Expanding Economic Thinking:
Shrii Sarkar and Amartya Sen
Sohail
Inayatullah
There
is a general sense of exuberance that with the recent Nobel award going to a
social welfare economist the trend away from financial markets being primary
has been validated by the economics profession. It is thus heartening that the
Nobel Committee has finally discovered the People's economy.
We
say finally because it has been the people's economy for thousands of years
that has nourished us, that has kept us alive. Whatever the historical era -
shudra, ksattriya, vipra or vaeshya - it is this level of the economy that has
been most crucial, and it is this economy that those in power have been most
concerned about dominating.
When
capitalists are in power, they want to ensure to monetize the informal
dimensions of barter, of small markets, of localism. They want to ensure that
the far reaches of corporatization expand to the most remote village so that
there can be paying customers for their products; customers who can pay in
cash and not in-kind through bartering.
When
vipras are in power, they too want to ensure that there is surplus at the
bottom level so their welfare can be taken care of. They want to ensure that
every last bit segment of the market is appropriately taxed.
Too,
in ksattriyan eras, warriors take from the poor for their dreams of conquering
neighbors. Indeed, history can be understood from this dimension - who is
taking from the peoples economy, what ways have been found to extract wealth
upward. Is it through donations to priests and monks, is it calls to
globalize, is it through monetization? By analyzing in which ways the people
are removed from direct economic activities we can gauge what level of
exploitation exists.
DEFINED
But
what specifically is the People's economy? Shrii Sarkar defines it as such:
"People's economy deals with the essential needs of the people - the
production, distribution, marketing ... and all related activities of such
essential needs. Most importantly, it is directly required concerned with the
guaranteed provision of minimum requirements such as food, clothing, housing,
medical treatment, education, transportation, energy and irrigation
water." (i). At essence, it
is about survival. With a vibrant peoples economy, people live, without it, as
Sen has argued, famines can result. And yet, it is this economy that the state
tries to regulate. Again as Sen has shown famines result partly due to state
intervention, especially in immoral dictatorships where there is no
opposition, where people have no way to express their frustrations, where
information is kept secret. In
contrast, a people's economy is decentralized, local, and ideally based on the
cooperative economic model, wherein individuals exist in community, in
relationship with each other.
This
message of localism has been the most recent wave of economic thinking.
Thinkers such as Hazel Henderson, James Robertson and representatives of
indigenous communities have consistently argued that the opposite of
capitalism is not communism but localism - that to survive we need to (1)
focus on the environment - a concern for animals and plants, (2) focus on just
distribution - on the ratio of wealth between the richest and poorest, (3)
focus on local forms of exchange, including local money, (4)
focus on the most vulnerable - often women and children, and (5) find
ways to empower these groups not by "developing" them but by
removing the barriers that vipras, ksattriyas and vaeshyas place in front of
them, that is the barriers that intellectuals/priests; police/military and
merchants/capitalists place on them. The
goal is not to help these people become rich (as defined by those in power)
but to ensure their dignity and their survival, to empower them. While
emergency help though social relief organizations is important, far more
crucial is removing the power of the landlords, of the courts, the police, and
larger corporations. Doing both of course is what states find problematic.
WHY?
Feeding the poor is admired but asking why the poor are hungry, and
then taking steps to eliminate the barriers of poverty is what threatens
governments, for it exposes that those in power are unwilling to transform the
structural basis of violence, of poverty. It is precisely this reason why
Shrii Sarkar and his social movements - Ananda Marga and Prout - have been at
the receiving end of brutality from state and national governments in India
and elsewhere. Sen wins an award because he theorises poverty, Mother Teresa
wins an award because she relieves human suffering - both are deserving
winners - but Shrii Sarkar, who theorizes poverty, relieves human suffering
and initiates powerful movements to expose and end poverty was
vilified. Of course, we should not be surprised by this. As he says
himself, whenever truth has been spoken to power, the response has been an
attack on truth. This is the natural cycle
transformative movements must endure if they are to create the
conditions for a better life for future generations.
Finally,
and this is crucial, and again problematic from a reductionist modernist
perspective, Shrii Sarkar has included inner, personal transformation as part
of the solution to poverty and injustice. Unless humans begin the inner
purification moral process themselves as well as the mental expansionary
process - through meditation - they, over time, will also become part of the
problem. The structures of exploitation - that is, the institutions, the
values and persons who legitimise and validate them - have too deeply infected
society. Only by enhancing one's morality and expanding the inclusiveness of
one's mind is it possible to avoid the dis-ease of an unjust system. It is
this combination that makes Shrii Sarkar both utterly unique and fundamentally
problematic to grasp. It might even have been enough, as mentioned above, to
theorise, relieve and challenge poverty but then to investigate inner poverty,
the lack of spiritual nourishment, immediately relocates poverty not only as a
food issue for the poor but as well a global moral and spiritual issue. The
solution thus becomes not just less authoritarian systems, and a better
framework for distributive justice - Sen's argumenmt - but inner and outer
systemic and epistemic transformation. It is thus grand sweep of self and
society that Shrii Sarkar brings to economic thinking, and in the process
fundamentally redefines the field.
OTHER
SYSTEMS
Returning
to the more specific issue of the people's economy, it is important to note
that communism as well spoke of the people's economy, indeed, the entire
philosophy was based on protecting the people, on ending wage labor
exploitation, but there were two problems. (1) Politics instead of being
landlord-laborer based became party apparatchik-laborer based. (2) Violence
was systematically used against localism so that there could be massive
industrialisation. (3) Dignity, in terms of local religions, customs and ways
of knowing, was jettisoned for progress. While in some cases this can be
justified, that is, where religion and other systems are conducive toward
violence against the other, in many cases, localism was quickly replaced with
allegiance to party, ideology and the great leader. Thus one dogma was
replaced by another.
Confucianism
as well has attempted to end the people's economy but in a far more benign
way. The trade off for ending local systems has been the paternal state where
father knows best. While this has had its merits - safety, security, survival,
education, a concern for the family and future generations, transparent
politics - the loss has been cultural pluralism, of the right to dissent.
While certainly for a "well knit social order" - to use Shrii
Sarkar's language - dissent should only come with responsibility, it appears
that in Confucian societies the spirit of difference, the sweetness of
culture, has been lost.
Globalism,
while absolutely brilliant at the continuous movement of money, its rolling,
has been less concerned about where the money is going, the ethical in and
outputs. It has been excellent at economic growth but less with distribution.
Moreover, the rolling of money has been based not on productive investment but
on short-term speculation, thus leading to a delinking of the financial
economy with the real economy of goods and services.
It
is this concern for inappropriate economic practices that Sarkar's other
branch of economics, the psycho-economy, attends to.
PSYCHO-ECONOMY
Psycho-economy
has two branches, the first of which, will never deliver a nobel in our modern
world, but the second in the coming generations should be fundamental. The
first branch consists of exposing and eradicating "unjust economic
practices, behaviors and structures." (ii) This is generally well
represented in the Marxist literature, and more or less, consistent with the
intentions of radical political-economy. Current thinkers such as Immanuel
Wallerstein and Johan Galtung have both excelled in this approach.
The
second branch is concerned with a post-scarcity society, that is, with mundane
economic problems solved, how to deal with pressing issues such as the
relationship between technology and work or the office environment. These
post-industrial issues include as well: how employees feel about their lives,
about their job, and about what is important to them.
Psycho-economy
is not an attempt to create a theory of information, since Shrii Sarkar is not
a reductionist but to ask what are the values behind an economy, what are our
aspirations? It acknowledges that life is not about economics and economistic
(reducing life to materialistic principles) thinking. As Shrii Sarkar writes:
"the psycho-economy is to develop and enhance the psychic pabula of the
individual and collective minds." (iii). What does this mean? At heart
this is about inclusion, about reframing our identity not as consumers (I shop
therefore I am) or as competitors (I have to increase my wealth by eliminating
other firms) but as spiritual human beings. This means seeing the exchange of
good, services and ideas as a process wherein others are not harmed, stolen
from or maligned but creating an economic process that allows each participant
to prosper. At heart, this is about spiritual cooperative economics, about
including others in how we do business, how we produce, how we consume, how we
live. It is understanding our desires and their relationship to the physical
world. Capitalist economics, however, ignores social costs such as the
drudgery of much work or the social problems caused by unemployment.
Capitalist economics does not ask the crucial question: is what is being
produced that which should be produced for the health and happiness of all?
Conventional
economics thus defines values, impact on the environment, impact on future
generations, as external to the economic process. Indeed, critics of
globalization have called for full pricing, where externals are internalized
by economic actions. The goal thus is to increase access to information for
buyers and sellers and to determine the impact of specific economic activity
on society. While this important, it does not nearly go far enough for Sarkar.
INFORMATION
ECONOMICS AND OTHER PARTS OF THE ECONOMY
Information
economic theory has made the mistake of further dividing reality into tiny
bits with the goal of quantifying each further subdivision, while Sarkar
argues that the opposite is needed, an expansion of what we allow in our
minds, or how we construct our minds. With Sarkar, information theory thus
moves to communication theory with reality being a co-evolutionary process
between self, others, the transcendental and the natural world.
This synthetic approach will not win nobel or other awards since it
does not give any specific additive knowledge (what science excels at),
instead it creates a new framework in which to understand current knowledge -
that is, it is transformative knowledge.
But
Sarkar's redefinition of economics does not avoid current commercial issues.
Indeed, he also writes on the Commercial Economy. This branch is generally
similar to our present understanding of economics, which is concerned with
issues of how to develop scientific productive and efficient processes that
"which will not incur loss," (iv) and ensure that "output will
exceed input." (v) While an idealistic, Sarkar never ignored the reality
of the physical world. Indeed, he asserted that we are not properly using our
current resources, either misusing them or mal-appropriating them.
The majority of problems in the world have come about because the
Commercial Economy has been seen as the totality of economics instead of just
as one dimension of economics. While Sen brings in values to economics, he
still does this largely in the context of the commercial economy. It is left
to others to point out that the general tools of economic theory cannot deal
with the household, village or indigenous economy.
Finally,
Sarkar adds the General Economy to his model. This last part is his ideal
vision of the economy. In this case, a three-tiered economic structure (state
run, cooperatives and individual/family run). Thus, while earlier parts of the
economy focused on the minimum requirements of life (that is, the needs of the
South); on the structural problems of exploitation (the global problematique);
on a postscarcity inclusive economy (the concerns of a post-industrial
economy); on issues of production and the international monetary system (the
world-economy), the last section of his theory of economics, focuses on what
an ideal economic structure should look like.
These
categories he gives us - the four parts of the economy - are not only
descriptions of the economy, but as well analytic tools, that is, they serve
to describe and reveal the world in front of us.
For
economic students, much of this is not economics, as economics as currently
defined is only concerned with production, and not with the values behind the
system. Issues of inflation and depression, while the concern of conventional
economics are not Sarkar's direct concern except in so far as they lead to
system transformation - the end of capitalism - or they increase human
suffering.
Sarkar's
Proutist Economics is then not about debating economic trends or pinpointing
depressions but rather about using the analytic tools Shrii Sarkar has given
us to better understand the world, to change the world, to relieve human
suffering, to transform self, to create a moral economy; and ultimately to
create a spiritual cooperative society.
Will
Shrii Sarkar ever win a nobel prize? Most likely never, and, of course, this
was never his aim. His prize will be the creation of a new planetary society,
a prize no committee can ever give, only the hard work of women and working
collectively, and the grace of Parama Purusa can afford that.
Notes:
i. P.R.Sarkar,
"The Parts of the Economy," in P.R.Sarkar, Prout
in a Nutshell. Translated by Acarya Vijayananda Avadhuta and Jayanta
Kumar. Calcutta, Ananda Marga Publications, 1987 (First edition), 16.
ii.
ibid., 19.
iii.
ibid.
iv.
ibid., 20.
v.
ibid.,
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