Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: An Eco-Socialist Perspective

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Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to Ted Benton, Leigh Brownhill, Meena Dhanda, Lucy Ford, Barbara Harriss-White, Neal Harris, Andy Kilmister, Laura Rival, and Verónica Isabel Sandoval for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1 All page references to Schumacher in this paper are to Schumacher (2011).

2 I am ignoring here the difference between the neoclassical/neo-liberal and Keynesian schools of thought in bourgeois economics because even though the Keynesian School argues for regulation of the market, it does not critique the assumption that large scale economic activity is inherently and always superior over small scale economic activity.

3 Mankiw (2017), along with many other orthodox economics textbooks, captures the standard micro-economics model of the traditional market-based bourgeois economics.

4 The standard orthodox macro-economic texts provide a description of an open national economy as an interactive network of households, firms, and a government sector; and then add chapters dealing with international trade, international currency movements, and the behaviour of international firms. It is very rare for an orthodox macro-economic text to even mention words such as colonialism or imperialism, leave aside incorporating an analysis of colonialism and imperialism into discussing the behaviour of households, firms, and governments. If there is a section that is devoted to ‘developing economies,’ that is merely to suggest economies that are at an earlier stage than the now existing ‘developed economies,’ which are characterised by a higher level of GDP per capita. Stages of economic growth theorised by the Nobel Economics Prize Winner W. W. Rostow best capture this dominant tradition in orthodox macro-economics (Rostow 1960). See Baran and Hobsbawm (1961) and Hunt (1989) for a sharp rebuttal of Rostow that focussed on the fundamental flaw in Rostow’s schema that ignored global imperialism in his theorisation.

5 Pat Devine is critical of Stalinist central planning but does argue for planning as a more efficient and democratic mode of economic organisation than private profit-oriented market economy, while Alec Nove allows for some form of market rationality of resource use but subordinated to an overall planned organisation.

6 That private plots of small sizes survived in the Soviet Union despite the state ideology of opposing such small sized private farming revealed both the resilience of small-scale farming as well as the limitations of state reach into that domain, especially in countryside territory as vast as the Soviet Union’s. Karl Kautsky (1988/1899) in his classical work had argued that small farming through overwork (by family labour) and underconsumption had a higher sustaining capacity against large (wage labour based) capitalist farming than small industrial firms had against large industrial firms. See also Banaji (1976, 1990).

7 For a competent review of balanced growth versus unbalanced growth models, see Cypher and Dietz (2008).

8 Marx’s EPM was first published in German in 1932. The first English edition of EPM published by Progress Publishers, Moscow (translated by Martin Milligan) came out in 1959. A revised English translation published in London became available in 1970 (Marx 1970). Schumacher, therefore, had access to both the German edition (being a German himself) and the English edition.

9 One of the most radical and original texts on critique of work and celebration of leisure is by Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue. First published in French in 1888, it has been available in English for a long and has recently been published along with Lafargue’s other writings by the New York Review of Books (Lafargue 2022).

10 Personal correspondence June 9, 2023.

11 This evaluation of Schumacher is articulated by Andy Kilmister (personal correspondence September 15, 2023). Jonathan Porritt in his introduction to Schumacher (2011) expresses a similar view especially on technology (p. vii-viii) but is largely appreciative of his ecological contributions.