The Coming Revolt of the Guards
excerpted from a
People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
... the mountain of history books under which we all stand
leans ... so tremblingly respectful [in the direction] of states
and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's
movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed
into submission.
All those histories of this country centered on the Founding
Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity
of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of
crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary
crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln;
in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Water gate crisis,
Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right,
and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state.
They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose
among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to
choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive
personality and orthodox opinions.
The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture,
beyond politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts
in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning
our own ability, obliterating our own selves. But from time to
time, Americans reject that idea and rebel. These rebellions,
so far, have been contained. The American system is the most ingenious
system of control in world history. With a country so rich in
natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford
to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit
discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful,
so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford
to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased.
There is no system of control with more openings, apertures,
lee ways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets
in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly
through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the
family, the school, the mass media-none more successful in mollifying
opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating
patriotic loyalty.
One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The
rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those
in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against
the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born,
intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled.
These groups have resented one another and warred against one
another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common
position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.
*****
.... Madison feared a "majority faction" and hoped
the new Constitution would control it. He and his colleagues began
the Preamble to the Constitution with the words "We the people
. . . ," pre tending that the new government stood for everyone,
and hoping that this myth, accepted as fact, would ensure "domestic
tranquillity."
The pretense continued over the generations, helped by all-embracing
symbols, physical or verbal: the flag, patriotism, democracy,
national interest, national defense, national security...
*****
The exile of Nixon, the celebration of the Bicentennial, the
presidency of Carter, all aimed at restoration. But restoration
to the old order was no solution to the uncertainty, the alienation,
which was intensified in the Reagan-Bush years. The election of
Clinton in 1992, carrying with it a vague promise of change, did
not fulfill the expectations of the hopeful.
With such continuing malaise, it is very important for the
Establishment-that uneasy club of business executives, generals,
and politicos- to maintain the historic pretension of national
unity, in which the government represents all the people, and
the common enemy is overseas, not at home, where disasters of
economics or war are unfortunate errors or tragic accidents, to
be corrected by the members of the same club that brought the
disasters. It is important for them also to make sure this artificial
unity of highly privileged and slightly privileged is the only
unity- that the 99 percent remain split in countless ways, and
turn against one another to vent their angers. How skillful to
tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building
resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black
youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange
of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain
untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where
children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft
carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women
for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting
them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by
an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and
anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic
inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention
from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within
the law by men in executive offices.
*****
However, the unexpected victories even temporary of insurgents
show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly
developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the
obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small
rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers
and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians
and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and
communications workers, garbagemen and firemen. These people-the
employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with
the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between
the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system
falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly
privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the
guards in the prison uprising at Attica expendable; that the Establishment,
whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain
its control, kill us. Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge
so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the
system. The new conditions of technology, economics, and war,
in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards
of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers,
the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to
remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted
on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The
internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees
and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult
for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to
hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world.
*****
The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit
to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities
decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually
nothing for children's playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men
who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists,
musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure
for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle
classes.
The threat of unemployment, always inside the homes of the
poor, has spread to white-collar workers, professionals. A college
education is no longer a guarantee against joblessness, and a
system that cannot offer a future to the young coming out of school
is in deep trouble. If it happens only to the children of the
poor, the problem is manageable; there are the jails. If it happens
to the children of the middle class, things may get out of hand.
The poor are accustomed to being squeezed and always short of
money, but in recent years the middle classes, too, have begun
to feel the press of high prices, high taxes.
In the seventies, eighties, and early nineties there was a
dramatic, frightening increase in the number of crimes. It was
not hard to under stand, when one walked through any big city.
There were the contrasts of wealth and poverty, the culture of
possession, the frantic advertising. There was the fierce economic
competition, in which the legal violence of the state and the
legal robbery by the corporations were accompanied by the illegal
crimes of the poor. Most crimes by far involved theft. A disproportionate
number of prisoners in American jails were poor and non white,
with little education. Half were unemployed in the month prior
to their arrest.
The most common and most publicized crimes have been the violent
crimes of the young, the poor-a virtual terrorization in the big
cities-in which the desperate or drug-addicted attack and rob
the middle class, or even their fellow poor. A society so stratified
by wealth and education lends itself naturally to envy and class
anger.
The critical question in our time is whether the middle classes,
so long led to believe that the solution for such crimes is more
jails and more jail terms, may begin to see, by the sheer uncontrollability
of crime, that the only prospect is an endless cycle of crime
and punishment. They might then conclude that physical security
for a working person in the city can come only when everyone in
the city is working. And that would require a transformation of
national priorities, a change in the system.
*****
The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration.
There is a chance that ... a movement could succeed in doing what
the system itself has never done-bring about great change with
little violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent
that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards
and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the Establishment
becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite's weapons, money, control
of information would be useless in the face of a determined population.
The servants of the system would refuse to work to continue the
old, deadly order, and would begin using their time, their space-the
very things given them by the system to keep them quiet-to dismantle
that system while creating a new one.
The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before,
in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted.
The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined
by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for
the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act
on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our
grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might possibly see
a different and marvelous world.
People's
History of the United States
History
watch