One of the
problems we’ve encountered with discussing the various types of socialism is
that the natural tendency of such groups to splinter, reform, separate, and
regroup makes tracing their genealogy a little confusing. When you toss in the habit of “re-editing the
dictionary” so that people become even more confused by the constant changes in
meaning of fundamental terms, and the reliance on assertion and ad hominem logical fallacies, it’s no
wonder why so many people end up being attracted to socialism. Not knowing what it is, they figure it has to
be better than anything they can actually understand.
Going to
authoritative sources, however, can clear up some of the mess, as well as
returning to original definitions of terms.
Now, we still haven’t discovered a clear and concise definition of
social credit, but we did find the following statement in an article by J.W.D.
Lee, “Douglas: The Man and the Vision,” An Address Given at an Australian
League of Rights Seminar at Dalby, Queensland in July 1972, The
Social Crediter, September
1973, Vol. 53, No. 6, p. 4. Since The Social Crediter claims (or claimed)
to be the official journal of the Social Credit Secretariat, founded (according
to the information in the journal) by Major Clifford Hugh Douglas in 1933, we
assume it is authoritative, and what is published in its pages represents the
official position of the social credit movement. We corrected some of the punctuation, but
changed nothing else:
Dr.
Colin Clark wrote in his recent criticism: “Douglas’s ideas really began to
exert influence when they were taken up in the mid-twenties by two active
politicians, Mosley and Strachey, who disseminated them in a naive book
entitled Revolution by Reason.”
With respect to Dr. Clark, this is so much tripe. On the contrary,
both the Fabians and the Guild Socialists repudiated Douglas’s proposals, not
for the technical reasons which one might suppose, but for the philosophical
end towards which they were directed. Sydney Webb, an early doyen of the Fabian
Society, did indeed concede that there was no technical flaw in Douglas’s
proposals, but that he did not like Douglas’s purpose. In 1934, Sydney Webb
wrote the preface to. The Financiers and the Nation, by the Rt. Hon.
Thomas Johnston, P.C., a former Lord Privy Seal. Webb eulogised Johnston’s book
as a “great public service”. It was but another diatribe on the merits of
nationalisation. Johnston, however, paid tribute to Douglas (p. 146). “What is
impressing hundreds of thousands of people in the world is the Douglas proposal
for a national dividend whereby the increased productivity of man and machine
can be readily distributed — to consumers, and not, as today, permitted
(first) to glut markets, and (second, and because of the glutted market) to
limit production and throw the producers unemployed and among the non- (or
limited) consumers. . . . If the claims of Major Douglas — to have worked out a
technique whereby such a distribution of national dividend can be made without
an inflation of the price level — are justified, then he has undoubtedly
performed a service to the whole community which entitles him to rank with Watt
and Lister.
Read carefully,
this passage is the clearest thing we have found acknowledging social credit as
a form of socialism. According to the author,
J.W.D. Lee, neither the Fabian socialists nor their offshoot the guild
socialists had a problem with social credit as a system. It met the technical criteria as a form of
socialism.
 |
| Guild socialism, a form of syndicalism |
What bothered the
Fabians and the guildists was not Douglas’s proposal per se. Rather, it was “the
philosophical end towards which they were directed . . . . he did not like
Douglas’s purpose.” viz., to
distribute purchasing power without the necessity of the recipient having
engaged in productive toil.
This, of course,
is directly contrary to the Fabian goal of mandatory “full employment” — what
Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State” and which Belloc and Chesterton
developed distributism to counter.
Another complaint, noted later in the article, was that social credit
(assuming it works) would do nothing to abolish private title of land and
industry. Since “ownership” and
“control” (enjoyment of the fruits, i.e.,
income) is what ownership is all about, however, it is clear that social credit
would, in fact, abolish private property by rendering actual legal title
utterly meaningless.
According to the
Fabians and guildists, then, social credit is, strictly speaking, a form of
socialism, but it doesn’t go far enough for them, and is therefore repudiated. Because this was reported in an official
social credit journal, we must assume that the social credit movement agrees
that social credit is, in fact, socialism, although having some issues with
other forms of socialism.
So, we still
don’t have a quick “elevator speech” telling us what social credit is precisely,
but we do have an acknowledgement from some other socialists that it is, in
general, a form of socialism with which they have philosophical, although not
technical, differences.
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