Photo: UNICEF

THIS magazine is about power and how it is exercised and also about when people cry ‘enough’ and join together to change their situation. But power is never waiting to be taken. It is always being exercised by another group, so community action involves a redistribution of power and can mean clashes with time-honoured systems of law or custom — fighting high food prices or school or health cutbacks, corruption or race or sex discrimination.

Often such conflicts produce concrete results. At the workplace taking a share of the
decision-making can mean winning a degree of self-management, like achievements on the shop-floor at Volvo where teams take single cars from the bare frame to completion instead of standing on depersonalised assembly lines. It can apply just as much to management boards, like those of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain where each group of the workforce has its own representative.

Why is there usually such little participation? Generally this is because apathy, obedience to arbitrary authority or the reluctance to take risks. Of course we are not born with such negative characteristics. They are nurtured by:

• Lack of information. Decisions on complex matters need an understanding of what lies behind them. Too often there isn’t the information or the time for individuals to make up their own minds. ‘Far better’, the argument goes, ‘to leave the decisions to those who know about these matters.’ And so the political and bureaucratic arteries harden.

For the low income countries the information problems are compounded by tragile communications networks and the illiteracy of half their adults. Whatever the geographical location there appears to be an irresistable logic which ensures that information flows upwards and decisions come downwards. It is the logic, for example, behind the new business intelligence company to be fronted by Brandt Commissioner Edward Heath, and including ex-World Bank President Robert MacNamara. International Reporting Information System will provide its computerised information service at the touch of a button on any international economic topic for modest fees of around $250,000 a year — an information service hardly accessible to the person in the street.

Much cheaper access to information whether through mass literacy campaigns, or the opening of company finance books or government files would be a lot more relevant.

• Massive technology. Small may be beautiful but big is definitely thought better. Since the Industrial Revolution the world has been adopting economies of scale. And giant factories are difficult for the small person to control.

• Conditioning for passivity. Mental constraints are the greatest cause of passivity with subservient attitudes probably at their worst in the Soviet Union. Fear is a great pacifier. The Gulag Archipeligo awaits dissidents. Russians have learnt the hard way that the elite Communist Party is in charge.

But docility doesn’t have to be directly instilled by the government. It can be done more subtly through traditions of class deference. What is it, for instance, which impels the British electorate to vote for an administration where 90 per cent of the senior ministers come from public schools, when only 3 per cent of the public’s children were able to receive such an education?

Nevertheless people are prepared to spend time learning, to brave the chance of a midnight knock at the door by a menacing figure, and to risk being ostracised for going against the norm. Their resolve is stiffened by the knowledge that if they don’t fight for their rights no-one else will. For community action is the best way to provide such basic needs as housing, clothing, food or work in the Third World. If all the people in the village participate in the decisions about the planting, harvesting and distribution of food, for example, then it is far less likely that anyone will go hungry. A worthwhile bonus too, is that such involvement gives people a sense of pride in their own effectiveness.

However, there is a dramatic difference between community action over single issues, and actions which aim at sharing power. It is the difference between reform and revolution. A community can mobilise for a certain goal, for example agitating for a larger fertiliser allocation to the local farming cooperative. But there will usually be no question of controlling the machinery which decides on the allocation.
The inspiration from a successful community project too often dribbles away into the sand instead of surging on to more ambitious goals. A heartening example of the tide being taken at the flood, however, is Poland’s Solidarity movement. Collective action against food price hikes were successful, they led to other demands. Free and independent trade unions were conceded by the government. But even this is not enough for a significant number of the Solidarity activists who are now after the whole hog — a representative government.

Such battles to organise collectively and democratically have been fought under many banners. Political freedoms have well-known landmarks in the West — the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the English Civil War. But much of this has gone sour. What use, people ask, is a vote when wealth and all the power that it brings is so grossly skewed. Even as sterling an example of equality as Australia still has a fifth of the population owning three-quarters of the nation’s wealth.

At the workplace, trade union rights were fought for and won in a series of running battles around the turn of the century. However, from a starting point of sympathy and protection for the underdog, many of these organisations today are as jealous for their power as any bureaucracy. Democratic challenge from below is squashed.

Yet despite the obstacles there are signs of hope that people are willing and able to take more responsibility in the running of their lives. And the brightest chances appear to lie with industrial and farming co-operatives.

That too, is what this magazine is about. Undoubtedly greater participation would be a better direction for both the underdeveloped and the overdeveloped world. For the poor world genuine community involvement could generate the enthusiasm and energy needed to break the spiral of despair that afflicts so many. For the rich world with its mania for growth, more people’s involvement might bring lower productivity but it might also help switch off the police sirens.