Sarvodaya has been the focus of considerable organising in India and Sri Lanka since the 1950s.[4] Sarvodaya adherents have gone into villages and worked at fostering self-reliance through practical means such as constructing housing and schools, installing energy systems and instituting soil conservation measures. These practical measures also serve to awaken individuals and groups to their own potentials for compassion, sharing and cooperative endeavour or, in other words, personal development and community building. Organisations and networks in what can be called the sarvodaya movement have supported such village work by recruiting volunteers, providing training and evaluating progress.
In spite of the enormous grassroots effort that has gone into promoting sarvodaya, the main path of development in India and Sri Lanka has been capitalist, to a large extent due to efforts by leading politicians. In India, national leaders have given lip service to Gandhian ideals but in practice given virtually no support to Gandhi’s vision of village democracy and self-reliance. This gives added weight to the reservation about the role of a sarvodaya state: the state, being a location of centralised power, is unlikely to provide much genuine support for a decentralised economic structure.
Outside India and Sri Lanka, sarvodaya is largely unknown. In developed countries, the principle of serving those with greatest need clashes with negative or hostile attitudes towards the poor and homeless, though serving the needy is not an enormous leap from familiar traditions of welfare, charity and mutual help. The idea of village democracy would require adaptation to be relevant to urban and suburban living, but it is not so far from notions of participatory democracy and experiences of community organising. However, sarvodaya’s commitment to bread labour is so alien as to be almost incomprehensible. Occupational specialisation is so elaborate in capitalist economies that bread labour appears only possible in some reversion to an agricultural society. Therefore this component would need some revamping to be relevant to a society with a high division of labour.
As a vision for an alternative, the possibility that sarvodaya might include a state can cause some difficulty. Although a sarvodaya state, namely the culmination of village democracies, is supposed to be very different from a capitalist state, nevertheless the concept gives more credibility to existing states than a model of stateless sarvodaya.
The greatest strength of sarvodaya as both a vision and a strategy for change is its total challenge to capitalist assumptions of inequality, competition, consumerism and alienating work. To raise sarvodaya as an alternative is to question the fundamentals of capitalism. Sarvodaya as a strategy for change has the advantage of being modular: local initiatives can be taken wherever possible, immediately, without waiting for wider changes.
Several of sarvodaya’s strengths are also its weaknesses. Because it is such a contrast to capitalism, it seems totally impractical in an industrial or postindustrial society. The method of local development is fine, but in itself contains no strategy for challenging the foundations of capitalism, namely the synergy of state power and corporate bureaucracy, including the influence of consumer goods, advertising and wage labour.
Anarchism
As a political philosophy and strategy for change, anarchism dates back to the 1800s, when in European socialist circles it was the major contender with Marxism. Whereas Marxism is primarily a critique of capitalism, anarchism is principally a critique of the state.[5]
While many anarchists still consider the state the main source of oppression, there has been a gradual broadening of concern among anarchists, so that anarchism has become a general critique of domination, including in its ambit the state, capitalism, patriarchy and domination of nature, among others. Given that many activists have taken on board feminist, antiracist, environmental and other causes, what continues to distinguish anarchist analysis is attention to problems with state power.
The anarchist alternative to the state can be called self-management which, contrary to the name, means direct collective control over decisions, typically at the level of workplaces and local communities. Rather than someone else having decision-making power — elected representatives, bosses, experts — groups of people have this power themselves. In workplaces, self-management means workers directly making decisions about what is produced, how the work is done and who does what. This is also called workers’ control.[6]
The word anarchy is commonly used in everyday speech and the media to mean chaos. In contrast, anarchy to anarchists means a society based on principles of freedom, equality and participation, without government or domination. Far from chaotic, it would be very well organised indeed — organised by the people in it.
Concerning capitalism, anarchism does not have its own separate analysis, but pretty much adopts the Marxist critique. Furthermore, anarchism shares Marxism’s ultimate goal, “communism” in its original sense of a classless society, without a state. Where anarchism dramatically departs from Marxism is in how to achieve a classless society. Since anarchists see the state as a central source of domination, they completely oppose the revolutionary capture of state power by vanguard parties — this is the core of the historical antagonism between Marxists and anarchists — and also reject socialist electoral strategies. Instead, anarchists favour self-management as the means as well as the goaclass="underline" workers and communities should take control over decisions that affect their lives. In either a gradual expansion or a rapid, revolutionary upsurge in self-management, the existing sources of state and capitalist domination would be superseded. Thus anarchists, like Gandhians, believe that the means should reflect the ends.
How an anarchist economic system would operate has not been given a lot of detailed attention, partly because it is assumed that the system would be set up by those participating in it rather than according to a theorist’s blueprint. One general vision is of free distribution.[7] Self-managed enterprises would produce goods for community needs. These goods would be available to anyone who needs them, without any system of monetary exchange. In order to coordinate production, enterprises would share information. For making higher-level decisions on all issues, the organising principle would be the federation. Each self-managing group would send one or more elected delegates to a delegate body which would make recommendations for the groups to consider. Delegates are bound by their groups’ decisions and can be recalled at any time, unlike representatives who are able to follow their own whims whatever the electorate prefers. The federation structure can have many layers, with delegates from delegate bodies meeting together and so forth. Delegate bodies would not have the power to make binding decisions. The function of federation is coordination, not rule.
It is now possible to consider anarchism according to the five principles of nonviolent economics.
Principle 1: cooperation. With the system of self-management, decisions are made collectively in a participatory fashion. While there can be disagreements and disputes, the basis for economic decision making is cooperation rather than competition.
Principle 2: serving those in need. The system of free distribution is designed to provide for human needs, in accordance with Marx’s principle of “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” (a principle rejected in actual socialist economies in favour of economic reward according to contributions). Unlike sarvodaya, anarchism does not make serving those in need a central moral principle. Instead, satisfying needs is treated more as a pragmatic issue, namely as a sensible goal that ought to be built into the way the economic system works.
4.
Detlef Kantowsky,
5.
On anarchism, see for example Daniel Guérin,
7.
Ken Smith,