The Vision, Not the Theatrics
Who is naming, and what would it take to see them: not the climbers, but the floor?
Artists make more artists. And it’s not a compliment. What we need is not copy cats but people who understand the essence and can make.
I have been reading a book from 1973. It is called Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher. Almost nobody reads it now.
Schumacher wrote before there was language for what was wrong. In 1973 people were still working normal hours 1. They still knew their neighbours 2. There was no burnout as a category, no precariat, no 996, no involution, no lying flat. All of that language arrives later. 3 So Schumacher was doing something harder than making an argument. He had to describe the illness and the cure in the same book to people who had no name for either. That is why he keeps reaching for Shakespeare. 4 That is the artist function: building a world people can already stand inside in their heads before the political name for it exists.
The imagination that would carry it was not yet required.
The language, when it arrived, came with the premise. There are the people who run up the escalator from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week, and the burn registers as proof, as worth: the fight against the machine experienced as their own ambition. The body becomes indistinguishable from the machine it is fighting. And there are the people standing at the bottom who do not step on. This looks like refusal. And when you watch for a second longer, their refusal still needs the escalator to exist. Take it away and there is nothing left to refuse. Both are living inside a premise neither has examined: that the escalator is the only way up, and that up is what life is for. There is a third person, who walks past it and finds the staircase that was always underneath.
There is a man in that book. Ernest Bader. A Swiss Quaker who owned a chemicals company in Northamptonshire through the second world war, and who in 1951 did something almost unheard of in British industry. He gave it away.
Not to charity. Not to a foundation with his name on it. But to the people who worked in it.
What I want to know is what happened that made him decide that way. Nobody records the interior of it exactly. What Godric, his son, recorded later was this: Never again. Just saying no to war is not enough. We must remove the roots of violence. 5 Bader had resented the labour market since he was young: the idea that capital employed men instead of men employing capital. He had practised profit-sharing from the start and found it was not enough. He did not resolve to be a good owner. Cadbury tried that. Build the village, house the workers, be decent. Bader looked at decency and decided decency was the baseline. Not the goal. 6
What follows is my reading of the man the record gives. He looked at what he was and understood that ownership had made him a man who could dispose of other people’s lives with a signature. Not a man who would. A man who could. And that distinction was enough.
So in 1951 he transferred 90% of the shares of Scott Bader into a Commonwealth held by its members. The remaining 10% followed in 1963. No member holds shares individually. There is nothing to sell, nothing to inherit, nothing to extract. Schumacher’s own word for what this did to ownership is extinction. Not democratisation, not redistribution. Extinction. One person one vote from the first day, including Bader himself, who stepped down into the same vote as the newest hire. The self-denying ordinances are in the constitution: the firm stays small enough that every member can hold it in mind, no arms manufacture, salary ratios capped, a portion of profit to charitable purposes outside. Workers govern themselves directly through the members’ assembly. There is no representative elected to govern on your behalf. The assembly is the governance. 7
The house keeps standing. The people keep living in it and working in it. What burned was the deed.
This is not democracy in the party-politics sense. In party politics you elect someone who then manages on your behalf and can be removed if they fail, and the elected representative becomes a class of their own, needing to stay in power and get re-elected, catering to the loudest and the wealthiest, while the voter feels the consequences the representative never does. At Scott Bader the management cannot be sold out from under you because there is nothing to sell. One person, one vote. Every person included.
He died in 1982 in Wollaston, aged 91, owning no personal business assets, no private house, no car. 8 The book written about him is titled The Man Who Gave His Company Away. 9 It is not a metaphor.
In 1958 he started Demintry with Canon John Collins, the Society for Democratic Integration in Industry, to carry the model outward. 10 Almost nobody has heard of it. Scott Bader still exists, still headquartered in Wollaston, still employee-owned under the Commonwealth structure. Over eight hundred people. 11 Seventy-three years. Almost nobody has heard of it.
The claim the model disproves: that bodies cannot be trusted to care for bodies without administration. This is the claim the state cannot afford to lose. If a project leaves that claim intact, the project is supplementary. It gets tolerated, cited, renamed, put in a classroom. That is the mechanism behind “Almost nobody has heard of it.” It is not an accident.
And then there is the money.
But it’s rarely about the money.
Someone asks for one thing. What comes back is generous, expensive and is the wrong thing. Money that is given as care; that lands in the body as a sentence about the future: you will keep carrying this. The body says no before the mind can soften it. From outside it looks like you have just turned down help.
It can be named, and naming it makes it harder to dismiss. Singapore is super-aged. Among the lower earners, the people with little schooling or none, the numbers are known. 12 It is not that they do not care. They cannot. The state cares too. 13 Nursing home capacity is already over twenty thousand beds and is set to reach thirty-one thousand by 2030; an efficiency drive in full flight, and on the global rankings the system comes first out of 188 nations on the health goals. 14 And the care arrives as a script. The poster in the public housing lift that says: go for public screening. The polyclinic is full. The wealthy are not in this queue. They go to private doctors, to clinics and hospitals that take them on their own schedule, if they are not too stubborn to go at all. Then the public hospital. My parents’ appointment is at 10:40. We arrive at 10:20. They are attended to at 12:10. The seats are all taken. People are milling in the corridors. The doctors give each patient fifteen, twenty minutes. My parents want to tell them their experience. The doctors are rushed. Not because they do not care. There are too many patients to be seen to. There is no time.
The plaster cast was put on after an injury; the years passed; the muscles went to nothing; the day it comes off the arm feels foreign and what was lost feels like something taken, though nothing was. This is the part the efficiency drive cannot register: the cast does not only hold the arm. It takes away the self-awareness first. It numbs out the exact thing, so that by the time the help arrives the person can no longer say what they asked for. The panic, when it comes, is the old installation becoming visible. The mezzanine is thinner than it looks. Everyone is left standing on a cold basement floor. And it looks like care.
The hero’s journey is the ladder in narrative form: the solo ascent, the dragon defeated alone, the glory taken alone. I say this as observation, not citation. I’ve read thousands of chapters of a genre built entirely on the climb, and what stayed was not the story but the noticing. I called it escape, as I read the hero as leaving his friends behind. That was my projection. What the chapters actually took was one moment when this person put on the hero’s coat, and the network of friends that carried him to it was already there. And at any time any of them could step up into the coat. The network was the story. The coat was just the moment it showed. Marketing found the same form and sold it back to us one hero at a time. The industry’s default template is a solo ascent with a product at the summit; it is taught, not just repeated. 15 And decades of that made the network hard to see. The forgetting was a mechanism too. The network cannot be sold to one person at a time; there is no one person to send the bill to. That is why the form never shows it.
The output that compounds is not copies of the climb. It is people who understand the essence and can make, and the making makes more of them. But knowing you can step up is not the thing. The thing is becoming part of the network, so that the stepping up is not a decision anyone has to make. It is what the network already holds.
And this is the calling, if it is one. Track what artists have always done and it is not invention out of nothing. It is naming, and it is remembering. The escalator was named as nature for long enough that no one remembered the staircase underneath. Schumacher reached for Shakespeare because Shakespeare could name a world before the politics had a word for it. That is the artist function, and it has never been more load-bearing than now: the staircase exists, the escalator runs, and the naming is the one act the times ask of artists and writers. To stop depicting the climb as nature, and re-imagine somewhere people can walk in, look around, and stand on the floor.
Deleuze and Guattari have a word for what Bader refused, arrived at from the other side: capture. Desire, labour, the flows themselves: those are the machines, and the machines produce. What everyone else calls the machine: the company, the market, the escalator: adds nothing of its own. It intercepts flows already moving and channels them into its own reproduction. 16 The interception is its entire contribution. Price is where it happens. So is earning. But below both sits the layer that captures most completely: the financial market. Lending turns the future into a claim held today, and the coupon is the cut built into the claim: owed before the flow arrives. Price intercepts the exchange. The bond intercepts the future. And the machine can build the flat, fund the wage, insure the house. The interception is still there, wearing a construction helmet, and the expiry is written into the deed.
I know two rooms where the interception does not happen. In one, a woman offers readings for people and never charges, because charging would mean asking for a price, and a price is a session, and a session is what the gym over there sells. She asks what you want to give. And leaves it at that. So that the reading can stay a reading. In the other, a man untied his income from what he cared about: something that ran while he wasn’t watching, and for once the rent did not hang on the caring, the caring could just be itself. He said it plainly to a teacher who had been holding twelve years of people in her sight while the chains undercut her every month: as long as the income and the caring are the same object, every student who does not come back is two things at once, a loss and a threat. Neither one produced anything new. But both stopped the capture.
There is a third room, and this one is documented. 17 Blood. Two systems side by side, one paying its donors, one not. The unpaid supply was more plentiful, safer, and it kept arriving; paying for blood changed the kind of person who gave, and what arrived. Nothing in the paid system produced anything new either. It only put a number at the door. The unpaid room had none. And the door with no number collected more. The book worked. 18 In 1975 the assembly urged every member state to build its blood supply on voluntary, unpaid donation, and the paid donor largely disappeared from national blood services. The gift survived. Plasma, the part that can be bottled, is still bought.
That is the small design where the ownership layer does not exist. Not a company, not a programme, not a plan. No claim upstream, no expiry held against it, no number at the door. A room where the flow passes through un-intercepted, and the people in it can feel the difference in the body: what is yours has one quality, what is held has another. Titmuss’s donors could feel it, and kept giving. The lady’s people feel it, and keep referring friends. Bader extinguished a deed worth millions. The lady who gave readings extinguished a price. The extinction is the same size.
Artists make more artists. That was the first line on this page, and it was never a compliment. It was a description of how a world actually changes: not through the climb, but through people who name the arrangement everyone took as law, and remember what was built before it, until both are visible again.
Bader refused a deed. The lady doing the readings refused a price. The man refused to let the rent hang on the caring. The teacher is standing in a room the chains cannot copy, twelve years deep in what people are carrying. None of them called themselves artists. The word would have embarrassed them, and the naming happened anyway.
The escalator is still running. The coupons are still collecting their cut before the flows arrive. Down the staircase, past the last landing, the mezzanine gives way. The cold floor holds. And it looks like care. So the question this page ends on is the one it opened inside: in a society where the cut comes first, who are the artists now? Who is naming, and what would it take to see them: not the climbers, but the floor?
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Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, “The Greatest Resource, Education” source ↩
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OECD, Survey of Adults Skills 2023: Singapore country note (older adults’ literacy: only 2.4% of 55-65s at strong proficiency; 61-point literacy gap vs 25-34s) source ↩
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MOH, Reducing Average Waiting Time for Beds in Nursing Homes source ↩
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Titmuss, The Gift Relationship, 1970; empirical test in a systematic review source ↩
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World Health Assembly, Resolution WHA 28.72, 1975 source · source ↩