“When the looms spin by themselves, we'll have no need for slaves.” - Aristotle
J.K. Suresh
G. Sivaramakrishnan
Abstract:
Developments in recent decades suggest that a potent nexus between power and knowledge lies at the root of the increasing control of society by a minority. Power and knowledge were perhaps largely independent in pre-modern society, especially the Indian. However, from the time of the industrial revolution, they appear to have attained a growing degree of affinity. Today, every major development in the sphere of knowledge is co-opted by power, whilst every new affirmation of power leads to a greater control over the process of knowledge creation and use. By power, we do not mean mere political power as understood by the state and its institutions. We rather understand it as an ecosystem that commands them in society through the system of capital and binds them through instruments for social and cultural productions that are mediated by knowledge. Social and cultural productions are typically controlled though communication and propaganda machines and linguistic devices, signifiers and signs that form a part of a society’s self-description and declared values and beliefs. They are intended to provide the rationale for all structures imposed on society.
Meanwhile, rapid advances in communications brought about by technology in recent decades have engendered an important transformation in the relationship between labor, production, demand and value which together represent a crucial aspect of human activity and exchange. The change involves the creation of hyper-real worlds that yield new sociocultural constructs to foster demand so as to meet production and exploit labor so as to maximize the efficiency of capital. How they are combined in different ways in each society determines their apparent diversity while concealing in reality the nature of power and its operation.
A major factor in the development of the knowledge-power nexus is the separation of knowledge from its location and context. The separation vests the pursuit of knowledge with an exciting and new dynamic, an expanded domain and a grand vision and purpose. This paper investigates the epistemic and historic evolution of the newfound liberation of knowledge from its location and context and its steady integration with power over the last two or three hundred years.
Introduction
As human beings we are largely products of our learning and the ability to transmit our learning to the next generation. Hence, it is a truism to say that all human beings are knowledge beings. This capacity to learn and transmit our learning to the next generation is perhaps what distinguishes us from all other animals. It is this which is responsible for the building up of human civilizations over millennia.
This trivial truth is in itself not very useful in understanding or explicating the nature and evolution of societies across centuries. Although as knowledge beings we all are equal, it must also be clear that there have been hierarchies in human societies and hence also of knowledge. No knowledge is innocent. Our knowledge has not only given us the power to dominate nature and control it to serve our needs but also to dominate other human beings. That knowledge is power is not only a Baconian or Western concept but was perhaps a larger understanding of human societies everywhere.
It is in this context that we have developed our present understanding of contemporary Indian society as having a huge knowledge divide between a small University- based/developed knowledge stream and a vast ocean of ordinary people’s knowledge, Lokavidya. It is our understanding that the knowledge of ordinary people which helps them navigate this world is in no way inferior to those who have formal University education and training. It is also a fact that those who have formal, institutionalized or University based knowledge have been the powerful, dominant ruling classes everywhere.
Pre-colonial India too had a divide between formal institutionalized knowledge practiced and propagated through its Sastras and Lokavidya. It may also be true that our Sastric knowledge and Lokavidya are more compatible with our culture, ethos, etc. Perhaps it might also be said that there is an organic relationship between the two, one reinforcing the other.
Colonial rule and the introduction of modern Western University knowledge nearly eclipsed our Sastric knowledge as there was no state patronage. It created a peculiar situation in which Sastric knowledge was almost frozen in its pre-colonial form while Lokavidya was considerably weakened, but 'survived' largely on account of its continued relevance to the vast masses in securing their material and societal needs. The British seem to have had no interest in replacing Lokavidya with their formal systems as they saw no serious threat to their interests from Lokavidya. However, the serious challenges to the economic, social and cultural life of the Lokavidya Samaj during colonial rule resulted in a continuous and detrimental change to its knowledge base, role and dynamics in society; also, the impoverishment of the country as a whole under colonial rule resulted in the marginalization of Lokavidya Samaj.
The coming of independence had little impact on Lokavidya or its Samaj initially. The policy of industrialization pursued based on modern Western science and technology (S&T) ran its course without much challenge, except for some muted criticism by Gandhians. The Indian state or government on their part did create bodies to promote Khadi and Village industries and appoint some Gandhians to guide them. Similarly, there was some interest in promoting Sastric knowledge by including it in the university curriculum. In addition, artisanal crafts/skills began receiving some assistance from central and state governments. Etc.
Meanwhile, in the course of nation-building in the ensuing years, we built a powerful and centralized state with a stated intent of developing the country. As a result, large scale interventions into agriculture that promote the extensive use of industrial inputs dislocated the centuries old knowledge base of the Lokavidya Samaj along with its material and social capital that helped it survive in earlier times. The relational capital of the village, sustained over time through dependency relationships in the cultural, economic and social context of the community, was dismantled through developmental efforts that were based on models imported from the West, which had no place for the customs and preferences of people and the structural and functional reality of the village.
Strangely, the divide between organized modern knowledge and Lokavidya based on centuries of experiential learning continues to increase without much hostility, even as it results in an increasing impoverishment of a large majority of people. On the one hand, formal knowledge continues to develop without much contribution from Lokavidya except perhaps for the supply of labour to run industries. On the other, the Lokavidya Samaj is autonomous to the extent that it relies on its own innate skills and techniques to adapt to changes that are brought about by University based modern knowledge. The catch is, of course, the inferior status/ position of Lokavidya in relation to modern University knowledge. This is clearly reflected in the pay a university degree provides and the wages that Lokavidya can command from the system. Suffice it to say then that Lokavidya survives as inferior to university knowledge in every respect. And, given the sorry state of the Lokavidya Samaj, it is in no position to challenge the divide; all it can do is to hope that there is no further downward slide in its condition. A question naturally arises as to how and why Lokavidya continues. The obvious answer seems to be that for vast masses of people there is no alternative to keep their body and soul together.
The Central Problem
The above situation seems to be a common feature of large parts of the previously colonized world, in South Asia, Africa and Latin America, from the standpoints of equity, poverty, justice and quality of life. Yet, seventy five years after independence, an obsession with blaming colonization for the ills of Indian society continues to be an important dimension of our intellectual and political discourse. Other (usual) suspects that are regularly arraigned for deposition in this narrative are corruption, centralization of power, bureaucracy, corporate greed, lack of public participation, the very idea of development and people’s unwillingness to become developed. Nonetheless, we are still not able to answer the question, “why do large levels of inequity and injustice persist (or in become deeper over time) even in societies where such malaises are under control or have been largely eliminated?” Further questions that arise here are, “why does the sorry state of India fail to convince people at large that development is a mirage, inequality can only increase over time, or that justice and equity are improbable outcomes in the modern society, etc.? Why is there no clamor for the abandonment of this path of development and for the pursuit of alternatives such as, say, village industry, small scale production, decentralized administration and appropriate technologies, etc.?”
We believe that four aspects of modern society may provide clues for understanding these questions better:
(i) The State and its Allies
The state and its command over society have grown enormously in modern times. Being controlled by a small and unrepresentative fraction of society, its ability to allocate resources as it pleases, suppress truth and misrepresent its actions has grown by leaps and bounds. Over time, it has created and propagated a majestic vision of a future world with grand infrastructure, luxurious lifestyles and technology led transformation of society. Every new development of S&T, economic theory or social engineering provides the state with an opportunity to predict the coming of a new and better World. And for each development that imposes new miseries on the ordinary people, the state redoubles its efforts to explain them away as temporary and unavoidable problems that will soon disappear.
However, mere force cannot create an enduring compulsion to expect the future to deliver better. It needs to be complemented with social and cultural constructs that act as a support structure for the state to build, sustain and perpetuate its control over the material and mental lives of men, as discussed briefly below:
(ii) The Web of Language
The language of modernity is as seductive as the goods and ideas that it offers to humanity. For example, metaphors not only provide a means to relate a set of objects and ideas to another while anchoring them to real concerns of humans, but also govern our thinking and expression. And it is through the socialization of the ideas of modernity that such constructs evolve in the modern world.
While we often think metaphors are only about poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish, and therefore not a part of our ordinary lives, they are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, and structures how we perceive, how we think, and what we do (Lakoff & Johnson, 1981)
For example, the metaphor of war almost entirely permeates the idea of argument in modern usage. Consider:
…the opponent’s position is indefensible
…attack the weak point in his argument;
…demolish his argument;
…this strategy is unsound;
…he won the argument;
…we gained and the opponent lost ground in today’s proceedings; etc.
It is very likely that such metaphorical perception, i.e., understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another, was different in India in earlier times. For example, the belief that Nyaya (in its ordinary sense) should prevail in a dispute entailed that the harshness of the verdict would be tempered by the ability of the accused to bear the consequences of the verdict. Thus, the verdict would not entirely depend on the merits of the arguments alone. Hence, structuring the argument in terms of what achieves the purposes of Nyaya would be more sensible than in terms of a war. Similarly, the argument between the Mimamsakas, and those said to have taken place between the Advaitis, Bouddhas, Jainas, Dwaitis etc., are not usually described in terms of war (although Indian scholarship by the middle of the 19th century had learnt to portray Mimamsakas as having demolished their opposing schools, etc.).
Under the sway of modernity, linguistic expressions of the modern man related to time, right and wrong, money, achievement, defeat, fulfillment, learning, life and death are rife with metaphorical entanglements of types that are different from that of previous eras. Especially when influenced by visions of a modern life of reason, progress, evolution, and plenty, it is possible that they provide a compelling rationalization for considering corruption, centralization etc. as unavoidable problems encountered in the process of building something very grand, viz., a new man and a new society on a path of endless perfection of thought, deed, imagination and aspiration.
(iii) Truth and Hyper-reality
In the era of monopoly capital, the historical contradictions between capital and labor, production and consumption, supply and demand are significantly eroded. Traditionally, capital only had to produce goods while consumption ran by itself. Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is much more costly than that of goods. It is in this process that the media plays a big role through blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional to a point where the fictional appears more real and serves as a substitute for reality itself. Once this is achieved, the value of a good is attached to a hyper-real set of symbols or representations that have no necessary connection with real objects or needs, rendering the concept of use value meaningless. Hyper-reality involves creating a symbols or sets of signifiers which represent something that does not actually exist, and value arises predominantly from relationships between the symbols, as for example in the association of a commodity or good with famous people who may not even use the good! In this way, the value of an object lies in its symbolic meaning, which is found in the signs that are projected onto it, and which marketers can make up as they go along; it is no longer to do with simply material production. (Baudrillard, J., 1994)
With the spread of media and communication into all facets of our lives, images now create reality instead of reflecting it. This is the evolution of hyper-reality. Public life, politics, production and consumption of physical and virtual goods, entertainment and interpersonal relationships – all these aspects of life are controlled by manipulated images of reality which in turn mold the behavior of the masses. Over time, such conditioning propels the creation of images which move further away from reality to produce manipulated representations that people recognize, derive comfort from and assign approval, properties and attributes to, even while (sometimes) knowing that they are unreal. This might be expressed for example in the belief that a popular leader works for 20 hours a day and never sleeps, is a superhuman political strategist and suffers from no illnesses even at an advanced age, is well read, etc.; that we were successful in repulsing enemy incursions by imposing heavy damages on their men and material; that a section of people in the country are lazy, aggressive and evil; or that another section of people are savvy, hard-working and therefore successful; etc. The fact that our expressions refer to images which we ourselves cognize as distorted does not come in the way of using them as symbols to anchor our beliefs on, because in the age of information and communication, it is the engagement created by ideas that finally determines their relevance, correctness and endurance; and not truth or fact.
When images that distort reality come into widespread use, further distortions emerge that are anchored on the old. As the cycle continues, the images drift far away from reality and provide a basis for constructing a new false reality.
For example, once Godse, Savarkar etc. are resurrected as patriots, if only driven by different ideas of truth, nationhood and civilization, it is an easy next step to incrementally add to their virtues every time their stories are told. As people get used to an account that has moved away from the real, a new narrative can be created that distorts their image a little more. After several such cycles, when they resemble knights in shining armor, the stage is set for lionizing them given that, using the same process in reverse, Gandhi, Nehru etc. are meanwhile incrementally reduced to the state of despicable and opportunist sell-outs to British imperialism.
(iv) Knowledge and its Location
Over the last three hundred years, an explanatory knowledge framework came into existence, initially in Europe, which considers progress as a central purpose of mankind, promotes the continuous accretion of tools, skills and techniques as a means to fuel it, and prescribes various structures for managing, governing and administering society. The framework is constituted by a vast network of complex knowledge of the world of the living and the non-living, obtained through experimentation, deduction, empirical observation, and a combination of logical devices. Its knowledge is associated with the practice of S&T and production of goods, and with the management of health, organizations, society, or countries; or with governance, economics, religion, spirituality, philosophy, etc. The framework is explanatory not only because it aggregates knowledge into a cohesive structure that can be explicated, but also because it clearly specifies the “aboutness” of knowledge. The “aboutness” of knowledge is similar to meta-knowledge because it describes the knowledge that the framework envelops.
The central feature of this framework is the separation of knowledge from its original context and location, which makes it capable of being modified/ manipulated from, as well as applied to, any place on earth, and therefore universal; it also makes it objective, culture-independent and applicable to all societies. Such a separation plays a critical part in knowledge discourses as follows:
(i) It defines the world of knowledge through an epistemic constraint, i.e., that which is not location-independent is not to be considered important, valid or real knowledge. This automatically disqualifies much of the knowledge of previous centuries – unless it can be recast to become independent of its location and original context.
(ii) Separation of knowledge from its location involves decoupling it from the culturally, socially and philosophically determined rationalizations, explanations, restrictions, limits on use and applicability, etc.
(iii) It also provides an ontic dimension that defines what constitutes the world. It might be understood in terms of objects and forces at one point in time, interactions and information exchange at another, or perceptions, images and representation at yet another. Any knowledge is considered valid as long as it is about the so defined constituents. All else is false knowledge.
Thus, Indian or African medicine, mathematics or astronomy of earlier centuries may be classified as either witchcraft or unscientific for so long as their narratives, practice and the theory behind it are coupled with stories of their origin, usage, restrictions and applicability peculiar to their cultures. However, once they yield to universalization and to the demands of standardization, normalization and alignment with the method prescribed by the framework, their validity is likely to be accepted. The recent spread of Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and orthopedic practices, and Yoga are good examples of how this process has worked over time.
In the ensuing sections, we focus our attention on how the new dynamics of knowledge shapes knowledge-power.
The Evolution of Knowledge-Power
For much of human history, knowledge seems to have been located largely in individuals and societies, and expressed in their historic, cultural, economic and social lives, rituals, memories, beliefs and lore. For millennia, an important expression of knowledge, viz. the tool (the “machine”), was only considered as an aid to the hand and the mind in every task, and not a replacement for either. Moreover, knowledge was integrated deeply into the cultural lives of society with clear and contextual limits on its applicability and use. For example, felling trees in the Devara Kadu (holy forest in Kannada) was forbidden as demanded by local customs because ancient Gods resided there. So was deep mining for iron because it would injure mother earth which was not considered an object, but a sentient being.
The separation of human knowledge from its location seems to have been first achieved in a major way during and after the industrial revolution in Europe (Such a separation in earlier societies, although not entirely absent, appears to have been incapable of building effective knowledge-power relationships around it). It was only around mid-18th century that England developed the necessary competence and capability to systematically embed a progressively larger amount of complexity (read knowledge) into machines; this capability gradually extended to different areas such as large scale manufacture of iron, textiles, steam and machine tools in the 19th century and to mass manufacturing of cars in the early 20th, enabling the architects of the assembly line to reduce human effort to mere manual labor for the most part. Within decades, mass manufacture of goods of progressively higher complexity defined most economic activity in the West over the rest of the 20th century. These developments suggest that knowledge acquires a different character and dynamic once detached from its location because it no longer suffers from the local social, cultural or economic constraints. In the course of its further development, it acquires the capacity for producing improved tools, reasoning and logic that can transform the socio-economic and cultural landscape of society beyond the location of its origin as well. Over time, the recast knowledge reappears in forms that are considered more efficient, labor saving and superior to the existing – technically, culturally and philosophically.
Around the end of the 20th century, information and communication technology (ICT) provided a radically new impetus to this process by connecting and simplifying the management of disparate and complex productive entities across the globe. It may be remembered that industrial production was progressively “templatized”, i.e., made formulaically repeatable over the previous hundred years. At this point in time, enabling knowledge flows to control demand and supply of goods and services and managing capital flows across transnational borders were two great impediments to the reliability and efficiency of production. The arrival of scalable ICT quickly led to the standardization and stabilization of all these aspects of the domain of production of goods and services. This in turn led to the rise in value and relative position of information and communication networks in the economy vis-à-vis industrial capital. As a result, a new hierarchy of economic value came into existence, whose apex is formed by services provided by ICT, the next lower stage being that of modern industrial production, while traditional industry and agriculture belong to the lowest stage. As transnational capital and knowledge flows grew, it led to a now familiar scenario of a few individual companies becoming more valuable than some of the biggest countries in the world.
This process did not happen magically or on its own. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, two centuries of colonization of lands and plunder of Nature by Europe had created great wealth for a few and deepened a desire for further control. Perhaps the ideas of sin and divine retribution were diluted through their experience in foreign lands; or possibly the lack of limits, conditions and constraints on their actions in colonies emboldened them to consider useful knowledge as that which is context free. In any case, a new type of knowledge-power nexus seems to have emerged during this period, freeing knowledge from some of its traditional constraints in several ways. One example of this was the change in the way people understood the “other”. Most Europeans in the 16th or 17th centuries instinctively conceived of the earth as a mother, or at least as a living and personal being. However, with the appearance of the mechanistic world view (Cartesian dualism), people began to think about the world in terms of inanimate objects that behave and therefore can be manipulated according to the laws of mechanics. Consequently, people not only found it easier to approach such things as trees and rocks as mere objects, but they extended such insensitivity towards animals and human beings as well. Since it was agreed upon that animals have no souls, it gradually became all right to use them as so much dead matter, or to subject them routinely to painful scientific experiments. When the logic was extended to lesser men, it facilitated the massive introduction of slaves into overseas territories as tools of production. The Cartesian self that is separated from the external world could easily approach living beings and deal with them much more ruthlessly than in previous times.
It is possible to consider this phase of Europe’s history as one where several elements of the cultural and social restrictions on the application and use of knowledge were eliminated primarily through the reasoning propounded by Cartesian rationalism.
As the process intensified over the 19th and 20th centuries, different areas of human endeavor in the production of goods and services gradually turned into objects of knowledge study, analysis and “re-engineering”. This led to a systematic reduction of all natural and social phenomena into governing principles and axioms that could be recombined in new ways. Over time, this process led to the precipitous fall in the number of skilled people employed in proportion to the volume of production of goods and services since early 19th century. Moreover, starting with the industrial revolution, the knowledge in the machine becomes increasingly foreign to the worker while his own knowledge is of little value to the owner of the machine.
During this time, all human activities became, at least theoretically, capable of being replaced by the machine at some time in the future. And this process yielded profits and political power on a scale previously thought unimaginable. Hence, the history of the modern world may also be read as that of a new political class which achieved spectacular success in separating knowledge from its location, creating the means for transforming and embedding it into machines, and using them to reduce human effort into mere labor.
Meanwhile, the experience of several “successful” countries of the non-West, e.g., China, Japan, South Korea etc. seems to suggest that in the age of monopoly capitalism, there is hardly any difference between the East and the West when it comes to the instruments of social change forged by knowledge-power. In recent years, knowledge- power has gained enough maturity to provide a knowledge response to every act of power and a response from power for every challenge to knowledge. Thus for example, if the ruling class decides that GM food provides the best returns on investment in agriculture, the sphere of knowledge provides a compelling response that settles the issue. On the other hand, if farmers challenge the price formulas, the knowledge or the locus standi of the Agricultural Price Commission (APC) in order to demand a price that provides dignity and comfort to their lives, it is power that intervenes to make it infructuous, either by commanding an appropriate response from the sphere of knowledge or through force.
We have seen in the foregoing how the separation of knowledge and its location led to the physical instrumentality for creating a high degree of inequality in income and wealth of people in all societies. As regards the world of ideas, the reification of capital, wages, profit, etc. in economics, for example, or the objectification of Nature and society by S&T have over time resulted in a subject-object inversion; the laborer, the farmer, or the hills and valleys (the subjects of human endeavor), cannot be understood except in terms of labor and capital (its objects).
As a result, modern knowledge has developed (and continues to develop) a justification for this inversion through powerful idioms, tropes, apocryphal stories, celebratory accounts, memes and the like that are deeply embedded into the language and which make it very difficult to perceive the new typology of exploitation. For example, it is near impossible to convince people that capital is labor saved to serve a few, having been extracted from laborers whose economic lives are eliminated by it; or to convince a manual laborer that a government officer’s salary of a lac rupees is not justifiable in comparison with his own earnings ten thousand rupees; mainly because he accepts the mental-manual labor distinction himself.
In the next section, we explore the effect of a mature knowledge-power nexus on Indian society.
India Re-Colonized
In the foregoing, we saw how the separation of knowledge from its location and its nexus with power, which began during the time of the industrial revolution in Europe, enabled the sustenance and concentration of power and control in the hands of a few across the globe. Notwithstanding which, it goes side by side with popular perception (in the West and among the elite in countries like India) that the S&T, statecraft and governance that came into being in this period constitute a great triumph of the human spirit in its exploration of the inner and outer worlds of man.
In the era of mass production of goods, the speed with which capital moves, multiplies and commands society continues to increase. Over a few cycles of interactions between capital, technology and the cultural context of the society in which they operate, they appear to achieve a high degree of stabilization leading to the easy development of templates to guide their processes. Increasingly therefore, the term capital may be considered as implicitly associated with a set of technological, cultural and institutional knowledge.
The greater role of transnational capital in society has successfully blurred the distinction between business interests, government function and institutional integrity (of public entities such as the bureaucracy, police, legislature, judiciary, press, etc.). Consequently, capital becomes, as it were, an independent force by itself, as if human agency is incidental to it. The resulting erosion of norms in governance and public life continues to accelerate across the world, making it impossible to halt the oppression of the majority and profiteering by the ruling elite. As a result, protests against unjust acts of the government by people have become increasingly ineffective in forcing the former towards either dialogue or compromise.
It appears that a new version of colonialism has emerged in the 21st century under the stewardship of a distributed and powerful transnational elite.
The Knowledge Question
The foregoing brings us back to a reconsideration of the so-called knowledge question that has occupied many bright minds in recent decades in the context of how knowledge in the modern era inexorably affects all societies to transform their cultural, societal, productive and reflexive aspects profoundly. In many of these studies, knowledge and power have been treated as somewhat independent parameters that come together either because of opportunism or serendipity. However, the knowledge-power hypothesis provides a consistent way of describing the dialectic relationship between the two that shapes each other continuously over time.
In accordance with the above, the knowledge question may be studied, for example, by considering societies in the last century through two focal points: the means to create new productive forces on which new relationships of exchange may be erected, and the means to make such conditions in society not only acceptable to the people but also appear natural, intuitive and just.
Simply put, these two foci help you move away from an industrial society to a post-industrial society – that is, from seeking value through consumption of goods related to food, shelter and clothing, towards seeking consumption demanded by multiple hyper-real worlds that both reflect and reinforce existing social hierarchies. The former describes
the nature of Capital which is limited, local, demand-supply constrained and use value centric;
the nature of Society which is culturally rigid, relatively unclassified and industrial;
the nature of Ideas which are “real” and not highly differentiated.
The latter describes
the nature of Capital which is (almost) unlimited, fungible and unconstrained by use value;
the nature of Society that is classified, is culturally open and post-industrial;
the nature of Ideas which, in the age of mass production, individualizes human experience through multiple imaginary worlds, tenuously linked with the real, that correspond to various hierarchies.
Properly speaking, the knowledge question is in reality the Knowledge-Power question. From the variety of types and forms of knowledge that exist in the world, Knowledge-Power privileges some and deprecates others to create a stable set-up at every point in time; and develops a belief system, an order, and a rationalization for the distribution of resources amongst classes. The theories of economics, S&T, society, philosophy and psychology of the moment reflect this reality. This is not to say that knowledge that is not a part of the knowledge-power nexus cannot exist. Such knowledge may continue to exist for the indulgence of a few, or may wither away on its own over time, or await its elevation to a dominant position at a future time. Knowledge of history, the steam engine and binary math are examples of these categories.
In accordance with the above, monopoly capital is not the central driving force of society; it is knowledge-power - whose one face is capital, the other being knowledge – that provides the means to order society and the meta-language to reason about society.
We will explore in a future article how knowledge-power provides a compelling reasoning to explain why the ruling elite chose a particular path in 1947; and the means to explain why the ruling classes are choosing another in 2023.
What Lies Ahead?
In the West, a search for mechanisms to deal with this problem has led to the creation of a system of welfare measures and doles, and in recent years to the establishment of a universal basic income (UBI) scheme. This is essentially a means to feed the unemployed and reduce the risk of social unrest that might arise by not feeding them. However, such schemes do nothing to resolve a deep contradiction underlying economics today between the need for creating employment for all and the compulsion for businesses to focus on costs of operation resulting in reducing employee count. In fact, the rising number of people who have never held a job (between ages 16 and 60 years) in some countries in Europe indicates the seriousness of the problem.
On the other hand, for ruling elite everywhere, the previous thirty years have been an outstanding success in terms of their acquisition of power, profitability and control of the state. An important consequence of this is the continuous erosion of the state’s resolve to stand by the poor and the disadvantaged. In a situation where all instruments of the state are pitted against the majority, people’s will and ability to fight has also become significantly weakened.
To take a recent example, the response of many governments across the world to CoVid seems to be not different from that of colonial masters towards their subjects. The wealth of the elite actually grew significantly during the years that CoVid swept the globe, while hundreds of millions lost their livelihoods. In addition, during this time, labor rights have been drastically circumscribed while big business has been favored with write-offs after defaulting on tens of lacs of crores of rupee loans from public institutions.
What is at stake today for human society is enormous. The nexus between knowledge and power of the previous few centuries seems to have created a great threat to the continuance of human life itself in the world. The struggle today is not merely against oppression by the elite, but against what empowers them, viz., the knowledge of people, divorced from their lives and social contexts, strengthened by its new masters only to descend back upon them as tools of destruction.
One may ascribe to Gandhi an intuitive grasp of this paradox when he calls for the elimination of the machine civilization of the West, labeling it as evil and despotic. In such a reading of him, it may appear that Gandhi wanted India to go forward by destroying the logic of the machine civilization rather than backwards to embrace traditional technologies and ways of life. On the other hand, it might appear that we are clutching at straws, given the enormous changes that the last 75 years have witnessed across the world. We therefore end here by saying that we are not clear as to how Gandhi will come to our rescue in this situation, or if he can. If anything, thinking about the path ahead will have to be situated in the reality of today. No less.
References
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1981). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press
About the authors:
G SivaramaKrishnan: Formerly a Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, Bangalore University and a Visiting Professor at NLSIU, Bangalore, GSR Krishnan – as he is widely known – has been actively associated with PPST since its launch. He has also been connected with Vidya Ashram, and Lokavidya Jan Andolan, Varanasi and Lokavidya Vedike and Gram Seva Sangha, Bengaluru since their inception. Lives in Bengaluru.
JK Suresh:He has worked for around 30 years in a few technology companies. His deep interests are in the relationship between politics, technology, science, society, language, philosophy and the like in India. He has been associated with the PPST group since its beginning and the Vidya Ashram since its early days. He is also associated with the Lokavidya Vedike and Gram Seva Sangha, Bengaluru.Lives in Bengaluru.
Comentarios