Reflections by Godric Bader
“ We need a nobler economics that is not afraid to discuss spirit and conscience, moral purpose and the meaning of life, an economics that aims to educate and elevate people”. E. F. Schumacher
Fritz Schumacher by Godric Bader
I begin by a personal revelation - 50 years late! For I now know the basic reason why I had the great honour to have attracted the interest of Fritz in myself and in our company, The Scott Bader Commonwealth Ltd., and that it has always been an unconscious influence - a kind of infiltration. I also now realise it must have also filtered through the minds of the present leaders of ITDG and been similarly understood by their choice - which originally concerned and puzzled me - of their recent truly brilliant change of name of ITDG to Practical Action.
The words Intermediate Technology Development Group that Fritz chose to describe his commitment to helping the “third” world, came from his deeply intellectual, but radical and practical mind, and its essence is now seen to be better understood as Practical Action, as these two simple words immediately and accurately describe what purpose he wanted the organisation to have; it directly appeals to the present imagination and conveys the essence more directly. He would have jumped at the inspired idea of the new name. Yes - Practical Action it is! I recall reading what he said about “ITDG” and appropriate technology and “Economics as if people mattered” in the last talk called “CARING, FOR REAL” that he gave at Caux (1976) in Switzerland just before he died - all his words then were at bottom calling for Practical Action - directly with the people - wherever they were on the earth.
So I now understand more clearly than ever why he was interested in me and Scott Bader. It was an attempt at practical action - putting good ideas into practical action in the world of industry and the economic field, and why he travelled, to the concern of his family and “Fritz watchers”, into ‘the sticks of Northamptonshire’, (to the small village of Wollaston to where our company had evacuated in 1940,) when he was in great demand as an advisor by many world governments. And, to come to my continuing revelation, why he often gave me much of his lunch times in London, usually in a small Polish restaurant (the Polonia) near the National Coal Board HQ (where the waitresses - some from Auschwitz - could still show you their numbers printed on their fore-arms ).
Yes he was interested in me, me who had failed the necessary higher standards demanded during the war to remain at university, and therefore was promptly called up for war service, becoming a conscientious objector hospital orderly in Oxford - not a Rhodes Scholar as he had been shortly before the war. Fritz wanted to see practical action - that was why he was interested in me, as the inheritor of the Scott Bader ethos the son of the “extraordinary” person he had got to know at a “Pacem - in -Terris” Conference in Geneva - my father, Ernest Bader, whose decision to rename and re-base his company which he had started in London in 1920 as an immigrant Swiss, was practical action par excellence. Fritz wanted to see it encouraged, developed and lived out, and I was most eager to sit at his feet - he had more understanding and patience than my father!
When writing his world renowned book “Small is Beautiful” he included a few pages about Scott Bader, where he describes the ethos of the company as ‘the development of the power over the responsibility for a bundle of assets - not ownership’. Normal ownership had been extinguished when the family company had been given freely into a charitable holding company, the Scott Bader Commonwealth Ltd., in 1951. Now I feel and say ownership as we have known it, and over a certain size, must very soon come to be seen to be indisputably old hat. (As an aside, when he told us the proposed title of his book as we sat talking over our lunch in the Commonwealth centre with him the general opinion was that “Small is Beautiful” was a very odd and unlikely choice! But he was already more ‘with it’ than we were and scored a big hit. He was always good fun at these times and invariably warmed and delighted us with his excellent sense of humour and pungent dry observations on current events).
He was, without a doubt, one of the leading figures with the most influence in how my life has been, and still - if not more so now - is lived. He understood because of the deep training and gifted intuition of his mind what the purpose - the paradigm shift - of Scott Bader Commonwealth was struggling with, and could spell it out better than we could, and I would like to think that the 21st century description we are beginning to use to describe Scott Bader as a ‘Democratic Trusteeship’, with its “responsibility for a bundle of assets instead of ownership of them,” has a direct parallel as to how we now urgently have to look at our earthly home. I see it, and I am quite confident that Fritz would want us to see it too, as a truly neat and beautiful description of how we all have to learn to live on our planet. It is being ‘responsible’ for the ‘bundle of assets’ - the air, sea, and land, through which nature and our life evolved and is sustained - not something to be selfishly fought over, bought, sold and pillaged. This was the understanding which should be demonstrated by Scott Bader - that there was a way forward,one with which we could say good-bye to the 150 year old Company Law, with its dominance of ownership, of shareholder money power; that there would be life beyond acquisitive capitalist motivation and that we hold the earth and its resources in trust for all its peoples. This practical statement is simple to understand. Right throughout our lives we have to learn, teach, promote and relearn this truth. I continue to return to it, even more in the second half of my life. Even our body is a ‘bundle of assets’ for which we have to be responsible, and for which our planet provides the means of our sustenance.
Quite early in our discussions about the way forward for Scott Bader this brought Fritz to suggest that the company should appoint two or three imaginative biologists. We should put them in our R&D labs and leave them alone for at least 5 years. We would then have our new products and no longer be ‘capital dependent’, for he saw, as an economist, that the world was using its capital, its fossil fuels, the coal, oil, minerals - as income, and literally burning it away, instead of using it to construct the means of recyclable and sustainable forms of production and lifestyles, seeing the direct parallel with nature’s ability to run the planet, without piles of waste everywhere. He was the first to see what is now called the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. However I was by then ‘only’ the Chairman, and was unable to persuade my fellow directors who were all in the tough competitive business world of using petrochemicals for synthesising useful polymers for paints adhesives and resins for glass fibre boats, pipes, tanks and building products. For them biology was not even a science and was a pointless direction for the company to go. But what an important move for the company to make was lost!
In business Fritz taught me that the conventional planning process and games with graphs and numbers were too fixed and lifeless. They did not reflect enough reality - if anything tangible at all. As the top Economic Adviser & Director of Statistics at the NCB he learnt that planning the way forward was not a rigid process, one should “stir forward to sense what one would bump up against”, so one had to be widely read and know what was going on in the world - as well as in one’s own sector. As the small poster on my office wall reads “Economic growth is a quantitative concept and quite meaningless until defined in qualitative terms”. And to illustrate Fritz’ later ability to put things even more succinctly after he had travelled more widely, he said, when questioned about the importance of Buddhism to him, and its relevance to economics “Economics without Buddhism is like sex without love”.
In particular I recall he directed me to read Tawney, - I should study in depth his writings and get to understand the basic import of his words. Especially that “It is a condition of freedom that men should not be ruled by an authority they cannot control” and that SB, uniquely ,was on its way to finding, as Tawney put it so well “ …a principle of justice upon which association for the production and distribution of wealth could be found”, and so to get a wider grasp of our Commonwealth’s concern for morality in business life and greater freedom of self determination. But Fritz then warned “ this is only an enabling act…though a necessary one, but not yet sufficient condition for the attainment of higher aims… yet everyone in SB has the opportunity to raise themselves to a higher level of humanity”. We could not go very much further than encouraging and educating people, for Tawney had said “It is obvious, indeed, that no change of system or machinery can avert those causes of social malaise which consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness of human nature. What it can do is to create an environment in which those are not the qualities which are encouraged. It cannot secure that men live up to their principles. What it can do is to establish their social order upon principles to which, if they please, they can live up and not live down, it cannot control their action. It can offer them an end on which to fix their minds. And, as their minds are, so in the long run and with exceptions, their practical activity will be”. (This is of course very true about Scott Bader)
Nevertheless I was encouraged by these words and so imbued with the fundamental concern for the freedom of democratic organisation I came to put it later in my own words in a paper I gave to an LSE Group, and later again in Toronto at a Quality of Life Working Conference, and then in Davos at The European Management Conference - just before it became The World Economic Forum but even then guarded by Swiss police with dogs and guns - I bravely claimed that democratic common ownership, as we then called it, created an organisation in which “man’s spirit can be freer so that he can become more creative, productive and responsible.” I maintain this was very true then, indeed it is still true now with threatened rail and even airline pilots strikes. I believe Democratic Trusteeship is a way of releasing the talent, so often frustrated, that many look for other work, or like the Quakers, give up industry (e.g. Cadbury, Rowntree, Huntly and Palmer, Barclays etc.), and company organisation leaving the less mobile workforces who can then only turn to unionism to speak, or call strikes, for them.
As all the rightful plaudits of EFS point out, Fritz would never have attained the recognition that he was one of the few people that had changed the direction of human thought of so many people, had he not developed a solid basis of “combined scientific thinking at its most rigorous with spiritual commitment at its most compassionate” to quote The Times. Sadly, this was said only after his death. I well remember his funeral requiem in Westminster Cathedral where Yehudi Menuhin with his young violinists, and speakers from around the world paid homage. Many people afterwards turned to me, including our technical Director, saying “ We did not know what we had in the Company”, or “We did not realise he was so widely known” such was his influence around the world.
Remembering him one cannot forget the highly infectious warmth and life of his personality. Here was someone who knew where he was in the big world. His depth of assurance came from his basic grasp of what mankind’s destiny should be in the world and how to enter and live out our evolutionary purpose on our planet. We were honoured to have had him as one of the Trustees of the Scott Bader Constitution - alongside Baroness Stocks, a social reformer, and Bob Edwards MP, a powerful Chair of the Chemical Workers Union, who fought in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil war. These were the powerful keepers of the flame when the family gave away their final controlling shares in 1963. Later, when I became Chairman he was appointed a non-executive Director in our Company with Roger Hadley (Professor of Social Administration at Lancashire University), a very useful pair indeed for our small company. Roger was also very enthusiastic about our purpose , having worked for us earlier, being in charge of our Personnel and Development Dept. and whose life and work at Lancaster was also influenced by Fritz. (Ref. R Hadley Thesis)
It is difficult to pin down the unconscious influence which Fritz had on Scott Bader; his depth of understanding and ability to analyse the situation was always apparent in Company meetings, and often a simple statement or question would clarify and show the way forward. His influence is undoubtedly now part of the DNA of the Company.
From the point of view of the Company and its economic efficiency, and better life for its workers, one of the most practical things Fritz brought about was our transference from coal to gas with the construction of a new gas main from Wellingborough (our local town) to Wollaston.
I was looking forward to having his acceptance to follow me as Chairman in 1978, when he so tragically died in a train when returning from Caux. It was reported “Dr Schumacher belongs to the intensively creative minority and his death is an incalculable loss to the whole international community”. It certainly was to Scott Bader, especially as he was also going to give our 1978 Commonwealth Lecture. In the event his son Christian took over, and we had the honour of Lord Robens to chair the lecture. Fritz was a true prophet, whom I still seek to follow, and one the world should have listened to earlier, this enables us to avoid the development of resource depletion and climate change that now affects us. Fritz would have agreed with the recent slogan which appeared in Time Magazine “Don’t blow it! Good planets are hard to find!”
SO now I feel his ideas are more alive and relevant than ever and the need for them is even more imposing.