In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and leisure, and replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs where we wait desperately for weekends and holidays.
Economic progress, we are told, is about moving from primary sector jobs to manufacturing and services. And so the livelihoods that keep all of us alive – farming, forestry, pastoralism, fisheries, and related crafts – are considered backward.
In India, this marginalizes 700 million-800 million people, two-thirds of its population.
The results? Horrendous ones like thousands of farmers’ suicides in the last decade; or the displacement by so-called ‘development projects’ of 60 million people from their farms, forests, and coasts.
Less visible is the pauperization of many others deprived of the natural resources they depend on, as their lands and waters get taken away for industry, infrastructure and cities. Entire new forms of poverty are being created by development.
Assembly line drudgery
Let’s assume that this is inevitable and desirable. As the narrative goes, who wants to continue the ‘drudgery’ of farming and fishing? But what are we replacing these with?
For the poor, either no employment at all, or insecure, exploitative and unsafe jobs at construction sites, mines, industries, dhabas, and other places that can hardly be called less drudgery. A staggering 93% of Indian jobs are in the informal sector, an increasing number of these in exploitative conditions.
And are the middle classes and rich better off?
In terms of remuneration, they are much better off – a recent study shows 1% of Indians owning over 50% of its private wealth (built on the backs of severely underpaid labor).
But what about the quality of work?
The vast majority of those in modern sectors of work, such as the IT industry, are mechanical cogs in a vast assembly line stretching across the globe. Early morning to late night, slouched on a computer terminal, or providing rote responses at call centers, or desperately seeking news to feed the incessantly hungry 24×7 news channels, or staring at stock market numbers – who can honestly say that these are not deadlihoods, suppressing our independence and innate creativity?
If this is not the case, why do we wait so restlessly for the workday to end, or for the weekend to come? Why do we need retail therapy, superficially trying to get happiness by going shopping?
Meaningful work
Over the last few years I’ve been taking sessions on development issues at alternative learning centers like Bhoomi College in Bengaluru and Sambhavana in Palampur. A large percentage of participants in these are IT professionals who want to drop out, to “do something more meaningful”.
Long ago I lost count of the number of people who’ve expressed envy about my enjoying my work. These folks have realized that they are not practicing livelihoods, even if they are making a pot of money.
I do not mean to say that all modern jobs are deadening, nor that all traditional livelihoods were wonderful. I am well aware of the inequality, exploitation, and even drudgery in the latter. But this bathwater needs to be changed without throwing out the baby of meaningful livelihoods.
Live examples of this include the Deccan Development Society and Timbaktu Collective, helping sustain and improve the social and economic status of once-poor peasants (including Dalit women farmers who are now also filmmakers and radio station managers); or Dastkar Andhra and Jharcraft, bringing back viability and providing new dignity to craftspersons. And so too that rare meaningful job in a modern sector: the field biologist who loves being in nature, the music teacher enthusiastically bringing out the talents of students, a chef in love with cooking in charge of an organic food kitchen.
Respect physical labor
For these counter-trends to gain ground, fundamental change is needed in education. In school and college, we are inculcated with the attitude that intellectual work is superior to physical labor. Our minds are trained, to the exclusion of building the capacity of hands, feet, and hearts. We are given role models of people whose success is based on conquest of nature and climbing ladders while kicking other people down.
And so we grow up undervaluing producers. The horrendously low prices that farmers get for their produce is a symptom of a society with warped priorities; we do not want to pay adequately to someone who keeps us alive, but we are willing to pay through our noses for branded shoes and gadgets. And in relation to the latter, we don’t even care what the actual factory worker gets.
So another crucial change is in economic structures: community tenurial security over land and natural resources, worker control over means of production, social control over markets. In Greece recently I went to a detergents factory taken over by its workers. They now run it democratically, have converted the machinery to produce ecologically safe cleaning agents, and have won support from nearby townspeople including consumers. They spoke of how fulfilling their lives are now, compared to earlier when under the yoke of a capitalist owner.
The next time we come across nomadic pastoralists steering their sheep through the traffic-laden streets of our cities, think of this. Yes, perhaps they are anachronisms, soon to disappear. But who is to say the same will not happen to our IT or digital media or call center jobs? Perhaps a generation from now robots with artificial intelligence, seeing some of us staring at a computer screen, will smirk about how inefficient and outmoded we are. Not only farmers and fishers will have become anachronisms, but humans as a whole, except perhaps the few controlling the buttons. Science fiction? Perhaps, but a lot of what was science fiction has become fact.
Revisit our role models
Before we end up in a future where humans are redundant, we could do some serious reconsideration. Perhaps we can transition from being only an IT professional or writer of articles, to being more of the human that we have the potential to be.
Perhaps we can facilitate farmers to also be researchers and filmmakers (as Deccan Development Society’s women have become) – variants of Marx’s vision of being hunter-fisher-pastoralist-critic all rolled into one. Many people I know (who’d be embarrassed to be named here) are accomplished researchers, farmers, musicians, parents, explorers, all in a seamless whole, breaking the false divisions between work and leisure, physical and mental, old and new.
Imagine if these were the role models given to our kids, imagine if as youngsters we were encouraged to be self-reliant, inquisitive, respectful of diversity, and a responsible part of the community of life. Imagine if we redefined work to include enjoyment and pleasure?
I believe this will happen, sooner or later. Till then, let us at least appreciate ways of life that have engaged respectfully with the earth for millennia, unlike the alienated modern jobs many of us have. And let’s question whether we want to continue being deadened cogs in a mass production system that enriches only a few. Let’s see how we can combine the best of old and new, to make both more meaningful and fulfilling. This could be the start of bringing back livelihoods and leaving behind deadlihoods.
This piece originally appeared in the Indian online magazine Scroll.in
A version of this piece is also available in Marathi on the Vikalp Sangam website.
Why developing countries like India with large informal sector (93%) needs a different kind of economy and how can we break free? Some radical thinking…
http://exhibitions.globalfundforwomen.org/economica/new-visions/breaking-free
Let’s revisit population control when we talk about such things. Improvements are not possible with doubling populations.
If you are talking about India specifically, the population has already stabilised and soon the rate of growth will be negative, as in the West. The growth rate for Hindus is already less than the replacement rate, ie the number of Hindus will start decreasing. Even the Muslim growth rate in India, which has been traditionally higher, is now coming closer to that point. But the concerns raised by the article are going to be greatly relevant for the millions of young people who will now start joining the work force. With its vision focused on manufacturing, the government of India may end up taking the wrong road once again, as it had done during the days of Nehruvian socialism.
I agree wholeheartedly. We’ve given up values, experiences, and life ways that have proven themselves, often over thousands of years, to be meaningful, enjoyable, and beneficial for us as living persons and as whole communities (even if those values/experiences/life ways are sometimes difficult or dangerous – but to some degree BECAUSE they are difficult and dangerous) and have traded them for values, experiences, and life ways that feel relatively shallow and meaningless, addictive rather than truly enjoyable, and destructive and divisive to us as individuals and communities. Modern pleasures may be safer, easier, and more dependably accessible, especially for the upper classes; but their appeal is to the machine-like side of our nature much more than to the personal-human side. Never mind the possibility of being replaced by robots; we are turning our own selves into robots to a significant extent. This is a far worse fate. Good to hear that there are some efforts out there to save the baby from the bathwater.
And I’ll second Lynn’s comment about population. Makes sense that even potentially good solutions won’t work if there’s just too many of us.
Cities are overcrowded, world is not. Actually fertility is declining last 40 years and 75 years from now population will not be more than 7 billion, as this site says.
Interesting videos @ https://overpopulationisamyth.com/
Thanks, Susmita. That’s good news (relative to other projections I’ve heard) if those projections are correct.
I don’t know too much about this whole issue but I’ve heard some scary statistics, like how many earths it would take to support the current world population if everyone tried to recreate a “first world” American-style lifestyle. I think it was something like 7 earths.
I’ll check out those videos next time I’m on a wi-fi that doesn’t block YouTube.
To follow up on this: This is obviously a complex issue, and not something we’re going to get to the bottom of here in the comments section, but, just for example, even if it’s true, as one of the videos says, that every family on the planet could have a home with a yard and still fit into a landmass the size of Texas, what about all the land it takes to support the plants and animals we eat, the oil and minerals for all the junk we consume and all the energy we expend, and all the pollution we generate. Can all of THAT fit into Texas along with our house and yard? It seems doubtful. So, there is the “footprint” of our lives to consider. And of course we still need to leave enough room for all the other creatures, bodies of water, trees, and so on. The word starts to seem a bit tighter when we take all this into consideration. But still, I have no idea where this puts us relative to the actual carrying capacity of the earth.