"There is always a time-lag
of generations between the appearance of a seminal idea, and the possibility of
its widespread acceptance by minds which can be opened to it, on a large scale,
only by the heavy pressure of events which have been correctly anticipated."
INTRODUCTION by Geoffrey Dobbs, Bangor
Wales. May 1974 It is one thing for the teacher to write a foreword to
the pupil's work, as C. H. Douglas once did for mine, and quite another, even
twenty-two years after the author's death, for the pupil to introduce the master's;
but I am glad to undertake this, not only because it is an honour to be asked
to do so by the author's daughter and copy-right-holder, but also because some
introductory explanation has now become very necessary for a book written in the
idiom of fifty years ago, some of which has been changed or even inverted in meaning,
although its substance remains singularly up-to-date and critically relevant to
the circum stances of the present day.
Economic Democracy, one of the key books
of the Twentieth Century, first appeared serially in the pages of The New Age,
beginning in June 1919. That is to say, it was published in what is now generally
acknowledged to have been the most brilliant English-language journal of the time,
and by an editor, A.R. Orage, who has become a legend. The New Age has an undisputed
place in the cultural history of the early Twentieth Century, and it was the leading
journal of the Fabian Socialists until the founding of the New Statesman in 1913,
which marked a stage in that cleavage between the will-to-power and the will-to-freedom
(to use Douglas's terms) which inevitably occurs, as the history of politics so
clearly shows, in every movement dedicated, at the outset, to the betterment of
mankind. It must be remembered, however, that although The New Age was in
contemporary terms a leading 'socialist' or 'progressive' journal - even 'avant
garde' in its day - the meaning of those terms has now been changed, sometimes
to the point of inversion, after half a century in which the world has been rushing
down the other fork of the cross-roads at which Douglas and his contemporaries
stood, having ignored the signpost which he set up, and having now discovered,
to its bitter cost, that it has taken the wrong path. It is therefore particularly
appropriate that this book, long out of print, should be republished, and that
signpost set up again,, so that a disillusioned world can realise that there exists
an alternative to disaster, though not without a radical change in the sort of
thinking which now accepts the centralisation of power as 'progressive', and condemns
its distribution as 'reactionary'. Even before Douglas appeared on the scene,
Orage and The New Age had chosen the path of freedom and turned their backs on
collectivist State Socialism, that is, on the socialism of the will-to-power,
as well as the soul-destroying wage-slavery of Capitalist mass-production. Under
the heading of Guild Socialism they were inclined to look backwards to the craftsmanship
of mediaeval times, and to reject all science and technology as of the devil.
Douglas supplied just what these people lacked. For although The New Age was the
forum for the leading literary and political writers of the day, it was then,
even more than now, taken for granted that politics and economics were subjects
for men of words. It was unheard of for someone with practical knowledge and experience
of the actual processes of industry and accountancy to take a hand. In this,
Douglas was as far ahead of his time as he proved to be in other ways. An engineer,
with a wide experience of practical responsibility in many parts of the world,
including the unique experience of drawing up the plans and specifications for
the electrical work on the Post Office Tube (one of the earliest examples of automation
in the history of engineering) he had spent the last two years of the First World
War as Assistant Superintendent of the Government Aircraft Factory at Farnborough.
In this capacity he brought an original mind to the question of the factory's
cost accountancy - a mind which thought first in terms of the practical realities
of production for use, and then considered the book-keeping or financial arrangements
as a secondary convenience, much as a railway engineer might consider the railway
ticket system. This might seem obvious, but it completely inverted the accepted
manner of thinking which treats the whole industrial process as if it existed
for financial ends, whether for profits or for employment and wages. Douglas's
first article in the English Review of December 1918: The Delusion of Super-production,
would have been still a little ahead of its time if published in 1968; and his
recognition of the social responsibility of the scientist and technologist, and
of the colossal sabotage and waste of real resources and energy involved in our
financially dominated economic system, have yet to receive their due, even now
when, at long last, events have begun to move public opinion in this direction.
It
is, of course, well known that, during the Great Depression of the inter-War years,
Douglas's ideas achieved a considerable following, and gave rise to a Social Credit
Movement which has left a small, but indelible, mark on the politics of the British
Crown Commonwealth. But only a handful out of all those who called themselves
his followers have ever grasped the truly radical nature of his thinking, or the
fact that his proposals for monetary reform were quite secondary embodiments of
the fundamental policy of the will-to-freedom, which now emerges as the sole alternative
to the present domination of the will-to-power. In a world writhing again in the
agonies of the money-torture, In a form even more deadly than that which afflicted
it in the 1930's, the words of Douglas strike home with a force even greater than
they had then, strengthened as they are by the course of events which he predicted.
To
those who believe that the pursuit of power- that is, of centralised power to
force one's ideas upon others-is the only conceivable course for any movement
to take which seeks to better the human condition, it will appear obvious that
Douglas and Orage and those that followed them in opposing the trend of centralising
Finance-Capitalism merging into State Socialism, had made the wrong choice, and
have paid the penalty of defying the course of history. If such power-seekers
are satisfied with 'the course of history' they need not trouble to read further.
But for those who believe that the truth alone can set us free, though not now
until the lesson has been learnt from the consequences of the mass-pursuit of
untruth, it may be noted that Douglas's analysis, based on a practical knowledge
of modern technology and accountancy, went accurately to the core of the matter,
whereas the analysis of Marx and of Lenin, men of words and of word-power, was
fundamentally abstract and inaccurate, although surrounded by a vast mass of detail
and of repetitive and hypnotic verbiage, in contrast to Douglas's condensed statements. It
is not, for instance, the widely held ownership of the means of production by
'private' (i.e. free, independent) people which creates an exploited proletariat
and the consequent class struggle. On the contrary, the more 'common' such ownership
is, the greater the freedom of the worker in choosing his employer, and the less
'common' the less freedom, until it disappears altogether when the State become
sole employer, under the abstract slogan: 'Common Ownership'.
No person of
even modest private means is 'proletarianised' by accepting employment; it is
the total dependence of the worker upon the employer which opens the door to exploitation,
and this has no real or natural economic basis, it is monetary and ideological-a
fact which becomes more obvious every year as technological invention increases
the productive power of human labour, and the workers organise to 'fight redundancy'.
Money, originating as bank credit, has been described as a license to live:
and it was upon the policy of credit-through-the-employer as sole distributor
of licenses to live to the bulk of the people that Douglas put his finger. When
we consider the total dominance of monetary considerations over our industrial
and political life, it is scarcely possible to deny that he was right. There
are two opposite directions in which a movement which sets out to protect and
liberate the workers can move from this situation. The will-to-freedom would work
towards the elimination of a proletariat through decreasing dependence upon employment,
as productivity increases, decreasing the importance of labour as a factor in
production; and also with the increasing need to conserve resources and avoid
waste through unnecessary employment in the production of unwanted and unneeded
products.
Incidentally, this would arrive at an economically classless Society
through the abolition of a financially dependent and exploitable class; a state
of affairs described by Douglas's title: Economic Democracy.
Alternatively,
a Socialism activated by the will-to-power, while retaining the slogans and image
of a movement for the liberation of the workers, can move in the opposite direction
by identifying itself, not with the people who seek liberation from the proletarian
condition, but with their class-status of exploitability through dependence on
employment itself. This it can seek to glorify, to expand, and ultimately to universalise
as a power-base for socialist politicians.
The aim here is the same as that
of the monopoly capitalist, namely the progressive concentration of employer-power
over ever-growing masses of workers, which most Socialist Governments discreetly
encourage, since they recognise it, as Lenin did, as an essential step towards
the socialisation of production and the total dependence of a fully proletarianised
population upon a single all-powerful Employer, the State. The power-socialist
views with even greater hostility than the power-capitalist the possibility of
an increasingly independent worker, capable of making his own bargain with the
employer, and with no need to surrender the control over his labour to a Union
Leader. In consequence the Big Unions have grown into labour monopolies with far
more terrifying powers over the workers than the employer holds; and have now
become armies, organised to demand money with menaces, not merely against the
employers, but, ironically enough in the 'public' sector, against the whole community-a
strange outcome from a socialism that used to talk about working to serve the
community and not for gain.
In 1918 Douglas could see great hope in the shop
steward, or rank-and-file movement in industry, to reverse the centralising tendency
of the Unions, in that it was decentralised, with the control of policy coming
from the shop-floor upwards instead of, as in the Unions, from the top downwards.
Insofar as this is still true, it is probably still an important factor tending
towards industrial peace and efficiency, due to the understanding and settlement
of genuine grievances. But in the meantime this movement has been the particular
target for penetration by communists whose policy is the ultimate centralisation
of power through the final merger between employer power and Union power, money
power and bureaucratic power, legal power and police power-all concentrated in
the all-powerful Work-State under the slogan 'all power to the workers' and under
the sign of the clenched fist of mass-intimidation.
There can be no doubt that
the socialist movement, nowadays, has rejected the will-to-freedom (except for
lip-service) and is wholly dominated by the will-to-power. Neither is this sort
of socialism limited to the Labour Party or the 'Left'. Was it not Baldwin who
said, as long ago as the 1930's: "We are all socialists now", and since
then, the line between 'Big Business' and socialism has become still more tenuous.
The hope lies in that its disastrous objective, the Socialist State, is at
last becoming widely recognised for what it is: the end-position of monopolistic
Finance-Capitalism, or, as the young people of the New Left are inclined to call
it, with greater emotional than historical accuracy: the Fascist Police State.
Unfortunately, some of them do not recognise the anarchy of 'continuous
revolution', which they have been led to suppose will avert this State, as an
essential part of the fear-mechanism which is used to introduce it. It is necessary
to be far more radical; to get down to the real causes; and to take the rejected
path to freedom with Douglas.
One of the difficulties in this re-thinking is
the change in the meaning of words and phrases brought about by their continual
use in the propaganda of power, so that parts of this book may be completely misunderstood
if taken in their current and corrupted meanings. This applies particularly to
words which refer to people and to property or ownership, which, in the idiom
of State Socialism which has become the accepted idiom of the day, are abstracted
from their real meanings and taken in a collective or exclusively monetary sense.
Thus,
in any political appeal 'the people', 'the community', 'Society' always starts
by meaning the actual people-you and me and everyone else-considered collectively,
and Douglas always used such terms in this sense. Now these words refer to some
vague, collective Moloch whose 'interest' is directly opposed to that of actual
people, now called 'private persons'.
'Common property or ownership' used
to mean our property or ownership; and the appeal of the word 'democracy' lay
in the opposite of financial monopoly or centralised government, namely in the
idea of maximum distribution of political and economic power to everyone, as a
person, not as a unit in some mass. Property is something which is 'proper' to
a person, and ownership applies to something which can be his 'own'. These words
refer to men and women, not to abstractions, and they imply the right to possess,
to enjoy, and to 'exploit' in the wholly beneficial sense of 'to make full use
of, to get value from' as well as to dispose of to the owner's advantage.
So
long as the monetary transactions correspond to these realities they are merely
a very useful convenience. It is not until the book-keeping becomes the main objective,
and the monetary sense usurps the real sense of the words that their meaning can
become inverted, and 'exploitation' can come to mean the misuse or waste of resources
for monetary ends and the failure to get value in real terms from them. 'Property'
having now become 'the right to get money from' and 'the people' a collective
mass represented by the Government, the way is now open for the complete inversion
of 'common property' to mean the expropriation of all actual people, while the
real powers of ownership pass to the ruling oligarchy and its dependent bureaucracy.
These
explanations have now become quite essential for most readers of Economic Democracy
whose memories do not go back to the time it was written. For instance, Douglas's
statement in Chapter 8 that: "Natural resources are common property, and
the means for their exploitation should also be common property," will inevitably
be taken, nowadays, to mean that natural resources should be expropriated by the
Government, and that property in them, far from being common, should be abolished.
It will be quite hard for many people to grasp the strange idea that he meant
exactly what he wrote: that 'common' meant common; 'property' meant property,
and 'exploitation' meant enjoyment and use by actual human beings. Perhaps
some examples will be helpful. Air, for instance, is a 'natural resource' which
is unique in being common property in the most complete sense-available to everyone,
everywhere, at all times, since all have the means for its exploitation in their
lungs. If it were to become 'common property' in the State Socialist sense, it
would, of course, be vested in the Government, and everyone would lose the right
to breathe freely, exploiting for their own personal gain the property of 'The
People'.
This is, I hope, far-fetched, but the same principles are already
being applied to water, which has some of the essential and universal properties
of air. Land, on the other hand, is a resource of a different nature, In
that it is fixed and local, it is also a 'mixed' resource; in part a universal
essential, but in part also a form of capital of no direct use per se, but only
as a vital factor in the production of necessities such as food, clothing and
timber. As common owners of the land we all need to be able to walk upon it and
to traverse it for purposes of travel and recreation, wherever this does not infringe
more important forms of ownership. We also all need to dwell and to make our homes
upon a particular piece of land, and it is here that the contrast between the
aims of the will-to-power and the will-to-freedom is at its most obvious.
Ought
the land to belong to the people-for instance, ought freehold home ownership to
be as common as possible? Or ought it to belong to 'The People', with the actual
powers of ownership exercised, through its agents, by one great Absentee Landlord,
the Government?
Land as productive capital is quite another matter. There is
no case for common ownership here (in the sense of administrative control) by
anyone who lacks the skill or the will to produce from it; though the Englishman's
love of his garden is a sign that this skill and will is quite common, even among
town-dwellers. But for the non-producer it is not the land, but its produce which
he needs to own. The same applies to coal, oil, or minerals in the earth's
crust. What use could most of us make of a coal seam, a copper deposit, or oil
or gas under the North Sea? To talk of common ownership of these in the real sense
is meaningless nonsense. We cannot exercise the rights of ownership until they
have been converted and made available to us in usable form. Exactly the same
considerations apply to the ownership of the capital equipment of industry required
for the processing of these resources for our use. What real (not monetary) use
could we make of a coal mine, an oil rig, or a steel mill?
It is most important,
however, to realise that, financially and collectively, we have to buy these capital
equipments,
and also their intermediate products, in paying their cost in the consumable goods
they eventually produce; and in this sense they may be termed 'common property'.
The financial system ought, therefore, to enable us to meet their cost without
mortgaging the future.
As Douglas makes clear, production is the conversion
of matter or energy from an unavailable form to one in which it is available for
the use of mankind. The efficiency of this conversion depends primarily upon usefulness
of the end-product. Usefulness to whom, who is to be the judge of it? Douglas
says these resources are common property; which means that they ought to be made
available for our use, and we are the judges of that use. And that means consumer
control of production: Economic Democracy; which is incompatible with a system
which distributes goods and services only through the process of producing more
goods and services, thus giving a clear incentive to produce useless, unwanted
or superfluous things, and to create a 'demand' for them. We are said to
live in a 'Consumer Society' suffering from the disease of 'consumptionism' due
to the greed of the common people as consumers. But this puts things upside down.
'Productionism' or 'employmentism' would be better names for the disease, for
we are passing increasingly under producers' control, the consumers, whose greed
is much exploited in the process, being force-fed with the by-products of an industry
which is primarily concerned with the provision of work and the distribution of
money.
This aim is opposite to, and incompatible with, that of production
for use with minimum cost and waste of energy and resources; and its end position
of 'workers' control-the dictatorship, not of one class over another, but of Man
as the hired agent of others over the same Man as free Agent-is incompatible with
economic democracy. The necessity for consumer control of production is
the necessary background for an understanding of Douglas's monetary analysis and
proposals, and much confusion has been caused by critics who have not grasped
this, but who used to maintain that he had mistaken a temporary shortage of purchasing
power due to deflation for a permanent deficiency in the system. In fact, Douglas
never said that our producer-dominated credit distribution system could never
distribute money to buy the goods wanted, but that it could not do so without
producing what was not wanted, and with accelerating waste and sabotage.
If
work accomplished, priced to cover an accumulation of costs over an indefinite
period, can be distributed only through work in progress (to be piled onto the
accumulated costs of work completed next year) then we have the recipe for our
modern predicament-the necessity for continuous 'economic growth', with ever-growing
squandering of energy and resources, as technological advance increases the product
per man-flour. Unless inflationary producer credits, supplemented by consumer
credits mortgaging future wages, are poured out faster and faster, then we can
buy less and less of what we have already produced. Douglas alone has analysed
the situation correctly and shown us the way out; and events have proved him to
have been right, and his critics wrong. Distribution, he pointed out, should be
a function of work accomplished, not of work in progress. That means that the
people, collectively, ought to be able to meet the accumulated costs of all the
goods they want as they come on the market, without mortgaging the future.
Douglas
defined 'purchasing power' as "the amount of goods of the description desired
which can be bought". It is not satisfying consumption which is waste; in
fact, that is the sole purpose which justifies production. It is non-Consumption,
or unwanted, or forced, or hypnotically induced over-consumption which is waste.
The processes of increasing technological efficiency which go on in industry
ought to be resulting in a continuous fall in prices, but this is more than offset
by the charging of all waste and inefficiency to the consumer. It was he also
who defined 'real credit' as "a measure of the effective reserve of energy
belonging to the community" which ought to be reflected in the financial
system. These considerations, put forward in 1918, can now be ignored at our dire
peril. It must be remembered that Economic Democracy was Douglas's first
book; the prentice effort of a mind already mature, but which was to grow in depth
and incisiveness for another thirty years. It is certainly his most 'difficult'
book; it is incredibly condensed, and it took a mind of the calibre of A. R. Orage's
to grasp its significance when it was written. Douglas once told my wife that
Economic Democracy was the last of his books that he wanted to see re-published,
and he is understood to have had thoughts about re-writing parts of it, notably
Chapter 8 with its 'purely idealistic' scheme at the end, which was admittedly
not practicable at the time, in contrast with the proposals for redistribution
of the National Debt in Chapter 9, and for the Just Price in Chapter 10. These
may be seen as early examples of proposals embodying the principles of consumer
control, produced under First World War conditions of centralisation, for application
in the post-War situation.
The later development of Douglas's financial analysis
and proposals may be found in The Monopoly of Credit (1931); but he was always
capable of producing, ad hoc, a precise set of monetary proposals for any given
situation; and these were never intended as any sort of permanent plan or programme.
Here, then, are some of the reasons why I have thought that this first
book now needs an introductory Chapter to put it into the background of the late
Twentieth Century, and to dispel some of the garbled versions of Douglas's ideas
which have been put about in the meantime. The Delusion of Super-Production, Douglas's
first article, published in the English Review of December 1918, has been added
as an appendix. It is difficult to imagine anything more prophetic or relevant
to the situation of the 1970's. (Now the 2000s.) There is always a time-lag
of generations between the appearance of a seminal idea, and the possibility of
its widespread acceptance by minds which can be opened to it, on a large scale,
only by the heavy pressure of events which have been correctly anticipated. It
appears that this time is now approaching for the opening of minds to Douglas's
ideas. In the 1920's and 1930's many people could see their application to the
situation of 'poverty amid plenty' through mass-unemployment among unsold goods
and unused productive power. But most people could see no further when, as Douglas
so frequently predicted, this 'problem' was 'solved' by the vast super-production
of War, and Keynesian economics brought in the era of accelerating super-production
via continuous inflation and 'employmentism'. At long last it is being realised
that this cannot go on indefinitely; that even this rich planet with its continual
shower of energy from the Sun, cannot endure without impoverishment, the wasting
of its resources at an accelerating rate upon purposes other than the precise
requirements of the people who live on it - purposes such as the distribution
of book-entries and money-tokens, or the imposition of the will of a handful of
controllers of production. Already the environmental Movement has become a 'bandwaggon'
which has been taken over by producer interests concerned to exploit (and often
to exaggerate) the scarcities they are making, so as to tighten still further
the dictatorship of the producer and distributor over the people they are supposed
to serve. In conclusion, it may be said, literally and solemnly, that no efforts
to deal with this economic dictatorship, or to avert the environmental crisis
which it is bringing about, can hope for success on the scale necessary to avoid
disaster, unless and until prejudice is laid aside, and the fundamental revolution
in ideas which was inaugurated by this book is accepted and put into effect. ABOUT
THE AUTHOR… OF ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY The late Clifford Hugh
Douglas, M.I.Mech.E., M.I.E.E., consulting engineer, economist, author, and founder
of the Social Credit Movement, was born in 1879 and died in 1952.
Among other
posts which he held in his earlier years were those of engineer with the Canadian
General Electric Company, Peterborough, Canada; Assistant Engineer, Lachine Rapids
Hydraulic Construction, Deputy Chief Electrical Engineer, Buenos Aires and Pacific
Railway; Chief Engineer and Manager in India British Westinghouse Company; Assistant
Superintendent, Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough (England). During the First
World War he was a Major in the Royal Flying Corps and later in the R.A.F. (Reserve).
After
retiring from his engineering career, he and his wife ran a small yacht-building
yard on Southampton Water for several years. The combination of beauty with functional
efficiency in a successfully designed racing yacht had a special appeal for him.
When he lived in an old water mill in Hampshire he used the water wheel to turn
a dynamo which lit and warmed the house as well as providing power for lathes
and other tools.
Later, when he moved to Scotland, many of his friends and
followers remember helping to build his small hydro-electric power house, sited
on the local burn which ran through his land. Since decentralisation of economic
power was of the essence of his teaching, it should be put on record that he practised
what he preached. One of his most interesting jobs, just before the 1914
War, was that of conducting preliminary experimental work and preparing plans
and specifications for the electrical work on the Post Office Tube in London,
with later supervision of the installation of plant in what was to be one of the
earliest examples of complete automation in the history of engineering. While
there were no physical difficulties about the work, he used to get orders from
time to time to slow it up and pay off the men. When the War came, however, he
noticed that there was no longer any difficulty about getting money for anything
the Government wanted. It appears that he was sent to Farnborough in 1916
to sort out 'a certain amount of muddle' in the Aircraft Factory's accounts, so
that he had to go very carefully into the costing. This he did by introducing
what were then known as 'tabulating machines' - an approach which anticipated
the much later use of computers, and which drew his attention to the much faster
rate at which the factory was generating costs as compared with the rate at which
it was distributing incomes in the form of wages and salaries. Could this be true
of every factory or commercial business? Douglas then collected Information
from over 100 businesses in Great Britain, and found that, in every case except
in businesses heading for bankruptcy, the total costs always exceeded the sums
paid out in wages, salaries and dividends. It followed that only a part of the
final product could be distributed through the incomes disbursed by its production,
and, moreover, a diminishing part as industrial processes lengthened and became
more complex and increased the ratio of overheads to current wages.
Unless
this defect in monetary bookkeeping were corrected (which in his view was perfectly
practicable) the distribution of the remainder must depend increasingly on work
in progress on future products (whether wanted or not) financed by loan credit,
export credits, sales below cost leading to bankruptcies and centralisation of
industrial power, or by consumer borrowing. The result must be predictably disastrous
- in fact, the modern dilemma between mass-poverty through unemployment and growing
inflation, debt and monopoly, with waste of human effort and the earth's resources
to maintain 'full employment', requiring continuous economic 'growth' and economic
warfare between nations leading towards military war. This original engineer's
approach, which regarded the monetary system much as Douglas, a former railway
engineer, had regarded the ticket system, as a mere book-keeping convenience for
the efficient distribution of the product, was completely alien and unacceptable
to the economic theorists of the day. Only one Professor of Economics (Professor
Irvine of Sydney) expressed agreement with it, and he resigned his post shortly
afterwards.
This general condemnation by the economists was, however, along
two different and contradictory lines, viz.:
1. that the cost-income gap was
an illusion due to Douglas's failure to realise that the costs all represented
sums paid out at a previous date as wages, salaries, etc.- ignoring the time factor
which was the essence of his analysis; and,
2. that it was, on the contrary,
a glimpse of the obvious, of no significance whatever, since this was the immutable
way in which the monetary and economic system must work for the stimulation of
new production and the maintenance of the level of employment - i.e. ignoring
Douglas's radically different objective of production for the consumers' use and
not for 'employment' or other monetary objectives. When the Great Depression
of the 1930's grimly confirmed Douglas's diagnosis and gave him a world-wide reputation
and following, his critics explained that he had mistaken a temporary lapse for
a permanent defect in the monetary system; but subsequent events have, by now,
so continuously fulfilled his predictions that this criticism is no longer credible.
Despite rejection by the Economic Establishment of the day, Douglas was
called upon to give evidence before the Canadian Banking Enquiry in 1923 and the
Macmillan Committee in 1930, and undertook several World Tours in which he addressed
many gatherings, especially in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and also at
the World Engineering Congress in Tokyo in 1929.
In 1935 he gave an important
address before the King of Norway and the British Minister at the Oslo Merchants'
Club, and in the same year he was appointed Chief Reconstruction Adviser to the
'United Farmers' Government of the Province of Alberta, Canada, which later in
the year elected the first Government to bear the title 'Social Credit'.
The
Canadian Federal Government, however, frustrated all attempts to implement Douglas's
advice by disallowing the legislation, some of which was passed, and disallowed,
twice; after which, although the Party remained in power for over 30 years, it
progressively abandoned the principles on which it was first elected. It
should be placed on historical record, as a precedent, that two 'provincial dividends'
of little more than token value, were nevertheless paid at one period to the citizens
of the Province, and that, while still acting under the advice of Douglas's representative,
the province paid its way without further borrowing, and drastically reduced the
Provincial debt.
This diversion of Douglas's ideas into the dead-end of Party
politics has received far more publicity than the original and experimental approach
to politics which is signposted in his later speeches and writings from 1934 onwards,
notably in his five major speeches in England:
The Nature of Democracy, The
Tragedy of Human Effort, The Approach to Reality, The Policy of a Philosophy,
and Realistic Constitutionalism. In 1934 a Social Credit Secretariat was
formed under his Chairmanship, which started an Electoral Campaign involving the
use of the vote for purposes desired by the electors rather than by Parliament
or the political Parties. This was followed by a highly successful Local Objectives
Campaign along similar non-party lines, and a Lower Rates and Assessments Campaign
which saved the British ratepayers many millions of pounds without loss of services,
by reducing loan charges.
The Second World War put an end to these activities
on an organised national scale, and dispersed them, with the Social Credit Movement,
into a decentralised force, better adapted to the present crisis of World centralisation. In
the final phase of his life, roughly from 1939 to his death in 1952, Douglas consolidated
his ideas in depth, contrasting very clearly the philosophy which underlies them
with that which activates the Monopoly of Credit. Although the best known of them,
which have already exercised considerable influence in the World, lie in the economic
sphere: the concepts of real credit, the increment of association and the cultural
inheritance, and the proposals of the National Dividend and the Just or Compensated
Price-his political ideas, though as yet little known, are if anything of greater
importance. They were always worked out with a characteristic practicality, taking
account of the feed-back from the course of events. No one else has thrown so
much light on the true nature of democracy, as distinct from the numerical product
of the ballot box; on the need for decentralised control of policy and hierarchical
control of administration; on the freedom to choose one thing at a time, on the
right to contract out, on the Voters' Policy and the Voters' Veto. In his last
address, given in London to the Constitutional Research Association in 1947, he
put forward his last proposal for the rehabilitation of democracy: the Responsible
Vote, in which the financial consequences of his open electoral choice would be,
for a time, differentially paid for by the voter in proportion to his income-a
literally revolutionary suggestion which demands an inversion of current ideas
about anonymous, irresponsible, numerical voting. Hugh Gaitskell, a former
Leader of the Labour Party, once sarcastically described Douglas as 'a religious
rather than a scientific reformer'. Perhaps he was more right than he knew!
It
may be that Douglas's thinking on the subjects of philosophy, policy and religion,
and the special meaning he gave to those words, will turn out to be his most valuable
contribution to the restoring of the link between religious belief and the principles
which govern Society. In his view, a 'philosophy', i.e. a conception of
the universe, always expresses itself as a 'policy'-a distinctive long-term course
of action directed towards ends determined by that 'philosophy'.
'Religion'
(from the Latin religare, to bind back) is not just a set of beliefs such as are
expressed in the Christian creeds (which constitute a 'philosophy') but is precisely
the 'binding back' of these ideas to the reality of our lives, not only individually,
but in the political and economic relationships of our society. The policies
of centralisation and monopoly now being imposed upon the World through the closely
related agencies of Finance-Capitalism and Marxist Socialism derive from a 'philosophy'
fundamentally different from, and opposed to, that of Trinitarian Christianity,
which was, however imperfectly, expressed in our Constitution, our Common Law,
and the progress towards personal freedom which had been made, especially, in
Britain and the Commonwealth.
At the time Douglas first put forward his ideas
and proposals for carrying forward this traditional policy to its next stage,
its Christian basis could be taken for granted as mere 'common sense'. Now, that
can no longer be taken for granted, and it has become necessary consciously to
distinguish the policies at work in our Society, and to relate them to the fundamental
beliefs which gave rise to them. In this sense, therefore, 'Social Credit' is
the social policy of a Christian 'philosophy'; and before the end of his life,
its founder made this explicit, rather than, as in its beginnings, implicit. |
