ORGANIZING THE ORGANIZED

...We need to remind everyone (and ourselves) that capitalism is an old idea, and one which caused so much misery that it led people all over the world to turn in desperation to solutions that themselves turned out to be disastrous...

...And we need to set out boldly to declare our own agenda...

...We have an educational job to do...

...So we need to shake off the burden laid on us, which we have foolishly accepted, of bearing responsibility for the distortions of socialism in various parts of the world...

...That is, we are accepting the Establishment's caricature of us—that our hopes for democratic socialism, or for participatory democracy, or for an egalitarian society (any of these descriptions will do) rested in some way on the bureaucratic pseudo-Marxist societies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...The irresistible popular movements for change in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the great populist surges that toppled the Shah in Iran, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, dictatorships in Latin America...

...the black movement in South Africa, the Palestinian upsurge in the Occupied Territories—all this is evidence of the potential for democratic revolutions everywhere...

...it survives with a surface of great prosperity and a core of economic and cultural sickness...

...socialism...

...This means making clear (if it has not been clear heretofore) that we never were and are not supporters of a bureaucratic, dictatorial pseudoCapitalism is an old idea that caused much misery...

...the substitution of nonmilitary solutions, whether economic pressure or negotiation, on the grounds that recent history shows no gains for human rights through military solutions, whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, or the Middle East...

...By organize I mean, to a great extent, organizing the organized...

...Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United States" and, most recently, "Declarations of Independence...

...There already exist thousands upon thousands of organizations all over this country, representing millions of people—Greenpeace alone has two million members—working for peace, racial equality, consumer protection, environmental health, women's rights, and other important causes...

...What can link them together (loosely, fitfully, without disturbing their identity, but joining their powers for certain crucial campaigns, as when so many different groups joined to block the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court) is a simple common agenda...

...We have before us the job of deflating those romantic ideas of the beauties of capitalism which are being rushed off the production line and shipped to those countries that have recently gone through tumultuous change and are looking for new ideas...

...But this does not mean, as the Establishment is rushing to declare, that the alternative is a happy return to laissez-faire capitalism...

...And it should not be impossible, though it will not be easy, to persuade Americans that our society, too, despite its glitter of consumer goods, needs the kind of democratic revolution we have been exulting over as we have watched events in Europe...

...We must point out that the only reason capitalism was able to survive in the Western world is that its victims organized—in trade-union movements, in farmers' movements, in tenants' movements, in women's movements, in civil-rights movements—and brought about just enough reforms (the eight-hour day, old-age pensions, higher pay, unemployment insurance, civil-rights laws, women's suffrage) to stave off revolution and leave capitalism alive, with a surface of great prosperity and a core of economic and cultural sickness...

...And we must point out that in the era of capitalism, whatever "progress" was made for new middle classes, starvation remained for most of the world, and national rivalries brought the most murderous wars in history...

...That may have been true of the communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and may still be true of some far-left groups today, but it does not apply to the broad civil-rights, antiwar, feminist, environmental, gay-rights movement that swept the country in the 1960s and continues today in various forms...

...So our job today is to organize, to create a vast movement in our country that can link up with popular movements in other countries of the world...

...The American public has already shown, in various public opinion surveys, that it will support reductions in military expenditures...

...That agenda is: using the immense wealth that goes each year into the military ($200 billion of the $300 billion, as an arbitrary starting point) and showing in detail how this $200 billion can give us: universal health care, guaranteed housing for everyone, useful work for everyone capable of working, child care for all working mothers, a cleanup of air and water all over the country, subsidies for the arts, a doubling of teachers' salaries, and more...

...The fading of the "Soviet threat" now makes possible a radical proposal for demilitarization to rebuild American society...

...Those movements were a new Left—isn't that what we called ourselves?—which was critical of the Soviet Union and of dictatorship everywhere...

...It should not be impossible to persuade Americans that such a democratic revolution is needed, when wealth is more and more concentrated at the top, when the economy is unhealthy, when we are ridden by homelessness, by frightening violence in our cities, by pervasive drug addiction, by alcoholism, by a deteriorating, poisonous environment—in short, when we show all the signs of a rich but sick society...

...The foreign-policy agenda is a bold, simple one: renunciation of force in the solution of international problems...

...Those movements were based on certain fundamental ideas: racial equality, antimilitarism, sexual equality, economic democracy, a suspicion of all state power, and a true cultural revolution in the schools, in family life, in human relations...