Capitalism

Living Pathways: Meditations on Sustainable Cultures and Cosmologies in Asia by M Nadarajah; Penang: Areca Books, 2013; pp 184, price unstated.

The idea of happiness has changed. It has emerged as a measurable, autonomous, manageable, psychological variable in the global middle-class culture. The self-conscious, determined search for happiness has gradually transformed the idea of happiness from a mental state to an objectified quality of life that can be attained the way an athlete after training under specialists and going through a strict regimen of exercises and diet wins a medal in a track meet. Might it be that the sense of well-being of a mentally healthy person shows its robustness by being able to live with some amount of unhappiness and what is commonly seen as ill-health?

Extending Lohia to our times, we can infer an important truth about capitalism. Capitalist development cannot take place without colonial or neocolonial exploitation. In the absence of external colonies or neocolonies, capitalism tries to create internal colonies, but they are not enough for full-fledged modern industrial development, which requires both exploitation of labour and the plunder and destruction of natural resources on a global scale. If internal colonial exploitation is fundamental to capitalism and unequal exchange in various forms is one of its important mechanisms, the Third World can be liberated only when it breaks away from the present system of international trade, exchange and finance and looks at ways of building an alternative society in all senses.

Since the thirties of the last century, India has witnessed a good few instances of intense sincere efforts of some somebodies to disown or step out of their bourgeois class allegiance and rush towards the proletarian heaven. It is a long and impressive list. Mohit Sen, who was felled by a massive cardiac seizure in the first week of May, was a partisan belonging to this series of ideologues who wanted to be nondescript non-kings.