Attention: Bill Ryan and All Others
Thanks Bill, for the material on Eimar O'Duffy. If you haven't read his
"Life and Money", do try to locate a copy. I'm sure you will find it a
delightful experience to read: "Life and Money" by Eimar O'Duffy
(London: Putnam, Third Edition, Revised, October, 1935, 217 pp.)
O'Duffy was born in Dublin in 1893 and educated at Stonyhurst and
University College, Dublin. He was a writer and novelist on a variety
of topics. I understand that from his work in connection with "monetary
reform" and consumer credit the Prosperity League came into being. For
the League, of which he was President, I understand that he wrote a
pamphlet entitled "Consumer Credit" which circulated throughtout the
British Empire.
All his life he "saw clearly that money lies at the root of most of our
problems" and fought to spread the knowledge of consumer credit policies
as per the Social Credit proposals of C.H. Douglas. He died in October
of 1935.
I have a copies of "Life and Money" and "Asses in Clover", but am sure I
have never seen his "Consumer Credit"--which I would dearly love to
obtain. Characteristic of his style, was his dedication of "Life and
Money": "I dedicate this book to my children, BRIAN AND ROSALIND O'DUFFY
who according to all the laws of orthodox economics should never have
been born."
Sincerely
Wally Klinck Tel/Fax (780) 467-4885
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 1. Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt, *The Political Economy of
> Social Credit and Guild Socialism,* 1997: page 168.
>
> "...Social credit provided the central theme of the Cuanduine trilogy
> of Eimar O'Duffy. The latter also published a social credit text,
> *Life and Money,* described as a 'critical examination of the
> principles and practice of orthodox economics with a practical scheme
> to end the muddle it has made of our civilization' (O'Duffy 1932) which
> went through several editions. He questioned the assumption underlying
> the growth of competition. Why should the 'manifold devices for the
> saving of labour' coupled with the multiplication of the fruits of
> nature and 'increasing social aggregation...have so utterly incongruous
> a result?' (O'Duffy 1932: 19).
>
> "O'Duffy's mythical science-fiction fantasy in three volumes is a comic
> indictment of politics and economics in the contemporary world. *King
> Goshawk and the Birds* (1926) portrays the philosophy of the capitalist
> financial system followed through to its logical conclusions: a
> monopoly has been established over song-birds and wild flowers. In the
> second book, *The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street,* a
> world where a sane credit system secures sufficiency and leisure for
> all is viewed through the unsympathetic eyes of a speculative
> opportunist.
>
> Finally, in *Asses in Clover,* the god-hero travels through the kingdom
>
> of Assinaria. There professors of the dismal science discuss how far
> the standard of living must be lowered in order to raise it, and the
> impossibility of providing an income for all in a land of plenty when
> there is no demand for labour. Despite their comic form, the books
> carry a sombre message. A social credit Utopia on the moon is
> destroyed by capitalist financial pressures. On earth, those who can
> afford to pay to see song-birds and wild flowers are content to do so.
> Those suffering abject poverty are too preoccupied with their plight to
> care about the world they have lost. The trilogy has an uncannily
> prophetic ring. On his death in 1935 O'Duffy was described by Douglas
> as an economist of 'no mean order...combining the typical Irishman's
> hatred of pomposity with a delicate sense of proportion...His books
> will, for many years, provide a touchstone of reality'."
>
> 2. Robert Hogan, *Eimar O'Duffy,* 1972, pages 73-77:
>
> "*Asses in Clover* is the final volume in the Cuanduine trilogy. It
> takes up again the story of Cuanduine and his battles against the
> modern economic system, as personified by King Goshawk and his comic-
> strip colleagues. As a story, this last book is much more rambling and
> ineffectual than was either *King Goshawk and the Birds* or *The
> Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street.* The reason is largely
> that O'Duffy was, during much of the writing, suffering acute physical
> pain, and it is remarkable that he was able to complete the book at
> all.
>
> "Its plot begins with a council of state between Goshawk and his liege
> kings, then diverges to chart at length the adventures of a new
> character, Mac ui Rudai, who is a kind of hyper-typical man on the
> street, and then after 160 pages or so returns leisurely to the
> original story of the birds. One of the birds has escaped from Queen
> Gusselinda's aviary and taken refuge in Ireland, where the natives
> refuse to give him up. Goshawk and his men mount a massive air attack
> upon Ireland, intending to devastate the country with bombs and poison
> gas. Cuanduine goes to Ireland, constructs a great airplane, and then
> in an excellently conceived battle scene destroys Goshawk's airforce.
> He next attacks Goshawk's castle, and although Goshawk is destroyed,
> his economic adviser, Mr. Slawmy Cander who is the real power in the
> world, is spared. Because Cander's power is so pervasive, Cuanduine
> finds it impossible to liberate the birds. So, giving up his attempt
> to reform the world, he returns to his wife, only to discover that his
> children have in his absence become creatures of the modern world.
> Quite thoroughly disgusted, Cuanduine and his wife fly away from the
> earth, never to be seen again.
>
> "There yet remain six chapters in the book, which tell what happened to
> the earth after the failure of Cuanduine. According to O'Duffy's
> reading of contemporary economics, the ironic central fallacy is that
> the capitalist state produces goods which the workers who produce them
> cannot afford to buy. Therefore, at the suggestion of O'Kennedy, who
> has returned from his travels on Rathe, an expedition os launched to
> the moon to open up a new market among its inhabitants. This works
> excellently for a while, but then:
>
> "After a time, indeed, the stream of goods began to diminish, because
> the imports of Selenite material [from the moon] could not keep pace
> with it. Unemployment at once began to rear its unwelcome head again
> on earth; but Mr. Cander was not to be defeated so easily. He arranged
> that in future the surplus profits should be invested in new
> enterprises on the spot: in other words, terrestrial-owned industries
> were to be started on lunar territory. The solved the difficulty for a
> time, giving much-needed employment to the 'heavy' industries; but
> after a while the competition of the lunar factories began to be felt,
> prices fell, and many terrestrial businesses were ruined. Only one
> course now remained: to conquer the Moon, and bring it within the ambit
> of the Earth's financial system. As the Economists put it, the
> economic problem was One Big Two-World Problem which could not be
> solved on narrow one-world lines."
>
> "The great powers of the earth--the British, the Americans, and the
> Japanese--all claim the moon as their rightful province and launch
> expeditions to subdue it. On the moon, however, the three expeditions
> spend most of their time destroying each other, and the remainder of
> the earth armies is easily repulsed by the Selenites. The the great
> powers of the earth combine in several joint expeditions to subdue the
> moon, but when these too are easily repulsed all hope is given up for
> the project.
>
> "'The effect on the Earth was immediate and tragic. Deprived of the
> only available market, industry after industry went smash, and the
> world sank into the blackest trade depression it had ever known.'
>
> "This depression was followed by a great war which destroyed most of
> the civilized world and reduced the few remaining inhabitants to a
> primitive pastoral existence. In a few more years, the society of men
> has been succeeded by a society of rabbits, and in the last chapter two
> of the Gods 'observed a dim star among the drifting millions flash
> suddenly, and go out.' One of the Gods muses that, 'There ends another
> of my experiments.'
>
> "And the second God inquires, 'A successful one?'
>
> "'Nay, a miserable failure, though at one time it gave good promise.
> That star gave birth to a number of planets, on one of which I evolved,
> after much thought and toil, a strange creature call Man. At first he
> was truly interesting, but he reached his zenith too quickly, and then
> rapidly declined. During his last few hundred years, when he was
> already far gone in decay, he achieved a mastery of natural forces that
> was marvelous in a race so stupid, but his wickedness and folly were
> such that it did him more harm than good. In the end I superseded him
> by a somewhat lower creature called rabbit; but this had no great
> potentialities either for good or evil, and so nothing came of it. A
> few million years ago the planet fell back into its parent sun, which
> has now itself come to an end.'
>
> "'Did these Men that you have mentioned achieve nothing of lasting
> worth?' asked the other God.
>
> "'Almost nothing,' replied the first. 'A few of them did occasionally
> show some glimmerings of divine wisdom to which their fellows paid no
> heed. That, and some trifles of tolerable music, is their only
> memorial. If you listen you may catch some echo of the latter still
> moving among the spheres.'
>
> ""The Gods were silent; and the ghost of the Ninth Symphony came
> stealing through the ether.'
>
> "This is an effectively wry conclusion to a highly talented writer's
> major work..."
>
> 3. Robert Hogan, *Eimar O'Duffy,* 1972, pages 68-73:
>
> "I am quite totally unqualified to discuss O'Duffy's *Life and Money.*
> Nevertheless, it stands in the same relation to his creative work as
> Bernard Shaw's *The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
> Capitalism* does to his plays. Indeed, if anything, *Life and Money*
> is more important for an understanding of O'Duffy's last work than *The
> Intelligent Woman's Guide* is for an understanding of Shaw.
>
> "O'Duffy's book came out originally in 1932 and quickly went into two
> revised editions. It was an analysis of the causes for the Depression,
> and an indictment of the economic system which had so spectacularly
> broken down in 1929. More important, if undoubtedly less sound, was
> O'Duffy's remedy, a kind of modified social-capitalism whose chief
> feature was its money reform--in other words, a Social Credit scheme.
>
> "In the most general sense, O'Duffy's view is that:
>
> "'The economic troubles of the world are occasioned by the fact that a
> monetary system which riginated at a time when the demand for goods was
> greater than the supply, and when competition between man and man was
> inevitable, is still in use at a time when the supply of goods is
> greater than the demand, and competition is giving place to co-
> operation.'
>
> "The monetary system of the world caused in O'Duffy's time the anomaly
> of millions of people starving in the midst of plenty. He wrote:
>
> "'Modern industry is so well equipped and organized that it can produce
> enough goods to satisfy everybody's wants without calling on everybody
> to work. But in spite of this, society insists that no individual
> shall take a share of the product unless he works. In consequence, the
> goods which an unemployed man would consume are presently left
> unproduced, with the result that those who would have made them are
> unemployed in their turn, and a fresh shrinkage of production follows,
> leading to more unemployment, and so on *ad infinitum.*'
>
> "According to O'Duffy, the two most usual economic remedies are
> Sisyphism and Procrusteanism. The sterile labors of Sisyphus are for
> O'Duffy 'an excellent symbol for the policy of 'making work' instead of
> distributing the product.' Following Frederic Bastiat, a nineteenth-
> century French economist, O'Duffy outlines Sisyphist reasoning as
> follows: Industry is an effort followed by a result; the result is
> wealth or prosperity; and hence it would seem to follow that the
> greater the industry the greater the wealth. Consequently, the
> Sisyphist, when faced by some economic catastrophe, attempts to remedy
> it not by a distribution of goods, but by the creation of work. This
> was the highly inadequate remedy of the British government during the
> Great Famine in Ireland in the nineteenth century. O'Duffy notes that
> De Valera's statement that Ireland had been well served by its Civil
> War because repairing the damage would cause employment, was nothing
> but Sisyphism. Or the French Minister who opposed the cultivation of
> sugar beets on the grounds that it required little land, labor and
> capital to provide a large amount of sugar, was nothing but a
> Sisyphist. Or the W.P.A. in the United States during the Depression
> was nothing, in O'Duffy's view, but a Sisyphist makeshift.
>
> "According to O'Duffy, 'the way to prosperity is to increase the
> proportion which result bears to effort: to get the maximum result from
> the minimum of effort.' In his view, the problem in a time of plenty
> is not to create artificial employment, but properly to distribute
> goods and leisure.
>
> "A second usual economic remedy O'Duffy calls Procrusteanism, and the
> Procrustean remedy is to fit the society to the economic muddle. The
> most usual methods advanced to do this are emigration and birth
> control. The great hue and cry today about overpopulation and the
> immediate necessity for birth control over the world would be regarded
> by O'Duffy as rampant Procrusteanism and an admission that the economic
> system is unable to function efficiently. The recent demands of Mr.
> Enoch Powell in England, that immigration to England by citizens from
> other of the Commonwealth nations should be immediately curtailed, and
> that the two mission Irishmen working inEngland should be immediately
> deported, are Procrustean solutions to the country's economic problems.
>
> "O'Duffy's solution, which he works out in ingenious detail, is a form
> of Social Credit. We have allowed, he says, the banker to treat credit
> as his own private property:
>
> "'We have allowed him to grant or withhold the use of it at his own
> discretion, to charge us interest on it while it is lent to us, and to
> withdraw it at his pleasure to our own prejudice. The foundation stone
> of the new system, therefore, must be the restoration of this credit-
> power to its rightful owners, the people, and its administration by a
> national authority in the people's interest.'
>
> "He then proposes that, instead of issuing a currency based on gold,
> that a new currency should be issued annually based on consumable
> goods, under a guarantee of cancellation with the consumption of the
> goods. Or, as he sums the argument up:
>
> "That money shall be valueless, a mere ticket for the exchange of
> goods.
>
> "That the issue and control of money shall be in the hands of a
> national authority responsible to the people.
>
> "That the amount of money issued in any particular period shall be
> equal to the collective prices of the goods available in the same
> period.
>
> "That goods shall be sold at their true economic price, calculated
> scientifically.
>
> "That a National Industrial Dividend shall be paid to every citizen
> without conditions as to work.
>
> "That new capital developments shall be financed out of new credits
> created for the purpose instead of out of savings.
>
> "Then in great detail, he outlines a plan for the administration of the
> scheme. This resume is, of course, a considerable simplification of
> the bare outlines of O'Duffy's scheme. However, I am sure that the
> perusal of the scheme in all of its rather persuasive detail would
> still undoubtedly lead one to conclude that this is only the visionary
> Utopia of yet another crank. Indeed, Bernard Shaw in *Everybody's
> Political What's What* takes the following caustic view toward the
> various schemes of Social Credit:
>
> "'Finance and money are much more puzzling than direct commercial
> profiteering for one's own hand with one's own little capital. They
> produce crazy schemes to which the Everyman family lends a greedy ear,
> as they all promise plenty of money for nothing. The Currency Crank is
> a nuisance in every movement for social reform; and the apostles of
> Social Credit once actually persuaded a Canadian legislature to budget
> on its imaginary riches. They are supported by the mystery of banking,
> which seems to create millions of money out of nothing, and by the
> fact, of which everyone has daily experience, that scraps of paper are
> accepted in discharge of debts of thousands of golden pounds. In these
> phenomena there is much more substantial evidence for the existence of
> the philosopher's stone, with its power of transmuting base metals into
> precious ones, than the old alchemists were ever able to produce. We
> may cease to believe in the philosopher's stone, and be convinced by
> the experience of the Alberta exchequer that there is something wrong
> with Social Credit; but as long as banking remains a private business,
> and rich people enjoy enormous unearned incomes without lifting their
> little fingers to earn it, there will be crazy schemes in the air under
> one name or another; and the Everyman family will run after them just
> as they ran after the South Sea Bubble."'
>
> "Shaw's conclusion is just, inasmuch as it is inconceivable that a
> scheme like O'Duffy's would be implemented anywhere in the foreseeable
> future. In the hysteria that followed the Crash of 1929, however, when
> it was perfectly obvious to everyone that the economic system was most
> lamentably inadequate, his scheme probably appeared to large numbers of
> the Everyman family as worth some consideration. At any rate, his book
> very quickly went into three editions. In the economic recovery which
> was largely impelled by the vast creation of work necessitated by a
> World War, schemes such as O'Duffy's were relegated to the dusty back
> shelves of libraries.
>
> "Yet perhaps one should not dismiss this volume quite so easily, for
> the soundness of its indictment may certainly still be seen in the
> patchwork Socialism of the great nations in the post-war world. Even
> such an economically reactionary country as Ireland has found it
> absolutely necessary to provide an imposing array of doles, welfare
> services, and state control of various key industries. The worldwide
> fact, plus the equally apparent floundering of the economy of the great
> nations, would indicate to this writer's admittedly ignorant view of
> the situation that a scheme lie O'Duffy's may be thoroughly impractical
> but nevertheless right. Or at least more right than the various
> economic bandaids that have been applied to a cancerous economy in the
> post-war world."
>
>
>
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