In a recent post on her blog, Fearless Heart (a post that also appears at Psychology Today), Miki Kashtan, cofounder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication, brought forward some fascinating connections between Gandhian economics and the commons. She focused on two key themes – the satisfaction of human needs and the idea of trusteeship for things that exceed our needs. Kashtan writes:
The fundamental basis of Gandhian economics is a commitment to universal well-being. Like so many who are interested in universal well-being, Gandhi was led, inexorably, to looking at the difficult question of need satisfaction, since physical finitude makes it clearly impossible for everyone to have everything they want all the time. Like many others, he attempted to address this challenge by supporting a shift from the multiplication of wants to the fulfillment of needs.
Kashtan notes that this is a highly complex issue, however. What is a need? How do we answer this question individually or collectively, and actually allocate resources to meet our needs? It first bears noting that much of Gandhian economics is based on his particular circumstances and those of India in the early 20th century. Still, certain fundamental principles such as simplicity, localism and decentralization should remain a beacon for us today.
When Gandhi wrote, “The spinning wheel and the spinning wheel alone will solve, if anything will solve, the problem of the deepening poverty of India,” he could have been talking about the commons. His point was that we need to devise new collective forms of self-reliance and self-sufficiency that will let us disengage from oppressive forms of provisioning and invent more humane and satisfying alternatives. Isn’t that precisely the lesson of the free software, local food and hackerspace/maker movements (and countless other commons)?