Gandhi against the “civilization of the machine”

Reproduction of another extract of the excellent Technocriticisms: from the refusal of machines to the contestation of technosciences, a book by the historian François Jarrige published in 2014. This passage discusses Mahatma's criticism of technology and the use of machines by British colonists to enslave the Indian people. In the 1920s, Gandhi launched campaigns of civil disobedience and passive resistance. He makes a homemade tool, the spinning wheel (chakra), the symbol of the struggle for independence. Here is what we could recently read about it in an article in the newspaper Le Monde :

“In the early 1920s, Gandhi (1869-1948) decided to rethink his fight against the British colonizer. The extent of the repression that fell on his supporters, several hundred of whom were killed in April 1919 during the massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, prompted him to open a new front. Now, it is also on the economic field that he will carry the weapon of civil disobedience.

The terms of trade imposed on India by England are particularly unequal. The country that, until the 18th century, exported its fabrics and canvases to the rest of the world became an importer. Cotton was confiscated by English industrialists, who processed it and shipped the finished products back to India, sold at a high price. To challenge this dependence and bring out an identity object capable of crystallizing a desire for reconquest, the spinning wheel is obvious.

“Spin and Weave” became the slogan that Mahatma (the “great soul”) kept repeating across the country, where the mobilization against taxes on salt and indigo to dye fabrics blue was being organized in parallel. Never separating himself from his own spinning wheel, he assures that he does not eat until he has used it for half an hour every day and calls for the reappropriation of looms that have long been abandoned. Everywhere, their rattling noise must be heard

Everyone is called upon to work the local cotton themselves to make khadi, which has become the symbol of the economic rehabilitation of the country. Wearing the modest fabric that low-income Indians wear became a sign of support for independence. In major ports, they started burning crates of clothing and fabric imported from mills in Manchester or Leeds. “It is hunger that is driving India to the spinning wheel”, argues the Mahatma.

In the spirit of Gandhi, this movement of collective reappropriation of a traditional craft activity goes well beyond an act of anti-colonialist resistance. It is part of a more general distrust of industrial modernity. “The machine is a bad thing”, is used to say the person who also believes that “the train can only spread evil” and pleads against the electrification of homes.^[1].”

The anti-industrial thinking of the nonviolence icon, as well as the importance of reclaiming material autonomy in the anti-colonial struggle, have largely been overlooked by protest movements in the West. However, they are essential strategic elements in order to increase the effectiveness of the fight against power.

Gandhi or the political economy of the spinning wheel (by François Jarrige)

Finally, no one illustrates the ambivalence of the relationship with technology in the colonial world better than Gandhi. If indeed he uses a simple traditional spindle to weave his clothes, he is traveling by train and using a watch. The figure of Gandhi deserves attention because the criticism of the machine occupies a central place in his speech and his action. However, while his successors and followers venerated him for his contribution to the political independence of India, they rarely took seriously his criticism of the technological surge and his proposal to restore the indigenous local economy. For Gandhi (1869-1948), the “civilization of the machine” and big industry created a daily and invisible slavery that impoverished entire segments of the population, despite the myth of global abundance. While some reduce Gandhian thought to a set of crude and simplistic principles, others see it as a rich “moral economy”, distinct from both liberal traditions and Marxism.^[2].

Born in 1869 in the state of Gujarat, while British rule over India was increasing and the railway network was expanding, Gandhi left to study law in England in 1888, like hundreds of young Indians from the upper castes. After 1893, he went to South Africa, where he prospered as a lawyer and learned about politics in contact with racial discrimination. There, he gradually developed a method of non-violent civil disobedience that would make him famous and organize the struggle of the Indian community. When he returned to India after 1915, he organized a protest against taxes considered too high, and more generally against discrimination and colonial laws. During the interwar period, as leader of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi led a campaign for aid to the poor, for the liberation of Indian women, for fraternity between communities of different religions or ethnicities, for an end to untouchability and caste discrimination, and for the economic self-sufficiency of the nation, but above all for Swaraj — the independence of India from any foreign domination.

In 1909, Gandhi wrote one of his rare theoretical texts in the form of a Socratic dialogue with a young Indian revolutionary. This text, Hind Swaraj, written in Gujarati before being translated into English, aims first of all to detach Indian youth from the most violent fringes of the nationalist movement^[3]. However, the work was forbidden until 1919. For Gandhi, these young revolutionaries are in fact the victims of a blind veneration of technical progress and brutal force imported from the West. He therefore progressively broadened his political criticism to include industrial and technical civilization itself. Gandhian thought is based on a strong criticism of Western modernity in all its forms. On the political level, he criticizes the State and defends the ideal of a non-violent democratic society, formed by federated villages and based on the call for voluntary simplicity. He denounces the notions of development and civilization, and the technological surge that underlies them, as sources of inequality and multiple perverse effects. For Gandhi, “the machine allows a small minority to live from the exploitation of the masses [...] but the force that moves this minority is not humanity or the love of others, but lust and greed”. Political autonomy is therefore useless if it is not accompanied by a profound questioning of modern industrial civilization. “It would be foolish, believes Gandhi, to say that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller”, and “we do not have to be happy about the prospect of increased manufacturing.” Gandhi defends the development of self-sufficient local crafts within the framework of the autonomy of villages and the limitation of needs.

Gandhi belongs neither to the Indian neotraditionalist currents who consider the ancient Hindu civilization to be intrinsically superior, nor to the camp of modernising nationalists seeking to copy the West in order to turn its arms against the colonial order.^[4]. He intends to define an original third way. Gandhian thought draws on multiple sources. In a way, it belongs to the antimodernist current that developed in Europe at the end of the 19th century. He read William Morris and John Ruskin, and was influenced by Tolstoy's anarchist Christianity.^[5]. His vision of the world was nourished by the intellectual atmosphere of the end of the Victorian era and by the ethical and aesthetic criticism of the technical and industrial surge that was developing then. Gandhi is neither hostile to science nor anti-rationalist, as is sometimes written, he first criticizes the way in which scientific discoveries and the use of reason are applied and put at the service of the powerful and exploited. He criticizes the West's blind faith in material progress and its desire for power, which is embodied in the technological surge. He also wants to save England from its own demons. For him, “mechanization has impoverished India”; it is transforming factory workers into “slaves”. It is not by “reproducing Manchester in India” that Indians will emancipate themselves from British rule. One of the particularly powerful technical bases of English domination was precisely the development of the railway: “Without railways, the British could not have such control over India.” Supposed to liberate the Indian people, railways were in reality used above all by the authorities as an effective tool for networking and dominating. “The railways also increased the frequency of famines because, given the ease of the means of transport, People sell their grain and it's sent to the most expensive market” at instead of being self-consumed or sold at the nearest market. Gandhi thus tries to link his criticism of large-scale industry and European technologies to his project of political emancipation.^[6]. It shows that progress leads to a deterioration in living conditions, that “civilization” constantly creates new needs that are impossible to satisfy, that it deepens inequalities and plunges part of humanity into slavery. For him, this type of civilization is hopeless. The mechanization and globalization of trade are a disaster for India, the Manchester mills having destroyed the crafts and the universe of Indian weavers: “The machinist civilization will never stop claiming victims. Its effects are deadly: people are attracted to it and burn themselves there, like butterflies in the flame of a candle. It breaks all ties with religion to in fact only derive tiny benefits from the world. Civilization [machinist] flatters us in order to drink our blood better. When the effects of this civilization are fully known, we will realize that religious superstition (traditional) is quite harmless compared to that which pervades modern civilization.^[7].”

Gandhian criticism of machinery was very intriguing in the interwar period. It is found in its economic program based on the defense of village industries as well as in its project to “demecanize the textile industry”, which immediately seems utopian and unfeasible. Moreover, Gandhi's positions went from total opposition to European machines to a more nuanced criticism: in October 1924, to a journalist's question, “Are you against all machines? ”, he replies: “How could I be... [I am] against the indiscriminate infatuation with machines, and not against machines as such^[8].” He also speaks out against those who accuse him of wanting to “destroy all machines”: “My objective is not to destroy the machine but to impose limits on it”, that is to say to control its uses so that it does not affect either the natural environments or the situation of the poorest.^[9]. He ultimately developed a philosophy of the limits and control of technological gigantism. But this discourse raises a lot of misunderstanding and is gradually being erased as a relic of an obscurantist tradition. The socialists, and with them Nehru himself in his autobiography published in 1936, lament that Gandhi “blessed the relics of the old order.” Moreover, his analysis of industrial technology was quickly marginalized at the country's independence by the forced modernization project. But the figure of Gandhi also exerts a considerable fascination well beyond the Indian peasantry. In the interwar period, his criticism became a source of inspiration for social movements and thinkers from very diverse backgrounds, even as the criticism of the “civilization of machines” was accentuated in Europe.

François Jarrige