Public Affairs; Don Devereux and Dallas Smythe: Wall To Wall Turnips: The Village Revitalized

This is how often speaking from the Center for the Study of democratic institutions in Santa Barbara. Abraham Lincoln once said that the role of government is to do for the people what needs to be done that they can't do for themselves. Today is the pervasive impact of technology produces more and more centralization more and more impersonal bureaucracies. The people grow increasingly distant from the decisions affecting their lives across the land in communities as diverse as the people who make them up. People are now seeking ways to do for themselves what needs to be done for people by themselves. These models of imaginative community organization can be found in the bootstrap enterprises springing up in black communities in the Community Corporation models such as the Eastern Columbus community organization eco in Columbus Ohio. They are the impetus behind the demand for decentralized school boards and they can be seen in sharp relief in the successful experiments now going on in New Mexico in a migrant program

called Home Education livelihood program. Help. Admittedly all these models are small and contain they take in comparatively small numbers of people within a relatively small geographic area with fairly defined objectives. They play no real part within the mainstream of the American political social or economic scene. In fact they are for the most part concerned with the poor and those already effectively disenfranchised. But so far the imagination of man has failed to outdistance the efficiency of the machine or to produce the inspiration for a great model that will return to the electorate as a whole. A decisive voice in their own affairs. It may be at least it is the hope of people presently experimenting in programs of community organization that out of these models may come some experience that will be relevant to regional or national problems. These experiments occasionally been misinterpreted as being related to the tradition of states

rights that has been identified with American conservatism for many years. For the speakers in our broadcast today the end and the means and the rhetoric are different. Their programs reach outside the traditional political establishment to empower the people to form their own associations for the solution of their own problems. Our guests are Don Devereaux of Santa Fe New Mexico and Alice Smyth of Canada. Mr. Devereaux has been instrumental in recent years when American affluence has been great in organizing community collectives among the poor in New Mexico. Dallas Smyth professor of economics at the University of Saskatchewan organized similar cooperatives in Canada during the depths of the depression in the 30s. Their conversation was recorded. The first choice is Mr. Devereux knows as he outlines the brief history of the migrant program in New Mexico. The migrant program in New Mexico is called Help. It's funded by

Title 3 b u b o u act and most recently by the Ford Foundation. And is a rather large program working all over the rural counties of the state primarily originally in areas of education and housing childcare. But most recently trying to move from its earlier service orientation into the actual creation of economic and political power in the hands of the Mexican-American rural community. And in this process it has gotten involved in the development of models of business and Agricultural Organization that are proving rather unique and almost surprisingly successful in agriculture for example we're trying to work with migrants in their home base areas where they may possess 8 10 15 acres of land that they've either been barely using at all or perhaps using an alfalfa and other forage crops and converting into

commercial labor intensive agricultural uses. And creating through cooperative organization the kinds of economy of size that allows us at least into the realm of intermediate technology and thereby some beginnings of fairly adequate stable income for these families that heretofore have more apps been making twelve hundred fifteen hundred dollars a year. Adequate incomes I'm talking really still low income three to four thousand dollars a year is our realistic target at this point in the nature of village industries we've been spawning. Oh perhaps six to date. Trying to find ways in which we can sort of almost drop protective wall around rural New Mexico and insist that things that the state or the federal government is needing and contracting for in that area be opened up to competitive bidding possibilities buying new organizational activities

in the rural areas. This involves a crate manufacturing plant for example in the village of Ela Votto a flag making operation and Jasko textile operation and true wood products toys and furniture primarily. These are all villages that heretofore have been pretty much devoid of anything like local economic activity. This is being done Moreover with an eye toward really a kind of radical social change an effort to not just emulate the typical economic activity of the dominant Anglo society but to try to find ways in which we can create new community concepts new collective cooperative concepts of business organisation. And I really think that the latter is more important than the achievement of economic activity persay. We've done this in a variety of ways in working with the rural villagers which they themselves have been a participant in

the attitudes and decisions that are involved. This means for example that we are not using individual incentives in the village shops but group incentives and that as profits are reached in a village shop the wages are not raised completely in accord with the profit level we have a formula used concept. So that's some of the profit margin is used to generate further activity for other people who are in a century the same situation we're providing the maximum possible work or determination of the production system. The concept of what the job involves the rotation of jobs etc.. We're trying to build really an almost socialist model really within the framework of the corporation which is proving curiously adaptable to this and trying to find ways in which we can reinforce the cooperative component of this activity in such a way that we're not going to be simply moving villagers up into

perhaps a rather bad carbon copies of the traditional economic system as look like in America for a long long time a highly competitive in many senses a highly irresponsible activity. And this is the general frame of reference in which we're operating. It's still very much at the experimental level. We've had enough kind of incipient successes that I think we can hopefully project with a good deal of encouragement. The fact that many of these things are going to take and are going to spread. While nothing I say should be taken as discouraging in its intent. Whatever you may sound like on the surface and I'd like to say that it seems wonderful to me to hear the kind of spontaneous creative activity which is going on under this general heading of your help program. But how can you protect help against the consequences of success.

That's the big question. It's a lot easier to operate in some areas admittedly around problems of problems and problems. And a measure of even failure temporarily. Case in point we've had some marvelous instances of misfortune which in themselves have been curiously cementing around the kinds of values that we're talking about. We had for example very little agricultural expertise in our cooperatives they were agricultural projects designed by sociologists and the participants in them were for the most part men who had had very minimal experience in commercial crops. We had one series of fellows for example in the more of a valley of northern Mexico who without any adequate instruction from us in the planning of turnips decided to broadcast seed an immense area of the more a valley in turnips and they literally broadcast seed and as a consequence rather than having rogue crops we have a wall the wall turn

of one part of them or a valley 15 tons per acre. Turn it touching turn of touching turn up. It was a curious situation and out of it because of the sudden volume of turnips we had actually we came up with some pretty good ideas we were forced to think in terms of selling outside the state so we ended up shipping to El Paso and all over the place. But it provided us with some very serious problems. We have had many other problems in similar sorts of ways where then without much real information or planning wrong species of vegetables we had a flat cabbage for example that somehow got into our cooperative last year that runs up to 35 pounds ahead. If you can imagine trying to persuade a housewife at the Safeway store to pay 12 cents a pound for a 35 pound cabbage all of these kinds of problems which occur inevitably are in themselves quite useful in terms of the the social dynamics of having to solve them and the kind of humor that's necessary but the success thing is going to be I think

the hardest of all the nuts to crack. All that you've been talking about are really technological innovations for the poor migrants models of business and I recall general organization and you talked about your wall to wall turnips and the huge cabbages these are technical problems not in the engineering sense but in the social technical sense. And sure they are those things that are going to try and test your movement and will stimulate it and make it grow. Let's assume that it does grow that it surmounts these. The question I'm really raising is how can you cope with this kind of technological success in light of the fact that the values in the surrounding social organization are inimical to those which you say you know what co-ops are interested in developing.

This is one of the things that I think makes the cooperative and the collective model of development in our minority communities so very exciting right now because of its possibilities of not only providing a kind of economic redemption for them but perhaps a sort of so societal redemption for the rest of us. Now I admit that it poses some very severe problems it's extremely simple under the influences of relative success to be corrupted by the essential values of the overall society which are still highly competitive highly individualistic highly acquisitive in terms of all the the trappings of the middle class. I honestly can't answer that question. We are trying to provide the kind of continuing education and involvement in these programs that will continue to reinforce the New Year migrants have television sets. A few do most don't.

Do they watch the popular programs that are broadcast. A few do and again most don't. This is a technological problem also in the sense that a lot of rural Mexico at the present time is sufficiently far removed from any broadcasting facilities that even if the migrant family could somehow put together the money to buy a set it isn't feasible now perhaps in the not too distant future. The technical aspects will be different and they will be plugged into the mass media in a large and perhaps a very unhealthy sort of way. I don't know. Well this is precisely the point I wanted to make how can you hope to in order to get them to develop their own indigenous cooperative society when they are being constantly bombarded with consumers in the mass media. This is a problem that's world wide in its scope but wherever American mass media material are going out in Africa South America you have the same problem. And I'd like to know what kind of

answer you can give for I have a kind of a clue myself as to the direction in which one could look for an answer but I don't know how to explore it or formulate it. It is simply this that one ought to look to the possibilities of exploiting and developing the strength of the backwardness of these countries in other ways to practice jujitsu on the problem to cultivate this detachment from the main stream technological order. I think this is very important work for example right now and just in technology having to confront what is really a large gap in American technology. The whole intermediate range. There is no question for example that when we're talking about the development of agricultural cooperatives with conversion to commercial agriculture etc. that we have to be talking in terms of some technological upgrading. We're not anymore going to be ploughing with

with horses. We're going to begin using fertilizers and better seed and all of this kind of thing some technology is inevitable or discovering however that the the major technological advances are so focused right now on the very large concepts of technology that the whole intermediate range does not receive much attention. And this is the range I think at which we are really concerned about moving into and probably staying for a good long time. It may be possible in that sense to turn some of these so-called liabilities of these people into real assets because they are remarkably adaptive and innovative at working out curious combinations of traditional and intermediate ranges of their approaches to farming and are probably going to produce higher yields breaker than a lot of people would be doing totally dependent upon modern technology. What you're talking about again the production front and I'm concerned with your flanks and your rear not your not your production

front. And I'm wondering what you can do to protect your flanks in your rear. Joe Clapper for example not long ago testified before one of these committees on winning the Cold War the House of Representatives talking about the impact the mass media. He was asked whether the popular music was good propaganda for the American system. And he said he thought it was that it cultivated a sympathetic view which later conversion could take place. It wasn't going to convert anybody by itself but it is stablished credibility confidence and so forth. Your people are being bombarded with all of the propaganda of consumerism. Just like people in any other part of the world or so-called underdeveloped. What can you do to send out reconnaissance parties and build the fences on your flanks in your rear. Because this is where you're really most in danger not on

your production front I would approach that really on two levels. Let's address ourselves right off the bat to mass media. The conference was recently held right here in Santa Barbara at the center involving ethnically oriented radio and radio still in most of Mexico for example is still the most important medium. I think there are in this country 200 some. So-called soul stations radio stations that are almost exclusively aimed at the black town the black urban ghettos of America. It was discovered in the process of organizing this conference that perhaps only seven of these or so a very tiny percentage are actually owned and operated by blacks. Most of them are owned and operated by whites with black deejays who are just serving as another way of pumping money out of black town and into the white town through advertising etc.. But I think this points to a real pressing need. I think there is a

need for a mass media that services Blacktown. The Mexican rural areas that is owned and operated by them and can be used to reinforce the kinds of processes that I'm talking about not simply a Mexican owned radio station that in reality is owned and operated by a highly acculturated Mexican who is working pretty much within the same premises a predominant society. But I think mass media have to be looked at as something that perhaps is one of the most important trappings of communication to somehow come into the hands of the people that it is designed to serve. You're absolutely right on that. I'm living as you may know up in western Canada where during the nineteen thirties during the Depression they were very hard hit and where a cooperative movement sprang up among white Anglo-Saxon farmers. Who are living on a barter basis for years there because in addition to the depression

they had very severe crop failures for about 8 years in a row and they developed a very elaborate cooperative organization of consumer co-ops producer co-ops Wheat Board for the production and retail and wholesale co-ops a very impressive facade on the outside I served as a director of one of these retail co-ops for three years. And it's perfectly clear that what happened was that these organizations succeeded and there was no continuing ideological content to their program which could make this thing hold together in the sense in which it was originally intended to. As you know the Rochdale pioneers of cooperation were not interested in cash dividends for the sake of cash dividends they were interested in primarily in the Educational Fund which was the purpose of saving money through the Co-operative movement. But these people in Western

Canada have long since forgotten about the educational fund if they ever heard of it and all they are interested in is the cash dividends and the organizations function just like the Safeway or any other commercial corporation functions. And it's this kind of erosion through success that concerned about. Now had American television not come into western Canada in the 50s. I think this erosion would have been very substantial had the Canadian mass media been able to provide an indigenous fair designed by produced and listened to by these people. I think they could have had an enclave living within the predominantly commercial North American environment which would have had viability but they never bothered to acquire any mass media institutions for themselves. They never got a radio station they never got a television station they don't have a daily newspaper which is a very bad mistake and here

they were a substantial part of the population of a political entity analogous to three American states. Yeah well that's not unless unless you people can learn from this kind of experience and protect your cultural flanks right. I think you're going to be in trouble. I think part of the problem in the mass media of course lies in the area of the obvious money. There is a tremendous tendency right now in the Southwest among the Mexican-American community to spawn endless sort of Ross on newspapers. Many of them coming out now. Varying circulation but this is one part of it only because the newspaper is not going to be the major carrier of culture into these homes. Although for the time being it may be for another five or ten years I think the radio even now is certainly the most important medium and probably television will become increasingly important as some of the technological problems of delivery into remote areas are solved. I

think it's an effort though that is going to have to be made quickly and the realisation that it's going to have to be made quickly that the mass media and who controls it is an important and essential asset of any kind of an honest to God sort of cultural revolution and that it's not done there we're apt to have the same kind of erosion you're talking about. Another thing though that I think is the whole educational system not only is in effect radio and TV in most of the Southwest run by the predominant society. But so is the entire educational system the values the sense of history the sense of self-identity the competitiveness all of the aspects of Anglo society are very thoroughly and very consciously developed in the curriculum which Mexican youngsters from the age of first grade to 12th are faced one of the major goals that I would assume would have to be Forth forthcoming really would be the acquisition of the educational system the public educational system by

those people whose children and whose villages that system is functioning and the kind of redesign of an educational system that reinforces once again the basic values of cooperative ism of collectivism of man as a community member that is so important to perpetuating this kind of activity. Increasingly coming to believe that the principal function of any educational system in any society is to reproduce the kind of structure that the dominant power groups in the community want with as little change as possible. So it seems to me that one has to look at the educational system and the mass media as part of the same operation and in fact if you ask what the principal function of the mass media is today it is to educate you. It educates people in various ways in North America it primarily educates them to be good consumers but educated does. Yeah this is true I think. I think these two institutions collectively in the media and the educational

systems are kind of the establishment DNA. That's right. By which the predominant society attempts at least to reproduce itself almost biologically generation upon generation upon generation. And when you begin to monkey with this part of the society structure you're getting into the more sensitive nervous system in this society and you can expect to arouse the kinds of reactions that any organism has when its central nervous system is disturbed. Let me ask you a question that occurs to me as perhaps one we've avoided in many of these discussions on. Is it possible to create a new sort of social man. Community man and get away from. Very systematically the highly individualistic human being. And is this a question of biology. I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a biologist so I really can't answer it. But men like Ari who wrote the territorial imperative and others are giving us kind of a new case of Darwinism today that there are distinct biological limits

around which we must function. And I'm making an assumption in my own preoccupation for trying to achieve a new man and a new community as part of our development process. I'm making an assumption that it's possible. And I'm hoping that I'm right. I'm having to assume that an awful lot of the competitiveness the tendencies toward consumption the acquisitiveness of modern Western man are indeed cultural and that there are cultural mechanisms by which these tendencies toward competition and conflict can be lessened and that the that the cooperative component in the nature of the human being can be emphasized. This is an assumption to be sure but I'm hoping I'm right what is your feeling about the possibilities of deliberately trying to redesign culturally human beings. Well I think this is been progressively what man's been about in the western world in the last couple of centuries beginning with the Enlightenment and

carrying through the Russian And later the Chinese revolutions. And it's seems to me in this connection that one has to look at what is going on in mainland China today. And it's extremely hard especially in the United States and Canada to really know what is going on there but my impression is that this is the central issue which is being fought out largely by peaceable means between the factions in mainland communist China today that they are attempting to do develop policies for cultural growth of people for whom cooperation will be the prime value and not individualism. And this is why they are so down on what happens in the Soviet Union and in the socialist countries in Eastern Europe where the profit motive is being introduced they regard this as a sellout to capitalism. Not that it's being engineered by the Central Intelligence

Agency but because it is philosophically psychologically a sellout to capitalism. And this is the best answer I can give you today I think we have to wait and see. After all if you look at the evolution of mankind one can say that you know in the past five or six hundred years the acquisitiveness and the development of man in the western world for better or worse did result in the development of our technology which we have today. This has certain potential benefits the world as a whole as well as potential catastrophe. And the question is how can man develop a social potential equivalent to his technical potential. Right now as this planet becomes relatively smaller and smaller and smaller with greater and greater numbers of people living on it and more and more complex kinds of involvements and situations. There seems to be little doubt

that unless some systematic effort can be made to cultivate the cooperative man the collective man the man who operates with a high level of social consciousness that this planet is going to be in for some very rough times and there's no built in guarantee that there has to be a happy ending to the story it may very conceivably be a disaster sending but one could hope that we have a fighting chance to do what you're suggesting. I would agree. You have been listening to a conversation recorded at the Center for the Study of democratic institutions in Santa Barbara. Our guests were Don Devereaux who has worked with the program of help in New Mexico and Dallas Smike professor of economics at the University of Saskatchewan Red China Canada. This program is produced by Florence Michel. This is how often speaking from the Center for the Study of democratic institutions in Santa Barbara.