Decentralism and Liberation in the Workplace
Americans are the victims of many destructive myths. One of the most pervasive is that “involving more people in decisions leads directly to damaging disagreements, decreased efficiency and productivity, and possibly even coercion and economic stagnation.” The politicians, ideologues and bureaucrats who these days promote rural revitalization, small-scale, and consumer cooperatives also often say that people are simply not dependable enough to make a decentralist society, based upon libertarian principles, workable in the near future. Adopting an authoritarian view of social change in a crisis-ridden America, many reformers and revolutionists imply between lines of rhetoric that humans are essentially competitive – rather than cooperative, aggressively selfish – rather than receptive and social. They label self-management as utopian fantasy, a vision made impractical by our history and the severe constraints of capitalist institutions.
In spite of this widespread and frequently unchallenged assumption, however, the libertarian notion of decentralism persists. It is a resilient social current which flows from our historical experience of mutual aid, the health-oriented nature of our species, and the continuous evolution of our collective consciousness. Cooperation and self-government have traditionally been as integral to the “American Dream” as the sense of national mission and need for dominance which led to imperialism; the preoccupation with private ownership; an economy built upon war, consumerism, and mountains of ephemeral goods. Some of our negative traits may, in fact, primarily be effects of over a century of manipulation by our rulers. Capitalism, the authoritarian myth, and the rationalizations upon which both depend have created a national cancer. This man-made disease has separated consumption from production, human labor from management, and participation from governance. But once acknowledged and clearly understood this social illness can be treated.
Decentralism is a regenerative process involving neighborhood government, shared ownership, regional self-sufficiency in food and energy, plus comfortable inter-community alliances. Through initial efforts at both the industrial and local political levels decentralism can move toward a libertarian culture which respects the tradition of freedom and independence in America’s past, and which adds to that heritage a more positive vision of human nature, ethical and ecological tools, and an international perspective.
The success of a decentralist movement will finally lie with individuals and local, autonomous groups. The tactics of change will vary from town to town, from region to region. Since such diversity is integral to decentralism, it becomes difficult to project specifically how the movement is likely to develop. A few hopeful suggestions, along with a look at personal and past experiences, are nonetheless still possible. The following pages constitute a brief look at how work is and could be organized.
Decentralism Betrayed
The development of a human relations emphasis within work systems has accentuated the importance of participation in management. Organizational leaders have realized the necessity of discussing problems in order to maintain a compliant work force. Usually they buy cooperation by providing information and some format for dialogue. Administrators and politicians urge workers to believe they are important parts of a “team” by explaining major decisions and encouraging involvement in the planning of routine matters. Various pseudo-legislative bodies, led by rational managers, use analysis to produce detente, and to reduce resistance to control.
This contradiction of centralization (in decision-making, ownership and wealth) and decentralization (in efficient operation) has intrigued me since I began work for the U.S. government. As part of the Manpower Administration of the Department of Labor, I painfully learned that decentralist strategies often become perverted. They are “regionalized” rather than becoming strategies for localism, they are state-managed rather than promoting self-management. First with apprehension and subsequently with anger, I witnessed the development of Manpower Revenue Sharing.
This “economic reform” emphasized comprehensive programs concerned with Keynesian economic control. This bureaucratic innovation created new obstacles for responsive organizations concerned with personal and local needs. Since its design in the early 1970s, hierarchy and oppression and alienation in the workplaces of America have all increased.
Revenue Sharing, instituted most completely through public work programs, was supposed to return tax money and some decision power to elected officials while gradually replacing federal “categorical” programs. But even “categorical” grants to local groups, based upon national priorities, were closer to a form of self-government than Revenue Sharing as implemented through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, called CETA by the numerous people and institutions which now depend on its funds.
Groups receiving “categorical” funds had often been run by locally-controlled boards. Board members – officials, professionals and workers – decided how the grant money for a particular type of program would be spent. They were sometimes held accountable by their clients and communities, or at least were accessible for criticism. Some groups remained sensitive to the idea that taxes funded their work. The projects occasionally focused on community development by making seed money available for enterprises. This spurred, in a few cases, local production for local needs.
Revenue Sharing programs were instead administered by city or State bureaucracies, interested mainly in efficient economic planning and information systems, and sensitive to political parties, big businesses and big unions. Local planning councils were established, but these soon discovered they were powerless. Council members were told in federal and State guidelines that their role was strictly advisory. Severe limitations were placed on their ability to create, reject or modify the government’s work programs and community plans. Counselors, job developers and other workers in these programs were conditioned to respond to administrative regulations. Program managers reported to policy groups made up of agency directors, state-level politicians and an occasional token “enrollee” or “low income person.”
Work programs today consider the labor needs of large businesses and public agencies. Their goal is economic stability, a seesaw between inflation and unemployment. The human right to decent and meaningful work, and to a voice in decisions affecting workers, is seldom mentioned. Manpower — a label which implies both oppression and sexism — means subsistence salaries for dead-end work, yet another form of alienated labor rather than needed capital for basic services and scarce goods.
False strategies for decentralism, such as revenue sharing, participative management and other technical inventions which prop up capitalist exploitation, rob people of the power to shape their work and training, and of their natural ability, through self-managed work, to control their own lives.
Post-Revolutionary Centralism
The corruption of decentralist strategies is a pattern which has historical antecedents in the period following America’s revolutionary struggle. By 1775 de facto governments and alliances had been developed throughout the colonies. After ten years of experience with united action against coercive British laws and the early development of economic self-sufficiency, people in neighborhoods were prepared to make personal commitments to both resistance and mutual aid. Public response to crisis had been effective, with the danger of war building cohesion. Voluntary cooperation was based upon mutual needs for moral and economic support.
As the struggle for independence was ending, however, new conflicts emerged. Commerce began to create disharmony in the early 1780s with small states pitted against large states, planting interests against mercantile money, and problems concerning the regulation of new territory. The wealthy, propertied elite which had urged rebellion was not prepared for true human liberation. The new nation needed, they felt, a strong central authority. As Washington put it, America needed “a power which will pervade the whole nation.. The voluntary “league of friendship” established by the Articles of Confederation, the first American Constitution ratified in 1781, was strained by international scheming and the capitalist urge to develop more territory on the continent.
State legislatures and communities refused to support the adventures proposed by the Council of State which managed general affairs. When leaders asked for more power, nothing happened on the local level. Why fight for independence only to be controlled by another powerful government? Why expend our resources to build a bigger army or expand American territory? People felt, as William Godwin put it in 1783, that, “The desire to gain a more extensive territory, to conquer or hold in awe our neighboring states, to surpass them in arts or arms, is a desire founded in prejudice and error. Security and peace are more to be desired than a name at which nations tremble.”
Since the Congress could not tax the States nor exert power over individuals under the Articles,
America soon faced a severe fiscal crisis. After 1781, only about one fourth of congressional proposals for fund requisition received a State or local response. Leaders like Washington, Hamilton and Madison were disgruntled. The financial manager of the revolutionary period resigned. In letters to State executives, Washington asked that Congress be given power to raise national revenues.
The argument that federation was a flawed system and that the Articles of Confederation – after only five years – needed amendment, set the stage for the Constitutional Convention. Instead of writing amendments, however, this group replaced State and local dominance with federal control in all matters not directly mentioned in the Constitution. Federal actions were subsequently assumed superior to State laws, and the central government was given power over individuals.
Federated “League of Friendship” to Constitutional Democracy
The shift in emphasis, planned by a ruling class composed of merchants, plantation owners, politicians and a few bureaucrats, was swift and deadly to the spirit of independence. The motives for centralization were a desire for more property and for a merging of business and government interests, compounded by a sense of national mission growing out of puritan religious zeal.
An enlarged capital base, expropriated from citizens, was gained by manipulation of information and the development of a closed social network including governors, large property holders and military leaders. Prior to the Philadelphia coup, persuasive arguments to legislatures and a narrowly defined voting public had been the basis for choices. Afterward our national policies were set by an administrative corps, with the technical help of “experts.”
The outcomes of centralization? Voluntary contribution became unequal taxation. Individual rights became privileges based on status and economic power. Liberty was redefined within an increasingly rigid set of prohibitions. The country became an abstract legal entity called The Nation. In this new Nation, changes could no longer be initiated by those affected or even their local representatives. Legislative power was easily cowed by executive power, agency rules and expertise, and business pressure. American government, originally envisioned as a system for coordination and transmission of power from individual to neighborhood to State and Congress, was cast in marble as a system of control from the top down. Decisions of the Nation were imposed upon an increasingly pacified public.
Yes, we have moved throughout our history from one property base to another, with slavery first becoming an industrial tool and then a government tool. Yes, wealth still becomes more concentrated in the hands of a few. And the current thrust toward a form of wage slavery and government support of huge businesses and agencies is no more humane than plantation life and sweatshops. But the process of centralization, and the hierarchy and oppression which are its expressions, does not describe the whole saga of America. The economic, environmental and social crises we face today, also outgrowths of this process, are creating space for positive change. The places where most people live—neighborhoods and towns and communities—are turning again to libertarian ideals.
Worker self-management and a call for direct self-governmentare both reemerging, as are efforts toward self-reliance in town and country. Local alliances are developing. All these are part of a massive social movement which can replace force with persuasion.
Who Owns… Who Decides?
Our 18th Century notion of liberation hasn’t lost its power and potential in this uneasy age. Crisis is once again a catalyst, which helps people to reconsider notions of nationalism, ownership, immense size, leadership and hierarchy. Many people are affirming, as many American colonists did, that authoritarian and purely scientific solutions give us, at best, short-term stability. “Law and order” and “domestic tranquility” are deceptive notions, usually sought at the expense of freedom. They end in stagnation and the death of dreams and human beings.
A country run by executive and agency and corporation decree is surely alienated from the communities which make up its foundation. Power centers replace liberty with efficiency and growth as rationales for major choices. Such economic motives require compulsory domination, slavery in the guise of citizenship.
People are beginning to see behind the facades, however, and to understand that ownership is naturally related to use, that basic human comfort is a universal right, that rights are bound to social responsibilities, and that work—not status or class—is the fair prerequisite for decision power. The American people are discovering, I believe, that actions which promote voluntary effort, self-management and the autonomy of neighborhoods can and, in the end, must replace the rulership of elites.
Changes in the way decisions are wade, a challenge of the idea that management is a superior skill and that workers are irresponsible, are crucial to a decentralist strategy. There is evidence in America and other parts of the world that people involved in decisions about production—all the workers and those affected by the work—can improve public health, safety, job enrichment and even the level of productivity.
Liberation in the workplace can’t be isolated from the economic and health dimensions of a change in power distribution. Decentralized decision power, without diffusion of ownership and improvements in the conditions of work, is subtle exploitation.
Bad air, dangerous machines and demeaning tasks cause severe mental and physical damage, the
death of workers and the inheritance of disease. Our disability and health care payments, safety standards and the basic compensation for boring work are woefully inadequate. Thus, the liberation of the worker must involve the sharing of both responsibility and profits. It will eventually require the breaking down of large companies and a new Bill of Rights for workers assuring a fair distribution of money and control over working conditions.
The essential aspect of the decentralist strategy toward liberation in the workplace is a widespread effort to resist and counteract, in industry, business and government, the dominance of central decision-makers. Workers can organize to direct their own activities, assisted by clearly articulated committee processes. Chairpersons can serve for limited periods, rotating this task to avoid the dominance which results from extended periods of authority. Committee work can, in turn, cease to yield special privileges.
This program requires consistent organizing and resistance to the appointment of agency directors and business and industrial managers. Promising developments in recent years are worker-owned enterprises and neighborhood corporations. For both of these frequent and public reporting to people affected is a necessary provision.
Libertarian Structure
TASK SHARING: based on personal ability, various levels of interest, and the willingness to accept specific responsibilities. The possibility of apprenticing is useful.
DELEGATED AUTHORITY: based on expressed commitment and consensual group choice. Consensus need not mean unanimity, but rather a willingness to set aside objections or to abstain based upon lack of knowledge.
WIDE DISTRIBUTION OF AUTHORITY TASKS: the object is to increase contact between workers and to help people develop new skills and a sense of personal power.
ONGOING ACCOUNTABILITY: those with authority maintain contact with the full membership. Recall is possible at any point.
ROTATION OF TASKS: scheduled at “reasonable” intervals.
EQUAL ACCESS: to physical and mental resources of the group. This involves some systematizing and peer teaching arrangements.
FREQUENT DIFFUSION OF RELEVANT INFORMATION TO EVERYONE.
LOCAL PLANNING FOR LOCAL NEEDS: Society naturally organizes itself by type of work and by locality. Workers focus on economic problems and working conditions. Local geographical groups—neighborhoods and towns—look at the coordination of social and economic life. Production is, as a result, a shared responsibility, a matter of balance between available resources and the needs of workers and consumers. Thus, changes in working groups must be accompanied by changes in community government. In this respect, the issue of work program planning (manpower) can help to promote both self-management and self-government. Money funneled through the Federal government for various types of Revenue Sharing is one portion of an enormous tax bill paid by local people. Work program planning councils already exist, although their membership is far from representative and control is exercised from above. As yet no logical arguments against giving this money directly to locally-constituted councils have emerged. It is time that people began asserting their right to control this needed resource.
Work and training program money is obviously just a slice of the tax pie administered by centralized power structures in government and industry. But this piece alone could easily support local management of needed production facilities, an experience which could subsequently be broadened. Some neighborhood corporations are already demonstrating the impact of this decentralist program through establishment of food stores, health and recreation centers, libraries, and neighborhood schools and criminal justice programs.
Congressional legislation to set up neighborhood government corporations has been in the works for several years, a tax reform measure that would promote local services, economic development and control of land speculation. But more direct action is possible. Public pressure could return power over money (revenue sharing and other funds) used for community development and work projects to the people who actually do the work. The type of pressure can range from letters of protest and public discussions to mass protests and community tax resistance programs. Town meetings can become places to pass resolutions on industrial peace conversion, tax reform and local resource use.
Resistance and community planning are inseparable. The first is an expression of American Revolutionary principles—minimal government, with the greatest degree of initiative and decision power at the base. Learning the lesson of “taxation without representation” from our past, communities can assert their freedom by refusing to pay federal taxes for war, bureaucracy and subsidies for private gain of the rich. Resistance is even more effective when combined with a clear sense of local goals and cooperative activity to produce needed items and services.
Looking specifically at short-term potentials, Revenue Sharing money—used in cooperation with the technical resources of educational institutions and existing businesses—can be used to analyze local energy and resource capabilities, to deliver basic services, and to make improvements in housing, hospitals, transportation, education, care for the helpless, and environmental protection.
Humane Use of Human Resources
A successful reorganization of community life depends upon the dynamic balance between individual choice and coordinated action. A working draft of the People’s Bill of Rights, developed by a national coalition of groups early in 1976, states one part of the case for self-management: “we know how to build and reconstruct the houses of our cities, how to build and run hospitals, recreation areas, schools that educate and train our youth, centers that bring together the wisdom and skills of our aged and the inexperience of our youth. We know how to produce and run fast trains and new types of transportation, clear our air and waters of deadly pollution, reforest our land and harness the energy of the sun. We can enrich our lives with music, theater, books and TV that speak for us.”
This statement asserts the needs creativity and productive capability of our people. The other art of self-management is effective planning and mobilization. With this balance in mind, the following is a list of changes needed in conjunction with a reform of the tax structure and the liberation of work.
TEMPORARY PROGRAMS: Work programs fill local education and service needs at a specific time. Community planning councils, with the membership of workers and citizens affected by the services, can both share information and make sure programs don’t become rigid or lose sight of their original purposes.
LOCAL DEVELOPMENT: Work and training programs contribute to a community’s overall goals. Councils can use their economic resources to support needed local projects in areas such as health, education, social service, and production of scarce goods and crops.
TECHNICAL HELP: The right to decent and meaningful work is dependent upon the stability of organizations. Work program staff members can provide “expert” help to deal with internal problems—skill training, health and safety, communication and decision-making, and community relationships.
WORKER SUPPORT: Work is most dignified and fulfilling when it is freely chosen. Programs can enhance freedom by serving as public utilities: 1) information centers with data on industry and community activity, 2) skill centers with a registry for those interested in learning or teaching, and 3) communication systems linking people with common interests. Access to counseling and special training can balance individual and community needs. Involvement in decisions about production can balance freedom and social responsibility.
Conclusion
The suggestions above are intended as a basis for further dialogue, an exchange of views and experiences about the way we relate to one another in our workplaces, homes and communities. The ideas hopefully provide the bare bones of a decentralist approach which avoids the formation of a bureaucracy while effectively coordinating social life on a libertarian basis. Experiences with self-management are both part of America’s history and part of its potential. Reforms and revolutions involving shared job control and sometimes ownership have been positive forces in Sweden, Yugoslavia, China, and to some extent in Japan and Puerto Rico. Even some Americans with power have begun to offer ways by which workers can share income and responsibility.
Our efforts in the workplace could be trivialized, just as, for instance, many educational experiments have been. Paulo Friere’s techniques of Praxis were eventually used by the Peace Corps. Free School methods were added to otherwise oppressive public school curricula. Day care centers became institutional families which avoided major economic changes. But self-managed groups can guard against this danger with liberatory techniques, planning and regular self and social criticism.
Applied to the places where we work and live, Decentralism is, at least for me, a matter not of order and efficiency, but of individual and local autonomy. Its thrusts are the broadest possible public involvement in the running of society, the control of work from the bottom up, and participation as a subject—rather than as an object—in the making of history. It is a new assertion of the anarchical spirit of the American Revolution, a spirit which led Jefferson, despite other expansionist errors, to say: “I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the government more at their ease, at the expense of the people.
Decentralism is also an assertion of our unity as people, a unity which is threatened rather than assured by authoritarian structures. Our unity grows instead from diverse and free action, from a sense of social engagement, and from a consciousness of how personal choices affect the whole of humankind.