What these and other similar volte faces have in common is that they give up on idealism. They decide to live with the frequently observed empirical facts that business grows, investment in technology grows, efficiency grows, and productivity grows when profits grow. The social price that must be paid to get a larger harvest is that property owners get a larger share of it, while the propertyless become even more powerless than they already were. 

If Gandhi’s message is identified with the spinning wheel, then it must be admitted that he offers no solution to the problem of increasing production. But if his primary message is taken to be dharma, and his primary critique of modernity that it is adharma then he does offer a solution. People who follow dharma will increase productivity, and devote the necessary resources to achieving that objective. They will seek simultaneously to achieve other objectives, such as dignity and independence for workers, and respect for all the living plant and animal forms that share the planet with humans. They will do these things for the same reason they do everything else: because it is the right thing to do. Quite apart from Gandhi’s decades-long obsession with spinning wheels, there is a non-capitalist way to increase productivity built into his ethic: live simply, work hard, study every problem methodically and scientifically, serve the community. ( 27A) This formula for personal conduct does not circumvent the need to make capital investments in order to increase productivity. It does suggest that the process of stewarding the investments need not be guided by greed. Not does it imply a world without markets, where nobody buys and sells. It does imply, to use Karl Polanyi’s distinction, a world without Markets, a world where markets are embedded in and accountable to social institutions, rather than the other way around. (27B)