Ghandi is well-known for the non-violent resistance techniques he taught and modeled during the struggle for Indian independence from a colonial power. What we perhaps don’t as often remember is that he spun the cloth for his own simple clothing and taught that it was a duty of every Indian to do the same.
Here is his rationale: “He chose the traditional loincloth as a rejection of Western culture and a symbolic identification with the poor of India. His personal choice became a powerful political gesture as he urged his more privileged followers to copy his example and discard—or even burn—their European-style clothing and return with pride to their ancient, precolonial culture.4 Gandhi claimed that spinning thread in the traditional manner also had material advantages, as it would create the basis for economic independence and the possibility of survival for India’s impoverished rural multitudes.5 This commitment to traditional cloth making was also part of a larger swadeshi movement, which aimed for the boycott of all British goods. As Gandhi explained to Charlie Chaplin in 1931, the return to spinning did not mean a rejection of all modern technology but of the exploitive and controlling economic and political system in which textile manufacture had become entangled. Gandhi said, “Machinery in the past has made us dependent on England, and the only way we can rid ourselves of the dependence is to boycott all goods made by machinery. This is why we have made it the patriotic duty of every Indian to spin his own cotton and weave his own cloth.”
It occurs to me that we have been colonized in the United States by corporate interests. For almost half a century, I have resisted this corporate take-over with my food choices. I believe my individual choices are important, but I think the time has come to connect with others to turn my individual choice into a political and economic statement.
I hope like-minded people can come up with one or more symbolic gestures as powerful as this one that Ghandi advocated to state our opposition to Trumpism and the values it promotes. If we can all unite behind this set of actions, it will have a strong economic impact, but even more importantly, it will make the case that our dismal failure to vote in sufficient numbers in the 2016 campaign didn’t.
It also occurs to me that the place we should look for this action or set of actions is in the food supply chain, which affects so many critical aspects of our lives on this planet: our moral sensibility, the environment, corporate/colonial rapaciousness, poverty, waste, health and more. I read a wonderful post this week envisioning a sustainable system, which I must add is NOT industrial agriculture — nor is it, according to this writer, universal veganism.
With such a vision in mind, perhaps there is some person or group out there capable of leading a resistance through mass action along the lines of Ghandi’s resistance. In the course of carrying out this action, an action in which every person could participate, we would not only deliver a strong economic and political message, but we might impact the environment sufficiently to counteract some of the damage this regime promises.
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