Khadi, the hand woven cloth gained much prominence when it was institutionalized by Mahatma Gandhi as a symbol Swadeshi to fight against the British rule. After independence, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission was established to strengthen Khadi as a means of strengthening the rural economy. However, Khadi has not been successful in penetrating the masses as a consumer product. Its use has been limited to politicians and devoted followers of Gandhi. This short paper makes an attempt to capture the reasons behind limited growth of the Khadi as an industry. The workings of Khadi and Village Industries Commission and Rajasthan Khadi and Village Industries Board are reviewed for the current marketing strategies. Subsequently, demand and supply side problems have been identified based on a literature review and recommendations have been made to tackle these issues.
The paper experimentally applies Marx’s theories and methodology to some specific Machine and Information Age information appropriation scenarios and sets context for the question, “Is the basis of surplus value in an Information Age situated in people’s labor, the stored informative-memory about people, or both, or is it found elsewhere in a changed production process, which may involve Marx’s visionary perpetuum mobile?†The paper uses aspects of Marx’s historical materialism method, commodity theory and theory of surplus value, to analyze informative-memory appropriation in different contexts, such as: appropriation of survey information (WWII Germany); spy appropriation of information from unwitting citizens (post -WWII and Cold War-era United States prior to 9/11); automated appropriation of electronic informative-memory from witting citizens (post-9/11 United States). This brief historical-comparative overview, application of Marx-inspired methodology to different historical information appropriation contexts explores the potential of Marxian applications in an information age, rather than engaging in detailed accounting of the contexts, or a continuation of arguments about the intentions behind the use of stored and machine-processed punch card information in the events of the Holocaust.