Tagore and the idea of Cooperation

Nearly eight decades ago, Rabindranath Tagore worried about the growing concentration of economic power and the coming destruction of rural India.

“Today, economic power has been captured by a small minority. But it has acquired this power only by accumulating the productive power of others. Their capital is simply the accumulated labour of a millions of working people, in a monetized form. It is this productive power that is the real capital, and it is this power that latently resides in every worker ...” — Samabayaniti/The Co-operative Principles, 1928.

In a compelling set of essays written between 1915 and 1940, Rabindranath Tagore articulated a social vision where exploitation would give way to a just, humane, collectively owned economy. At the core of his thought was the cooperative principle. This is an idea worth revisiting on the International Day of Cooperatives, which this year falls on July 2, and even more so during the lead-up to 2012, which is the United Nations International Year of Cooperatives.

Why cooperatives again? Have they not been tried — and have failed? Well, so have big banks and large corporations. Yet they continue undiminished. The reason they do so with such impunity is that alternatives are hard to come by. With the financial crisis on the one hand, and the (predictable) collapse of the system of microcredit on the other, the need to identify alternative forms of ownership is greater than ever before.

In India, the experience with the century-old cooperative movement has been mixed. There are some stunning successes: Amul, for one. There are others, too, where cooperatives have proved transformational for the marginalised. The problems are also well-known: abuse, politicisation, excessive dependence on the state, and so on. But these are mere symptoms. The real disease lies elsewhere. There is little understanding, much less acceptance, of the cooperative principle and its potential. It is yet to enter the core of our social vision, leave alone public policy. Those spaces are dominated, ever more aggressively, by the competitive principle, the sceptre of ‘efficiency' and private gain. This is why India can emerge as one of the top wealth-generators even as 93 per cent of its working citizens toil in the informal sector. That 93 per cent contributes almost half of India's fast-growing GDP. But it has no say over the way that growth is generated — or any voice to claim a fairer distribution of the wealth it produces. The same goes for the majority that survives on the agrarian economy.

Written some eight decades ago, Tagore's thoughts stemmed from these concerns: the growing concentration of economic power and the destruction of rural India. He wrote: “Today our villages are half-dead. If we imagine we can just/ continue to live, that would be a mistake. The dying can pull/ the living only towards death.” (from The Neglected Villages, 1934).

He was deeply sceptical about the solutions proposed by the elite — such as charity or moral enlightenment of the wealthy. These were like putting out “a raging fire by blowing at it,” he wrote. Instead, he sought an ethical model of production.