“The world has enough for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed” this quote by Mahatma Gandhi could not have been more relevant. The Mahatma was incredibly prescient and foresighted in his statement if understood with the relevance of how the must buy must-have mindset of society is clawing away at resources. Gandhiji warned Indians about the dangers of giving into western industrialization and capitalist tendencies which would be the ruin of not just India but had a broader and more general message at its core. Since the need for protectionism and withstanding the onslaught of avaricious corporate and industrial tendencies are not limited to India alone. 

Jean-Paul Satre asserted once that “the whole of human development, up till now has been a bitter struggle against scarcity.”

The fundamental definition of Scarcity can be traced back to the old northern French escarcete which necessarily implied an insufficiency of supply. However, with time it acquired a more precise understanding which was a period of inadequacy or more specifically a dearth. However, in the nineteenth century, neoclassical economics the term scarcity evolved from its foundation and the term then subsequently passed into general usage through its transformation into a concept signifying a general term of Scarcity altogether (Xenos,n.d.).

Through the course of his book’ Scarcity and Modernity’ Nicholas Xenos makes the claim that the idea behind a universal scarcity is due to some aspects of modernity, wherein he states that due to modernity, relative wealth is seen as the primary signifier/identifier of distinction. The quest for wealth coupled with the instability prevalent upon maintaining a sort of social standing through the means of wealth is the principal source for the experience of Scarcity. He goes on to claim that regarding how individual choice has been impacted due to commercial elements in society with regards to globalization as well as highlights how according to him material objects are seen as a sign of social status in society. Due to these factors, the conditions for an overall environment of desire and greed is created that ends up remaining unfulfilled. It is this environment that leads people to experience Scarcity as a permanent condition prevalent throughout their existence. 

His claims regarding what can be termed bourgeois desires which are inherently greedy, which stem from modernity and specifically capitalist and Neo-liberal tendencies in a society. The utterly mundane desires and greed for material and superficial things of the bourgeois elements in a society such as the greed and avarice at display in financial centres and on stock exchanges to do with insider trading, frauds, Ponzi schemes, embezzlements and so on these are the cases that receive maximum media coverage. There are also instances of sportspersons taking performance-enhancing drugs and even faking score lines just for the sake of betting syndicates, it can be evidenced in the healthcare business too wherein pharmaceutical companies have incredibly unfair pricing policies or in the private sector wherein the primary motive is profit maximization at the expense of the misery of patients. This phenomenon of greed in a purely material sense can be best exemplified through the example of a character in the french film Pierrot Le Fou by legendary French director Jean Luc Godard. In the movie, the director films a shot of the heroine on a beach who has got nothing to do and is walking up and down the beach shouting ‘I do not know what to do’.This shot goes on for about five whole minutes. The director, through this shot, tried to bring out what petty desires and concerns an average bourgeois female/male have in their day to day life. 

Once India truly opened up its economy allowed foreign investment, promoted free trade; this was aptly known as the liberalization and globalization period. The world, on the whole, started tilting towards neo-liberal measures and schemes. Neoliberalism can mainly be understood to be a mix of neo-classical economic theory with neoclassical liberal political thought. This implies that markets are efficient and clear, individuals are rational utility maximizers, the price mechanism offers the best way of disseminating and digesting all the possible and available information in an economy. Ultimately inequality paves the way for more and more investment, an uncontrolled market will provide the fruits of the growth to all participants. Government involvement and intervention is dissuaded which implies that the government should withdraw from managing the economy and actually end up leaving its functions and tasks to uninhibited and unconstrained entrepreneurs. 

The problems with globalization and neoliberal policies of various governments are immense. Linked initially with Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism has been the dominant global political, economic trend that has been adopted by the right as well as the left. These parties and the policies they enact end up representing the immediate interests of incredibly wealthy investors and arguably less than even a thousand corporations. Over the years, with the help of a massive public relations exercises, neoliberalism’s tenets and ideals have been accepted as the norm within society, which has resulted in the virtual defines of anything and everything ranging from corporate tax cuts, undoing environmental regulations, to even delegitimizing and disempowering public education as well as social welfare schemes and programmes. Any activity that can hamper corporate control over society is immediately suspect since it would end up interfering with the running of the free market which is propelled, promoted and marketed as supposedly the only rational, fair and democratic allocator of goods and services. 

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton famously said that globalization is a force of nature and which turned out to have drastic ramifications. Since the market for imports to a third world country widens a bit, consumers in the specific country acquire and build upon a particular taste for a new product, which in turn puts pressure on the country’s foreign currency reserves. This results in the government reorienting its production towards exports, which may stem from a trading agreement, which also might require further cuts to import restrictions, and so on. The inference from the observed phenomenon is that governments can resist globalization in a sense by foregoing welfare costs to some portions of the population. This will result in rising resentment and protests against the government in question hence this calls out the contradictions which are evident in the actions of people in the form of consumers and on the other hand in the form of producers. 

Over the years, owing to neoliberal policies and schemes adopted by successive governments, there has been an increasing inequality in the world with less than 1% of the world population being richer than 99% of the world population. Specifically taking up the case of India wherein owing to several land grabs under the garb of development and progress, several indigenous tribes, as well as other sections of society, have been exploited and fleeced. Owing to an increasingly hostile and intolerant form of discourse and rhetoric prevalent not just in India but across a lot of countries, the people who protest against land grabs under the garb of “development” owing to unfair terms and conditions or even purely on the will of the landowners of not selling their respective properties, the protesters and dissenters are deemed anti-progress, anti-state and even anti-national in several cases. Examples are abundant with shameful examples of repression, such as is evident from the case of Narmada to Rajpura wherein the government tried to dispossess and displace the inhabitants of the respective areas to make way for ‘national interest’ in the form of development and progress. The baffling part is that general civil society fails to register concern or protest when such blatant land grabs are undertaken under the garb and facade of neoliberal measures of progress such as development, industrialization,etc. Recently in New Delhi, when students and faculty of the erstwhile Jawaharlal Nehru University protested against the fee hikes in their university and against privatization of education in universities, on the whole, owing to a pliable media and blatant propaganda a significant set of people supported raising the fees and were for privatizing education completely in universities. This is in stark contrast to when the government made a significant corporate tax cut in September or rolled back the high taxes levied on Foreign Private investors. When the government devotes capital towards industrialists and corporations there is no significant protest from the generally “bourgeois” classes who are content with these measures but when it comes to social welfare measures there is a huge hue and cry regarding the need for welfare measures for the particularly marginalized sections of society namely students, farmers, scheduled tribes and castes as well as other backward castes. This reflects how deep and pervasive the rot in society is because the wealthy and upper classes in society owing to their might and plight with the government as well as money and muscle power can influence opinion through media, propaganda, etc. 

Neoliberal policies have resulted in the intensification and empowerment of the exploitative and unfair tendencies of a generally capitalist society. People’s desires and greed which were relatively subdued before the advent of the neoliberal regimes has now been intensified with validation from the excessive commercialization of everything around them. Ever since even the 16th-century anxieties around bred have consistently haunted capitalist thought with examples in popular culture ranging from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. With the rise of capitalism from the late seventeenth century, there has been an observation among analysts and thinkers that there is a specific dialectical pattern which capitalist defenders incessantly anticipate the charge that greed is universalized. With the consistent effort of whitewashing avarice or greed which is one of the seven sins, there has been an effort to normalize every capitalist immoral overstep linked to greed be it from frauds, embezzlements and so on under the garb of profit-making for the overall comfort of his/her family. Hence over the years, a generally pejorative connotation of the term greed has turned into an acceptable idea of profit-making concerning competition, rate races, and so on. 

Neoclassical economists promoted the claim that income inequalities were imperative for growth since it raised the savings rate which stems from the hypotheses that rich people have a lower marginal propensity to consume than poor people which in turn will accelerate investment. Starting from the 80’s owing to this claim in the United States, politicians and policymakers justified taxation and fiscal policies on the whole that favoured the rich over the poor. However, over the years, even neoclassical economists have expressed their doubts about the thesis that inequality is good for growth since recent research seems to suggest that inequality ends up creating an uncertain policy environment and overall political instability as well as impeding fixed capital formation. On the one hand, the developmental regime redistributed land from farmers to the beneficiaries of the public sector, namely industries and infrastructure however the neoliberal regime redistributes land directly to private and increasingly financial and non-industrial capital. While the former would have been restrained by developmental constraints and compulsions, ranging from productivity to balanced regional development, the latter can easily and does easily dispense and ignore all other considerations but growth. This new kind of regime in India specifically emerged in the ’90s and by the 2000s had reached up to the scale of India’s special economic zones. Multiple governments upend existing norms and laws to suit industrialists and corporations even if it is at the expense of the livelihood of a specific section of society and or concerning environmental concerns and guidelines. The Adani group was given clearance by the Chattisgarh state government to build a mine in one particular region despite NGT objections owing to specific guidelines and norms already in place regarding environmental and ecological concerns after the mine was built the mine’s activities resulted in the surrounding areas being parched with no groundwater being available for the neighbouring village community members. The same Adani’s group desire for land in an area consisting of Adivasi were displaced as well to make way for Adani’s land grab. Here again, Gandhiji’s statement would stand the test of the ground as the real scorch and earth practices aren’t the so-called backward farmers or other marginalized sections of society but the supposed harbingers of development and progress. When environmental concerns and guidelines are upended to make way for petty and myopic concerns of the government and industrialist mafia, it spells doom for the future of that country. 

The policies initiated by Reagan and Thatcher have been incredibly successful in generating growth, albeit at the expense of redistributing resources and opportunity. With rising corporate and social inequality, productivity has stagnated, lowering potential growth rates for the whole economy, which has resulted in a vicious cycle of low productivity, low-interest rates, higher debt levels and even higher inequality. If neoliberalism has failed there is also the upside with regards to policy fixes which begins with taxation coupled with investment in productive infrastructure and education however the bad news is that owing to increasingly capitalist and corporate-friendly governments in major economies such as the United States of America, United Kingdom and even India the pursuit of such policies will be a long haul owing to the increasingly crony capitalist and austerity measures that are being indulged in with a vengeance. Ever since the 2008 crisis, austerity has been employed as a policy and measure, which is imperative for reducing sovereign debt and restoring the overall economic order.The need of the hour is wealth redistribution and welfare measures without worrying about the response of industrialists, corporates, etc. Instead of blind austerity measures, corporate tax cuts the excess resource and capital should be invested in health, education, poverty upliftment, employment generation schemes, and so on. Since the problem isn’t with allocating wealth and resources to the marginalized and underprivileged sections of society and sectors of the economy but instead is to do with the material concerns of society on the whole need to be curbed with regards to avaricious incessant desire for more and more that stems from years and years of capitalist and subsequent neoliberal conditioning and influence. Resources are becoming scarce due to the unequal resource allocation among different classes of society which needs to be corrected as well as curbing the never-ending greed that is a result of consistent conditioning by neoliberal and capitalist elements on the whole.

George Soros, the Hungarian – American business magnate, said that “all wealth is public in some essential way because it was not generated in a vacuum” stems from an extremely Gandhian line of thought. Gandhiji envisioned an extremely creative dynamic between the individual as well as collective wellbeing; he saw the two as being in sync which further implied that nobody specifically should be asked to pay the price for the majority to benefit. This went against capitalist ideals to do with individual sacrifice for the greater good as is the case for large scale industrial projects like mining for which there is large scale dispossession for the “greater good”. He argued that cooperation and not competition is the natural state of humanity the same can be said to be appropriate for our economic system. Gandhiji’s ideas of Sarvodaya which implies welfare for all cannot possibly coexist in a neoliberal world where the primary aim and motive is greed and profit maximization and not welfare for all.

References – 

Agarwal, Kabir. “Thousands Hold ‘Coal Satyagraha’ In Chhattisgarh, Say Public Hearing Was Staged”. The Wire, 2019, https://thewire.in/rights/coal-satyagraha-chahattisgarh-mahagenco-coal-adani-enterprises.

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Singh, Lalan, and Kranti Kumar Rawat. “In Chhattisgarh, Adani’s Coal Mine Leaves A Village Parched This Monsoon”. The Wire, 2019, https://thewire.in/environment/in-chhattishgarh-adanis-coal-mine-leaves-a-village-parched-this-monsoon.

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Xenos, N. (2019). The austere life | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. [online] Royalsocietypublishing.org. Available at: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2016.0378 [Accessed 27 Nov. 2019].

Author – Kabir Dev