THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
‘Never follow leaders’ Bob Dylan
I have been doing battle with bureaucracy, involved in a dispute with contractors and ultimately the housing association of which I am a tenant. It has been an interesting exercise and unfortunately an exercise in re-learning what I have long known, that most officials can handle no end of anger and even abuse, since the latter immediately puts the complainant in the wrong and enables your average jobsworth to retain the high moral ground. What they cannot handle is mockery, to have their pomposity pricked and their self importance subject to ridicule. In the face of such a reaction there is no end to the sheer malevolence and pure undiluted spite to which they will resort.
All organisations established on the hierarchical principle descend into bureaucracies that take on a life wholly separate from the founding aims and principles of these organisations and even at times develop trends that are directly hostile to them.
The Housing Association movement has a noble history and much to be proud of, millions of people are currently housed in good quality homes as a consequence of the work of a few idealistic individuals who established the movement. My own association being a particular case in point, established as a response to te rampant exploitation of working people by private landlords it has enabled people like my self to live in affordable homes in central London. The movement still contains, as I can testify, individuals motivated by these ideals and working extraordinarily hard to ensure that tenants receive a good service. It is to them that I dedicate this article.
However as the movement grew and the bureaucracies grew with them top down command hierarchies developed that saw the emergence of organisational man the careerists, jobsworths and pen pushers several times removed from the tenants they are employed to serve. Tenants, being human, are of course awkward they cannot be easily shaped into items on excel spreadsheets, or SMART plans drawn up on flip charts, they are demanding, they adopt lifestyles that create problems for the management of properties, they complain, they are sometimes downright unreasonable. Soon your average jobsworth is beginning to view tenants through hostile eyes. Tenants are to be controlled, kept in their place, carolled; at best a nuisance, the whole organisation would run a lot more smoothly without them, at worst they have become The Enemy.
Now it will be argued that this is a caricature, though if I cannot exaggerate I’m not sure what is the point of opening my mouth, however anyone who works in housing, as I have, will recognise the type.
I suspect that such individuals are universal, you can find them in every culture, every ideology every political system and every organisation. I would contend that they thrive best in hierarchies, collectives developing a culture that keep these people in check.
Again I speak from experience, from 1987 till 1994 I worked for a non-hierarchical collective, providing housing for single homeless people, it was amongst the most idealistic, fruitful and rewarding times of my life. SHP was one of the most innovative and successful of the wave of new homelessness agencies that sprung up in London in the late 1970s. One of the key driving forces behind the early charity was a person who had experienced long-term homelessness, including living in most of the London hostels. He became SHP’s first worker and it was his emphasis on the rights of single homeless people and their need for respect that provided the founding ethos of the organisation. The level of service to residents subsequently developed represented state of the art provision, practices evolved by the organisation became adopted across the field, the interests of residents were central to the ongoing debate as the organisation evolved. I believe that the non hierarchical culture was essential for this develpment. No bosses, everyone paid the same, complete equality, all the creative and imaginative skills of the workers utilised; this in a London wide organisation employing over a hundred staff. This sounds unreal, but I can testify to its success. Consequently I always laugh when people say of anarchism that it is a good idea that could never work in practice.
Maintaining a collective non-hierarchical structure in the hostile climate of a modern capitalist state represents a challenging enough process in itself and the eventual destruction of the collective represented a long and complex process, a story perhaps for another time. One thing I do remember from that period was that every problem within the organisation was blamed on its organisational structure. Yet we are surrounded by malfunctioning hierarchies but nobody suggests, as seems obvious to me, that the organisational structure ,of say G4S, is part of the problem.
For all that we talk about living in a democracy most people spend their lives working in an authoritarian state, this might be benign or highly dictatatorial but whatever it is inimical to equality and free speech. As Nick Cohen writes:-
When you enter your place of work you leave democracy at the door. Just consider all the recent scandals in the banking industry, incidents of supermarket collusion and price fixing, the cartels that have operated in pharmaceuticals, the behaviour of the tobacco industry, or giant corporations like Addidas, McDonalds or Coca Cola, how many employees have spoken out? We are aware of the whistleblowers because they are so few, most employees, for understandable reasons, kept silent. It is hardly surprising in such an atmosphere, where the role of trade unions and independent labour organisations have become so greatly diminished, that the human spirit is so often crushed, that imagination and the ability to fully engage with the world are slowly strangled.
I have also been a manager in the NHS and a number of smaller organisations and can tell you that there is more bullshit talked about management and leadership than almost anything else. In my experience the most benign, the most creative and imaginative manager ultimately engages in acts of infantilising his staff. Of course there are many people who prefer being told what to do, it is the natural order of things, the culture of hierarchy is reinforced everyday, they do not want the burden of democracy and the responsibility that goes with it. Thus it was true that those who most undermined the collective at the end were those in administrative positions who disliked the constant meetings and the responsibility of decision making involved in running a collective, they wanted to ‘get on with their work,’ they longed for someone to tell them what to do.
Though living ones life primarily in an dictatorship has its price, infantalisation is corrosive to the soul and eats away at self respect and personal dignity. Thus the jobsworth knows he has little real power and relieves his sense of impotency on the service users, customers, clients, patients, all whom he sees as lower in the pecking order than himself. This is why mockery is so damaging to the official, to the employee, it exposes in an instant their real degree of impotence.
Which is were I came in. My own dispute with the hierarchy, though petty in the great scheme of things is of course important to me. It is only one of millions of disputes going on between lone individuals and hierarchies of varying scale and authority. I have been extraordinarily fortunate in that the person most directly responsible for my case is very much in the mould of those who established the housing association movement in the first place, civilised and humane, like countless others working in the voluntary, statutory, and private sectors fighting to keep organisations human, often swimming exhaustedly against the tide. They are, to adapt/coin a phrase The Ghost in the Machine, the soul of soulless institutions. Without them all our lives would be even more diminished than they already are.
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