The Economy of Permanence: A Quest for a Social Order Based on Non-violence (स्थायी अर्थतन्त्र)

Economy of Permanence
The trend in modern life is to follow fashions by increasing the complexity
competitively while lowering the human standard in so doing.
In America, home-life is being rapidly broken up by false ideas of living being
disseminated. A couple may live in a flat of one or two rooms with 'labour-
saving devices'. The husband will go to work in the morning and so will the
wife. Each will have a snack breakfast on the way in some cafeteria, perhaps,
lunch at a factory refreshment bar or grill, and the two will meet in the
evening and have their supper in a restaurant and, if their combined income is
big enough to support a car, will go for a drive and visit a cinema and return to
their rooms to listen in to the radio. There is no house-keeping, cooking or
other attributes of the home. They will not care to have bother of having
children nor can their 'high' standard of living allow of it. These are they who
are slaving away for the manufacturers who set the 'high' standard so as to have
'hands' readily available for the factories. The casual labour that helped the
British gardener's wife, the parlour maids and other household servants have
been driven to the factory gates and have had their standard of living 'raised'.
Such 'high' standards are advocated not for the betterment of the people from
altruistic motives but to serve the selfish ends of interested parties.
Manufacturers, apart from diverting servants into factory hands, paralyse the
freedom of action and movement of their employees by such standards being
set up. The bargaining power of labour is reduced in the proportion in which
material standards are raised.
A mill-owner, who desires that his 'hands' should not seek periodical digression
but should be regular in their attendance so that his mill production may be
steady and not fluctuate, will plan on his workers leading a complex standard
of existence which he will be pleased to call a 'high' standard of living. To
achieve this end he will pay his workers higher wages, support a liberal-
welfare schemes, and get them accustomed to amenities of factory life such as
clubs, tea rooms, games, cinemas, good housing etc. The result of all this will
be, that the worker who gets used to live on this level of a complex standard of
the American couple we noticed, will be loathe to change places even if his
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