PEACE THROUGH SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT 5. SIGNPOSTS
return to top pageIt can be no part of this exercise to detail a blueprint of what we ought to do and where we ought to be going; all that can be essayed is a few signposts by way of suggestion.
We exist within a web of needs, obligations, institutional pressures, traditions, propensities, and civic and moral imperatives; at present the forces dominating these matters have developed to an extent to which they are now out of control, running amok and creating dangers of such magnitude as to put a question over the continuance of the civilisation that has produced them.
There is thus a need to establish, or to re-establish, such controls as will enable civilisation to survive; since the primary cause of this lack of control is the excess of the factor of size itself, it is to the small, the local, the human-scale and non-centralised kinds of organisation that we naturally need to look, and it is on this that there is a need for a quite dramatic recasting of some basic assumptions we need to make about political and economic structures, not least because, unwittingly perhaps, we have allowed the scene to become dominated by structures which are able in no way, whatever their professions, to correspond to democratic reality.
The twentieth century has seen a virtual explosion of power of many kinds, in transport, communication, industry, finance, medicine, retailing, wholesaling, insurance, entertainment, the media and other kinds; in every case the result has not been an increase in citizen power at the grassroots, this has been assumed to be assured by the extension of the franchise for voting in political elections, but by an increase in the power-to-control-or-decide at the centre, a focus generally remote from citizen cognisance or awareness.
What alternative structure do we then envisage which will in fact correspond to democratic reality, one which enables the citizen to exercise real influence and control over the ongoing social process in which he is enmeshed?
It would be absurd even to seek to answer this question in full; but for practical purposes it may be answered by referring to just two ways in which democracy may be made vibrant and alive and in doing so give some indication of the kind of principles that might be applied over a much greater field.
Education, to take the first, is a key area of democratic concern. In Britain, over the last century and a half, what originated as a piecemeal operation, generally in private hands and differing widely in terms of content, standards and achievements, has been largely replaced by centralised control by a single government ministry.
This has been a quite incredible process of removing from local citizen control one of the chief determinative factors shaping their lives, their morals, their attitudes, their underlying assumptions about the nature and organisation of society itself and, in large part, their beliefs. That control is now in the hands of people whose chief concern is to win power to rule others; they are leaders of mass political parties who by one stratagem or another have managed to gain the top of the greasy pole and to enjoy the fruits of office.
It is assumed that they are fit persons to tell countless people in their local communities how they should, indeed must, educate their children.
To that end they engage a graded hierarchy of salaried officials to draw up schemes and plans; these officials then 'advise' the minister how these should be operated and administered, by themselves of course, how much they will cost and how they will be funded.
What is remarkable about this process is the general failure to recognise the extent to which the untenability of the assumptions on which it is based is exceeded only by the implicit and actual dangers to liberty involved.
It is assumed, for example, that a salaried career official in an office in London is far better placed to decide how the children of communities hundreds of miles from his desk should be educated than the parents and neighbours of the children themselves; it is further assumed that local people can be deprived of their responsibility in this crucial area of their concerns without in any way subverting the basic principles of democracy and that there will be no ripple effects in, for example, prompting people to have less concern for their civic concerns and responsibilities.
The safe disposal of political and economic power is one of the most intractable problems of human history and the mere existence of the global crisis, the most momentous crisis in all human history, is all the evidence we need that far from solving it with, absurd concepts of mass forms of democracy it is these forms which have enabled it to arrive. It is a problem we have scarcely yet begun to confront.
The reason for the modern radical failure lies in the absence of adequate intellectual and theoretical equipment with which to do battle.
It is because Leopold Kohr, (Breakdown of Nations), and to a lesser extent Fritz Schumacher, (Small is Beautiful), have given us invaluable tools in this area of radical concern that they need to be listened to.
Both were professional economists and both were, in important respects, echoing the thoughts of earlier writers such as Gandhi, Tolstoy, William Morris and others. Not least both were seeking to establish the practical aspects of the moral insights of these earlier teachers who included of course Jesus, The Buddha and the even earlier tradition of Isaiah, in terms of prevailing political and economic realities.
In practical terms we need to see that if we repeat the old radical mistake of trying to capture power with mass types of organisation we shall simply betray our purposes and ourselves.
Any mass political organization is compelled to pursue power as its primary objective and to subordinate ideological considerations to that end; if it fails to do so, if it puts ideological considerations foremost, it soon ceases to be a mass organization for it is soon replaced by a rival mass body with a sharper sense of the realities of the play of power on a mass scale.
The modern problem then is not communism or socialism or capitalism; it is not even war or environmental dangers, as Leopold Kohr has so clearly demonstrated, it is size.
Instead of trying to capture centralised power our challenge is to dissolve it into units, which are small enough to enable us to control their functioning and to put the stamp of our moral judgement on them.
Without that control all else is idealism, slogans and words in the wind. It means that we must aim to transform power onto an organic basis, one reflecting the structure of the natural world and comprised not of a mass, but of a multitude of small, human-scale, non-centralised cells, each cell fully empowered over all local affairs and conceding to central powers only those roles, such as defence and foreign relations, necessary for the nation to function.
And the nation itself must be modest in size. In this the Swiss with their modest sized cantons have a lesson for the world. So too do the small nations of Scandinavia. It is no accident that these small countries are the most stable, democratic, peaceful and prosperous in the world. They enjoy these advantages because they are small and so enable their citizens more able to control their workings.
We have to recognise that giants like the USA, China, Russia, and India are threats to the rest of the world because they are giants. They are not countries at all, they are imperial empires, and the day of such empires is over if humanity is to survive the dangers they are creating.
The radical future is the future of the small, of a human-scale size, which enables ordinary citizens to control what is happening.
So when we leave this gathering by all means keep up the pressure for reform on different abuses of power such as ecological vandalism and 3rd world indebtedness, but realise too that these are only some of the effects of the global crisis and that real radicalism today is concerned with its causes, chief of which is a scale which transfers power from the citizen to giant centres which will always abuse that power. Hence our need to make it safe in localized citizen hands.
Some organizations, such as those related to transport, to communications, to environmental needs or health for example, are necessarily large because of the nature of their functions; where such a need exists I think we must always insist on the adoption of two principles:
1. The organization concerned should be confined to its own function and to have no power of control over matters beyond it; and,
2. The management and control of the organization shall be in the hands of persons elected from local organizations below and not of nominees appointed from the central government above.
The radical challenge today means we go back to our village or to our local urban community and give our lives to making it a centre of power, the power to control our own schools, hospitals, shops, farms, industries, utilities (such as electricity and water), trains, transport, police, TV and radio and much else besides.
These are not changes which can be accomplished overnight; there is a need as never before for a major educational drive and an immediate practical drive for peoples power; it means a need for each community to have its own independent magazine with which inter alia to challenge the falsities of the mass media; it means creating and promoting local economic activity and wherever possible boycotting large-scale enterprises, not least supermarkets and chain stores; promoting local independence and local sustainability in food-growing and marketing, in establishing local workshops for local clothing, household linen, footwear, household furniture and equipment, local house building, local transport facilities, perhaps on a co-operative basis, for buses and taxis instead of the curse of private car ownership.
We need to couple this drive with a refusal to have dealings with national economic organizations such as banks and shops, for example and at the same time reject the commercial propaganda which seeks non-stop to lure us into an ever more complex, wasteful and destructive lifestyle.
Today we need to learn to live simply, simply in order to live.
All this and much else besides, all to end the tyranny of giantism running amok and creating more world wars, more global economic upheavals, more suicidal abuse of the environment, more social disintegration and more cultural decadence.
In this context we should be aware that if, as seems likely, we enter a phase of global economic collapse, the restoration of many kinds of localized citizen power may become an essential means of survival.
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