Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenian Assembly for 'asebia'- impiety- which is the word Indo-Greeks used for 'adharma'. Gandhi saw Socrates as a 'reformer'- just like Hindu reformers of the period, some of whom may have faced, if not death threats, then 'social death'- i.e. ostracism. Gandhi himself had had to do a 'prayaschitam' (expiation) ritual to be readmitted to his caste after he 'crossed the black water' and thus became guilty of 'adharma'. Thus, Gandhi saw himself as a victim of an oppressive social order and thus similar to Socrates.
In one matter, Gandhi was different. He had plenty of money but not, perhaps, enough for any of his crack-pot schemes. This led him to John Ruskin who had come up with an ingenious theory of how the merchant could get more out of his workers while paying them less.
The expedient Ruskin offered cashes out as what Economists call Wage discrimination- which occurs where people are paid different rates for the same job. In an open market this would not be possible but if there is a monopsonist- a single buyer of labor- then 'surplus value' (i.e. the difference between what one is paid and what would one have accepted) is extracted from the worker by the employer.
Wage discrimination is unfair. It is a 'market failure' caused by local monopoly power. There generally are laws against it- more especially if the thing is done on the basis of race or gender. Yet, we find it in the Bible. A landowner hires labor at the beginning of the day for a penny. Later he finds he needs more help and hires more people for a penny. But these guys are working shorter hours. Their pro rata wage is higher. Finally he gets in some extra workers at one penny so as to bring in all of the harvest. The workers who had toiled all day should, clearly, be paid more because the per hour wage rate has risen. This caused 'marginal' workers to take up employment. Wage should be equated with marginal product. Clearly, the 'rate for the job' is what the per hour rate for the last hired.
The landowner however will only pay what he promised. He says ': ‘Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take what thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.’
What will happen next year when this dude needs to hire laborers? Nobody will join work at the beginning of the day because they believe he will be bound to raise the rate so as to save his harvest. His sharp practice will end up costing him dearly.
John Ruskin, who was stupid and mad, wrote a silly book called 'Unto this Last' where he suggested that if employers pretended they lurved their workers and were shedding their blood for them, then maybe the workers would work for free or even pay for the privilege.
Gandhi was given Ruskin's worthless book by a White Missionary who may not have known that Ruskin and Carlyle (another Guru of Gandhi's) had supported Governor Eyre whose reign of terror in Jamaica had rolled back the civil and political rights of 'coloured' people. I may mention that Kamala Harris's paternal family was radicalized by this. But Indians too were dismayed that Eyre was not indicted and put on trial in England. Thus they turned their backs on Eyre's defenders- Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens- and embraced his opponents- Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley & 'Harbhat Pendse' (Herbert Spencer who became hugely popular in Maharashtra). Gandhi, cretin that he was, chose the opposite side- though, to be fair, this was because he was stupid and ignorant rather than vicious or (like Ruskin & Carlyle) a wanker who couldn't even consummate his own marriage.
Phiroze Vasunia, a Classicist, observes 'We might surmise that, with his paraphrase of the Apology, Gandhi retains the ambiguity in Ruskin’s title and interprets it not just in the terms of equal pay to all workers
Wage discrimination is not 'equal pay'. It is unfair and may be illegal.
but also in the terms of a principled commitment to be upheld to the very end of one’s life, that is, unto the last or unto death.
There is another saying 'cobbler stick to thy last'- i.e. don't talk about stuff you know nothing about. Ruskin and Carlyle were guilty of this type of 'ultracrepidarianism'.
Gandhi is certainly aware of the Biblical significance of the phrase and observes in his version of Unto This Last that he employs the title Sarvodaya, rather than a literal translation, since the expression from the New Testament will ‘be understood only by a person who has read the Bible in English’
The problem here is that the Biblical story- which is about how if you convert you get everything in the next world which more virtuous converts of longer standing get- describes an unfair practice in this world by which workers get shafted now by a stupid landowner practicing wage discrimination who does not realize that he's going to lose much more money than he gained by this sharp practice the very next year.
God's economy is different. Paradise is entirely a gift which is not earned in any way. You can give a gift to anybody you please. If you contract for labour and there is an asymmetry of power then if the reward is unequal, the contract may be considered unconscionable and set aside.
In Jewish law, the hired worker (poel) though considered a 'day-laborer', is actually paid by the hour. If he started work in the morning, he may quit at mid day. There is a strict obligation to pay him fully before sunset. Local custom can override a verbal agreement if that is more equitable to the weaker party. Now, it is true, in the parable, the landowner presents himself as gratuitously rewarding the last hired workers. He is saying 'I said I'd pay them fairly but did not specify any fixed sum as I did with you who came to work at the beginning of the day. Maybe I've erred by overpaying the late-comers- but that is my business'. The problem here is that the 'custom of the land' might be that 'the fair payment' is the best pro-rata rate- i.e the wage should equal the marginal product. This is because this is the 'repeated game' solution. If it is not enforced, then workers won't start work at the beginning of the day, hoping to get higher pay later on as the employer becomes desperate. This would cause 'market failure'. Uncertainty would have increased. Laws exist so as to prevent this sort of coordination breakdown.
Why does this parable feature in the Gospel? The very next passage concerns Lord Jesus predicting his own horrific death which was meant to humiliate his flock who would endure much persecution before Rome itself became the citadel for Christ's Church. In other words, put up with horrendous unfairness in this world so as to reap a big reward in the world to come.
Gandhi appears to be saying 'the meaning is we must first concern ourselves with the weakest and most vulnerable.' But this means being obedient to those above you and asking them to reward not you but those who are poorest. The people at the top get the reputational benefit of the self-sacrifice of the middling sort while those at the bottom gain by becoming more productive. If they too show the same self-sacrificing spirit, then Thrones and Palaces become safer and more luxurious. Ruskin, of course, was a great believer in the Empire. He'd have been delighted if a little brown barrister had actually taken up his creed. Sadly, the Tatas- who are Parsis as I imagine is Vasunia- gave Gandhi lots of money to organize the Indian workers in South Africa. So he didn't end up serving the Whites, as Ruskin would have wanted, but Gujarati and Marwari and Jain businessmen in India. He was a good and faithful servant to them. But he was a crackpot. Still, it must be said, the Gujerati contribution to Indian National Politics has tended to be good and wholesome. At any rate, Modi & Shah have made it appear so. Morarji Desai, on the other hand, was an unmitigated disaster. I look forward to Vasunia discovering the influence of Socrates or Heraclitus on that urine drinking shithead.
Vasunia gives us the following quotation from Ruskin
The fact is, that people never have had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other people.
Ruskin's daddy was a merchant. Buying cheap and selling dear is what paid for Ruskin's expensive education. I suppose he wanted his readers to think Daddy kept his profession secret from sonny boy.
I should like the reader to be very clear about this. Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed—three exist necessarily, in every civilized nation: The Soldier’s profession is to defend it. The Pastor’s to teach it. The Physician’s to keep it in health. The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.
Judges give judgments which are enforced by the police or by bailiffs or other such muscular dudes. Ruskin truly was as stupid as shit.
The Merchant’s to provide for it.
Farmers and factory workers 'provide' for us. Merchants merely facilitate this.
And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.
Soldiers have such a duty. Nobody else does.
“On due occasion,” namely:— The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.
He is welcome to do so unless he can actually cure the disease in question. Incompetence relative to the task is sufficient reason to fun the fuck away.
The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood.
can give up his job. He doesn't have to die just because his bosses ask him to do something he thinks is wrong.
The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.
Which is why lawyers whose innocent clients are convicted of a crime always and immediately top themselves.
The Merchant — what is his “due occasion” of death?
Getting hit by a bus.
It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
Nobody knows when they will die. Yet everybody knows how to live- even a wanker like Ruskin who wouldn't fuck his own wife.
Vasunia writes
Since Gandhi was from a bania or merchant community and had studied law in London, he was arguably both a lawyer and a merchant and thus was familiar with two of the ‘five great intellectual professions’.
By caste he was 'Vaishya'- i.e. belonged to the 'productive' caste.
As a lawyer, Gandhi found no rest in South Africa and was constantly agitating for the rights of Indians and others.
i.e. he did what he was paid to do.
In these pages of Unto This Last, Ruskin was nonetheless interested in the merchant more than the lawyer: he wrote that the merchant ought to be ready to suffer on behalf of his men and even to suffer more than his men; the merchant or manufacturer should give of himself ‘as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son’ .
Daddy should take a hint and just fucking die already so I can enjoy my inheritance.
In effect, Ruskin was showing Gandhi that a merchant could be a ‘hero and martyr’ if he were prepared to act in a spirit of self-sacrifice.
But Gandhi wasn't a merchant. Also, no actual merchant in India or Britain or South Africa had actually sacrificed himself for his workers. Even among cannibal tribes, it was unusual for the local business magnate to chop himself into pieces and throw himself into a stewing pot so as to furnish his employees a tasty treat.
But Ruskin mentions the soldier, pastor, and physician as well as the lawyer and merchant in his list of five great intellectual professions, and we might also think of the affinity between Gandhi and the first group.
To his credit he had been an ambulance-man in two South African wars.
In relation to the pastor, it is not difficult to point to passages in Gandhi’s writings, even at this early date, where he speaks of his religious and spiritual convictions and offers people advice on religious, spiritual, and moral issues.
You don't have to be a pastor to do that.
The Socrates of Gandhi’s Apology speaks at times as if he were a preacher or as if he had an especially close connection to the divine.
Which Socrates did claim to have.
Nor is it difficult to think of Gandhi as a healer and physician,
because, unlike his pal, Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, he hadn't studied Medicine.
despite the scepticism he expresses about conventional ‘Western’ medicine.
Pranjivan, too, rejected the germ theory of disease. However he made a lot of money in the gem trade. Incidentally, he was also a barrister.
In the preface to his version of the Apology, he writes that the Indian body politic is diseased. ‘When the disease is diagnosed and its true nature revealed in public, and when, through suitable remedies, the body [politic] of India is cured and cleansed both within and without, it will become immune to the germs of the disease, that is, to the oppression by the British and the others.’
Vasunia does not understand what Gandhi meant. It was this. Tilak & Co had gained popularity by attacking British methods of preventing the spread of the plague. Gandhi was saying 'germs don't exist. If we follow the true religion correctly, we can't fall ill. Who is preventing us following the true religion? It is the Brits! Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much!'
Readers can find ‘in the words of a great soul (Gandhi uses a form of mahatma) like Socrates the qualities of an elixir’ (CWMG vol. 8, p. 174).
Because Sadhu Mahatmas have attained supernatural powers- e.g. immortality, omniscience, ability to occupy more than one body simultaneously etc. Even their words can provide an elixir though, obviously, what would work even better would be to cut off a piece of their body and use it as a magical talisman.
When they have drunk this elixir, or amrit, Gandhi’s readers may be able to fight off the disease and cure the afflicted body.
Thus gaining immortality.
Gandhi/Socrates is a special kind of physician who will help his followers and disciples overcome the moral sickness that restricts their spiritual growth and hinders their intellectual development.
Not to mention their ability to gain super-powers.
Ruskin also places the soldier in the five professions he mentions in Unto This Last, and it is interesting to see Gandhi, the professor of non-violence, give prominence to the soldier, or warrior, in the heading under which he offers his version of the Apology. The title that he uses is Ek satyavirni katha, which can be translated as ‘Story of a true soldier’ or ‘Story of a soldier of truth’,
Hero, not soldier.
the latter being the form employed in the English edition of the Collected Works. ‘True soldier’ is arguably more martial than ‘soldier of truth’, but in any case the association of Socrates with ‘soldier’ in Gandhi’s version suggests that he thinks of Socrates as a figure who is ready to go to battle and to give up his life for what he knows to be the truth.
Socrates had been a soldier.
Gandhi’s Socrates is religious and pious, a man who says he believes in God, and a philosopher who has a soldier’s toughness to withstand the hostility that he encounters in many quarters. Rather than choose words or terms that might connect Socrates simply or uniquely to a philosophical, spiritual, or religious tradition, Gandhi refers to the Athenian as a satyavir and by that expression emphasizes his willingness to fight unto death for his cause.
No. Socrates is a hero who won't fight legitimate authority. He accepts the sentence of the Court just as Prahlad accepts the death sentence passed on him by his father.
By making a soldier a part of his title, Gandhi may also be recalling the terms used by Plato in his Apology. Socrates uses military language to describe his own pursuit of philosophy in the face of threats to his wellbeing; he suggests that when he stands fast at his trial and declines to run away he is acting like a solider at his post; and he also implies that his own obedience to god is comparable to the obedience of the soldier to his commanding officer.
Socrates was indeed a courageous soldier. Was he using military language to intimidate the court? Perhaps. But there would have been nothing dishonourable in his saying one thing to get acquitted so as to return with the help of a foreign army to slay his persecutors. Plenty of aristocratic warriors had done something similar. All's fair in love and war.
Vasunia writes-
Socrates was ‘a great satyagrahi’ and a role model to Indians in the subcontinent as well as in South Africa:
the Boers had fought an extremely bloody war with the Brits who used concentration camps- where Boer women and children died like flies- to break the spirit of the Boers. Even barrister Smuts- brilliant soldier that he was- had to come to terms. Sadly, Smuts could play the 'Yellow Peril' card so as to 'win the peace'. Gandhi unwittingly helped Smuts by first betraying the Chinese and then refusing to make common cause with Africans, Coloureds and, most importantly, striking White workers.
‘We must learn to live and die like Socrates.’
Smuts & Co only lost the War because they didn't want to be exterminated as a race.
Gandhi urges his readers not to be afraid and not to act out of ‘fear of dishonour or death’
neither of which was threatened. The choice was between swallowing your pride and making a bit of money or having to fuck off back to India.
and to grasp the true nature of the problems afflicting Indian society and culture
i.e. stupid nonsense cooked up by a crack-pot.
Gandhi wrote-
‘We pray to God, and want our readers also to pray, that they, and we too, may have the moral strength which enabled Socrates to follow virtue to the end and to embrace death as if it were his beloved. We advise everyone to turn his mind again and again to Socrates’ words and conduct’
By harping on death Gandhi was ducking the real issue- viz. money. That's what brought Indians to South Africa. If your monkey-trips got you expelled from the country, folks back home would laugh at you. That's why you needed some sort of quasi-religious alibi. After all, this Suqrat dude must have got to Heaven- right? Oh. The Greeks turned Christian and decided pagans like Socrates were fucked for all eternity. Sad.
Still, Gandhi was a Hindu and believed in transmigration. Thus his account of Socrates's speech has a different import to the English reception of the ancient Greek. Gandhi writing in Gujarati says ' You have sentenced me to death. I shall now leave this world. My opponents will be looked upon as men who betrayed truth and perpetrated an injustice. I will suffer my punishment. But they will [also] suffer the penalty for their [evil] deeds. This is what always happens. Perhaps it is just as well that it should be so.
In other words, Suqrat gets reborn as a Brahmin. His persecutors will be reborn as unclean Mlecchas or, if they had some redeeming feature, Indian untouchables.
Vasunia writes- 'one of the interesting points about Gandhi’s rendition in this and other passages that touch on the issue of death is precisely that by his excisions
i.e. reference to Truth as a Platonic form in which the virtuous participate more fully
he amplifies the emphasis on death.
Re-birth.
That Socrates is happy to lay down his life in the right way, for the right reason, and at the right time is a message that Gandhi takes to heart and strives to put across to his readers.
That's why a person who thought Gandhi was a nut-case and that it would be a disaster for India if the Brits slyly fucked off nevertheless might find it worthwhile to follow that Pied Piper. Why be reborn on this earth when, by following Gandhi you can be reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex and no dirty pictures?
Vasunia thinks Gandhi was 'uncannily successful in his dealings with political opponents'. I suppose it is true that there were times when he could bully those in his own party. But after 'Quit India' flopped, he lost that power. The truth is, a guy who keeps saying he will fast to death but who never dies comes to be seen as a poltroon. Vasunia quotes the cretin Ajay Skaria ‘. . . the heroic nationalists who gave their life to the nation
were not Gandhian. They belonged to the 'Garam Dal' of Lal, Bal & Pal not the 'naram dal' of Gokhale and Gandhi.
also practiced a certain living by dying,
they ran the risk of being killed and some were actually killed. This is why they are still respected. As for 'living by dying'- it involves lots and lots of lying. I myself have chopped off my own head three times since lunch to protest against the suffering of trillions of Netan-Yahoos who are being incessantly sodomized by Joe Biden's invisible cock. This is my Socratic 'practice of death'.
where they gave themselves to their very death for a cause.
The Boers had done so en masse. Then they realized that the Brits might exterminate them completely. Thus they bent the knee and, thanks to Smuts, profited by it.
This very giving of themselves to their death authorized a living on and an evading of death so that their cause, the nation, could be better pursued.’
Just as my giving myself to death three times a day authorizes me to go on living so as to protest Biden's buggery of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
Gandhi in South Africa initially believed he could be helpful to Milner & the Anglo Saxons. The Asians could be a counterweight to the Boers. The problem was that the Boers had fought well and had won international sympathy. Smuts genius was to play the 'Yellow Peril card'- Asiatic immigrants work for less money. The White Man can't compete. Ludicrously, this cry was taken up even in England where it was suggested that Chinese coolies would take jobs from British coal miners. F.E Smith's maiden speech- still considered the finest ever made- made this point with a learned reference to Virgil which Vasunia would well understand viz. Proximus Ucalegon ardebat, which he construed as—the hon. and learned Member for East Manchester is letting off Chinese crackers. The meaning being 'the Yellow Peril argument is an incendiary attempt to wreck the whole argument for Free Trade.'
Gandhi was bound to fail in South Africa because Milner's days were numbered. Kitchener tipped Smuts the wink by telling him to agree to anything because the new administration would favour the Boers. They lost the war but won the peace. The British Empire was cracking up because national communities wanted to be masters in their own house. They would give short shrift to colored immigrants or 'minorities' (though South Africa had a Black majority).
Vasunia concludes his little essay on Gandhi & Socrates thus. 'Many of Gandhi’s interlocutors, opponents, and gaolers would have had a far deeper knowledge than Gandhi of Plato’s Greek
because the average turnkey in an Indian prison attended an English Public School before reading 'Greats' at Oxford.
and a more wide-ranging familiarity with Plato’s dialogues (and, for that matter, of Ruskin’s work). Gandhi could not read classical Greek. But it was he, and not they, who perceived the transformative potential of the Apology in an English translation of the Victorian period and who thereby came to a better understanding of satyagraha, the truth-force that brought an Empire to its knees'
The Empire was brought to its knees on three different occasions
1) After the first world war, Britain was reliant on Indian troops in the MENA. It was losing to both the Bolsheviks and then the Turks. Ireland was in flames. Egypt was in a similar condition. Afghanistan, though losing the third War, could not be occupied. The head of the British Army, Sir Henry Wilson titled his speech to the War College- in 1921- 'the end of Empire'. Britain didn't have the troops or the money to hold India or Egypt or Ireland or even- if there was a Bolshevik uprising- England itself!
Thankfully, Gandhi surrendered early in the next year so India did not get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got. I suppose this suited his financiers. Consider the case of Ghanshyam Das Birla. As a young man he'd had to go into hiding fearing getting caught up in the Roda cartridge case- i.e. being sent to prison for contact with Revolutionaries. Supporting Gandhi financially helped Birla gain respectability and the friendship of Tegart- the Police Commissioner who had slaughtered the Jugantar revolutionaries. After retirement Tegart became a director of Birla's holding company in London. Birla himself did very well both under the Raj and much more so in independent India.
2) After the Wall Street Crash when Labour had once again come to power. Even the Tories admitted that India had to be placated. Thankfully Gandhi completely screwed everything up and managed to unite everybody against the Congress at the Second Round Table Conference. Still, his financiers got the Mody-Lee agreement while the Brits got to unilaterally dictate the pace and scope of the transfer of power.
3) After the fall of Singapore. Gandhi's stupidity was the 'Day of Deliverance' for the Muslim League. Quit India failed completely. Gandhi had become irrelevant save in so far as he could still collect money and blackmail his acolytes. Then a Hindu shot him- the fucker kept promising to fast to death but seemed set to live for ever, unlike Socrates whose 'practicing death' involved actually dying- and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. True some Chitpavan Brahmins were massacred in revenge but nobody really liked them.
Gujeratis- Gandhi & Jinnah- had done their best and the outcome was the worst possible one. Not till Modi became P.M did Indians lose their prejudice against the smug, sanctimonious Gujju who might suddenly start babbling about Socrates or urine drinking or some other such shit.
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