In reply to: “Small Wasn’t Beautiful,” March 4, 2025
To the Editors:
Udi Greenberg’s review of Tehila Sasson’s book The Solidarity Economy endorses its startlingly inaccurate account of the views of the British Left and its development NGOs. I write as a now-academic political economist who as an activist was involved in almost all the organizations named in the review in the period from the 1970s onward.
It simply isn’t true that either “ethical consumption” or “small is beautiful” were ever dominant ideas on the left or among mainstream development NGOs. Ethical consumption was an idea which arose out of environmental, not mainstream left, ideology, and only had a short period of prominence in the 1980s and ’90s. The Labour Party, development groups, and the wider left never adopted it as a significant goal or strategy, seeing it (rightly) as too individualist and non-structural. It was never a core idea for the leading NGOs Oxfam or War on Want, both of which became in this same period much more radical, focused on power and the underlying structures of post-colonial global capitalism. For individual activists an attempt to consume more ethically did become important—a source of personal integrity. But very few saw this as a major path to social or economic change.
The article and book also greatly overstate the influence of E. F. Schumacher. He was very influential in the green movement, but hardly at all on the left, which remained statist and laborist in both its Labour and wider forms. It is true that western development NGOs did turn toward local community self-organizing in their work in the Global South; this was a reaction to the failures of official overseas aid propping up corrupt governments whose policies had little impact on the poorest.
Post-Gandhian thought, the African socialism of Julius Nyerere, and Latin American liberation theology were much bigger influences than Schumacher. And crucially, the latter two offered local bottom-up complements to anti-capitalist analysis and strategy, not alternatives to it. Schumacher’s “intermediate technology” (affordable and usable at village level) was a thoughtful strategy for those in rural areas on the periphery of the globalizing economy. But very few people promoting it thought it was a substitute for post-colonial, state-led economic policy.
Michael Jacobs
Professor of Political Economy, University of Sheffield
Udi Greenberg replies:
I thank Professor Jacobs for his letter—it is enlightening to hear from those with firsthand experience of the periods and people discussed in Sasson’s book. I also thank him for the opportunity to clarify some of Sasson’s key arguments, on which my essay built.
Jacobs is right that ethical consumption and fair trade were hardly the only concepts that animated British NGOs. The Solidarity Economy in fact devotes considerable attention to more radical and statist ideas, which were inspired by Nyerere and Gandhi, as well as the New International Economic Order. Among other things, it discusses the 1968 Haslemere Declaration, in which activists and scholars called for a commodity agreement for sugar. The book also reconstructs as the War on Want’s campaign during the 1970s against British tea estate for Tamil workers in Sri Lanka.
That said, The Solidarity Economy does not aim to offer comprehensive account of the entire NGO sector and its varied activities. Rather, it seeks to address specific questions: Why was it that this universe also adopted fair trade and ethical consumption as central strategies? And how did nonprofits help popularize these as central strategies for addressing global injustice? This is why Sasson, and my essay, focus on charity shopping, the social audit, and micro-financing. In the book, one can find many other examples, such as efforts at debt forgiveness (the Jubilee 2000 campaign). Those strategies were never completely hegemonic, and they did not displace more radical strands of thought and activism. It may even be fair to say that Sasson exaggerates their influence (most of us historians do that with our protagonists). But the archival evidence presented in her book is nevertheless unambiguous: fair trade and consumption were clearly pivotal in British NGO’s attempts to devise ethical solutions to global trade and inequality within capitalism.
Perhaps more important, Sasson asks why it was these strategies that persisted while others did not. Not only that: they migrated from nonprofits to the sphere of state policies. After all, when Labour returned to power in the 1990s, it did not seek to reshape the world’s trade; its leaders seemed much more interested in consumer and community-based initiatives. Jacobs, and the rest of us, may mourn this approach as ineffective. It was certainly meeker than what many in the NGO universe had hoped for. But Sasson’s book helps us see that Labour’s approach was not merely an importation of conservative ideas. It built on a long tradition that originated in the left itself.
All of this can help clarify the role Schumacher plays in this story. His and others’ ideas about economic decentralization and community-based initiatives were not just a reaction to the failures of 1960s development. They rather emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, in response to the perceived shortcomings of Labour statism, both at home and in relationship to the postcolonial world. And like the visions of more radical thinkers, they drew explicitly on Gandhi. The Solidarity Economy shows that those ideas resonated beyond the circles of green activists (even though Schumacher’s ideas did play a significant role in early environmentalism). They were read and incorporated by figures in organizations like Oxfam and the War on Want. Schumacher himself in fact launched his own NGO, the Intermediate Technology Development Group, which helped popularize some tools that were adopted by others (like the social audit).
In short, while left-leaning activists may have viewed Schumacher with suspicion, his ideas were very much part of the history of the left. Understanding their impact is pivotal to envisioning a different future.
