return to top page A PAIR OF CRANKS
Foreword
by
John PapworthA Pair of Cranks will be published by New European Publications on 30th September 2003 The authors whose work fills this volume were fully aware of the imposing economic and political realities which dominate our lives and which increasingly threaten us with nemesis, and in this they could claim some degree of uniqueness; for years they were lone voices promoting a radically new perspective in seeking to grapple with them. They did not join any political party, they did not campaign for 'peace', or to 'ban the bomb', or for lower taxes or for higher welfare handouts; however desirable or necessary in themselves such things might be; instead they focussed their energies on what they regarded as the supremely important issue of the contemporary scene, and on a factor nearly all other politically engaged persons choose to disregard, or of which they might have had no awareness.
Their concern was focussed on the factor of size, and given the extent to which measurement dominates so many aspects of life, the prevailing disregard of it in relation to political and economic institutions was and is surely remarkable. After all, a fraction of an inch either way in the size of a shoe means it either pinches or tends to slip off; the size of a garden spade must be appropriate to the size of the person using it; the size of a toothbrush needs to be related to the size of human dental arrangements and so on. But in politics and economics this factor is either not considered or pushed into the background of other considerations regardless of the consequences - which are often disastrous. This perspective of the singular importance of size and scale is at last beginning to find wider acceptance, and this major shift of consciousness is one of the most hopeful auguries of contemporary developments.
The first on the scene of the new radical thinking was Leopold Kohr. An Austrian by birth, after studying at the universities of Innsbruck, Paris and Vienna he escaped the probable destiny of one of Hitler's death camps and during the war was in charge of a Customs Union research project in Washington. His book, 'The Breakdown of Nations', after being hawked around the publishing world repeatedly, was finally published by Faber and Faber in 1957, largely owing to the intervention of one of its directors, the well-known poet Sir Herbert Read.
The publication date is worth some attention: nearly half a century ago perhaps one of the most important political treatises of the 20th century first saw daylight. It was only sketchily reviewed and even then in largely dismissive or patronising terms, and but for the efforts of some perceptive supporters, might well have sunk without trace. Its thesis found no acceptance in any party political programme, nor did it appear to merit any attention in any university teaching programme, a situation, which, despite the formidable changes of recent decades and the spur to new thinking they have given, still appears to hold.
This is not the place for a detailed analysis of its theme but we may care to note that it begins with an examination of many of the contemporary explanations for the major troubles of the time, that they are due to war, economic upheavals and collapse, unemployment and other aspects of social misery, and each explanation in turn is dismissed as a prelude to introducing his own explanation in terms of size. He does this by referring back to Aristotle:
"To the size of a state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their natural facility when they are too large."
From there he goes on to explain how none of the problems confronting the modern world can be successfully tackled if the signpost of its concluding phrase and Aristotle's overall message are ignored. It is a message Kohr proceeded to apply with a wit and profundity all too rare in modern political literature but, as already indicated, at the time it found few takers.
Fritz Schumacher was almost an exact contemporary of Kohr; both were of German speaking origins, both were economists and both were primarily concerned with the factor of size as being the key to grasping the real nature of, as well as the real solution to, the problems of contemporary life.
Schumacher's book, 'Small is Beautiful', by contrast with Kohr's 'Breakdown of Nations', was an instant success. It first appeared nearly twenty years later and sold by the million, as well as giving its author an international reputation. It might be thought that a major publishing event of this order would have had a considerable influence on party political programmes, on government policies and not least on university teaching, but the evidence that it did so is hard to find. Its theme was of course, despite its absurd title, similar to Kohr's, but whereas the latter had expounded a systematic thesis, Schumacher's book was largely a collation of articles written at different times for different purposes. Their main burden was indeed that of questioning the prevailing acceptance of the ideas of size and more significantly, the acceptance of growth as being a both feasible and worthy objective, and the promotion of practical alternatives.
Kohr appears to have had no orthodox religious views, whereas Schumacher was a devout Catholic and this is reflected in much of his writings, not least in 'Small is Beautiful'. What follows in these pages from the pens of both is a roving camera of comment on different aspects of the global crisis but always from the perspective of the factor of scale and, in this case, the human scale, from two quite different temperaments.
They consist of articles contributed to two journals the present author founded and edited, the first of which, RESURGENCE, originally subtitled 'The Journal of The Fourth World', both writers helped me to establish, and the second, Fourth World Review, established after Schumacher's untimely demise in 1977, to which Kohr was a regular contributor until his death in 1994. The question may well be asked, "Why republish them now?" and to this there are several answers. One is that their intrinsic merit is its own recommendation for wider reader attention; another is that the problems both authors seek to grapple with are now of even graver import than when they wrote, if only because the basic structural causes continue to be ignored.
But a third answer is probably more compelling: the failure of orthodox remedies to resolve the elements of the global crisis has had its own significant impact on public consciousness. We are today at the beginning of the 21st Century in a quite different world from that which prevailed around the middle of the 20th.
At that time to question the structure of political and economic reasoning was to invite ridicule, abuse or indifference; people who did so were so obviously cranks and in no way merited serious attention. Today such attitudes are significantly less strident, the gathering clouds of global prospects are conveying their own message. (Does the reader need to be reminded of the new world war waiting to happen as a result of the accelerating armaments programmes around the world? Or of the inevitable global economic collapse that will ensue from the current mindless pursuit of 'growth' in a world of finite resources? Of the monstrous depravity of our assaults on the life-support systems of the planet? Or of the multiplying evidence of individual stress and of family and social breakdown now proliferating in all 'developed' countries?). At last people are being impelled to question assumptions which formerly held unquestioned sway.
Not least we need to note the upsurge of ethnic and regional nationalism which today has become one of the most dynamic features of the political scene. The pressure for Scottish and Welsh self-government is mirrored by similar moves for localised independence everywhere, constituting a ferment now global in its scope and which is going to compel continuous map redrawing for generations to come.
And of course this ferment is in full accord with what both Kohr and Schumacher spent much of their adult lives seeking to promote. Yet if it is one thing to propose change, especially in some fundamental matters, it is another to be involved in it when one may lack a clear grasp of the deeper reasons why a change of course is needed at all.
A journey without clear signposts can be a hazardous business and likely to result in much confusion and a multiplicity of cross purposes which may lead nowhere. What follows here is precisely the kind of material the modern radical so often needs in order to get his bearings in seeking worthwhile results. Amid a plethora of political literature this volume can claim its own priority for attention, not least from the extent to which time has amply confirmed the validity of the principles to which it relates and which both authors did so much to expound.
The catchphrase 'Small is Beautiful' had the merit of striking a responsive chord in the general consciousness enough to make Schumacher's book, of which it was the title, one of global appeal. But for many thinking people there was a downside in that it smacked of sentiment rather than reality, of a yearning for an unreal and unrealisable world rather than addressing the imposing problems of here and now. Besides it embodied a patent untruth, small can also, like a nail in ones shoe, a torture chamber, a cesspit or a bee sting be painful, abhorrent or ugly. It is a consideration which may help to explain why the concept has found so little expression in the formulation of official policies.
Such influence as it may have had in 'radical', 'green' or 'alternative' thinking also seems to have declined markedly from its initial impetus. A document issued by 'Positive News' and apparently prepared by a former Chairman of the Schumacher Society in August 2002 projects a nine point programme which makes no direct reference to the basic tenets of the Kohr/Schumacher theoretical concerns at all.
One purpose in publishing these essays is to convey just how solid authoritative and far reaching is the reasoning that buttresses the whole concept, and its starkly practical relevance to the problems of social organisation that beset us today. The reader will find here a vigorous analytical approach to such matters as land, money, labour, farming, urban slums, war, economic malaise and Third World poverty. In each case he will find a fresh perspective being applied to old problems, a perspective which is scholarly and clear-sighted, as well as challenging to established assumptions over a wide field.
Hence the purpose of this important volume is not simply to produce a recycling of former contributions to two journals in which they first appeared, but to furnish the radical movement with a reminder of some vitally important theoretical equipment it currently conspicuously lacks, written by two of the most important political writers of the 20th Century.
Both had a common theme, but as we have noted, they approached their work from widely differing perspectives. Leopold Kohr was a polymath whose writings express a familiarity not only with the abstruse reaches of economics, a subject in which he held a professorship in the University of Puerto Rico, but in political theory reaching back to classical authors of ancient Greece, and also in the world of modern physics, mathematics, art and literature. The sheer breadth and depth of his learning found ready expression in the fund of examples and allusions on which he was able to draw to give, repeatedly, illumination and arresting insights to the theories he was propounding.
His major work was indubitably 'The Breakdown of Nations', which must have been gestated in the late thirties and early forties of the last century. Despite the awe-inspiring tragedies of two world wars, economic upheavals and the malignant dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin, the radical world still lacked any awareness of the true nature of its problems. In Britain and elsewhere, the easy assumption still dominated left-wing thinking that all that was needed to solve the problems of war and economic malaise was a change of centralised government. There was no hint in any of its publications, especially in 'The New Statesman', and in the stream of pamphlets put out by the Fabian Society, in the hey-day of both (and both were leading, if not indeed, dominant, voices of the period), that what was required was not so much a change of government as a change in the scale of government.
So the solutions advanced by socialist thinkers generally did not reach beyond a belief that schemes for the nationalisation of industry, of health care, transport, education, social services, marketing and so on, if adopted, would pave the way to a brave new world. It was overlooked that a change of government of this order was simply institutionalising and enlarging the very scale which was such a major feature of the capitalist world, and that since the problem lay not so much with capitalism, or indeed with communism or socialism per see, as the scale on which they operated, that any change which ignored the factor of scale would run into precisely the same problems.
And so it has proved and today, over sixty years later, the same problems beset whatever government is in power, in whatever country, as though neither of the authors with which here we are concerned had written a word.
It is difficult to recapture the animated spirit for progress and peace which suffused the 1945 election in which for the first time a majority UK Labour government with an enormous majority swept into power. Bliss was it that dawn to be alive! A socialist commonwealth was going to be created in which all the old problems, unemployment, inadequate education, poor health standards, meagre social and welfare provision, would be swept away and if the reader seeks answers to the problem of why these phenomena are still with us he may be assured he will find at least some of them in these pages.
If the claim may appear excessive let the reader reflect on the multiple tragedy which was created by the same inflated misconceptions that the Labour government of 1945 inflicted on the then British colonial world. If centralised administration, and much more of it, was good enough for the British people, so official thinking went, it would certainly solve the problems of the colonial world.
But there was a difference, and it was one ignored with wanton official obtuseness, for whereas the varying regions of Britain had been compressed into rule under a single governing body for centuries, the different tribes and small nations of the colonial world had been robbed of their independence and power of self-rule by the much more recent advent of colonial overlordship. Their spirit of independent identity was still very much alive and was generally the motivating force working for freedom from colonial rule.
Not unnaturally they anticipated that with the departure of the colonialists, their dreams of a restoration of free, independent self-government would be realised. Instead they found they had been cruelly betrayed; instead of freedom they found they had merely changed one set of overlords for another.
The colonialists took care to hand over power based on their own presuppositions of centralised administration and control, and a book describing how this was done in the teeth of the bitter opposition of the local tribal and hereditary royal leaders and the consequences which ensued, has yet to be written. Their struggle was little reported in the press, the organs of which were far more concerned to report the emergence of the new forms of colonial rule now in the hands of indigenous leaders elected in accordance with the bogus democratic procedures that were current in the homelands of the departing colonial powers.
What was fully reported subsequently was the inevitable orgy of violent fratricidal conflict which erupted in many parts in the wake of the demise of the former colonial rulers. In Africa the toll of human life now runs into millions. Scarcely any part of the continent has escaped the inevitable strife that the neglect of the centuries-old tribal institutions has provoked and today, for the most part, it has become a huge arena of endemic misrule, corruption and oppression as it sinks to ever lower levels of poverty and social disintegration. It is a tragedy as vast as it is needless and if the principles enunciated in many of the following essays had been heeded there is little doubt it could largely have been avoided.
If the burden of this volume is concerned with the more immediate and imposing problems confronting the survival prospects of civilisation generally, and more especially in the more advanced mis-developed countries, it is because those problems are here more pronounced. And the overall problem abides, what is the direction our affairs need to take and how do we go about taking it? Of one thing we may be sure, and it is an unspoken affirmation that runs throughout these pages, that attempts to grapple with the problems of the modern world which ignore the factor of scale are predestined to fail because it is precisely such ignoring which has done so much to create the problems in the first place.
It does not follow that if this factor is taken fully into account that all our problems will just disappear. We are not perfect beings and there are no perfect solutions to the problems of seeking a harmonious, equitable, peaceful and free society, especially in a context where some forms of global association are already operating; all that can be affirmed is that if it is adopted we will cease to be helpless in seeking to grapple with them; that they will, in many important respects, become manageable and containable, whereas the forces promoting them are now running amok, out of control and defying any attempts to restrain them.
The references of many of these essays relate for the most part to the period in which they were written - the third quarter of the 20th century, but however dated, the principles they are used to expound represent significant advances in the field of human understanding and development. As such they are part of the heritage of human wisdom which no one concerned with the matters of under discussion can afford to neglect.
They are of singular importance for the way they help to provide a significant part of the theoretical basis of the world revolution now happening under our noses. They are pointing to the world of tomorrow, a world which will not be in pawn to a few megalomaniac 'great' powers, but in the free hands of a rapidly growing number of small, often minuscule, independent nations. These nations will cooperate in a variety of ways that serve their common interests as common sense suggests they should, but it will not be a world dominated by EUrope, China, America or any other super-power-entity, and if it survives on a human scale basis, survives too the current US propensity for war, and the other threats of power-out-of-control such as nuclearism, GM crops, economic collapse, sheer excess of human numbers, environmental degradation or social disintegration, we may yet make some advances in realising the age-old human dream of freedom, justice and sanity.
return to top page