SOCIAL ART RESOURCES
The Tutor in Adult Education 1928
The chapters of this report, funded by The Carnegie Trust a century ago, provide food for thought about the scope and potential of the voluntary principle in education. Complete text.
Alternative Ways of Financing Production
Potentially, the work of Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952) provides the foundation for an institutional theory of money capable of clarifying the relationship between debt-based finance and the processes of production and income distribution. In the absence of this valuable tool, proposals for socially just and environmentally sustainable economic measures will continue to be classed as “unprofitable" and therefore “economically unviable". Read more ...
Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare?
"The brave new world of bad science and big business" is the subtitle of Mae-Wan Ho's 1998 book on developments in genetic engineering. Read more ...
What's wrong with SUPERMARKETS
Supermarkets wield immense power over the way we grow, buy and eat our food. They are shaping our environment, our health, and the way we interact socially. Read More ....
The Pickles Papers ...
(revised and expanded second edition, taken from libcom.org)
A booklet published in 1988/9, tells the story of how local government of the people, by the people and for the people was wrecked by lies, treachery and self-interest. It is a world-wide story that was repeated over and over again during the course of the 20th century. Ever since Rudolf Steiner spoke on The Karma of Untruthfulness during the First World War, corruption has disempowered ordinary people. "It is a story of intrigue and double-dealing, ambition and power, sex and money, conspiracy and corruption, betrayal and blackmail!" Read more ...
NEW VIEW
In these days of constantly changing goalposts, the work of Rudolf Steiner is of relevance to people of all faiths and none. In introducing Steiner to a wide readership, New View magazine offers an invitation to take fresh look at the world and ourselves.
Published quarterly at Christmas, Easter, Midsummer and Michaelmas New View offers substantial analysis of international news and contemporary insights based on Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. Regular items include: World events, Community, Health, Education, Self-development, Arts, Science, Environment, Biodynamic-Agriculture, Book and Film Reviews and much more.
See https://www.newview.org.uk/ for details.
These articles have appeared in New View:
Being pregnant in an age of compliance: Thoughts on healthcare, safety and freedom
Maria Lyons New View Issue 97 97, Autumn 2020
So much of what is nowadays termed healthcare has far more to do with the subtle manipulation of behaviour and fostering of compliance than it does either health or care. Of course, with the “coronavirus crisis” ... read more ...
The Pandemic of Fear ... (and the Medicine of Love)
Benjamin Cherry New View Issue 96 Summer 2020
The Medicine of Love (Within the Pandemic of Fear)
Benjamin Cherry New View Issue 96 Summer 2020
ART AND SOCIAL CREDIT
For poets, playwrights, craftspeople, actors and novelists the concept of economic democracy through social credit possessed immediate appeal. Lack of financial security has been an incessant impediment to artistic endeavour. Names associated with the social credit movement include Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Storm Jameson, William Carlos Williams, James Laughlin (American publisher), Charlie Chaplin, Eimar O’Duffy, Aldous Huxley, Sybil Thorndike and Bonamy Dobrée. Involvement included the authorship of articles and pamphlets, and organisational activities.
Below is a selection of writings from this body of literature.
Time there was when Social Credit spoke its own arcane language not easy for outsiders to understand. That is no longer so. Anybody seriously concerned with money sooner or later must ... Read more ...
The Tax Haven in the Heart of Britain
There is an institution with a murky history and remarkable powers that acts like a political and financial island within our island nation state. Welcome to ...
As a Franciscan dedicated to simple living and the Gospel call to solidarity with the marginalized, Fr. Richard Rohr sees an opportunity for each of us to rediscover a “soulful” relationship with money. Read more ...
In 1989 Sue Townsend wrote a small but highly readable book entitled Mr Bevan's Dream. The book tells the story of the socialist dream of a National Health Service free at the point of need, and ... Read more ...
Creative Listening by Rachel Pinney
Listening is a very important human ability which we are on the whole not good at because of the noise of our own thoughts, the noise of our own computer ticking over with its associations and its habitual responses. But if one really listens, it's an act of self-abnegation, making oneself available to that person, stopping being the automatic creature that most of us are most of the time, machine-like. One is becoming fully human, and the contact that one establishes when one is really listening and giving attention, awareness and consciousness to another person, is the contact which comes from the more real parts of ourselves below the part which is automatic and machine-like. Read more ...
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists graphic novel by the Rickard Sisters
One of the pleasures of the book for me was how the children emerge as important characters, asking the crucial questions that sometimes only a child could ask, and personifying the perfectly valid ideals that get crushed by a harsh economic system.
Reviewed by Bernadette Meaden. Read more ...
Why Schools of Economics and Political Science Should be Closed Down (2012) by John Papworth
John Papworth goes to the very root of the problem to explain how we, the people, have all been led to trade in the wisdom of ages contained in Aristotle's theory of scale for the shallow modern philosophy of 'just follow the money'.
The book juxtaposes the teachings of the ancient thinkers that put the human being at the centre of economic and political theories against the teachings of the modern schools of economics and political science that have made 'the market' the central focus. Read full text...
'The Machine Stops' (1909) by E.M. Forster
In his novella The Machine Stops, Forster (1879-1970) identifies a social phenomenon which appears in a number of fictional dystopias of the twentieth century. The ‘Machine’, like ‘Big Brother’, or the shadowy authority behind the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning’ (DHC) governs human relationships whilst remaining beyond human comprehension or control. The full text is available here.
Easy Essays by Peter Maurin (1949)
Peter Maurin's teachings were based upon cult, culture and cultivation ... Read more ...
Editing Humanity (The Economist 2015)
A new technique for manipulating genes holds great promise - but rules are needed to govern its use. Read more ...
Frankenstein in the Fields by Ellen Teague (The Tablet 1998/9)
Powerful and rich Western companies are pushing genetically modified crops. The long term effects on the environment and human health remain uncertain. Read more ...
NOTE: The last paragraph of the Frankenstein piece is slightly incomplete.
Danger, Ugliness and Waste (1923) by Owen Barfield
At a time when this country, if not all Europe, if not civilisation itself, needs more urgently than ever before the assistance of the clearest brains it possesses, I do not apologise for trespassing on your time. Nor will I waste it by...
Pearls of Wisdom 1 by William Dobson
'Thoughts can be as poisonous as dangerous drugs. You may, if negative in a single hour, or by being in the company of persons whose minds are full of envy, jealousy, cynicism or despondency, absorb a literally poisonous element of thought, full of disease.'
Pearls of Wisdom 2 by William Dobson
'The cultivation of habits of cheerfulness and emotional conditions of a hopeful, optimistic and cheerful mind, have a powerful influence in the building up of a healthy body and the production of happiness. Every mental activity creates a definite chemical change in the body, so that if our thoughts are wholesome and healthy, we are constantly made better by them.'
Writings of Eimar O'Duffy
The Goshawk Trilogy
Social credit provided the central theme of Eimar O'Duffy's mythical science-fiction fantasy trilogy. Published in three volumes, it is a comic indictment of politics and economics in the contemporary world. Read more...
All three books in the Goshawk trilogy are available in print.
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King Goshawk and the Birds (1926) The complete text of the first book of O'Duffy's trilogy is available here. |
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The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) The complete text of the second book of O'Duffy's trilogy is available here. |
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Asses in Clover (1933) The full version of the book can be read from here. Commentary to 'Asses in Clover by Frances Hutchinson |
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Life and Money (1933 edition) Note that the page numbering shown in the ‘contents’ page reflects the original 1933 printing, from which this text was taken. It is hoped to commission a facsimile reprinting of the whole book. These historical page breaks are also indicated in the main text. PART 1: THE ECONOMIC MUDDLE PART 2: THE NEW MONETARY SYSTEM PART 3: THE SABOTAGE OF PLENTY PART 4: THE SABOTAGE OF CIVILISATION PART 5: THE SABOTAGE OF LIFE PART 6: THE LEISURE STATE |
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Social Credit in the Twentieth Century The twentieth century financial system which made the First World War feasible was the subject of comprehensive study by Clifford Hugh Douglas. Despite Douglas’ analysis of the relationship between finance and real-world policy formation, throughout the inter-war years financial policies leading inevitably to poverty amidst plenty and further warfare were persistently adopted. Subsequently, the worldwide Social Credit movement which arose during the 1920s and 1930s was systematically airbrushed out of public memory. The vast body of literature on the subject of Social Credit is documented elsewhere on this website. The Social Credit debate was supported by a wide variety of poetry, fictional and autobiographical writing, much of which is currently being made available again, in print or electronically. Eimar O’Duffy’s Goshawk Trilogy, King Goshawk and the Birds, The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, and Asses in Clover illuminates the lunacy of maintaining outdated and irrelevant economic theory as a guide to practical policy formation. |
Other Literature
Hannah Arendt : On Standing Up to the Evil of Banality by Jack Maden, May 2020
Where does evil come from? Are evil acts always committed by evil people? Whose responsibility is it to identify and stamp out evil? Read more ...
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All Faiths Letter to the Prime Minister 3 November 2020
On 3rd November 2020 a remarkable letter was jointly signed by all leaders of the major faith communities in England. It was addressed to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Robert Jenrick. The letter set out the case against further suspension of public worship. The fact that a letter of this quality, should fall on deaf ears demands the attention of people of all faiths and none.
"Our thoughts and prayers have been with the Cabinet, Parliament and all who advise them, and above all with those who have died or are bereaved, unemployed or unbearably stressed by the virus and its consequences. ... Read more ...
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Help Your Child to Wonder by Rachel Carson
Published posthumously by Harper Collins in 1965.
After publication of her first two books, The Sea Around Us and and The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson's article entitled "Help Your Child to Wonder" was published in Woman's Home Companion in July 1956. The original article, complete with illustrations and advertisements of the day, is a fascinating historical document in its own right. Rachel Carson's dream was to produce the text as a book with illustrations, but the publication of Silent Spring (1962) prevented her from completing this project. After her death the text, with photographs by Nick Kelsh and an Introduction by Linda Lear, was published by Harper Collins in 1965.
Text as published in Woman's Home Companion
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Visioning the Sustainable City by Bill Hopwood and Mary Mellor
Published in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
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'Taking the Bottles Back' by Sue Townsend
Taken from Chatto Counterblasts No.9 Mr Bevan's Dream, Sue Townsend 1989
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AFTERWORD to George Orwell’s 1984 by Erich Fromm
1984 is more than a satire of total barbarism. "It means us, too," says Erich Fromm in his Afterword. It is not merely a political novel but also a diagnosis of the deepest alienation in the mind of Organisation Man.
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Address delivered by Dorothy L. Sayers at the Biennial Festival of the
Church Tutorial Classes Association in
Derby, May 4th, 1940
WORK
The unsacramental attitude of modern society to man and matter is probably closely connected with its unsacramental attitude to work. The Church is a good deal to blame for having connived at this. From the eighteenth Century onwards, she has tended to acquiesce in what I may call the " industrious apprentice" view of the matter: " Work hard and be thrifty, and God will bless you with a contented mind and a competence." This is nothing but enlightened self-interest in its vulgarest form, and plays directly into the hands of the monopolist and the financier. Nothing has so deeply discredited the Christian Church as her squalid submission to the economic theory of society. The burning question of the Christian attitude to money is being so eagerly debated nowadays that it is scarcely necessary to do more than remind ourselves that the present unrest, both in Russia and in Central Europe, is an immediate judgment upon a financial system that has subordinated man to economics, and that no mere readjustment of economic machinery will have any lasting effect if it keeps man a prisoner inside the machine. Complete text.
Poems
The Banker and Economist' by Eimar O'Duffy (1933)
'Our Problem and a Solution' by Bob Harvey (2008)
'Legalized Usury' by Peter Maurin
Brer Fox 'n' Brer Rabbit:
The Win-Win Game (1913)
The game of Monopoly is named after the economic concept of monopoly, meaning the domination of a market by a single entity. First patented in 1935, the game is derived from one of a series of variations on The Landlord's Game. These were created in the United States in the late 19th century as an aid to the group study of the works of Henry George (1839-1937). In his Progress and Poverty and other works George demonstrated the feasibility of eradicating poverty amidst plenty as industrialisation proceeded. He advocated:
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The Brer Fox 'n' Brer Rabbit version of the original Landlord's Game is played in three stages. Stage 1 demonstrates the working of the zero-sum game of capitalism, where the winners gain, but the community as a whole achieves a lower-than-potential total of wealth creation. Stages 2 and 3 show that it does not have to be that way. By a process of elementary accounting, the game of finance can be converted into a 'win-win' game. See HARDER ESSAYS, The Win Win Game 1913-2020.
Many versions of the original Georgist game were drawn up in many localities across the world.
Click here to access this game.