Rajni Bakshi's Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom is a book iconic in style and content. Bakshi argues that the search for a non-autistic economics may not be futile. The beauty of human striving is that oxymorons become creative possibilities at a different level of living and analysis.
She begins with the basic opposition between bazaar and the market and asks a series of probing questions, issues that deal with history, anthropology and philosophy. Bazaars, says Bakshi, are spaces for gathering and pretexts for conversation. Arguing over prices was part of the conversation. There was a multiple sense of humanity enclosed in the world of haggling. Haggling is an encounter, a search for the relevant other, the right bargain. It is an attempt to put a face to the act of buying and selling. Haggling created the idea of public culture long before a philosopher like Habermas even thought of public spaces. The bazaar and the agora were civilisational constructs.
The question Bakshi asks is how did the bazaar, an almost universal entity representing free exchange become a market, a close restricted, contractually controlled encounter limited to a few people. How did freedom get reduced to the impoverishment of the free market?
These questions start Bakshi on a journey, a pilgrimage through history and a travelling ethnography of markets and bazaars across the world. It is a search that takes her from talking to a movement like SEWA to the cathedral called Wall Street. Bakshi defines the bazaar as a conversation that is open, free, emergent and full of daily rhythms. She adds to that conversation by being a wonderful listener and a playful storyteller. If economics is to be rescued from its autism as a dismal science, it needs storytellers like Bakshi who are curious, tough, reflective, unsentimental and hopeful without being pious.
Wide horizon
Bakshi explores the mystery of the market from its origins to the meltdown, suggesting that the meltdown demanded a rethinking wider and more fundamental than September 11. The latter reinforced ideas of security, state and territoriality adding to the procrusteanism of convention, the other created a search for new ways of thinking, living, forms of practice and thought experiments which could construct a futuristic vision of the market beyond demonology.
Bakshi sees her pilgrimage as an exercise in futurism, of reading signs of the market and decoding them. These signs and their decoding, she admits, “might be vital to the future of civilisation”. The questions about the market and the bazaar are thus civilisational questions, where the complexity of wholes must transcend the particularism and parochialism of parts. The method is simple. She reads the classic critiques of economics from Stiglitz and Daly to Sen and Soros. She summarizes each narrative and then follows its practical possibilities. It creates a narrative at two levels, an intellectual critique of the market and an anthropology of alternatives and possibilities. Bakshi has only one fetishised God to attack. It is the Goddess TINA, a sulky, protestant, procrustean and fundamentalist figure who claims there is no alternative. Bakshi as a storyteller knows that as long as story-telling is alive, there is a fool and an alternative born every minute.
The first chapters are about the classic expositions of the market like Soros, Hayek and Polanyi. She examines the fate of each of their ideas and then explores the strange socio-drama of how a dream of freedom became “unfreedom”. She chronicles the struggles against economics from within, focusing especially on Hirschman, Ekins and Stephen Marglin. She shows that there have been whistle blowers and dissenters within. In fact, it is interesting that the three outstanding critiques of the market as a pathology came from World Bank experts like Stiglitz, Herman Daly and Rajan. This creates a wonderful sense of balance showing that autism is not a universal symptom of economists. The presence of Stephen Marglin, Amartya Sen and Stiglitz has created new questions providing both new exemplars and new paradigms. Bakshi's search, by avoiding demonology and rhetoric, becomes an open work where dissent is playful.
Personalities
Her sense of dissent and dissenters is critical. Her choice of Fritz Schumacher, Hazel Henderson and Paul Ekins is immaculate. What she shows as a fable of critique is that critical economics should have both the right aptitude and the right attitude. She provides fascinating capsule biographies of Schumacher's role as a consultant in Burma, creating an imaginary called Buddhist economics, chronicles Hazel Henderson's attempt to create new measures for economics beyond the contextual illiteracy of GNP. She provides a vignette on Bhutan's attempt to create a vision of Gross National Happiness.
Her chapter on money is fascinating, quixotic, utopian and yet wonderfully practical as she follows inventors of alternative money like Edgar Cahn, Irving Fisher, Michael Linton in their attempts to rework the relation between price and value. Basically she sees each as a major inventor who seeks to show that money can imprison the imagination. Her attempt to describe the ancestors of the monetary debate is fruitful especially as one reads that Thomas Jefferson felt that banks were more threatening than standing armies. She makes a disturbingly profound point. When the economist Irving Fisher studied the experiments in complementary currency he realised that locally created currency could lift many Americans out of their doldrums. He approached the treasury which in turn approached a bevy of economists at Harvard. The dons replied that if such a program was implemented on a large scale it would end up restructuring the American economy and lead to a profound decentralisation of decision making. A wonderful opportunity was lost at that critical moment.
The chapter on money was for me the most fascinating. Bakshi writes of Hazel Henderson's work on money. Henderson talks about the bandwidth of money, its ability to provide growth with value. Henderson argues that money has lost its bandwidth for growth, innovations and transactions in the twentieth century. In the chapter on competition she tries to square another circle by asking if competition can be compassionate. The answer as affirmative comes from such a wide spectrum of thinkers from the Dalai Lama to Linus Thorwald, the founder of Linux.
The conflict of competition and compassion leads to the inevitable search for the gift economy. The battle between global and local centers around the profundity of what is food and how it is grown. One then follows a search for chaordic economies, i.e. economies that mimic the wisdom and complexity of nature, exploring issues like the minimisation of eco-footprints and the commoditisation of water. One meets legends like Amory Lovins, Paul Hawkin and new ways of looking at green tapping and trusteeship. Bakshi herself asks whether the power of eccentricity and innovation can match the scale of the crisis. She remains optimistic arguing that the age of dualism has declined and that new thought has invented critical ways of putting dualisms together. What we have here is a beautifully written book, a huge collection of moral fables, by a superb storyteller. My one quarrel is that she valorises Schumacher over two of my heroes, Nicholas Georgesceau-Roegen and Ivan Illich. But what is the use of story-telling if the listener cannot tell his own version of the same story?
Shiv Visvanathan is a Social Scientist
Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom;Rajni Bakshi; Penguin Books, Rs. 450
