On February 20th, 1998, in the midst of a
heat wave, the last of 4 major cables supplying electric power to the business district of
Auckland, New Zealand, failed.
ATM's consumed bank cards. Carcasses rotted in useless freezers. The water system, dependent on electric pumps, went dry. For 52 days, the commerce center of New Zealand's largest city sputtered along with generators, candles, and prayers.2 "We've got one of the most modern cities in the world being reduced to Third World status," Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters said.1
Depending on strangers who care nothing about you beyond your ablity to pay creates dangerous dependencies. Mohandas Gandhi understood this. Freeing India from Britain required breaking India's dependency. Swadeshi is striving for local sufficiency--each Indian village would meet as much of its own needs through the work of locals.
Instead of viewing the new India as a nation-state, Gandhi saw a country of over 700,000 villages, each with local production and control. Village production was meant for village consumption; only things that could not be produced by the village economy were bought outside the village. The village was seen as an extension of the home. (Interestingly, the word "economics" derives from a Greek word meaning household management.)
Gandhi sought to restore the dignity of manual labor. "Not mass production, but production by the masses."
It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for the machinery methods continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God. Millions cannot keep fit by games and athletics and why should they exchange the useful productive hardy occupations for the useless, unproductive and expensive sports and games.3
India's local economic base had been
textiles; with the arrival of inexpensive machine-made
imports from Britain, local economies collapsed. The
spinning wheel became a symbol of India's incipient freedom. Long before
Kalle Lasn's
Adbusters mastered
culture jamming, Indians of all classes proudly wore homespun clothing as they struggled to free themselves from British rule.
6 months after India became free, Gandhi was assassinated. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister for free India, did not share Gandhi's vision, and India remained economically, if not politically, colonized. The concept of swadeshi still lives in Gandhi's teachings, however, and his words still inspire those who fear economic globalization.
1http://www.
cnn.com/WORLD/9802/24/nzealand.blackout/
2" Aucklanders gathered yesterday to pray to God for deliverance from the darkness plaguing the heart of New Zealand's largest city after all human attempts to end the power blackout failed last week.
A fundamentalist Christian group, however, said the blackout was God's retribution on Auckland for playing host to the "Hero Parade", a gay rights parade and celebration held the weekend before the power failed. "
3from "Gandhi's Swadeshi, The Economics of Permanence," Satish Kumar, in The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1996. p. 420. Much of the information in this write-up was gleaned from this essay.