Help To Those Who Need It Most – E F Schumacher
Published in AVARD (Association of Voluntary
Agencies for Rural Development) Newsletter, January-February 1961
I can, frankly, see no value in discussing such questions – very
interesting from a purely academic point of view – as the ideal size of towns,
the ideal location of industry, or the ideal transport system, because even the
most brilliant answers to them will do nothing to mobilize the creative power
of the people. Instead, I think, we should ask the much simpler and much
more profound question: Why is it that the people are not helping themselves?
What has come over them? On the whole, throughout history, all healthy
societies have managed to solve their problem or existence, and always with
something to spare for culture. Grinding poverty with malnutrition and
degradation, with apathy and despair, as a permanent condition of millions of
people, not as a result of war or natural catastrophe – this is a most abnormal
and historically speaking, an unheard-of phenomenon.
All
peoples – with exceptions that merely prove the rule – have always known how to
help themselves; they have always discovered a pattern of living which
fitted their peculiar natural surroundings. Societies and cultures have
collapsed when they deserted their own pattern and fell into decadence, but
even then, unless devastated by war, the people normally continued to be able
to provide for themselves, with something to spare for higher things. Why not
now, in so many parts of the world? I am not speaking of ordinary poverty, but
of actual and acute misery; not of the poor, which according to the universal
tradition of mankind are in a special way blessed, but of the miserable and
degraded ones which, by the same tradition, should not exist at all and should
be helped by all. Poverty may have been the rule in the past, but misery was
not. Poor peasants and artisans have existed from time immemorial; but
miserable and destitute villages in their thousands and urban pavement dwellers
in their hundreds of thousands – not in war time or as an aftermath of war, but
in the midst of peace and as a seemingly permanent feature – that is a
monstrous and scandalous thing which is altogether abnormal in the history of
mankind. We cannot be satisfied with the snap answer that this is due to
population pressure. Since every mouth that comes into the world is also
endowed with a pair of hands, population pressure could serve as an explanation
only if it meant an absolute shortage of land – and although that situation may
arise in the future; it decidedly has not arrived today (a few islands
excepted). It cannot be argued that population increase as such must produce
increasing poverty because the additional pairs of hands could not be endowed
with the capital they needed to help themselves. Millions of people have
started without capital and. have shown that a pair of hands can provide not
only the income but also the durable goods, i.e., capital, for civilized
existence. So the question stands and demands an answer: What has gone wrong?
Why cannot these people help themselves?
Now,
I shall venture to suggest the reply that the cause lies in the impact of the
modern West upon these societies and populations, The paralysis or apathy –
“somewhere very near the soul of India", as the Indian author said – is
similar to the paralysis of the Aztecs when they met Cortes and his men sitting
on the backs of horses and equipped with firearms. It was not the power of the
Spaniards that destroyed the Aztec Empire, but the disbelief of the Aztecs in
themselves. I suggest that the cause of economic misery in a country like
India is not the adherence to her own traditions
(which Mr. Black
presumes to call "tragically inadequate") but the turning away from
these traditions, and that the cause of this turning away is the mere
existence, abroad and in India, of the modern Western methods of production,
distribution, administration, and so forth. M. de Jouvenel
says that the difficulties to achieve a "take-off" are greater for
Asian countries than they had been for the West. This is probably true, but
hardly because “the industrial revolution in the West coincided with the
demographic explosion, while this explosion occurred in Asia without an
attending industrial revolution.” A population determind to help itself never
finds a shortage of productive tasks to employ all hands. What seems to me to
be of infinitely greater importance is that the West abandoned its own
traditions only as it itself developed and applied the modern methods, while
the Asian countries partly owing to European domination – lost (not all, but
still too much of) their own traditions, because of something that had arisen
not among themselves but in the West. Thus they fell into an abyss of misery.
To
talk in purely economic terms, probably the greatest cause of poverty in an
underdeveloped country today is the existence of a modern transport system.
None of the developed countries ever had the task of achieving development at
a time when transport was fast and cheap. No, it was, only after extensive
and broadly based development had taken place that transport became fast and
cheap. To start with, every town, every village enjoyed the protection of high
transport costs – a kind of natural educational tariff to shield it against
competition from all other towns and villages. Hence it was obvious and natural
that each locality should attempt to provide for its own normal and fundamental
needs through its own labour, intelligence, and natural resources. Hence there arose a multitude of skills in a
multitude of localities, and out of the ground thus prepared grew a middle
class among which could be found the adventurers and entrepreneurs for more
ambitious enterprises. All this was an organic process of growth, carried
forward by individuals coming from "the people" not by small groups
of intellectuals, educated in foreign lands, who took it upon themselves to
transform whole societies and create new traditions. All these possibilities,
however, are destroyed by cheap and fast transport. Village industries,
thousands upon thousands of small workshops, wither away, because there is
somewhere an "efficient" modern factory which can deliver similar
(though often vastly inferior), goods at a lower price. But is not this the
essence of "progress" – the substitution of superior methods of
production for inferior ones? Does not the lower price benefit the villagers,
raising their standard of living, enabling them to save and to invest and
finally to accomplish the "take off"? Many economists argue that way,
but the truth is otherwise. Because their own production has stopped, the
villagers are poorer than ever before; they may be unable to pay for any of the
factory goods, except by getting into debt. It has happened even that the
factory itself, having accomplished its frightful work of destruction in the
villages, has had to close down for lack of a market
It
was his intuitive understanding of these fatal mechanisms which led Gandhi to
say in 1912 that “India is being ground down, not under the English heel, but
under that of modern civilization.” On another occasion he said: “much of the
deep poverty of India is due to the departure from Swadeshi in the economic
life. If not a single artIcle of Commerce had been brought from outside India
she would be today a land flowing with milk and honey.” He also suggested that
a small part of India ought, to be set aside and protected against all goods
from out. side the area: it would then soon be demonstrated that the inhabitants
of the chosen area would extricate themselves out of theIr mIsery, by theIr own
efforts and within a very short time, while limiting their external trade
entirely to necessary commodities not locally produceable.
Economists
have assumed too easily that what works best in an advanced country must be
best for economic development. Gandhi never made this mistake. “England has
sinned against India by forcing Free Trade upon her. It may have been food for
England but it has been poison for this country.” The problem posed by Free
Trade, however, exists equally within a country when such a country
possesses (a) modern transport system and (b)a fringe of Western type
industries. Efficient and fast communications, like Free Trade, are food for an
advanced country, and poison for an underdeveloped country. Modern economists
have generally seen the “potential” of an underdeveloped country mainly in
terms of its raw material exports to the rich countries; and as such exports
are obviously cheapened and facilitated by efficient transportation, they have
concluded that investment in transport facilities deserves a high priority.
This, I suggest, is a tragic error; it must spelI general ruin unless
counteracted by deliberate measures or what might be called "controlled
isolation" for a great number of relatively small communities, so that
local labour will be used primarily to cover local needs.
It
is here also that the institution of money, if handled in a manner which is
“food” for advanced countries, may become poison for the underdeveloped. It is
today fairly generalIy agreed that a country struggling for development cannot
do so on the basis of free convertibility of its currency, in other words, that
there must be some “controlled isolation”. But that the same need arises within
the country, particularly a large country like India is generally over-looked.
If no provision is made for this, then there will innumerable occasions when
useful economic activity will only be possible on a barter basis (i.e., without
money or not at all. Barter, however is clumsy and inflexible; what is really needed
is local money or script issued in accordance with local needs as the American
colonies possessed it before the War of Independence.
These
suggestions will appear reactionary and retrogressive to economists who imagine
that the experience of advanced countries, where “development” is
self-generating and may even be excessive, can be applied to underdeveloped,
countries, where “development” is not only urgently needed but also exceedingly
difficult to get started. From so unrealistic a point of view, my suggestions
must of course look retrogressive, because it is in fact necessary to go back
in the experience of the advanced countries to the early stages of their own
development.
M.
de JouveneI rightly insists that “there are degrees of freedom in the
processes” of economic development. This is perfectly true and constitutes a
very necessary observation to correct certain schools of economic determinism.
But it is also necessary to recognize that in a given situation some things are
possible and others are not. What is decidedly impossible is to achieve
economic development on a wide scale, when every budding activity is
automatically exposed, to the icy blast of competition from production units
employing advanced Western techniques of high capital intensity, whether such
units are situated at home or abroad. Equally, it is impossible to mobilize and
utilize “the really crucial economic and human resources” which “must come from
within”, if the ideology of the “planners” mocks and denies the ideology of the
people, for instance, when Mr. Black expresses his own ideology in the words:
“There is real hope that people will take ideology less seriously simply
because they will be too busy.” Man does not live by bread alone, and the poor,
having little bread, are more dependent for their life and happiness on
immaterial things – more than the rich. And if they are robbed of them, they
lose their self-respect, their will-to-live and will-to-help-themselves. How
can they then be mobilized?
It
is the impact of the West, now intensified by westernized ruling groups, which
so easily tends to produce paralysis rather than the much-desired upsurge of
vitality. It also produces the phenomenon to which M. de Jouvenel refers as,
“technological dualism”, which represents, however, an irreconcilable division
for beyond the field of technology and splits into "two nations" each
leading a totally different life from the other. M. de Jouvenel himself says:
“In fact there is no difference between the situation thus arising and the
situation arising in a colony with a ‘colonial’ and a ‘native’ sector,” –
surely the most unfortunate and destructive disease to befall the body of any
nation that has only recently gained its independence. This is not, as is
sometimes suggested, merely a problem of the location of industry, and even the
widest possible scatter of industry over the entire country could not re-unite
the “two nations”, but would merely spread the disease.
All
the most decisive problems of development maybe summed up, it seems to me, in
the question: “How can the impact of the West be canalized in such a way that
it does not continue to throw the people into apathy and paralysis?” It is only
when this question has been satisfactorily answered that we can be certain that
Western aid – to render which we are in honour bound – will do more good than
harm. More or better economic planning from the centre provides no answer. It
is only for the purposes of analysis that one can isolate the economic factor
from the rest of human life. For fruitful action, the whole of man has to be
recognized. If this is not done and action is based solely on economic
calculations, as laid down in elaborate central plans, the only mode of action
can be coercion from the top. But what shall it profit? If coercion succeeds,
freedom is lost; and if it is stultified by apathy and. sullen disdain, the
people sink ever deeper into misery.
The
alternative to coercion cannot be provided by economic planning, because that
itself pre-supposes coercion. It cannot be found when spiritual realities are
dismissed as being of no account or treated as subservient to economic aims. It
cannot be found when the people are considered as objects which must be driven,
cajoled, or manipulated. Perhaps the best – perhaps even the only effective
slogan for aid is: “Find out what the people are trying to do and help them to
do it better.”
*bold emphasis not by the author
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