HKDD; Vaisyas - agriculture, cow protection and trade.

[Guest guest]

Dear all,

 

I would like to comment on the last writings by HKDD.

Whilst I agree with much of her writings, I find three

major points that I feel I can just not agree with,

and ultimately are at the heart of the reasons, as I

see it, of the failures of cow protection in ISKCON.

If this were to be the case then the removal of these

three points from our vision could aid in the

revitalisation of cow protection.

 

The first is her total refutation of capitalism. I

feel what she should be attacking is materialism,

politics and technology not capitalism per se.

 

The second is her assumption that "to use bulls for

agriculture, produces a product which is too expensive

to sell in a capitalist market and use the funds to

support a family."

 

The third is that subsistence agriculture is the way

forward for the majority of people (devotees), and

that that is THE solution and all other ways are

deviations from the truth.

 

 

Though I have not studied the Populist Movement, but

have studied Marx, Gandhi and E.F. Schumacher, I would

not agree with your proposition that protecting the

small farmer does not exist within the framework of

capitalism. Nor that because the populist movement

tried to find a solution within the capitalist system

it was a failure. HKDD says that one way they fought

was to make co-operatives for buying supplies and

selling their products. But then came their political

demise. The point I would make here is that what one

can criticise is the creed of capitalism, but not

necessarily capitalism itself. This reasoning relies

on a semantic understanding of the word capitalism.

Capitalism itself, without an adjective creed or

whatnot, is solely the dealing of wealth, as expressed

in the private accumulation of utilisable goods and

services - that where capital is administered by being

allocated ownership.

 

The creed of capitalism that we are experiencing now

is immoral, mostly due to the political cultures of

the times with their dominant development paradigms.

In Adam Smith’s time he was referring to the power of

the individual decision maker within a moral social

framework. He himself was a scholar of moral

philosophy, and I am sure he would be appalled to see

how his teachings have been perverted. One can look

around at subsistence villages to ancient empires, as

of the Vedic times, and see wealth accumulation,

distribution and administration. The politics of how

to do this and of how much capital to accumulate are

separate from the types of capitalism themselves.

 

Capitalism does not mean concentrating wealth among a

few. It just happens that our immoral politics allows

this. Total free market capitalism does not exist

anywhere – Singapore and Hong Kong are probably the

closest on will find, and the corollary of total

state-owned capitalism (communism) does not exist

anywhere. In between are places where ownership is

divided between the state and private parties, but

where ultimately the state has full control over the

private participants in the way that it can administer

decrees and laws to infringe the ownership rights of

the individual.

 

So, capital and its forms of being as expressed by

capitalism is solely relevant in the political and

technological landscape. I am not sure off the

Constitution of the US, but I do know that in the UK

ultimate ownership is with the queen through God. So

ownership has a stewardship ring to it. This fact

though is so removed from the understandings of the

owners that it is only relevant to lawyers and

scholars.

 

A major point here needs to be made in reference to

ISKCON devotees in general. As God is seen to be the

owner of everything then no-one person “owns”

anything, not ones body, family, house, land, car or

whatnot. For me, one should see ownership as

stewardship – all the above are in my possession,

no-one should try to take them from me as I am their

carer, but I am the living entity and material nature

is here for me to exploit according to how I deem fit

within my knowledge of what is stewardship. Too many

devotees fear ownership and see it as wrong; that to

possess and exchange goods and services is wrong. What

results is like communism where the state is the

ultimate owner, here people felt disempowered and

disenfranchised and ultimately neglected the care of

their non-possession or non-work. Although with

devotees the state is not the ultimate owner and God

is, still the same type of neglect can result due to

disempowerment and disenfranchisement leading to the

ultimate neglect of ones duties. Has this not been

seen too many times on ISKCON farms?

 

This comes down to the second point, that small

farmers can not survive in a capitalist framework. A

vaisya is meant to take care of agriculture, protect

cows and trade. Prabhupada emphasised the need for the

former two, but always with the understanding that

trade would inevitably come from that, as excess would

come naturally. So, when HKDD calls for 100%

subsistence lifestyles not only is this really

impractical and infeasible for most devotees at this

moment in time, it is also not what is meant to be the

ultimate reality, as that should include trade. And

trade involves commerce, the exchange of goods and

services and the accumulation of wealth via profit

taking – a form of capitalism.

 

There is at this moment another opportunity for small

farmers to take back the agricultural industry form

the multinationals, and that is via organic and

specialist food production. This can keep the politics

of ownership within co-operatives, whilst assuring a

form of self/community-sufficiency is a feasible

option at the moment.

 

The third point that subsistence agriculture is the

way forward for the majority of people (devotees), and

that that is THE solution and all other ways are

deviations from the truth, I find quite amazing.

Devotees throughout the world have hectares of land

that were either donated or were bought on the backs

of the sweat of sankirtana devotees, and yet this land

goes mostly unused, or if used used in a way that is

highly inefficient, or not in accordance with what

should be done. Rohita says that they only cultivate a

few hectares and then using a tractor, Syam cultivates

very little at the Manor though he has the trained

animals to do it and could easily buy or rent land

with the help from the Hindus in the UK. At Inés Rath

they have a whole island barely used for agricultural

production. Even with the Dharmaksetra project in the

UK, the production side of the endeavour was almost

completely overlooked, whereas Vedic Emporians were

costed to the last piece of marble. At Vrindavan, at

Mayapur, here in Argentina, in Brazil, all over the

world, from my experience, and from what I have seen

and heard, production of agriculture is not greatly

seem in ISKCON farms.

 

I do not mean to belittle the hard work that many

devotees have put in here, but to show that even if

this amazing solution of HKDD’s were to appear –

meaning huge tracts of land bought for the devotees to

live a subsistence lifestyle, I doubt devotees would

do it very easily. It lies in our conditioning, it is

a social issue.

 

 

What solutions does HKDD ultimately offer?

 

That we wait for a white knight to give us land? That

we go to less developed countries to take over

abandoned villages thereby skirting the need to buy

land (this I did myself)? Or, why not, that we all go

to the devotee farms now and stop consuming milk and

veg and clothes from the outside and become truly

self-sufficient now?

 

I ask, because after reading KKDD for many, many years

now I am always left thinking – but yes, that’s wrong,

that’s wrong, the whole of today’s system is wrong,

but where is the solution? What can be done now, here

in these circumstances that we find ourselves?

 

That is why I think the solution we need to take is to

realise that we need to take to production, to

agriculture, within the present system, as a niche

player and to trade our way to subsistence. To use our

passions as economic actors to realise ourselves as

vaisyas and ksyatrias, as farmers and merchants and

administrators. NOT to criticise one thing whilst

putting a solution forward knowing full well that few

will take it up, not even ourselves.

 

 

Hoping to be better understood than I feel this

manages, and to be critical only for the sake of

solutions to an apparent conflict of understandings.

 

Mark.

 

__________

 

Get your free @.co.uk address at http://mail..co.uk

or your free @.ie address at http://mail..ie