Localized Economics

Swadeshi, or “localized economics,” is a concept developed by Mahatma Gandhi. At the beginning of the 20th century, India began importing cheap factory-made cloth from England, which forced thousands of local weavers and spinners out of work. The result was dire poverty and social chaos. Gandhi’s response was to throw away all articles made of English mill cloth, and wear only cloth which he spun himself. The image of him spinning on his charka became instantly famous; thousands followed his lead, and the result was India’s independence.

Fifty years after India’s independence, we find these problems all over the world due to the corporate globalized economy. In standard modern-day economics, the goal is to maximize profit at any cost. To this end, corporations will use many techniques to relentlessly pursue the bottom line. They will often:

Seek to maximize output per worker, regardless of health and safety concerns
Seek areas of the world where wages are low and human-rights laws are lax
Seek to ensure low wages by maintaining sufficient unemployment in the worker pool
Disempower communities through lobbying, policies and legal action
Use economies of scale to reduce per-unit costs, regardless of how much of a product is actually needed
Orient production towards the buyers who can pay the most
Concentrate capital due to winner-take-all competition and unfettered “free” markets
Pump money into advertising to create an imagined need
Promote the myth that happiness lies in consumption

It is hard to overstate the social problems that are caused by this corporate paradigm.
Many countries now struggle with:

Widespread unemployment and plummeting wages
A dwindling middle class and a growing income gap between rich and poor
An impoverished working class
Dangerous or mind-numbing manufacturing work
Exploitation of child labor
A disenfranchised populace that’s easily incited to fanaticism, violence or terrorism
Demographic upheaval and ruptured families due to lack of local work
Widespread hunger and accompanying disease
Erosion of democracy, human rights, and worker rights
Environmental damage due to manufacturing and shipping

As if this were not enough, a globalized economy depends on cheap oil for manufacturing and transportation. This is becoming more and more untenable, for both environmental and political reasons, and is already impossible for countries in the global South. In Congo, for example, gasoline is $12 per gallon and the average person makes $100 per year, making any kind of oil-based manufacturing or transportation impossible for a local business.

The solution is clearly not to be found in globalized economics. A new paradigm must be created, which emphasizes sustainability and quality of life as opposed to mass production and bottom lines. Gandhi’s idea of Swadeshi provides that paradigm, though it can sound deceptively simple. As Gandhi said, “My definition of Swadeshi is well-known: I must not serve my distant neighbor at the expense of the nearest.” This is the heart of Swadeshi, though it encompasses much more than that.

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