authoritarian state, that's the way to do it. You start beating heads real quick. But that's not the way most people are. This is, after all, a fairly liberal society, and lags behind. It's one of the glories of living in this country. Hannah Arendt used to say there are a lot of fascists in this country, but no fascist constituency. I think that's the key to the thing. Really, this is still a relatively free country, and I think the authoritarians will always be behind. Hallelujah! Rain: That's an optimistic note. Hess: There's another point about that: why be anything but an optimist? Rain: Well, there are reasons ... Hess: One of the reasons I'm optimistic is that there are now "aged hippies." When I talk to old people these days, I don't feel like I'm organizing them. I feel like I'm organizing us! There's a tremendous difference. The wonderful thing is we are now moving into a period when the counter culture is a generation and more deep. Whole new vistas open up. And there's a competency explosion. You finally have to go to your local hippy to get anythfog done well. Who would trust a short-haired auto mechanic? Rain: It's not just at the hands-on level, either. Some of the best economists and designers and architects are long-haired people. What happened during the '70s when it looked as if we were halfasleep is that we educated and trained ourselves. Hess: There is this whole gang of ingenious, cooperative people clustered on this continent now, and some people, when they say "American," mean that. To be an American now can be a very proud thing, and when you talk to people and say first, "I love this country, but I hate the government" -that's a good distinctionand make it clear that you're really not knocking everything, then it seems to me that you can make the most extraordinary proposals and people will at least listen. "You have to go to your local hippie to get anything done well. Who would trust a short-haired auto mechanic?" This is not the first time Karl Hess has appeared in RAIN' s pages. For five years he worked in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington , DC, trying to bring to life the ideas for urban selfreliance he and David Morris had written about in Neighborhood Power (1975, $3.45 from Beacon Press, Boston, MAJ. He considers this experiment a noble failure, which he has ruminated upon in Stepping Stones, RAIN (V:2:18 and V:10:18), and in his book Community Technology (1979, $2.95 from Harper Colophon Books, New York, NY). David Morris, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (Washington, DC), appraised Community Technology quite critically in RAIN (VI: 1: 14). With Karl sitting in our kitchen a few months later, the temptation to drop a match to the oil was irresistible. Rain: We'd be curious to know your reactions to criticisms by David Morris of your book Community Technology. He basically says that your politics are too personalistic and that you ignore what he calls institution building and power building. Hess: Well, I didn't ignore it. I meant to speak against it. I feel that power building in any institutional sense is to lose the fight before you start. If the counter attack to institutional power is counterinstitutional power you, by definition, have lost. You've simply taken the most disagreeable features of the things that you are opposed to and have internalized them. You've agreed, in effect, to live the way that they live. I don't want to do that. I think that David's criticism is a decent and accurate one, but the point is, it's deliberate: it's not ignoring, but rather, taking a position. My position would be that in Adams Morgan, the problem was that finally the neighborhood moved toward the re-creation of the kind of institutions that had oppressed it. November 1980 RAIN Page 11 It would be instructive to see how or if David, with the Institute for Local Self Reliance, has been able to resist all of the institutional problems that he once fought. I'm dubious. I'm as skeptical of that as he is of my position. Adams Morgan, no matter what he says, is not the neighborhood that it had the potential to be. It's now an upper middle class, boutique neighborhood, and it has traditional politics. I don't close my eyes to it. I object to it. He's got an organization that has become very successful, quite large, and should have practical experience in resisting that bureaucratization. How he does it will be an important revelation. I think it's going to be difficult. Like the [California] Office of Appropriate Technology, or any such thing. The intentions of the people involved in such institutions sooner or later become blunted by the demands of the institution itself. There's so much evidence about that, it's reckless to ignore it. As to whether we can get from here to there without it is, again, merely optimistic, but it occurs to me that we are doing it, that the things which endure have done it. Th~re are co-ops, there are worker-managed businesses, and there are schools and other things that have endured without becoming institutionalized. The problem is, not everyone can get from here to there at the same time, and I think we are so beguiled by the liberal notion of equality across the board that it is offensive to think that anybody gets there before anybody else, and it is troubling to think that middle class people will probably get there first. So, some people, whose concerns are for the very poor people, will naturally be troubled by that. I understand the offense that can be taken but I think the reality of the situation is that poor people generally have had a very low capacity for organizing. Most social change in the world has been change either by disaffected aristocrats or by the middle class. I think that was changing in this country prior to the Progressive era, and there were a lot of poor people then who were organizing on their own behalf, but it occurs to me it is possible to say the Progressive era stopped that and has possibly wiped it out. The black movement (and that's a ve·ry sensitive thing in the Adams Morgan story) has generally opted for the building not of alternative, but of counter institutions, and that has been a failure. That is to say, the building of big black businesses has been like the "All my politics are very personalistic. You're damn right they are." building of anything else, and the building of community black political power, if it is done through the traditional parties, has produced politicians who are primarily Democrats and Republicans. You have lone voices now and then, like Jesse Jackson, talking about something else, which is building power at the lowest possible levels, changing the way people think (a cultural revolution as opposed to a political revolution), but the black movement continues to move along the lines of building power. Well, we'll see. I think it's a failure so far and I think it will continue to be a failure, but I'm not omniscient. All my politics are very personalistic. You're damn right they are. In fact, I think that I would now mistrust any politics that could not be described by a person on personal terms. If they could not tell me precisely what they intended to get out of it and how they were going to live in the changed society, I wouldn't be interested in their notions of change. So that's a valid criticism, and there we are: there's the contention and I admit to everything that David said. He's very astute and knows what he's talking about. It's a choice. You make choices. Rain: Those are interesting responses. We're glad to hear them. Hess: It's the best response I can come up with. I learned a long time ago that I don't have the wit for universal solutions, and I'm more and more convinced of that as times goes on. My business is not the business of finding solutions, but the business of living in a community. That's a very personalized thing and very limited, and I think it should be subjected to all David's criticisms except one: that it's incorrect, because none of us know. That's what we're trying to find out. OD
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz