Abstract
What happens when a thinker and practitioner of transformative politics claim to be imagining and doing socialism from a perspective drawn from the resources in the East? We show how Gandhi seeks to shape an Indianized version of non-violent socialism consistent with what is claimed to be Marx’s basic principle of communism: “To each according to his need, from each according to his capacity.” His framework challenges any claim to violence as a necessary condition for the praxis of socialism. He seeks to end capitalism without putting an end to the ‘capitalist subject.’ This dialogue of Gandhi with Marx’s Capital on socialism gathers further steam when we unpack the former’s conceptual contour that underpins non-violent socialism—labor, capital, capitalist, capitalism, property, industrialization—in order to set up its encounter with the fundamental point of Marx’s critique of political economy foregrounded in his book Capital—modes of surplus labor appropriation and its specific form in (capitalist) exploitation. Our analysis reveals that, when made to confront surplus and exploitation, Gandhi’s insistence on a non-violent relationship with the ‘capitalist subject’ even as capitalism is supposed to be withering away is inconsistent in terms of his own framework. Likewise, any asserted Marxian claim of socialism as necessarily epitomizing material development and abundance and which is to be arrived at through class violence is rendered problematical by Gandhi. These insights then open up the possibility of further exchanges about post-capitalist futurities.
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Notes
- 1.
“At the time of the Ahmedabad strike, Gandhi was forty-eight years old: middle-aged Mahatma, indeed”; the experience of the strike was generative of what Erikson calls Gandhi “religious actualism” (1993: 396); i.e. attention to “that which feels effectively true in action” (as against factual reality or truth). Gandhi thus foregrounded a conception of truth (sat) which he attempted to “make actual in all compartments of human life” (see Dhar and Chakrabarti 2016: 568–570).
- 2.
Truth is never given to the subject by right. … truth is not given to the subject by the simple act of knowledge (connaissance), … for the subject to have right of access to the truth he [or she] must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point other than himself [or herself]. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play.…there can be no truth without a conversion or a transformation of the subject, without a long labor of ascesis (askesis)” (see Dhar and Chakrabarti 2014).
- 3.
See the classical case of the giant Mondragon Cooperative Complex in the Basque region of Spain for an example of economic democracy (Wolff 2012).
- 4.
Marx actually defined them as ‘productive’ capitalists (a gift of industrial capitalism) as distinguished from ‘unproductive’ capitalists (bankers, merchants, shareholders) who generated surplus value in circulation; rather than take one as more important than the other, he considered them to be mutually related in the systemic production of capitalism. With emphasis on exploitation, our focus though is directed at productive capitalist since by virtue of appropriating surplus value through production process it is they who are the exploiters. Marx was clear that unproductive capitalists do not exploit; as condition providers to organization of exploitation and productive capitalists, they are receivers of surplus value.
- 5.
Another portion of surplus value goes for social sectors such as education, health, poverty schemes, etc. through alternative mechanisms such as taxation by state (Marx 1977).
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Chakrabarti, A., Dhar, A. (2019). Non-violent Socialism: Marx and Gandhi in Dialogue. In: Chakraborty, A., Chakrabarti, A., Dasgupta, B., Sen, S. (eds) ‘Capital’ in the East. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9468-4_12
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