Conscience

The past week marked a watershed moment for India’s corporate world.
Tata — a harbinger of hope and de-facto standard for corporate governance came in the limelight for the inharmonious ousting of its chairman, Cyrus Mistry, and return of its former head. Amidst all the shock and awe that followed, what occurred was a series of revelations. Mismanaged businesses, non performing assets, acquisitions gone wrong and excess sentiments attached to loss making businesses. What eventually revealed was a salt to software conglomerate that was making up for its losses with profit margins that were increasingly diminishing. While such moments are dime a dozen in the corporate world, it came as a shock for me as Tata was a conglomerate whose reputation was irrevocably tied to quality, standards and the highest standards of corporate governance. In a nation ridden with corruption and lack of empathy towards employees, Tata has been a force to reckon with. However, the sudden loss of roughly about 50,000 crores from the market capitalization of the business reflects how quickly the sentiments of people have changed towards the business.

Ironically, during the period that this occurred in, I happened to be in Kerala. While one might know about Tata’s presence in the state for its tea estates, what’s hidden in the pages of history is a tussle between local communists and the TATA group when it came to creating automotive plants in the region. Since the industry would pose unique challenges and excess damage to the environment, the movement ensured the industries never came up. While the move was exceedingly criticised at the time by a young, educated population that could possibly attain jobs with ease locally at the time, in hindsight, I realize the value of what they did and the reasoning behind it. Had those industries come up, thousands of jobs that could have been made available to local unskilled labour — the kind with little hopes of being employed abroad would have been lost. Added to this was the harm the industrial wastage could cause towards the water, land and air surrounding the region. While the environmental diversity of the region has taken a hit with vast plots of land being planted with the same variety of plant, the setting up of tea estates has done considerably less harm than the automotive plants would have. The entire series of events got me wondering if capitalism has truly worked for the people. If India has ever had capitalism in its market in its true essence, and if our repeated chants of capitalism being the true solution to the state of the nation’s misery makes any sense.

At the crux of capitalism are two core principles. One is the belief that capital has to be mobilized / invested into ventures with calculated risk with the possibility of having it grow. Stagnant capital diminishes over time in the face of inflation and due to the same does not add to the wealth of the owner, and rather, makes him poorer. The second idea runs off the basis that (skilled) labour when paid for can be leveraged towards producing services or goods of value, which when sold in markets that find demand for it can convert into profit. However, in practice, these are not the only basis on which capitalism has worked. To be more specific, the labour part of the capitalistic equation has often been underpaid, and the market has been ill-treated by profit seeking conglomerates. Take for instance the ‘export’ of slaves from Africa — one of the earliest ventures of scale. Humans were commoditized and shipped like cotton or sugar. The idea was that these ‘lesser’ humans were better off working for white masters in civilized societies that being susceptible to the forces of nature and wildlife in the remote regions of Africa. The capitalist here believed he was paving a better life for the slave in bondage than in his freedom in the wild. As industrialism took over and factories sprouted up, millions of individuals left the misery of their farms for a steady payment at a factory. Labour was ill valued here for the sake of larger profit margins, but the individuals that had just migrated from the farms where starvation and poverty were their constant companions found comfort in being ill-treated in the factory. The devilish image painted in the works of Charles Dickens came as a result of seeing how profit hungry the industrialists of the time were. Due to the same, when Ford came through and said he will pay his employees a pension, a compensation that would suffice them enough to afford housing and a vehicle and have them work only 8 hours a day, it seemed revolutionary. Think about it — a man coming through and saying you have to work for 8 hours was .. revolutionary. And it wasn’t the kind of shoddy revolutionary that fizzled out within the company. It was the world changing, head splitting, culture evolving revolutionary.

Companies around the world had to follow suit as individuals became increasingly aware of their rights. In other words — while capitalism worked for the profit seekers, for a good 3 generations (Circa 16th-19th) — it rarely ever helped alleviate the poverty of the common man. Don’t believe me? Why didn’t any of the colonies that the East India company have a presence in flourish during the time they were engaged in trade with them? Heck, forget going back 2–3 centuries. Take present day India and a look at the countless scams involved with our resources. From coal to oil, all the resources that the common man here has a right to, is privatized at extremely cheap rates to conglomerates that peddle their way in through means that might not be in sync with expected standards of governance. In other words the supposed “capitalists” of the nation bought out resources that belonged to the people of the land for pennies on a dollar and called it “progress”. The countless Maoists and naxalite movements that we hear of rarely through corporate media around the nation have stemmed off this very approach towards nation building. Thousands of families which have natively lived and thrived within a region are told to move, forgoing their sources of livelihood, sentiments and traditions attached to the place. All overnight, with little or no compensation. Thousands of acres of land are whisked off the remote jungles into the clutches of profit seeking developers with the intent of power creation (energy) or resource seeking (mining). If anyone benefits through such activities, it has always been the corporate power-houses, which ironically, includes TATA and Reliance. Nation states like Qatar have been able to leverage their local resources for the good of the people. The UAE for instance has been able to put together a fund of 2 trillion dollars for the post oil era. Think about it, a nation with a minute fraction of the population of our country — has been able to set up a fund the size of our annual GDP for a period post its resources diminish. That, right there, is forward thinking. Or even better, it is the government working along with the capitalists to protect the best interests of the people.

Capitalism has looted nations off its wealth. It has blinded leaders towards serving private interests. It has made mindless zombies off a workforce that is addicted to a pay package , foregoing the possibilities that come along with being human. It has ruined our education system by teaching that a student that does not work in sync with the needs of the industry is useless. Where did you think our love for “Attendance” and disregard for the arts stemmed from? It has made an ever increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. Let me put it in context for you. 100 of the richest in India own 25 percent of the nation’s GDP in assets. Crazy, eh ? Let’s take it a little further. The richest 1 percent of India owns 53 percent of the nation’s wealth. All this in a nation where 700 million people deal with chronic hunger. Where a population the size of America’s does not know how to read. Also, a nation that produces engineers that equal the population of Oman in count. It has had its lobbies battling for unreliable, environment polluting, blast producing sources of energy that are produced from the carcasses of animals and plants dead millions of years ago over greener forms that generate no harm. It has created technological giants with the power to peek into every aspect of our lives and sell that data with the intent of profit generation. Or maybe it wasn’t capitalism. It was just human greed and the lack of a conscience.

Capitalism , in theory, is a powerful force. A batch of principles that can generate good for countless lives around the world. As I write these words, I understand that I am harnessing the good of capitalism. 5 decades back, the only job opportunity that would be available to the majority of the people in my part of the nation would be in agriculture. Today, I can look up to work in media, literature, finance or tech- all because capitalism has bought together these opportunities. However, as it stands right now, it is corrupted to a point where it makes little or no sense. Diminished and broken to a point where its basis needs questioning. Broken to a point where it needs a knight to stand up for it and fix it for good. Capitalism works only if it benefits everyone involved and as it stands right now, the playing ground is not even. There are entities out there working towards making this ground even. Hackers revealing incriminating corporate evidence are one group, but rarely do they ever create sustained long term change. They are often put behind bars for their work and criminalized for the good they do. One could point back towards the profiteers in this instance again. Then there are startups and venture capitalists that take massive risk with the intent of disrupting the market. Sure they do create jobs and products that take the human species forward but in comparison with the established entities of the world doing their damage on the free market, their little efforts diminish. While they take considerable amount of risk with the work they do, rarely has a start-up been ever bailed out by the government for doing the kind of work that can bring about a global recession.

So how do we fix this ?

Capitalism cannot be fixed without the raising of human conscience. What we have is not a crisis of principle, but of leadership, understanding and empathy. In our mindless race to the top, we have ignored how businesses have sidelined and benefited from the poor. Through our yearning for a paycheck, we fail to see the hungry and the impoverished of the nation. Forget all that. We tend to ignore how inhumane we become as mindless zombies working for the corporate establishment that seeks to better its own cause and care little about its people. Think your organizational culture is different? Look at what happened with former Tata executive Nirmalya Kumar. Fired, solely for working with the former head Cyrus Mistry. Fired. In the middle of an open panel with college students. Capitalism will not function until the second key component (labour) understands its own value and seeks its rights. Until the ones that move the spokes and the wheels of the system attain a heightened awareness of the exploitation that’s occurring within it. This however, will not happen with the existing education system that is rigged to the benefit of the “owners” of the nation. Nor would it come from the media, which is again owned by the same parties. Perhaps, it could stem from conversations. Or perhaps from seeking knowledge. Or from disconnecting the system and understanding what the heck is going on. Maybe, it could stem from not chasing crap we don’t need with the desire to stay on top of the consumerist pyramid chugging things down our throat. Point being, as long as the masses choose to behave like asses, capitalism will continue to do what it does. Exploit and bereave people. However, it does not have to end that way for all of us. The huge gap of leadership existing entities show signs of opportunities -both for the establishment of a better world and wealth generation for entrepreneurs. That , backed with a lack of attachment to material possession and core principles that do not put others in the way of harm for personal profit is perhaps what’s needed to save capitalism, from itself, for the people this time.These leaders that are capable of combining the for-profit mentality and the best interests of the people will create a new elite that establishes its roots deep in productivity, innovation and valuable labour.

9 centuries back, feudalism saw its demise in the face of capitalists questioning their authority, creating a new era of prosperity. The current times require conscious capitalism to take center stage in the face of greed, corruption, malice and authoritarianism for the larger good.

Writer: Joel John
Editor: Harshit Sarin