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Bazaars, Conversations and
Freedom: For a Market Culture
Beyond Greed and Fear
Rajni Bakshi
April 2012
978-1-906093-63-1 (pbk)
www.greenleaf-publishing.com/bazaars
© 2012 Greenleaf Publishing Limited
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prelude
a walk down wall street
It was on 11 September 1609, that the first European set foot
on the island we now call Manhattan. Henry Hudson came
ashore near about the site where the World Trade Center
was later to soar and crash. The explorer and his crew of
20, aboard the ship Half Moon, were working for the newly
formed Dutch East India Company. Their mission was to find
the fabled Northwest Passage which would allow European
trade vessels to navigate past the frozen northern coastline of
America to reach China.
Sailing into the mouth of the river that was later named
after him, Hudson saw scores of native people paddling their
canoes between the mainland and an island they called Menatay – ‘the place where the sun is born’. The southern tip of
Menatay was a summer time gathering place where the Delaware people came to mingle, converse and barter. Hudson
and his crew ventured into this gathering with an offering of
beads, knives and hatchets. In turn they were given beaver
and otter skins. Here was free exchange in an almost pristine
form. Hudson’s journals glowed with accounts of the loving,
generous nature of the indigenous people.
Within a few years, the Delaware gathering place gave
way to a rag-tag settlement of Dutch traders and immigrants.
2 bazaars, conversations and freedom
When guns, germs and greed replaced the bonhomie of first
contact, the European settlers built a small wood and mud
barricade across the narrow southern tip of Manhattan. The
walls of Fort Amsterdam were a symbolic representation of
collapsed conversations.
Eventually, the Delaware people retreated inland. The
expanding population of European settlers now declared Fort
Amsterdam to be an ‘obstructing nuisance’. So they pulled it
down. The short and narrow street that replaced the barricade
was named, naturally, Wall Street. A vastly different kind of
meeting place and market began to take shape in and around
the literal and metaphorical Wall Street. Free exchange gradually morphed into an idea known as the ‘free market’.
Three hundred and ninety-nine years later, almost to the
day that Hudson landed there, Wall Street imploded. From the
primitive barter hub of the Delaware tribe to the fall of Lehman Brothers and other giant finance companies in September 2008 we can find a wealth of encoded messages that might
be vital to the future of civilisation.
I more or less stumbled upon these codes. My journey
was initially driven by rather basic questions which were far
upstream of the doomsday machine that has shredded businesses on Wall Street and thus across the world. Can we
resuscitate the planet’s gasping ecosystems only to the extent
that the money bottom line of the market will allow? Why do
enough responsible people accept, as a gospel truth, the claim
that no further miracle drugs would be invented without the
motive of enormous private profit? We all enjoy the freedom
of open exchange in a marketplace but is that the same as
the ‘free market’? To my surprise I discovered that a dazzling variety of people, across the world, are troubled by these
questions. Most of them share a firm conviction that the creative freedom inherent to our species is far more powerful than
the ‘free market’ orthodoxy.
Before I could venture further I had to first grapple with
my own preconceptions. My training, both at home in India
prelude 3
and in the West, urged me to view what I critiqued from up
close and with empathy. It was not enough to read about and
talk with people who understand, perhaps even worship, the
prevailing market culture. It seemed imperative to visit the
site of its core symbol. So I went walkabout on Wall Street. The
onward journey came to be defined by two sights – Federal
Hall and the Trinity Church which crowns Wall Street at its
junction with Broadway.
Federal Hall stands on the site of the original New York City
Hall where George Washington was sworn in as President and
the first federal government of the newly born United States
of America was housed. The New York Stock Exchange next
door, though it now dominates the image and identity of Wall
Street, came up much later. That civic meeting place, and the
house of worship nearby, served as a reminder that bazaars
and marketplaces have fundamentally been a point of connection and conversation. More importantly, until about 200
years ago, those conversations were as much about civilisation-making values and politics, as about material exchange.
This realisation shaped the onward journey and provided
the fundamental premises of this exploration. The bazaar, an
ancient mechanism of human society, is quite distinct from
what we now call the ‘free market’. Bazaar refers to a location; the market is an idea. Bazaars bring together buyers and
sellers, eyeball to eyeball, for open and direct exchange. The
free market, as it emerged in 18th-century Europe, fostered
complex mechanisms of more indirect and distant exchange.
Within the babble and bustle of bazaars buying and selling
were tossed together with storytelling, politics and even the
framing of moral values. By contrast, the idea of a free market
depends on assiduously separating the economic sphere from
the rest of life.
As I ventured forth on this journey I found that the bazaar
now also serves as a metaphor for those processes that define
value, even commercial value, in a deeper and wider sense
than price or financial assets. The market culture that is now
4 bazaars, conversations and freedom
in the throes of crisis, has depended on keeping the profit
motive pure and ‘unsullied’ by social, moral or ecological concerns – relegating them to family, government and charities.
With a wee bit of licence, the term ‘bazaar’ can be deployed
to allude to a more socially embedded market culture – based
on a broader, more well-rounded, view of human nature. This
view challenges the notion of ‘economic man’ as a utility-maximising, or selfish, individual unit. What is now coming apart
at the seams is the idea that combining social and moral values with commercial objectives would somehow reduce the
reach of ‘the market’.
Above all, bazaar is more akin to market economy – that
circle of open exchange where producers decipher consumers’ will and purchasing power to create goods and services.
What the ‘free market’ has fostered is a market society
where virtually all functions of life are seen to be best served
by the pecuniary motive.
But now, across the world and at multiple levels, society
is fighting back. I found an illustration of this as I stepped off
Wall Street and onto a subway train.
‘To the best of my knowledge there is no mention of the
bottom line in the Hippocratic Oath’, said the bold print of an
advertisement in the subway car. The copy was accompanied
by the photo of a venerable looking male doctor wearing a
blue surgical cap. The small print of the advertisement urged
New Yorkers to call the Lenox Hill Hospital Physician Referral
Service – ‘For the surgeon whose only concern is your health.’
Even as an advertising ploy, this was a statement. It tapped
into deep-seated anxieties.
Back in India, my friend Rohini Nilekani found a more
direct and stark expression of this anxiety expressed by a villager in Bihar: ‘Once upon a time the natural order of life was
that samaj, society, came first. Government and market were
less powerful. Colonialism changed this. Samaj fell to second
place and government dominated. Now the market rules, government is in between and samaj is a poor third.’
prelude 5
Or, as the economist Jeremy Rifkin has put it: ‘Can civilization survive when only the commercial sphere is left as the
primary mediator of human life?’
I knew at the outset that merely mapping these anxieties
was not my mission. As the walkabout stretched wider, taking
me into diverse realms, I found myself recording the quest for
ways to redress this imbalance. The stories in this book could
be read as dispatches from that journey, an account of scattered initiatives or trends. And, yet, there is a deeper subtext.
These tales offer glimpses of how a post-revolutionary era is
taking shape.
The people you will meet in these pages are not working for
a new order that can come about through a cataclysmic shift
of power. However, a host of trends and initiatives are pushing
ahead a transformation that may be no less profound. At the
heart of this foment is something both simple and demanding
– a broader view of human nature. There is a surge of people
who are seeking a better balance between competing human
tendencies – greed and generosity, competition and cooperation, conflict and conciliation. Most of them are boldly confident that the higher faculties of our species can not only make
individual lives better, they can also underpin our interactions
in marketplaces.
As this confidence grows, the future is taking shape in
the spaces that have opened up since the two dominant, and
conflicting, utopias of the 20th century collapsed. While the
communist utopia fell dramatically, triumphant free-market
fundamentalism has been quietly punctured. The stark choice
between State domination and market free-for-all was cleared
away along with the debris of the Berlin Wall. But the pullingdown of that Wall may be a greater watershed than we have
fully grasped – because barriers to thought and perception are
far more stubborn than inanimate bricks and mortar.
That might explain why the wrecking balls bringing down
the barrier in Berlin sounded like bells ringing in the victory of ‘capitalism’. Many mistook the reaffirmation of free
6 bazaars, conversations and freedom
exchange and open society as a victory for ‘the market’. And,
yet, the process of unbundling these confusions has steadily,
if rather quietly, been gathering momentum. So far this shift
was restrained by the basic catch that, as Albert Einstein used
to say, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. It is now tempting to visualise the
meltdown on Wall Street as a forest fire that will clear away
not only destructive financial instruments but also a fossilised
mind-set – to make way for a healthier culture of commerce
in which bazaars are conversations about not just freedom of
exchange and material opportunity but also about purpose,
and social and moral values.
The memory of the literal wall that once stood at Wall
Street is important here. It serves as an invitation to restore
collapsed conversations. It is also a reminder that we now live
in an age where might is not right. Yes, might still often wins.
But after the varied struggles of the 20th century, and above
all after Mahatma Gandhi, right has powerful might. More and
more people are surging against barriers of thought and ideology to challenge conventional wisdom about what is possible.
This is the striving for higher forms of freedom.
Freedom from the dogma of TINA, that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to the self-regulating market run by a mythical ‘economic man’; freedom to foster a culture of commerce based
on a fuller, more real, view of human nature; freedom to forge
more equitable relations in the marketplace and challenge
power structures. But all of this also requires freedom from
fear – the fear of wide, uncharted spaces and uncertainties.
Writing these stories has taught me to respect such fears of
the unknown. Here is an attempt to open a dialogue that is
inviting not just to daring innovators but those submerged in
business-as-usual.
Then again, not all the premises of this journey challenge
conventional wisdom. It is now widely agreed that freedom
to exchange and transact is valuable only if it is universally
and evenly available to all. Arbitrary controls enforced by
prelude 7
unaccountable bureaucracies or distortions created by private
power cartels endanger this freedom and must therefore be
prevented. This is the theory of even the prevailing market
culture.
Yet we find an astonishing variety of ‘unfreedoms’ persisting. Apart from coining this apt term, Amartya Sen has also
shown how the prolonged celebration of utility and wealth has
obscured the central value of freedom itself. But just as the
walls of Fort Amsterdam had to come down in order to lay
Wall Street, the assumptions and baggage associated with the
idea of the market are now being unravelled. No pat formulas
await discovery, nor do old maps help much. But, as Sen has
urged, an overarching concern with processes that simultaneously enhance individual freedoms and broad social welfare is
a good way to journey further.
Chapter 1 traces the historical and cultural transition that
put bazaars and politics in a position of subservience to the
market. Chapter 2 continues this journey upstream into the
history of ideas to show how the current narrow definition
of self-interest came about. It is now being overturned by
upheavals within the discipline of economics and other revolts
which make homo economicus look more like an effigy than a
portrait. Chapter 3 delves into multiple dimensions of how the
old habit of money is being re-examined, tweaked and recreated to challenge – and perhaps even transform – the ways in
which we pass on information about value.
A feral kind of competition has been increasingly endemic
in the market. Chapter 4 traces the growing interface between
cooperation and competition, particularly the gift culture of
the internet and wider implications of the open-source movement. Chapter 5 explores how the terms of engagement
between Main Street and Wall Street might be redefined to
truly address the needs of those who feel threatened by globalisation. Chapter 6 explores the promise and limitations of
changes unfolding within the world of corporations. Chapter
7 grapples with the possibility of creating a new operating
8 bazaars, conversations and freedom
system for the market mechanism – one that is founded on the
reality that nature bats last and it owns the stadium.
In the tradition of the agora as an open space for philosophical reflection as well as material exchange, these stories are an endeavour to expand conversations in and about
bazaars, to explore how far we might stretch the freedom to
seek universal well-being. Hence the title Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom. True, each of these words evokes a multitude of images and cannot be fixed to any one meaning. And,
yet, we can venture forth, carefully, knowing that words serve
as tools or signposts for a fluid and multi-dimensional exploration of reality.
The basis of this endeavour is the raw faith best expressed
by pioneers of the open-source phenomenon: with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. Or, as Marcel Proust said, ‘The real
voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.’