Khadi work is the only true political program before the country. You live in a great city. You do not really know the amount of poverty that has overtaken the country called India. As a matter of fact, in India there are thousands and tens of thousands of villages where men do not get more than 21/2 rupees a month. There is no use shedding tears for them if we won t wear a few yards of khadi which thy have manufactured and want us to buy so that they may find a meal Khadi means employment for the poor and freedom for India.
Ruskin s interpretations of modern machinery as tools of exploitation and means to hold power over others had further effects on Gandhi, as they encouraged him to emend the working conditions of Indian industrial and agricultural laborers. Although Gandhi worked closely with the owners of machinist mills and large landowners, he never abandoned the laborers who were forced to work in dreadful conditions. Gandhi s heart was continually with the laborers and he dedicated countless amounts of time to their struggle, as he acted on the lessons that he learned from Ruskin s Unto This Last.
I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life The teachings of Unto This Last I understood to be:
1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.
2. That a lawyer s work has the same value as the barber s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.
3. That a life of labor, i.e, the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living.
The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.
Gandhi attempted to promote Ruskin s ideals by fighting for labor rights throughout India. Judith Brown Amhebad.
Coincidentally these three socialist principles that Gandhi adopted from Ruskin, were the same ideals that motivated him to establish his first ashram in Phoenix, South Africa. Great Britain, Gandhi declared, gave me Ruskin, whose “Unto This Last” transformed me overnight from a lawyer and a city-dweller into a rustic living away from Durban on a farm, three miles from the nearest railway station. Within the ashrams Gandhi attempted to achieve the end of equality set forth in Unto This Last by adopting the means of utopian socialists, which will be discussed in the following.
The Influence of Utopian Socialists
In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas More, introduced a literary work that would be adopted by some of the most influential revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work, Utopia, inspired socialist thought throughout Europe and later Asia, as Gandhi indirectly adopted More s socialist views from British contemporaries and Karl Marx. Although Gandhi does not credit More as a great influence, Gandhi s ashrams and his vision of the perfect village closely resembled the ideal utopia of More where a classless society prevailed.
More’s Utopia was a response to the presence of severe inequality and exploitation that existed lacks classes, everyone shares in the same work, everyone is equal, and everyone has the same rights a society that is the absolute opposite of contemporary India. All people spend time in the country working the land, as this is an agriculturally based society they must assure themselves of continued crop growth. In addition to creating the same conditions for everyone, this assures that they will have ample supplies to suppress the animal instinct of greed and desire. All clothing is plain and simple, designed only for utility and practicality. More points out that if someone was dressed in finer material, he would not be better protected against the cold, nor would he appear better dressed to the Utopians. Hereditary distinctions do not exist because children are easily moved around from household to household, depending on which occupation he would like to learn. Since there is very little distinction in occupation, dress, lodging and riches, greed and desire were non-existent in More s utopia. but More sees more than just this change of state. He sees a moral revolution, whereby institutional values are replaced by true Christian morality and more humane values, an idea that was of cardinal importance to Gandhi.
William Morris, a more modern utopian socialist, adopted many of the same ideas of both More and Ruskin. Following the lines of these socialists, Morris argued that the modern world only provided opportunity for the rich and that true equality can only be achieved by the reintroduction of simple village life. Morris disgust of the modern industrial world and his preference of the medieval-style of life is revealed in his work News From Nowhere.
England was once a country of clearings amongst the woods and wastes, with a few towns interspersed, which were fortresses for the feudal army, markets for the folk, gathering places for the craftsmen. It then became a country of huge and foul workshops and fouler gambling dens, surrounded by an ill-kept, poverty-stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops. It is now [after the eradication of capitalist machinery] a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary dwellings, sheds, and workshops scattered up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty. For, indeed, we should be too much ashamed of ourselves is we allowed the making of goods, even on a large scale, to carry with it the appearance, even, of desolation and misery (Morris, 91). News from nowhere
Morris envisions a utopia where machinery and large urban centers have disappeared. London is again a collection of villages, mingled in great woodlands and meadows, where there are shops from which one takes the necessities of life for the asking and people work for the joy of it, and all labor for useful ends (Laidler, 142). became convinced that a political revolution was needed to restore humanity to a state in which work could once more be enjoyed, without the exploitation of workers that seemed to him prevalent in Victorian England. Morris theme to return to the simple village was readily adopted by Gandhi and amplifed his belief that the reconstruction of the village was the only way to save India from economic blight.
Like More and Morris, Gandhi was also in search of a utopia where class was eradicated and everyone shared in the same work, not only to realize economic equality, but to reintroduce morality and ethics to a world that was preoccupied with materialistic greed and unconcerned with the conditions of fellow humans. Combined with Gandhi s Hindu background, the literary works of utopian socialists motivated Gandhi to abandon modern society and return to the ancient village style of life where dharma could be sufficiently practiced. Thus Gandhi initiated ashrams, which closely followed the ideals of the utopian socialists where the oppressive caste system was abolished and the small community jointed in the work that needed to be done. These small communes were completely self-sufficient, like the utopias of More and Morris, and were upheld by Gandhi as models for Indian villages. The similarities between the utopias of More and Morris and the South African and Indian ahrams of Gandhi are staggering.
Considering Gandhi Today
Today, in the age of unethical multinational corporations and severe environmental pollution, it is important to consider Gandhi s disapproval of and alternatives to capitalist machinery in order to regulate careless and underhanded corporations. Big business and capitalist domination ultimately results in a harsh reality for international laborers, who are often economically uncapable of purchasing the products which they produced. Furthermore, the gap between the rich and poor and the bad maldistribution of wealth continually expands as capitalist governments promote multinational corporations. Considering that these truths are completely unacceptable, it blatantly appears it is our responsibility to push for more business regulation and to restrict the permissible capitalist dynasty that controls America, simply to ensure social stability in the future. Business domination in America has led to the infelicitous position of American jobs depending solely on private corporate decisions in hiring and firing, investing and producing, and on the judgement of investors as to whether higher interest rates and more unemployment are in order. Furthermore, today business now regularly takes advantage of their mobility and knowledge, and the financial plight of local, state, and national governments, to extract concessions from them. A recent Wall Street Journal article described how the very profitable firm, Intel, drew the New Mexican town, Rio Rancho, into tax abatements that contributed to serious financial shortages in local schools. Intel explained that they had to bargain down sales and property taxes to compete, and that the schools were not their responsibility (Ken Hill). And everyday, big business corporations, like Intel, continue to commit harsh social crimes that go uncriticized by Americans. Wage-slavery at Taco Bell, environmental contamination care of Shell, and a number of jarring offences committed against humanity by the tobacco companies are only a few of the revolting crimes executed by American corporations. We must follow in the footsteps of Gandhi to buy locally and boycott the products of these multinational corporations that immorally exploit laborers cause environmental and human degradation in hopes that the American government will abolish all disastrous effects of big business.
However, Gandhi realized that a government that over limits capitalism and wealth is a dangerous mechanism that can impede individuality. In every real sense a badly paid unskilled worker in a capitalist nation has more freedom to shape his or her life than many employers in socialist Germany. If he or she wants to change their job or the place where they live, if they want to profess certain views or spend their leisure in a particular way, they face no absolute impediments. There are no dangers to bodily security and freedom that confine the laborer by brute force to the task and environment to which a superior has assigned them. Many have forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of society as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us. In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation.