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Statement of Intent

John Papworth

'THE FOURTH WORLD' began with the launching of 'RESURGENCE' by John Papworth. The first editorial was published on 1st May1966 and reprinted 20 years late on 1st May 1986 in 'Fourth World Review' Number 15 under the title 'Statement of Intent' with a commentary by John Papworth. Here is that first editorial.

For many reasons we know today that the 'rash, fierce, blaze of riot' which exemplifies so much of contemporary civilization, 'cannot last'. Man must achieve a steadier tempo of social progress, together with a more organic and more dispersed structure of power. Either that or his present top-heavy power structures will defeat him.

Mainly as a result of a prolonged failure to analyse the full consequences of the modern revolution in what Ellul calls 'technique' mankind is moving into a state of endemic emergency in relation to the problem of war, human numbers, food and energy supplies, and human identity.
The answers the Marxists have sought to provide here are unacceptable if only on the grounds that a class analysis of these problems fails to provide any clues to their solution. The main threat of war stems not from capitalism but from power, and there is today sufficient evidence to indicate that even nations from which capitalism has been formally abolished do not hesitate to raise huge armies, engage in the arms race, and embark on war when they feel it suits their purposes.

Neither do they differ from capitalist governments in creating, or failing to solve, the other major problems looming upon us. The deliberate squandering of natural resources (posterity's heritage temporarily in our keeping) is not less marked in China than it is in the USA, and the cruel tragedies of alienation not less evident in Moscow than they are in London.

The assumptions of the labour and social democratic parties that now encumber the scene are equally unacceptable. Today they have become petty empires of power in a social structure rapidly going rotten. They do not understand the causes of this decay and they hold out no prospect at all that they can either arrest or reverse it.

This is the key to the disarray in which the old progressive forces now find themselves; their failure is fundamentally one of the mind; they have no answer at all to our major problems or to the institutionalised powerlessness to which the forces of contemporary life have reduced the inarticulate masses of the world, on whose behalf they presume to speak.

Devoid as they are of any real sense of direction they betray them at every turn, for it is this powerlessness of people which is the key to the war situation, a powerlessness which springs directly from the acceptance of a machine-scale of organisation in defiance of human considerations. We now have ample cause to know that on such a scale all power becomes oligarchic, with a strong tendency towards totalitarianism, militarism and sheer irrationality. (We mean by this, for example, that the preparation alone of a hydrogen bomb is an insane act compounded by its manufacture, storing and testing.)

It becomes oligarchic, whether nominal control is in the hands of communists, capitalists or social democrats, or leaders of any other political belief. With the best will in the world none of the main political leaders in any of the major countries, given their lust for power, can help what they are doing, however irrational it is. They are not masters of their fate; they are victims of the complex pressures implicit in a scale of organisation, which is too large for anyone to control.

How can these reactionaries do anything to promote peace when everywhere they are part and parcel of the very nation-state power structures that are promoting war?

How can they do anything to prevent a tidal wave in human numbers when they themselves embody the size and scale organisation, which has done so much to destroy human-scale communities and community morality, a morality alone by which any serious voluntary check on numbers can be achieved?

How can they act to conserve food and energy resources when they seek through their quest for power to embody social forces that can only exist by squandering both? And what can they do to rescue for the common man his sense of identity and purpose when, again, it is their own lust for power that impels them to destroy it in multitudinous ways?
Not surprisingly, their failure has been matched by the failure of those who have sought to act against the war danger and to establish an effective political alternative.

Against the background of a world-wide war crisis that is basically a crisis of political power, the methods of war protest so far evolved, the marches, meetings, manifestoes, and other forms of mass activity, are clearly inadequate and can now hope to achieve little of practical effect.
Today there are welcome signs that a growing number of people are beginning to realise that this is so. . . the growing spirit of distrust of the established political processes shown by the young, especially in the Universities;…these signs, and many more, are indications of an awareness that an entirely new political approach needs to be made.

Such an approach will only achieve force when it has attained a measure of clarity about its objectives, and this involves a sustained debate about the whole nature and scope of power in modem life, a debate which will surely pose an enormous question mark over every form of social and political organisation that now prevails. There are no wholesale solutions to these problems and we know from experience that when such 'solutions' are tried, as in Russia in 1917, their main effect is simply to create another problem and to deepen our dilemma. The reason for this is simple, such approaches, being totalitarian in themselves, tend to produce totalitarian results.

A civilisation that genuinely reflects all that human beings long for and aspire to cannot be prefabricated either by Fabians, Commissars or capitalists; it can only be created on the basis of each person's freely acknowledged power to decide on each of the many questions that affect his life. He who would gloss over these rights, for whatever ostensible reason, is on the high road to totalitarianism and war.

For these reasons we need to assert that democracy is not a formula to determine how people can vote, it is a process, which expresses how they live. Men will not come to reject our war societies until they have some coherent alternative to which they can turn. We think this alternative, based on love, non-violence, personal dedication and the power of the individual to make his own decisions, is today the only alternative to the monstrous biological anticlimax towards which human society is clearly moving. It is evident that such an alternative will embrace a multi-cellular, power-dispersed world civilisation, rather than the totalitarian, state-power giants that dominate it today, and we propose to concern ourselves no less with the enormous task of making explicit the new theoretical approach to politics it requires.

Editor of Resurgence

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