Expanding Economic Thinking Shrii Sarkar and Amartya Sen

8/14/2019 Expanding Economic Thinking Shrii Sarkar and Amartya Sen

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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 asocial welfare economist the trend away from financial markets being primary hasbeen validated by the economics profession. It is thus heartening that the NobelCommittee has finally discovered the People's economy.

We say finally because it has been the people's economy for thousands of yearsthat 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 mostcrucial, and it is this economy that those in power have been most concerned aboutdominating.

When capitalists are in power, they want to ensure to monetize the informaldimensions of barter, of small markets, of localism. They want to ensure that the farreaches of corporatization expand to the most remote village so that there can bepaying customers for their products; customers who can pay in cash and not in-kindthrough bartering.

When vipras are in power, they too want to ensure that there is surplus at thebottom level so their welfare can be taken care of. They want to ensure that everylast bit segment of the market is appropriately taxed.

Too, in ksattriyan eras, warriors take from the poor for their dreams of conqueringneighbors. Indeed, history can be understood from this dimension - who is takingfrom 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 throughmonetization? By analyzing in which ways the people are removed from directeconomic 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. Mostimportantly, it is directly required concerned with the guaranteed provision ofminimum requirements such as food, clothing, housing, medical treatment,education, transportation, energy and irrigation water." (i). At essence, it is aboutsurvival. With a vibrant peoples economy, people live, without it, as Sen hasargued, famines can result. And yet, it is this economy that the state tries toregulate. Again as Sen has shown famines result partly due to state intervention,especially in immoral dictatorships where there is no opposition, where people have


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no way to express their frustrations, where information is kept secret. In contrast, apeople's economy is decentralized, local, and ideally based on the cooperativeeconomic model, wherein individuals exist in community, in relationship with eachother.

This message of localism has been the most recent wave of economic thinking.Thinkers such as Hazel Henderson, James Robertson and representatives ofindigenous communities have consistently argued that the opposite of capitalism isnot communism but localism - that to survive we need to (1) focus on theenvironment - a concern for animals and plants, (2) focus on just distribution - onthe ratio of wealth between the richest and poorest, (3) focus on local forms ofexchange, including local money, (4) focus on the most vulnerable - often womenand children, and (5) find ways to empower these groups not by "developing" thembut by removing the barriers that vipras, ksattriyas and vaeshyas place in front ofthem, that is the barriers that intellectuals/priests; police/military andmerchants/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, toempower them. While emergency help though social relief organizations isimportant, far more crucial is removing the power of the landlords, of the courts, thepolice, and larger corporations. Doing both of course is what states findproblematic.

WHY?

Feeding the poor is admired but asking why the poor are hungry, and thentaking steps to eliminate the barriers of poverty is what threatens governments, forit 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 socialmovements - Ananda Marga and Prout - have been at the receiving end of brutalityfrom state and national governments in India and elsewhere. Sen wins an awardbecause he theorises poverty, Mother Teresa wins an award because she relieveshuman suffering - both are deserving winners - but Shrii Sarkar, who theorizespoverty, relieves human suffering and initiates powerful movements to expose andend poverty was vilified. Of course, we should not be surprised by this. As he sayshimself, whenever truth has been spoken to power, the response has been anattack on truth. This is the natural cycle transformative movements must endure ifthey are to create the conditions for a better life for future generations.

Finally, and this is crucial, and again problematic from a reductionist modernistperspective, Shrii Sarkar has included inner, personal transformation as part of thesolution to poverty and injustice. Unless humans begin the inner purification moralprocess themselves as well as the mental expansionary process - throughmeditation - they, over time, will also become part of the problem. The structures ofexploitation - that is, the institutions, the values and persons who legitimise andvalidate them - have too deeply infected society. Only by enhancing one's moralityand expanding the inclusiveness of one's mind is it possible to avoid the dis-ease of


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an unjust system. It is this combination that makes Shrii Sarkar both utterly uniqueand fundamentally problematic to grasp. It might even have been enough, asmentioned above, to theorise, relieve and challenge poverty but then to investigateinner poverty, the lack of spiritual nourishment, immediately relocates poverty notonly 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 frameworkfor distributive justice - Sen's argumenmt - but inner and outer systemic andepistemic transformation. It is thus grand sweep of self and society that Shrii Sarkarbrings 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 notethat communism as well spoke of the people's economy, indeed, the entirephilosophy 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 usedagainst localism so that there could be massive industrialisation. (3) Dignity, interms 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 systemsare conducive toward violence against the other, in many cases, localism wasquickly replaced with allegiance to party, ideology and the great leader. Thus onedogma was replaced by another.

Confucianism as well has attempted to end the people's economy but in a farmore benign way. The trade off for ending local systems has been the paternalstate where father knows best. While this has had its merits - safety, security,

survival, education, a concern for the family and future generations, transparentpolitics - the loss has been cultural pluralism, of the right to dissent. While certainlyfor a "well knit social order" - to use Shrii Sarkar's language - dissent should onlycome with responsibility, it appears that in Confucian societies the spirit ofdifference, the sweetness of culture, has been lost.

Globalism, while absolutely brilliant at the continuous movement of money, itsrolling, has been less concerned about where the money is going, the ethical in andoutputs. It has been excellent at economic growth but less with distribution.Moreover, the rolling of money has been based not on productive investment but onshort-term speculation, thus leading to a delinking of the financial economy with thereal economy of goods and services.

It is this concern for inappropriate economic practices that Sarkar's other branch ofeconomics, the psycho-economy, attends to.

PSYCHO-ECONOMY


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Psycho-economy has two branches, the first of which, will never deliver a nobel inour modern world, but the second in the coming generations should befundamental. The first branch consists of exposing and eradicating "unjusteconomic practices, behaviors and structures." (ii) This is generally wellrepresented in the Marxist literature, and more or less, consistent with the

intentions of radical political-economy. Current thinkers such as ImmanuelWallerstein and Johan Galtung have both excelled in this approach.

The second branch is concerned with a post-scarcity society, that is, with mundaneeconomic problems solved, how to deal with pressing issues such as therelationship 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 ShriiSarkar 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 andeconomistic (reducing life to materialistic principles) thinking. As Shrii Sarkar writes:"the psycho-economy is to develop and enhance the psychic pabula of theindividual and collective minds." (iii). What does this mean? At heart this is aboutinclusion, about reframing our identity not as consumers (I shop therefore I am) oras competitors (I have to increase my wealth by eliminating other firms) but asspiritual human beings. This means seeing the exchange of good, services andideas as a process wherein others are not harmed, stolen from or maligned butcreating an economic process that allows each participant to prosper. At heart, thisis about spiritual cooperative economics, about including others in how we dobusiness, 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 problemscaused by unemployment. Capitalist economics does not ask the crucial question:is what is being produced that which should be produced for the health andhappiness of all?

Conventional economics thus defines values, impact on the environment, impact onfuture generations, as external to the economic process. Indeed, critics ofglobalization have called for full pricing, where externals are internalized byeconomic actions. The goal thus is to increase access to information for buyers andsellers and to determine the impact of specific economic activity on society. Whilethis 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 intotiny bits with the goal of quantifying each further subdivision, while Sarkar arguesthat the opposite is needed, an expansion of what we allow in our minds, or how weconstruct our minds. With Sarkar, information theory thus moves to communication


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theory with reality being a co-evolutionary process between self, others, thetranscendental and the natural world. This synthetic approach will not win nobel orother awards since it does not give any specific additive knowledge (what scienceexcels at), instead it creates a new framework in which to understand currentknowledge - 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 generallysimilar to our present understanding of economics, which is concerned with issuesof how to develop scientific productive and efficient processes that "which will notincur 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 weare not properly using our current resources, either misusing them or mal-appropriating them. The majority of problems in the world have come aboutbecause the Commercial Economy has been seen as the totality of economicsinstead 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 isleft to others to point out that the general tools of economic theory cannot deal withthe household, village or indigenous economy.

Finally, Sarkar adds the General Economy to his model. This last part is his idealvision of the economy. In this case, a three-tiered economic structure (state run,cooperatives and individual/family run). Thus, while earlier parts of the economyfocused on the minimum requirements of life (that is, the needs of the South); onthe structural problems of exploitation (the global problematique); on a postscarcityinclusive economy (the concerns of a post-industrial economy); on issues ofproduction and the international monetary system (the world-economy), the last

section of his theory of economics, focuses on what an ideal economic structureshould look like.

These categories he gives us - the four parts of the economy - are not onlydescriptions of the economy, but as well analytic tools, that is, they serve todescribe and reveal the world in front of us.

For economic students, much of this is not economics, as economics as currentlydefined is only concerned with production, and not with the values behind thesystem. Issues of inflation and depression, while the concern of conventionaleconomics are not Sarkar's direct concern except in so far as they lead to systemtransformation - the end of capitalism - or they increase human suffering.

Sarkar's Proutist Economics is then not about debating economic trends orpinpointing depressions but rather about using the analytic tools Shrii Sarkar hasgiven us to better understand the world, to change the world, to relieve humansuffering, to transform self, to create a moral economy; and ultimately to create aspiritual cooperative society.


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Acarya Shambhushivananda Avadhuta, Prout - Neo-Humanistic Economics.Weisenauer Weg, Germany, Dharma Verlag, 1989.

Rameshwar Dayal Singh, "Poverty Alleviation is Possible," Prout(December 1-15,1998), 38-39.

Ted Trainer, "Our Economic System: Why it must be scrapped." Research paper,Faculty of Arts, University of New South Wales.

Expanding Economic Thinking Shrii Sarkar and Amartya Sen

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