Statist provision vs. Gandhi’s localist vision 

Under present circumstances workers need - and fight to defend - state-provided benefits such as social security. When facing a crisis of competitive pressures, as they always eventually do, capitalists push to undermine such benefits. Greens should stand for their defense and extension - but not, I think, quite in the same way as the left has traditionally done.

Statist provision is not viable in the long run. The modern nation-states are too large and inherently too bureaucratic (their functioning is too opaque) to be counted upon by the mass of citizens to act responsibly. Corruption, power elitism, irresponsible manipulation of the economy, etc. will always, in the long run, lead to unjust outcomes. When push comes to shove social provision of all kinds will ultimately be sacrificed to the needs of the state and its ruling elite. This applies to the socialist bureaucracies (Soviet Union, China, for example) as well as the capitalist bureaucracies (United States, Germany, for example).

That being the case, Greens should explain that national-scale provision (social security, single-payer health care, etc.) may very well be the best among all currently possible options, but at the same time the citizenry should be aware of the long-run limitations and consequences of statist dependency.

We saw the whole Soviet bureaucratic system crumble. We are seeing the Chinese bureaucratic system move increasingly toward inequality. We will see the British national-scale social health care system gutted in the long run. Workers can and should resist. But workers should have no illusions about the nature of these Leviathan states. They can’t be made into benign or responsible or “worker controlled” polities.

Here is how Gandhi (correctly, in my opinion) viewed it:

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[excerpted from The Resurgence of the Real by Charlene Spretnak, pp. 173-176]

As the European empires disintegrated in the wake of World War II, the governing of their former colonies fell to an elite stratum of colonial society, the members of which had been educated in Europe and schooled thoroughly in the ideologies of modernity. India was no exception, although it very well could have been if Gandhi’s vision had prevailed.

With tragic consequences for India’s future, he was marginalized, as soon as independence was assured, by Nehru and the other Fabian socialists, who had learned in London to invest their faith in the modern state. Like those young men, Gandhi had studied law in England, but his formative experience there had occurred decades earlier, when a burst of creative resistance to the modern political economy had been in the air. Ruskin, Morris, Kropotkin - all of these thinkers were discussed and debated in the circles to which Gandhi gravitated during the years 1888-1891. Once he returned to India and saw the degenerate conditions of village life under the British, he began to conceive a grand project of renewal.

Although Gandhi served as a brilliant strategist for three decades in the struggle for independence, he viewed postcolonial statehood as a mere preliminary condition for the revival of India. As early as 1915, he began, with the founding of his first ashram, to train volunteers as agents of village revitalization. Initially, they addressed the most pressing problems - sanitation, hygiene, healthcare, elementary education. One of Gandhi’s projects in particular, the revival of the craft of hand-spinning cotton yarn and weaving it into cloth (khadi), was enormously successful on several levels. It built confidence within the Indian independence movement since cottage-industry production of khadi provided an alternative to buying British cloth, previously the only option. The rebirth of the craft of making khadi also improved the standard of living for millions of extremely poor villagers by providing additional clothing and income. For both villagers and activists, the heady experience of self-reliance and successful initiative prompted them to move beyond the usual dispirited fatalism of conquered peoples.

Gandhi’s vision for a new India, after independence, was informed by his long-standing critique of the modern assumption that the key to well-being lies in [political centralization and] the growth of industrial production. To avoid this trajectory for India, Gandhi proposed “enlightened anarchism,” a model of decentralized political structure whereby the new state would be a confederation of regions. His focus was not the abstraction of the modern state or “the masses.” His focus was place: the village or town, the district, and the surrounding region. Gandhi’s vision of development was to make villages and towns largely self-sufficient in economics, government, culture, spiritual vitality, and primary and vocational education. Higher education and expanded trade would be available at the regional level. A good deal of ownership in each district would be held by community trusts.

Gandhi sought to renew and enrich the premodern sense of reciprocity, with nature as well as fellow humans, for the benefit of all. The quality of justice would be reflected in the protection from exploitation and structural violence afforded to the least powerful members of society.

His vision was regarded as hopelessly anachronistic by the ambitious young men who gained control of the new Congress Party and then the new government of India. They believed their perspective to be supremely superior because it was far more modern. The old man’s “Constructive Program” was tolerated as an ornament affixed to his immeasurably valuable function as leader of millions of citizens in the independence movement. The Indian pols apparently viewed the situation as a public relations problem, adopting the symbol of the spinning wheel as the icon of the Congress Party. But ... focus efforts on the village and district levels instead of the cities? place a good deal of ownership into community trusts instead of nationalizing industries? The political sophisticates, who modeled themselves after the British Labour Party, viewed Gandhi’s Constructive Program as backward, irrelevant, and embarrassingly romantic.

Because the father of Indian independence consciously applied and expanded the ideas of several counter- modern theorists of the West, it is not accurate to say that India simply “took the Western path after 1947,” as one often hears. The new Indian nation- state took a particular Western path, the one paved with modern ideologies. Its leaders turned away from Gandhi’s visionary renewal of traditional strengths of culture and place.

At least the “lite” socialist leadership of the Congress Party protected the public from exploitation by transnational corporations for forty years - until the forces of the global market finally crashed through India’s borders a few years ago. The country is now on a hypermodern path, welcoming huge concentrations of transnational capital. Today India’s minister of finance speaks proudly of “creating a second industrial revolution.” As always, every Indian politician claims in nearly all speeches and interviews to be following in the footsteps of Gandhi.

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