Bazaars, Conversations & Freedom , livre ebook

Rajni Bakshi

BAZAARS, CONVERSATIONS AND FREEDOM
For a market culture beyond greed and fear
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Prelude A Walk Down Wall Street
1. The Need to Gather Rescuing Bazaars from Goddess TINA
2. Self-interest and Market Failure In Search of a Post-Autistic Economics
3. Can Money Work Differently? Community-Created Currencies
4. Competing Compassionately The Freedom to Cooperate
5. Cosmopolitan Localism Wall Street, Main Street and Beyond
6. Who Cares . . . Wins! Challenging the Divine Right of Capital
7. Nature Bats Last Earth as Home or Marketplace
Author s Note
Epilogue
Source Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
BAZAARS, CONVERSATIONS AND FREEDOM
Rajni Bakshi was educated at Indraprastha College, Delhi, George Washington University, Washington DC, and the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She has been writing for a wide range of English and Hindi publications for the last three decades.
Her previous works include: The Long Haul: The Bombay Textile Workers Strike, The Dispute Over Swami Vivekananda s Legacy: A Warning and an Opportunity, Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi, LETS Make it Happen: Alternative Economics and An Economics for Well-Being. She lives in Mumbai and is associated with the Centre for Education and Documentation. She also serves on the board of Citizens for Peace, as well as Child Rights and You.
In Memory of Sant Dass father, mentor, inspiration and Dayaji
With untellable shukriya to Pushpa and Rohini
Prelude
A Walk Down Wall Street
It was on 11 September 1609, that the first European set foot on the island we now call Manhattan. Henry Hudson came ashore near about the site where the World Trade Center was later to soar and crash. The explorer and his crew of twenty, aboard the ship Half Moon , were working for the newly formed Dutch East India Company. Their mission was to find the fabled Northwest Passage which would allow European trade vessels to navigate past the frozen northern coastline of America to reach China.
Sailing into the mouth of the river that was later named after him, Hudson saw scores of native people paddling their canoes between the mainland and an island they called Menatay- the place where the sun is born . The southern tip of Menatay was a summertime gathering place where the Delaware people came to mingle, converse and barter. Hudson and his crew ventured into this gathering with an offering of beads, knives and hatchets. In turn they were given beaver and otter skins. Here was free exchange in an almost pristine form. Hudson s journals glowed with accounts of the loving, generous nature of the indigenous people.
Within a few years, the Delaware gathering place gave way to a rag-tag settlement of Dutch traders and immigrants. When guns, germs and greed replaced the bonhomie of first contact, the European settlers built a small wood and mud barricade across the narrow southern tip of Manhattan. The walls of Fort Amsterdam were a symbolic representation of collapsed conversations.
Eventually, the Delaware people retreated inland. The expanding population of European settlers now declared Fort Amsterdam to be an obstructing nuisance . So they pulled it down. The short and narrow street that replaced the barricade was named, naturally, Wall Street. A vastly different kind of meeting place and market began to take shape in and around the literal and metaphorical Wall Street. Free exchange gradually morphed into an idea known as the free market .
Three hundred and ninety-nine years later, almost to the day that Hudson landed there, Wall Street imploded. From the primitive barter hub of the Delaware tribe to the fall of Lehman Brothers and other giant finance companies in September 2008 we can find a wealth of encoded messages that might be vital to the future of civilization.
I more or less stumbled upon these codes. My journey was initially driven by rather basic questions which were far upstream of the doomsday machine that has shredded businesses on Wall Street and thus across the world. Can we resuscitate the planet s gasping ecosystems only to the extent that the money bottom line of the market will allow? Why do enough responsible people accept, as a gospel truth, the claim that no further miracle drugs would be invented without the motive of enormous private profit? We all enjoy the freedom of open exchange in a marketplace but is that the same as the free market ? To my surprise I discovered that a dazzling variety of people, across the world, are troubled by these questions. Most of them share a firm conviction that the creative freedom inherent in our species is far more powerful than the free market orthodoxy.
Before I could venture further I had to first grapple with my own preconceptions. My training, both at home in India and in the West, urged me to view what I critiqued from up close and with empathy. It was not enough to read about and talk with people who understand, perhaps even worship, the prevailing market culture. It seemed imperative to visit the site of its core symbol. So I went walkabout on Wall Street. The onward journey came to be defined by two sights-Federal Hall and the Trinity Church which crowns Wall Street at its junction with Broadway.
Federal Hall stands on the site of the original New York City Hall where George Washington was sworn in as President and the first federal government of the newly born United States of America was housed. The New York Stock Exchange next door, though it now dominates the image and identity of Wall Street, came up much later. That civic meeting place, and the house of worship nearby, served as a reminder that bazaars and marketplaces have fundamentally been a point of connection and conversation. More importantly, until about two hundred years ago, those conversations were as much about civilization-making values and politics, as about material exchange.
This realization shaped the onward journey and provided the fundamental premises of this exploration. The bazaar, an ancient mechanism of human society, is quite distinct from what we now call the free market . Bazaar refers to a location, the market is an idea. Bazaars bring together buyers and sellers, eyeball to eyeball, for open and direct exchange. The free market, as it emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, fostered complex mechanisms of more indirect and distant exchange.
Within the babble and bustle of bazaars buying and selling were tossed together with storytelling, politics and even the framing of moral values. By contrast, the idea of a free market depends on assiduously separating the economic sphere from the rest of life.
As I ventured forth on this journey I found that the bazaar now also serves as a metaphor for those processes which define value, even commercial value, in a deeper and wider sense than price or financial assets. The market culture that is now in the throes of crisis, has depended on keeping the profit motive pure and unsullied by social, moral or ecological concerns-relegating them to family, government and charities.
With a wee bit of licence, the term bazaar can be deployed to allude to a more socially-embedded market culture-based on a broader, more well-rounded, view of human nature. This view challenges the notion of economic man as a utility-maximizing, or selfish, individual unit. What is now coming apart at the seams is the idea that combining social and moral values with commercial objectives would somehow reduce the reach of the market .
Above all, bazaar is more akin to market economy-that circle of open exchange where producers decipher consumers will and purchasing power to create goods and services.
What the free market has fostered is a market society where virtually all functions of life are seen to be best served by the pecuniary motive.
But now, across the world and at multiple levels, society is fighting back. I found an illustration of this as I stepped off Wall Street and on to a subway train.
To the best of my knowledge there is no mention of the bottom line in the Hippocratic oath , said the bold print of an advertisement in the subway car. The copy was accompanied by the photo of a venerable-looking male doctor wearing a blue surgical cap. The small print of the advertisement urged New Yorkers to call the Lenox Hill Hospital Physician Referral Service- For the surgeon whose only concern is your health . Even as an advertising ploy, this was a statement. It tapped into deep-seated anxieties.
Back in India, my friend Rohini Nilekani found a more direct and stark expression of this anxiety expressed by a villager in Bihar: Once upon a time the natural order of life was that samaj , society, came first. Government and market were less powerful. Colonialism changed this. S amaj fell to second place and government dominated. Now the market rules, government is in-between and samaj is a poor third.
Or as the economist Jeremy Rifkin has put it: Can civilization survive when only the commercial sphere is left as the primary mediator of human life?
I knew at the outset that merely mapping these anxieties was not my mission. As the walkabout stretched wider, taking me into diverse realms, I found myself recording the quest for ways to redress this imbalance. The stories in this book could be read as dispatches from that journey, an account of scattered initiatives or trends. And yet, there is a deeper subtext. These tales offer glimpses of how a post-revolutionary era is taking shape.
The people you will meet in these pages are not working for a new order that can come about through a cataclysmic shift of power. However, a host of trends and initiatives are pushing ahead a transformation that may be no less profound. At the heart of this foment is something both simple and demanding-a broader view of human nature. There is a surge of people who are seeking a bet