Eric Hobsbawm concluded his book, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century with the following paragraph. ‘We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and – if readers share the argument of the book – why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.’¹ 

This darkness could be barbarism or even extinction! As early as 1972, the Club of Rome in its report, The Limits to Growth, warned that the average quality of life would decline sometime during the 21st century and pleaded for a profound, proactive societal innovation in order to avoid an increase in the ecological footprint of humanity beyond the carrying capacity of planet earth. The study, repeated in 1992 and 2002, reaffirmed the same conclusion.

The sceptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, evidently did not agree with the report. He concluded his frighteningly referenced book of the same title with the following words: ‘Thus, this is the very message of the book: children born today – in both the industrialized world and developing countries – will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and more possibilities, without the global environment being destroyed.’² 

However, a vast majority of the scientific community does not agree with this simplistic linear extrapolation of the past. We cannot follow that path any more. Global warming is real, climate change is real, resource depletion is real, pollution accretion is real, shrinkage of fresh water sources is real, struggles for control over diminishing resources are increasing – all these are real. That human beings are ingenious enough to solve the problems resulting from their own actions is nothing but a modern superstition.

There are many things that we cannot change. We cannot alter the radioactivity in the fission products from spent nuclear fuel; we cannot bring back the Himalayan or Alpine glaciers; we cannot rebuild the polar ice cap; we cannot manufacture coal, petroleum or natural gas; and we cannot instantaneously switch over to solar energy for everything. There are ever so many problems that science and technology cannot solve or will take too long a period to do so.

In the 2002 study, The Limits to Growth, Meadows and Meadows stated: ‘The limits are real and close and in some cases below our current levels of throughput. But there is just enough time, with no time to waste… just enough environmental resilience and enough human virtue to bring about a planned reduction in the ecological foot print of human kind: a sustainability revolution to a much better world for the vast majority.’³ 

Yes, just enough time. Or is it already too late? But better later than never.

We realize that each day we are getting more trapped. We have been trying to convince society, especially the politicians and intellectuals, that ‘tomorrow will be too late’, but without much success. It was during the long years of public debate, that often became polemical, about the Silent Valley Hydro Electric Project and later, on the critical importance of not just preserving but nurturing our forests, that the question of ‘sustainable development’ was brought centre-stage. What is development? Is it mere growth? No, development is not mere growth, we argued. It is the improvement in the physical-biological and also socio-cultural quality of life that constitutes human development. We argued that beyond a certain stage of growth there could be development with or without growth.

 

The seeds of the concept of the Fourth World had already been sown in my mind during 1962-65 when I was a doctoral scholar in Moscow. After passing out from the Trivandrum Engineering College as an electrical engineer in 1956, and a short stint of training in the Tata Hydro Electric Company, I joined the first batch of the atomic energy establishment, Trombay Training School. The successful launch of the first Sputnik by Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, six months ahead of the USA, made such an impression on me that I decided to go to the USSR rather than the US for higher studies. I began to learn Russian earnestly. It was only five years later, in 1962, that I could realize my dream. In October 1962, I joined the Moscow Power Institute as a PhD student. That I was awarded a PhD degree three years later is a routine story. But what I learnt of life there – of socialism and communism, of the paradise built and the signs of its decay that were already visible – was to have a profound impact on my later life.

 

What I saw in the USSR at that time was far beyond my expectations – no starvation, no poverty, and no unemployment. Every child, as well as every ill person, was well looked after, and everyone had a home with access to gas and electricity. Everything, including travel, was inexpensive. The minimum income level was about three times the subsistence level – or the poverty line, in our language. Science and technology and productive forces were growing rapidly and the country had already overtaken the US in space and nuclear technology. No citizen had to worry about the future, nor about the future of their children or grandchildren. Lifelong security was ensured by the society and not through personal accumulation of wealth; there was no necessity for that. Yes, the USSR at that time appeared a real paradise on earth.

I had not visited the US at that time. Was it a better paradise? That depends on one’s concept of paradise. If Indra’s swarga is one’s concept of paradise, USA was a better one, but not for all – not for the unemployed, the old or the ailing.

Unfortunately, the people of Soviet Union were taught that the success of socialism lay in overtaking capitalist USA in per capita consumption of everything. Even as early as the early sixties, symptoms of the disease which was to later kill the Soviet Union, and defeat the first socialist experiment, were already visible.

 

There was a craze for ‘foreign’, especially American, goods; there was a black market in the dollar-rouble exchange. The Soviet concept of development or progress was anything but socialistic, no different from the capitalist concept of abundance. As against the ambitious goal for ‘upbringing of socialist persons’ (Vospitaaniye Sotsialeecheskaya Cheloveka), circumstances had moulded them into persons with capitalistic aspirations.

There was tangible alienation of the people from the Bolshevik party. There was visible degradation in the ethics of communist party members. Dictatorship of the proletariat had become the rule of the party. It soon degenerated into the rule of the party elite. The absence of democracy made internal correction difficult. The governmental bureaucracy had increasingly becoming obstructionist, corrupt and inefficient. Marxist philosophy become unpopular among students of Soviet universities.

Discussions with party comrades in the institute revealed that were they aware of these problems; they even assured me that they were striving to rectify them. But they failed and probably were bound to fail in the absence of democracy.

I hoped for a socialist experiment – with democracy, a concept of development based on quality of life, accepting freedom for different nationalities – to succeed in India. I wished very much that the children of India too would enjoy their childhood as Soviet children once did. I wanted people of India to be rich in goods necessary both for their physical as well as cultural well-being. I also knew that without an active and creative democracy this could not be achieved. One has to start with strengthening democracy, with more and more people participating. It was also clear that in the contemporary world of scientific and technological revolutions, democratic participation is possible only on the basis of ‘knowledge’.

 

It is as clear as daylight that the human species has chosen a wrong path for development, one which will invariably lead to an economic catastrophe. This can even result in the reversion of the species to something that may be called a post-capitalistic barbarism. The trauma of this fall might even lead to a virtual extinction of the species. The only redeeming factor is that humans can foresee this impending catastrophe and do something about it. If only we fully internalize the possibility of such a catastrophe and start preparing ourselves to face it from now itself, we may be able to survive, both as a species and as a civilization.

‘Business as usual’ will not suffice. We have to make drastic changes in world outlook, in economics and in politics. One may call it socialism of the 21st century or solar socialism or solar democracy. Indications of such a society are discernible in the Communist Manifesto and in Hind Swaraj. Both argue for de-urbanization, horizontally networked local economies, wisdom to distinguish between pseudo needs manufactured by capitalism (greed) and real needs, inter- and intra-generational equity and emancipation from all forms of alienation.

The campaign initiated by the KSSP as part of its Golden Jubilee activities has as its governing theme: ‘Let’s Strive for Another Kerala’. The development path being followed by Kerala during the past two decades, though one of ‘high growth’, has not been inclusive. As in other parts of the country, inequality here too has increased as the earlier development path of Kerala, distinguished for its focus on human and social development, has given way to a growth-centric one conforming to the national path.

Every new system – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – initially grows within the womb of the older system. Socialistic societies can be and have to be nurtured within the womb of capitalism till they grow strong enough to emerge. Kerala had an excellent opportunity to embark on such an experiment – the massive People’s Plan Campaign that was initiated in 1996. The left unfortunately lost the plot because it did not consciously attempt to develop socialistic societies – in economy, in world outlook, and in culture.

 

The term ‘Kerala Model’ highlighted the achievements in social development, whose parameters are high longevity, low infant mortality rate, low birth rate, high level of literacy and so on. It is generally believed that there is a strong correlation between economic development and social development. The Kerala experience seems to complicate such a simplistic causal relationship. And there is a reason for it. The relationship between social development and economic development is mediated through consumption of goods and services. Goods and services are produced, exchanged and consumed because they have some use value, useful to the promotion of quality of life. Such a correlation can be established only if we define consumption and quality of life independently. The UNDP definition, however, privileges per capita income. We can define social development differently using two indices, both being expressed independently of income. One is the physical-biological quality or material quality of life (PQL) and the other, spiritual or non-material quality of life (SQL).

 

We may define a physical-biological quality of life, using three indicators.

(i) Effective expectation of the community, which is the regular life expectation less the average lifetime integrated morbidity period, morbidity being defined as the condition under which any individual is incapacitated from participating in the societal processes in a normal manner due to physical or mental ill-health.

(ii) Liberation from heavy manual labour with the use of labour saving machines and from boring and repetitive, non-creative labour by restructuring the labour process or, to put it differently, the degree to which productive labour becomes a pleasure and not a punishment.

(iii) Sustainability, meaning thereby to ensure that future generations too can enjoy an equally high quality of life. As Marx succinctly put it: ‘…all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as pari patres familias…’ (good heads of the household). The lesser the use of non-renewable resources, the greater the reliance on renewable resources and the lesser the overall throughput of material resources for the same effective life expectation and liberation from boring, tiresome manual labour, the higher is the PQL of society.

We may define the spiritual (non-material) quality of life (SQL) of a society using, again, three parameters.

1. Social quality: the lesser the crime rate, like murder, robbery, rape, violence against women and alcoholism, the higher the social quality of life of that community. One can, to begin with, give a measure to this quality as the ratio of ‘total state expenditure on health care plus education divided by total expenditure on military, police, judiciary and administration.’ The higher the ratio, the higher the social quality of life of that society.

2. Cultural quality: This is more difficult to define. Tentatively one may define this using three parameters (a) the average number of years of education, (b) average number of hours spent in reading and, finally, (c) the average level of participation/attendance in cultural and sports activities.

3. Economic quality: Though we wanted to keep income out from our quality of life consideration, inequality in income has to be taken into account. This can be expressed simply in terms of the gini coefficient. The lower the gini coefficient of a society, the higher is its economic quality – absolute incomes are immaterial.

 

It is generally believed that high income will lead to high PQL and SQL, because it allows society to consume more. It is seldom asked: What do they consume? Goods consumed by people or produced in a society have got three types of use values.

a) Welfare value: food, medicine, cloths, housing for example, have welfare values. If these are in short supply, both PQL and SQL will come down. There is a class of goods and services like a grinder, microwave oven, induction heater, cycle, and so on, which add to the comfort of living and also increase the socially available leisure time.

b) Vanity values: There is a class of goods and services like, for example, gold ornaments, expensive clothes, exotic food and private cars which do not improve either PQL or SQL. In order to produce these goods, society as a whole has to put in more labour. This reduces the socially available leisure time and hence will lead to a reduction in SQL.

c) There is a third category of goods which are detrimental to societal well being – narcotics/alcohol, weapons of mass destruction, among others. Increased manufacture and use of these goods reduces the quality of life of humans at a global level.

 

Theoretically, it should be possible to restructure global society such that wars and war efforts become unnecessary. Consumption of narcotics and alcohol too should be consciously reduced. Their production and the labour thereof, can be progressively reduced to zero, thereby increasing socially available leisure time as against socially necessary labour time. Further, both society and the individuals can further decide to reduce their own vanity consumption (according to their own definition of vanity goods) and thus further reduce the socially necessary labour time.

Capitalism cannot survive without constantly accumulating capital, and for this both production and exchange of goods have to continuously increase. The variety and demand for welfare goods being necessarily limited, the only way to expand production is through expanded production of vanity goods and through creating a feeling that they are welfare goods. A new economic (call it Human Economy?) theory has to be evolved using categories like socially available leisure time, value of leisure, welfare value including comfort value, vanity value, destructive value, physical and spiritual quality of life and so on. Such an economics will demand the understanding of a number of additional categories, which are necessary for working out an internally consistent social organization.

The categories like development, growth, progress, equity, sustainability are all known. Even the concept of social security is understood. But there are certain other important aspects which require a deeper understanding. They are rurbanism, wastage index, dehumanization index, and local economy.

 

Rurbanism: Agriculture has been under threat the world over since long. The new phenomenon of global warming only makes the threat graver. All of this originates from one tendency: urbanization leading to extremely uneven distribution of population or centres of consumption, while all the resources such as soil nutrients, water and sunlight – the essential elements of primary production – are evenly distributed in character. Drawing on the observations of the well-known soil chemists of the 19th century like Justus Von Liebeg and others on the disruption of soil metabolism, Karl Marx concluded that cities like London, on the one hand, extract nutrients from the soils of far off villages and countries in the form of foodgrains and fibres and destroy its health and, on the other, accumulate them in the form of human excreta and urban waste, polluting the river Thames and causing a health havoc to city dwellers. Marx and Engels argued that no socialism or communism is possible without restructuring cities like London. In the Communist Manifesto, as an important post-revolution programme, they therefore recommended a ‘combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries and a gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by ensuring a more equitable distribution of population over the country.’

This proposition has wide ramifications. It means saying ‘no’ to the hegemony of large-scale industries; a strengthening of local economies; increase in local employment and production; reducing the quantum of travel and transport necessitated by large towns and concentration of production; higher participation of citizens in running the affairs of the society and a deepening of democracy; in short, creating an economy of ‘networks of associated producers’ through broad-based control over the means of production, and so on.

 

Today, a village need not mean the ancient type of villages without roads, electricity, telephones, schools, hospitals, theatres and so on. We can have all these and still remain a village centred society with relatively evenly distributed population. Kerala continues to exemplify this. It remains a rural-urban continuum with a spread out population, and a bulk of its agriculture distributed evenly. However, capitalistic notions of development, strongly shared even by the left, privilege urbanization, industrialization and world class metropolitan cities as the goals and means of development. Such notions also include increasing the tertiary sector, including those from speculative trading, real estate business, ravaging the soil, the rivers and forests, as a sign of progress. Any dependence on the primary sector is taken as a sign of underdevelopment. All these together are destroying the natural advantages which Kerala once enjoyed.

I believe that none of this will lead to any improvement in the quality of life of the citizens. Rather, a reduction in the daily travel necessitated by the requirement of earning a livelihood, reduction in a disruption of families because of economic activities, reduction in the dependence on food materials transported from far off places alongside associated risk of transport breakdowns – all these will improve the quality of life. A situation when a larger number of goods with welfare values are produced locally and more and more local employment is generated, reducing the average job-related travel distance of citizens, is a far more desirable goal.

 

One can define a Citizen Travel Index, based on the average daily or annual time spent for travel by a citizen, to eke out a livelihood. A reduction in this can be taken as an improvement in the quality of life. Similarly, one can define a Material Haulage Index, based on the distance travelled by a commodity from the point of production to the point of consumption, with weightage given both for quantity and value – expressed finally in terms of total dollar/rupee – kilometres of consumption.

A high Travel Index and a high Haulage Index indicate advancement in the wrong direction – towards a decreasing quality of life. The two can be, if necessary, combined into a Wastage Index. Globally the Wastage Index is increasing. Soon we will reach a point of discontinuity with nowhere to go!

In any society, resources spent on education, health care, transport, communication, energy, culture etc. improve the quality of life of the society. A high level of social insecurity, on the other hand, denotes a poor quality of life. This necessitates larger and larger resources to be spent on the so-called ‘state’ – on police, jails, judiciary, defence and administration. The ratio of such expenses – which may be collectively called repressive expenses or control expenses – to the total expenses of the government (as different from the state) may be taken as the level of underdevelopment and may be called as ‘Dehumanization Index’.

A new economy – one can call it an ‘adiabatic economy’ – will have to be developed. Local (different levels of localness) economies will have to become self-reliant based on their own renewable and non-renewable resources and annual supply of solar energy and rainwater. The capability of labour power has to be continuously upgraded to help local societies graduate from self-reliance to self-sufficiency. This should be the meaning and result of ‘development of productive forces’. It should help the local to become powerful enough to withstand the onslaught of the global, to make small not only beautiful but also powerful. Today, the development of productive forces is consciously geared to make the large powerful, to force small producers to part with their means of production and thus lead to the increasing corporatization of the world.

 

In my view, all these ideas are reflected, to a greater or lesser extent, in the recent campaign initiated by the KSSP. The idea was to impress the people on the need for social control over land use in the backdrop of ongoing destructive developments such as the digging or filling up of rice fields, mining of rivers, levelling of hills and quarrying of rocky lands. The real estate mafia, supported by a sand mafia, a clay mafia, land levelling and land filling mafia as component parts, has became invincible. Ironically, this grouping is more powerful than the liquor mafia. The booming construction industry does not contribute any use value. More than half of the new flats are reported to be unoccupied; others are under occupied.

People have to mount a campaign to force the government to enact and implement strict laws prohibiting any family from owning more than one dwelling unit. Policies have to be put in place that will attract investment in avenues compatible with the ideas and practice of sustainable development such as in renewable energy, recycling of wastes, non-polluting technologies, etc. Agriculture today warrants new sources of nutrients and water. Whatever nutrients we take away from the soil in the form of crops and wastes have to go back, so wrote Von Liebeg and other soil scientists. They also pointed out that adding chemical fertilizers does not help. That is why Marx, Gandhi and Mao argued that all excreta – animal and human – as well as all agricultural waste should go back into the soil.

 

A decade and half ago, the KSSP carried out an experiment: a sangha swapna or collective dreaming exercise. About sixty leading activists of one panchayat – Madakkathara village panchayat in Thrissur district – sat together to articulate their hopes and aspirations about the nature of their panchayat 25 years thence. At the end of the dreaming conclave they came up with a written report on their development perspective. They shared this dream with about 2000 citizens, took inputs from them and finally prepared a 25-year perspective plan. This perspective plan envisaged the following.

1. Full utilization of all cultivable land to yield maximum possible production in a sustainable manner.

2. To recycle all the locally generated organic waste.

3. To procure all the biodegradable waste from the neighbouring municipal corporation and convert it into organic manure to improve soil nutrients.

4. To have complete and scientific management of water as part of the command area of Peechi irrigation system.

5. To go for large-scale precision agriculture and thereby increase the efficiency of utilization of organic fertilizers and water.

6. To develop integrated animal husbandry of milk and meat animals like cow and goat; waste to food converters like pigs, poultry and fish and thus become self-sufficient in milk, meat, eggs and fish to ensure food self-sufficiency.

7. To ensure opportunities for economic activities (self as well as wage employment) for all those willing to work so that livelihood related long distance travel is reduced to a minimum and so also transportation of goods of consumption.

8. To set up industries to manufacture as many items of daily use as possible within the panchayat, as well as to share with neighbouring panchayats items requiring large-scale production.

9. To boycott all transnational, corporate products, wherever a near equivalent ‘local’ product can be produced,

10. To stop consuming goods which have only vanity values or destructive values.

11. To provide reasonable housing for all citizens of the panchayat, which requires only a small increase in the number and quality of dwellings.

12. To provide good quality education (regular and vocational) for 12 years, so that people acquire all the knowledge and skills, including fluency in the use of English language and computers, to live in a global 21st century.

13. To ensure neighbourhood schooling system of the highest quality so that children can go on foot or on cycle to schools, making the school bus system redundant.

14. To provide pedestrian walkways and cycle paths.

15. To provide high quality integrated health care services for all citizens free of cost and thus de-commercialize health care services.

16. To reduce inequalities in income, expenditure, education, housing, and in other spheres.

17. To ensure a high degree of social security for all citizens so that they do not have to amass wealth by hook or crook to ensure their long-term family security, and to develop a strong faith in the community.

18. To strengthen neighbourhood democracy so that nobody can upturn the achievements of the community.

19. To reduce their carbon footprint continuously to zero by embarking upon an ambitious programme for carbon sequestration and food production through massive cultivation of food growing timber trees like jackfruit, bread fruit, mango, coconut, and so on.

20. To produce all the energy required by the panchayat through rooftop solar photovoltaic systems (ranging from 1 kw to 3 kw per household), both for households as well as public and other institutions, thus doing away with cooking gas and coal as well as electricity from thermal stations.

21. To become, effectively a self sufficient village republic of the 21st century – linked to other panchayats, horizontally and not hierarchically.

 

Such were their dreams. However, the highly splintered and mutually inimical political groups (in all parties) ensured that this dream was not realized. The situation is the same throughout Kerala – citizens are not free to dream and act. Political parties of all kinds are afraid of dreaming citizens!

The campaign for ‘Another Kerala’ calls for the people to dream about a new Kerala, a different Kerala, panchayat by panchayat, town by town. There are thousands of citizens – academics and lay people, cultural activists and political activists, workers and peasants – who feel deeply that the future shall not be a continuation of the present

The campaign enjoins them to dream boldly, to think deeply, to plan scientifically, and to act with determination for a better tomorrow, for a different Kerala, for a different India and for a different world.

Nobody can stop me from dreaming.

 

Footnotes:

1. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. Viking, 1995, p. 585.

2. Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 351-52.

3. Donella Medows, Jorgan Sanders and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update. Earth Scan, Asian Edition, 2005.