1
Throughout society, the centralizing style of organization has been pushed so far as to become ineffectual, economically wasteful, humanly stultifying, and ruinous to democracy. There are overcentralized systems in industry, in government, in culture, and in agriculture. The tight interlocking of these systems has created a situation in which modest, direct, and independent action has become extremely difficult in every field. The only remedy is a strong admixture of decentralism. The problem is where, how much, and how to go about it.
Let me give some rough definitions. In a centralized enterprise, the function to be performed is the goal of the organization rather than of persons (except as they identify with the organization). The persons are personnel. Authority is top-down. Information is gathered from below in the field and is processed to be usable by those above; decisions are made in headquarters; and policy, schedule, and standard procedure are transmitted downward by chain of command. The enterprise as a whole is divided into departments of operation to which are assigned personnel with distinct roles, to give standard performance. This is the system in Mr. Goldwater’s department store, in the Federal government and in the State governments, in General Motors and in the UAW, in the New York public schools and in many universities, in most hospitals, in neighborhood renewal, in network broadcasting and the Associated Press, and in the deals that chain-grocers make with farmers. The system was devised to discipline armies; to keep records, collect taxes, and perform bureaucratic functions; and for certain kinds of mass production. It has now become pervasive.
The principle of decentralism is that people are engaged in a function and the organization is how they cooperate. Authority is delegated away from the top as much as possible and there are many accommodating centers of policy-making and decision. Information is conveyed and discussed in face-to-face contacts between field and headquarters. Each person becomes increasingly aware of the whole operation and works at it in his own way according to his capacities. Groups arrange their own schedules. Historically, this system of voluntary association has yielded most of the values of civilization, but it is thought to be entirely unworkable under modern conditions and the very sound of it is strange.
2
Now if, lecturing at a college, I happen to mention that some function of society which is highly centralized could be much decentralized without loss of efficiency, or perhaps with a gain in efficiency, at once the students want to talk about nothing else. This insistence of theirs used to surprise me, and I tested it experimentally by slipping in a decentralist remark during lectures on entirely different subjects. The students unerringly latched on to the remark. In their questions, for twenty minutes they might pursue the main theme —e.g. nuclear pacifism or even the sexual revolution— but they returned to decentralization for many hours, attacking me with skepticism, hot objections, or hard puzzlers.
From their tone, it is clear that in this subject something is at stake for their existence. They feel trapped in the present system of society that allows them so little say or initiative, and that indeed is like the schooling that they have been enduring for twelve to sixteen years. The querulousness and biting sarcasm mean that, if decentralization is possible, they have become needlessly resigned; they hotly defend the second best that they have opted for instead. But the serious and hard questions are asked with a tone of skeptical wistfulness that will be able to resolve all difficulties. If I confess at some point that I don’t know the answer, at once students invent answers for me, to prove that decentralization is possible after all.
Naturally, at each college we go over much the same ground. The very sameness of the discussions is disheartening evidence that the centralist style exists as a mass-superstition, never before questioned in the students’ minds. If I point to some commonplace defect of any centralized system, or one which leaps to the eye in the organization of their own college, I am regarded as a daring sage. No other method of organization was conceived as possible.
3
Decentralization is not lack of order or planning, but a kind of coordination that relies on different motives from top-down direction, standard rules, and extrinsic rewards like salary and status, to provide integration and cohesiveness. It is not “anarchy.” (But of course, most Anarchists, like the anarcho-syndicalists or the community-anarchists, have not been “anarchists” either, but decentralists.)
As an example of decentralist coordination, the Anarchist Prince Kropotkin, who was a geographer, used to point spectacularly to the history of Western science from the heroic age of Vesalius, Copernicus, and Galileo to his own time of Pasteur, Kelvin, and J. J. Thomson. The progress of science in all fields was exquisitely coordinated. There were voluntary associations, publications, regional and international conferences. The Ph.D. system was devised to disseminate new research to several hundred university libraries. There was continual private correspondence, even across warring boundaries. Yet in this vast common enterprise, so amazingly productive, there was no central direction whatever.
The chief bond of cohesion was, of course, that all scientists had the common aim of exploring Nature, as well as their personal idiosyncrasies and their personal and clique rivalries. The delicate integration of effort occurred because they followed the new data or worked with the frontier theories. It was almost uniquely rare, so far as we know (the case of Mendel is famous), that important work dropped out of the dialogue.
In the past forty years, the organization of science has begun to rely heavily on central Institutes and Foundations, to choose areas of research, to select personnel, to grant funds. National governments have become the chief sponsors and, in a sense, directors of research. It is possible that, on balance, this mode of organization might produce better results. It is efficient in that there are, literally, more “scientists” and there is a proliferation of research products. Without doubt some methods, like population surveys, and some apparatus, like atom smashers and moon rockets, require a lot of capital and central organization. It has been argued that when knowledge accumulates beyond a certain point, its dissemination must be centrally directed and further research must be systematically directed.
Yet it is not self-evident that this style is superior to the private industriousness, lonely thought, shoestring apparatus of Pasteur, Edison, and Einstein, or the master-disciple relations of [J.J.] Thomson [Ernest] Rutherford, etc. Proof is difficult either way, for if the best brains are working in one style we cannot tell what they would be doing if working in another style. Even in technology and in the modern, centralized climate, as
Ben Seligman has pointed out, “Since 1900, about half of the important inventions affecting consumer goods have come from independent researchers. Air-conditioning, automatic transmissions, cellophane, jet engines, and quick-freeze came from old-fashioned inventors or small companies.
6
A Marxist student objects that blurring the division of labor, local option, face-to-face communication, and other decentralist positions are relics of a peasant ideology, provincial and illiberal.
There is something in this. In fact, there have always been two strands to decentralist thinking. Some authors, e.g. Lao-tse or Tolstoy, make a conservative peasant critique of centralized court and town as inorganic, verbal, and ritualistic. But other authors, e.g. Proudhon or Kropotkin, make a democratic urban critique of centralized bureaucracy and power, including feudal industrial power, as exploiting, inefficient, and discouraging to initiative. In our present era of State socialism, corporate feudalism, regimented schooling, brainwashing mass communications, and urban anomie, both kinds of critique make sense. We need to revive both peasant self-reliance and the democratic power of professional and technical guilds and workers’ councils.
Any decentralization that could occur at present would inevitably be post-urban and post-centralist; it could not be provincial. There is no American who has not been formed by national TV, and no region that has not been homogenized by the roads and chain stores. A model of twentieth-century decentralization is the Israeli kibbutz. Some would say that these voluntary communities are fanatical, but no one would deny that they are cosmopolitan and rationalistic, post-centralist and post-urban.
Decentralizing has its risks. Suppose that the school system of a Northern city were radically decentralized, given over to the control of the parents and teachers of each school. Without doubt some of the schools would be Birchite and some would be badly neglected. Yet it is hard to imagine that many schools could be worse than the present least-common-denominator. There would certainly be more experimentation. There would be meaningful other choices to move to. And inevitably all the schools would exist
in a framework of general standards that they would have to measure up to or suffer the consequences.
10
A student hotly objects that decentralism is humanly unrealistic, it “puts too much faith in human nature” by relying on intrinsic motives, like interest in the job and voluntary association. Another student mentions Rousseau, who is still academically out of fashion since his debunking by Professor Babbitt a generation ago. (Jefferson, too, is now getting his lumps.)
This objection is remarkably off-base. My experience is that most decentralists are crotchety and skeptical and tend rather to follow Aristotle than Rousseau. We must avoid concentration of power precisely because we are fallible; quis custodiet custodes? Democracy, Aristotle says, is to be preferred because it is the “least evil” form of government, since it divides power among many. I think the student states the moral issue upside down. The moral question is not whether men are “good enough” for a type of social organization, but whether the type of organization is useful to develop the potentialities of intelligence, grace, and freedom in men.
More deeply, the distrust of “human nature,” of course, is anxious conformism. One must save face, not make a mistake in any detail; so one clings to an assigned role. But, unfortunately, the bigger the organization, the more face to save. For instance, we shall see that the government Peace Corps is many times as expensive as similar less official operations largely because an errant twenty-year-old well-digger might become an International Incident, so one cannot be too careful in selecting him. Convenience of supervision overrides performance. And the more “objective” the better. If the punch card approves, no one is guilty. To bureaucrats, a fatal hallmark of decentralist enterprises is their variety in procedure and persons; how can one know, with a percentage validity, that these methods and persons are right?
Morally, all styles of social organization are self-proving, for people understand the tightness of what everybody in fact does. But different styles have different norms. The centralizing style makes for both petty conforming and admiration for bigness. The more routine and powerless people are, the more they are mesmerized by extrinsic proofs of production and power. An enterprise that is designed on a small scale for a particular need of particular people comes to be regarded as though it were nothing at all. To win attention and support, it must call itself a Pilot Project, promising mighty applications.
Nevertheless, still deeper than these neurotic confusions, there is, in my opinion, an authentic confusion in the face of unprecedented conditions of modern times, that makes for rigidity and fear of social experiment. A student says, “We could afford to experiment if it were not for the Chinese, the Cubans, the crime rate, the unemployment, the space race, the population explosion.” The leap in technology, the galloping urbanization, nuclear weapons, the breakdown of the colonial system—all involve threats and dilemmas. The inevitable response of people is to rally to the style of strict control by experts. In emergencies, centralized organization seems to make sense and often does make sense. It is also comfortingly dictatorial.
13
These, then, are the chief prima facie objections raised by college students. Decentralization is disorderly and “anarchic.” You cannot decentralize air-traffic control and public health. What about automation? Decentralization is a peasant ideology. It makes for “States’ Rights” injustice. It is unworkable with big dense populations. It implies an unrealistic faith that human nature is good and human beings are reasonable. It is impossible to go against the overwhelming trend toward bigness and power.
What is most discouraging in such discussions is that students keep referring to “your system” or “the de-centralist system.”
But I am not proposing a system. It is hard to convince college students that it is improbable that there could be a single appropriate style of organization or economy to fit all the functions of society, any more than there could—or ought to be—a single mode of education, “going to school,” that suits almost everybody; or any more than there is a “normal” psychology that is healthy for almost everybody.
Rather, it seems to me as follows. We are in a period of excessive centralization. In this book I shall try to demonstrate that in many functions this style is economically inefficient, technologically unnecessary, and humanly damaging. Therefore we might adopt a political maxim: to decentralize where, how, and how much is expedient. But where, how, and how much are empirical questions. They require research and experiment.
In the existing overcentralized climate of opinion, it is just this research and experiment that we are not getting. Among all the departments, agencies, and commissions in Washington, I have not heard of one that deals with the organizational style of municipalities, social work, manufacturing, merchandising, or education in terms of technical and economic efficiency and effect on persons. Therefore, I urge students who are going on to graduate work to choose their theses in this field.
74
“The moral and social philosophers who have been critical of centralization, human rationalization, and collectivism, have wildly varied in their political and economic tendencies. Coleridge was an Establishment conservative, Madison a democrat, Bakunin almost a permanent-revolutionist, and Sorel almost a fascist. Proudhon maintained private property, Kropotkin was a communist. William Morris wanted to cut back on technology, Patrick Geddes thought that big new technology would bring decentralist liberty, and Borsodi and Aldous Huxley relied on small new technology. Wright was paternalistic, Mumford is rather administrative, Biddle a community developer, and Malatesta was a libertarian. In a striking way, all of these philosophers have been out of the mainstream of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘politics’, which have been capitalist, statist, welfare-statist, nationalist, or Marxist. In an equally striking way (it seems to me), all of them speak to the political unease of our own times.
*
The following Paul Goodman essay is from Irving Howe, (editor). The Radical Papers. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1966. pp. 190-208.
Notes on Decentralization
What Is Meant by Decentralization and What Is Not Meant
Decentralizing is increasing the number of centers of decision making and the number of initiators of policy; increasing the awareness by individuals of the whole function in which they are involved; and establishing as much face-to-face association with decision makers as possible. People are directly engaged in the function.
Conversely, centralization is organization with top-down decision making (on the basis of “upward communication”), departmentalization of the function, chain of command or bureaucracy, and maximum standardization of performance and procedure. People are personnel of the organization that performs the function.
Decentralization is not lack of order or organization but a different kind of co-ordination. Western science from 1500 to 1900 was entirely decentrally coordinated. In its high early period the free enterprise system of joint-stock companies was decentrally coordinated. The American political system of limited powers and checks and balances is de-centralist in principle.
Many functions must be centralized by their nature: where there are no natural limits, or the function extends over the whole system, or the logistics is more important than the particulars—e.g., epidemic control, setting of standards, certain kinds of production and distribution, unification and scheduling of transportation. Also, in situations where force must be collected and directed to an emergency. At present we ought to centralize further in some functions: e.g., we ought to have modular standards and standard parts in building and in machinery. “Natural monopolies” like telephone-telegraph or railroads. And, internationally, where vast capital is required, like the moon shot.
At present there is a strong trend to spontaneous decentral political action—in the direct-action movements, and also some trend in cultural fields, like off-Broadway or Summerhill. But to decentralize, to delegate autonomy to many centers, can also be a political decision of a central power, usually compelled by the fact that the centralization is not working. For example, the New York City Board of Education is experimenting with decentralizing,
In the present period decentralized centers need not be narrow, isolated, or “provincial.” We exist in a post-urban, post-mass communication, post-centralist period. The de-centralist kibbutzim might, by some, be considered as fanatical but scarcely provincial.
The fact of great populations docs not prevent decentralization. Decentralizing is primarily a question of sociological organization rather than geographical dispersal, though that is sometimes involved. In a big city the organization of arrondissements with neighborhood city halls can importantly decentralize. A big university should be run by its many faculties.
Decentralizing is largely an empirical question and requires research and experiment (which it is not getting). The maxim of decentralization is to decentralize where, how much, and how it is expedient. For example, a gang or collective contract is used in important assembly-line manufacture in Coventry, whereby the gang determines its own working schedule, persons, and operations. In what industries in the U.S. is this feasible? How should it be tailored?
Present Excessive Centralization
In some aspects of social organization there is historically a discernible cyclical swing between excessive centralization and excessive decentralization. Within the nation states at present there is, in most major functions, excessive centralization or centralism on wrong principles (just as internationally there is decentralization on wrong principles). Our emphasis ought to begin to be the other way.
Our present overdeveloped centralism goes back to a bureaucratic style perfected in the eighteenth century for taxation and policing; a military style developed with the emergence of the nation states for logistics and to wage war; an economic style dominated by abstract money-profits rather than specific uses and work processes; and—to a lesser degree—a style of industry determined by large concentrations of machinery around steam prime-movers, cash cropping, and enclosures.
These have produced overcapitalized and often inappropriate technology, an inflexible and insecure tightly interlocking economy, ignorant mass consumption with a complicated standard of living of inferior quality, the development of sprawling urban areas rather than towns and cities, brainwashing mass communications, mass democracy without real content, and mass education that is both wasteful and regimenting.
With these there is a prevalent superstition that no other method of organization could be more efficient or is even possible, and that in all functions the reasonable mode of operation is by “rationalization” (subdivision, standardization, cash accounting). Because of the superstition and the inflexible organization, these beliefs are self-proving. No other kind of operation or administration is paid attention or subsidized; no research is done into possibilities of decentralizing. Breakdowns in the centralizing system are handled not by examining the system but by patchwork or imposing new levels of control according to the same administrative style. Meantime the hidden costs involved in centralization are omitted from the cash accounting.
This superstition confounds the real confusion accompanying unique conditions of modern life, new technology, urbanization, and one world. For instance, automation, a centralized mode of production, is applied both where it is appropriate and where it is inappropriate, but little attempt is made to analyze these differences. And in automatic production itself, although there is a necessary concentration of capital in the equipment, it does not follow that programing should be under central control of the same corporation.
My bias is that automation should be applied to the maximum in the production of hardware and perhaps subsistence goods, in clerical work, etc.; but automation, computing, and standardizing methods in general, should be severely restricted in all human services, education, restaurants, social-work, hospitals; e.g., there should be a standard high-grade TV machine made by the millions and at minimum price—even though this would lose certain excellences of highest quality, styling, workmanship—but the larger part of programing should be decentralized and for specific audiences.
In all forecasts of the fairly immediate future, it is said that employment in commodity production will be sharply diminished. But for useful leisure, the development of community culture, human services, and education, the rationalizing and cash-accounting style is inappropriate, whereas the decentralist style is enriching.
The grave threat in modern urbanization is anomie, the rootlessness and helplessness of individuals, the loss of citizenry. When it tries at all to cope with this, centralized administration tries to encourage “participation,” but participation is empty unless it involves the possibility of initiating and deciding—that is decentralized administration. It is interesting to contrast the dull formality of a PTA meeting at which nothing important can be decided with the liveliness of the public meeting of a local school board to which important authority has been delegated. “Association” and “participation” are not mere interpersonal relations; they are sharing in objective enterprise.
Prevalent or Inevitable Defects of Centralization
However competent, the few at the top who decide in large, centralized enterprises are not enough minds to do an adequate job. Top managers—and independent professionals—are the most overworked members of society.
In “upward communication” of information, at each level there is processing and abstraction from the concrete; and with each abstraction there is the accumulation of mere approximation and of actual misfitting. Much is left out altogether.
To cope with the multifarious details and persons of large enterprises, recourse is had to standardization. This leads to inevitable misfitting and loss of peculiar appropriateness and quality. It is rare that the standard procedure is the best in any particular case.
The subordinates, meanwhile, necessarily become stupider, since they cannot learn by initiation and responsibility. In a departmental system, much of each man’s capacity is unused. Each man knows only part of the process and so cannot really understand what he is doing. There is increased reliance on extrinsic motivations of salary, security, and perquisites, because subordinates cannot take satisfaction in completing the function. Finally, activity becomes timeserving and status-maintaining, regardless of the function.
In established organizations those who rise to the top also tend to be chosen by systematic rather than functional criteria. They are safe men. The image of performance is more important than the actuality. Since those who could criticize—colleagues, consumers, electorate—become stupider, the top men also become stupider.
The inflexible departments do not always dovetail; communication breaks down since few men have a sense of the whole. The resulting difficulties are solved by adding higher levels of control, more administrators.
Finally, the systems tend to run for their own sake. Since so much capital and so many persons are tightly interlocked in them, they cannot afford to risk any change; and any novelty or experiment involves dislocations and is “not worth the trouble.” A system running for its own sake loses touch with its ostensible function and becomes isolated from the environment; its chief function is to protect, reward, and incestuously recruit its own personnel; its chief business is paper work, public relations, and the maintenance of a routine production.
Unfortunately, when such systems are very large, they preempt the social means and space for carrying on their functions at all. There is no way to be effective outside the system and no way in the system, so people with inventive ideas and initiative become discouraged and either drop out or resign themselves to token performance. Worst of all, in many functions of society, simple direct action becomes quite impossible, even though it is commonsense and would meet with general approval. Eagerness and earnestness are stymied by licenses, merely formal standards, due process, confronting stuffed shirts, and the need for amounts of capital entirely disproportionate to the enterprise.
By and large our country at present is constituted of a rather small number of great commercial baronies, organized as described, which are private powers; these are checked by the great public power of governments; and there are also great entrenched organizations like the Pentagon, the FBI, the major universities and school systems, the labor unions, and a few others.
The baronies compete semi monopolistically, fix prices, and generally maintain the structure; and their relations with the labor unions are analogous. When Private Power confronts Public Power, e.g., in the regulatory agencies, the result is often a stalemate, so that there is no social motion. Often, however, there are alliances, as in the military-industrial, scientific agencies-universities, Urban Renewal-real estate promoters, etc., and these alliances lead to further aggrandizement of the same overgrown organizations and the products are not distinguished by ingenuity, beauty, thrift, or precise utility.
A major area of abuse by interlocking is the pre-emption of Research and Development money in all fields by giant corporations. But recent reports of the Senate Anti-Trust Committee show that most invention and innovation comes from individuals and small companies, and at far less cost. The big corporations use public subsidy for R and D mainly for what amounts to packaging for the consumer.
Despite the good intentions of many individuals in the system, this vast machinery of social power is almost powerless in most simple practical matters. Everyone in society, from lowly citizens to topmost leaders, shares the sneaking suspicion that “Nothing Can Be Done.”
Examples of Overgrown Systems
A: New York School System: A Classical Bureaucracy
(Let me say that I have affection for the earnestness of the N.Y.C. school system, its attentiveness to the children as the main object, its sincere egalitarianism, its concern for all types and conditions; its dreamy desire to experiment. But its structure is a disaster.)
The structure has been aggrandized from an ancient plan with little change. E.g., in 1900, 6 per cent of seventeen-year-olds graduated from high school; now more than 60 per cent. The system now serves 1,000,000 children, there are 750 schools rather rigidly controlled by one headquarters; the annual budget exceeds $700 millions—excluding capital improvements.
The following are expected, and actual, situations: to remove rats from a school, the principal cannot call an exterminator but must appeal to headquarters and go, in principle, to the Board of Estimate. To remove a door catch (“city property”) requires years of appeal.
An architect is told that he is not allowed to consult the teachers of a school he is to replace; he must simply adapt standard plans that are a generation out of date and were not good to begin with. Because of specific pedagogic conditions, a principal asks for soundproofing, but no money can be allotted for that, although there is provision for much less urgent needs. A very old-fashioned type of door hardware is specified, which is kept in production, for reasons of nepotism, only for the N.Y. school system.
Despite this bureaucratic pedantry, there are public scandals because janitors have been taking home $50,000 a year, or a roof costs $750,000 to fix, and still leaks. On the other hand, there are scandals because of trivialities: a high school student has done carpentry on a boat for a school official.
When local school boards (with rather unspecified powers) were re-established in 1962, at the end of a year of operation it was said that their main achievement so far was to make it possible for the field superintendents to communicate with headquarters (through the freewheeling of the local boards), something which had not occurred in two generations. For instance, a rubber stamp from the superintendent in charge of building was required to make alterations to a wall to install a valuable new press given to the School of Printing; all this would cost the city nothing, yet the rubber stamp was delayed for nearly two years, with a mountain of correspondence, till a local board complained loudly and got the stamp.
In recruiting teachers for such a vast system, processing takes nearly a year. Naturally many of the bright new graduates go elsewhere, to the suburban communities. (Yet the civil service type of procedure is necessary to avoid nepotism and political pressure.) Entirely irrelevant qualifications, and the tie-in with the graduate schools that license teachers, keep many fine teachers out. It takes many years to change an outmoded rule; for instance, the rule that a teacher must have no trace of a foreign accent, that made sense during the height of the immigration three generations ago, was a disaster when some districts had 35 per cent Puerto Rican children who could not speak English, yet one could not recruit bilingual teachers; the rule has only recently been modified.
The administrators, superintendents, and secretaries, principals, assistants, clerks, guidance, attendance officers, etc., proliferate; yet the fundamental educational fact, the number of children per teacher, cannot be altered because of the expense; but the large classes do positive damage to both children and teachers, so that the whole system perhaps does more harm than good. Correspondingly, each school is too large. Where intelligent principals ask for 400, there are schools of 1800 and the official limit has finally been reduced to 1200. The requirements of educational community are necessarily sacrificed to administrative convenience and ignorant public pressure.
Timidity, administrative unwieldiness, the need for standardization put insuperable obstacles in the path of experiment. When an experiment—e.g., the tailor-made Higher Horizons—succeeds on a small scale, it is diluted by being standardized.
(A considerable useful leeway is given to the principals—in both staffing and methods—so that the schools differ a good deal depending on the principal; but the teachers and staff meeting have far too little leeway.)
Finally, this vast system is made increasingly inflexible by its interlocking with the other aggrandizing systems of society, to form one nationwide educational monolith. E.g., the textbook manufacturers, the graduate schools of education, the National Science Foundation, the proliferating national testing services, the corporations, the church, the Pentagon.
B: Monolithic Mass Communications: A Constitutional Danger
The interlocking systems of mass communications with a few decision makers at the top of each system produces inevitable brain washing and makes democracy impossible.
Some kinds of news and events do warrant standard national researching and broadcast. Only great news services and networks can perform such services. Therefore we need a mixed system.
Fewer than 60 towns have competing newspapers (in 1900 there were 600). These are served by, now, only three international news services. With the best will in the world, these few persons cannot know what all the real news is. Three big broadcasting networks get most of their news from the same source.
The standard of living (how to be decent) and what is correct and tolerable in expression and entertainment is determined by these networks, the movies, and a few national magazines; but the sustaining advertisers are the same and the ownership elaborately interlocks.
This system requires creating a pervasive mass audience and attitude. Anything that might offend a large segment (a few hundred thousand) must be excluded; the vast capitalization demands a vast audience to pay for itself. There is thus an inevitable restriction to the sensational and the bland. (The “storm of angry letters” that the sponsors fear may finally be as few as twenty.)
Since there must be limited broadcasting channels, if the networks control most of them there is an implicit censorship. And this becomes explicit when tapes are wiped out and certain speakers are officially or unofficially blacklisted. The FCC has proved powerless to compel reasonable coverage of everything worthwhile. The licenses once given are apparently in perpetuity.
The networks, once established, can wield enormous political pressure. (In one case of being threatened, a network was promptly able to produce 10,000 telegrams sent by children.) The equal-time provision has been abrogated for national elections—the networks are trying to extend the revocation to state elections. If they also control most of the local stations, this makes it impossible for new political thought to enter into discourse.
The expensive network time makes for minute and second scheduling, and thus a format that prevents freedom of thought or art. Also the discouragement of using especially TV to cover actualities—since these might always prove either boring or untoward.
In publishing of books, there is similar concentration of capitalization (huge presses and teams of salesmen and promotion), and this increasingly determines the content and format of books, in order to make it possible to set such big capital in motion. And there is interlocking with magazines for serialization, with book clubs, with Hollywood.
The flood of publication, broadcasting, and journalism in the style, format, and acceptable content of the mass media, decided by the few who rise to the top in such vast semi-monopolies, finally swamps independent and dissenting thought and style and constitutes a virtual censorship in depth. Overexposed to one fairly homogeneous kind of interpretation, and underexposed to any rival interpretation (and in some localities and on the TV medium not so exposed at all), people begin to take the interpretation of the interlocking mass media for the reality; that is, they are brain-washed. This is a constitutional crisis for democracy.
C: Cars and Roads: Hypertrophy of a System Beyond Function
During the twenties automobiles began to be sold for style and status rather than more serious function and convenience; this removed natural limitations on the proliferation of such formidable and expensive objects. Meantime, the middle-class suburbanites pressured the building of parkways. There is now a car for every 2.7 Americans, considerably more than one to a family.
The cars exist as the crucial element in a vast complex—of fuel, servicing, and highways—that entirely transforms the environment. Highways are built at a cost varying from $500,000 to $3 million a mile. After armaments, highway construction is the big item in federal budgets, and it looms immensely in state budgets.
By 1970 the cost, with accrued interest, of roads for a single car trip five miles to the center of Washington will come to two and a half dollars (per car trip) each way. Fifty per cent of central Los Angeles has been given over to the roadways.
General Motors alone employs 600,000 people; its annual turnover is $14 billion. The automotive complex (including oil and roads) has become indispensable to keep the economy going, so that a falling off of car sales can precipitate a serious recession. “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.”
Three or four car manufacturers control the market, competing semi monopolistically with fixed prices and improvements spooned out slowly. Progress in design has been determined entirely by profits; the increase in power has been largely for sales and is unfunctional for most situations. Even safety features are neglected. (Forty thousand are killed annually in automobile accidents.) Only the competition of European small cars made, for a time, a radical change. No effort has been made, e.g., to develop an efficient small slower-moving electric for urban use (taxis). Also, expensive as they are, cars are built not to last, and the companies push for laws to exempt them from supplying parts for longer than five years.
Because of direct and indirect subsidy, cars and trucks have pushed other kinds of transportation out of the picture, especially for commuting. There is little effort to achieve a balanced transit pattern, using all means for the general convenience. In most large cities traffic congestion and parking are almost intolerably inconvenient; the fleets of cars on the suburban parkways make no economic or psychological sense.
The cars and highways have imposed an entirely new and disruptive community plan. The tremendous suburbanization has become their creature. Villages and city neighborhoods are disrupted by highway shopping centers. Families are dispersed and the lives of children depend on automobility. Centralized plants, including central schools, claim per-product efficiency, but the hidden costs of the highways and transportation are not counted.
Of course most of this imposition of a new pattern would have been impossible if there had not been advantages and conveniences in the cars; but by hypertrophy the system has itself become the dominant cause. The highway planning now occurs independently and determines the location of communities and the manner of life in them.
In the mess we are in, however, the only conceivable remedy is public centralized regulation and planning. The automotive complex must now be treated as a “natural monopoly” and regulated.
D: Supermarkets: Logistic Planning That Proves to Be Inefficient
The effect of the hyper organization of food production, processing, distant transportation, and supermarket retailing has been that the farmer’s share of the take has persistently diminished (e.g., 44 per cent in 1953, 38 per cent in 1963), whereas the profits of the chains themselves have not risen, and food prices to the consumer have risen slightly. This is an application of Borsodi’s Law: as the cost of production per unit diminishes because of centralized operation, the cost of processing and distribution increases disproportionately. This law is relevant especially for bulky and perishable commodities like foodstuffs, and where the fixed capital investment can be relatively low in proportion to the product (as in natural farming).
At present, one out of every two dollars spent for food goes to one hundred corporate or (not Rochdale) co-operative chains. Seventy per cent of all food sales is through the central systems. The ten largest chains sell 30 per cent of all food.
In this system both farmers and retailers fall under the control and decision making of the chains. Farmers contract long beforehand, regardless of weather or the ability to take advantage of sudden opportunities. The emphasis is entirely on large-scale cash cropping. Farmers’ markets in the towns and cities are closed. Inevitably, marginal farms must discontinue, and this is an important cause of the present excessive urbanization. (Farm families now make up less than 7 per cent of the population.)
It is clear that in many thousands of cases people would choose the farm way of life if there were any possibilities of getting any cash at all; e.g., in some states a small rise in the farmer’s price for milk results in many marginal farms resuming operation. But at present farm subsidies overwhelmingly favor the big operators.
With the concentration of growing in huge plantations in Texas, Florida, California, etc., breeding and hybridization are determined in terms of canning, ability to preserve and ship, and appearance for mass sale, rather than freshness, flavor, or nutrition. Very little is naturally nurtured or naturally ripened. There is excessive use of pesticides.
In the retailing there is a profound change in consumer habits. Packaging assumes great importance, no matter what is in the packages. Consumers pay several cents more for a brand-name product (e.g., Clorox, although a locally bottled bleach is identical in every respect). Independent grocers are forced out, adding to the anonymity and anomie of urban neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, despite these disruptive changes in the way of life of farm and city, brought on by rationalization of food production and distribution, there is little increase of actual efficiency. And there is a tremendous social and economic cost in forced urbanization and rural depopulation.
E: Costs in Service Enterprises with Different Organization and Motivation
Consider a range of services where staff and overhead are the chief costs. With extrinsic motivation and organization not growing from the function, the cost may rise by a factor of 3, 5, or 10, or more. E.g., the following somewhat comparable enterprises:
On Broadway a modest play (without music) requires upward of $100,000 to rehearse and mount, and $20,000 a week to run. The standard estimate for an off-Broadway production, e.g., as at the Living Theater (now defunct except in Europe), is $20,000 to mount and $2000 a week to run. Professionally, these productions will be comparable in every way—we are not here considering the aesthetic or community value. Contrast with both these types an ad hoc production by artists, e.g., a play in the loft of the Judson Church: this might cost $50 to $500 to mount and nothing at all to run, since the script, acting, staging, and space are all gratis.
In TV, NBC sponsored time costs $143,000 an hour for 220 stations, $650 per outlet for the network, or $2000 for one station. This does not include the cost of the program: a very modest half-hour program costs $10,000 to produce. Now compare two non-profit (educational TV) stations: WNDT in New York costs $650 an hour to run, not much cheaper than commercial television (but this figure includes the cost of programing). On the other hand, KQED in San Francisco runs for $225 an hour. The difference is that the top salary at WNDT is $45,000, the staff about 150, etc., whereas at KQED the top salary is $15,000, the staff about 50, etc. Professionally the two stations are equivalent, but KQED is much more daring and lively. (Characteristically, the staff turnover at KQED is almost nil—we are obviously relying on artistic and technical motivation—whereas WNDT is a way station for persons moving toward higher salaries elsewhere.)
In radio, WMCA charges $700 an hour for air time, excluding the cost of the program. But WBAI, a listener-supported station of comparable power, costs $38 an hour to run, including programing (provided gratis by artists, academics, or the politically minded). WBAI is one of the three stations of the Pacifica Federation, which exchange tapes but are entirely independent.
A good non-residential private school in New York, class size 20, costs about $850 per pupil per year, not counting plant and some endowment. An elementary pupil in the New York Public School system costs $750, also excluding capital costs for plant and replacement; the class size is officially 29, but in fact most classes are 32-35. Thus public and private costs are similar. By contrast, a Summerhill school in Stony Point costing $500 per child, provides, for 50 children, three full-time paid instructors and the equivalent of about five more voluntary teachers from among parents who are artists or professionals and teach part time. (The public system, by and large, discourages the entry of unlicensed teachers into the classroom.)
College tuition at Columbia or Cornell is $1700, which is estimated to be a little more than 50 per cent of the actual cost per student for “education and educational administration.” The markup over actual classroom costs is 400 per cent. (At smaller liberal arts colleges, e.g., Wesleyan in Connecticut, the markup is 300 per cent.) Especially in the freshman and sophomore classes, the professors lecture to very large classes and the smaller groups are taught by ill-paid section men. In the small colleges proposed in The Community of Scholars, the tuition is estimated at $650, with ten professors for 150 students.
The Peace Corps is a model of efficient and dedicated bureaucracy. Yet it costs more than $12,000 to select, train, and maintain a volunteer for one year ($9000 for the volunteer, $3000 for central administration, liaison with host countries, etc.). The Friends Service VISA program, which is comparable in essential respects, provides the same service for $3500 a volunteer. For another comparison, Operation Crossroads, prorated for the same period, costs $5000. Important causes of expense in the Peace Corps are the very rigid selection to protect the image abroad (only one of eight original applicants is finally sent), training in the setting of an American university, and propaganda and promotion. The Friends spend nothing at all on administration (the program is taken care of as an extra duty by their regular offices), prefer to train in the field where conditions are known, and their candidates have a service philosophy to begin with.
Official urban renewal planned for the West Village in New York City was to cost $30 million (including a $7 million subsidy), to provide net 300 units after demolition and relocation. A counterplan proposed by a neighborhood group would cost $8.5 million, without subsidy for net 475 units, without neighborhood disruption and relocation. The savings in this case come from tailoring to the actual needs by real architects rather than bureaucrats and promoters. The neighborhood plan comes to $18,000 a unit. Incidentally, in a similar neighborhood, with the unpaid labor of friends, I remodeled a commercial loft to a comparable standard for $500, and the rental at ordinary market value and amortization came to considerably less. That is: the professional neighborhood housing is cheaper than official housing, but artists’ lofts are cheaper still.
There is no mystery about what swells costs in commercial, official, and Establishment enterprises, where the organization, motivation, and procedure are not designed directly to fulfill the function. It is profits, patents, and rents; semi-monopolistic fixed prices; need for union protection of workmen hired for somebody else’s enterprise, union scales and featherbedding; salaries determined by considerations of status because the personnel is not intrinsically motivated to the task; expense accounts; proliferation of administrators, paper work, business machines; the waste of skill by departmentalizing task roles and standardizing procedure inflexibly; high cost of contingencies because of tight scheduling; public relations and promotion to shore up the image.
On the other hand, when enterprises are run autonomously by professionals and artists intrinsically committed to the task, people make do on means and procedure; they become inventive by making decisions flexibly as opportunity presents; they keep an eye on the essence rather than the convention; they put in as many hours as are necessary without watching the clock; they use all available skills wherever available; they eschew status and sometimes live on a subsistence wage; and administration and overhead are tailored to what is indispensable for the concrete function.
F: Typology of Enterprises in Terms of Engagement
A: Enterprises Extrinsically Motivated as Part of the Organized System:
- Commercial enterprises, run for profit as well as status, etc. (E.g., NBC or the Broadway theater.)
- Official or Establishment non-profit enterprises (E.g., Columbia University, WNDT.)
B: Enterprises Determined by the Function or Concrete Task:
- Professional (E.g., KQED, Friends Service, West Village Neighborhood)
- Artistic or community (E.g., Judson Players, WBAI, the Barker School, artists’ lofts.)
Profit-motivated enterprises may or may not be more efficient than Establishment non-profit enterprises. Since performance in the non-profit field is largely symbolic, there is no attempt to cut costs. But the cutting of costs in profit enterprises is largely offset by the grasping, padding, and status seeking of the personnel. An extremely extravagant model is the combination of centralized commercial and official, as in cost-plus contracts. This is the opposite of the TVA idea, where the official was to serve as a yardstick.
Intrinsic professional performance necessarily costs more than artistic and community performance (which really costs nothing beyond materials and subsistence) because the persons are members of a licensed or peer-group guild; they are institutions, and this is usually necessary for continuous operation over a range of occasions. Artistic performances, on the contrary, are ad hoc. (For a continuously productive artist, each work is ad hoc.)
Add to these four types two other extreme types of production and service. On the one hand there are family, amateur, and folk enterprises, which do not enter the cash nexus at all but are very important for the economic and social well-being. For instance, one nation might have a per capita “income” several times more than another, and yet the actual standard of living be very little different, since the “poorer” nation is more skilled and self-reliant.
On the other hand, there are the great background enterprises that fill universal needs, necessary for a modern society to function: municipal services, natural monopolies, literacy, subsistence, etc. It is probably most convenient and efficient to run all of these by free appropriation. The standards and motives of personnel should be strictly professional. (This is Marx’s “administration” that is supposed to supersede the “withering away of the state,” but in my opinion he extends the range of these functions too far and would make the whole society lifeless. These functions are best regarded as merely supportive and background.)
Idea of a Mixed System
The above six types of enterprise are, in one form or another, operative in any modern society. But the proportions are, of course, very various—so the United States, Russia, Sweden, Nigeria, etc., have different real constitutions.
The idea of a mixed system is a proportioning among types of enterprise so that they in fact influence one another pluralistically and if necessary can check one another.
A mixed system would try to keep the proportion of the types roughly within limits of maximum cost efficiency. (I doubt that the American proportion is at all within these limits. E.g., it takes $30,000 in new investment to re-employ one workman.) This might involve lowering the GNP: e.g., cooperative enterprises often avoid cash transactions’, a quality standard of living is less cultured and often costs less; skilled and engaged people do more directly for themselves and one another, e.g., repairs; a better rural-urban ratio, say 20 per cent instead of 7 per cent, would be more efficient as well as more socially and culturally satisfactory.
A mixed system would allow various types of motivation and organization to do what they can do most appropriately and cheaply.
A mixed system would reopen opportunities for people to choose the way of working and living that most suits them, and would thus re-create the possibility of engagement.