The idea is that while greed is not our end, it is the means to our end, and so we must accept it as the basis of society. It is for our own good!

In Gandhian economics we reject capitalism because means and ends are not reversible under it. Who would support a system where greed was the explicit end? No one except a very few misguided and disturbed people.

The urgency of adopting Gandhian economics is this: These few misguided and disturbed people are running the current world economic system of capitalism.

Gandhian economics is not about following Gandhiji blindly to the letter. It is not about finding out every word Gandhiji ever said about any topic related to economics and then repeating it, perhaps in modern garb, with econometrics tacked on for respectability. That approach may be called a Gandhist economics. That is the approach that most economists professing Gandhian thinking have taken. They usually limit themselves to one or two of Gandhiji's books that they consider to have economics content. Then they repeat what Gandhiji said with new words.

I have never seen the point of this exercise. We must create a living, breathing study in the spirit of Gandhiji. We must apply his definition of experiments to the world of economics around us. We must look at all his writing, on every topic imaginable, to get glimpses of the brilliant insight that his approach to life can teach us about developing a method of writing about economics. Sometimes it is his writing on diet that may inspire us. For instance, an agitated follower of Gandhiji who had resolved to become a vegetarian even while living in a meat eating family wrote to Gandhiji a letter that carried this thought: Through some substantial self-restraint the writer had managed to become and stay vegetarian while living in an extended Indian family. His family had recently brought to his attention the thoughts of the much-revered Swami Vivekananda, who urged his countrymen to partake of meat offering to take upon himself any sins that may befall people who did so. To this Gandhiji calmly replied that one must always do what feels right to us through a process of inner searching and turn down the views of even the greatest of authorities in favor of the results of our own inner experiments.*

I am always moved by this letter to a man whose own faith had been shaken by the words of authority. I am moved to attempt a creation of a Gandhian economics, in the spirit of Gandhiji, without looking to anyone, not even Gandhiji as the sole authority, but rather allowing bapu to lead us by shining his light upon our world. I have no desire to belittle the great scholars who may know much more than me about what Gandhiji said about this or that. They may be great in their own way. This for me is a personal search, the story of my own experiments with the truth of economics.

*Young India, 7-10-1926. 

I imagine a Gandhian economy without money. I have some slight experience doing that. An economy must be a small unit. Removing money from the picture removes large entities from the picture. It removes profit-seeking firms and it removes government and quasi-government bodies. They all work with a monetary framework. That is how they exert power.

A few years ago I was scheduled to teach a performance art workshop at a university in India. I was under some pressure to kowtow to the head of the university. I refused. So I was banished from the institution. Since interest in my workshop was high, I quickly organized a voluntary economy that enrolled students, acquired studio space, ran a three-day workshop that ended with a public performance. I have lectured about this event and the Institute of Failure has published my work about it so I will not elaborate on it further here. But I will say this: no money changed hands at any point. We had created a small moneyless economy.

I think economies should be small and local and moneyless. It can be done. It is the foundation of our Gandhian economics.

Economics is not and can not be value-free. In the act of using concepts such as supply and demand economists implicitly make value judgements. They are mostly unaware of that. But it is true.

For instance when we say demand. It is not a thing. It's a concept. This concept requires a peculiar world-view. We must suspend disbelief and accept a view of the world where we can quantify intentions and aggregate them. That requires a value judgement. We believe our action increases understanding and that that is a good thing. But that is in itself a belief. Further, the idea that intentions can be conceptualized requires a big leap of faith. That they can then be aggregated has been shown to be a fallacy by economists themselves.

Gandhian economics embraces value judgements. We start with them and use them at every stage of our analysis. Truth, nonviolence, and dignity value are our foundations. They are our means and our ends.

A Gandhian economics must be a nonviolent economics. It must also be an economics where we are constantly experimenting with the truth of the notions that we develop.

Gandhiji clearly gave us hint as to how such an economics could be possible. He said that means and ends must be reversible. So any action we take with an end in mind must pass this test: What happens when we exchange means and ends? Does the action still make sense or does it expose its ugly belly? If we are planning massive upheaval to create a dam (means) with the idea that farmers in the region will have water for their fields (ends) then that plan fails our test. Try it. Would you have farmers work on their fields, watering the crops and displacing people (means) just to achieve a huge ugly dam (ends)? That sounds absurd doesn't it?

Now consider Gandhiji's vision of a society where local communities engage in small-scale projects that lead to a better life for everyone. In all these cases an exercise in interchanging means and ends leads to pleasant, if humorous results. How about teaching neighbors to read and write (means) so that they may become better citizens (ends)? Reversing the two we get this: Create better citizens (means) so that there is greater literacy (ends). Sounds good to me.

Gandhiji wrote

The unity of all life is a particularity of Hinduism which confines salvation not to human beings alone but says that it is possible for all God's creatures. It may be that it is not possible, save through the human form, but that does not make man the lord of creation. It makes him the servant of God's creation.

Here Gandhiji sets the first task of a developing Gandhian economics: Develop an economics that treats all of creation as not only the means but also the ends. Gandhiji continues in the same essay

Now when we talk of brotherhood of man, we stop there, and feel that all other life is there for man to exploit for his own purposes. But Hinduism excludes all exploitation. There is no limit whatsoever to the measure of sacrifice that one may make in order to realize this oneness with all life, but certainly the immensity of the ideal sets a limit to your wants.

Gandhiji hints here that a Gandhian economics would begin with the limiting of wants. He continues

That you will see is the antithesis of the position of the modern civilization which says: 'increase your wants.' Those who hold that belief think that increase of wants means an increase of knowledge whereby you understand the Infinite better. On the contrary Hinduism rules out indulgence and multiplication of wants as these hamper one's growth to the ultimate identity with the Universal Self.*

Gandhian economics may then be defined as the study of how to use our abundant resources to limit our wants and satisfy them over time in a way that enriches both our resources and our selves making self-realization possible for all.

*Harijan, 26-12-'36, p 363-364 (From weekly letters from Gandhiji).

Ahimsa is the law of nonviolence. Gandhiji's practice of satyagraha, or truth-force, was built on this idea of ahimsa. What confuses the student of Gandhian economics is how the idea of karma is to be reconciled with the idea of ahimsa.

Karma is seen by many as a law that teaches an eye for an eye. It has been compared to Newton's laws. The idea seems to be a quaint one: a violator will be violated, a thief stolen from. That is a common, though violent and misinformed idea of karma.

Karma is seen from a more accurate and enlightened perspective as a repayment of rna, or debts. Someone does something to you, let us say steals from you. In doing so they are simply repaying past rna. With that act, the olds debts have been paid and you are now free as long as you do not respond to the act by creating a fresh act. Governments, companies, and people get entangled in ever increasing violence by being reactive and recreating new karmas that are then acted out and reacted out infinitely.

The key to understanding karma is this. What someone does to us, an act, has no power whatsoever on our essence or higher self. It is only with our ego-identification with the act that the debt created by the act, rna, turns into rnanubandhana, or debt-bondage.

Ahimsa, the law of nonviolence, is the only reliable way to end karmic ties with what is undesirable. For once we have paid our debts we are free!

In 1978 E. F. Schumacher, perhaps the 20th century’s most celebrated humanist-economist (author of Small is Beautiful), acknowledged his debt to Gandhiji and called the Mahatma one of the truly great economists and prophesized that one day Gandhiji may be remembered as the greatest economist of all.

Life is violent. Humans are violent. When we talk about nonviolence we are not using it as a descriptive term. We must accept the violence inherent in life. Gandhiji called this sat, a Sanskrit word which means the way things are.

Nonviolence then is our response to sat. We accept that violence is part of our nature and pure nonviolence is impossible. But we also accept that violence is not the entirety of our nature. There is more to us than that. That nonviolent part of us makes a nonviolence response to sat possible.

Pure materialism based on self-interest is pure violence. Yet we must accept that as part of life. So the entire system of classical economics from Adam Smith onwards all the way to the present is not so much wrong as it is limited. Human beings are capable of behaving like profit-seeking selfish calculators, inflicting great violence upon themselves and the environment. However that is not all humans are capable of. Human beings are capable of thought, of contemplation, of transcending the violence of economic life and choosing a nonviolent response.

This nonviolence is what is emerging as Gandhian economics.

Gandhiji gave us a simple criterion with which to evaluate economic theory and policy: are means and ends interchangeable?* In the period before Adam Smith all the way back to Aristotle the preoccupation of economic thinkers was with right economic conduct and the fair prices that would result from it. Here means and ends were undoubtedly not only connected but also interchangeable.

With Adam Smith came the focus on self-interest as the means and a prosperous society as the end. With Smith onwards economic thinking suffers from this inconsistency between means and ends. After all how can pure greed and selfish behavior lead to anything other than a greedy and selfish society? Smith's book was called the Wealth of Nations but really is a system for creating a few fabulously wealthy individuals in a morally broken society.

The other so-called revolution in economics is Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes proposed a system of deficit spending during times of critical economic crises to rescue the system. Here the distance between means and ends is compounded! First we must accept a corrupt system based on self-interest (Smith). Secondly, we must accept that such a system must periodically crash and cause untold suffering. Hence we must mortgage our future to save the system (Keynes).

Using Gandhiji's simple criterion we must reject both Smith's classical economics as well as Keynesian economics unless our human imagination is limited to imagining only selfishness and overspending as our ends.

*Young India, 31-12-1931, reprinted in M.K. Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism. Delhi: Farsight, 2009, p 67.

Karl Marx made an important observation: Human beings are different from other so-called factors of production. As workers, humans are paid less than what they contribute to production. There lies the source of surplus value.

Gandhian economics also sees human beings as unique. They are capable of consciousness. It is this capacity for consciousness that makes humans able to vary their level of what I call dignity value. So while everything in the world has its inherent dignity value, humans have the capacity to actually increase their dignity value.

This puts a great responsibility upon our shoulders as humans. We must accept what the Gandhian economist E. F. Schumacher called the 'vertical dimension.' We must allow ourselves to grow as people, grow in consciousness.

Modern life, based as it is upon self-interest and mass-production with a simultaneous rejection of spirituality, just does not allow for such growth. The spirit weakens, then withers.

The madness involved in the mass production and mass purchases of poorly conceived and poorly made products can be explained using Gandhian economics.

Decisions about what to make and where to make things are based not on total costs but on marginal cost, the cost of making one more unit of the product. In the manufacturing of a million units of a modern product, the cost of making one more unit is very small. So very large amounts of very many things get produced in far flung places at great environmental and human cost as long as marginal costs are low.

Developing our model of Gandhian economics further, we can say

P--c--P+ ....... (1)

P--m--P+ ......(2)

where
P = person
c = commodity produced by neighbors
m = microcredit obtained through and with neighbors
P+ = enhanced person

(1) Engaging in work and trade among neighbors enhances people.

(2) Engaging in credit and debt with neighbors through microcredit enhances people.

Our economic system makes us either whole or not whole. When the entire economy is based on making maximum profit at the least cost it fragments us. We are reduced to worker and buyer. We are not workers and buyers but whole beings to begin with. It is the harsh inanimate logic of classical economics that fragments us. Once divided, we lose touch with the whole life and simultaneously work a lot and buy a lot. We do this without joy for we are separated from ourselves.

There is a fresh way of doing things. I come across it every day. A new generation seems to be growing up looking for new ways to build relationships and model exchange. This week I came across two such examples.

My wife took me to gravel & gold in the Mission in San Francisco. The store is full of magical things made by hand with little hand-written notes about the maker. We found folding scissors made very sturdily by the same family in Oregon for a couple generations. They are TSA-approved and perfect for traveling with. A hand-written note said

Founded in 1971, Slip-N-Snip is the original inventor and manufacturer of folding scissors. All components are manufactured here in the US by Don Gallogly and family.

We also bought some beeswax candles. Each item in the store had a maker and a story behind the maker. There were no fake 'old brands' bought out by people looking to make money on the basis of a name that may have nostalgic associations. The shop-keeper when we went there was Nile, one of the three owners of the store. She was very knowledgeable about everything the store carried and clearly loved her work. She was working when we came in, filling out orders, hand-writing notes, arranging products for sale. She was working when we left. Watching her I had to say good work!

Back in Berkeley I was walking to the farmers market when I came across the East Bay Alternative Press Festival (December 11, 10-4). What a delightful event. There were rows and rows of tables and chairs with mostly hand-made and some small-press books, zines, and other artifacts. I bought a little hand-made comic called black tea by Jason Martin. Jason was shy but available to interact with his customers. Many of the maker/sellers were happy to trade their books for ones you may have made. I had a wonderful time being there.

What was interesting about these two experiences was to see an emerging Gandhian economics in action. What was being sold was a result of good work, and the selling and trading itself was done in a way that was on a small, human-scale respectful of human dignity.

Classical economics is based on self-interest. Krishnamurti said

Corruption is not just passing money under the table or smuggling goods into the country. Corruption begins where there is self-interest. Where there is self-interest, that is the origin of corruption.*

Classical economics, which is based on self-interest, is corruption.

* The Benediction is Where You Are: The Last Bombay Talks 1985. Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India, 2001, p 3.

Classical economics is based on an inanimate logic. The logic of machines. Each factor of production is paid on the margin, that is what the last unit employed contributes. It is the economics of the status quo. Values are exchanged but are static, never enhanced. Commodities trade for money which trades for commodities.

Marx improved on this system considerably by pointing out that labor was different from the other factors of production. Under capitalism labor was paid not according to its contribution but simply a socially conditioned subsistence wage that was below its contribution to production. This yielded surplus value which was appropriated by the capitalist. Thus money trades for commodities which bring the capitalist even greater sums of money.

Gandhian economics is the economics of the whole person. Engaging in living, the person does many things both spiritual and material. One aspect of living is working and trading with neighbors. The interrelationships created by living and exchanging commodities with others allows the person to grow.

While other approaches to economics treat money and commodities as the central aspect of economic life, Gandhian economics is a holistic economics with humans as it central point and the possibility of growth, both spiritual and material, as its promise.

If classical economics can be summarized as

C-M-C

where C = commodity, M = money,

and Marx's critique of classical economics as

M-C-M+

where M+ = enhanced money,

then Gandhian economics is

P-C-P+

where P = whole person, P+ = enhanced persons.

Work and trade amongst neighbors who are whole enhances people's lives.

The problem of economics was famously formulated by Paul Samuelson as What to produce, How to produce, and For Whom to produce. However, classical economics in it's quest for a value-free study of the subject has not looked at the three-fold central problem as a spiritual one.

The central problem of economics is a spiritual one. We can only answer the What, How, and For Whom in a holistic way by asking first, what would be in keeping with human dignity? and second, what would further the inner lives of the people involved? Based on these questions it is clear that the How of production becomes the first and most important economic problem. How do we work? What do we bring to our work? How do we work with others? How meaningful is our work? These are the central problems. From these flow the What and For Whom.

What I have described above is the opposite of the approach of classical economics which starts with What and then looks for the cheapest means (the How) to make it. To me this is a recipe for disaster.

What we call Gandhian economics is the small economics of neighbors and self-sufficiency. It has deep roots in the United States. The great historian of the Reconstruction, Eric Foner writes

Northern investors understood free labor to mean working for wages on plantations; to blacks it meant farming their own land and living largely independent of the marketplace.*

* Short History of the Reconstruction. NY: Harper & Row, 1990, p 25.

There is an increasing level of comfort with private for-profit microfinance institutions in developing countries. Even though only 1 in 10 microfinance institutions is private, they account for over half of the industry's assets.* These companies make a profit by lending to the poor at high rates of interest. I don't think these companies should be allowed to operate at all.

Microfinance is about extending small amounts of money to poor people. The loans are signed not only by the borrower but also by a number of neighbors who all vouch for the borrower. This system devised by Mohammed Yunus (who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize) in Bangladesh was created in the spirit of seeing credit as a fundamental human right, one that was denied to the masses for much of human history. The only access to credit that the poor have had in developing countries has been the usurious money-lender. Microfinance was developed as a way to break this mold of exploitation and make credit available to all.

To allow market-driven for-profit institutions to operate in the guise of microfinance institutions is to return the poor to the world that Yunus worked so hard to bring an end to.  A for-profit company has a very simple goal: to make as much money as possible at the least cost. Private companies, in their search for new ways to make money pose as benefactors while exploiting the poor. They should not be allowed to operate. Microfinance is a spiritual idea of our time as much as Gandhiji's satyagraha, or soul-force was in his own. The spirit must not be compromised with the flurry of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) and corporate scandals that have arisen with the privatizing of the idea of microfinance.

* Little India, November 2010, page 37.

Buying and selling create relationships. If we think of the value inherent in the transaction between the person selling and the person buying in terms of what I call dignity value, we must take into consideration not only the satisfaction that the exchanged item produces for the buyer and the surplus created for the seller but also even more importantly the quality of the relationship created between the two. Over time commerce has the power to create rich and complex webs of interaction and inter-dependence. These themselves contribute to the value of what is exchanged.

We must create an economy where neighbors trade with neighbors. But who is a neighbor? Is it just the person who lives and works nearby? I don't think so. A neighbor is someone who is close to me in their values. On that basis the Fair Trade sugar that I buy from Africa is produced by neighbors. The Barbour raincoat that I wear on my bicycle to work in the Winter is made by neighbors in England.

My neighbors share my appreciation of the dignity of work and the wholeness of the person and are of every race color and nationality. Together we can create a new economy.

There is a scene in Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man For Himself in which a woman is slapped repeatedly for saying 'I will not choose,' as a race car painted with signs advertising Marlboro Cigarettes pulls up. Living in our times I often feel like that woman in the movie. We are supposedly living at a time of great choice and that choice itself has been raised to the status of a god. We are happy because we have choice. But what really are we choosing? Is a choice between one worthless shiny trinket and another really a choice? Or is it that in making our daily choices of mass produced gadgets, gimmicks, and genetically altered foods we numb ourselves of the consciousness of a real meaningful interconnected life with a real human web of relationships?

Krishnamurti said

Where there is choice, there is no freedom. And choice exists only when the brain is confused. When the brain is clear, then there is no choice, but only direct perception and right action.*

'I will not choose,' Godard's woman seems to say, when the choice is a not a meaningful choice at all. Give me a whole life and I will not need 'choice,' she seems to say and Life sponsored by Marlboro or some other Corporate entity slaps her for it. That was Godard's indictment of modern man in 1979. How will we respond to that today?

* The Benediction is Where You Are: The Last Bombay Talks 1985. Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India, 2001, p 20.

While colonialism imposed an economic system that destroyed the livelihoods of millions of small artisans and craftsmen in India, modern economics has had the same devastating effect on well-established businesses that once made things in the United States. For many years after moving from India to the United States, I enjoyed wearing Converse sneakers, particularly the Chuck Taylor All Star (dating back to 1923). They fit beautifully, were made in the same factory in North Carolina for over 60 years, and cost $29 at my local shoe store in Berkeley.

Then in 2001 I noticed something had changed. I had just bought a pair of Converse shoes, taken them home, and put them on. I was shocked to find that they did not fit right! On closer inspection they did not look right either. Their elegant, timeless aesthetics had been replaced by the distinct mark of overseas mass production. The old Converse with their Made in U.S.A. tags were gone forever. I later found out that the last pair of the Converse high tops to come out of North Carolina were on March 31, 2001.*

I also found out that the logic of modern free-trade economics had changed the shoe industry. Businesses like Nike that had never owned a single shoe factory outsourced their entire production and were immensely profitable. They produced at pennies per shoe and sold at prices much higher than the traditional shoe-makers. In this altered environment the Converse brand was bought by two sports-industry entrepreneurs. The new owners were not interested in the factory in North Carolina that had made the Converse shoes for over half a century. Nor were they concerned about the skilled American workers who worked there. To the entrepreneurs, Converse was just a brand name with nostalgic associations that could be exploited for maximum profits at minimum cost. Suddenly a quality shoe that was being manufactured in America, creating gainful skilled employment for workers and a profit for the owners, following all the regulations of worker-safety and human welfare, stopped being made. It was replaced by a noticably inferior product produced in sweatshops in Asia and bringing fabulous wealth to its new entrepreneurial owners.

The case of Converse is not an isolated one. It has become the norm. I know of very few businesses that still make things in the United States. The economics that has created this change is based on an artificial splitting of the person into consumer and producer. It is argued that producers must be free to produce anywhere and anyhow. Consumers must be free to buy as cheaply as possible and in ever increasing quantitites. But human beings and human society can not be split into consumers and producers. We are whole beings and our society depends on its people being whole. The nature of the work we do creates the character of the fruits of that work. What we do is what we are, what we make is what we partake of. Gandhiji taught us to become the change we wish to see. What sense is there in hiring large numbers of strangers in far-flung lands to make large quantities of useless things even as we dismantle our own tradtitions of work? If we work poorly and buy poorly does that not make us a poor society?

* Smithsonian 32(8), November 2001, p. 26.

I have been reading the works of Gandhiji for many years now. Recently I decided to undertake a reading of the chronological Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi in 98 volumes. I have just completed volume 1. I was delighted to find Gandhiji's economics to be very clear and focused on the dignity and wholeness of the person even in these early years of writing.

In discussing the treatment of indentured servants and equally applicable to our own so-called illegal immigrants Gandhiji writes

A man is brought here, in theory with his own consent, in practice very often without his consent, he gives the best five years of his life, he forms new ties, forgets the old ones, perhaps establishes a home here, and he cannot, according to my view of right and wrong, be sent back.

What a wonderful statement of an economics that is at once moral, historical, and holistic!

Traveling across the India Gandhiji found former cloth-weavers, who had once been prosperous, reduced to destitution as a result of British India's free trade policies. This was happening all over the country and in direct proportion to the availability of cheap cloth manufactured in England and sold in India.

The free trade argument artificially divides people into producers and consumers. Free trade gives consumers the lowest possible prices and keeps producers in line by only affording them normal profit. According to classical economics free trade results in consumers having the final say in what is produced and that too at the lowest price. In other words consumer is king.

People cannot be split into consumers and producers however! How we spend our money affects what we do for a living. How we spend is how we earn. As India's masses were being coaxed into buying cheap foreign cloth and other products, more and more Indian artisans and farmers were finding themselves unemployed and under-employed, increasingly reduced to working meaningless menial jobs when jobs were to be found at all. Gandhiji observed free trade reducing the standard of living in the country as it reduced the quality of work available in the country.

It was from these travels and observations that Gandhiji decided to focus his economics on swadeshi, the idea that buying and selling were undertaken by people, not consumers and producers, and that a person was not split into king and slave but rather needed to be whole and trade with neighbors who were themselves whole.

I was reading an essay* by Gandhiji the other day in which he suggested swadeshi as an economics principle. He went on to explain that it meant not so much buying what is nationally produced over what is produced abroad, but rather buying from what and who is close to us, our neighbors.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I prefer to buy the food I get at the farmer's market down the street from me. I like to go to my local stores in Berkeley. I do not go to Costco or WalMart or stores like that. This I do instinctively, without a lot of thought. I like being swadeshi.

The economics behind this idea and the local food and other local movements is simple: We are not producers and consumers but people. Buying and selling (and thus working) are two sides of the same coin. How we buy exactly reflects how we sell. If we buy cheaper and cheaper we also, over the long haul, sell cheaper and cheaper. If we buy sweated goods we also sell sweated goods. It is not possible to keep buying mass produced cheap products from thousands of miles away while maintaining or improving our standard of work and hence our standard of living.

Free trade equals free fall. Local trade on the other hand nourishes the organic relationships between people who buy and sell never as the split-personalities of producers and consumers that classical economics would have us believe but as whole people.

*Address delivered before the Missionary Conference on February 14, 1916.

What makes us work? We need to satisfy some basic needs in order to live. Let us call them x. We also want more than the basic survival needs in most cases. However at that point the variety of what we want is endless. Some people want more for their children, both materially and emotionally. Others want to explore their histories by delving into the past of their community, their race, and participating in activities that promote that. Still others look into the infinite future and seek comfort in faith, or relationships, social institutions that may extend further than individual human lives. A small portion of people simply want maximum profit. Whatever the desires may be beyond the basic level necessary for survival, they are many. We may call these y. So the basic motivation to work comes down to x + y.

Economics has traditionally defined y in terms of profit maximization. However there is no reason why that has to be so. There are really endless possibilities.

We must start with the individual. Not as consumer or producer, but as a complex whole. We are not people who act as producers for a while and then change hats and become consumers. We are human beings. What we do affects us to our very core. It changes us. In fact we are what we do.

Economics has traditionally broken the person up into his and her roles. We must start afresh putting the person at the center of our analysis. The whole person.

What matters is not what I consume but what I do. How do I live my life? What do I do all day. When I go to work do I do something fulfilling or do I simply move papers around for someone else? Working for institutions whether they are corporations, universities, or the government often feels like that. I work for a large corporation. I am 'compensated' for my work. Is that because my work is not really that meaningful to me? If it is not meaningful to me can it be meaningful to society? Can millions of meaningless actions taken by millions of workers in institutions end up creating meaning for society as a whole? I don't see how it could.

We must carefully build our new economics bit by bit first focusing on the individual, then the family, society, and the world.

A tractor will not feed a farmer's family. A tractor is only a tool. So are markets. Useful as they are waiting for the Market system to feed the hungry and clothe the needy will not work. We need to put markets, communities, and the government to work on small-scale, micro-development efforts to eradicate hunger.

A million children go to bed hungry each night in the United States of America.

It doesn't have to be this way. Kids can't vote and more importantly they can't cast 'dollar-votes.' It is up to each one of us to change the society we live in. Let us stop believing in Markets to solve our problems. Let us start by talking to each other.

These are dispatches from a former economist who is disgusted by his profession. The logical inconsistencies, the hidden agendas, the conservative bias in economics finally led to the financial crisis and a world-wide depression. Isn't it time to stop the madness? And take steps towards a new economics taking Gandhiji as our starting point. Not simply rehashing Gandhiji's ideas but developing new ideas in his spirit. This is not a Gandhist blog but a Gandhian one.

Economics is about relationships. These can never be reduced to supply and demand. When I go out to breakfast that is one kind of relationship. I am being fed, I am appreciative of that, I pay. When I teach that's a very different relationship. I am challenging, setting up puzzles, the student is perhaps confused even angry at first. A Market Driven university, a Market Driven health-care plan, a Market Driven work place all pretend that the various relationships involving work offered and accepted can be reduced to supply and demand. That is our number one error. There is no such thing as supply and demand.

A brief note on dignity value.

Last summer I introduced the notion of dignity value at the Goat Island symposium (July 2008). In this little note I want to point out the shortcomings of the two traditional notions of value in economics.

Classical economics acknowledges value as a central concept and defines it as value-in-exchange. The value of anything in this formulation is what it can exchange for. The problem with this is that there can never be a general increase in value. Anytime something increases in value, something else must necessarily decrease in value. Value is not only relative but it is also reciprocal. In a Robinson Crusoe economy, a favorite pedagogical device in Classical economics, when coconuts rise in value they do so not only in relation to but also inversely to let us say boats. Since there can never be a general rise in value, humans are stuck in a mad system of competition. I can only increase my value at an equal cost to someone else.

Marxian economics significantly improves on this notion of value by bringing in the concept of surplus value. While most commodities trade for their value-in-exchange, labor suffers from an asymmetry that explains the origin of value in the first place. While the fruits of labor receive their value-in-exchange, labor itself is only paid its value-in-use. Though a worker may produce ten boats in a day's work (value-in-exchange), labor is paid only what is needed to socially reproduce itself (value-in-use). Perhaps the equivalent of one boat is sufficient to keep the worker coming to work each day. This leaves nine boats for the capitalist which constitute the surplus value.

While Marx's construction of the concept of surplus value is a huge improvement on the Classical formulation, it has in recent times lost its power of explanation. After all surplus value makes sense only when people are engaged in largely creating things of value. But most things produced in our time have no dignity value at all. The exploitation is no longer in terms of the stealing of value created away from workers but the non-creation of value in itself. Value-in-exchange for the majority of material objects is high. Surplus value is high. But dignity value is close to zero.

Gandhian economist E. F. Schumacher gave a public lecture in September 1977 during which he talked about his name. A name with the obvious meaning, shoe-maker. It is not enough to know about shoes, he said. Even to know everything there is to know about shoes. As a shoe-maker you must make a study of the foot.

A week later he died. After a life-time spent understanding economics I like to think that the shoe-maker is now studying life itself.

26 Short Recesses at Summer School

Lecture given in 3 parts at the Goat Island Symposium at the end of the last Summer School, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, July 26, 2008.

Part 1 (6 minutes)


1.
Uma walked slowly and deliberately a few steps behind her father as young brahman boys threw stones at her and called her names she did not understand. This happened not once but every day of her life that she went to school. She was wearing chappals, or open shoes with a toe hold, and she held books under her arm.

2.
A convergent problem is one where solutions devised to solve it converge over time to one perfect solution. A divergent problem diverges to multiple solutions, both simultaneously and over time.

Over centuries of Indian culture the problem of how to store water, carry it, and pour it was solved by the evolution of the lota. A design consisting of a slim convex neck (for holding), a long lip (for dripless pouring), and a round bottom (for maximum volume and stability) became the universal Indian solution to the problem of water.

3.
Bryan, you know how buildings are built. The foundation, the supporting columns, the load-bearing walls, the facade, the gossip. If I want to describe to you my friend the building I live in I must tell you about all these things.

What if I told you my building was a nunnery as late as 1933? That a nun living on the first floor once had a quarrel with a nun living on the third floor. That the nuns on the first floor could hear everything that went on on the second floor and that the nuns on the second floor could hear everything that went on on the third floor but never in the reverse direction. There are stories I could tell about nuns being possessed by the love of god and others by the god of love.

4.
I love you. Do all three words have the same power? I - Love - You?

Examine these words as the common functional form y is a function of x. When you say y is a function of x you remove yourself from the xness of x and involve your self instead in the the yness of x.

In I love you, love takes over and emerges as all important. You emerge as all important. But I am lost. That is tragedy. That is classical economics.

5.

I am a tiger. I am untamable. Do not attempt to fight me. Goddess Durga knows that to befriend me you must ride upon my back. I am Durga's vahana. Together we ride through the beautiful jungle of the Sunderbans.

I was thirteen, developing my character, a tiger, for my brilliant theater teacher Arun.

Arun was a third generation conservationist. His grandfather had worked with Jim Corbett studying the behavior of maneaters, or man-eating tigers. Tigers as a general rule find human flesh repulsive. Too salty, Arun would remark in mock seriousness and burst into a loud laughter, finding his own joke very funny. We didn't know then that hidden within his joke was a grain of truth. A salty grain of truth.

6.
A nice way to do this is to say, arre baba enough! smiling all the time. You can only do this if you are older than the other person or a social equal.

7.
What is value? Economists have tried to answer this question for at least two hundred years. I will try to answer it in a minute.

There is an inherent value in all things and beings.

It is the inherent dignity of a rock, tree, or person that gives it its value. The classical economists as well as the Marxians miss this simple point. A tree may have no economic value-in-exchange nor reflect any labor expended by humans but surely it has value.

8.
I am not knowing if I had someone in my life or not, I am not knowing if I had another man or not, I am only knowing that I am loving you.

These immortal words are uttered by my favorite actress, Shilpa, whose name means well proportioned, and who incidentally went to school with me in Bombay. She says these words to Ram, her husband. Ram is an avatar of Vishnu in the epic Ramayana though in this movie he is a wealthy businessman. Her lover, whom she may or may not acknowledge, is simply named Dev, or God.

9.
Banganga? We awaken a man sleeping next to a hot coal iron to ask, Banganga? He points in the direction of the bazaar. My mother and I walk that way. The market is full of exploding plastic lotas in every shade of purple, plastic scouring pads in yellow, and plastic images of Ram, Krishna, Hanuman, and Devi, with her lolling red tongue and garland of human skulls around her neck. The air is thick with incense and diesel fumes broken up by the salty air from the Arabian Sea of my childhood memories.


10.
We arrive gawking at the gorgeous ankles of the girls out on Colaba causeway shopping for sandals. We ask for beer in cans and the waiter says we never serve beer in cans here and Bhaskar says nai, we always get beer in cans here and I add, and cheeselings. The waiter scratches himself through his Leopolds monogrammed shirt and insists, beer in bottles and peanuts. Okay baba bottles and peanuts but make it fermented beer. Bombay's the only place in the world where you can get fermented beer.


Part 2 (12 minutes)


11.
My name means fearless eleven. That is my first name means fearless and my last name means eleven. I have been pondering the question of what my name means for over 30 years. Is there the possibility of being fearful of eleven? What is it about eleven that would generate such a question?

In my researches on the origins and meanings of my name I have looked most recently at numerology. If I use Pythagorus's formulation eleven becomes a very interesting number. For instance both Harry Potter and Voldemort become eleven. September 11 is an 11-11.

My name was perhaps intended to prepare me for the great fictional battles of our time.

12.
Then we see the stone steps. They are uneven and cratered, caked with mud from the rain. I walk my mom down the steps and even as we walk we realize we are leaving the plastic incense diesel behind and following the path that the great mythical hero Ram took 700 years ago. Then we see the cats! They are everywhere, under the wooden planks left so it seems for years resting against a paanwalla's store, on every balcony and wall. And we notice that everyone here has their front door propped open. Are we still in Bombay I wonder? After all my mom's flat has uniformed security guards 24/7 (though they are asleep when I come home each night), an intercom security system (turned off when the power is down).

And then we see it. Banganga! With a single arrow the exiled King Ram pierced the earth here and sprouted the holiest of the holy rivers, Ganga, to create this little tank in Bombay. Subsequent Mughal, Portuguese, and English rulers tried to cover it up, blow it up, and turn it into a garbage dump but 700 years later, here it is. Steep stone steps mostly eroded by the strong rains go down to Banganga. My mother hesitates. I worry about my Canon SLR slung carelessly around my neck. Then a young girl appears from nowhere. She is wearing a blue saree, gold bangles, ear-rings and a nose-ring. With a beautiful smile she takes mom's hand and leads her down the treacherous steps all the way down to Banganga and as I fumble with my camera and rush down the steps to capture a digital image of this apparition she is gone.

Mom smiles at me and says this is my Bombay.

13.
I will call the inherent value in all things dignity value.

All things natural and created have dignity value. It is when a society departs from the dignity value of things that bubbles are formed. The dignity value of all the so-called financial innovations in the real-estate market and stock market is close to zero. Their existence is of no real value whatsoever.

John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out years ago that bubbles are created by innovations in a subject incapable of innovations. In other words 'new' financial instruments are given a high and rising economic value while their dignity value is zero. The rising economic values of these financial assets in relation to their dignity value creates bubbles.

Crashes return things to their dignity values. Bubbles must burst. There is after all a quiet dignity to that.

14.
Unable to demonstrate in practice what their words threatened in theory, the stone-throwing boys over the years asked their younger brothers and cousin-brothers and neighbor-brothers to join them in the game of insults. This continued until Uma had learned to read and write. Then her father died. Uma was married off to a widower with children and soon gave birth to my mother. I thus owe my own life to the ending of my grandmother's schooling.

She continued wearing chappals after her father died.

15.
Abhay sings Rabindranath Tagore's song Jana Gana Mana which was adopted as India's National Anthem. Another song of Tagore's was later adopted as the National Anthem of Bangladesh.

16.
Tigers do not like humans. Though the rest of the animals follow with the jungle itself a steady cycle of birth and rebirth, humans intervene deep into the jungle creating a cycle of failure. Honey collectors go into the Bengali jungle and smoke out wild bees to collect honey. Boat people anchor their floating homes along the Bay of Bengal and clear the forest of vital dried wood and disintegrating vegetation to use as firewood. Humans attack the jungle, while the rest of the inhabitants of the jungle live the natural rhythms and cycles of the ages, in balance.

17.
There was once a Bombay and a Mumbai. I'd go to sleep in Mumbai and wake up in Mumbai and then go to Bombay where I was beaten. Mumbai was the padar of aai's saree but often she'd be chopping vegetables and have a big knife in her hand. I could have done without Bombay and our Principal, Mrs. Doongajee scaring the shit out of me by wearing Santa outfits even as she twisted my ear until my ear stood upside down, or so it seemed then.

And you prefer Bombay? the pony-tailed author at the next table asks. Well it is what's in my bones. Bombay whacked me with a foot-rule every day until I was 10. How can I forget?

By the time we've finished our first bottle of fermented beer the waiter has brought us a small green plastic bowl of cheeselings.

18.
The British colonial policy of divide and rule was an official policy of creating divisions where none existed. At the turn of the last century the British tried to divide Bengal into a Muslim East Bengal and a Hindu West Bengal even though the people of Bengal thought of themselves simply as Bengali, not Hindu or Muslim.

19.
If you are younger but a social superior then you could try, basbasbasbassss! Again, smiling but not necessarily all the time. If you are younger and socially inferior you have to wave your fingers frantically as well as appreciatively, yes both at the same time. No that's not all. You should also bow, slightly waggle your head from side to side s-l-o-w-l-y and say, nainai-nainai-nainai-nainai.

20.
A bubble is a perfect model for the economic system I advocate. It is non-hierarchical, has no top or bottom, has no beginning, middle, or end. It contains within the same substance that is without (air) and can be looked at as well as looked through.

When it pops nothing bad happens. The inside air meets the outside air.

Bubbles remind me of Joe Brainard's I Remember. The entire book has no beginning, middle, or end. There is no prescribed way of reading it.

An economy should be capable of being approached that way. The value held in any thing being equal to the value outside of it.

21.
As a kid I always drew muscle-men with bulging I mean really bulging muscular arms and legs. So when I turned 13 I was thrilled to discover that I could myself be one of these men I used to draw. My brother and I pooled our entire savings together and proceeded to the sports shop next to Metro and bought the "Bullworker 3" devised by a Swiss genius to build unbelievable muscles.

The colorful book that came with it had chart after chart showing 'potential growth' at each age. Unfortunately the chart only went down to age 18. It was so frustrating! A man of 40 could expect a 300% increase in muscle in just 30 days. But what about a boy of 13? No one had an answer for me. It must have stayed at the back of my mind all these years because a year ago when I turned 40 guess what I bought? Yes a bullworker! It no longer comes with a glossy book promising potential growth. I am not sure if my muscles have increased 300% but my right elbow hurts a little.

22.
The Salt March protesting a new British tax on salt, the most basic commodity used to flavor food, drew thousands of supporters as Gandhiji walked continuously for 25 days from his ashram to the Arabian Sea where he defied British authority and law by picking up salt washed off the sea water. He then said simply, British rule is now over.

23.
While the building of a dome, like a lota, is a convergent problem, the use to which it is put is a divergent problem requiring divergent solutions. That is why a dual-use building is not only feasible but even inevitable given enough time just as the lota is used not only to drink water (held an inch above the lips, never touching) but also to clean the anal orifice (held an inch above the fingers of the left hand, never touching).


Part 3 (4 minutes)


24.
While Gandhi resisted British policies by picking up salt washed off the sea, his mentor Ravindranath Tagore did so by singing a song. He returned his knighthood and wrote songs that were transmitted by word of mouth all over Bengal. Hindus and Muslims both spoke Bengali and sang Tagore's songs of unity in open defiance of British policy.

In the beautiful jungle of the Sunderbans in Bengal, the Hindu goddess protector of tigers Banobibi had no intention of separating from her male consort, the Muslim Dakshin Rai regardless of the divisive tricks of the British government. Banobibi and Dakshin Rai were after all as old as the jungle itself.

25.
Cutting down and clearing the jungle to turn it into farmland changes weather patterns, erodes the soil, destroys the delicate balance of birth and rebirth. This disturbance of the endogenous forces within the jungle moves salt water from the Bay of Bengal inland.

As the salt content of the soil rises sources of fresh water are polluted with salt. Streams and ponds that the tigers habitually drink from are salty. Excessive levels of salt in drinking water causes liver and kidney damage, even failure. Stripped of their dignity, the weakened, dying tigers are driven to eating man as food and are henceforth referred to not as tigers but simply, maneater.

26.
Sixty year old Narayanamma, whose name means mother of Vishnu, is a widow and a coolie.

In this poorest of poor regions in Southern India, farmers who are too poor to hire help during the all important harvest season are simply called coolies.

Narayanamma has enough water in her well to water her half hectare of paddy but the diesel pump has broken down.

A new pump will cost 2000 rupees but Narayanamma, like most coolies, has a natural business sense. She has a buyer in the village for her broken pump willing to give her 1,200 rupees and even haul it away. She is in good standing with her relatives who can gather among them 100 rupees for her, leaving her in need of 700 rupees for a replacement pump. The alternatives are to turn to her usurous landlord or starve.

The Coolie Credit Fund hears cases such as this each week. They approve for Narayanamma an interest-free loan of 700 rupees and turn down a farmer looking to buy an extra cow.

"The Coolie Credit Fund has 48 members and so far, no defaulters," says the Fund's Secretary Venkatarayappa, whose name means father of the sacred mountain Venkata.

"But as an external force, our role is limited. We don't think we can do anything more here." The private, nonprofit organization behind the Coolie Credit Fund is planning to leave. They recognize that their presence in the long run is unhealthy.

"We plan to slowly withdraw from all the villages."

In the long run the coolies themselves must transcend their name, their fate, and create their own microlending institution. Perhaps they will name it Dignity Credit Fund.

Notes and Sources:

A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1990, Penguin Books, New York.
Banking the Unbankable: bringing credit to the poor by the Panos Institute, 1989, PANOS, London.

Many thanks to Brenton Cheng and Edward Schocker with whom the collaborative performance project, Bamboo Alley, was conceived, created, and performed at Red Rover, Stanford University, May 28, 2008. Photographs are from this performance and were taken by Toni Gauthier, tonibirdphoto.com. 

What is value? Economists have tried to answer this question for at least two hundred years. I will try to answer it in two minutes.

There is an inherent value in all things and beings.

It is the inherent dignity of a rock, tree, or person that gives it its value. The Classical economists as well as the Marxians miss this simple point. A tree may have no economic value-in-exchange nor reflect any labor expended by humans but surely it has value.

I will call this inherent value in all things dignity value.

All things natural and created have dignity value. It is when a society departs from the dignity value of things that bubbles are created. The dignity value of all the so-called financial innovations in the real-estate market and stock market is close to zero. Their existence is of no real value whatsoever.

John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out years ago that bubbles are created by innovations in a subject incapable of innovations. In other words 'new' financial instruments are given a high and rising economic value while their dignity value is zero. The rising economic values of these financial assets in relation to their dignity value creates bubbles.

Crashes return things to their dignity values. Bubbles must burst. There is after all a quiet dignity to that.

For some reason I feel like I must end with a story Schumacher tells in Good Work. During the War, as a German citizen living in England he was interned on a farm. His job was to get up at daybreak and climb the hills to count the cows. Day after day, he'd climb up the many hills and count the cows. Each day the count was the same. He'd been counting cows for a year when one day the count was one less. There had been 100 cows. Now there were 99. A cow had died that night. Fritz Schumacher's point was a simple one: Had he been noticing the cows in a qualitative way for a year instead of counting them, he may actually have noticed something valuable, something that may have saved the 100th cow.

From a letter to Matthew Goulish.

Presented at Performance Studies International Conference (PSI #12), London, June 16, 2006 with Matthew Goulish.

Dear Abhay,

What debt do we owe Mohandas K. Gandhi?

My question to you has many faces. What is the debt with which Gandhi has left us? Or: What forces did colonialism deploy that Gandhi rethought as debt? Or: What did rethinking colonial force as debt allow to unleash as a force of liberation?

Each version of the question contains, circulates around, this word: debt. I have revealed the end of my essay at the start. After all, I am attempting a brief venture into economics, not a mystery story. But this approach requires that I backtrack and explain myself.

Already, I have presumed the value of naivete. Nothing qualifies me to venture, however briefly, into the field of economics, or into the historical discourse bequeathed us by this figure of monumental significance, Mohandas K. Gandhi. Nevertheless, my proposed question is simple enough, if one understands its foundations. Its first foundation, a further presumption, is the proposal that economic thought might elucidate Gandhi’s actions. Its second foundation would then be this, another question: what is debt? What do I mean by debt, and why do I mean it? I owe you an explanation. Or shall we say at this point in my essay I am in debt to you in the amount of one explanation. In the debt economy, this is the debt incurred with nothing borrowed. I owe you an explanation, but not because you have loaned me an explanation first. I am not repaying you an explanation. I owe you an explanation simply because I have started talking, and you as listener can expect an explanation as your right. In the pecuniary parlay of outgoing and returning accounts, something must be returning in order for a debt to have accrued, even though nothing has been loaned. What might that something be when the exchange has not been entirely material, but conceptual and linguistic? Maybe we have entered into an arena of ethical debt, a balance of equivalences. If I own the house, and you occupy a room in it, you owe me rent, even though I have not first loaned you that rent. I have loaned you the place to live, and we have agreed that the rent is the equivalent of the shelter. Is that a fair assessment? So in terms of me owing you an explanation, shall we say the explanation is the equivalent of the attention you have given in listening thus far? Here I will give away another version of my ending in asking the question about Gandhi and debt. India lived in a house, which it found suddenly to be owned by the British Empire, which then told the people of India they needed to pay rent to continue to live there. Gandhi claimed that the British Empire had thus constructed a debt, which India was in no position to reject, but was in a position to pay. Thus his noncooperation was in fact, at least in the economic sense, its opposite: absolute cooperation, meta-cooperation, holding the British Empire to the promise implicit in its social structure, that such debt, once having been constructed, cannot be refuted. So the debtors can pay it off through manual labor, and buy their house back from the creditors. In such an undertaking, Gandhi invoked a notion of debt with its roots in the religion of the land. Here I am again venturing into a field foreign to me. So before I attempt that concluding venture, I will backtrack once again. It is only in backtracking that I do not trespass.

You are the economist, Abhay; I the self-taught and interested amateur. You were born in Bombay, and studied at Bombay University. I was born in Flint, Michigan and studied at Kalamazoo. I have trespassed into your territory in more ways than one with my question, but before I turn it over to you for an answer, let me complicate it. At least I can say I knew of Gandhi before Richard Attenborough’s movie starring Ben Kingsley. In high school I read the book that Thomas Merton edited of Gandhi’s writings on nonviolence. I wrote a history paper comparing Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. I got a B+. The teacher preferred my earlier work on the musical 1776. It was, after all, 1976, the bicentennial year. But I knew in my heart he was wrong, and I repeated to myself my newfound mental mantra: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win, or some high school rewrite version that I will spare you. Be that as it may, I was soon thereafter cast as Fagin in the school production of Oliver! It was to be the role my parents still consider the apex of my career. Recently, in Roman Polanski’s film of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the Fagin part was played by Ben Kingsley, an actor some have told me I resemble. This digression proves the extent of my trespass: you come from the very land of Gandhi; I come from a place where I was thought to resemble the actor who played the part of Gandhi, an actor, incidentally, from Yorkshire. Now, a subdigression. It happened ten years later, when in my mid-twenties I delivered pizzas in Chicago, one in a small army of deliverymen who congregated nightly awaiting our orders in the backroom of a thriving northside restaurant. Another driver, named Patel, the butt of many jokes, spoke with a thick Indian accent. The other drivers in their diverse ethnicities – Polish, German, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Ukranian – made him their unwitting clown, since his limited English gave him only the vaguest sense of his own ridicule. I befriended a driver from Spain, Luis, older than the others, and not given to joking. I sometimes asked Luis about vocabulary, as I sat on the long drivers’ bench reading Faulkner or Carlo Levi, or whatever I read in those days. Once I asked him the meaning of dotage, and he explained it to me patiently as the happy old age of patriarchy. I don’t remember why, but in some conversation with Luis I mentioned something about Ben Kingsley. Suddenly I felt a vice grip on my bicep, and turned to find Patel, who had been standing next to me, clutching my arm and peering at me with a look of ferocious intensity. It seemed Patel had suddenly transformed into a kind of demon, and I had no idea what I had said to inflame him. He shouted at me: Exactly! Exactly! Exactly what, Patel? I asked. Exactly like Gandhi! Patel said. Walk like Gandhi! Talk like Gandhi! Look like Gandhi! Exactly! At that moment I realized he was speaking of Ben Kingsley. I looked to Luis for help. And Luis, with infinite wisdom, simply said, We understand you: Ben Kingsley was exactly like Gandhi. Exactly, said Patel, his passion calming. I noticed then that he had tears standing in his eyes. Ben Kingsley. The actor quoted the words exactly. Now I quote the actor’s quotations. Witness the extent of my echolalia. What debt do we owe Mohandas K. Gandhi? It is a question complicated with simplicity. Today I am the foreigner. And the journey of the question has been a 1,800 word walk to the sea, trespassing through your discipline and your country. Anyone who cares to join me on that walk may come along now to its end, where your answer will produce something useful as salt.

He defeated colonialism by accepting it, his acceptance as radical as it was mundane. We have been colonized, he said, and that has put us in debt. To escape the colonization, we must pay off the debt. Once we work our way out of it, through manual labor, we will arrive at a zero point. We will owe nothing, and no one will owe us. That point will be our independence.

I told you it was a simple idea.

But complexity lies in the radical acceptance, for after all, what had Gandhi accepted but the ownership consequences of criminal acts? Such was the culture of colonialism: making India pay for something that was India’s by right; taking it from them first by force, and withholding it to demand payment returns. The rejection of colonialism’s criminality, one could argue, lay in the acceptance of its code of ethics – of ownership through labor, as if the house had been built on foundations of illusion, and the criminality dispelled by the strict adherence to the illusion’s laws. We have locked you in a debtors prison by virtue of our strength, says Empire, and your only recourse is to work your way out for the next 1,000 years, to which the prisoner responds, I will begin my work today, and in the purity of the task I will enact my perfect escape.

Furthermore, in the method of the payment, the perfect act of purified labor, was a profound refusal – a refusal to accrue more debt, not just economic, but ethical, which is to say, and this is the point about religion where I left off: karmic – a debt not of, or not only of, material and labor. The debt economy is the symptom; the cause lies in an economy of deeds and actions. Because man, according to Brahmanism, is born “as debt.” Debt marks his mortal condition. This does not mean that an original sin determines human nature. Debt is neither the sign nor the consequence of a fall, nor does it result from a contract. It simply and directly places man in the condition of debtor. This status is made concrete and diversified in a series of duties, invoked, in the Hindu laws, to justify the rules which organize material administration. It is a karmic approach to debt, as a connection and drawing together of heaven and earth, into which we humans buy our destiny by pouring into the celestial treasury the bad money of sacrifice.

Thus the action of working off colonialism entwines with the action of working off one’s human condition, and such working must be nonviolent, that is, with violence turned only inward on the self, since externalized violence would produce more debt, would multiply that debt we have been born as, under heaven or under empire. Nonviolence does not spend currency it does not have.

Dear Abhay, forgive me my intervening into this subject, my presumption mediated only by my role as interlocutor. What debt do we owe Mohandas K. Gandhi? What debt has Gandhi left us with? What forces did colonialism deploy that Gandhi rethought as debt? What did rethinking colonial force as debt allow to unleash as a force of liberation? And finally: What forces of liberation does such thought – shall we call it our Gandhiology? – allow us to unleash now?

I look forward as always to your response.

Matthew


Sources:

Gandhi on Non-Violence ed. Thomas Merton, New Directions, New York, 1964.

On the Name by Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Suffering’”, note 3, pages 132 – 137, with extensive quotations from Benveniste and Malamoud, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1993.




My dear Matthew,

1.
A young female disciple in the Ashram has a dream which she describes to Gandhi the next day:

I was lying in your lap, Bapu, and you were breast-feeding me. I said I had had enough milk but you kept saying, have more have more have more. Milk squirted into my mouth continuously.

2.
In the language of economics, debts are a function of deficits and credits. A fresh deficit increases the debt. A fresh credit decreases the debt.

We were allotted 30 minutes to read our latest letters of which you, my dear Matthew, took 14 to ask your question, leaving me with the possibility of one answer 16 minutes long. Or 16 answers each a minute long. An answer that takes less than a minute creates a credit, one that takes over a minute, a deficit. I have 16 minutes to repay my debt to you.

3.
I am supposed to start speaking. I am standing in front of 300 students and teachers of Jamnabai Narsee School. The headmistress who is secretly known as Dolly by the teachers is motioning to me to start. Speak, she now whispers. But I simply stand there silently. I have been unable to memorize the speech written for me by Divya Shah’s father. It is 1976 and it is Gandhi’s birthday and I stand silent in front of the assembly. I can not even get to the opening sentence: He was known as the naked fakir.

Later, my father spends days talking to me about Gandhi. Having studied at a school started by freedom fighters, he has read every word Gandhi has written in his native Gujerati. Thus begins a dialogue on Gandhi between father and son that lasts seven years, until father dies, unexpectedly. The opportunity to say more about Gandhi does not arrive for another thirty years. Until today.

1976 is also the year my family does not move to Bangladesh. My father turns down an offer from a United Nations agency to serve as Chief Economist there. I remember him saying, the Bangladeshi question must be answered by a Bangladeshi.

4.
Leading classical economist Robert J. Barro can not understand why countries want political freedom when their material conditions are poor. “It sounds nice to try to install democracy in Haiti or Somalia, but does it make any sense?” He obviously does not think so. According to him democracy should come later, as a sort of reward for materialist development.

5.
I am 13 years old. I have just joined the original Aurobindo Ashram founded by the Maharaja of Baroda. I am here to learn yoga but my teacher likes to talk about bicycles and economics and rna or debt as he sips goat’s milk from a tall glass.

Like Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of karma are about actions and reactions. People and nations come together to repay past rna. If I steal from you, Matthew, I only complete an action that you once started. My act does not create a fresh karmic debt for me.

It is only by my ego-identification with the act that I create rnanubandhana or debt bondage.

6.
The old physics professor is with us. We are on the last train to Virar, the end of the line at the foot of the mountain we will climb early in the morning.

The old physics professor is slow and mild mannered. From time to time he tries to get me and Bento, my fellow economics student, into a discussion of the contradictions of classical economics. “You must read the works of the great radical economist A. G. Frank. He distinguishes between underdevelopment and undevelopment. Undevelopment is the natural state of a country that has not harnessed its economic resources. Underdevelopment on the other hand is a state of economic distortion created by colonialism.” Frankly, we are not interested in any of this.

It is so dark that I can not see more than a shadow when I hold my hand out in front of me. Little circles of light crisscross the wet ground. We are moving in one uniform group when a lone figure separates itself from us. Would any of you join me? It asks. Join me in teaching people in Taragoan village to read and write.

Bento and I mumble something about literacy being an itemized entry in the 6th Five Year Plan and ignore the old Gandhian.

7.
Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar defines fantasy as the gap between the many desires, formulated as demands on the environment and the environment’s inability or unwillingness to fulfill them.

What strikes me about this definition is its exact correspondence to classical economics: the gap between unlimited demands and limited resources.

We may say,

classical economics = fantasy

8.
The Indian economist Amartya Sen has demonstrated that famines are not a problem of underproduction. In fact during the worst year of a famine, food availability is often at an all time high. The problem is not lack of food but rather what he calls entitlements and capabilities. The poor, now unemployed as a result of the famine are unable to purchase food.

Sen has shown beyond a shadow of doubt that political freedom is a precondition to the elimination of mass starvation. No democracy with a relatively free press in history has ever suffered a famine.

9.
The economics of colonialism starts with the logic of competition which ensures that any producer who lags behind in investment is run to the ground. If we accept the notion that dominant values in society are always the values of the ruling class, then thrift, which is for the producer a necessity for survival, becomes the value of the great middle class. Production and savings begin to outweigh the capacity of the economy to absorb them and must be directed abroad.

How well does this model fit the data? Consider this: From the time India became a colony to the outbreak of the Great War, one half of British savings were invested abroad. Flow of dividends and interest alone provided 10% of British national income.

10.
Classical economics views debt with the same mixture of pleasure, guilt, disgust, and feeling of power that a young child exhibits towards its feces.

We may say,

Debt = feces

11.
The young disciple asked Gandhi to explain her dream. Gandhi said, it means that you can trust me.

Sudhir Kakar has called Gandhi a brilliant amateur analyst.

12.
In classical colonial economics, credit is first directed towards the richest segment of society, then on to inhuman extensions of the capitalist’s ego: machinery, and finally abroad, to the colonies.

Gandhi’s radical rethinking was to apply credit to the poorest strata of society, then to machines that were small, powered by human effort and requiring mental and physical dexterity and alertness. Finally, credit would flow to one’s neighbors.

13.
In 1976 while I wrestled with the idiotic Gandhi speech, Bangladesh was under severe famine. Muhammad Yunus, a young economics professor at the University of Chittagong put together his life’s savings and made credit available to 42 hard-working but severely impoverished neighbors in Jobra village. The total credit was dispersed by him personally, using all his own resources, which amounted to a total of $27.

In doing so he started a bloodless revolution. Yunus, in that act, repositioned his country from a state of underdevelopment to a state of undevelopment.

Thirty years later Grameen Bank has dispersed over $5 billion in credit to 4 million borrowers, 96% of them women.

Consider two of his most recent ventures:

1. Extending credit to women to buy cell phones, not for personal use, but effectively creating a public call office in even the remotest of the poor communities, linking them to neighbors, and the rest of the world.

2. Credit is being extended to 26,000 beggars in rural Bangladesh who now on their daily begging rounds from house to house carry with them sweetmeats and toys for sale. Where once the beggars faced irate householders throwing money and food at them from small windows, they now have families who have set up stools for them to sit on during their daily visit. Children come running out of the houses to see the latest candy and toys that the beggar has brought. Yunus has turned social deficits into social credits.

A remarkable study of rural money lending in Pakistan by Irfan Aleem has found that default rates amongst the very poorest who have been extended credit are amongst the lowest in the world at around 2%.


14.
“Dear Prime Minister,

You are reported to have the desire to crush the ‘naked fakir’, as you are said to have described me. I have been long trying to be a fakir and that, naked – a more difficult task. I therefore regard the expression as a compliment though unintended. I approach you then as such and ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine and through them those of the world.

Your sincere friend,

M. K. Gandhi”


15.
Muhammad Yunus has one more dream. He wants to make credit a human right. “We all consider it normal that banks exclude 80% of the world’s population,” he says, anger brimming just below the surface. “I want the United Nations to include the right to credit in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

The ability to accept a debt is the next frontier of human rights.

16.
When the child comes to realize that the passing of resources through its bottom is related to the further taking in of nourishment from its mouth, it has learned the economics of Mahatma Gandhi.

We must reword our equation to say,

debt = milk

And in deference to Gandhi’s dietary choices we may modify the equation one last time and say,

debt = goat’s milk

Your friend,
Abhay


Sources:

Aleem, Irfan. “Imperfect Information, Screening, and the Costs of Informal Lending: A Study of Rural Credit Market in Pakistan,” The World Bank Economic Review 4(3) 329-349 (1990).

Barro, Robert J. Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

Fenichel, Otto. “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 7:69-95 (1938).

Gandhi, M. K. The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vols. 1-6. (Bombay: Navajivan Trust, 1968).

Heilbroner, Robert. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. (New York: Touchstone: 1999).

Kakar, Sudhir. Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Kanth, Rajani. Paradigms in Economic Development: Classic Perspectives, Critiques, and Reflections. (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

O’Bryon, Linda. “Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the World’s Poorest Citizens Makes His Case,” O’Bryon interviews Muhammad Yunus, Nightly Business Report, March 9 (2005).

Schumacher, E.F. Gandhi Memorial Lecture, Institute of Gandhian Studies, Varanasi, 1973.

Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989).

Sen, Amartya. “The Economics of Life and Death,” Scientific American 268(5) 40-7 (1993).

Svoboda, Robert E. Aghora: At the Left Hand of God (Albuquerque: Brotherhood of Life, 1986).

Visscher, Marco. “The World Champ of Poverty Fighters,” Ode 3(6) 26-31 (2005).

Weber, Thomas. “Gandhi, Deep Ecology, Peace Research, and Buddhist Economics,” Journal of Peace Research 36(3) 349-362 (1999).

The most powerful operational use of sacrifice in economics is Marx’s concept of Surplus Value. It is the ultimate sacrifice made by that invention of industrial-capitalist society: wage labor.

Labor in a capitalist society earns a fraction of what it creates. Most products and services command their value-in-exchange. Hence a product utilizing twice as many resources will usually cost twice as much. However labor only commands its value-in-use. It is paid what is needed to reproduce itself, what Marx called the subsistence wage. The remainder, which is the bulk of the value created, is what Marx called Surplus Value, all of which flows to the owners of capital.

From a letter written by Abhay for the Four More Years of Economics correspondence project with Matthew Goulish.  See www.year-of-economics.blogspot.com

 Lecture given at the Goat Island summer school in Bristol, UK (2001), and Chicago, Illinois (2002). Later published by the Institute of Failure.


Fragile, Father, Dead: 26 short failures in performance, place, and economics.   

Abhay Ghiara

1.
The blast of hot humid air that greeted me at Midway made me want to cry. As my Nigerian driver glided the large yellow taxi through Chicago traffic I thought about how the air of a place can find no way of getting into the people who live there in the absence of humidity. The thick Chicago air pregnant with waters has burrowed itself into my bones and when on occasion the wet Chicago air that resides in my bones meets the wet Chicago air that never left home, the airs meet and greet each other.

And that’s when you are quiet and concentrate on the Abba or Carpenters or whatever plays on the Nigerian’s radio. Sounds that seeped into your bones even as the hot air burrowed in Lagos or Bombay or elsewhere. At a stoplight a beautiful Mexican girl blasting Latin tunes pulls up right next to our car. We look, the Nigerian and I, look at her and her glistening skin, her heaving, small, perfect breasts, dark eyes. We see all this, how hip she is, how her head bobs back and forth to the beat. And we know that our worlds, our hot humid nights in Lagos and Bombay memorizing Tennyson while listening to Neil Diamond have separated us from this dark Mexican girl and everyone else.

2.
Bhakris. We are going to make bhakris.

Laughter. Rounds of nervous laughter. Exclamations of bhak-ri! followed by more laughter.

I plan to go home and make bhakris. They are made of bajri, a grain that has been used to make bread with in my mother’s family for generations. Today when I mention making bread out of bajri I get the laughter. Nervous laughter. A lot.

All over post-Green Revolution India, communities have stopped eating traditional grains grown and harvested locally by women and switched to wheat, especially mill and factory processed white flour. The memory of food that is traditional, ecologically sustainable, women-grown is an embarassing distant memory. Hence the nervous laughter.

3.
Television came to Bombay in 1973. The Cricket Club of India scrambled to find commentators. The early commentators hired were veterans of radio. I remember at age 7 how odd it sounded to have these commentators describing not only the game but also each step each player took, the slow rubbing of the ball, the change in fielding positions. I could clearly see everything that was being described, a little differently, making me see double.

4.
The humidity in Bombay makes my head spin. Sometimes I have difficulty breathing. I don't remember things like where I am supposed to meet Adil...where Iam....I stand on railway platforms drenched with sweat breathing through my mouth to let in large quantities of hot wet air, making a funny, sinking sound.

I peel my wet clothes off and jump in the cold shower. I stand very still trying to cool down. Half an hour later when I turn the shower off I break into a sweat.

5.
Tarzan was our favorite comic. Tarzan with his huge, muscular body, perfect teeth and hair that was straight and never disturbed even as he swung from vine to vine.

I started reading Tarzan in 1976, the year we learnt, in geography, how India was discovered in 1495. We spoke English, celebrated Christmas, and sang Tom Dooley in Assembly. Karan Macker could not ride the B.E.S.T. bus because he fell down whenever he did and Parag Mandrekar spent all day in a house with no parents and Tintins covering an entire wall and Asterix on another, and bits of old chewing gum all over the small freezer inside the refrigerator.

We were Tarzan, and though we spoke the language of the apes, one day a ship would discover us, and recognizing who we really were, take us away.

6.
Tell the story of your life in 3 words. Use an object to tell your story.

A young Peruvian girl holds a red apple in her left hand, looking straight ahead, has tears pouring down her eyes.

FACE
GRANDMOTHER
RED

Over and over the story is about loss, leaving, and never going back.

An older South African student, an ex-policeman, holds a cane in his hand. He grabs me and draws me into his space, hands me the cane and bending over motions me to strike him.

DUTY
HONOR
GUILT

Seeing my utter inability to strike him, he takes the cane and hits the empty plastic chair until the cane splits into pieces.

We perform our pieces for each other and then respond to each others pieces. Over time the instructions get more and more complex, the constraints more and more specific, performance and response blend together, solos, duets, quartets flow into each other and out.

7.
I am an economist and a performer. I am interested in creating community, from its infrastructure to its collective expression.

I am interested in personal change through performance. And social change through performance. And in a change in the nature of performance itself though the creation of community.

Collaboration takes time. Collaboration is exhausting. Collaboration results in conflict.

Except for 3 short years under Indira Gandhi, India has been a democracy since 1947. Economists from the Ford Foundation, UNESCO, and the World Bank have visited India ever since, and after a thorough examination declare the Indian economy dead. Democracy is a sham, people say, even back home. Let us go back to the organized benevolent despotism of British rule.

Whatever the merits of subjugating peoples less powerful than ourselves may be, they shall not be discussed here. Let me turn instead to the work of the Indian Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen. Sen’s life work has been an inquiry into the nature and causes of famines. To summarize his work, let me number his ideas:

1) Famines are not a production problem as is commonly assumed, but a distribution problem. The problem is never too little food, but too little food in a particular region.

2) In every country suffering from famine, the aggregate food supply is adequate to feed the entire population.

3) At the outbreak of famine, it is the government’s job to make sure that food gets from regions of excess production to regions in dire need of food.

If these basic facts are understood and utilized, famines can be completely avoided. Now, wouldn’t a benevolent despot be able to command the country’s bureaucracy to take action in such a situation faster and more efficiently than a democracy? Sen has shown beyond a shadow of doubt that the answer is no.

Consider these facts:
1) No democracy in history has ever suffered a famine.
2) Take the case of India: Under British rule India suffered several prolonged famines. After independence, India has suffered no famines at all.

Democracy, like collaboration, is difficult. But if we want all of us to survive, for the human race to not keep leaving behind the unfortunate, the hungry, the poor, and the sick, it seems to me that we have no option but to embrace democracy and in doing so embrace collaboration.

8.
Am about to leave the dusty desert metropolis of Jaipur. The tall, cool, clay pots of chilled lassi have kept me an inch on the safe side of heat-stroke...I used to think Bombay was hot!

I am not sure where I am going next. I think I will take the least dangerous looking bus. I am in such a world out here! I get up and sit on the well kept lawn next to a gigantic cage full of parrots red, yellow, blue, white. I sip hot spicy chai and eat my stuffed paratha and try to keep my eyes open. It is getting warmer every minute. By the time breakfast is done, if my foot is in the sun it will feel like it is on fire.

People don't know what to make of me. Seeing my hat they speak to me in English. We are students..hullo madhat..hullo banana..I invariably reply in Hindi..from here only..oh you look different..So you are in the commission racket and not students? ...yes,yes... for what?...That silver shop...ok...have a good day (in English)....

The foreigners are curious but I could well be a commission agent. So no one meets my eyes.

9.
Last night at Kopis cafe a couple sit reading two copies of The Gifted Child Manual, the man in dark blue shorts and T, the woman in a very short Rani skirt flashing a pretty white triangle. She smiles at me once, twice, perhaps three times and adjusts herself.

All night in my sleep triangular handkerchiefs fly in geometric trajectories until I awake.

Jayant’s neck tumors have decided to grow again and that, the image of white round balls growing bigger becomes the formica of our childhood dinner table, the design on the plastic dinner plates of my childhood, smuggled in by our American friends. Independence Day is about replaying events. About that moment at which we were connected. A brief triangular flash that reminds us that I am at point A and you are at point B but we were once a little dot, a point where we came from. That is what I tell my brother.

10.
In the hot desert towns of Rajasthan, as in the Sahara, the most expensive homes are built where the best breeze may be felt.

Air, which has no value in exchange here, becomes an economic commodity when it moves.

Without air, moving or not, rich and poor would perish together. Something that has no economic value actually sustains life.

11.
I have to battle the mob at the bus station and the railway station now. Got to deposit my bag in the cloak room...Everything in India has a proper name. Problem is often that thing does not exist, In Jaipur I entered the foreign post office building. Only a facade. Literally. No foreign, no post office. Chat with the chaiwalla and everything is set straight.

Cybercafes signs everywhere. What that means is a paanwalla (betelnut tobacconist) will have an aging old computer in his kitchen, "hall", or closet. The water is free and the activity is collaborative. Same with STD< ISD< PCO booths. You share your conversation with your lover in another continent with 3 or 4 sturdy men who rub their mustaches from time to time. At one booth they even shut the door so we could all have privacy from the noise outside.

The food is excellent. No vegans in India. Dairy reigns supreme. Lassis, chass, dahi, doodh. Coffee drinkers would be quite glum I think. While the tea drinker is served an endless stream of piping hot sweet and pungent chai, the odd coffee drinker looks on hopefully at the espresso machine that the chaiwalla has installed on his cart. A closer inspection reveals it is not exactly an espresso machine but part of one. An old one. So she must not be surprised when the chaiwalla takes milk, adds sugar and nescafe, then sticks the cup under the spout for the bubbles and froth. The instant coffee sits on top of some foam and the chaiwalla is proud of his skill. No self respecting Rajasthani would pay the princely sum of Rs. 5/- and not see her nescafe sitting intact on top of her foam.

12. In the malaria infested paddy fields of Kerala in southern India the idea of disguised unemployment does not make much sense.

For the last fifty years, ever since development economics came into vogue, it has been widely accepted that a developing country can develop rapidly only through industrialization. The classical two sector economic model postulates that:

1) There is a surplus of labor in rural areas of developing countries. Since rural labor easily accounts for 80% of the total labor resources in such countries, this surplus is a significant unused potential.

2) This surplus labor unlike urban surplus labor is not at all apparent in the form of visible unemployment. Rural family and clan ties make it difficult to exclude semi-productive members from the family group and so everyone appears to be working but in reality everyone is underworked.

3) This phenomenon of underworked rural labor has been called disguised unemployment.

4) Large scale relocation of the underworked rural labor to urban areas can provide the  labor resources  industrialization requires.

5) Industrialization thus offers hope to developing countries by harnessing all the wasted potential represented by the country's disguised unemployment.

Back to the paddy fields. Some years ago a bright young economist from Bombay by the name of Cajetan Fernandes studied this issue first hand. He spent two years in the rural south, assiduously recording observations, gathering statistics and writing up his results.

The results of the empirical study by Fernandes can be summarized as follows:

1) Rural labor was largely engaged in agriculure.

2) Agriculture being a cyclical economic activity, unlike industry, required labor to be available in short and intense,  predictable (harvest time) and unpredictable (depending on seasons and weather)  cyclical patterns.

3) Periods of peak agricultural labor needs tended to coincide closely with outbreaks of water-bourne diseases.

4) In each period of peak activity in the year, family farms tended to use not only every available pair of hands in the extended family unit but also routinely hired additional outside help. When it mattered most, everyone who wasn't sick was working.

5) The idea of disguised unemployment as a rationale for industrialization falls apart when tested in the paddy fields.

Fifty years ago Gandhi intuitively felt that this idea of disguised unemployment was at best a half truth. But lacking sophisticted economic arguments, his ideas were simply regarded as quaint and outdated.

Today we have sophisticated voices of dissent in the Universities of India. Voices that stand up to the tyranny of the economics of the West. Are we going to start listening to these voices?

13.
How fragile is my father. How fragile our dialogue when he passes away, dies. How fragile his father. How fragile their connection when he, my grandpa, passes away, dies.

The link between father and son is a long delicate thread made of silk. With this one thread between them, father and son do their dance. At the end of each side is a matchbox drawer that father speaks into and son listens and son speaks into and father listens.

Until the thread snaps and one father is carried away by laughing boys with large handkerchiefs up up to the towers where no one may speak, as the son watches. The other father’s dead body drawn into the government electric holy fires by rolling steel wheels. One moment I see him, apply eau de cologne on his forehead, the next moment, he is gone.

14.
What we think of as our collaborative performance is our narrative, created to provide ourselves with closure, using discrete variables plucked from the organic continuum that is our piece. What Charles Correa, the Indian architect, calls creating the machine by looking at the spare parts.

Narratives are not unbiased aggregating of events but rather, logical, time-based outcomes of biases and opinions, world-views held at the point of time that the narrative is created.

Goat Island method results in the setting up, within a collaborative performance piece, of multiple narratives, at least some of which conflict with each other at every point in the piece and all of which conflict with each other at least at one point during the piece.

When my students discover that and work through it, they have breakthroughs. They find within themselves the capacity for metanarrative.

15.
My lovely Krista,

I send you the words of Hijikata Tatsumi mixed with my own.

I sat on the verandah and watched the rain fall on my toes, the legs of the aaram chair, and Rukkaiah’s water buffalo. How important the verandah is to me I would think. The rain falls without beginning or end. As it falls I think of the time all five of us, aai, pappa, Jayant, Naval, and I dragged our cotton mattresses out and lay them touching on their sides making a seamless family bed. And how pappa kept telling his stories as we rolled around and around even as rain fell and felt cold on our arms and legs and faces and aai’s exposed belly. As it fell, time and space became mixed and intertwined until no distinction remained between the two.

When pappa got up, at what part of the story, what time of the night I do not remember. I remember the scolding, the silent fury, five limp mattresses hurriedly dragged inside, the hot suffocatingly humid air inside the house and sleeping stiffly until dawn.

16.
While a cool lassi in a clay pot saves the traveler in the hot, dry deserts of Rajasthan, the lassi is helpless in Bombay. On a late morning after a long train ride I drank two cold lassis outside the old Bombay Brebourne Stadium and felt sick and congested. Though lassis are served in Bombay the Bombay lassiwalla knows he is doing you no favor in the humid, fumy, wet Bombay weather by handing you a lassi. So he does this without flair, without a smile or even a nod. And the lassis look sad and unappetizing in their tiny glass glasses. The drink that keeps me going in Bombay is coconut water. Anywhere you are in the city, a Keralite coconutwalla can be found in his short lungi miniskirt and a bare chest. And, oh, the cool water from the coconut does the trick each time. I will not faint now for another 15 minutes. I know my name and where I am. For another 15 minutes.

17.
We accept in our society the idea that work should be interesting. By interesting we presumably mean that work should be devoid of many routine elements; elements that require the repetition of tasks. Our acceptance of this idea parallels our culture’s whole hearted acceptance of capitalism as the only viable economic arrangement whatever our socio-political beliefs may be. Our acceptance of capitalism along with the distaste and repulsion that we feel for what is boring are not unrelated. In fact it was Adam Smith, father of classical economics, who first made a cogent case against boredom. Smith’s famous description of a pin factory
created a vivid image of a worker’s life and spirit being broken by the repetitive nature of his work.

To find sympathetic students of boredom we must carefully disentangle ourselves from Smith’s overwhelmingly popular vision and look back in time. Diderot spoke almost lovingly of the nature of routine and the splendid effect repetitive work has on the human psyche. In that view boredom becomes the state of mind that makes it possible for the worker and the work to become one. The repetition of a task however simple over and over in the course of ones life was what Krishna spoke of on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. In India I know people who spend their entire lives reading and rereading Krishna’s words over and over in their solitude.


The nature of the boring is such that it must be given space to be. It must not be required to live up to society’s current notion of what is important or valuable. Adam Smith made the distinction between the older idea of value in use and his own idea of value which he called value in exchange. Our modern day sense of value is almost completely devoid of the older meaning of value as something that is important to us personally. We have replaced value in use with value in exchange so that the only things that are deemed to have value are those that others would want
from us. Since everyone has to experience and contemplate his or her own boredom alone, one’s own boredom has little or no value to anyone else. Boredom in other words has very little value in exchange. In our present society the lack of value in exchange is equated with the lack of value itself and looked upon with suspicion, hostility, and disdain.

18.
Bombay! My friend Kim took me to two of Bombay's underground dancebars last night. You won't find them in Lonely Planet but they are not hard to find if you are driving slowly along the streets of Matunga. For a uniformed guard will come running up to your little Maruti car and take the drivers seat.

On three dance floors young women in sarees sway to the sounds of Hindi film music. The songs are all romantic, of love unfulfilled, of promises made and broken, of sweet sixteen pyaar yaar. Disco lights flash and men are seated on plush sofas along the edge of the dance floor. The men drink. The men motion ever
so slightly to the waiters in dark suits to bring them 500 rupee garlands, 50 rupee rolls, and 10 rupee packs. As the women sway to the music, mouthing the words of the songs that everyone knows, the notes start flying in the air. When a particular guest wants to shower a particular sareed woman with money he raises an eyebrow or a finger and one of the ubiquitous dark suited men rush to him politely, take his money and then tower above the favored woman dealing the money around her like a practiced card
dealer. The garlands are gently placed around the woman's head. The DJ changes the music dramatically from an old mellow love song(when hips gyrate ever so slowly and eyes are closed, lips trembling) to an action packed tune where everything shakes and rattles and turns and bounces.

There is absolutely no nudity, no hint of disrobing. The women are fully clothed, look traditional except for the loose long dark hair which has, instead of coconut oil, hair spray in it. The men make no attempts to touch the women, or to get to know them,
instead sinking deeper into their romantic dispair. In a country where almost everyone has an arranged marriage, love is an object of endless fascination. The liquor flows freely and the service is impeccable.

My friend Kim is getting sentimental and the 10 rupee notes he holds out to this one disney beauty (who barely smiles a knowing smile, and barely sways her ample hips) are disappearing alarmingly. The sociological discourse he has given me early in the evening when sober has long been replaced by his crooning along with the songs that are being blasted on the expensive sound system.

A man with a little mustache and an oversize suit is approaching us with a leather folder. When several hundred rupee notes are stuffed into the folder he shakes hands with us and escorts us out into the humid Bombay air. There is Kim’s little Maruti right in the middle of the street with the uniformed man beaming at
us.

19.
I woke up quite early on Tuesday. The room was warm and dry as always and my ceiling fan was creaking. The smell of toast and tea danced seductively in the air.

All this I say because I had got so used to this life in the dry desert city that I could have stayed for ever...and they, I mean the guesthouse running and owning family must know that. Every morning after lingering as long as the waiter with the long mustache would let me linger with my breakfast, (me with my stuffed whole grain paratha, the others with white toast, sharing huge pots of tea), I would reluctantly walk past Mr. Patil at reception to check the LIST. Each day it would be the turn of someone or the other to leave. On tuesday I am on the LIST!

Indian buses have a strict division of labor. The driver keeps driving the bus. His job and place in the set up is to drive, preferably non-stop at full speed until he gets to his destination. Bearded Indians with hats standing under trees that are known to be and have served as the only bus stop for 20 miles in any direction waving frantically LOOKING at the driver drive up do not as much as warrant a tap on the brakes. It is the conductor who is the brain of the set up. Luckily, the conductor has seen me or heard my Ayyyyy Thairoooooo! for the bus has stopped 30 meters ahead. My bus is the most dangerous looking one on this road. The conductor is yelling ALWAAR ayyyy ALWAAR and smiles at me knowingly. I say how much he says 48 and grabs my 50  rupees and stuffs it in his pocket as he carefully records the transaction in his journal. All Indian conductors carry black journals with them that they continuously update.

Every 20 minutes the bus stops. The way the conductor jumps out seems to indicate to everyone but me just how long the bus will stop. If it is just a water from the copper urn under the tree stop or a pee stop or a chai stop. The driver stays in the bus racing the engine. When the conductor is ready ( I have seen that at each stop he exchanges pages from his journal with someone inside a little wooden box with a hole in it that serves as a window.) When conductor saheb is ready he does a dhad dhad with his knuckles on the bus as off it goes with about six people hanging on, trying to jump back into the bus.

Rajasthan traffic is different from Gujerat. The Gujerati driver skillfully curves around you as you walk, pedal, or drive. Bhaskar my best friend from fourth standard taught me to keep moving at a steady pace so the traffic could guage my speed and adjust. I saw a little school girl on a bicycle that she could not sit on and pedal at the same time (we don't believe in child size anything) move against the flow of heavy traffic in the middle of the road without an accident or even angry yell. But that was Gujerat! Now I am in Rajasthan and I have already been bumped and scraped twice. The Rajasthani knows nothing about guaging anything and if he did he would resist using such knowledge on principle. He simply moves on in a straight line and if a camel, donkey, child, cyclist, pedestrian, or any such entity dare come in his way..well he keeps going. How many scooters I see on their sides wheels turning, engines running while their owners sorted things out in the middle of the street..A rajasthani farmer has taken a liking to my orange Old Navy backpack. An ambulance goes by doubling as a bus for short haul trips. In an emergency, everyone will get off and wait for it to come back. Then they can go home.

20.
Marcos’s parents are farm workers who cross the Mexican border each morning to work a 10 hour day in the farmlands of California.

Tereza’s single parent mother works long hours as a bartender.

Leilani’s husband gave her 2 young children to support and left. She works nights at Safeway.

These are some of my students and their stories are not uncommon at the technical college I teach at. For 75 years, immigrants have sent their children or themselves enrolled at our college with hopes of realizing the American dream.

Some numbers: Over 80% of our students come from families in which neither parent attended college. Over 75% are from immigrant families. Like myself, they were born most commonly in developing countries.

These students come to us to be trained in the latest cutting-edge technology, engineering principles, and everything to do with computer technology.

The one thing these students do not expect to do is study performance. And yet, each one of our seniors is now required to take the performance class that I have developed and teach before they can graduate.

21.
Adam Smith has been called the father of classical economics. To understand classical economics, to pin point the crux of the problem with classical economics, you must allow me to explain Smith’s economics to you. And you must be patient and follow along with me.

Some history. Two important schools of economics preceded Adam Smith. Economic thought in the hands of the Mercantilists consisted mostly in extolling the advantages of hoarding gold and silver and undertaking wars to expand the princely treasure chests. It was the french Physiocrats who pointed out that wealth consisted not in the net value of the Monarch's hoards but in the flow of income from hand to hand within the fabric of society, a remarkably democratic idea! But don't get too carried away by this. We will return to it later. Smith took to this idea of wealth as a flow. Imagine the workings of blood in the body. A hoard of blood is of little value to the organism. The flow of blood through the body on the other hand nourishes, energizes, and keeps alive the organism. Similarly, Smith argued in his great work of 1776 (The Wealth of Nations) that the old notion of wealth as the stock of iconic value (for what else is gold and silver except an icon of wealth?) held by kings and princes needed to be replaced by the concept of wealth as spending flowing through the economic arteries of the nation's populace. So Smith integrated a very new vision of wealth into economic thought.

Using that basic analytical approach, Smith made two important points. Firstly he was able to describe, in detail, the functioning of an economy where important economic decisions were made not by a political authority but by the market itself. Secondly, Smith attempted to uncover the forces that led to the growth and decline of economies over time.

Let us consider the functioning of the economy first. Smith was able to show that under certain ideal conditions, demand and supply would be able to adjust automatically, enabling people to vote for, through their spending choices, the goods and services they desired. These elected goods and services in turn would be produced, in the quantitites the people voted for, by profit-hungry businesses kept from exploiting the situation by ever present competition. Each business in attempting to satisfy the dollar-votes of the people, would be forced to keep prices close to the actual cost of production or else risk losing their business to the other businesses lurking in the shadows, waiting to steal the honor of satisfying the wants of the public at a profit.

Now to Smith's second important idea. Smith argued that the satisfaction of the people's wants (expressed through their dollar-votes) by businesses would lead to a massive flow of goods and services through the nation's economic arteries. In other words the wealth of the nation would grow and the nation would prosper. This process would not continue for ever, though. As demand for goods and services grew,  competition amongst businesses would grow as well. But businesses would have to pay an increasing wage as demand kept growing. This combined with constant competitive pressure to keep prices low would eventually lead to declining profits and in an increasing number of cases actual losses. The economy would experience a downturn as businesses failed, employment dropped, and the early promise of economic expansion vanished. Hey! This sounds more like Marx's vision than that of the father of classical economics. Are you sure you don't have them confused? you say. Actually this was to become part of Marx's vision, for Marx's economics was essentially Smith's economics turned upside down! What makes Adam Smith the darling of the conservative set is that after setting up a promisingly doomed vision of economic development over time, he saves it just in time. So the declining profits and downturned economy are not the end of the story but just the events leading up to the INTERVAL. So what saves the (capitalist) world? In two words, sex and mortality. For during the long years of economic prosperity before the economic decline, people are reproducing like crazy, confident that their pay raises and overtime can support a larger family. At the same time, the increasing income dramatically cuts down on infant mortality rates. Just when it seems like despair is to be the order of the day, the increased work-force (the babies have grown into able-bodied adults) intensifies the competition for jobs, bringing wages down. Suddenly, as wage pressures fall, profit opportunities multiply and the once declining economy will glide upwards again for another long period of economic growth. Since the growth of population is potentially limitless, the economy endlessly loops through periods of growth and decline. Such is the nature of the growth and decline of the wealth of nations.

I would like to point out two important things about Smith's economics. Firstly, it is essentially an apologist formulation. One may notice great declines in economic prosperity under capitalism, but they were part of the grand scheme of things. The declines were to be followed inevitably by powerful expansions, so it was best to accept economic reality rather than question it and risk losing the prosperity lurking right around the corner. Secondly, Smith's vision has erroneously struck many people as a singularly democratic one. After all, they contend, it is what the people want, as expressed by their dollar votes that gets produced. That too, at the lowest cost and prices as insured by competition. It is not what the monarch or other authority wills that gets produced, but what the people want. Surely there is a powerful democratic thrust to Smith's vision. Unfortunately that is pink eye-wash. Spending in the form of dollar-votes would be truly democratic only in a society with a perfectly equal distribution of income and wealth. Think of what Smith's vision would look like if applied in the more familiar political, rather than economic context. Each person in society would get to vote only in proportion to his or her income and wealth. What a capitalist economy produces is what people want in proportion to  their income and wealth. Which is why the market will never produce housing for the homeless or food for the hungry while producing bombers for the military.

An alarmingly uninformed common tendency in our country even amongst so called liberals is a preference for 'market outcomes' over political decision-making. That is in fact the undoing of democracy. The talk of dollar votes creates the illusion of democracy while steadily eroding democratic process.

22.
The sounds, the smells, the voices. I remember being sick in Surat and hearing the sounds of the spices in hot groundnut oil spluttering and popping and then the moist vegetables eased into the boiling oil going psssshhh pssshhh. Gold bangles clanging as chapatis are rolled and the pressure cooker whistling. I lay in bed for an hour listening, and smelling. I was quite well when I finally got up.

I convinced my friends Bhaskar and Kim to take me to Gossip to see a Hindi movie. It was hard, they wanted to see an English movie. But I convinced them to do it for me. After negotiating a fair price with the lady with the nose-ring and baby (if you are going to further the illegal market why not help a black-marketer who is also a mother?). The first thing that strikes you in the movie theater is how loud the sound is. It is BLASTED on the sound system. Kim and Bhaskar are complaining about seeing a Hindi movie. Mothers walk their kids and carry their babies up and down the aisles as they watch. Mobiles keep ringing and are answered promptly. No one seems to ever hang up. At a sentimental moment I turn first to Kim and then to Bhaskar. They are both crying. The girl's father is shouting GET OUT! The hero answers with a quiver in his voice, half to himself, half to the audience: I swear to make him my fatherinlaw before I die.

23.
As a child, when my family travelled from Bombay to Baroda, we would get off at Surat station to munch on the famous Surati Nankhatais and sip tea in clay cups. Later, when we were done and heard the train whistle, we would fling the clay cups into the air and over our train compartment and hear them fall on the other side.

The Surati Nankhatais are still available on Surat station. But your tea is served in a styrofoam cup.

24.
Textbooks define economics as the study of how to optimize the use of our scarce resources to satisfy our unlimited human wants. Human wants, as opposed to needs, are defined as being unlimited. Resources are said to be scarce because the earth does not posess the resources to satisfy our unlimited wants. It seems clear to me that the task of economics thus posed is one of squeezing out the most of our resources, through exploitation of nature, human labor, and the dismantling of myriad cultures in a futile attempt to satisfy human wants which are by definition insatiable.

Is there an alternative? Yes. Consider what happens if you apply Gandhi’s satyagraha to economics. Take away the assumption of unlimited human wants. Why should we accept that human wants are unlimited? In other spheres of human inquiry do we accept that the human inclination toward unlimited violence, unlimited destruction, and unlimited carnal engagement are not only unavoidable but natural conditions to be catered to in every possible way? If we accept the prudent limiting of human wants as we do the limiting of other human proclivities, economics as we know it would have to change in a fundamental manner. The limiting of human wants would bring out the absurdity, and through a falling rate of profit negate the economic logic, of the exploitation of nature and human beings. The end of monoeconomics would bring an end to the economic logic of monoculture.

25.
I remember Lin Hixson of Goat Island saying once that the Goat Island process was about construction. That is what I am interested in. The parts. The whole. How the parts are put together to create the whole. Why the whole makes sense. When and why the whole fails. When and how the whole fails to fail.

I am interested in method. How do you construct? How do you develop a method to create a construction in 5 different ways? How do you develop a method to develop a method? How do you develop a method that fails. And fails to fail.

There is a Duchamp exhibit at Stanford that I love to go look at. A thread one meter long is dropped, its shape traced. A piece of wood is carved to match the shape. The part. Process repeated. Over and over again. The whole emerges.

Charles Correa, the Indian architect calls his process the spare part and the machine. In Bombay, at an institute of higher learning,  the research wing and the administrative wing are joined together by a long circuitous passageway. The short-cut involves walking through a walled jungle. The parts are laid out carefully. The whole is created through choices that participants make. And fail to make.


26.
I remember the movie theaters of Bombay. Metro, Regal, Strand, Sterling, Eros, Liberty.

Outside Regal cinema, in the Colaba circle, would be a large painted sign that said To Night.

TO NIGHT.

The rains come in June. Roads are flooded. We are getting off the taxi to stop at Kayani’s for a mava cake. In the rain. A mava cake is baked with one wax paper cup on the bottom and another wax paper cup on top. A cake, with an umbrella. We stuff our mouths with mava cake and run in the rain avoiding the biggest puddles.

I am wearing plastic shoes with swastikas on the heels. My shoes have two small holes positioned to squirt water onto my chin every time I take a step. 

So when we arrive To Night, we spend a lot of time looking at the black and white photographs of the movie. What is happening here? Who is this man? Why is the woman wearing trousers?

When they finally let people in, we are moving at last. Flowing into Liberty as one. Tickets please, tickets please. Smell of Turmeric and oil. 2 snacks are offered at the stand inside: spicy popcorn and oily wafers. But that is for the INTERVAL.

We walk on red carpet. Airconditioners hum. Everyone is excited and talking at once. My father has a cadbury bar. After the public service film on Nirodh, a triangle is flashed meaningfully on screen.

Now the Indian news reel starts. A cricket match. Engineer hits a series of fours and India declares, with 7 down and 450 runs. Crowds cheer in the theater. Men in the lower stalls whistle and stamp. The upper stalls are alive with a hum of excitement and around us in the balcony and dress circle, people just smile a lot.

Everyone claps when the Indian news reel is over. Everyone knows, Engineer has been in retirement for years. The match was played five years ago.