The frustrations of the later days of the khadi movement revolved around a central fact: the extremely low productivity of spinning yarn by hand with an old-fashioned spinning wheel. Even with an inexhaustible supply of labor regarded as zero cost, and even with volunteers committed to love and service, there was no way to overcome poverty without producing cloth more efficiently, and also rice, wheat, lentils, and other basic goods. 

In the face of the frustration of Gandhian alternatives, and indeed of any alternatives that collide with the dynamic of the dominant paradigm, it is easy to conclude that capitalism is the only possibility. This conclusion appears to follow from the premise that poverty cannot be overcome without increasing productivity, coupled with the premise that productivity cannot be increased without offering material incentives to the owners of resources. Gandhi’s experiments with primitive technologies can be consigned to the dustbin along with the 20^th century’s myriad other unsuccessful attempts to deviate from the dynamic of the dominant paradigm. Thoughts such as these governed India’s switch to a Green Revolution strategy in agriculture shortly after Nehru’s death in 1964. It is true that India had no choice, since President Johnson of the USA had threatened to cut off food aid, leaving India to starve, unless it adopted policies promising larger profits to larger landholders with greater resources and more modern attitudes toward technology. But, quite apart from American pressure, which has been described as “leaning on an open door,” many Indians had already concluded that Gandhian and Nehruvian policies were not working, and that capitalist agriculture was the only viable path. Similarly, India took a neoliberal turn in 1991, again with no choice, since it desperately needed support from international lenders, and could only get it by accepting economic orthodoxy. Again, quite apart from the pressure, the logic seemed to many irrefutable: India could not overcome its economic stagnation that was lowering the masses into ever greater depths of misery unless it could produce efficiently, and it could not produce efficiently without liberalizing markets and allowing investors to reap higher profits.