Samar Bagchi

On 26th November 2019 Agence France-Presse reported from Paris that the scientists of United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) have predicted that if the global temperature rise has to be restricted to 1.5°C then the global emission of CO2 has to be reduced by 76% by 2030. Acknowledging the imminent ecological crisis endangering the very existence of life on earth, European Union (EU) has decided that by 2050 it will bring down carbon emission to zero. On Monday, 2nd December 2019, United Nation’s chief Antonio Gutters while opening the plenary of a UN climate conference at Madrid, said, “One is the path of surrender, where we have sleepwalked past the point of no return, jeopardising the health and safety of everyone on the planet. Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand, that fiddled while the planet burned?” All the aspects of nature on which life depends—forest, biodiversity, water availability, air and water quality, Arctic and Antarctic ice, glaciers etc.—are endangered. 

The roots of the present social and ecological collapse lie in our worldview of what we call ‘Progress’ and ‘civilisation’. Socialist theory and reigning historiography recognise the continuous advance of technology, industry and society from primitive communism to socialism as ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’—which has been questioned by Indian thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi. Tagore, while touring China in 1924, said in an address, “We have for over a century been dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot choked by the dust, deafened by the noise, humbled by our own helplessness and overwhelmed by the speed. We agreed to acknowledge that this chariot drive was progress and that progress was civilisation. If we ever ventured to ask ‘progress towards what and progress for whom’ it was considered to be peculiarly oriental to entertain such doubts about the absoluteness of progress. Of late, a voice has come to us bidding us to take count of not only the scientific perfection of the chariot but also the depth of ditches lying across its path.” Gandhi had similarly warned, “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” The words of Tagore and Gandhi seem to be prophetic. Marx inherited the ‘progressivist’ interpretation of history from enlightenment thinkers and Hegel.  

If we look backwards into history, we will find that the human civilisation has produced great peaks in creativity, self expression and wisdom in which humans differ from any other life form.  In comparison to the past, the present civilisation seems barren. Take Mediterranean civilisation as an example. Between the 7th Century BC and 3rd century AD, the world had witnessed in the Mediterranean area an astonishing flowering of civilisational expressions in philosophy, sciences, arts, drama and architecture. This flowering of culture took place even though they did not have electricity, mobiles, computers and rockets, super highways and automobiles and  Coca Cola. Witnessing the barrenness of the present civilisation, the English poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “Where is the life we have lost in living / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge.” Looking at the social and environmental crisis that the earth faces today, it seems that mankind has lost the sense of wisdom.

I think the cause of the escalating ecological crisis lies in the gluttonous consumerism that has gripped the handful of rich in the world. But the foundation of this crisis was laid by the philosophers of sciences—Francis Bacon (b. 1561 – d. 1626) and Rene Descartes (b. 1596 – d. 1650)—in the 16th and 17th centuries. They talked about extracting the ‘fruits of science’. Bacon emphasised that science would increase human power and give a better control of nature. He wrote, “empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences.” No wonder that Bacon has been called the ‘philosopher of industrial science’. Descartes in his Discourse on Method  wrote, “By them I perceived it to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life; and … by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.” This was the Judeo–Christian world view. The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, says: God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Marx and Engels celebrated unreservedly, following Bacon and Descartes, the “subjection of nature’s forces to man”. In the Communist Manifesto Marx predicted the “clearing of whole continents for cultivation” by modern bourgeois production. Descartes’ method would reduce all actions and phenomenon in nature to mere principles of matter and motion. He laid the foundations of the Newtonian mechanistic–deterministic worldview. Engels was aware of the dangers of the reductionist worldview as expressed by Bacon and Descartes. Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring, “The analysis of nature into its constituent parts was the fundamental condition for the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature during the last four hundred years. But the method of investigation has left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in isolation, detached from the vast interaction of things.” 

It is a fact of history that colonialism, Industrial Revolution in Europe and the rise of capitalism changed the whole characteristic of science and technology. It was highjacked by capital and became a handmaiden of the ruling class to strengthen its domination and hegemony over society. Socialism came as a challenge to capitalism with the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution. But Lenin, Stalin and later Soviet leaders planned to fulfill the objectives of communism—‘each according to its ability and each according to its need’—through a highly industrialised society. Lenin said, “communism in Russia means electrification of Russia”. Stalin wrote that the objective of socialism is “securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole society through the continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production on the basis of higher techniques.” Soviet leaders started speaking of surpassing USA in per capita production, thereby producing abundance in production of goods and services in society for the satisfaction of the material needs of man, which will create the material basis for achieving the ideals of communism. Late Harry Magdoff, co-editor of the famous American socialist magazine Monthly Review, in a letter to Michael Lebowitz of Venezuela wrote, ‘When I worked at the War Production Board I met with members of the Russian purchasing mission and was astonished, among other things, by their worship of the big and the focus on catching up and overtaking the United States.”  

In the middle of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was at its peak, it was not impossible for Marx to envisage the impending ecological collapse that the Earth faces today because of the burgeoning consumerism for maximising profit during the last 200 years or so. The famous American writer Mark Twain wrote, “Civilisation is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.” A statistic will give us an idea of the growth of ‘unnecessary necessities’. There has been a phenomenal growth of production of goods by the end of the 20th century.  In the middle of the Industrial Revolution, in 1800, when an American used to go to a market, one had a choice of only 300 items to buy in a market space of about 150 sq m. But in 2000, when an American, living in a city having a population of a hundred thousand, went to the market, one had a choice of one million items in a market space of 1.5 million sq m. This abundance in production is at the root of the ecological crisis destabilising the four primary bases of nature: land, air, water and biodiversity. The planners of communist society did not consider the inherent dangers and dialectics of ‘continuous expansion and perfection of socialist production’. I have full faith in the egalitarianism of a communist society but Marxists have to differentiate between ‘need’ and media-inspired ‘scarcity conditioning’ of the human mind. 

Tagore wrote, “Simplicity, naturalness and ease are the marks of the civilized, and excess and ostentation, of the barbarian…. This is the simple truth, and it must be brought home to our boys in every possible way and instilled in their nature.” A new kind of education as envisaged by Tagore and Gandhi has to be started right from the childhood, instilling in the mind of a child the words of the philosopher–mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), “Humankind is only a very small link in the immense web of nature, but it is the only one that through thought understands nature; it is the only species on earth to be responsible for the earth and will be able to transform it for the better or for worse.”  Humans have to decide how science and technology have to be used to live life simply in a future society. We have to decouple science and technology from the grip of a consumerist society—be it capitalistic or socialistic.

Hence we find that so far as the maximisation of industrial production is concerned there is not much difference between capitalism and socialism. On the other hand, Gandhi says, “Industrialism, I am afraid, is going to be a curse for mankind. Exploitation of one nation by another cannot go on for all time. Industrialism depends entirely on your capacity to exploit, on foreign markets being open to you, and on the absence of competition…. India, when it begins to exploit other nations—as it must, if it becomes industrialised—will be a curse for other nations, a menace to the world.” Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, in his book Small is Beautiful, says, “As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses…. The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.”  Mass production continuously increases greed, which in turn impoverishes nature. So, Gandhi says, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed.”  

On 5th October 1945, Gandhi wrote to Nehru, “The first thing I want to write about is the difference in outlook between is. If the difference is fundamental then I feel the public should also be made aware of it…. I am convinced that if India is to attain true freedom and through India the world also, then sooner or later the fact must be recognised that the people will have to live in villages, not in towns, in huts not in palaces. Crores of people will never be able to live at peace with each other in towns and palaces. They will have then no recourse but to resort to violence and untruth…. While I admire modern science … which should be reclothed and refashioned aright. You must not imagine that I am envisaging our village life as it is today. The village of my dreams is still in my mind. After all every man lives in the world of his dreams. My ideal village will contain intelligent human beings. They will not live in dirt and darkness as animals. Men and women will be free and able to hold their own against anyone in the world.” Nehru replied to Gandhi on 9th October, “It is 38 years since ‘Hind Swaraj’ was written. The world has completely changed since then, possibly in a wrong direction…. You are right in saying that the world, or a large part of it, appears to be bent on committing suicide. That may be an inevitable development of an evil seed in civilisation that has grown.” Nehru, in his Autobiography, further says, “We cannot stop the river of change or cut ourselves adrift from it, and psychologically we who have eaten of the apple of Eden cannot forget that taste and go back to primitiveness.”  So, the planners of India, after independence, tried to ape the Western paradigm of development and led India to a stage where the hungriest people of the world stay here in India, one lakh farmers have committed suicide in less than three decades, and every 3rd second a child dies of malnutrition.

Nehru understood at the fag end of his life the mistake that he had done. On 23rd September 1963, Nehru spoke in a seminar on ‘Social welfare in a developing economy’ thus, “My mind was trying to grapple with the problem of what to do with more than 5,50,000 villages of India and the people who live there…. If we were to think purely in terms of output, all the big and important factories in India are not really so important as agriculture…. what Gandhiji did was fundamentally right. He was looking all the time at the villages of India, at the most backward people in India in every sense, and he devised something. It was not merely the spinning wheel; that was only a symbol. He laid stress on village industries, which again to the modern mind does not seem very much worthwhile.” Again in a debate in Parliament on Planning on 11th December 1963, he said, “I begin to think more and more of Mahatma Gandhi’s approach. It is odd that I am mentioning his name in this connection. I am entirely an admirer of the modern machine, and I want the best machinery and the best technique, but, taking things as they are in India, however rapidly we advance towards  the machine age … the fact remains that large numbers of our people are not touched by it and will not be for a considerable time.”

It was a very late realisation of Nehru. He died in 1964.  

(Samar Bagchi is a scientist and former Director, Birla Industrial and Technological Museum, Kolkata. He is famed for his work on taking science to the masses.)