Vandana Shiva’s Thoughts on “Occupy Wall Street” Capture the Movement’s Meaning — an Overdue Gandhian Perspective on More Equitable Living

16 November 2011

Paradigms are often confining — we tend not to see beyond what we know (or what we think we know)

Americans (generally speaking) complacently take idealized ideas about capitalism and “free” markets as being the proper paradigm for civilization.

Even in the depths of the “99 percent’s” current economic struggles, there is little overt talk about unrestrained capitalism’s inherent moral and social deficiencies, when used as an organizing cultural force.

That’s why so many otherwise intelligent people dismiss Occupy Wall Street as a leaderless and message-lacking near anarchy.

The truth is more interesting.

Spain’s “Los Indignados” articulate Occupy Wall Street’s mission

Physicist/philosopher Dr. Vandana Shiva quoted “the indignants” (Spain’s equivalent of Occupy Wall Street):

Their declaration states: “We are the people . . . . We are here because we want a new society that gives more priority to life than to economic interest."

Shiva explained that the developed world’s dominant culture is accustomed to hierarchically organized domination. It does not comprehend horizontally-organized movements which lack leaders and/or cleverly managed sound bites.

Dr. Shiva quoted Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) to show how far democracy has plummeted from its original goals

From being "by the people, for the people, of the people", it has become "by the corporations, of the corporations, for the corporations".

Money drives elections, and money runs government.

Occupy Wall Street’s message is that our unconstrained capitalistic paradigm needs to shift somewhat

Shiva continued:

Humans . . . with duties and rights, have been replaced by corporations, with no duties to either the earth or society, only limitless rights to exploit both the earth and people.

Corporations have been assigned legal personhood, and corporate rights, premised on maximisation of profits, are now extinguishing the rights of the earth, and the rights of people to the earth's gifts and resources.

Why duties and rights are important — and why consciously prioritizing them is necessary

Cultures consciously and unconsciously assign rights and duties. The developed world, and especially the United States, has effectively placed corporations’ legal duty to maximize profits in the top spot of our cultural priorities list.

That seems self-destructively odd.

As Dr. Shiva implies, thoughtless profit “maximization” duty prevents us from focusing on the costs of our short-sighted exploitation of human and material resources. It fails to take into account more morally compelling ideas about why society and culture exist in the first place.

People have always taken it for granted that we have duties that go beyond profiting in the present moment. Were that not so, parents would sell their children, farmers would degrade their land, nations would obliterate national parks and virtual all the “commons,” and there would be no uproar when despots killed their own people.

All five of the world’s major spiritual traditions — Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism — attack the idea of profit as being humanity’s sole purpose and meaning. That in itself should demonstrate how ridiculous it is to put corporate money grubbing above all else.

The moral? — Gandhi wasn’t wrong

Dr. Shiva’s humanitarian tone is reasonably taken. Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would agree.

That’s what the Occupy Movement is about.

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Vandana Shiva’s Thoughts on “Occupy Wall Street” Capture the Movement’s Meaning — an Overdue Gandhian Perspective on More Equitable Living