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related RADICAL NOTICEBOARD postings 24th August 2001 The Bunzl Papers John Papworth/John Bunzl 9th July 2002 Simultaneous Policy John Papworth/Sir Richard Body
John Papworth
4th September 2003An open letter addressed to Sir Richard Body
part of the continuing dialogue about editorial policy at
Fourth World Review
see also A Pair of Cranks by John Papworth
You seem to be urging me to publish more material about 'positive' things such as small schools and small hospitals, and news of tribal and small nation developments.
On the last item, which I regard as pivotal to Fourth World affairs, I have approached several people, including yourself and a young man from New Zealand…to do a regular column for me. On the other items, of which there is already an extensive and growing literature, whilst I do not for a moment discount their importance, I have to ask you whether you seriously think the global crisis is caused by the absence of small schools, or is likely to be resolved by their multiplication?
These important matters are of course peripheral to the general drift towards a global nuclear holocaust, to the giant uncontrollable thrust of global economic forces to register surplus balance sheets, regardless of the effects on finite resources, the fragile balance of environmental sustainability and the even more fragile fabric of our social structures.
How do we respond to these forces? How do we achieve a social order where ordinary people and the framework of their moral reasoning take precedence over boardroom judgements? How do we restore moral order over the prevailing moral anarchy of market forces and maverick politicians before our planet is made irredeemably uninhabitable for human society?
It seems to me there is a profound theoretical confusion at work here. A confusion which in some part you seem to share, and which has bedevilled all radical attempts, whether from 'peace' organisations, friends of the earth, monetary reformers, educationalists, human rights bodies and so on, to alter course for generations.
There is an innate and continuing supposition that we can resolve matters by seeking to change what governments (and other forces) are doing. Correlated to this is the supposition that this is possible because we live in societies which are democratic and where ruling forces are controllable by citizen moral judgement.
I sought to show in my book, Small is Powerful why in mass terms, this latter assumption is quite untenable and why a mass democracy is an oxymoron, since on a mass basis determinative power is not in citizen hands but in the hands of those controlling the central levers. It is a conclusion amply confirmed by the events of April 12th of this year, a date future historians, (if there are any), may well mark as the beginning of the end of Western Civilisation, if only because just as it showed with unarguable clarity that the massed millions around the world demonstrating for peace were quite powerless to prevent war, so they are powerless to prevent or to halt any other of the monstrous abuses of power which are part of our daily diet of experience today and which are undermining the entire fabric of civilised existence.
What confronts us is a much bigger problem than whatever it is governments and other forces are doing, the problem emanates from what they are.
The power in the hands of these people has to be stripped down to local levels for the supreme reason that such a reduction in scale is the only way democracy can be enabled to function. It is also the only way we can get to grips with the giant forms promoting the global crisis before we are altogether undone by its workings.
This is the central concern of Fourth World Review. It is a message which has few takers; the idea that it is practical or even sensible, to scale down governmental power strikes even good people seeking solutions to our major problems as too absurd to merit discussion. It is, nevertheless, an idea which is beginning to have its day - not least in the worldwide eruption of ethnic and tribal consciousness that is now the cause of numerous conflicts in every continent; not least in the multitudinous moves for reform now surfacing in so many spheres (and not least, as you have noted in education and health matters), and not least too in the growing general awareness, (especially among the young), of just how terminal the global crisis is likely to prove. Truth does, after all, have a power of its own.
You insist on the importance of Fourth World Review but are you sure that your proposals will improve its position? You cite Positive News as a success story, yet its entire thrust is with concern to oppose what governments are doing rather than what they are. This seems to be the crucial theoretical divide and one which proliferates confusion in nearly all current reformist literature, as well as in the conferences and lectures that are promoted.
Nothing today is easier than to pen resounding articles showing just how terrible are the actions of governments and corporations; but there is a limit to the capacity of anyone to absorb the message of 'woe, woe', without indicating how we move on.
Well-meaning spokesmen and spokeswomen jet around the world to lecture us on how terrible global trade and money arrangements are, but without exception they assume that a democratic drive to change governmental policies is possible and will effect remedies, without advancing a shred of evidence to prove as much. In ignoring the nature of political structures and the power those structures have to manipulate and determine, these good people are not advancing remedies, they are simply promoting distractions. Yet they currently dominate the 'alternative' field even as they are going nowhere and the crisis worsens, whilst Fourth World Review has barely a few hundred readers (and even fewer subscribers).
My younger son commented recently, "In Fourth World Review you have an excellent product, but you have no marketing strategy." I think he is right. I am sure with a number of editorial adjustments that reflect a wider range of concerns, coupled with a considered promotional scheme, the journal and its message can achieve the kind of prominence so urgently needed.
The existence of Fourth World Review has only been made possible by considerable help from friends who have seen its point and have been keen to promote it, but this help is increasingly tardy, partly because some good people, such as Maurice Ash, have passed on. Today we scrape along from one issue to the next and survive on a string.
What is the traffic jam here? Why do we continue to act as though any sort of progress can be achieved without some purposive overarching conceptual framework of the society we want to achieve? We seem at times oblivious that it is our industrial and technological civilisation and our neglect of Ghandi's message of the spinning wheel, rather than the failings of any particular persons or parties, which is the source of our crisis and of our discontents.
I am prepared to devote all my editorial labours to improving it in any way that does not cloud the clarity of its theoretical stance but I do need help in the matter of promotion; is there anyone you know who might devote himself to just this?
And financially, if Fourth World Review is to survive at all, it simply must get more help, not least because it is still the only journal in the world maintaining a signpost that points in the only direction we can take which can save our bacon; more help so that I am not spending so much time scratching around for funds to pay overdue bills for the last issue and seeking to provide for the next. This hand-to-mouth existence is wearying.
But it is a prerequisite of any sort of progress that this message to put power back into peoples hands before those who now manipulate it destroy us should be heard, and that we cease this everlasting theoretical fogginess and muddle which has aborted all attempts at countering the global crisis. It is a message which despite Kohr and Schumacher, is still not accepted or acted upon, and I see no prospect of any effective moves to improve our prospects until the radical elements everywhere rally behind it. And still, in more senses than one I am driven to reflect:
"But always at my back I hear,
Time's winged chariot hurrying near."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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