The Modern World witnessed the use of non-violence as a strategy for Social Justice by Gandhi and King (Jr). They were successful at kicking the British out of India, and gaining civil rights for blacks in the United States. However, did these non-violent movements succeed in fundamentally changing the distribution of resources or wealth in these societies? Has political freedom gone hand-in-hand with economic freedom of the oppressed??
Both Gandhi and King had undeniably fought for radical economic change, but their lives were cut short before their full vision could be realized.
Gandhi famously called poverty “the worst form of violence,” and advocated for economic self-sufficiency. He is among the few in the recorded history for having struggled to practice what he preached, by spinning his own clothes and living a life of material simplicity.
After Gandhi’s assassination, the world’s largest democracy has whole-heartedly embraced capitalism, forcing two-thirds of India’s population to now survive on $2 or less a day. Though the civil rights movement in US succeeded in earning the right to vote in the 1960s, the racial economic divide in the United States has barely shifted.
Naomi Klein in her book “The Shock Doctrine” has documented in extensive detail how leaders of other nonviolent movements had sold out as they gained power during the transition to democracy in their countries. She gave the example of the Solidarity movement that Lech Walesa led in Poland that abandoned its progressive economic program of worker ownership, and enacted economist Jeffrey Sachs’ neo-liberal recommendations: eliminating price controls, slashing subsidies, and selling off state mines, shipyards and factories to the private sector. As a result, the percentage of population living below the poverty line in Poland increased from 15 percent to 59 percent in 2003.
Another example cited by Klein is the story unfolding in South Africa, where the African National Congress (ANC) had advocated for radical economic change, including the nationalization of the country’s wealth and industry, as well as protecting the right to work and to decent housing. Since Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency, banks, mines, and monopoly industry that Mandela had pledged to nationalize, remained firmly in the hands of the same four white-owned mega-conglomerates that also control 80 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In 2005, only 4 percent of the companies listed on the exchange were owned or controlled by blacks. Seventy percent of South Africa’s land, in 2006, was still monopolized by whites, who are just 10 percent of the population. The most striking statistic is the fact since the year Mandela left prison, the average life expectancy for South Africans have dropped by thirteen years.
There is no denying the fact that in all of these cases and many more, ordinary people employing nonviolent techniques were able to win substantial political freedoms and rights that have unquestioningly made their lives, and those of millions of others, better. However, the economic elite that controlled the country before the nonviolent movement gained power, continues to do so afterwards, and the plight of those at the bottom have in many cases exacerbated.
History so far has demonstrated that attaining real economic justice is a far more elusive goal than nonviolently bringing down a dictator. We need to acknowledge this fact about the failure of the non-violent transitions to democracy till date to democratize wealth, in order to stop such scenarios from playing out again in the future. It calls for a clear distinction to be made between the political and economic outcomes and those responsible for undermining political as well as economic justice. They are not usually one and the same.
