Beyond Decentralization

While the institutions of great scale fall apart around our ears, the proprietors of those institutions recognize that decentralization urgently is required--but they see and suggest the requirement only as a function of the Great Institutions.

They offer the failed institution itself as a solution to the failure.

An example. The Federal government's Executive makes a crucial issue of executive power and privilege. The Executive demands, or takes, the power of an absolute monarch. And everything continues to go wrong. So--the Executive embarks, collaterally, upon a campaign to decentralize government.

What does it mean? That the Executive understands that only by delegating responsibilities can any social organization be innovative, resist rot and, as is today demanded, figure its way out of the disasters caused directly by the inevitable miscalculations and misperceptions of central power. Central power is preoccupied in every known instance, with the preservation of privilege and not with innovation and creativity, things that inevitably challenge accreted and self-serving, non-creative authority.

But, even as the Executive understands the need to decentralize so that people may survive it also has an institutional imperative that says the people must survive to serve the institution.

Another example. Industrial leaders begin, as though it is a difficult perception, to see that the assembly line has a diminishing utility because, over time, it drives people quite mad, causing them either to work badly because of sheer boredom or because of active hatred. Either way, the line becomes a target for industrial sabotage of an order previously known only in places being occupied by a tyrant enemy.

Finally, an example for a particular argument: The cities are falling apart. Nothing works in them. Crime goes up and so does the police budget. The police can't protect. Transportation declines and the highway budgets go up. The roads can't deliver, they can only congest. Kids seem to get dumber but the school budgets stay high. Schools can't educate--at best they try candidly to pacify.

Some cities, notably New York, try to decentralize with little town halls, police auxiliaries, elaborate traffic laws, and wild experimentation in the school system. But always the great institutional ooze pervades. It is all done within the reinforcing system of the city government itself.

A reaction. In some place, like the neighborhood in which I live, people understand the need to decentralize, but in a way that actually will detach them from the big institutions; that will permit them the space for their own survival, not just the 'privilege' of being volunteer rather than coerced servants of institutional ambition. (An industrial version of this occurs when a management lets workers form production teams rather work on the assembly line. Production, of course, goes up. The workers are a bit happier. But their relationship to the ruling institution remains unchanged. They have been made happier, not for humane reasons, but for the strictly businesslike one of getting more and better work out of them. It is like a sweet, secret wage cut in the final analysis.

After understanding that the great institutions have failed, what?

In the Adams-Morgan section of Washington (racially, economically mixed but predominately poor and black) the first step, taken out of desperate impatience with past 'civic association' type organizations, was to form a neighborhood assembly, based on the town meeting model but with an important innovation, open committees. In fact the committees came first.

Neighborhood people, galled by the filth of the streets left untended by the city and admittedly spoiled by uncaring attitudes that flourish in neglect, decided to form a committee to get folks together for volunteer clean-up days. Since the first meetings to discuss an overall neighborhood assembly had been held, the committee to clean the streets identified itself with the larger group, but it worked independently and creatively. It got the streets, at least some of them, cleaned up. Neighbors began meeting neighbors while sweeping. Neighbors became neighbors. They became citizens of their neighborhood.

Other committees began working on housing (how to stop speculators from uprooting the neighborhood), rats (how to kill them), recreation (in an area of 31,000 persons with only two tiny play areas).

The recreation committee built a ball park, bleachers, and playground equipment on a vacant lot which became Community Park despite the wails of the titular owner. It remains Community Park. The housing people galvanized enough community support to defeat an invading gas station (there are five already in the neighborhood) and to hold the line against a number of evictions from houses bought by speculators--and to begin accumulating the support and capital to start the local, hopefully co-operative purchase of vacant buildings.

Meantime, the town meeting went ahead. In one year (this past one) the membership has gone from 1,000 to 3,000 and more than 100 neighbors join each month.

Another spontaneous committee has begun collecting clothes and discarded household equipment which is now given free at the store-front office of the Adams-Morgan Organization (AMO).

Because of the regular town meetings, the established politicians in colonial Washington have begun to take notice of Adams-Morgan and even obsequiously seek it out. The people, bless them, have not been conned. At each meeting, the attitude of doing it ourselves seems to strengthen and fear of 'downtown' to weaken. (At a recent ceremony, to count block-by-block votes for an operating council to carry out assembly decisions between meeting, a local judge was scheduled to preside. He was so obviously scornful of the local attitudes and informality that he was asked to leave; an act of lese majeste with profoundly encouraging implications for a neighborhood that just two years ago was totally dominated by a hat-in-hand attitude toward government officials.)

Next on the neighborhood agenda are crime prevention actions (neighborhood patrols, youth programs, run by and not for young people, and whatever else the apparently endless ingenuity of the neighbors can come up with). Also, a committee is forming to start a health-training and service center, and a co-op real estate office. There already is an exemplary co-op grocery store, record store, community paper, and a Video Center which uses portable tape machines as a way for people to engage in what amounts to an audio-visual debate about anything and everything that effects their lives.

Also, there is a highly regarded therapeutic community of recovered drug users; a credit union; a community assistance co-operative for Spanish speaking people; a brilliantly innovative community studies program through Communitas College, also in the neighborhood; volunteer work by Antioch law school students, also in the neighborhood, and a growing feeling that when you say hello to someone on the streets that the greeting has new and neighborly meaning.

My own particular interest (while regularly working on several AMO committees and on its operating Council) is in a project begun by Communitas College and the Institute for Policy Studies. It is called Community Technology, is an incorporated, non-profit group and is made up of a mathematician and an engineer from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, an engineer from the Naval Research Lab, a consulting chemist, an organic farmer, an auto mechanic, a theoretical physicist with a practical turn of mind, a carpenter, two women with lab jobs or training, a woman weaver, a welder (me) and the founder of Communitas.

The object is to study the possibilities of decentralized, small scale (knowledge intensive rather than capital or labor intensive) technology in a community setting. Also, to establish a communications system regarding technics and technology inside the neighborhood, between neighborhoods and 'craft guilds,' to inventory the skills and tools of the neighborhood, and to initiate local projects.

Specific projects already underway: high density fish culture to provide local protein from basement-sized 'fish factories,' hydroponic, high yield rooftop gardens for vegetables, solar power devices, wind power tests, non-wasting waste disposal and utilization, junk reclamation and distribution, and community, co-operative production and transportation.

The scientific method itself, which is just common sense and experimentation, is a denial of the failed, big-scale tragedies of farm, factory and forum which now threaten to bury us in their rubble. And, it seems to me, this same common sense approach now demands that we look to small victories in small places, to creative community, to neighborliness, as the way to our most grand victory--the return to human scale, human purpose, and human, rather than institutional, values.

Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Senator Barry Goldwater, was instrumental in launching the Adams-Morgan neighborhood government.

In some places, like the neighborhood in which I live, people understand the need to decentralize...