Howard Zinn Discusses the "Alliance"
On April 22, 1996, Calvin Simons, co-founder of a chapter
of the Alliance in Sonoma County, interviewed Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus
of History and Political Science at Boston University and author of A People's
History of the United States. The topic was the Alliance movement in the
United States; a populist movement recently launched by journalist Ronnie
Dugger. The following is excerpted from Zinn's remarks.
I think this is a special moment in history for the Alliance because we
are at one of those points where the similarity of the two major parties
of the day on the important issues is more evident than it has been in a
long time. The Democratic and Republican parties today are both very closely
connected with corporate wealth; they both have the same fundamental foreign
policy; they both support enormous military budgets and only differ in small
ways on how much social spending there should be to take care of human needs
in this country. The problem now for the Alliance is to concentrate on issues
that form a common denominator to the environmental movement, the women's
movement, the labor movement, the black movement, and I think it is possible
to do that.
If I had to identify what that common denominator is, I would say it is
the issue of how we distribute our national wealth rationally and justly.
How do we take the $265 billion in the military budget and adapt it for
human needs? How do we change the tax structure so that we take back the
trillion dollars or so that went to the upper 1 percent of the population
as a result of what they call "tax reform" in the last 15 years?
How do we take that huge sum of money and use it for all of those things
we claim we don't have money for?
What to do with this wealth is something that touches on the problems of
Black people, Latino people, people who live in the cities, and people who
are the victims of crime, poverty and drugs. It touches on women's issues,
because so many women's issues depend on how we help women who are in need,
who are taking care of children and who have no help. It touches on the
environmental problem because there seems to be no money in the budget to
take care of cleaning up the air, cleaning up the water, creating a mass
transit system, and so on. I think the careful building of this Alliance
and of a movement is a good tactic. When you have a great national movement-and
this happened during the civil rights movement, it happened in the anti-war
movement in the Vietnam years-it doesn't matter whether you have a Republican
party in power or a Democratic party in power. If the movement is large
enough, if the public opinion is strong enough, the heads of government
are very sensitive to what they perceive as a threat to their power, and
they will then respond. Nixon, the Republican, had to respond to what was
an overwhelming anti-war movement. Kennedy came into office not planning
to do anything about civil rights; he had to respond to the mass demonstrations
in Birmingham.
The heart of the matter in our society is corporate control of the economy,
and the reason it's difficult is that corporations are a power outside the
political process. They are feudal entities; they are little dictatorships.
I think ultimately the way to begin to bring corporate power under control
is by organizing in two different areas. One is in the area of the work
place. The only time General Motors and Ford and U.S. Steel began to come
under some kind of democratic pressure was when the workers organized there-direct
action in the work place against the power of the corporations. The other
place is the community. Consider the economic power of the boycott. Here
in California, how did the United Farm workers begin to have some effect
on the corporate control of agriculture? By organizing a national boycott.
The corporations respond to economic fear. Of course, this is hard work.
It's a problem of looking around in a community and seeing what small piece
of the larger problem you can work on.
Here in California, the issue of affirmative action has become a very important
one. It is an issue in the California educational system. It is very important
for the Alliance to build its strength and influence by speaking to the
needs of those people who are served by affirmative action-women, minorities,
Black people-and carry a campaign on an issue that can be won. For several
hundred years we have had affirmative action for white males. The G.I. Bill
was an affirmative action for veterans. People didn't dare complain against
the G.I. Bill because it was invested with patriotism and the flag and war
and all of that. That also was a situation where we gave an advantage to
people we thought had been disadvantaged, and it's the same kind of principle.
All that is being asked is a few years of affirmative action for Blacks
and women and other people. It is a matter of restoring a kind of justice.
So I think it's an issue in which people can be persuaded.
The question of employment is absolutely basic to solving the economic problems
of the country, and neither party has addressed it. The Democratic party
comes forward with weak proposals like more training. You can train people
and train people and train people, but there are many highly trained people
who are losing their jobs these days. What we require is a full employment
program-the enforcement of the employment act of 1946. Right after the war,
a full employment act was passed. We convinced the federal government to
see that there was full employment. We need to go back to the New Deal idea:
if private enterprise won't create jobs for people, then the government
will create jobs for people-guaranteed employment for anybody who wants
work.
Now of course that takes money. Roosevelt had to spend money in order to
create public works programs. And he had to go into debt, and he had to
unbalance the budget. We have to get away from the fixation of a balanced
budget, and we have to make it clear that the money for full employment
exists. The money is there in the military budget; it's there in the huge
amount of wealth concentrated at the top. Solving the problem of employment
will immediately have an effect on the wage structure all over the country.
One of the reasons wages have been going down is because of this great surplus
of labor, and I think that is crucial.
In early June there is going to be a gathering in Washington around the
issues of the rights of children. They are going to try to bring a million
people to Washington to speak for children. There is a common denominator:
Clearly children are the first victims of cutbacks in social services and
education and health programs and so on. When I think of networking, I think
of this children's march, which has already been endorsed by hundreds of
organizations around the country.
Look at the Million Man March. Whatever qualms you might have about Farrakhan
and his ideology, the fact is that huge numbers of Black men around the
country came to Washington, and I don't think they came because of Farrakhan;
they came because something in their lives impelled them to want to make
a statement about the way they are living now and how they want to live
and somebody said, "Here's the time, here's the place-come." The
possibility for applying that to other issues is there.
One thing we can learn from the movements of the last 20 or 30 years -the
anti-war movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the civil rights movement,
the disabled people's movement -is that obstacles which seem insuperable-the
power of the government, the power of some entrenched groups-could be overcome
if enough people organized and persistently stuck it out. These movements
started out with very small numbers of people, and their situation seemed
hopeless. What could seem more hopeless than for black people in Mississippi
to change the power structure of Mississippi? What could seem more hopeless
than for a handful of anti-war people in 1965 to transform themselves into
a national movement that could help bring the war to an end? The New England
Anti-Slavery Society started with seven people: the first subscribers to
Garrison's Liberator. The great lesson of those movements is for people
not to despair. Small movements become great movements if people persist.
A new political movement has to get large numbers of people to work for
it, based on their enthusiasm and their moral convictions. But I think it
can be done. It's a matter of appealing to other people in the community
around issues that they care about, bringing them together more and more,
letting people see who you are, getting on radio and television, writing
letters to the editor, becoming a more visible force in the community. There
is a large potential of people out there who feel exactly the same way that
people in the Alliance do. There is a huge amount of alienation in the country
from the political process, a huge amount of disillusion about the way the
economic system is working. I think that if they hear about a group that
speaks to things that are on their mind, you will see people coming around.