Facts and Arguments about the Introduction of Initiative and ...

to donate for intrinsic reasons can, therefore, be restored.
However, the recovery initially takes some time.
We believe we now know why Arjo Klamer’s pedagogic approach
failed. We also understand, perhaps, why it is best if
blood doning remains unpaid. However, is it not possible that
in many respects we now find ourselves in a situation similar
to that which Klamers’ children would have ended up in
if he had continued with his disastrous educational project?
Because it is not at all clear why what applies to the donation
of blood should not also apply to the readiness to donate ones
labour and social involvement for the collective good.
3-3: About Jorwerd
Countless books have been written about the transformation
of village life. But the story of how “market forces began
to encroach on and crush civil society from the private
sector side” (Barber) is perhaps nowhere more grippingly
recounted than in the book by Geert Mak which has already
become a classic: Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd’ (‘How God
disappeared from Jorwerd’, 1996).
Jorwerd is a small farming village in the north of Holland,
in the province of Friesland. Up until forty or fifty years
ago, the farmers had the core elements of the agricultural
economy under their control, even if that economy did not
produce very much. It began right at the family level: “The
typical rural families with lots of children did not have it
easy most of the time, but they always had one advantage
compared to families in the towns: they usually had their
own vegetables, their own meat, milk, butter, cheese, eggs
and potatoes, and thus they were more or less self-sufficient.”
(p. 22)
What was bought (coffee, tea, sugar, soap etc.) did not represent
a major outlay. But the point is that they decided what
they needed and whether and when to buy it. However, that
changed: “Up until the 1960s, many farmers rarely went
into a shop. The tradespeople came to the people at home.”
An elderly lady who lived in the village told the author:
“We wrote down what we needed in a little order book, but
nothing more. Coffee was coffee, tea was tea, and soap was
soap. A week’s shopping for the entire family never cost
me more than about twenty guilders” (p. 22). This system
finally disappeared irrevocably in the 1970s. People had become
mobile, the traders in Jorwerd died out, advertising
and low prices in the big shops in town, which had become
accessible thanks to the car, completely changed their buying
behaviour.
That is what happened in terms of consumption. But control
of production also moved out of the village, because industrial
technology increasingly took over agriculture. First
of all came the milking machines, and the tractor replaced
the horse. Investment in this technology was not yet a problem
for the majority of farmers. But this, too, changed in
the 1970s. The refrigerated milk storage tank became the
norm, for example: “The farmers had to purchase big refrigerated
tanks. Gone were the days of the old-fashioned
milk churns that were left by the roadside at the farm gate
every morning and evening; gone was the local milk lorry
which came to pick them up; gone, too, the clatter and chatter
of the many small dairies” (p. 87).
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Control over economic processes shifted away from the
local community; external factors, mainly technical inventions,
began to play an increasingly significant role. The
farmer also became dependent on the bank. “Sometime
during the 1960s, there was a complete change of attitude”
among the farmers of Jorwerd about getting into debt. “For
some of them, the path to the bank started with the purchase
of their first tractor at the end of the 1950s. The majority
of farmers could still afford to buy one out of their
own pockets. But more and more money was needed: for
machines, for byres, for all sorts of new acquisitions. And
then, around 1975, when the money from the dairy was no
longer paid in cash on the kitchen table (...) the bank became
a fixture in the farmers’ lives” (p. 88).
The inhabitants of Jorwerd became less dependent upon
each other and more dependent on strangers from outside
the village. Take the village blacksmith, for example: “The
blacksmith at Jorwerd was, like most village blacksmiths,
a real jack-of-all-trades. He shoed horses, repaired roof
guttering, installed stoves and didn’t balk at the complete
overhaul of a tractor. On some ice rinks in Friesland, old Renault
4 cars which he had cleverly converted into ice-sweeping
machines were still being driven around years later. His
modified Harley-Davidson ice sweeper was a great success,
too. He loved technology for its own sake – but technology
finally went too fast for him to keep up.” (p. 148) “Any village
blacksmith could repair the most important machines
on a 1970s farm without any difficulty: tractor, mowing
machine, milking machine, manure spreader and much
more besides. That was no longer the case for the tractors
and milking machines that appeared on the market after
the 1970s. They were so full of technology and electronics
that only well-trained young mechanics could master them.
As a result, an ordinary, old-fashioned blacksmith was out
of his depth. In this respect, too, the farmers became increasingly
dependent on intangible economic forces in the
outside world” (p. 150). “In this way, something in Jorwerd
that had been an essential part of the farmers’ lives for centuries
disappeared: their own small economy within the big
economy. The boundaries between the two became unclear,
more and more holes appeared in the dyke of trust and tradition,
and suddenly the village economy was swept away as
if it had never existed.” (p. 151)
As control over the economy, both consumption and production,
slipped away, the state began to intervene more and
more with regulations, exactly as Barber describes. For the
farmers in Jorwerd and elsewhere, the introduction of the
milk quota had enormous consequences. In 1984, the European
Agriculture Ministers decided to put the brakes on the
overproduction of milk. Each farmer would only be allowed
to produce a certain quota; every litre of milk produced in
excess of the quota would result in a heavy fine. There was
soon a roaring trade in milk quotas. A farmer who was allocated
a milk quota of 250,000 litres was in effect given a
million guilders’ worth (around £300,000) of milk rights,
which he or she could sell. Later, a manure quota was also
introduced. A cattle farmer was not allowed to produce more
than a certain amount of manure. Another roaring trade
was created. Pig breeders were prepared to pay to be able to
dump their surplus manure on someone else’s land (p. 97).
From the point of view of the social fabric, it is significant
that these regulations were another element over which the
individual farmer had absolutely no control, but which dras-