I find even popular writings by economists quite baffling.They begin beguilingly enough in brisk back-slapping language,but as you proceed with trust and hope they slip in some concept and term that makes sense only to economists.As though when you are led on by some agent of a stockbroker with rosy promises in plain intelligible language and you are getting mentally ready to part with some money in the hope of a fast buck,he suddenly slips in some mysterious quibble that only he and his tribe understands to shatter that trust and puts you off.
So when I hear government circles smugly boasting that India is soon going to be a five trillion dollar economy catching up with China and even leaving her far behind,or that India might score growth rates like 7% or 8% per annum I am impressed but not quite certain what it means.
At the time when India is supposed to have broken the 8% barrier and even lifted 30 miion people out of poverty in one mighty heave; economist Utsa Patnaik calculated that the common man in India had slipped back to the nutrition level of colonial times.Mind you,even under colonial rule the total drain of wealth from India had not gone down but had registered steady and ‘substantial gain or growth.Of course it had meant dire increase in the burden on the common Indian.
So when the corporates in India had cornered the largest share of the burgeoning wealth in the country,how can we accept it as a sign of unmistakable growth?And even radical doom-sayers who constantly shake their heads about the country’s economy grow hushed when facing this milestone.
At a time most people would have starved to death without government dole and the rate of unemployment has been the highest in history and prices of the commonest food items beyond the reach of the poor.
To which I expect the ready answer will be that I have gotten it all wrong.That what is on issue is the growth of powers of production and the wealth these have produced,not how many these have pushed down the poverty line.Like the decades of early industrial capitalism in Britain when the peasants thrown out of the countryside into squalid towns where mIllions huddled, bred like flies in a fetid swamp,slaved in mills and died in droves of ill-health,disease, capital punishment for some crime or alcohol or sheer desperate despair.Those were days when British economy was thriving and Britain was called ‘the workshop of the world’.So there must be real and substantial growth.Yes,growth of the whole country and not capital alone.
And then,look at the figures spewed by such respectable and powerful institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and all the forums with high-sounding names,the think-tanks,and foundations.They seem to be singing in the same tune.Only catch is that the source of their figures and facts is the government about whose numerous sleights-of-hand to conjure booming positive statistics journalists are so vocal.
During the days in the mid nineteenth century which culminated in the great industrial exhibition to display Britain’s spectacular ‘growth’,the thinking men of that country had been far from impressed. Carlyle called Economics which explained and vindicated this growth ”a dismal science”.John Ruskin examined the favourite term of economists in measuring this brutal accumulation as units of ‘value’ under a searching moral lights. The prim arbiter of taste and culture Matthew Arnold at least found it grim and grimy.
At that time in the confines of his constrained room and supported by Engels’s periodic remittances,Karl Marx had found in Ricardo’s notion of ‘value’ as a product of human labour the springboard for HIS concept of value.However stupendous in quantity he had found this ‘value’ a product of merely alienated and thus degraded and humanly devalued labour.
Apart from the question as to why we should be so jubilant about this ‘growth’ there is a substantial argument in my view as to the continued use of this conceptual tool to measure our progress.Quite naturally it blinds us to the steep erosion in the process of generating such ‘value’ of all noble and civilizing qualities of human life of human beings.
Economists like Mahbub al Haque have under pressure of a guilty conscience tried to humanise this brutally mechanical concept by concocting a notion of ‘human value’ and sought to construct with some beguiling statistical ruse this ‘human value’ by mixing with mere cash such intangibles as longevity,nutrition,education and political capability and so on. While a heroic endeavor in the last analysis it seems hardly very convincing.It turns ethics into a gross calculation of accountancy.
And does it not try to hide under the sand the sheer precariousness of such a project as abstracting from the indivisible, inexorable totality of human accomplishments,of labour in the Marxian sense? Marx has found such an alienated process of production not only dehumanizing but also inherently contradictory and therefore doomed to crisis.Its moment of triumph is also the beginning of its decline.
By abstracting economics from the entire gamut of human existence,the challenges of producing a human way of life that fulfils all the human potentialities and aspirations for aesthetic,moral,intellectual and spiritual as well material satisfaction, this method of calculation and intellection blinds human beings to the great and dire complexity of the circumstances of human life. A few are content with the wealth they command and let everything else of worth go to ruin.They waste billions on the tinsel lustre of a lavish wedding or Yogic or sacred MELA and ignore the rampant crime,the monstrous degradation in the worth of men,the dignity of women and the security of children.Human beings are perpetually thrown at one another’s throat.Art and culture are reduced to a thin film of refined taste and discrimination for enjoyment of a few.
The so-called economy is allowed to hurtle on while its drivers are either uncertain against its destination or like drunk drivers themselves compromised by their own interests in the course to be clear-eyed.The state in spite of its claim to impartiality wobbles dangerously in its dispensation of justice and the umpires fail to intervene in moments of fatal lapses by rulers in their mistaken view that the rulers know best.Even if such growth is proved with a seemingly objective measurable unit it is only an illusion.Things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
