Fr. Victor Ferrao
In a market-driven economy, all exchanges take up an acquisitive mode. This leads societies to view loss and gain through an economic prism. Perhaps, we need new tools to render its play visible. We had tried to understand the modes of expenditures and how they affect self-production of Goans. Here we shall enter the allied domain of modes of production. This brings us into the Marxists analysis. But globally Marxist tools are found wanting and there are already Post-Marxist scholars who attempt to open other vistas on our economies. But I do not wish to walk their path as I still wish stay within the paradigm of non-productive modes of expenditures that are opened by George Bataille whom we attempt to study.
To achieve our task, maybe we have to explore the notion of hybrid economies. The notion of hybrid economies assist us to stay open to think excess and understand how it is auditing several societies. Most often, economies that are thought to be oppressive are thought to be invading from outside. In fact, such an understanding is profoundly sexist.
A short detour into psychoanalysis may expose how such an understanding has a subtext that views capitalist economies as rapes of the original local economic orders. Rape signifies a sexual conquest and becomes a forced assault against the will of the victim.
Scholars like J.K. Gibson-Graham teach that economies do not function as pure outsiders but in an entanglement with the local collaborators.
Hence, even if wish to stay with the metaphor of rape, it is always done with the local collaborators. Hence, our metaphor metamorphisizes and becomes a gang rape. This is why we have to rethink unidirectional modes of thinking economies.
To do this, perhaps, we have to rethink unidirectional thinking that animates our thought about colonisation. Colonisation could not happen or even last that long without the local collaborators. We have to factor this excess element in our thinking of colonisation.
Goa has to debunk this unidirectional thinking. We have to do it in India too. Our economic structures that we experience around us have never been anti-colonial. They have smoothly transited from colonial times and to our post-colonial society like ducks swimming into the water.
The inherited colonial economic apparatus has not taken up any anti-colonial form that Mahatma Gandhi tried to bring through swadeshi and village economy. The colonial economic elite continues to have hegemony even in post-colonial times.
This inherited economic order is actively creating our society. Our Ganvkaria model of economic production that was uniquely native to Goans was weakened and eventually destroyed by the colonizers. The last nail on its coffin was put by the political as well as economic elites in our times. We have to accept the truth that it is a hybridized economy that has its roots in colonization is producing our society today. It is the one that puts the fire in the bellies of our caste and religious orders as well as produces what an average Goan will do between birth and death. It is difficult to put the clock back today.
But becoming aware of the modes of production of our society can open our minds to integral thinking which then may lead us to imagine alternate ways of producing our selves both individually and collectively.
The unidirectional thinking has been politically milked to divide Goan society into major caste blocks. It has not just hidden the hybridized economic structures that have their roots in colonisation, but legitimized and fuelled all major mass movements beginning with the battle to save Goa from its merger into Maharashtra.
Often, it also accentuates the divide between the two Ks of Goa: the Kristanv and the Konkones.
Given the gravity of our condition, we urgently need to embrace an integral thinking that views everything from a pluriversal locus. This integral thinking can bring to our attention to how our Goan-ness is still is based on the economy of surplus and survives only because we are still indulging in non-productive expenditures.
There are different modes of non-productive expenditures in our society. Democracy also has space for these non-productive expenditures. Our vote is largely a non-productive expenditure. But today we often sell it and bring it into the regime of use-value. Reducing the power of vote from being a collective power or the power of the people to simple tool to earn thirty silver pieces of Judas for oneself takes away the excessive power of non-productive expenditure.
Non-profit expenditures are spent without counting the cost on the collective society. It is a self-less giving for a higher cause. In a regime of non-productive expenditures, the individual does not stand to again alone. It has always been a community affair. Thus, appropriating of the excessive power of our votes, we have put Goa, Goans and Goan-ness in a precarious condition of destruction.
Democracy unfortunately has become a hybrid means that seems to have become a road to our (un)freedom. This is why it is important to reflect on the modes of our self productions and address those issues that we can to save Goa, Goans and Goan-ness.
