“AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED”

E.F. Schumacher’s ideas in Small is Beautiful have come as a revelation to me. I honestly believe that if the political will existed to apply these ideas, the problems associated with climate change, poverty and social breakdown would be ameliorated. It is not a case of not being able afford to do these things - "economically." We can't afford NOT to.

Schumacher exposes the craziness of narrowly-defined economic thinking, and criticises progress viewed merely as a “forward stampede”. I couldn’t help thinking of Tony Blair when he characterises people who hold this view, but it would be equally true of all politicians in the post-Thatcher mould. That's all of the major parties, isn't it? “You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down… we must take our fight forward and not be fainthearted… if there is trouble with the environment, we shall need more stringent laws against pollution, and faster economic growth to pay for anti-pollution measures… if there are problems about fossil fuels, we shall move from slow reactors to fast breeders.” etc.

By contrast, Schumacher’s humanistic economics wants to give the idea of growth “a qualitative dimension”. We need to take stock and see that we are destroying the very basis of our existence. Then, using the courage of our convictions, decide which things we want to help grow, and which we'd like to see less of.

BUDDHIST ECONOMICS

Here are his ideas on labour (from Wikipedia):

1. “From the point of view of the employer, it (labour) is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.”
2. “From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.”
3. The Buddhist view, “takes the function of work to be at least threefold”: “to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”
4. “to organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence”.

TECHNOLOGY WITH A HUMAN FACE

“Modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all.”

Schumacher suggested superimposing on large-area states a cantonal structure of modest size so that vast industrial concentration (with all this entails in imbalance, ineptitude, and diseconomies of scale) becomes not only unnecessary but also impractical and inefficient. Once the development district is 'appropriately' reduced, it becomes possible to fulfill a society's material requirements by means of less expensive and simpler equipment than computerized, labour-saving machinery. This is the famous “intermediate technology”.

The reduced efficiency of intermediate technology provides the same amount of goods, but at a higher cost in labour. However, since this can be achieved only by full rather than partial employment of the available labour force, it represents no additional cost at all, socially. It is, in fact, a benefit. (adapted from Wikipedia)

Well, does it sound hopelessly idealistic, or just idealistic? As for a concrete plan for how to get from here to Schumacher’s kind of social, agricultural and industrial organisation, I’m not sure. (I’ll have to answer Neb’s points on Pol Pot! To be continued...) Meanwhile, it would help if the Department For International Development started prioritising people rather than mere productivity.

Here are some short videos of the Schumacher approach in action. Small is Working

SYD BARRETT (1946 – 2006)



Syd Barrett, of (The) Pink Floyd, died on July 7. As soon as the news was announced, tributes flooded into the BBC’s entertainment website. It’s fascinating that someone who probably recorded no more than ten outstanding songs, nearly all of which are featured on one album, should have such an enduring appeal. What is it about these songs that distinguishes them?

In the mid-1960s, the Beatles were the real innovators, leading the way into the territory of childhood as a storehouse for the imagery with which to communicate the psychedelic experience. Other musicians dutifully adopted this template, creating a very British style of psychedelic music utterly different from what American bands were doing at the time. For a short time, attachment to childhood was cool and the underground was awash with nursery-rhyme songs from the likes of Donovan, Kaleidoscope, The Idle Race and Tomorrow. Syd Barrett was – for the brief time when he sang for Pink Floyd – the unacknowledged master of the genre. He, more than anyone else, created the flawed, but often brilliant, psychedelic album The Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Because he had never really severed connection with his childhood, Syd’s songs are both more playful and more genuinely affecting than anything that his contemporaries were able to produce - perhaps with the exception of Strawberry Fields Forever. The Pink Floyd, produced by Norman Smith, brought the songs to life with sparse experimental arrangements featuring moments of Syd’s jagged tinny guitar and liberal use of reverb. Bass lines meander, scamper around and often disappear altogether; the most startling effect is brought about, for example in the Scarecrow, by omitting the low frequency sounds and then introducing them unexpectedly. (This almost never happens in modern music, which uses bass more or less formulaically, dead-centre and constant, until the listener tunes it out.)

The album opens with Syd, like a child fascinated with a new book on astronomy, stringing together the names of astral bodies into a seamless incantation in Astronomy Domine; it is perhaps the first, and certainly the most evocative, piece of “space rock” ever produced. In Matilda Mother, there are obvious psychedelic parallels in his description of being read a fairy story: “You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines…” (Vocal harmonies suddenly drench the last word here, creating an unforgettably synaesthetic effect.) In the nonsense song Flaming, where he is “lying on an eiderdown” and “travelling by telephone” there is something euphoric in the way these vocal lines are delivered. It’s typical of his best vocals: artless, sometimes a bit flat, but sung with such teasing knowingness that the listener cannot help being transported to the enchanted space where the lyrics were captured.

One of his songs, Effervescing Elephant, was so obviously a children's song that I managed to get away with teaching it to my class of 8-year-olds to sing at assembly. One of the girls subsequently learned the words by heart and went around singing them to impress her classmates. I wonder if she ever found out its origin.

Syd’s obvious yearning for a more innocent time, amplified by copious LSD use, probably contributed towards his mental breakdown. Sadly, none of his later work after Piper At The Gates of Dawn come from the same land as these early songs. You can only hear the hollow voice of someone completely losing their bearings, as the other musicians struggle to keep to his erratic time signatures. The sound of this lonely encounter with madness is one reason why he has such a cult following, but it is in these few short pieces of English whimsy where his genius lies: See Emily Play, Astronomy Domine, Lucifer Sam, Matilda Mother, Flaming, Bike, the Scarecrow.

Pink Floyd, with a new guitarist who briefly tried to write and sing in Syd Barrett's style, went on to conquer the world as arguably the most artistic of all rock bands, but in a completely different vein, and without any of the lightness of touch that characterised their founder.

Obituary on Pink Floyd fan site

TRUE GREEN

According to The Observer, Mr David Cameron is courting the "muesli vote" or something. Well, here's something which may surprise him: green voters can see through this kind of cynicism.

Here is another quotation from E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which remains startlingly relevant more than thirty years since its publication around the time of the 1970s oil crisis. His critique of Keynesian economics is based on our treating irreplaceable natural capital as mere income; he argues that countries’ pursuit of growth has necessarily institutionalised greed and envy as a basic mechanisms, resulting in instability and conflict worldwide. All other values have been subordinated to the economic one. Drawing on ideas from Gandhi, he comments here on the dehumanisation of work.

“It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the ‘standard of living’, and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would condemn the central preoccupation of society as a crime against humanity.”

Schumacher was a true visionary. It’s incredible to think that, had his ideas been taken seriously at the time, all the foolishness of “Thatcherism” – in whose shadow we still live – might have been avoided. That her successsor is attempting to mask hardline industrial capitalism with a few "green" gimmicks is shameful. It's time that the "muesli voters" took to the streets.