Vinay Gupta describes his political evolution over the years. A very interesting and strongly recommended piece from one of the digital mavericks of our time. We excerpt the last two phases of his thinking.

Vinay Gupta:

“I became a Gandhian through a more subtle process. I started to try and figure out how you could actually have a Stateless society that worked. I’m from a medical background (my father, a doctor, my mother, a nurse) so my mind was naturally shaped by epidemeological and caring models. I wanted to envisage and work towards a society in which public health was good, and people were happy. These are simple goals to express, albeit far from the heart of most political theory and doctrine, and I wanted to understand how to get there. Gandhi’s attitude to war (nonviolence at all costs!) is what he is best remembered for, but it’s Gandhian economics which is the Jewel in the Crown of Gandhian thinking.

Gandhian economics (note that it’s not Ghandi – even very politically literate people habitually make that error) is the economics of local, recirculating wealth. Gandhi was acutely aware of the fact the British were in India as looters, to strip the wealth from the society and export it, and stopping this looting was an integral part of his strategy. But, in fact, the idea of “keeping what you make” is close to Libertarianism, integral (no doubt about this) to Anarchism (depending on the nature of the goods, of course…) and Gandhi’s model is uniquely Indian in its inception – when Gandhi says “local” he means “embedded in an extended family, a family of such families, bound together by mutual obligation.” This is at the heart of Western misreadings of Gandhi – he was far from asexual (a tantric, even a celibate one, is not asexual) and his model of society was built on the matrix of mutual obligations which is the core of the Hindu body politic, extended to include those who are not full members of the groups which control local resources. Gandhi wanted to extend the extended family to include everybody, but crucially, face-to-face, daily-contact responsibility for the poor and needy on your doorstep, for the working man who brings you your rice, for the doctor who sees your children, was Gandhi’s model. You might call Gandhi’s vision of the world Individual Socialism, where the matrix of mutual obligations which comprise Indian society at its best is extended to include everybody – we are all obligated to help each-other, without State coercion in the vast majority of cases, and so the world runs.

It’s easy to read Gandhi as a Libertarian Leftist, and I made this mistake myself for years, because I had not fully factored the degree to which Gandhi was building on Indian models of social obligation (and, indeed caste dharma) to build a society. But it all came back to water, to sanitation, to power, to infrastructure, and it’s in this perspective that I found my way.

The most tangible benefit of being a member of a developed world State is infrastructure: water, sanitation, power, roads, all that stuff just works and is damn cheap. People in the poorer countries pay 10x or 100x as much for clean drinking water as we do, because Western states are really good at infrastructure. But does this mean we’re doomed to big central governments as the only way to provide the infrastructure which makes a good standard of living affordable to everybody?

When I first thought about this as a political problem, I could not get anywhere. But I am an engineer and it’s in engineering that I finally found a political synethsis I could believe in.

Gandhi was a designer. The spinning wheel for which he was famous is a political object, which works in three ways.

* Firstly, it keeps the price of cloth high and distributes the income from making cloth to individual people spinning. Gandhi wore the loincloth (rather than a suit) to show that if you could only afford a little cloth because the hand-spun stuff was so expensive, that was fine.

* Secondly, the spinning wheel was Free, it was a design which had originated in a competition for a new spinning wheel, which Gandhi then adapted and modified, and which anybody with the skills could manufacture without patent or copyright concerns. It was a tool Of the People, By the People, For the People. It was Freedom, of a material kind.

* Thirdly, it was sustainable, it used nothing which was imported, it used nothing which was not abundant, it used nothing which could not be replaced. From end to end, the manual spinning of cloth was an organic, indiginous activity with this tooling, quite unlike the far-off Mills of Manchester with their coal-and-iron spinning infrastructure.

And that it when it clicked for me: infrastructure shapes our political options, it shapes the playing field in incredibly deep ways. Deeper that government, the material base of the society shapes the structure of our lives.

Marxism sees Capital, Labour and Talent fighting for their shares of the rewards of Industrial Manufacturing. It’s a model, but an incomplete one.

Georgism sees Capital, Labour, and Talent too, but also takes into account Landlords and Monopolies, which gives a further, wider picture.

But both of these models assume a manufacturing base which greatly rewards large scale and centralization, and the Gandhian model (which I’ll call Individual Socialism a few lines longer) assumes that you can use a Legislative Subsidy (banning factories, essentially) to produce a better wealth distribution, in exactly the same way that Capitalism uses a Legislative Subsidy (in the form of limited liablity) to produce a worse wealth distribution, to pack the resources at the top.

And this became the four turning of the wheel: Infrastructure-Centric politics. I spent a long time writing and thinking about this, producing models like The Free City State and Infrastructure for Anarchists which teach infrastructure theory as a core political truth, literally as the substrate of society, and examine how different styles of engineering and governance over engineered artefacts could produce a better political structure and thereby better society.

It was only after several years of this that I realized I was reprising the work and words of Buckminster Fuller, sometimes to the letter. And that was the political equilibrium at which I remained for several years, plugging away on trying to bulid physical systems, maps and models, to enable a resilient relocalization which would produce high quality of life on practically no natural resources, with the objective of protecting the people from the worse consequences of centralization and authoritarianism, as a first step – no, rather, as a component – of a better future for everyone.
Then then came the Pirate Party.

I’d given up, completely, on electoral politics. I wanted to exercise my political power using as much leverage as I could possibly find, using my engineering nous to exercise disproportionate impact on the future course of humanity and life on planet earth. At this altitude, the air is pretty thin – there were, for many years, perhaps six people in the world that really understood what I was doing and why, and all of them were busy running similar projects, attempting to steer the globe down a better path by skill and individual expertise. This brain trust was a lonely place.

Then the Pirates came, and my ears pricked up. They seemed to understand tech. They were not anarchists, but nor were they Libertarians – a sophisticated discourse about individual liberty and common goods, first in non-scarce areas like knowledge, but with a sophistication that spoke to the clear possibility of extending this kind of savvy into new areas, like perhaps (in the long run) taking an intelligent new approach on land rights, sustainability and environmentalism.

In short, people were beginning to think about politics in a way that I recognized as genuinely fresh, novel and intelligent, and I began to do some research, wrote a short, informal manifesto, and joined. In that order.

And then they won 10% of the votes in German elections. And this rocked me to the core.

I’d implicitly given up on electoral democracy as a route to sane governnance. The track record was so bad in every country I’d lived in that I had simply abandoned hope that there was any way for me to express my political will through the matrix of a political party and not walk away with utter nonsense for results. The tiny fringe parties which might have been closest to my goals were banished to perpetual irrelevance in the First Past the Post, winner take all electoral systems of Britain and America.

But in Germany, the Pirates were winning.

So I rejoined the UK Pirate Party, with an eye on helping move us towards a showing in the European elections, and took a role uniquely suited to my talents.

I am the Defence Policy Working Group leader for the UK Pirate Party. I’ve gone from being a political radical in the wilderness to a small part of a Party Machine because, at last, a political party which shared enough of my beliefs and values to make common cause with arose, and that party is credible enough to command substantial popular support in major global powers.

There’s a new dawn coming, because the Pirate Party has astonishing demographics in under-30s, and the US copyright lobby is going down with the ship as the US hemorrhages political credibility and good-will globally, making breaking the Internet on Hollywood’s behalf less attractive with each passing day.

In short: finally I’ve re-enlisted in Democracy as a route to real political change, and I have the Pirate Party to thank for that. Thanks are due to Falkvinge for daring to do the impossible, and I’m proud to be able to do a little to help.”