Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society—Alternatives to the Market and the State

333 Pages·1999·36.296 MB·English

by  Race Matthews

lobs
OF OUR
own
BUILDING A STAKEHOLDER
SOCIETY ■ ALTERNATIVES
TO THE MARKET & THE STATE
Foreword by the Rev. Peter Thomson -
Anglican Priest and mentor to Tony Blair
race mathews
radical writing
JOBS OF
OUR OWN
Building a
Stake-holder Society
Alternatives to the Market
and the State
RACE MATHEWS
jo4int*ly published
<27
Pluto
Press
First published in 1999
under fhe Radical Writing imprint, jointly by
Pluto Press Australia
Locked bag 199, Annandale NSW 2038, Australia
http://www.socialchange.net.au/pluto
and
Comerford and Miller
36 Grosvenor Road
West Wickham, Kent, BR4 9PY, United Kingdom
UK and Ireland distributors Central Books,
99 Wallis Road, London El 1 5LN
All rights reserved.
Copyright © Race Mathews 1999
Design and typesetting by Wendy Farley, Anthouse
[email protected]
Cover photographs are from The Family of Man
exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Front: Howard Sochurek
Back: Arthur Lavine
Printed and bound by Aiken Press
Australian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mathews, Race, 1935- .
Jobs of our own: building a stakeholder society:
alternatives to the market and the state.
Bibliography.
Aus ISBN 1 86403 064 X
1. Distribution (Economic theory.) 2. Cooperation
Australia. 3. Cooperation - Great Britain. I. Title.
339.2
A catalogue record for this book is available at the
British Library
UK ISBN 1 871204 17 8
What people are saying about
Jobs of Our Own...
Race Mathews has produced an exciting, informative and
visionary manuscript. As I read and re-read this work, 1 was
continually struck by its relevance to the contemporary political
scene here in Britain, as well as in other parts of the. world. It
is a scholarly study which reads as easily as a novel.
Peter Thomson, Anglican Priest, and, by Tony Blair's
account, “the person who most influenced me”.
In Britain, Canada, Spain and Australia, there have been on­
going efforts to develop an alternative and kinder way of doing
business — a Middle Way - dating back to and beyond the
opening of this century. Race Mathews has uncovered a
fascinating and unexpected linkage between these apparently
unconnected reform movements. Are these the roots of a 21st
century renaissance?
Father Greg MacLeod, Director of the Tompkins Institute, University
College of Cape Breton, and author of From Mondragon to America:
Experiments in Community Economic Development.
Race Mathews’ book penetrates to the heart of the Mondragon
Co-operative experience. There is a common factor in all three
of his case studies: individual men - believers — who
interpreted their mission in terms of responsibility to their
natural community.
Sr. Jesus Larranaga, former associate of Don Jose Maria
Arizmendiarrieta, and one of the five founder members of the
Mondragon co-operatives.
This is a remarkable social history that illustrates the influence
of personalities on the course of events. Conscience and the
rejection of poverty was the dynamic that, led to insights into the
necessity of equity in the distribution of wealth as a corrective.
In England, intellectual debates and theories; in Antigonish,
discussion and study issuing in social action; and in
Mondragon insight, theory and action combined! And lastly,
hope for the future.
Sister Irene Doyle, former Antigonish Movement field worker and
associate of Father “Jimmy” Tompkins and Father Moses Coady.
JOBS OF OUR OWN iii
RACE MATHEWS is a Senior Research Fellow in the Inter­
national Centre for Management in Government at the Monash
University/Mt Eliza School of Business and Government in
Melbourne. He has been a state MP and minister, a federal MP
and a municipal councillor. He was Principal Private Secretary to
Gough Wliitlam as Leader of the Opposition in the Australian
Parliament 1967-1972 and to Opposition Leaders in the
Victorian Parliament 1976-1979. His Australia's First Fabians:
Middle-Class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour
Movement was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994,
and he is currently editing case study collections in public sector
transparency and accountability and police and emergency
services management. His E-mail address is [email protected]
iv JOBS OF OUR OWN
As an Australian I am disappointed that my own country
is no longer part of the emerging Third Way consensus that
is evident across Europe and the United States. Australia is
languishing in a complacent comfort zone, unsure of its role
in the global community. What appeared as a promising start
during the Hawke-Keating years has fallen flat on its face
under the present backward-looking conservative government,
which continues to yearn for a lost past it can never recover.
A warning to us all that there is nothing inevitable about
progress. Race Mathews has remained a ‘true believer’. This
book is a testament to his continuing search for the Third
Way in politics. It is full ol optimism and hope. My wish is that
it will be warmly received.
Foreword ix
Contents
Foreword by Peter Thomson vii
Author’s Preface x
Ac kn o wlc dgc me n ts xiii
PART I: BRITISH DISTRIBUTISM
1 Distributism: The Socialist Seedbed, the Catholic
Harvest and the Public Benefit 2
2 ‘Why Are the Many Poor?’: Conscience and the
Rejection of Poverty 20
3 Precursors and Converts: Henry Manning and
Cecil Chesterton 42
4 The Originator: Hilaire Belloc and the Idea
of Distributism 60
5 The Missionary, the Doctrine and the Debates 90
6 Putting Distributism on the Map: The Distributist
League and the Weeklies 111
PART II: DISTRIBUTISM REBORN
7 The New Distributism in Nova Scotia: ‘Jimmy’
Tompkins, Moses Coady and the Origins of the
xAntigonish Movement 134
8 The Antigonish Movement and the Limits
of Rochdale Co-operation 154
9 Mondragon: The Role and Significance of Jose
Maria Arizmendiarrieta 179
10 Mondragon: The Structure and Operation of
the Co-operatives 198
11 Evolved Distributism: The Performance and
the Promise 232
Bibliography 248
Endnotes 263
Index 294
JOBS OF OUR OWN v
To the memory of Jimmy Tompkins, Moses Coady
and Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta
vi JOBS OF OUR OWN
Foreword
by Peter Thomson
Peter Thomson is an Australian Anglican priest, currently marking
in Britain. Britain 5 Prime Minister, Tony Blair, describes him as
'theperson who most influenced me\
RACE MATHEWS has produced an exciting, informative and
visionary manuscript. I am honoured to have been invited to
write this foreword. As I read and re-read this work, I was
continually struck by its relevance to the contemporary polit­
ical scene here in Britain, as well as in other parts of the
world. It is a scholarly study which reads as easily as a novel.
The scene is set deeply in that distinctive phenomenon of
nineteenth-century British history, Christian socialism, and
allows us to see the very wide meaning thinkers of the time
gave to the term. Christian socialism had not then been
subjected to the hijacking of its meaning and value by other
groups on the Left, which so damaged its visionary warmth
and appeal.
Subsequently, the sense of hope for a people dispossessed
of a stake in the emergent industrialised world was shattered
by ideologies of the Left and the Right that were barely a
caricature of the reality of human existence. From that
perspective, the book traces the rise of distributism, through
Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton and their
links with Catholic social thinking, especially the work of
Cardinal Manning, its account continues with the founding
of the Antigonish initiative in Nova Scotia, through to the
ongoing success of the collective Mondragon experience in
northern Spain.
Both Antigonish and Mondragon owed their birth to the
entrepreneurial work of visionary yet ‘earthed’ Catholic
priests, eagerly seeking a way to deal with one aspect of the
legacy of industrialised capitalism: poverty, and hence dispos­
session. That so shameful a disregard of our brothers and
sisters had occurred was not only a failure of intelligence but,
worse, a failure of the heart: of character, even morality. We
had lost our way.
In our world of late twentieth-century capitalism, hope
has now re-entered the political vocabulary with the advent of
Foreword v i i
New Labour, and its sweeping victory in the recent elections
in Britain- A new symphony in a new key has been born,
bearing the mark of a new and positive form of political
democracy, where fraternitas — the common good — is seen
to underpin the familiar tunes of equality and freedom. The
name of the symphony is community. It is the Third Way.
Together with hope, there has been a return of trust: another
word which sears its way into the language of politics and the
common good.
The political polarities of the past are seen to be
transcended by the realities of the present, by an acknowl­
edgement of the global economy and of the political possi­
bilities of the global village. Our human condition cries out
‘we long to belong’, but it is also the paradoxical nature of
humanity that the ongoing tension — and often open tribal
conflict — between the T and the ‘we’, with which even our
families deal in the course of their daily round, can threaten
the very fabric of our fragile social existence. If individualism
is dying, collectivism in the form of state socialism is dead.
Can we live with the understanding of that paradox within
our political structures? the challenge is squarely before us.
The future of our civilisation is at stake. The crisis is there to
be met head-on.
The answer must be that change is possible. Critical
analysis is of the utmost importance, but cynicism must be
seen for what it is: the product of a lazy intelligence, unnat­
ural in its cosy conservatism, fearful of risk, rejecting the
power and energy of change. The new agenda of the Third
Way, pioneered in Britain, has lit a flame that is spreading
across Europe, and is finding its way into America. It is
sharply focused. It is an investment in people. It is an admis­
sion that we belong together, and the key to it all is partner­
ship. The growing belief in the commercial world is that good
business depends on a healthy society;
In the eyes of Labor’s True Believers, the challenge for the
social sector is to acknowledge that it needs all the help and
support it can muster from other sections of society; in order
to change a culture of dependency into one of enterprise and
initiative. It is axiomatic politically that individuals prosper in
a strong and active community of others, where the meaning
of citizenship demands not only individual rights, but also
responsibility and obligation.
viii JOBS OF OUR OWN