| Subject: | [socialcredit] "Ecosocialism of Fools" | | Date: | Sunday, October 7, 2007 10:21:06 (-0700) | | From: | william_b_ryan <william_b_ryan @.....com>
|
This is the "Ecosocialism of Fools" paper that Ms.
Hutchinson referred to in her recent article:
--------------------------------------------
F_A_I_R__U_S_E__C_L_A_I_M_E_D
http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Social+Credit,+Ecosocialism+of+Fools,+Derek+Wall,+Capitalism+Nature+Socialism
Capitalism Nature Socialism, September 2003
Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools
By Derek Wall
Social credit was attractive to those who recognized
the value of intrinsically satisfying work as a basis
for participation in the community.
In this new economy socially and ecologically
destructive activities would be neither valued nor
justifiable on grounds of economic necessity.
Following over half a century of neglect, these texts
possess the potential to provide the basis for a new
economics of cooperation.
"[We] have a campaign which rallies the small business
men and bothered intellectuals; which launches a
violent attack on socialism; which attacks high
finance and the banks; which insists on the legitimacy
of profits and the necessity of private enterprise;
which organizes a uniformed body of 'Greenshirts,'
strictly disciplined and lead. What is this but
Fascism in the making?"
1. Introduction
Economic debate in the British green movement is
increasingly dominated by concepts of “monetary
reform” drawn from the social credit philosophy of
Major Clifford Douglas, a Scottish engineer, who
developed his ideas in the aftermath of World War One.
For advocates, social credit provides the key to
understanding how economic forces generate ecological
destruction, social injustice and political
centralization. Brian Leslie, whose parents were
members of the Social Credit Greenshirts during the
1930s, chairs the Green Party Economics Working Group.
The newsletter, "Sustainable Economics," is almost
entirely concerned with social credit and Party
economics speaker Molly Scott Cato advocates monetary
reform. Green critics of globalization, including some
from outside the UK, such as Herman Daly, Richard
Douthwaite and David Korten acknowledge the value of
Douglas’s ideas. David Icke, an ex-UK Green Party
national speaker, has been a militant supporter of
social credit monetary reform. Social crediters also
court the anarchist oriented direct action movement in
the UK. Ecosocialists too are advocates of social
credit. Frances Hutchinson, a former member of the
Green Party left grouping, the Association of
Socialist Greens, has revived the Douglas Social
Credit Secreteriat. Social credit, for historical
reasons, has never been big in the US but in the UK it
is impossible to discuss green economics without
coming across the topic.
Academics have taken an increasing interest in social
credit, noting Douglas’s importance as an advocate of
a national income scheme, seen by some as a
“capitalist road to communism.” In earlier decades
commentators as varied as Galbraith, Keynes and
Mumford praised Douglas’s contribution to economic
debate.
Politically, social credit has deep roots in the UK.
During the 1930s, working class activists in the
Coventry League of the Unemployed and the Kibbo Kift
Kin, a bizarrely named socialist scouting body, came
together to found the Social Credit Greenshirts.
Social credit has also been politically significant in
Australia and New Zealand. Indeed, the New Zealand
Labor Party is said to have won a general election on
a social credit program. The philosophy took root most
strongly in the Canadian province of Alberta, where
the Social Credit Party won a stunning election
victory in the 1935 provincial elections.
Wilfrid Price, a member of the Greenshirts in the
1930s, joined the Ecology Party (now the Green Party)
in the early 1980s and powerfully spoke for social
credit as a form of green politics. He introduced
Frances Hutchinson to social credit. Hutchinson,
arguably the most energetic advocate of Douglas’s
legacy today, sees social credit as the most
sophisticated product of Britain’s Guild Socialist
movement, which originated within the ecosocialism of
such luminaries as William Morris. To his followers,
Douglas was a prophet of considerable power whose
thought demands critical attention.
In contrast, this essay argues that far from being a
link to an historical ecosocialism, Douglas’s
philosophy functioned as a tragic episode in its
disintegration. Social credit has ominous parallels
and shares elements with traditions of anti-semitic
populism. The danger that social credit, along with
other right wing political economies, presents within
the anti-globalization movement is examined. The case
of social credit indicates why ecosocialism has the
potential to degrade into ecofascism and how such
degradation can be fought as part of a vitally
important hegemonic battle within the
anti-globalization movement.
2. Social Credit
Douglas argued financial forces had increasingly
centralized political power, yet a leisure state was
achievable because technology, even in 1918, had so
massively increased potential production. Scarcity was
artificially produced to maintain economic activity.
Because purchasing power was too low to buy all of the
goods produced by industry, it was necessary for the
community to manufacture money to mop up excess
supply. Thus, crisis could be avoided, banks would
lose their monopoly of credit, and “economic
democracy” would result.
Douglas’s analysis of chronic economic
under-consumption is based on his A+B theorem. He
found while working for a Royal Air Force Factory at
Farnborough that the income yielded by production was
insufficient to buy the output created at the plant.
The income generated in the form of A payments
included salaries and dividends paid by the plant; B
payments were made up of additional elements such as
bank charges. The cost of the goods produced included
A + B, yet purchasing power was leaking away in the
form of B payments, leading to an acute drop in
economic activity.
Douglas saw money as socially constructed and of
symbolic value only.
Despite its lack of “reality,” money, rather than
being a neutral fluid that allowed economic
development to take place, could distort production,
distribution and consumption. Banks created credit,
increasing the money supply and partially allowing the
leakage of B payments to be overcome, so as to
maintain economic activity. Yet, credit created by
bankers has to be paid back, enslaving both producers
and consumers with debt; 97 percent of the money
supply in the UK at present is made up of debt money
that must be paid back with interest.
Douglas boldly argued that cultural inheritance is a
forgotten and all-important factor of production.
Wealth is generated by ideas, which give rise to
technological innovation. Rather than being the unique
product of particular inventive individuals such
cultural capital was produced by the community, which
should be rewarded for its collective intellectual
labor. Douglas argued that society could pay
individuals a dividend as a result of such cultural
capital. Taxation could be avoided because the
community could directly generate money and an age of
plenty would ensue.
Douglas was an economic utopian:
“The strength of the appeal, which Major Douglas makes
to his followers is that his theories promise
something for nothing. Consumers are to receive
credits; dividends are to be issued to all; taxation
will become unnecessary and no one will be called upon
to pay the cost.”
Douglas can be seen as a minor under-consumptionist
advocate of proto-Keynesian economics with little to
say to radical greens. Keynes famously described him
as “a private” rather than a general in an army of
economic radicals challenging the bankrupt orthodoxy
of liberal thought.
Indeed, his emphasis on technological advance as a
source of Promethean human development would seem to
be antagonistic. Yet, social crediters argue that
environmental problems can only be seriously analyzed
and dealt with using “monetary reform.” Green social
crediters contend that ecologically destructive
economic growth is explained by the creation of
debt-money that forces us to produce and consume more
and more. Douglas noted in the 1930s that,
“Industry has run riot over the countryside. A
population, which has been educated in the fixed idea
that the chief, if not the only, objective of life is
well named 'business,' whose politicians and preachers
exhort their audiences to fresh efforts for the
capture of markets and the provision of still more
business, cannot be blamed if, as opportunity occurs,
it still further sacrifices the amenities of the
countryside to the building of more blast-furnaces and
chemical works.”
In 2001 Alain Pilot, a prominent social crediter from
Quebec, echoed such sentiments arguing:
“The basic cause of the pollution of the environment,
of the waste of resources of the globe, is the chronic
shortage of purchasing power, which is inherent in the
present financial system.”
The great car economy has been seen as one particular
consequence of the debt system. Douglas powerfully
criticized the notion that human wants were unlimited
and growth must therefore continue infinitely. He saw
wants as constructed by forces of finance to maintain
accumulation. He also believed that “the genuine
consumptive capacity of the individual is limited,
[therefore] we must recognize that the world, whether
consciously or not, is working towards the Leisure
State.” In Douglas’s alternative future, business:
“would of necessity cease to be the major interest of
life and would, as has happened to so many biological
activities, be relegated to a position of minor
importance, to be replaced, no doubt, by some form of
activity of which we are not yet fully cognizant.”
Supporters within the UK Green Party have argued that
social credit produced by the community rather than
banks could be used to fund expensive policies without
massive tax rises. Alternative energy systems, home
insulation, recycling schemes, land reclamation and
measures to end poverty could be funded by debt-free
money produced by the community.
In turn, the national dividend is a form of basic
income scheme, which would decommodify labor,
encouraging individuals to work share and allowing
unpaid creative and necessary social labor to be
undertaken. Jobs that were unnecessary and
ecologically destructive could be swept away, thus
removing the opportunity cost of environ-mental
destruction as the price of job preservation. The
building blocks of conventional economics, infinite
wants, scarce resources, and opportunity cost would be
removed by the Douglas revolution. Scarcity is a
particular target of Douglas’s ire:
“The world is obsessed, or possessed, by a scarcity
complex. While at the date of writing Great Britain is
preparing for another war, she still has a million
unemployed, farms going out of cultivation and
agricultural products being destroyed because they
cannot be sold, publicists still inform us on the one
hand that the situation is due to over-production, and
on the other hand that sacrifices must be made by
everyone, that we must all work harder, consume less,
and produce more.”
Social credit is an obvious solution to the global
debt crisis and provides a way of tempering
globalization. Globalization is conceptualized as a
product of demands for increased free trade as nations
struggle to export surplus goods that are unsold
because of the chronic loss of purchasing power.
Organic agriculture has been conceptualized as another
positive by-product of a debt-free world.
Green demands for grassroots democracy can be promoted
by decentralizing credit creation to local
communities. Social justice will be built by
de-monopolizing credit creation so as to create
prosperity for all. Social credit can be seen as
providing three key framing tasks noted by social
movement theorists describing successful mobilization.
Thus it identifies a source of political ills, poses a
solution and prescribes a course of action.
Douglas has even be described as practicing a
practical green lifestyle,
“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
decentralization of economic power was of the essence
of his teaching, it should be put on record that he
practiced what he preached.”
3. Social Discredit
While Douglas argued the economic system is profoundly
dysfunctional, his analysis is flawed. Taken at face
value, his description of the A+B theorem is
unsustainable. B payments are paid to individuals and
firms in exactly that same way as A payments, so they
are potentially available to buy goods.
Either A or B payments can be saved or spent. During
the 1930s, critics of social credit often foolishly
invoked Say’s law to attack A+B. Say argued that the
circular flow of income meant that all factor payments
provided income that would generate equilibrium
balancing consumption. Galbraith, Keynes, Marx and a
constellation of economists have challenged the notion
that income must equal consumption. Yet if incomes are
saved and such saving does not lead to an equivalent
balancing increase in investment, this does nothing to
justify Douglas’s approach to “under consumption.” If
we save more either category of payment can fall;
there is no essential qualitative difference between A
and B payments. If consumer spending or investment
falls because of a loss of business confidence,
recession may result, but this has little or nothing
to do with A+B.
Critics and advocates of A+B have spilt much ink
refining Douglas’s scheme so that it makes greater
sense. Typically five or six alternative scenarios are
entertained and worked over, generating much tedious
detail. After much intellectual labor it is possible
to interpret A+B as a system that suggests that in a
growing economy there will be a gap between rising
productive capacity and income. Damning Douglas with
faint praise, Metha, who is hailed by social
crediters, argues that he dimly “foreshadows the
Harrod–Domer idea that for equilibrium, investment, in
absolute terms, will have to increase at an increasing
rate.” Douglas’s analysis suggests under consumption
is chronic, while classical economists found it
difficult to explain depression, Metha notes his
“theory implies that industry never faces boom
conditions.” Rather than making goods cheaper,
investment in capital increases their price so
purchasing power is not great enough to absorb them.
Douglas simply provides at best a garbled and grossly
simplified version of Marxist and/or Keynesian
approaches to growth and crisis. In turn, any notion
of exploitation or injustice driven by forces other
than finance is absent from Douglas’s work:
Douglas’s account of banking does seem a little
stronger than the A+B theorem. Hiskett and Franklin,
in an otherwise strongly critical account of social
credit, note,
“The attempt which is sometimes made, by orthodox
defenders of the banking system, to show that banks do
no more than lend the money which is deposited with
them, is based on a specious argument which tries to
prove too much.
“The indisputable fact is that, by action of the
banks, £1,000 of new cash, deposited with the banking
system, is built up into a total of £10,000 deposits
by the addition of £9,000 of credit money.”
Money is clearly socially created and is no longer
linked to anything of intrinsic value. It can be seen
as a source of damaging debt, and could in the short
term, be created by the community. Douglas’s fallacies
should not be used to close down all discussion of the
role of debt within capitalism.
Yet, money cannot be created at the stroke of a pen as
a utopian lever.
Money, even if it is made in a debt-free form will
fuel either growth or inflation. If the community
“prints” more money and spare productive capacity is
present, more goods will be produced, creating more
potentially destructive economic growth. If banks
simply produced unlimited amounts of money at the
stroke of a pen, their legitimacy would fall and their
deposits would cease to be seen as “good.” Socially
constructed money is still likely to follow Gresham’s
law that accepted credit will be driven out by that
with less legitimacy. To make money work appropriate
rituals have to be performed. In turn, bankers cannot
be seen as the source of all evils, as wicked
magicians who commit the evil of usury to gain
dominance over creation. Douglas’s beliefs have more
to do with medieval theology than any imagined new
economics. His calls for the de-commodification of
money, the ultimate commodity, act only to erect an
obvious oxymoron.
Marxists are criticized for advocating economic
reductionism, and the project of journals such as CNS
has been to provide more nuanced approaches that
articulate economic, ecological, and social forces.
Social credit is not merely economically reductionist,
but apparently reduces economic processes to a single
cause. Far from exploring the second contradiction of
capitalism many monetary reformers revert to an
economic prehistory by erecting a monocausal account
of political economy. Debt creation and speculation
may accelerate ecologically destructive accumulation
but the monetary forces articulate with a host of
other processes. both economic and cultural. Instead
of seeking to embed economic forces within the social,
Douglas advocates a fiscal technical fix.
The more closely you study Douglas’s writings, the
more apparent it becomes that his ideas are based on
anti-semitic conspiracy theory, with the economics
fitted in almost as an afterthought. As early as 1922
he concluded,
“the International Financial groups who precipitate
these struggles [world wars] do not really care how
frequent they are — the cost of them is simply passed
on to the public in prices, and the real authors of
them not merely go completely untouched by the
repeated tragedies, but from villas on the Riviera or
elsewhere “glut” their love of power by contemplating
the writhings of the world they have enslaved.”
In Social Credit he observed,
“In a remarkable document which received some
publicity some years ago, under the title of 'The
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,' a
Machiavellian scheme for the enslavement of the world
was outlined. The authenticity of this document is a
matter of little importance; what is interesting about
it, is the fidelity with which the methods by which
such enslavement might be brought about can be seen
reflected in the facts of everyday experience.”
It was explained in that treatise that the financial
system was the agency most suitable for such a
purpose; the inculcation of a false democracy was
recommended; vindictive penalties for infringements of
laws were advised; the Great War and the methods by
which it might be brought about were predicted at
least twenty years before the event; the imposition of
grinding taxation, more especially directed against
Real Estate owners, was specifically explained as
essential to the furtherance of the scheme.
Douglas’s racism became more bizarre over time, and by
the 1940s he was arguing that Hitler was funded by
Jewish conspirators, that the Holocaust was a hoax and
that a new world order was being created to advance
the plot. His closest supporters were purged from the
Social Credit Party (SC) in Alberta in part because of
their anti-semitism. In 1983, Alberta was rocked by
the Keegstra affair, when a schoolteacher was sacked
from his job for informing pupils that the Holocaust
was a hoax and that a Zionist plot was driving global
power politics. James Keegstra, a vice-president of
the Social Credit Party in Alberta, used propaganda
produced by Ron Gostick.
Gostick, in turn, was a former school student of SC
Premier Aberhart and the son of Edith Gostick, SC MLA
from 1935 to 1940 for Calgary. He created the Union of
Electors as anti-semitic rival to the official SC in
1946 and “eventually became one of Canada’s most
notorious anti-Semites, leader of the Canadian League
of Rights….established in 1968,” which publishes
Canadian Intelligence Service and On Target. Louis
Even, leader of Quebec Social Credit until the late
1950s, created “two extreme right-wing groups, Les
Pelerins de Saint-Michel and Les Berets Blanc.”
Members of the Australian League of Rights, a sister
organization to the Canadian group, have backed
Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation Party that has
helped fuel the current persecution of asylum seekers
in the country. The League, founded by Eric Butler to
promote social credit ideas, published The
International Jew: The Truth about the Protocols of
Zion in 1946.
Douglas assumed that bankers seized the B payments and
refused to spend them. The A+B theorem means little
without a bankers’ plot, which deliberately engineers
crisis by removing purchasing power from the system.
The bankers are aliens!
Major Douglas really appears to hold the view that,
although the banking system is administered by
individual members of the community, it is in effect
run as though it were being administered on behalf of
the inhabitants of another planet. He believes that
debt is continually being incurred to those imaginary
proprietors — who claim the ownership of all creation
of new money — a debt which accumulates, and is never
fully discharged, but which involves that
purchasing-power is drained away from the community
whenever loans are repaid and money is retired.
Anti-semitism, rather than being contingent, is
necessary to Douglas’s economics. Bob Hesketh, after
making an extensive study of Douglas’s writings,
observed,
“My research has convinced me that Douglas’s
conspiracy-based understanding of the world, rather
than his monetary and political theories hold the
secret for comprehending his ideas […] He created
social credit specifically to undo the power of the
conspiracy as revealed in the Protocols. His monetary
and political theories were tactics for defeating
Finance.
“In Social Credit, Douglas links the plot by finance
to absorb money in retained profits to violent threats
and the plots of a racial elite.
“Apart from any more subtle explanation, even great
banks hesitate to distribute their true profits for
fear of attracting too much attention.
“Corner sites are potential key positions. It may be
stressing the theory a little too far, to use it as an
explanation of the fact that a recently built bank in
Cleveland, U.S.A., has machine-guns mounted at each
corner of it. A polite intimation that his overdraft
must be reduced, is a more effective argument to the
average man than a threat by a machine-gun. But the
idea is no doubt dissimilar.
“An organization can only grow powerful at the expense
of those involved in it, just as a tree can only grow
at the expense of its soil. Corner sites, granite and
marble buildings, only two of the more tangible signs
of growth in the banking organization, represent
undistributed profits.
“Undistributed profits are simply cancelled credits;
they are 'savings' by an institution. They are credits
transformed from a visible form represented by
deposits, into a potential form such as […] the
security for loans or mortgages. Every credit
cancelled in this way, whatever forms the cancellation
may take, simply represents so much purchasing-power
destroyed.”
As a result,
“It still further restricts the money and
purchasing-power at the disposal of individuals and
concentrates this money power in financial
institutions. If the process is allowed to proceed
without interruption, and it remains true that the
possession of money is the only claim to the
necessaries of life, then it is not difficult to see
that within a short space of time, that condition of
universal slavery to which the writer of 'The
Protocols of Zion' looked forward with such exultation
will be an accomplished fact.”
In an essay entitled “British Politics” he argued
that,
“a serious depression stretched from the time of the
Crusades to the beginning of the Renaissance and is
explainable, I think, far better by the fact that the
English nobles were all mortgaged to the Jews as a
result of the Crusades, than in any other way.”
He called for intense struggle against the bankers,
"If there is a spark of virility left in this country,
the day the next war breaks our the local
representatives of Finance will face a firing party in
the Long Gallery of the Tower."
Anti-semitism based on economic grievances directly
led to the Holocaust and was literally murderous.
Douglas’s anti-semitism should not be dismissed or
excused. It is frightening to find social crediters
who are moved by the fact that M4 of the money supply
is growing, but show only the mildest concern over
their prophet’s murderous hatred.
4. From Ecosocialism to Ecofascism
Douglas, for his advocates, is the prophet,
anticipating Galbraith, Gorz and a host of green
thinkers. Price, describing activists within the
Social Credit Greenshirts during the 1930s, observed,
The various aspects of ecology had their specialists
in the Party. Edgar Saxon […] was a prominent food
reformer and a champion of compost growing. […] Ashley
Lewis, produced a pamphlet and lectured on how Britain
could feed herself by a proper return to the soil of
organic waste. He later gave up a well paid job in
London to work as an agricultural worker at about a
quarter of his former salary. John Hargrave, the Kibbo
Kift Kin leader, advocated the formation, as a leisure
activity, of a voluntary forestry corps of young men
and women to look after our forests and wild life.
Eric de Mare, an architect, wrote 'Britain Rebuilt'
showing how people could be properly housed without
ribbon development and spoiling the countryside. […]
Thus, one attraction for advocates of Douglas is his
supposed role as an early pioneer of green ideology.
Hutchinson, who observes, “the anti-globalization and
environmental movement did not start with Rachel
Carson, still less with Seattle,” believes that
Douglas, despite his racism, can be used to show that
concepts such as ecological economics and
anti-globalization have deep roots.
Yet, we need not rely on Douglas’s dubious legacy in
seeking historical examples of radical green thought.
The supposed rediscovery of social credit is not an
act of remembering, but a way of forgetting Emma
Goldman, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Mary
Shelley, Marx (of course!) and many more.
Even a superficial examination of key elements of
green politics suggests that there is a deep and
diverse history to be discovered. Typically, in 1906
writing in her journal Mother Earth, Goldman attacked
a productivist, ecologically destructive capitalism:
“Whoever severs himself (sic) from Mother Earth and
her flowing sources of life goes into exile. A vast
part of civilization has ceased to feel the deep
relation with our mother. […] Economic necessity
causes such hateful pressure. Economic necessity? Why
not economic stupidity? This seems a more appropriate
name for it.”
There is considerable evidence for the existence of a
historic ecosocialist tradition in Britain, which
Peter Gould has described as the Early Green Politics,
when radicals such as Edward Carpenter, William Morris
and Peter Kropotkin linked socialist and anarchist
themes with environmental concern in the period
between 1880 and 1900. Ecological thought was
important in the British socialist movement in this
period and the boundaries between socialism, ecology
and anarchism were porous. The earliest Marxist group
in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation, which
included both William Morris and Engels, was
sympathetic to ecosocialist perspectives. In turn,
British ecosocialism can be seen as a node within a
global network which linked radicals in the US, Russia
and Western Europe.
Between 1905 and the 1930s, this network weakened and
fractured with many advocates eventually moving
towards either Stalinism or fascism. The Social Credit
Greenshirts are a powerful example of this process.
They evolved out of a socialist scouting movement,
inspired by the writings of Ernest Seton Thompson into
the Kibbo Kift Kin. Hargraves, the leader of the Kin,
was introduced to social credit by Rolf Gardiner and
transformed the movement into the Social Credit
Greenshirts. Gardiner went on to become one of
Britain’s most important far right ecological
activists; he corresponded with Hitler’s agriculture
minister Darre and enjoyed close links with European
Nazis who advocated a blood and soil philosophy.
Douglas wrote some of his earliest work in the guild
socialist journal 'The New Age.' Arthur Penty coined
the term guild socialism in his book *The Restoration
of the Gild (sic) System,* yet became an advocate of
fascism by the 1930s. Equally, the alternative
political economy of Chesterbelloc (or distribution)
moved from guild socialism to fascism. Hilaire Belloc
became convinced, like Douglas, that the “future was
in the hands of Jewish bankers and financiers” and
became a supporter of Mussolini.
Of course, not all of these elements embraced the far
right to the same extent. Equally, some figures
maintained an ecological politics of the left; for
example, G.D.H. Cole continued to propagate a guild
socialist message in the mainstream labor movement. In
turn the Labour governments of 1945 to 1951 realized a
little of the ecosocialist vision when they introduced
Britain’s first national parks. Nonetheless, Douglas’s
legacy is one of defeat for radicals, part of a story
of dispersal, disillusionment and movement towards the
right. The growth of Fabianism and Stalinism within
the British Labor milieu marginalized ecosocialist
concerns. Such marginalization encouraged movement to
the right. In turn anti-capitalist political economies
such as those of Douglas that rely on conspiracy as an
explanation of ecological and other ills open the door
to fascist potentials. Douglas is not a figure that
ecosocialists should celebrate, but one that we should
learn from.
Douglas and distributism were quite consciously used
by activists in Britain’s neo-nazi National Front to
construct a “third positionist” politics, which
rejected capitalism and communism and blamed Jewish
financiers for environmental damage. The National
Front’s founder and first chairman, A.K. Chesterton,
was also a former socialist who in the 1930s had
embraced fascism in the form of Oswald Mosley’s
British Union. Chesterton, cousin of G.K. Chesterton,
drew upon social credit to construct the ideology of
the Front. The National Front created a surrogate
environmental group Greenwave and attempted to recruit
activists on the left. The two third positionist
groups that have succeed the National Front, the Third
Way and the International Third Position, both
continue to promote social credit.
The Third Way has even re-published an academic
article from Burkitt and Hutchinson.
5. Anti-Semitism and Populism
Rather than being an original and important economic
theorist, as his supporters imply, Douglas parallels a
wider tradition of anti-semitic populism which has
been particularly important in the US and Canada.
Populism is confusing because in its call to hear the
voice of the people, it combines features from left
and right. Social justice is mixed with scapegoating,
religious fundamentalism and nationalism with calls
for direct democracy. Like socialism or fascism its
manifestations can be heterodox.
Populism need not be anti-semitic, but a major strain
of populism argues that an elite of bankers has
conspired to enslave “ordinary folks” using the tool
of “usury.” Indeed, an important feature of US
populism that stretches back to the Populist Parties
of the 19th century is an obsessive joint concern with
money and conspiracy. In 1873, the de-monetization of
silver was condemned as a crime perpetrated by a
“cabal” of English, Jewish and Wall Street bankers. In
turn the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913
fuelled populist paranoia. In the 1920s, Henry Ford
criticized Jewish bankers and called for workers and
manufacturers to make a common cause against finance.
In 1935, Father Dennis Fahey published The Mystical
Body of Christ in the Modern World, which reinforced
the ideas that an international Jewish financial
conspiracy was working to dominate the world.
The most important US populist of the 20th century and
the closest equivalent to Douglas was Father Charles
Coughlin, the radio priest of the Depression era.
Coughlin was a radical who rallied millions of
ordinary Americans to his crusade to rid the US of
poverty caused he argued by corrupt politicians, over
corporations and arrogant bankers. He started firmly
on the left as an advocate of Roosevelt’s New Deal but
frustrated by his inability to influence events moved
to Fascism during the 1930s.
Coughlin was yet another under-consumptionist who
believed that currency reform could be used to boost
the economy. Between 1933 and 1934, he produced
proposals to increase the money supply and to base
money on “real wealth” instead of precious metals. He
argued that the US government should sack the private
bankers who ran the Federal Reserve. Coughlin,
contrasting productive capitalism with parasitic
finance, argued:
On the one side tenaciously clinging to the past were
the speculative bankers, the credit inflationists, the
gamblers with other peoples’ money.
Opposing them were the battalions of the exploited —
the deceived investors, the small depositors, the
anxious industrialists, the hard pressed merchants,
the laborer and the farmer.
Coughlin is a key figure for third positionists and
his 1934 slogan that declared that both capitalism and
communism “are rotten!” continues to inspire modern
neo-Nazis. By 1938 his newspaper Social Justice was
defending the Kristelnacht pogrom and re-publishing
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
From the 1950s, Willis Carto, inspired by the ideas of
the American Nazi Francis Parker Yockey, used his
journal the Spotlight to argue that Jewish financiers
were part of a conspiracy with the Bilderburg group
and the Trilateral Commission to dominate the world.
A.K. Chesterton’s title, *The New Unhappy Lords,*
suggests the conspiracy has been used to destroy the
British Empire, drawing upon Coughlin, Carto, and
Fahey and as we have already noted, Douglas.
The British League of Rights established Bloomfield
Books, which has promoted Douglas’s books along with
Holocaust revisionist titles, the Protocols, a massive
range of populist conspiracy texts and even Mein
Kampf. The League of Rights also encourages supporters
to subscribe to Spotlight. The Bromsgrove Group, an
alliance of varied monetary reformers, contains the
Christian Ecology Group, Green Party Economics Working
Group, as well as right wingers such as Don Martin
from the League of Rights and Alistair McConnachie.
James Gibb Stuart acts as convener. His book *The
Lemming Folk* is a conspiracist’s bible, which
promotes once again the populist message that the
“money power” links capitalism and communism with its
plan for world domination. The book, which has been
promoted by the far right British National Party, also
praises apartheid,
“it means separate development — not racism, or
repression, or institutionalized violence, or the
eternal social and economic subjugation of one race by
another. It was adopted in South Africa some thirty
years ago because a white minority saw it then as the
only means by which they could preserve their culture
and their identity.”
During the 1970s Stuart supported Rhodesia’s white
government who he saw as a target for the conspiracy
because of their financial independence. His associate
Alistair McConnachie, suspended from the UK
Independence Party, an anti-European Union group,
after writing to the Scotsman newspaper to question
the Holocaust, edits 'Prosperity,' a social
credit/monetary reform newsletter widely promoted in
the green movement. McConnachie, who was a member of
the Douglas Secretariat during the 1990s, and remains
active in monetary reform circles, is reported to have
stated, “I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to
execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct
physical evidence to show that such gas chambers
existed.”
Through contact with far right monetary reformers
former Green Party national speaker David Icke has
been advancing populist conspiratorial ideas complete
with accounts of Jewish bankers funding both the
Bolshevik revolution and Hitler’s regime.
Icke notes:
“Some research I have seen claims that of, 388 members
of the Russian Revolutionary Government in 1918, only
sixteen were Russians by birth. All but two of the
rest were Jews from elsewhere, mostly from New York.”
In turn he suggests:
“if you control the financial system, undermining a
country to prepare the ground for revolution is no
problem. The 1929 Wall Street crash in the United
States was similarly engineered. The Brotherhood
bankers created inflation and encouraged the stock
market to overstretch itself, so making a crash
inevitable.”
The bizarre nature of Icke’s message makes it easy to
dismiss, yet he has attracted large audiences on his
global tours. Icke is an heir to Douglas and both show
the dangers of anti-semitic conspiracy. The bankers’
conspiracy is a stable of far right politics on a
worldwide scale and the term “usury” has been used to
justify pogroms for centuries.
6. Towards an Anti-Capitalism of the Right?
With the possible exception of Tony Gosling social
credit advocates in the UK Green Party do not promote
anti-semitism, yet green social crediters ignore the
racism of Douglas and advance a philosophy that
contains numerous links to the ultra right. Social
credit has the potential to provide young militants
with an alternative right wing anti-capitalism that
provides network connections to virulent racists.
Today’s anti-globalization movement is already being
targeted by the far right. The British National Party
magazine Spearhead in a review of one of David Icke’s
books notes how anti-globalization can be fitted to a
“nationalist,” i.e., neo-Nazi agenda.
Free trade, GATT, the European Union, United Nations,
Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission and the sinister
Bilderberg Group all come under the microscope,
fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw in a global
vision of a nightmare world of asset strippers,
political spivs, thieves and liars of cataclysmic
proportions. Readers on the idealist liberal-left will
lose their rose tinted spectacles when ingesting the
full horror to which world events are rapidly moving.
In Europe the radical Dutch group Fabel de illegal
pulled out of the anti-globalization movement in
protest at the International Forum on Globalization
connections with the far right. In the US, Ralph Nader
made links with Buchanan, who tapped into populist
resentment with a politics based on exclusionist
resistance to the New World Order. In Canada, Will
Offley has shown how third positionist inspired
journals including 'The Radical' have “systematically
courted sectors of the left, the greens and anarchist
currents” with some success.
Naiveté on the part of anti-globalization activists
puts the movement at risk. For example, Amory Starr,
who claims to be a radical opponent of globalization,
has called for alliances with the religious
“nationalists,” observing “the militias subscribe to
conspiracy theories that are not only not anti-semitic
but differ little from left-wing analyses, emphasizing
the Trilateral Commission, the New World Order and
GATT.” She sees religious nationalism, including the
militias, hard line Zionists and the Hindu
fundamentalist BJP, as potential resources for those
who seek to re-embed local economies so as to resist
global corporations.
While Starr provides a particularly worrying example
of how progressive politics can shift towards the
right she is far from unique. Indeed, mainstream Green
politics and even ecosocialism contain fascist
potentials.
Conspiracies are seductive because they frame the
complexities of capitalism in personal terms. Instead
of examining abstract notions that show that
accumulation is functional to capitalism, they
generate a personal enemy with a human face who can be
challenged. Personification need not lead to racism
but it often does. Equally, there is a powerful strain
of populism in green anti-capitalism that looks back
with nostalgia to a falsely imagined era of the free
market and small business. Greens often focus on
corporations and argue that an ecological economy
based on localized markets can replace “bad”
multinational corporations with “good” community based
businesses. Good people can tackle the bad economic
structures and social forces may remain invisible. In
turn, Marxism has all too often been vulgarized into
an assault on a conspiratorial capitalist elite.
Kovel, who challenged Nader as Green Presidential
candidate in 2000, has noted that such approaches
always risks articulation with prejudice: Populism
builds on resentment and anger against abusive Power
[…] The politics of resentment can easily turn into
the politics of exclusion, scapegoating and
demagoguery. That is why, along with the many virtuous
people who have marched under the populist banner,
have come more than a fair share of dubious characters
who […] combine populist virtues with various
malignant tendencies […] So long as [activists] remain
populist, they cannot rise above the implications of
its basic method, which is to personalize politics.
The racism and scapegoating can be restrained, but the
need to focus upon some personification of evil
remains.
Most populists are not racists and criticism of
finance is not necessarily anti-semitic; yet the
uncritical celebration of Douglas’s ideas is
dangerous. An honest admission of his anti-semitism
and a clear rejection of racist elements in his
thought by his advocates seems necessary. Without
criticizing the dark side of Douglas there is a clear
danger that racial conspiracy will be legitimized
within supposedly radical discourse. Green movements
with unpleasant right wing connotations have on rare
occasions rehabilitated themselves. In the UK, Earth
First! (EF) explicitly broke with conservative and
Malthusian forms of deep ecology and have helped
launch a vigorous anti-capitalist movement. EF!ers in
the UK have been on the militant edge of the
anti-racist movement, physically disrupting the
construction of prisons being built to house asylum
seekers and throwing pies at racist politicians. There
is little evidence that social creditors are making
similar efforts.
There is a clear danger atavistic right wing green
political economies such as social credit will gain
hegemony and displace alternatives. The components of
right wing anti-capitalism are ready for political
entrepreneurs to fashion and frame into more solid
discursive wholes. Unless eco-Marxists, social
ecologists, anti-racists and other radicals work to
educate, agitate and organize, anti-capitalism could
become the plaything of a ghoulish right that many of
us may wrongly have felt had been buried long ago.
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