Human Scale Revisited by Kirkpatrick Sale

Author:Kirkpatrick Sale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2017-04-06T18:51:16+00:00

So the capitalist crisis, then, is really made up of two facts: first, that the industrial system is not working, even on its own terms; second, that it is.

Of course none of this is really news. Many have realized the quite catastrophic nature of what we have come to, not only as it impinges on the present but, even more, as it threatens the future. It was this that led some rather more farseeing capitalists to establish the famous Club of Rome, whose reports on growth that I cited earlier made clear the serious nature of the long-term crisis, presumably to allow rational businesspeople and politicians to devise some remedies before it is too late. It is this that has led the United Nations at various times over the last decade to sponsor a number of sober and comprehensive conferences on such matters as pollution, climate control, law of the seas, income disparity, food, and population.

Some who have seen the crisis have argued that everything will eventually shake itself out, technology will come to the rescue, and there’s no real need to make substantive changes. This is the attitude of the standard American business sector and of mainstream free-market economists. Others who also take a somber but less optimistic view of the crisis have argued that it does indeed require thoroughgoing changes in economic and political systems, particularly in the direction of planning, especially governmental and intergovernmental planning. This is the standard socialist response. But business as usual or business by government does not seem to be much of an answer for anyone who has been paying attention to the world for the last century.

There is, however, a third response possible, and it is one to which a number of people, bidden and unbidden, knowingly and not, have been turning in recent decades. In place of optimistic drift and pessimistic planning, this response points rather to the reduction of all economic systems and organizations to the point where they can be controlled by those who are immediately affected by them. It emphasizes, for the individual, self-definition of the job, self-scheduling of time, work in small groups based on consensus and cooperation. It encourages the development of family-farm agriculture, the decentralization of industry, worker ownership and self-management of firms and factories, and alternative technologies and all that they imply. It seeks self-sufficiency and self-reliance for neighborhoods and communities, community control of industries, and regional cooperation where necessary. And overall, it favors an ecologically minded, people-oriented, small-scale, steady-state society.

British writer Gordon Rattray Taylor stands out among those who have studied and advocated this third response. He says simply:

The present system is biased in favour of goods as against other desirables; it neglects bads; it provides motives for anti-social and inhumane behaviour because it is mechanical and inhumane itself. The way to correct it is not to substitute vast monolithic publicly owned boards and corporations, which are equally open to inhumanity and distorted valuations. It is to substitute decisions made by that marvellous

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