Papworth submitted this “General Declaration” to The Fourth World First Assembly. 16 December, 1980.
PREAMBLE
1 Crisis
The world community is today embroiled in a vast crisis of power, creating dangers which could well result in the destruction of civilisation.
2 War
The most obvious of these dangers is that of war. The world is currently spending nearly S450 billion each year on armaments (more than twenty times the estimated sum required to provide adequate food, water, education, health and housing for every single member of the human family), and the nature of the armaments themselves is such that if used to wage war they might well imperil human survival itself.
3 Overpopulation
Scarcely less pressing is the danger of overpopulation. Within the last two centuries technology and gigantic overcentralised administrative systems have brought about the destruction of most of the organically structured communities which once prevailed in every part of the world. With the loss of local power to make local decisions, and to affirm distinctive patterns of local life and culture, has ensued the destruction of those close personal ties which formerly bound local communities together and which gave them a distinctive moral coherence and direction. Without community there can be no effective social morality, and without such morality how can there be an effective restraint on numbers in a free society?
4 Community Revival
Societies based on the principle of a mere mass aggregation of human numbers will never solve this problem, indeed they have largely created it; only a revival of localised community life, based on nonviolent community power and responsibility, which can re-awaken a degree of community consciousness of the transcendent nature of the purpose of all life, can hope to resolve this crisis and restore a healthy balance between numbers and resources.
5 Ecology
Not perhaps quite so obvious but certainly no less pressing, is the disruption of the ecological balance and of the interlocking life-support systems of the planet by modern giant-scale methods of industrial and agricultural production. Again, this is a question of moral principle and of moral obligation in a context where giantism, and the individual anonymity of the mass society which giantism breeds, has reduced the capacity of society to sustain a moral consensus, especially in relation to ecological considerations, to merely vestigial proportions. As a consequence the ordinary business of getting and spending is conducted on such utterly amoral principles that many species of life land not least the human race itself are now endangered.
6 Resource Depletion
In many places water tables are falling at a drastic rate: land being stripped of its natural forest cover and the humus leaches out of such soil as survives: water systems, lakes and even oceans are being made uninhabitable for marine life: an ominous process of rapidly expanding desertification is now in train: the protective ozone layer of the stratosphere appears to be under threat from the multiple use of aerosol-type sprays: the common use an increasing variety of dangerously toxic elements, especially farming, is poisoning many forms of life and having unpredictable genetic effects: the common use of antibiotic and other medicines is creating hitherto unknown biological hazards, and the natural resources of the planet are being exploited and squandered, often to a point of total depletion, in ways which take no account the ordinary wellbeing of even the immediate posterity humanity.
7 Alienation
And what of the effects which the multiple excesses modern life are having on humanity itself? The general burden of sickness of body, mind and spirit that now prevails in all man’s urban complexes suggests an wholesale disruption of the inner world of human kind and of its quest for social and personal fulfillment, as such it may, presage a new ‘dark age’ in human affairs.
8 Social Control
These dangers, and there are many more, are all products of human decisions, they are in no sense natural and indicate clearly that our political, social and economic developments a out of control, they are no longer responding to true human needs and are leading humanity away from those adventures of the spirit which are the chief glory of its existence, towards destiny of damnation which nobody of sound mind could possibly want.
9 Human Scale
It cannot be asserted that a revival of social structures on human scale will lead inevitably to a solution of these problems. Human motives and behaviour have always been characterised by a mixture of good and evil, and no doubt they always will; what is unarguable in the light of modern experience is that overgrowth leads to an inevitable loss of democratic power and control whereas on a human scale ordinary people are able to make decisions for wise and even splendid objectives if they wish to do so.
10 Giantism
It is giantism which has created this loss of control, for one, the factor of giantism is of sufficient novelty and pervasiveness to account for the scale of the many-faceted disaster that now confronts us. Never have our societies and social institutions been so enormous, never have they been so unmanageable.
11 Human Survival
It follows, however contrary to the conventional wisdom such a conclusion may be, that human survival now depends on the swiftness with which our political, social and economic institutions can be made small enough for them to be manageable and more adequately responsive to human control.
We therefore resolve as follows:
Declaration
12 We are the people of the Fourth World, we represent a broad global spectrum ranging from ethnic, cultural and linguistic, to religious, economic, ecological and community concerns, many of which have been submerged to one degree or another by the disastrous onrush of giantism of the last two centuries or more. We are united in our determination to defuse the prevailing anarchic crisis of power by seeking to create our own social, cultural and economic patterns as we see fit.
13 We declare that it is only through small social units which are capable of being subject to the control of their members that the peoples of the world will ever defeat the danger of global wars which giantism has created, and achieve genuine progress and prosperity. It is only by such means that they can resolve the problem of excess human numbers, make effective a proper respect for their material environment so as to defeat the ecological peril and end the curse of “alienation from life and fellowship which now afflicts millions upon millions of people in many parts of the world. Neither we nor our forebears ever desired this development of giantism, very often it was fiercely resisted, it was never accepted and now we proclaim our total repudiation of it.
14 We assert in its place our inalienable right to live as free, independent, autonomous and self-governing peoples and we denounce the validity of any arrangements, however long-imposed, especially by giant political units, which seek the continued denial of this right.
15 We further assert our right to operate and control our own schools, hospitals, police forces, banks, industries, commercial trading and transport arrangements, forms of taxation and other matters of community concern as seems best to us without external interference or coercion.
16 There is quite clearly a pronounced need for many forms of association and co-operation across national frontiers if the potential for the enrichment of human life is to be realised as much as possible; we are happy to acknowledge this need and we look to a far greater degree of transnational co-operation in the political, economic and social spheres than prevails today. We affirm our readiness to participate in such co-operation wherever the mutual or general interests of people are thus best served, but in so doing we reserve to ourselves the inalienable right to decide in what ways we shall participate, and the full freedom to withdraw from any such arrangements at any time.
17 In general terms we assert that any state which exceeds modest, human-scale dimensions is at serious risk of being unable fully to control its own affairs and is thus a danger to its own and other people in terms of war, ecological excess and economic dislocation: the bigger the state, the bigger the danger.
18 We further affirm that even within such human-scale nations, in order to overcome the dangers of war and the overgrowth of human numbers, to check the spread of the spiritual void of mass alienation, and to widen the boundaries of freedom, there is an urgent need for a new respect for the rights and powers of decision-making and control of both political and economic institutions by the members of localised communities in their villages, wards and parishes as the case may be, in every part of the world. Such a programme of non-centralised political and economic power as is here envisaged can do much to prevent the power of the state being seized by any group for the purpose of war, aggrandisement or oppression.
19 For the same reason we hereby affirm our unreserved opposition to any attempts to increase the size or the scale of political units or any moves towards further governmental centralisation. We denounce such trends as likely to lead to yet a further loss of human control and a further increase in the prevailing global dangers.
20 The grim lesson of political life of the 20th century, which has already inflicted more murder, suffering and infamy on the common people than has been perpetrated in any previous period, is that the only safe form of power is shared power.
21 We reject the pseudo democracy of huge mass political parties, for since these are really complex forms of citizen manipulation by party leaders in whose grip the real power is held, no real sharing of power is practised.
22 We call on all the peoples of the world to affirm their membership of the human family and their duty to advance its well-being in terms of peace, freedom and ecological sensibility by joining with us to establish The Fourth World, a world where power is fully shared by the people in societies which are modest enough in size to do justice to the majesty of the human spirit and to serve the noblest accomplishments and potentialities of its creative genius.
23 We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly for the liberation of peoples everywhere in these terms.
Long live the Fourth World!”
From Fourth World Review #86 (1997)
Community Reality and Power
Perhaps it was the 19th Century socialist thinkers who were responsible for the mischief; they have persuaded generations of radicals to suppose that the realisation of social objectives can only be accomplished by winning positions of power in centralised political institutions.
The supposition has an inbuilt tripwire, plus a glaring falsity of analysis. The falsity is the idea that in mass terms, regardless of the scale of the operation, the ballot box was a means of citizen empowerment. On the contrary, in mass terms (the qualification is all-important) it is a means of disempowerment.
Why? Because the larger and more centralised the political unit the more other forms of power (money, the media, militarism and other means of manipulation) simply marginalise the supposed power of the ballot box with their own. In any case the larger the political unit the smaller the significance of any individual member of it.
These manipulative and essentially totalitarian forms of power do more; they promote the values on which people vote, and the issues relate to the interests of the power freaks rather than to genuine citizen needs. So people vote on whether to have this or that kind of centralized ‘Europe’, not whether we need any such ‘Europe’ at all; or whether to promote the growth of the car industry by one means or another rather than to abolish the social cancer of car ownership altogether; or, in general terms, how to promote the growth of consumerism when such growth is already threatening the viabilitv of civilisation itself?
Any radical seeking to challenge such evil on a mass basis is at once in it a doghouse of contradictions. To realise socially transforming objectives he must challenge the entire consumerist ethic, the effects of which have already despoiled parts of the planet beyond redemption; but to seek to gain the votes needed to realise his objectives he can only challenge consumerism at the price of electoral failure. How many people will vote for monster taxes on motoring, on air travel, on agricultural chemicals and so on?
The tripwire is in the centralized system itself, in its institutions, its financial and revenue arrangements and the values on which they are based. The idea that power resides in government is an illusion, real power is largely hidden from the public eye and is wielded by the civil service, the police, the bankers and, above all, by the forces of the market. To govern at all any would-be radical government has to go along with these forces or be reduced to a nullity. Successive Labour governments in Britain have never even contemplated being radical for just this reason. The price of high office is eternal compromise on vital principles.
Yet still the lure of gaining such office continues to hold many who seek change spellbound (a good three-quarters of the time in Green Party local branch meetings , is taken up with discussing how to raise money to field a parliamentary candidate). The tragedy here is that such centralist thinking persuades people to focus in exactly the opposite direction to the one that imperatively needs all they can give.
The sickness of the mass society is not going to be cured by mass forms of political activity. We have to see that the most awesome and ferocious destruction centralised power has inflicted on human life lies in its destruction of the power and even the identity of localised communities. In that destruction and in the ever larger forms of centralised power it has gestated lies all the tragic imbecility of so much of 20th century life, ranging from world wars, psychotic despotisms masquerading as governments and inflicting death and horror on innocent people in numbers dwarfing all precedent, and the environmental mayhem now under our noses disintegrating social bonds and beckoning a new dark age.
If we want to build a new world we must see that its living cells can only be countless empowered communities across the globe, each controlling its own resources and its own social processes and co-operating with others as need and common sense might indicate.
We must come to see that community life on a human scale is not a matter to be bracketed under ‘any other business’, it must be at the top of the radical agenda where it belongs. The inherent evil of mass power can only effectively be challenged by community power. Centralised control must give way to democratic citizen decision-making, and the centralised amorality of money and power give way to the considered moral choices of community common sense.
We are pleading here with friends of any general radical disposition whatever to stop wasting time and resources in seeking to challenge mass evils on mass terms, but to acknowledge the sovereign and inalienable right of every person to playa creative and fulfilling role in the entire political process in his or her neighbourhood community.
Easier said than done, of course. The cards all seem to be in their hands: money, the media, hierarchical status and power and so on. But perhaps it is a case where appearances are deceptive. Increasingly they are creating problems which are proving beyond their capacity to solve; problems of employment, homelessness, environmental squalor, drug dependency, family breakdown, crime, stress, corruption, alienation and general social decadence.
All this despite the fact that they have generated in our own lifetimes an explosion of material productive capacity which dwarfs that of all former civilisations. If they cannot ameliorate the consequences of their own functioning then clearly the ball is in our own court. It is up to us to grasp that it is not enough to adopt the role of the ‘alternative’ voting fodder, or, for that matter, of ‘alternative’ readership fodder’; we have to break the mass society mould imposed on us and which isolates us from our neighbours and be ready to assume leadership roles in banding with our neighbours to restore localised community life and power to its proper paramountcy by tackling these problems.
The old order is breaking down. If it is not to result in another nightmare phase of totalitarian despotism to counter the inevitable wave of social discontent already brewing it is up to each one of us to help to create a new order, one which reflects and resonates the inalienable right of each person to play a proper role as a creative activist within it.
This editorial appeared in Resurgence, March 1971, at a time when proposals for a United Europe were on center stage. After objecting to such centralized schemes, Papworth concluded the essay with these recommendations:
Europe of a Thousand Flags (excerpt)
Localised Franchise
Yet there is an important respect in which the arguments for a United Europe are soundly based, and it is for this reason that it is all the more pity that they are seldom rehearsed. Europe needs a European railway service and another for posts, telegraphs, shipping, air transport, health-promotion, currency management, legal matters and so forth. The argument therefore that all these matters need to be under some central government in Strasbourg or elsewhere, which simply means that it will be a government exceedingly remote from the people and highly susceptible to the organised pressures of really big business, is precisely the one we are seeking here to refute. Such a government will surely fail to pass any test of democratic practicability, and the evidence for this is abundant, for it is writ large in the experience of almost every European country. Such governments, even on the vastly smaller scale of present national frontiers, just do not work as democratic entities. This is where we are at.
What then must we do? If we grant the necessity for some forms of unity why not steer a clear course between the Scylla of continental-sized centralism and the Charybdis of national-sized centralism by working for a system of separate, autonomous authorities drawing their power to act from the localised franchise of all the European peoples? The present parliamentary constituency boundaries of Britain, based largely on the Reform Act of 1832, are now virtually useless, merely because the functions of Parliament have become so extended and complex, and the populations of the constituencies have become so enormous, that no single individual can possibly hope to ‘represent’ the people on the multiplicity of interests now at issue. (It is because Members of Parliament just cannot do this that Parliament itself as a watchdog of liberty has fallen into such disrepute, and why the role of the M.P. has become so largely superseded by the activities of the bureaucracy). Yet it may well be that these boundaries are just right for electing a ‘representative’ to the Railway Council of Britain, which in turn might elect members to the Railways Board of Europe; they might be just right too for elections for all the other separate services that a modern state requires. On this basis Europe might well become functionally united simply in terms of those functions where unity is desirable. But this would involve no pretentious and dangerous nonsense of a European Parliament, for the political base would remain where it belongs, and with it the jealously guarded rights of separate currencies, custom barriers and whatever other economic defences small countries may feel a need for against the pressures of overmighty neighbours, international commodity markets and panic movements of share prices.
Such a step would accomplish two things, it would achieve a unity of Europe in those separate organisational matters where it is desirable, and it would establish effective barriers to unity where it is not. We do not want a political or overall economic union of Europe, and, again, the argument here is not about efficiency but liberty. It is the cause of liberty that demands that the multifarious groupings of Europe do not allow their capacity to decide and control to pass from their hands to that of some remote, super-capital, if only because there is not a single instance, historical or actual, where such a scale of organisation has been found to be reconcilable with the realities of democratic control. Under such a form of unity the people of Europe will soon find they have no more power to influence affairs than have the ordinary people of the Russian or American Empires.
Adjunct of a Machine
There is also a deeper reason for insisting on this. It is no accident that nearly all the arguments for a United Europe are economic, and relate to aggregates of production — especially industrial production. Such arguments are not primarily concerned with man at all, but with machinery — how to make machines work more efficiently, never, be it noted, how to make life for man more meaningful. It is an argument that sees man always as the adjunct of a machine and never as the only rational reason for the machine’s existence. So that what we are witnessing is yet a further consolidation of man’s status as a mere appendage to the machine’s purposes or requirements. We have travelled a dangerously long way along this road, which is already studded with the horrors of the communist and fascist dictatorships; is it to be supposed that we can proceed further to make man, and all the attributes of his genius, a mere subject of machine-technology requirements without encountering even more of such horrors until his essential uniqueness, his humanness, is totally subjugated? Where man has reached the heights he has done so on the basis of the free expression of individual genius regardless, and all too often in defiance of, economic considerations. Is it to be supposed that the essential point of reference in the scheme of things can be transposed from man to machines and pursued to its ultimate logic without promoting a collapse of man’s inner world which will equal in depth those heights of achievement he has accomplished?
Nothing is more tragic today than to witness the large number of young people who are enthusiastically championing the cause of a United Europe without the ghost of a notion of its real implications or of its ultimate goals. For it is in them we might have hoped to find the impetus for the real campaign for the restoration of the dignity of man before the forces of the modern world destroy it. In political terms this means both the affirmation of freedom and the advocacy of those institutions that express it, and which enable people to decide what they want, instead of being conditioned or beguiled into wanting what others have decided for them. Will the students take this on? Will they stop their beautiful romanticising about the all too human shortcomings of Chairman Mao or Che. Will they get over the Marxian debauch and the prolonged hangover to which it has subjected the radical cause? Will they stop shouting futile slogans about such matters, for example, as workers control, at a time when the workers themselves have virtually lost control of their own union organisations and are showing not a vestige of interest in controlling anything else? Will they cut the cackle of the absurdities of anarchism and at least draw the moral that the spiritual home of anarchism was Tzarist Russia, a country so vast and with a bureaucracy so autocratic and ponderous as to inevitably drive generous-minded men into supposing that the only effective answer to such a monstrous stale machine was no state machine at all?
Will the Haslemere Group grasp that we can only help the underdeveloped peoples of the world in one way, and that is not by producing more pamphlets on the Jamaican Banana Industry but simply by getting off such people’s backs, which means changing our life style so that we are less dependent on the products of their labours?
And will those beautiful peace organisations who have not yet grasped the inevitable dangers of world war that a United Europe will promote wake up and use their resources to champion the only road to peace that is likely to find it, which is through the political power to decide being multiplied in a variety of forms at doorstep level, plus a deliberate separation of the functions of government among a variety of bodies each of which draws its power to act from the basic level of the franchise, which is the voter, and not from any central apparatus? With such a structure no Stalinesque or Hitlerian psychopath could possibly grab power to make war; the centralised power to enable him to do it would just not be there.
Bid for Freedom
But such an approach needs endless debate, redefinition and clarification, and the student world, with its commitments to the values of the mind, its relative freedom to reflect and its freedom from the time-consuming responsibilities of the adult world, plus its very existence as a community, is peculiarly suited to initiate precisely this. Will it act now, in full accordance with the student radical tradition, and make a bid for freedom against the forces of intellectual treason which are everywhere rampant sloganising about economic efficiency and so forth, as they busily bind further shackles on man as part of a progress to his perdition?
There does not seem to be much time.
…
John Papworth’s later major work was Small is Powerful: The Future as if People Really Mattered (London: Adamantine Press, 1995).