Unto This Last - Sarvodaya

Sarvodaya means "universal uplift" or "progress of all." It was coined 1908 by Mahatma Ghandi in his translation of John Rushkin's tract on political economy, "Unto This Last."

The information I share here is found in places throughout the internet. I chose wikepedia as my source. I've read some of John Ruskin's "Unto This Last" and should warn you that it's dated (1862) and very scholarly, but the message of economic responsibility is there.

Today's changing economy is forcing peoples to reevaluate the economic structure of the west. More importantly, movements like "Occupy Wall Street" are putting the focus and blame for the economic downturn squarely on the shoulders of unscrupulous money lenders and corporate greed. John Rushkin's lectures that took place almost 150 years ago are again being dusted off and held up to the light for review and guidance.

Bottom line; the "Haves" should be morally responsible and financially accountable for maintaining an economic structure conducive to the safe and natural civil conditions of the "Have Nots."

Social theory

Ruskin attacked orthodox, nineteenth-century political economy principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in The Stones of Venice, and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as The Political Economy of Art (A Joy For Ever), but he gave them full expression in the influential essays, Unto This Last.

At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or crafstman, in modern industrial capitalist society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith, expressed in The Wealth of Nations had led, through the division of labour to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment. (See section, "Stones of Venice", above.)

He argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.

"Nay, but I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work. By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be "chosen." The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum."^[200]

In the preface to Unto This Last (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and ‘gentleness and justice’; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame.^[201] Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the welfare state.^[202]