By Joe Mancini
Published in June 1997
The Working Centre was part of a group of citizens and organizations that sponsored a public event at Kitchener City Hall featuring John Sewell, the former mayor of Toronto. He is the sparkplug behind the organization Citizens for Local Democracy which is a citizens group that spontaneously grew to challenge the Torie’s monstrous amalgamation of the Toronto region into a megacity of over 2 million people.
Sewell described the simmering political ferment in Toronto where local citizens wrote over 12,000 letters and made 550 presentations against the mega city proposal at the two-week public hearings. Sewell talked about how Citizens for Local Democracy had transcended political parties and established a community of sorts where people could talk about issues and do something about them.
All this action boiled over because ordinary people know that bigger government means an arrogant and distant administration. Is it inevitable that governments and private corporations must consolidate ever larger organizations under bureaucratic control? Bigger is better must be judged not only by efficiency but by its lingering destructive effects on communities, democracy and responsibility.
Think about the relationship between joblessness and centralization. Large corporations and bureaucracies have unfair advantages because they control the rules, the infrastructure and the money and their mega-structures are increasingly so unaffordable that they are forced to continually lay people off.
Meanwhile some 20% of the labour market is unable to find work. When I am out speaking at churches, schools and community groups, a question that I am often asked is something like, “Why don’t the unemployed have jobs or why don’t they take responsibility for their actions and create a job?” The answer that I always want to quote back comes from Christopher Lasch who answers, “How can responsibility thrive in a world dominated by giant organizations and mass communication?”
Lasch, in the introduction to his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, takes the answer further:
“In the first half of the nineteenth century most people who gave any thought to the matter assumed that democracy had to rest on a broad distribution of property.” People observed that, “a degraded labouring class, at once servile and resentful, lacked the qualities of mind and character essential to democratic citizenship. Democratic habits they thought– self-reliance, responsibility, initiative — were best acquired in the exercise of a trade or the management of a small holding of property. A “competence” as they called it, referred both to property itself and to the intelligence and enterprise required by its management. It stood to reason, therefore that democracy worked best when property was distributed as widely as possible among the citizens.”
The democratic culture of small towns broke down after World War II when cities throughout North America began to develop like sprawling conglomerations with minimal public space and fragile civic identity. This is the way of centralization. It pretends to simplify with one big administration but we end up with vision statements and bureaucracy. It replaces self-reliance and initiative with dull management. John MacLachian Gray, writing in The Globe and Mail, describes this as “too many people are being paid too much money to tell other people what to do, and too few people are being paid too little money to actually do anything.”
Democracy and Right Livelihood are closely related. Robert Theobald describes this as “the desire that people have to make a living in ways which satisfy themselves and respect ecological necessities”. At The Working Centre we see people everyday who are looking for work that has meaning, purpose, joy and a sense of contributing to the greater community – work which fulfils the human spirit.
Thankfully, there is a whole new world of opportunity that is emerging beyond centralized bureaucracy. (See article below – Creating a New Local Order) Our whole thinking of the importance of Local production would take on new meaning if the downtown became a place to trade goods that people actually make in K-W. Local food can be fresher and more nutritious when people switch from packaged, chemical food to locally grown organic food that need not travel more than 40 km rather than the standard 1500 km journey. Local means cheap because there are great savings that go to the producer of local goods as overhead costs are less. Small works because initiative and creativity all flourish with the home producer.
A society of responsibility and competence will come when more opportunities are freed up to make small scale production practical, when the virtues of hard work, thrift and learning a trade can be matched with the ability to practise these virtues. When neighbourhoods develop community tools –projects and cooperative structures that ensure that people have access to productive tools in order to support local producing and trading.
Centralized administrations are increasingly revolting to people. Opportunities to create local culture and products are growing. Local Democracy will once again become important when as Gray puts it, “the real achievers and producers of Canada, the real people who actually perform useful functions in and for and around their communities, can receive the financial and moral support they need to do their work”.
