Bilgrami, Akeel. "Gandhi and Marx". Social Scientist, Vol.40, No.9/10 (2012): 3-25.

Bilgrami, Akeel. "Gandhi and Marx". Social Scientist, Vol.40, No.9/10 (2012): 3-25.

• The most seminal of Gandhi's works, primarily Hind Swaraj, where written between the turn of the century and the Interwar period. It was during this time that Gandhi believed the forces he sought to counter were most pressing and demanded action. He believed India was at a crossroads similar to Europe at the end of early modernity, and that it must avoid the same mistakes as Europe to prevent sinking into late modernity (5).
• The author claims that the key enlightenment ideas of 'liberty' and 'equality' are often viewed in contradiction with each other in a zero-sum game. The author argues that this contradiction and tension underlays most European philosophy of the Enlightenment (5).
• Two areas in which this contradiction is evident are property and praise. The property element is obvious, with the 'right' to private property undermining equality through an unequal distribution of goods. The praise argument states that by praising certain individual actions we elevate those individuals and violate equality. The converse of these rights in favour of equality would thus damage freedom (6).
• Since these the contradiction between these two conceptions within their Enlightenment framework cannot be resolved, Dr. Bilgrami proposes that we instead change the framework and definition of the two concepts by introducing a third concept (7). Dr. Bilgrami proposes the unifying concept of an 'un-alienated life', which he believes to be present in the works of Gandhi and Marx (8). 
• "The so-called Early Marx who lamented the alienation that afflicted modern capitalist civilization and the Gandhi who thought that India should not embrace the alienated culture of the modern West, were thus intellectual partners in a common theoretical cause" (8).
• Both Gandhi and Marx has similar concerns about the increased alienation of man, that being the distancing of mankind from his fellow man and from subjective experiences of the world, although they diagnosed different causes. Gandhi focused on the largest visible cause, to him imperialism, while Marx looked at the conditions of everyday labour within capitalism which resulted in alienation (8).
•  For both thinkers, the goal has been an end to individual atomization and the formation of a mass society, either through revolution or the restoration of traditional norms of life and society (9).
• Science and the scientific method have been targets of severe criticism by Gandhi, however he does not deny their effectiveness. Rather, Gandhi objects to the use of scientific methods of observation in areas where they do not belong by colonial powers, resulting in systems of knowledge which reinforce imperial control and dehumanize and alienate the observed people (9).
• Gandhi connects this concept of 'scientific method' in its broad application to a specific pathway of development which Europe followed and which India should ignore. Gandhi spends some time dedicated to finding out when Europe went wrong: When did nature become natural resources? When did humans become citizens? When did people become populations? When did knowledge for pleasure become technical expertise for rule? (10).
• For Ghandi, the West rejected the sacred place of nature over a long period ending with the victory of Anglicanism in England. Some groups viewed nature as essentially sacred well into the English Civil War, but after the Protestant victory, the businessmen who wanted nature only for exploitation firmly dominated political and intellectual life (10).
• The rise of Deist thought in Europe similarly contributed to the desacralization of knowledge and expertise. Whereas previously, God had inhabited all of the Earth, official Deist philosophy gave him the position of a 'watch winder', meaning that the rest of university could be understood without direct reference to God. This severed most forms of knowledge from faith (11).
• These scientific methods allowed for the cessation of conceptualization based around humanity. Now discussions could concentrate on statistics, and the could occur without referencing the individual and human impacts. Gandhi believed that this alienation paved the way to immense violence, colonialism, and ultimately genocidal subordination to scientific principles or plans (12).
• Gandhi also hated the European concept of 'nationalism', which he believed only produced artificial divisions and disunity among God's peoples. He did not want India to become a nation-state in the European sense of the word, and wrote largely to prevent Indian intelligentsia from adopting that perception (13).
• The nationalism of Germany under Nazi rule exemplified everything which Gandhi found wrong with modern nationalism, namely in that it generated support through the creation of an 'otherized people', who the nation could rally against. Gandhi fought especially hard against the Hindutva movement during that time, which to him personified the dangerous European nationalism (14).
• Gandhi similarly rejected European concepts of multiculturalism and secularism as useless when applied to India, because they were meant to repair the damages of a form of nationalism which Gandhi tried to make sure did not ever take root in his country (14).
• Marx approaches the same ideas of dehumanization and alienation as Gandhi, but from a perspective of such conditions being a result of the capitalist system. Unlike Gandhi, Marx did not place the desacralization of nature or humanity as the root cause or even a main element of this alienation (15).
• Both thinkers also have the same perception of the change in how humans view the world, despite disagreeing on the causes. They both agree that humanity has shifted from practically engaging in a world they live in, to viewing nature and each other with a detached and extractive gaze as a resource (15).
• Marx provides an insight into the process by which nature was desacralized, noting that before viewing nature as a resource, its normative values must be stripped away. The application of the scientific method, which demands the use an objective view of the world, is ideal for transforming natural objects into mere resources without normative or subjective values (16). From this stage, the natural object can then be considered a resource to be exploited because it has already been stripped of value besides its physical properties (17).
• Gandhi's solution to the issue of desacralization is unclear, as his hope of a return to re-sacralized natural world is based in a restoration of 'traditional' Indian religious and cultural practices, and is therefore of limited use to other regions of the world (19).
• The author proposes another view for the potential solution to this issue. Although the de-valuing of nature is a consequence of the Western scientific method, it does not necessarily have to be since no science makes philosophic claims about how to view nature. Dr. Bilgrami therefore suggests that we propose that nature is valuable by its existence, not requiring any traditional culture or idea of divine sacredness to base these claim on (20).
• Gandhi and Marx both agree that the alienation of man from man is a consequence of contemporary systems of political economy, which atomize the individual to the degree that the collective or social body is only hypothetical and no longer creates humanized bonds. Gandhi believes that this can be solved through a society where no one is well-off is someone else is poorly-off. This implies and requires equality, but does not make it paramount since it focuses more on community and sympathy than physical goods (21).
• In this statement, equality is not a goal unto itself, but a goal in that it advances the worthy cause of dealienating man from man. A society is perfect not based on material equality, but when the 'malaise' which afflicts everyone who feels a distance between themselves and others has disappeared (23).