Dr Mohinder Kumar
“We are condemned to be free” thus wrote Jean Paul Sartre, a noted French intellectual, renowned writer and a political activist. Sartre, as the world knows, is the only thinker in the vast galaxy of intellectuals who declined to accept Nobel Prize for literature, as a mark of his freedom, self-determination and assertion of individual free choice. As existentialist philosopher aspiring for individual freedom and searching intrinsic meaning in human existence, he met with condemnation in freedom. Freedom was nowhere in sight though he tried much to decode its code. At one stage he would long for life of absolute freedom without causal determination. That was the period when radical Students Movement in France guided by the New Left and existentialism was in full fermentation in the 1960s.
Today farmers in India in the New Millennium aspire and tend to find themselves in a similar cultural ethos, environment and ‘state’ -understood with political and mental significance. There is general restlessness in the country wherein farmers are the forerunners of the silent movement of suicides.
Sartre saw a streak of condemnation resting in freedom and could not attain emancipation until he was drawn to Karl Marx’s notion of the “realm of necessity” in a class-divided society. Marx would henceforth help Sartre strike a balance between the “realm of freedom” and “realm of necessity”. Let us recall young Siddhartha is the earliest example in human history who as Buddha suggested to the world Middle Path -to shun polarities and extremes. Sheer concrete individualism aspired in the realm of freedom on the one hand and ruthless over-dependence of human beings in the realm of necessity on the other are the two polarities afflicting mankind as it moves from one historical epoch to the other. Farmers are often seen oscillating between these two extremes.
As “independent”, ” autonomous”, so-called “free” owner-operators engaged in separated cultivation processes, parceled-out in millions of numbers, these farmers of ours are similarly fighting this battle, not just for survival but also for emancipation -to be genuinely free.
A few questions arise. The first is: freedom from what? Is it freedom from the system? Second is: Freedom for what? Is it for more rational organization of farmers’ life which is essentially historical, and not just stuck at the present? It raises further questions of fundamental importance while we narrowed our framework hitherto to mere supply of inputs and institutional credit. Do farmers aspire to explore existential “purpose” of human life in farming activity? Are they doing so generation after generation since the times immemorial and that is why we call agriculture a compound of “households”, “tradition” and “culture”? Is this agriculture endangered? Are we able or prepared to see this demise? Has it something to do with what Epicurus called, “alienation of labor” in Nature and Marx later added to it “alienation of labor” in history? Do farmers seek to save this purposeful farming activity and end up in desperation giving up their own lives in a bid to save agriculture that is endangered? Is not there need to transcend the surface-reality of agriculture as it appears and it’s needed to see the abstract, hidden, substratum of farming? Are farmers any way finding it difficult to build “rational organization of historical life” based on their constraints? Do the so-called “Producers’ Organizations” (POs) which are sprouting on borrowed institutional and corporate finances genuinely “organize” farmers in a form that facilitates or enables them to attain true and genuine freedom instead of these POs ensuring commodities and supply lines for enhanced value chains, which ultimately benefits global finance, banks’ capital and global markets by endangering local communities and farmers in the final analysis? Is it a new battle between capital and labor (or farmer) for survival and expansion? Man started his journey in history of evolution in a friendly mode of “association with nature” or “unity with nature”. Is it so that now the processes of “natural selection” have reached at peak so that nature itself appears to the farmers as a force that is antithetical, alienated and estranged so that they should end their lives, being unable to build and re-build their life everyday with renewed vigor on constraints in nature that they had been any way facing from day one but never felt so desperate and disheartened as they feel today? Quest for freedom and emancipation is very old but suicide as a mechanism adopted by farmers is a tragic and weird solution, which means no social solution though logically it may be an individual solution, since farmers operated in a rural world ridden with concrete individualism ad individualist, separatist tendencies. Many questions can be posited and these should be. However, let us first read little more on the question of freedom, to later revert to the question of farmers’ fate and future based on the past history.
“Men are deceived if they think themselves free”, thus wrote Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher. In fact it is rare that any philosopher, intellectual or writer witnessed and recorded any degree of aspired freedom that was available to man in any epoch of human history. But at the same time it is the freedom -whether it is freedom from wants, desires and accumulation (Buddha) or freedom from vice or freedom from slavery or freedom from exploitation- that has always weighed down on the minds of people including the farmers. Men can face any adversity or big crisis or calamity of fortuitous event with relative ease but comparatively cannot tolerate the rut of daily life, it seems, if it is ruthless, marked by over-dependence, uncertainties, risks, suffering, pain, desperation, alienation, separation, estrangement, immorality and what not that only sucks out all energy, pleasure and meaning of human existence. What visibly disturbed Siddhartha 2500 years ago, i.e. human “suffering” or “Dukha” silently perturbs every individual, including the farmers though response to the situation is always different. Though responses are different, the source is same: human “estrangement”. There is also a school of thought according to which emancipation and freedom cannot be limited; it has to be total, comprehensive and all-inclusive, limited not just to the farmers even as all divisions of society are inter-connected in a system of complexity that becomes ever complex day after day. A sustainable solution to the problem must encompass not just farmers but all individuals, sections and classes of the society pitted as each of these are against the ruling elements and antagonistic state elements emerging and evolving from within the society, depleted and replete every day, it seems.
The question of farmers’ suicide as manifestation of aspired freedom could be a question of freedom actually attained from the perspective of dying farmer. Therefore, the perspective of farmer that has died also becomes important. While individual perspectives in “concrete” sense of separated individuals having autonomous existence as “being” or “person” may be important in immediate sense, it is the “abstract individualism” or “universalism” that matters the most according to which human perspective and not concrete individual perspective has to represent the mankind and its problems and crises. We may have to understand that man is “universal” first, individual later and a farmer in the last or least instance. Only through such perspective emancipation of everyone including the farmer appears a “possibility”. Otherwise remaining focused on individuated and separated individuals in their compartmentalized modes of existence, does not offer even any far distant possibility of salvation or emancipation or freedom.
The issue of farmers committing suicides has rarely been posed in terms of fundamental question of philosophical perspective on man, his/ her relationship with nature, with fellow beings (each other), with objects and instruments (natural resources including land) of man’s labor, and with his labor process (command over cultivation process). As a result, even in matters of suicide a person that has died is seen a farmer -first and last -not a person with those rich yet alienated relationships cited above or as an ecological living conscious entity who is related to his surroundings in ecological relationships including nature on the one hand and human-social-economic-political (philosophical) superstructures on the other. First, man is factored into a professional “farmer” (now agri-business man); then farmer is factored into an array of different causal factors that would determine his life, existence and activity in truncated way: Now informal credit was held as causal factor then institutional credit factor would hold sway over his life. Now marketing is a problem then input supply would be held accountable. Now extension is a culprit then capitalist supply chain would be missing and interrupted. In this truncated and atomist approach farmer (who is essentially man) never happened to deserve a human approach to his life’s existential problems. Separately concerned would be showed for absence of “farmer-friendly policy”. At the most we witness “human face” of variants of development models and never really aimed to transcend statistical empiricism or scienticism celebrated on suicides. It is invariably always forgotten that behind those “empirical” (statistical) realities, there existed or could exist a more fundamental essence of humans and human society afflicted by estrangement (“virha” and “viyog” or separation) i.e. human estrangement, and it has happened ever since humans faced class-caste-based dichotomies, divisions, dualities, dialectics, dissociations, etc. of varied kinds leading to the human estrangement since ages under varied “modes of production’ or systems of production. The first labor/human estrangement may be said to have appeared when humans were alienated from nature while they were acting and working upon nature to start with.
This is what Marx has to say in the context of today’s plight of the farmers: “Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die”. Farmer-cum-creative artist Gajendra Singh, even as he hanged on to a tree before hanging himself down to die, was persistently trying to “maintain a continuing dialogue” for 74 minutes with over 5000 people standing and watching him on the ground. Did anyone pay attention to what he said? There is no record. Why? Growing sense of human alienation in society where suicides and deaths are no more than numbers. A man is just a mathematical number. So was Gajendra Singh and over a million of farmers whose death is recorded by the National Crimes Records Bureau. It would not be surprising if statisticians someday suggested the state to devise a statistical suicide-meter to gauge and count such deaths and forecast their trend by econometricians using sophisticated models. Economists already study “patterns” and characteristic features of such suicidal deaths in their research studies. Sense appearances, surface reality, indicators and characteristics seem to be more important even in suicides. Should the research hitherto have been content merely with identifying characteristics of died farmer and his family and “causal” factors which mechanically caused or determined his decision to commit suicide as if it was an investment or economic decision? “Economism” itself, meaning mere economic/ income approach to the farming, as an atomist approach to the activity, has inflicted heavy toll on the lives of farmers before the spate of suicides was unleashed by the circumstances of widespread human alienation and estrangement manifested in human insensitivity.
Marx’s analysis of the question of human alienation induces us to go back to asking fundamental questions. It also induces us to have an alternative approach to the question of farmers’ suicides, which should be based on Greek physicist and philosopher Epicurus’ perspective on nature and man. What is that perspective? It is that the first alienation in Nature i.e. between nature and man has already taken place, which is irreversible and presents itself as “rift” between the organic and the inorganic. But it can be compensated by union and association. Marx went further and employed this rift in the metabolic relation between human beings (farmers) and the earth (land) to capture the estrangement of human beings (all individuals including farmers) within class-based capitalist society from the natural conditions. These natural conditions formed the basis for their existence, called by Marx “the everlasting nature-imposed conditions of human existence. Farmers are since ages accustomed to this nature-imposed necessity of being positively dependent on nature (earth/ land/ water). This “rift” as long as it is not antagonistic between nature and human beings (farmers) is tolerable, rather accepted by farmers even as land is their “tool” or “object of labor” on which they worked for creativity and productive activity.
The main culprit is the system of capitalism, its avaricious tendency for money accumulation and fetishism for commodities based on over-exploitation of land and other natural resources which pits human beings (farmers) against soil/ land/ water. This antagonism also forms the basis for alienation of human being (farmers) from each other, which is most dangerous for survival, subsistence and existence. Premature, untimely and contingent death of farmers is but a corollary of socially alienated existence of farmers striving and struggling daily as Robinson Crusoe on secluded islands amidst turbulent capitalist conditions. Farmers as “natural beings” subsist as “free” owners of land but are ruthlessly dependent on exogenous non-natural forces imposed from outside like institutional credit, financing, markets, technologies, resources, etc. which they find most difficult to cope with. While financial inclusion is posited as good and virtuous, it is overlooked that social exclusion of independent farmers is also immoral, which desires reorganization of structure of agriculture on cooperative/ collective basis without Stalinist methods (of 1940s) and institutional methods (of the New Millennium), which render individuals apolitical and ahistorical though overtly making them pushed under the umbrella of “groups” and “companies” controlled by exotic financial institutions.
Farmers are now on a look-out for genuine freedom. Having lost natural values, natural being status and natural meaning of existence, they seek success which comes by suicide. So, having lost values, meanings and oneness with natural conditions of existence, they desperately strive to succeed in achieving their “purpose” of existence which they ultimately find in suicide. Society today is insensitive to death as it used to be so to the life and lively existence. If society could not value life, how could it understand death? Two questions shall always haunt us: First, what prompted Buddha to renounce the world in thick dark? Second, what prompted Gajendra Singh to hang himself in day light and in full public view? The clue lies in human alienation and social estrangement. Who is the culprit? Capitalism, of course, which promoted concrete individualism.
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