A market fundamentalist might ask: so what? What does it matter if the Indian public retail marketplace is enclosed — that is, replaced by a digital marketplace operated by Amazon or Flipkart for profit? Provided consumers get the goods they want at the right price, who cares?

India’s small businesses see this enclosure as an existential threat, fearing the loss of their livelihoods to Amazon’s predatory tactics. R. R. Reno’s review of Oren Cass’ The Once And Future Worker in First Things suggests the longer-term consequences of prioritising the needs of consumers, or the imperative toward growth, over the livelihoods of ordinary people. In America, Cass argues, the policy focus has long been on sustaining consumption and growth at the expense of focusing on work and livelihood.

The upshot has been a tendency toward financial rewards that accrue only to the most successful, with a growing battery of consumption subsidies propping up the stagnating middle and lower orders. In the process solidarity, dignity, meaning, community and other critical values are lost and with them much that gives strength to the American democratic enterprise.

The prospect of small traders uniting to challenge this direction of travel carries an intriguing echo of the growth of unionisation among industrial workers in the nineteenth century. Perhaps they will fail, as the Luddites failed to prevent the mechanisation of weaving. Or perhaps in the digital era we will see traders’ unions emerging to defend and promote small business livelihoods, just as trade unions defended the livelihoods of industrial workers in the past.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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