January 1982 RAIN Page 17 to do some educating, do some pilot projects. Lord knows that we wouldn't have moved very far at all in appropriate technology and solar energy in this country without some government money in there doing some of the seed work. My guess is things would have moved much more slowly if we had left it totally up to the people in the local community to vote with their dollars because some of the projecs on paper seemed a bit far out, and some of the salespeople for those projects were a bit far out. One of the issues I raised in Helping Ourselves is that there should be neighborhood councils that have a certain amount of money which they can allocate to different self-help projects. I think one of the values of that idea is that you can develop a group of five or ten people at the community level and, through communication and exposure, get them up to speed in terms of what are some of the more progressive things they do in the community. It's a far more difficult thing to do that across the board in almost a voter education effort. What is needed is to set up situations where the people who have control are accountable to the public, and that's why you have to have a decentralized government form; so they can be very accountable. But to make it a pure democracy at that level—I don't find it dangerous, I just think it would be slow. RAIN: Another point you make in the book is that existing social networks in the community—the churches, the Kiwanis clubs, etc.—should be used to spread self-help values. Have you seen much evidence of a shift in emphasis toward self-help among these kinds of organizations? Stokes: No. There's been no concerted effort to get to them. I've been trying to do some articles for their magazines to raise that is- -sue. It's especially important given the Reagan initiatives on voluntarism. The old-style voluntarism is passe, and the new style is self- help. The level of traditional voluntarism has not increased much at all in the last decade and that's understandable. More women (who once made up the prime resource for voluntary activity) have entered the workforce. Inflation has forced people to either work more or do more for themselves, and that has led to a real upsurge in self- help voluntarism—either individually (planting a garden, putting a solar collector on one's roof) or community-oriented in terms of things like weatherization. The importance of the Kiwanis clubs, women's home auxiliaries and so on is that they can help turn self- help voluntarism (which as I said, is often inwardly directed) outward into the community. They have the experience, the knowhow, the legitimacy in the community to do that kind of thing. As irrelevant as the Kiwanis clubs have been in many communities other than as old boy networks for the small businessman, their record of good deeds in raising money for crippled children and so on has, over time, built up a certain trust, and it's important to see to what extent one can work with these groups. But I also see a whole lot of potential problems there. The best example of that I can think of is my mother is president of the hospital auxiliary in my home town. They raise scads of money for the hospital and put in thousands of volunteer hours. But they use the money they raise to buy things like CAT scanners. I pointed out to my mother that that was an incredibly capital intensive piece of technology and asked if they had ever considered using the money to hire part-time physician assistant types who could do door-to- door health care planning and in that way cut down the strain on the medical care system as well as improve the people's health. No. It was just an idea which had never crossed their minds. RAIN: You describe in Helping Ourselves how self-reliant values flow out of personal involvement in self-help projects. For example, by getting involved in an energy conservation program, people come to realize how their personal behavior relates to dwindling energy resources. Yet you also note that many people don't make the first move to become involved because of an apathy or fear of taking risks which is rooted in long-term poverty or powerlessness. Do you have any thoughts on ways that this barrier can be overcome—that existing community groups can draw the net wider and encourage more people to make the first move? Stokes: That's a good point. It's an issue I only deal with slightly in the book because I don't have a whole lot of what I consider to be very firm well thought out answers. I think we have to realize that the history of organizing in this country, or any country, is a history of two steps forward, one step back. We're talking about moving a very large and ponderous system, turning it in a totally new direction, so the failure rate is going to be real high. And we will get discouraged and burn out, there's no doubt about that. But hopefully we can reduce that to a bare minimum and hopefully we can take some of the negative side of organizing—what you're saying about people being difficult to organize because they've been beaten We need people to say "No, we can handle this ourselves." down so many times—and minimize that, too. But I don't think we can ever avoid it, because there's a utopianism involved in the idea that somehow we can devise a scheme that will bring everybody along at the same speed. It's almost a politician's technological fix: the belief that somehow we can find the perfect system rather than recognizing that maybe the chaos that is reality cannot be solved, only managed. In a political sense, the way that we manage it is to realize there's going to be a lot of fallout and a lot of people are never going to become involved. They're just too burned out or lazy or uninformed or whatever. We have to assume that's always the case, and yet, while assuming it, not lapse into an elitist approach that says "alright, that means a handful of us are really going to do it." That was Lenin's argument in State and Revolution—that what you need is the "vanguard of the proletariat," the party. Well, that led to the party running the country, and people having nothing to say about it. RAIN: The next question is somewhat related. You refer in your book to the Mother's Clubs in Indonesia and South Korea as examples of self-help efforts which began as one-issue campaigns (birth control) and gradually expanded to include a whole range of economic and social issues. But, you also note that many other self- help efforts have remained one-dimensional and have been frustrated because they were not part of a broader movement for change. What are some of the elements which help successful groups like the Mother's Clubs to achieve a larger view of the world and expand their concerns? Stokes: One element is the severe, almost desperate nature of problems facing these women. Their poverty is so all-pervasive that there are a hundred things they want to accomplish. Family planning probably wasn't even the first one on the list, but it was the first thing they could get some government money for and some government organizers to help them with. So, they had some good leadership and some good initiatives from government, coupled with really severe conditions. The programs may possibly also have been helped by the fact that in both Indonesia and South Korea there are certain sertors of the economy which are moving ahead very rapidly, leading to hope that things can get better. I think that in the United States one of the difficulties in building the coalitions, building on different actions, is that our problems are not that severe—especially those we've been dealing with in terms of quasi-middle class organizing. For example, I organized a housing co-op in the building 1 lived in here in Washington. Well, we thought of taking that co-op the next step and putting in a food cont.-
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