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Expanding Economic Thinking:Shrii Sarkar and Amartya Sen
Sohail InayatullahThere 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 far reaches 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 of minimum 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
 
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 of indigenous 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 of exchange, 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 of them, that is the barriers that intellectuals/priests; police/military andmerchants/capitalists place on them. The goal is not to help these people becomerich (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, for it 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 if they 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 of exploitation - 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 
 
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. Thesolution 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 Sarkar brings 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 basedbecame 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 far more 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 of difference, 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 of economics, the psycho-economy, attends to.
PSYCHO-ECONOMY
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