| Subject: | [socialcredit] Autobiographical Note | | Date: | Tuesday, May 13, 2008 08:54:12 (-0700) | | From: | william_b_ryan <william_b_ryan @.....com>
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From http://www.douglassocialcredit.com
An Autobiographical Note
by
Frances Hutchinson
It may be helpful to outline how and why I came to
engage in the formal study of the works of Clifford
Hugh Douglas and the history of the Social Credit
movement. After decades of campaigning for peace,
co-operation, green politics, women’s rights, third
world issues, education, local government,
international understanding environmental issues,
peace and justice generally, at the age of fifty I
became a post-graduate student in the Department of
Economics at Bradford University. I reasoned that
although each issue was rich in its own literature, no
substantial changes in policy were forthcoming because
one factor overarched policy-making in each subject
area – the economy. I was advised by Dr (now
Professor) Mary Mellor, whom I had met at a
‘red-green’ gathering in Manchester, to put my general
reading onto a more formal footing by enrolling for
postgraduate research at a university.
Having located a tutor – Brian Burkitt, Senior
Lecturer in Economics at Bradford – and paid the
registration fees, I was left with a problem. What
should I research? The whole of economics was too tall
an order. At the time, I was standing in local
elections as a Green Party candidate. When I discussed
Green Party policies with my elderly neighbour, Tommy
Tinkler, he said that concerns about protection of the
environment, notions of sufficiency as opposed to
unfettered economic growth, and basic income were
nothing new. It had all been said before in the 1930s
by “Major Douglas and social credit”. Through
University Extra-Mural classes and a local social
credit study group which met weekly, he had studied
alternative economics, including social credit in such
detail that he was able, fifty years later, to provide
me with an outline of the basic ideas from memory. He
gave me The Monopoly of Credit by C. H. Douglas, some
copies of the national weekly The New Age, and of a
bi-monthly newsletter of the ‘Northern Greenshirts’*,
printed in Keighley. Social credit and its place in
the history of economic thought was to become the
subject of my research from then onwards.
Over a lifetime of study of the social sciences,
politics and economics, I had never heard mention of
Social Credit. Hence from the very outset of my
research there were unanswered questions. Tommy
Tinkler was astounded that I knew nothing of the
subject. Yet when I mentioned it to my father, retired
senior lecturer in economics, and to my tutor, both
knew what I was talking about immediately, though both
declared that “all that crank nonsense was over years
ago.” Which it was. Douglas had been dead forty years.
Repeatedly, over the years, I was advised, in a kindly
sort of way, not to pursue the subject because it was
only propounded by right-wing, anti-Semitic fanatics.
For this reason I at first avoided contact with known
social crediters.
In those pre-internet days obtaining information on
obscure topics was tricky. Through the library system
I located three books on social credit published
between 1953 and 1972. All three authors focused on
political events in Alberta, Canada, in the late
1930s, giving virtually no indication of what social
credit economics was about. Since no list of his books
appeared, it was clearly assumed that the reader
already knew what ‘social credit’ was about. I
collected copies of all Douglas’ books and articles
written between 1918 and 1924. Having analysed these
works I set out the economics and philosophy of social
credit. It all made very good sense. Here was an
alternative to business-as-usual, ‘I’m alright, Jack!’
growth-based, environmentally destructive capitalism
and socialism ‘as-we-know-it'. I went on to study the
world-wide debate between Douglas and leading
policy-formers in the early 1930s. And finally I
looked at the events in Alberta in 1935 when the
election of a Social Credit government brought social
credit onto the political arena.
As my research continued, Brian Burkitt met Donald
Neale through an anti-Common Market group meeting
which he was attending. Through that contact I met
Marjorie Douglas, Audrey Fforde, Donald Neale and
members of the Secretariat in Scotland. Later, I met
Mike Rowbotham at the first meeting of the Bromsgrove
Group. Mike Rowbotham and I worked together for a
while, preparing The Grip of Death and What Everybody
Really Wants to Know About Money for publication by
Jon Carpenter. Mike Rowbotham introduced me to
Elizabeth Dobbs, sadly after Geoffrey had died. I
spent a weekend in Bangor with Elizabeth shortly
before she moved into residential care. I also visited
Don Martin and Jane in Sudbury, and Eric de Maré.
However, I sought to avoid being drawn into the
internal ‘politics’ of the Social Credit movement,
seeking instead to research Douglas social credit in
such a way that it could be openly discussed in
universities. I discovered that a number of career
economists had taken their ideas from Douglas without
acknowledgement.
Throughout my research I was sustained by the guiding
hand of Brian Burkitt, who is an authority on radical
economics in the inter-war years (see Brian Burkitt,
Radical Political Economy Harvester 1984). Nothing
would have come of my rambling researches without his
firm discipline, fund of knowledge, constant support
and sparkling sense of humour. Ten years ago, our
findings were published in The Political Economy of
Social Credit and Guild Socialism* (Routledge 1997), a
refereed publication.
Once published, the book would, I thought, be snapped
up by green campaigners everywhere. And indeed, the
review published in Resurgence (No. 190,
September/October 1998, pp64-65)* indicates, I was
justified in my opinion that we had presented a
readable and relevant account of the story of social
credit. However, the book was so highly priced that it
disappeared onto the shelves of university libraries,
and nothing more was heard of it in the popular
alternative press.
I continued my researches, writing two more books and
working with different co-authors. In the ten years
following from 1993 I gave papers at sixteen
university conferences in ten different countries, and
had eleven papers published in refereed journals.
Although I worked with academics, and with alternative
thinkers in the voluntary sector, nobody was prepared
to step outside the mould of conventional economics by
entering into a meaningful dialogue on the subject of
social credit. By the time the ‘post-autistic
economics’ students started their enthusiastic attack
on the logical inconsistencies of neo-classical
economic theory (c2000/1, see www.paecon.net), I was
beginning to lose heart.
Meanwhile, with Brian Burkitt’s help, I put together a
module entitled “An Institutional Analysis of Money”
for second and third year economics undergraduates.
Based on the work of Clifford Hugh Douglas and
Thorstein Veblen, it proved very popular with the
students. The course contrasted the orthodox approach
to economics teaching, which is ‘institution free’,
with the realities of economic life where economic
agents operate within a network of man-made laws and
institutions. Thus for a few years social credit was
studied in a university. When it was suggested that
the course could form the basis of a book, Mary Mellor
and Wendy Olsen offered to help with the writing. In
due course The Politics of Money: Towards
Sustainability and Economic Democracy was published by
Pluto Press in 2002. Although it received very few
reviews, it is now sold out. Since I am no longer
connected with any university, I am not in a position
to bring out a revised edition.
In 2001, Alan Armstrong gave up the editorship of The
Social Crediter, and the Chairmanship of the Social
Credit Secretariat, because he found himself unable to
enlist support for his monetary reform proposals from
politicians following unfounded allegations of
anti-Semitism. As I see it, the Secretariat is an
educational rather than a campaigning body. Douglas
was firmly opposed to propaganda. The history of the
movement shows that Social Credit spread most
effectively through weekly study groups (See The
Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism
and The Challenger).
However, in writing about social credit I had
certainly become caught up in another agenda. In June
2002, as we were on the point of sending the final
draft of The Politics of Money to the publishers, a
draft paper was circulated to the three of us and to
all with whom we were in professional contact. The
paper, by Derek Wall, currently Principal Speaker of
the Green Party, entitled “Social Credit: The
Ecosocialism of Fools,” was a collection of untruths
juxtaposed with emotive non-sequiturs. The gist of the
paper was that Douglas and all social crediters were
anti-Semitic. Therefore greens and all respectable
academics should drop the subject if they did not want
to blight their careers by being labeled
‘anti-Semitic’. With great difficulty I persuaded Mary
Mellor to continue with the book, promising that I
would research the allegations fully. The quality of
the Wall paper was such that I felt certain it would
never appear in a respectable journal. I was wrong.
For whatever reasons, the editorial board of
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism published the paper,
under the same title, in September 2003 (Vol. 14, No.
3, pages 99-122).
By now, I was thoroughly curious myself. A body of
economic theory presenting a sane alternative to
rampaging consumerism, disseminated through study
groups across the world, was to be studiously avoided
because it was - anti-Semitic? It just did not begin
to add up. Were the editors of academic journals,
their referees and the organisers of international
conferences on economics playing with fire when they
accepted my/our work for publication and discussion?
One journal, the Political Quarterly, is read by any
social scientist and politician worth their salt. Were
its editors failing in their duty to protect the
public from unsavoury material when they published
“The Contemporary Relevance of Clifford Hugh Douglas”
by myself and Brian Burkitt, in the October-December
1999 issue (Vol. 70, No.4, pages 443-451)? Would the
study of social credit really lead impressionable
people into setting up Nazi-style death camps? I was
somewhat nonplussed.
In the early years of the 21st century, people
continue to air their views and/or campaign on a whole
range of single issues: anti-war, anti-nuclear
weapons, animal rights, organic/local agriculture,
fair trade, slow/safe food, debt, poverty, racism,
feminism, conservation, ecology, alternative
medicines, education, diseases and disabilities which
have struck their own families – the list is endless.
Some pick up on Basic Income, Credit Unions, LETs
schemes, Grameen Banks and the like as ways out of
specific pockets of economic disorder. However, unless
and until there is a radical re-think about the
operations of the institutions of banking and finance
which now regulate all human co-operative activity,
the over-arching problems will continue to grow at a
far faster rate than individual solutions will be able
to solve. Social Credit offers a starting-point – it
was never more than that – for a healthy debate about
ways forward into the future.
Although I advocate the study of Douglas’s writings on
social credit, and the study of the story of the
Social Credit movement, I do not claim to be a ‘social
crediter’, because labels of this type imply the
bigoted advocacy of an unscholarly collection of
dogma. On the same basis, I do not claim to be a
pacifist, ecologist, economist or Marxist. What I do
advocate most urgently is the study of the works of
leading writers on politics, philosophy, pacifism,
ecology, economics, including especially Douglas,
Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx and many others (see
my/our published works for introductory comment on the
work of leading thinkers).
Despite the efforts of so many dedicated individuals,
at present there is no public forum for debate of
alternative political/economic thought. Recently, open
debate in the Green Party of England and Wales has
been suppressed (see “Is Democracy Dead?” by Brian
Leslie). Social credit has been so effectively
‘discredited’ that no voluntary or political
organisation dares to take it on board, neither will
individuals work to promote study of the subject for
fear of being discredited themselves. Editors of
alternative journals have turned down contributions
even vaguely connected with social credit. All I am
able to do is place material in the public arena for
possible study at some later period.
Frances Hutchinson
June 2007
In addition to having published numerous articles and
reviews in academic and other journals, Frances
Hutchinson is the author (with Brian Burkitt) of The
Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism
(Routledge, 1997) (Reprinted by Jon Carpenter, 2005),
(with Andrew Hutchinson) of Environmental Business
Management (McGraw-Hill, 1997), of What Everybody
Really Wants to Know About Money (Jon Carpenter,
1998), and (with Mary Mellor and Wendy Olsen) of The
Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability and Economic
Democracy (Pluto Press, 2002). She was awarded a PhD
for her published works, and now edits The Social
Crediter.
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