| Subject: | [socialcredit] William Irvine and Major Douglas | | Date: | Wednesday, December 5, 2007 09:37:30 (-0800) | | From: | william_b_ryan <william_b_ryan @.....com>
|
This is excerpted from "Chapter Three: William Irvine
and the Farmers in Politics" in *A Sovereign Idea:
Essays on Canada As a Democratic Community* by
Reginald Whitaker:
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p. 100
...As a member of Parliament, Irvine was best
described as the proverbial gadfly. He made his
maiden speech in the House on the eighth day of his
first session; instead of praising the beauties of his
riding in the traditional manner, he began by citing
Hegel, and then launched into an attack on the party
system and the banking system. From then on, Irvine
was regularly heard on all sorts of issues. The only
times when he was silent were when he was defeated and
out of Parliament, as he was in 1925, from 1935 to
1945, and after 1949. Gerrymandered out of a seat,
Irvine could come bouncing back again from elsewhere.
Over the years he represented three different
constituencies, including one in British Columbia.
Although he had few illusions about the usefulness of
Parliament, it did give him a job, and a forum for his
eloquence and fertile political imagination. His name
became associated not only with lost causes, such as
group government, but with liberal ideas in advance of
their time, such as the abolition of capital
punishment and the reform of the divorce laws to put
wives on an equal footing with husbands.29 Irvine,
along with Woodsworth and A.A. Heaps also acted as a
three-man pressure group to draw public attention to
labour issues and the grievances of the working class.
The most spectacular example in the early 1920s was
the crisis in the Cape Breton coal mines, when the
British Empire Steel Corporation slashed the wages of
the workers by a third, while the Liberal provincial
and federal governments acted to jail union leaders
and support the company. On issues such as this,
Irvine was unfailingly on the side of the workers.
One issue with which Irvine forcefully associated
himself during the 1920s, not without ambiguity to his
ideological position, was advocacy of Social Credit.
In lieu of either a Marxist critique of the structure
of capitalism or of a fully developed
social-democratic critique of the economic practice of
capitalism, Irvine's economic thought was somewhat
eccentric. Although he was never a monomaniac on the
subject, as the true believers later proved to be,
Irvine did place considerable weight on the views of
monetary reformists, particularly those of Major C.H.
Douglas, founder of the Social Credit movement in
England. Premised on an "underconsumptionist" theory
of business cycles, Irvine's views ran strongly
towards social control of the credit system and the
provision of sufficient purchasing power in the hands
of the people to maintain effective demand for the
goods and services produced. Production was not
itself the problem and could, Irvine believed, be
carried out effectively either under capitalism or
socialism. The real problem was distribution, and the
source of the problem was the money economy. Instead
of being a social or collective service, geared to the
common good, the financial system had, under
capitalism, fallen under the control of finance
capital, in the form of socially irresponsible
bankers. Following Hobson and Lenin, Irvine further
suggested that the growing power of finance capital,
along with the underconsumption endemic to industrial
societies, had generated imperialism in search of
markets for surplus goods and investment, and thus
exacerbated the chance of war through
inter-imperialist rivalry.31
Social Credit, in its broadest and most basic meaning,
that of the ability of the nation to use credit on the
assumption of future economic growth returning a
social surplus is, as Robin Neill has pointed out, a
developmental strategy for a new nation differing from
the National Policy strategy only in its
"institutional instruments and the implications for
the distribution of the results of accumulation": as
such, it had deep and indigenous roots in Canada
extending back well into the nineteenth century.32
Irvine succeeded in referring a motion to investigate
the credit system to the House Committee on Banking
and Commerce in 1923. Irvine, working closely with
W.C. Good, had a number of witnesses called to present
unorthodox views. George Bevington, an Alberta farmer
of proto-Social Credit views, testified at some
length, and was later followed by Major Douglas
himself, who came from England for the occasion. Also
called were leading bankers and academic economists.
The hearings thus present a valuable insight into the
state of thinking in the country on monetary questions
at this time. It must be said that much of the left
wing attack on the bankers and orthodox economists
reads very well from a respectable post-Keynesian
perspective. Indeed, much of what appeared to be
radical and crankish notions to the conventional
wisdom of the early 1920s seems to be merely
unexceptionable good sense today. The notion of
government scrip replacing private bank notes as the
sole legal tender, the idea of a central bank, the
demystification of the gold standard, the recognition
that banks create credit through loans and that the
actual amount of currency in circulation is a small
percentage of the total money supply - all these have
become the conventional wisdom of a later day.
Irvine's sharp intelligence demonstrated itself time
and again when confronting the pillars of finance or
of academe. One of the barons of Bay Street, Sir John
Aird, was reduced to pleading the "we do not want
theories introduced into banking. If you get into
theories you are on dangerous ground." It might also
be point out that Irvine's thesis of underconsumption,
although deficient in itself, did suggest what one
mainstream economist has called the "characteristic
radical groping towards the formulation of important
economic principles and concepts," including a "close
Canadian approach to a Keynesian basis for fiscal
policy ... one the earliest states of principle to
capture the spirit, if not the letter, of the
'national employment budget,' the concept of the
'gross national product,' and the role of the
government in the achievement of high and stable
levels of employment and income."34
Unfortunately for Irvine, despite his avowals that so
far as the Douglas system of Social Credit went he was
"merely a student of the subject ... not a
propagandist,"35 the popularizing of Social Credit was
an activity with disastrous and ironic consequences
for an Alberta socialist. Social Credit was an idea
which had immense scope for organizing the western
farmers in a manner which could only spell trouble for
convinced socialists...
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William Irvine and
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