The relevance of Gandhi in the capitalism debate

"The world has enough for everyone's needs, but not everyone's greed," Mahatma Gandhi said in what is now one of his best-known quotes. Its ubiquity is for good reason. Our 'must-have, must-buy' economy is eating into the planet's resources like never before, something Gandhi foresaw three-quarters of a century ago. He also warned of the dangers of other countries taking to western industrialism.

Despite his global impact as a moral philosopher, asking what Gandhi would do is not a question many economists care to ask. Instead, the man known as 'Bapu' (father) in his homeland is regularly written off as something of a retrograde Luddite and idealist. After all, this was the man who opposed mass production and called on his supporters to weave their own cotton clothes.

Rajni Bakshi is one of a growing band of modern-minded, Gandhian intellectuals calling for a change of view. A prominent Indian writer and journalist and Gandhi peace fellow at Gateway House, she insists Gandhi's thinking has a "very real place" in today's debates about capitalism.

Sarvodaya: welfare for all

With a few caveats, win-win models of business – very much in vogue in sustainability circles – could have come from Gandhi's mouth, Bakshi argues. But instead his word would have been "sarvodaya", which loosely translates as "welfare for all".

"Gandhi visualises a very creative dynamic between the individual and collective wellbeing. He sees the two as being in sync. Nobody should be asked to pay the price for the majority to benefit," Bakshi says.

The idea counters widespread capitalist notions about individual sacrifice for the greater good. As Bakshi puts it: "In a place like India, people affected by large-scale industrial projects like mining are told that they must pay the price for the nation to progress … Gandhi fundamentally rejected this as immoral."

At the root of this rejection is Gandhi's questioning of capitalism's inherent Darwinism. Co-operation, he argued, not competition, is the natural state of mankind. The same is true for our economic system. Intrinsic to this belief is a concern about 'command-and-control' business models that rely on, and exacerbate, distortions of power.

Take modern agriculture, says Baskhi. Gandhi would have taken issue with genetically-driven intensive farming. Why? Because the key crop science is held by private interests and kept from small farmers. As a potential alternative, she points to the case of community supported agriculture in the US, where consumers form direct links with local farmers.

Questions for the responsible business movement

At the heart of the problem are structural imbalances that feed injustice. This raises serious questions for the current social responsibility movement, says Bakshi. Sticking with agriculture, she cites efforts by large corporations to improve farmer livelihoods by cutting out exploitative middlemen. While Bashki welcomes such adjustments, they're ultimately a palliative not a cure. "At the end of the day, if you limit the amount of buyers, then you've effectively reduced the bargaining power of the primary producer in the long run," she says.

Gandhi would have posed other tricky questions for today's responsible business movement. The first would be around charitable giving. It's nice, but not enough, Bakshi insists: "How you make your money in the first place is more important than how much you give away."

Gandhi's questioning of potentially exploitative business models certainly fits with his welfare for all philosophy. But it goes further than that. Corporate philanthropy or so-called "compassionate capitalism" can only ever get us so far, notes Bakshi: "He [Gandhi] argued that all efforts to improve the human condition are bound to fail unless they put 'dharma', or a moral framework and a sense of higher purpose, above the pursuit of 'arth' (wealth) and 'kama' (pleasure)".

Ultimately, for Gandhi, life is a transitory affair. The higher purpose of which he spoke could be described as "god-realisation" or, in less spiritual parlance, "self-realisation". That idea shapes Gandhi's ethics, namely the pursuit of love, compassion, self-knowledge, duty, self-control, and so forth, as the root to such realisation. It also has implications for wealth creation: what, after all, is wealth for?

As Bakshi explains: "Your physical self is a temporary manifestation in time and space. In this context, Gandhi is saying whatever you generate is never fully yours because it's going to be there long after you. In essence, you are only its caretaker". Clinging to material wealth is therefore a redundant pursuit. So too, by the same logic, is an economic system that exists exclusively to generate such wealth.

This position invites a second tough challenge for the responsible business movement: do current ideas of trusteeship go far enough? It's there in environmentalism; the notion that we should be leaving the planet's resources for those who come after us. But Gandhi's thinking is far more radical. If business were to drop the idea of wealth accumulation as its ultimate goal, how different would business look? What goals would replace it, and what would be their means of achievement?

"I'm only asking the question", says Bakshi. "I don't claim to have the answer." That said, she does have a suggestion: "Not everyone has wealth-generating capabilities. Those that do are somehow better endowed, therefore, which means that they have more responsibility." It's directed to individual entrepreneurs, but the same could be said for companies too.

Utopian economics?

It is easy to see how Gandhi's thinking, based as it is within a strict moral framework and anti-utilitarian ethics, might be considered utopian. Yet Bakshi points to a growing popularity of his ideas, even though many might not be branded explicitly as 'Gandhian'.

One unlikely referent is investor George Soros. Bakshi credits the Hungarian-American business magnate (and founder of the New York-based Institute for New Economic Thinking) for accepting that business produces wealth within a social, political and cultural context. "He argues that all wealth is public in some essential way because it wasn't generated it in a vacuum," she says. A very Gandhian idea.

Other examples range from the development of "genuine progress indicators", such as the Gross National Happiness index in Bhutan or the New Economics Foundation's Happiness Index, to the Voluntary Simplicity Movement in the US and the Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture in India.

Bakshi's personal favourite is the development of open-source software, which dates back to the early 1980s. As she notes: "At the same time that the largest fortunes were being made through proprietary software, a bunch of scattered programmers created an entirely alternative worldview." Openness for all, not control by the few, was their mantra. Their motivation didn't derive from "some lofty ideas of trusteeship", she admits, but from the realisation that locked-in systems "work against creativity".

Rajni Bakshi is author of six books, including An Economics for Wellbeing and Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom. A recent paper, Civilisation Gandhi, is available online

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