He was probably a socialist by instinct, but without its rigid orthodoxies. He felt that a capitalist with a benevolent heart was the right answer.
Those who profess the ideas of “nation-state”, usually brand Gandhi as an “Anarchist” due to his ideas of self sufficient villages , decentralized economy and Village Republic, but what usually forgotten in this conversations was the fact that he was instrumental in building the idea of “state”. This shows that he wanted a state but a state with village republics – how contradictory , one might think , but to comprehend Gandhi is not an easy task either.His economic ideas had moral tinge, take morality from his ideas of economics and it won’t make any sense.
Today, the rural villages are not self- sufficient, there is wide-spread distress migration and the livelihood of millions is at risk.This pushes one to ponder whether Gandhi was right then and is he relevant now ?
Gandhi was not an easy man to comprehend, especially when it came to his economics. One reason for this is that he arrived at his conclusions through a moral understanding of the universe, and not by thinking about growth or investment or demand and supply.
This is why his economic ideas are difficult to slot in the Left-Right-Centre range of ideas, or the Communism-Socialism-Capitalism range of ideologies.
It is thus best to discuss his ideas in terms of broad themes, test them against current realities, and then conclude whether he has been prescient or foolish in his proffered solutions.
Gandhi believed in Swadeshi, in rural self-sufficiency, in cottage and small industries rather than big industries, in less mechanisation and more labour input in production.
Despite being surrounded by many businessmen who bankrolled the Congress party during the freedom struggle, he did not think capitalism was the answer to India’s needs. But he did not believe in textbook socialism either and said:
“I have looked up the dictionary meaning of socialism. It takes me no further than where I was before I read the definition.”
He was probably a socialist by instinct, but without its rigid orthodoxies. He felt that a capitalist with a benevolent heart was the right answer.
“No doubt capital is lifeless, but not the capitalists who are amenable to conversion.” He felt that the rich must hold their wealth in trust on behalf of the whole of society. He said: “Real socialism had been handed down to us by our ancestors who taught: ‘All land belongs to Gopal’.” In other words, the good capitalist is one who thinks of society before his own profits.
If you take the moral element out of Gandhi, you cannot understand his economics. But since it is not our purpose here to discuss his morality, we have to parse his ideas for their economic content in order to figure out where his ideas have been relevant, where they have failed, and where they could be proved right in future.
Let’s start with a core Gandhian idea—swadeshi. Today, interestingly, only RSS thinktanks hold the idea dear. In purely economic terminology, swadeshi is not too different from modern-day protectionism.
Gandhi seemed to suggest as much when he wrote in one of his essays that “India must protect her primary industries even as a mother protects her children against the whole world…”. On another occasion, he wrote: “Much of the deep poverty of the masses is due to the ruinous departure from swadeshi in economic and industrial life. If not an article of commerce had been brought from outside India, she would be today a land flowing with milk and honey!”
India became a land of milk surplus and Dabur or Patanjali honey only after we abandoned swadeshi.
But Gandhi’s swadeshi was not really inward-looking; it was more about promoting the idea of self-sufficiency and independence, less about just keeping imported goods out.
“True swadeshi is that alone in which all the processes through which cotton has to pass are carried out in the same village or town.” This tied in with his idea of self-sufficient village republics which are governed democratically and produce all the basic things they need inside the same village.
“My idea of village swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbour for its vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity. Thus every village’s first concern will be to grow its own food crops and cotton for its cloth. It should have a reserve for its cattle, recreation and playground for adults and children. Then if there is more land available, it will grow useful money crops, thus excluding ganja, tobacco, opium and the like.”
Gandhi’s village republics were posited as inimical to large-scale industrialisation as visualised by his successor Nehru.
Unlike Ambedkar, who saw villages as cesspools of corruption and bigotry, Gandhi saw India’s future in its villages, and he pitted large-scale industry as being dangerous to the idea of the village republic and small business.
He wrote: “I would say that if the village perishes, India will perish too. India will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost. The revival of the village is possible only when it is no more exploited. Industrialisation on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive, or active exploitation of the villagers as the problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore, we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use.”
Gandhi’s ideas on cottage units and the debunking of large-scale industrial production made India miss every possible bus on the road to rapid industrialisation. Nehru compounded this folly by making the State the engine of industrialisation. We also created unviable small businesses by protecting them, and prevented them from growing in scale. We privileged smallness and import substitution all the way to 1991 when bankruptcy made us see sense.
The mix of Gandhian morality and Nehruvian statism gave us the worst of both worlds. It needed a member outside the Nehru-Gandhi consensus and an external crisis to take India out of the Gandhian paradigm.
Gandhi’s idea of everyone producing all his needs by himself and self-contained villages would be bizarre in today’s interdependent world. But is it all that bizarre in a post-internet, post-global world where growth is driven by services rather than manufacturing or agriculture?
Is it all that unreal in a world where individuals can earn by doing jobs at remote locations, delivering services from home or office?
If we assume that both manufacturing and agriculture will be substantially mechanized, creating very few jobs, we will all be living and working in our virtual village republic, linked by email, social media, Facebook, Twitter, and what-have-you.
The digital world has made the world a potentially self-sufficient village. Gandhi lived in a different world. It is inconceivable that he could have visualised this change.
His idea of a village republic was wrong in the way he conceived it but has come true in a way he could not have imagined. India’s future is in urbanisation, but our urbanisation will be as part of the global village.
In the new world of automation and globalisation and localisation, where formal sector jobs will shrink, our future depends on self-skilling, self-employment and self-upliftment—exactly what Gandhi would have wanted.
Self-empowerment, with governments and businesses playing enabling or supportive roles, is the future. Non-profits will have a large role to play in this brave new world. Pretty Gandhian, one should say.
The second Gandhian predilection relates to his aversion to automation and machinery. He saw physical work as ennobling and eulogised this with his embrace of the outdated charkha. If today’s digital world is inconceivable without large-scale automation, Gandhi seemed like the ultimate Luddite.
He believed that machines ought to be built around men, and not the other way around—of men adjusting to assembly lines.
If Gandhi had had his way, Ford would never have set up the Model T assembly line. He believed in low-tech, not high-tech. Hear his views on machines and automation: “My machinery must be of the most elementary type which I can put in the home of the millions.” And further: “I would not weep over the disappearance of machinery or consider it a calamity.”
But innovation and miniaturisation have gotten around the Gandhian rider that machinery must be small enough to enter the homes of millions, and that is exactly what is happening.
From the laptop to the smartphone, machinery and gadgets have not only entered the home, but also your pocket. Machinery has become empowering in a way which even Gandhi may not have objected to. What he would have objected to was our excessive dependence on it, and our slavish abandonment of human values by making machines and gadgets our new gods.
At the deeper level, what Gandhi really objected to was the exploitation of man by man, and this is where his objections to machines and automation and capitalism came from.
Thus, even as he believed that “capital exploits the labour of a few to multiply itself,” he equally saw that organised labour could become a menace if it was not self-restrained.
While the Congress party was at the forefront of strikes and hartals during the freedom struggle, Gandhi himself had this to say: “Strikes, cessation of work and hartal are wonderful things, no doubt, but it is not difficult to abuse them.” In fact, he abhorred concessions dragged out of employers by using the coercive power of strikes. His morality cut both ways, and he did not see capital and labour in perpetual conflict, as long as each of them focused on its own dharma.
Perhaps, the most interesting idea Gandhi propounded, which kept him untainted by the failures of capitalism (2008) and socialism (1989) in our times, was his idea of trusteeship.
By trusteeship, Gandhi meant businessmen should run their enterprises for profit, but the wealth created should be used not for personal aggrandisement but to benefit the whole of society. This idea was accepted by the Tatas, who put all their shareholdings in trusts so that the profits not required for growth could be channelled back to society in some ways.
Gandhi did not fully expand on his ideas of trusteeship beyond a broad principle, and this is how he put it: “Supposing I have come by a fair amount of wealth—either by way of legacy, or by means of trade and industry—I must know that all that wealth does not belong to me; what belongs to me is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better than that enjoyed by millions of others. The rest of my wealth belongs to the community and must be used for the welfare of the community.”
Gandhi was clearly not against wealth creation, but he was against its egregious use for personal ends.
In many ways, the idea of trusteeship—though not in the way Gandhi may have conceived of it—is catching on in the west. America’s wealthiest billionaires are adopting what is called “The Giving Pledge”, under which they give up more than half their wealth for charitable purposes. Warren Buffett, the iconic investor, began this programme some years ago along with a few other billionaires, including Bill Gates.
Today, more than 150 billionaires have taken the pledge to donate more than half their wealth to philanthropy, including Mark Zuckerberg, Vinod Khosla, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and David Rockefeller.
Back home in India, our IT billionaires, from Narayana Murthy to Azim Premji and Shiv Nadar, are committing crores to philanthropy, though the giving tendency is yet to go mainstream. Perhaps, it is a matter of time before they too start thinking of themselves as trustees of the wealth they inherited or created.
Gandhi may or may not be the last word in modernity, but his moral force is working in many ways even with the wealthy.
Gandhi’s core ideas—swadeshi, village republics, small businesses, self-employment, dignity of labour, and trusteeship of wealth—are all anachronistic in today’s digital world, but somewhere his moral principles have driven change in the direction he desired. He was right in some ways, but often for the wrong reasons.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.