Page 12 RAIN June 1979 byTom Bender I. Sitting down to write this morning, I've become aware that my perceptions have made another distinct shift over the last few months. Seeing a full-page "definition" of a.t. in a government proposal, I flashed back to Schumacher's four-word definition - simple, sustainable, small and non-violent. I realized that my own sense of "appropriate technology" had shifted to "what follows naturally in the absence of special conditions favoring largeness, concentration and exploitation." A.T. does not need our close attention now. It will flower whenever it is not crushed. It is the favoritism towards bigness, and its causes, that now needs our attention and action. The words of Frances Moore Lappe and Joe Collins ring ever clearer-"The introduction of any profitable technology in a society riddled with inequality only worsens that inequality." What must now be dealt with is not legislation and subsidies favoring a.t., but correcting and removing the regulations, subsidies, practices and beliefs based on exploiting people, resources, and our future for the benefit of a few. A token federal solar tax credit is fine, but in its next breath Congress turns around to deregulate oil and hand the oil companies a $45 billion windfall. A battle of subsidies and legislation is a battle of power, and without enough of us knowing how we're being milked and bilked; who's doing it, how and why; how power flows and is exploited in our society; and how to create alternatives, we don't have a mouse's chance in an elephant dance to have any effect. What we're concerned with is a good society and how to obtain and sustain it. Our development of technological alternatives has revealed two important things. It has shown how technological choices have been exploited by decision-makers to serve the benefits of powerful and weal thy interests. And it has made it clear how tech.nologies have been developed and the institutions of our society reshaped specifically to further the domination of wealth and power. Nuclear power has been consciously promoted to provide subsidized energy to continue automation and elimination of jobs to undermine unions. Below-parity farm price supports have been shown to have been a specific action directed to force into bankruptcy small farmers without access to tax favoritism of large farmers. Health insurance has made the doctors wealthier, not the patients. Credit buying has raised prices by almost 20 percent-that's quite a service to the shopper. We have had the livelihood of a third of our farmers taken away by legislative edict. We have had citizen leaders assassinated by our government's FBI and CIA agents. We have supported fascist dictators and murdered democratic leaders of other countries. There is much that does not show in our newspapers and TV, and much that needs fundamental change. A single company (GM) has the power to blackmail the railroads into purchasing their locomotives or lose the shipping of 40 perc~nt of all autos built in the country, and to repeatedly buy off anti-trust suits by the Justice Department. Fifty companies (that's the equivalent of one per state) now control 90 percent of the profits in food manufacturing in the U.S. The largest two-Unilever and Nestle S.A.-are not even U.S. companies. That concentration of power is a threat to every citizen. Ironically, that power represents and has been built by our own money. We are having our land, our livelihood, and our freedom taken from us and given into the hands 'of an elite and unscrupulous minority who have shown again and again that they seek only their own benefit and are callously indifferent to the rights and needs of others. But in the flowering of every dream lies the seed of its own downfall. The maturing of Corporate America has made its culmination ever more apparent. And in the act of ruling America, the rulers have shown their hand. With visibility comes understanding and reaction. Already strong and healthy manifestations of alternate dreams are emerging that can reo store balance to our society. Our first task is understandingas free from our own preconceptions as possible-both the realities of what exists and of what can be. And with it comes our main task, the construction and evolu tion out of the different beliefs, understandings, dreams and fears that each of us hold, a truly democratic, egalitarian and sustainable society that raises our spirits rather than our debts. The debates and feelings that run high between Capitalism and Socialism and Democracy and Communism and Left-Wing and Right-Wing and Broken-Wing are largely manufactured . and hollow struttings, seeking small differences where sameness predominates. A bureaucracy, whether corporate or governmental, is still a bureaucracy. Do they differ, or do they share being a problem? Is Capitalism or Communism better to live under, or have they both dismal records of being merely concerned with materialistic expansion of our society? Are the huge farmer's co-ops that have squeezed other farmers out of business any different than Corporate America? Is or isn't there a fundamental difference between a Ma and Pa grocery, a Plaid Pantry and a co-op, all of which sell at the same scale and prices? Is making-a-living self-employment Capitalism the same as making-a-killing Corporate Capitalism? If a RightWing group grabs the issue of controlling government spending before a Left-Wing group, does that make the idea suddenly evil? What differences are there between a nationalized industry and a government-regulated monopoly? Our simple ideologies don't work. Any institutional system grows lax and sloppy and fossilized over time-regardless of its ideology or initial behavior. A renewal process and change from one institutional form to another seems essential, as in any living system. A mixed political/economic structure, keeping alternatives alive and flourishing side by side, is probably valuable to keep each element lean and strong. Citizen participation always seems to fall off when problems are under control-why not? Red Bologna would have no pressure to be exemplary if all of Italy was Communist-would it continue as well with its problems largely solved? The success of the Revolu tion in China has bred new problems, as has the success of Capitalism in the U.S. When we talk of politics, we find it hard to talk in the same breath of art, poetry, music, dance, architecture, gardens or beauty, yet the political/economic structure is the structure that makes the other achievable, or even thinkable.
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