return to top page 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 commentary.Not much of that needs to be changed after twenty years surely, even if the dangers to which it refers are as acute as ever. There is now a fully fledged 'Green' party on the scene in this and about a dozen other countries but almost without exception they are hooked on the mesmerising mystique of mass power politics and the possible fruits of office in Westminster-style parliaments in blissful disregard of the fact that it is these structures which have gestated the global crisis out of their own vitals as it were. The rhetoric argues otherwise but the policy implications have their own conformist thrust. The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.
The crying need of the hour is for consensual voice of crystalline clarity asserting the inalienable rights of localised communities to their own decision-making powers as but a prelude to determining how those powers shall be recovered before the giant centralised forces which have created the global crisis destroy us.
The failure to grasp this point is the main reason for the failure of the 'Green Movement' to mount a resonating alternative vision of a genuinely ecological society. Such a vision is needed if multitudes of people are to be impelled to act to assert the kind of community and neighbourhood power without which no Green objectives can possibly be realised.
We are paying very dearly for the failure to follow up the pointers of this twenty year old 'Statement of Intent' for by now, with consistency, clarity and the kind of energetic spirit of commitment both can yield we might, instead of being stuck in the prevailing morass of confusion, which yields its own sense of futility, inertia and apathy, be on the high road of a magnificent change of global consciousness; we might indeed be more than ready to affirm our insights of ecological consciousness and bioregional vision against the bleak prevailing powers of giantism and darkness in sharply political terms.
We hold the present in trust for the future; the supreme form of betrayal today is to duck this challenge and to swan along in disregard of our most unnatural pattern of disempowered living which, with the continuance of its acceptance, ensures the likelihood there will be no future worth discussing for anyone.
The alternative before us admits of no evasion; we either go forward to a human scale, power-dispersed, community-based, organically structured form of powersharing such as has characterised the more stable and durable societies in the human record, or we go down to a global collapse of the main artefacts of our civilization to a level which may well involve our biological survival as a species.
We are not talking about what we think we like, or what we are accustomed to, or what we would prefer if we were free to choose, or whether we should really feel altogether comfortable if we lived in properly sustainable communities, or whether we prefer the anonymity of the mass city life, or whether we want to continue to selfishly drive our own little cars, to shop in supermarkets and to read one-hundred page or more newspapers, we are talking about the survival of civilization and the continuation of human race.
Editor of Fourth World Reviewcopies of this document may be obtained from 26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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