Those who do the work in the workplace should get the rewards

A cooperative enterprise rests on a basic concept — the people who do the work earn the money. Strange, isn’t it, that this straightforward idea is considered radical.

It shouldn’t. Yet it is. The modern capitalist system is advertised as a “meritocracy” — those who work the hardest earn the most. In reality, this is a fairy tale; those who accumulate the most are those who have the most capital, often inherited. The system is called “capitalism” for a reason.

Not even the hardest-working chief executive officer works 340 times harder than his or her average employee. The financier who manipulates numbers on a computer screen, indifferent to the humanity that produces those revenues and net incomes, surely does not work hundreds of times harder. Or, likely, even as hard, particularly if the corporate raider is looting a manufacturing company with a factory floor.

If the chief executive, or any manager, is elected from the ranks of the workforce by those same co-workers due to his or her meritorious effort and/or willingness to obtain a degree in management, then indeed an enterprise can be said to operate on a meritorious basis. Such enterprises already exist; some were created as cooperatives at the start and some were taken over by their workers to forestall closure or abandonment.

If you gave the average employee the choice of working in a cooperative, in which everybody shares in the rewards if the enterprise succeeds and everybody has a vote in strategic decisions in a democratic process, as opposed to being an exploited, powerless cog in the traditional authoritarian, top-down capitalist enterprise, there would be considerable support for the former option. If the person given this choice were to be told that wages, benefits and working conditions would be better in the cooperative (as in fact is the case), the decision becomes easier.

But what do we say to a small-business owner? Mom-and-pop businesses form part of the backbone of communities and, unlike a large corporation in which ownership shares are traded among speculators far removed from the actual underlying business, the small businessperson is present, often for long days. Here we have people who do put in more hours than others, and have put their limited capital at risk.

Why should anyone have to work 14 hours a day?

Two recent conversations have gotten me to think about this particular question. One was a debate conducted on another blog in direct response to a question from a small business owner who said he works 14 hours a day, six days a week. The other was a debate with a passerby I had last weekend while staffing an Occupy Wall Street literature table who insisted she was more deserving than others because she worked 12 or more hours a day when others weren’t willing to do so.

If someone chooses to work such hours and is personally fulfilled by doing so, that is that person’s business and not mine. But if you are at your job 14 hours a day, six days a week, your family is missing all the other things you have to offer them. And no matter how nice a house you may have, you’re not there to enjoy it.

Nobody should have to work such punishing hours. There are those who choose to do so out of personal conviction, but there are many millions of people in sweatshops working such hours, or still longer hours, who earn starvation wages — and they have no choice about it. The big capitalists of the world — people who have far more than any small-business owner — earn their fabulous wealth by exploiting such people, and by exploiting relatively more privileged people in advanced capitalist countries who work lesser hours but nonetheless work long, hard days.

Capitalists become rich by paying their employees less than the value of what they produce — usually far less. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t capitalists who don’t work, but a person who runs a small family business is not in the same category as a big capitalist. The passerby with whom I debated last weekend said if the people whom she claimed were jealous of her house were to run businesses like she does, and put in as many hours, they could have what she has.

But there is only so much space for such businesses; under capitalism, most people are going to have to work for somebody else. Moreover, opportunities are vastly unequal. I grew up in a middle class household where the expectation was always that I would go to college (which I did), and we lived in a town with an excellent public-school system, so I received a better education than most students. I had advantages that many people do not have, had I wished to pursue a business career.

Yes, some folks do climb out of disadvantageous situations, but only so many can do that in a (capitalist) system that puts tremendous roadblocks in front of people. Saving is difficult when mere survival is an increasingly difficult struggle.

A small-business owner may object that s/he puts in more hours than employees do (if they have any) and has capital at risk. That may be true, but having to do so is a requirement imposed by the capitalist system; it is not something ordained by some natural order. The capital put at risk was undoubtedly lent by a bank, which collects high interest — in other words, the bank is exploiting the small businessperson. The banker did nothing but sign a piece of paper while the owner works 14 hours a day. Why should the banker earn such big money? Quite likely, the banker, who repeats this exploitative operation with others, earns far more money and works far fewer hours.

The small businessperson is exploited by capitalists, too, just in a different way than an employee is.

The proprietor works, the landlord takes

Let’s take a concrete example. For more than 30 years, including two decades at his last location, a vegan baker much loved by the community operated a bakery before being forced out of business by a landlord who continually jacked up his rent, at three times the rate of inflation. The baker always gave to the community, frequently donating goodies at public events; I was far from the only person routinely greeted with a hug and often offered a free tea when I stopped in. During those years, the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City changed from a unique enclave of Puerto Ricans, Ukrainians, Poles, artists, squatters, community gardeners, anarchists, communists and beatniks to its present-day state of gentrification run amok.

[Credit: VegGuide.org]

The baker worked from early afternoon to midnight six, and usually seven, days a week, just so all of his money could go to the landlord, who merely needs to sit in his comfortable office many miles away and let the money roll in. For landlords, the neighborhood is nothing but a cash cow to exploit, cynically taking advantage of the cachet created by the residents they are squeezing out by their exorbitant rents. The baker’s fate has been the fate of countless small businesses; only faceless chain stores are able to afford the rents. This corporatization has been replicated in countless other neighborhoods.

The free-lance worker gets the short end as well. For years, I was self-employed, and had to, for tax purposes, operate as my own small business and fill out tax forms the same way an actual small business would. But I was no businessperson — I was a worker who didn’t have a regular job. I was exploited; in fact I was more exploited than I now am with a regular job because I had no health insurance and I had to pay double the usual Social Security taxes (my half and the employers’ half).

People are taught to have a 19th century, romantic notion of capitalism — a myriad of small enterprises competing in a free market. But a “free market” has never existed. Capitalism was built on pushing people off their farms and passing draconian laws to force them into the new factories; markets are expanded through force both military (World War I is one particularly bloody example) and financial (such as International Monetary Fund diktats); and the largest competitors become a handful of oligarchs whose wealth enables them to get governments to give them yet more advantages and who compete by cutting wages rather than through competition that exists only in textbooks.

Employees are exploited through this system, regardless of collar color, by being paid only a small fraction of what they produce and forced to compete for a dwindling number of jobs, but also because they, as consumers, have to pay the high prices that result when competition reduces an industry to a small number of oligopolistic behemoths who dominate a market. Small businesses are also at the mercy of larger corporate entities, including rapacious bankers, and are hurt when their customers have less money.

In a cooperative economy, no individual must assume all the risk. The cooperative can do so, taking loans at reasonable rates by making a good case to a publicly accountable bank operated as a public utility. Enterprises would relate to other enterprises in a cooperative, not competitive manner, eliminating much of the anxiety inherent in a capitalist system in which humans serve markets instead of the other way around.

Hard workers such as the small businesspeople under discussion would be valuable to a cooperative enterprise. Someone possessing such drive would likely wind up being elected to an administrative or management post by their collective. Talents and hard work would still be recognized; such a driven person would still have the personal satisfaction of a job well done; and s/he could work fewer hours, allowing more time to be spent with family and friends.

Others, too, will contribute talent and work to the cooperative enterprise while sharing the burden. Everybody who works should have a say in what is produced, how it is produced and how it is distributed, with community input — after all, it is the community that would be supporting the enterprise, and the enterprise in turn would be operated by people from the community. Production should be for human need, not for a minuscule elite’s private profit with no regard to the greater good. Benefiting the community and earning a comfortable living while working a humanistic workday shouldn’t be oxymoronic.

Republicans, corporate interests intentionally destroying Post Office

Privatization is a polite word for corporate self-interest. When calls for privatization arise, it is always useful to see who’s interest is being served.

Take the United States Postal Service. The Republican Party is doing its best to destroy a national institution that provides hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs. (The Democratic Party is doing nothing, perhaps waiting for a signal from its corporate benefactors.) Merely reading “unionized” in front of “jobs” leads to the conclusion that ideology is behind this latest attack on working people, and surely a Right-wing desire to eliminate large unions and drive down wages further is a significant motivation.

Not the sole motivation, however. Privatizing the Postal Service would mean big new business for delivery services and companies that supply postal products. Advocates of privatization recently sought to inject more wind into their sails with the release of a study by a “think tank” with the bland-sounding name of National Academy of Public Administration. The “study” has yet to published in full, but its four authors, described as “postal industry thought leaders,” have published their conclusion — a call for a near total privatization.

Just who are these four “postal industry thought leaders”? With one exception, they are people who have a vested interest in privatization. Surprise! Here they are:

• Ed Gleiman, a former member of the Postal Rate Commission, has since become a lobbyist for the Direct Marketing Association, a group representing large mailers.
• John Nolan, a deputy postmaster general during the Bush II/Cheney administration, is currently a board member for Streamlite, a business-to-consumer lightweight package delivery service. He is also a senior advisor to The Western Union Co., another corporation that stands to benefit from dismantling the Postal Service.
• Edward Hudgins is a director of the Atlas Society (“Atlas” as in Ayn Rand) and previously worked for the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. The latter two organizations are manically dedicated to destroying all protections for employees, while the phantasmagorical absurdity of Ayn Rand’s novels bear as much relation to reality as an elephant that flies.
• George Gould, a former political director for the National Association of Letter Carriers union, doesn’t appear to have an ideological axe to grind as do the other three “leaders” and perhaps is guilty of nothing more than absorbing neoliberal ideology. Critics of the NALC say that the union has failed to fight for its membership, and Mr. Gould’s participation in this “study” might provide those critics additional fuel.

Direct funding by a corporation that stands to benefit

To round out the picture, the major funder of the postal privatization “study” is Pitney Bowes Inc., which stands to directly benefit. Greg Bell, executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union, writes:

“Pitney Bowes, the company that is funding the review, stands to be a major beneficiary. The company is widely known as a provider of mailing equipment, but it is also a major mail ‘pre-sorter.’ The company takes advantage of generous pre-sort discounts offered by the Postal Service to provide outsourced services to high-volume mailers. In 2011, Pitney Bowes operated 41 mail processing facilities and generated $5.3 billion in revenue. Pitney Bowes would certainly snatch up a major portion of USPS revenue if it were given the chance.”

FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., the two largest U.S. private delivery services, also stand to benefit from the destruction of the Postal Service. FedEx is one of the heaviest spenders on political donations and lobbying, and employs several dozen lobbyists who formerly worked in government, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. UPS is also a heavy spender on donations and lobbying, while employing its own team of lobbyists who formerly worked in government.

The National Academy of Public Administration “study” advocates a bizarre “hybrid” scheme in which all postal activities will be privatized, except for the “final mile” — a Postal Service worker would deliver mail and packages to mailboxes and other final destinations. The paper states:

“In the ‘final mile’ package strategy, private sector consolidators compete to pickup, process, and transport hundreds of millions of packages. Shippers pay the consolidators to prepare and transport the mail for ‘last mile’ delivery by USPS letter carriers. The consolidators pay USPS a delivery charge. Upstream competition among private sector providers promotes efficiencies that lead to better service and lower overall prices.”

Private oligopolies are not known for lowering prices, however, and the paper’s assertion that regulation counter excesses is refuted by the many industries in which regulation is toothless, and in which agency chiefs routinely cycle back to their primary roles as corporate executives. We need only look at vastly inflated pharmaceutical prices, runaway financial legerdemain and a lack of resolve in food safety to know that private delivery companies will easily evade any serious scrutiny, piling up profits while cutting jobs, wages and benefits. The only certainty is that large numbers of jobs will be lost.

Who can fund 75 years of pensions in 10 years?

A government institution painted as financially troubled is easier to be targeted for corporate plunder than one on firm footing, so, voilà, congressional Republicans cooked up a devastating scheme. A congressional bill signed into law in 2006 requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its pension costs for the next 75 years in only 10 years. This is unheard of; certainly no private business would or could do such a thing. This preposterous requirement — why do I keep seeing sneering villains twisting their mustaches like in those movies of a century ago? — has saddled the Postal Service with a $16 billion deficit.

Hoping to maintain corporate momentum, a leading congressional Republican, Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has pushed a bill that would allow an oversight committee to modify union contracts. Representative Issa’s bill, if passed, would allow unilateral cuts to previously bargained wages.

The National Association of Letter Carriers, however, has already approved wage cuts. The latest contract increases the number of “temporary” mail carriers who have inferior wages and benefits, setting a up a two-tier system in which newer workers have lower pay, not fundamentally different than the new two-tier pay systems at General Motors — taxpayers loaned the money to GM to keep it afloat, and the reward is more austerity. These deals in turn serve to depress wages elsewhere by setting lower standards.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of Postal Service jobs have already been eliminated. A statement issued by Detroit Workers’ Voice, analyzing the attacks on postal unions, says:

“Postal workers are being run over time after time, and the strategy of the leadership of the postal unions has proved completely ineffective in stopping this. Yes, the union leaders sometimes have snappy criticisms against management. But they collaborate with management. Thus, when new contracts with management help the USPS decimate the workforce, the main union officials hide the setbacks or justify them. Insofar as there is struggle against the USPS bosses, it is within strict limits. Organizing the rank and file for struggles within the postal facilities is avoided. Public actions of any kind are rare. Militant action that would really press management is off limits.”

Postal Service unions, of course, are hardly unique in their timidity. Fightbacks are possible, as the Chicago teachers’ union demonstrated last year. The Chicago teachers spent months preparing parents and the city as a whole for a possible strike as neoliberal Mayor Rahm Emanuel sought to break the union and replace public schools accountable to the public with private, non-union charter schools under corporate control.

There were critics who complained that the teachers didn’t win many advances and ended the strike too quickly, but it is more realistic to analyze the strike in a fuller context — given the totality of the circumstances, the Chicago teachers won as much as they could have and would have begun to jeopardize the massive public support behind them, an indispensable force as the city’s other unions did nothing to help.

No union, no matter how militant, can win substantial gains without a movement that mobilizes sustained support from those unionized, non-unionized and unemployed — a movement that acts on the understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all. Unions aren’t making efforts to create that support, instead at most narrowly attempting to slightly slow down the defeats to their specific memberships. The structural causes of our present-day world of austerity are far larger than any union federation nor are they contained with any single geographical unit. The entire history of capitalism has led us to today’s world.

An injury to one, or to one group of employees, truly is an injury to all. Enormous power is concentrated into the hands of financiers and industrialists, and there are no limits to the injuries they and the politicians who serve them intend to inflict. Putting our heads in the sand and hoping it’s the other person who gets it only delays the injury to one’s self and makes it worse when they come for you.

Cyprus pensioners told to pay for crisis. Who will pay tomorrow?

Either bankers are so confident of their power that they increasingly can’t be bothered to disguise it, or we have to stretch the definition of “democracy” so far that the word loses any sense of meaning. This week’s news that the newly elected government of Cyprus was ordered to make its savings depositors pay for a bailout of Russian oligarchs and real estate speculators is stunning even by the standards of the global economic slump.

None of the previous eurozone bailouts had gone so far as to directly confiscate the savings of ordinary depositors. Not even in Ireland, where former Prime Minister Brian Cowen had huffed and puffed that Ireland would not surrender its sovereignty — which he demonstrated by insisting that Ireland’s ultra-low corporate tax rate not be touched. It wasn’t. European bankers had no issue with that, granting him that one concession while imposing cuts to wages, lowering the minimum wage, drastically raising water rates, raising university tuition and reducing health care services.

The intensity of Ireland’s austerity derives from the decision by the former prime minister to cover all potential losses by Ireland’s major banks, no matter how reckless their speculative lending had become. In other words, the Irish government paid off the bad loans made by its bankers and guaranteed speculators in the banks’ bonds would suffer no losses, and passed the bill onto its citizens. This represented an extraordinary warping of the idea that bank deposits, up to a certain level, are guaranteed. Other countries have had various versions of this austerity imposed on them. But now the European Union and its bankers are attempting austerity from a different angle: Partial confiscation of all savings, even if “guaranteed.”

No, that doesn’t mean that the normal austerity terms aren’t being imposed by the European Central Bank, the eurozone’s finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund. For weeks, rumors had circulated that, this time, that there would be a sharing of the cost of a bailout as Cyprus inched closer to a bailout. In the ordinary sense of this concept, that would mean that bondholders and the banks themselves would shoulder some of the burden. Not surprisingly, there had been pushback against this idea with financiers complaining that making them take responsibility for their own speculation would be disruptive to financial markets.

Finance ministers want pensioners to pay for crisis

Plan B was is to make working people and pensioners who have their life savings in banks and had nothing whatsoever to do with the latest eurozone crisis instead shoulder the burden. The Cypriot government was told point-blank to confiscate a portion of depositors’ savings or all money would be cut off, which would cause an immediate collapse of its two primary banks. No matter that deposits up to €100,000 are guaranteed. To avoid a bank run, Cypriot banks are closed for at least three days so that Cypriot parliamentarians can be hectored by eurozone finance ministers to do their duty.

The Cypriot parliament said no in its March 19 vote, but “no” votes in other countries have been reversed under pressure, so this drama has not yet run its course.

Cyprus needs €17 billion to bail out its banks, but European Union and International Monetary Fund officials are loaning only €10 billion, insisting that the remainder come from a deposit tax and other internal measures, including privatizing utilities. And why do Cypriot banks need all this money? Because they over-extended themselves on loans to real estate developers and others, the same story as in so many other countries. They also absorbed losses when Greek government bonds they owned were devalued in the wake of Greece’s ongoing crisis. An added complication is that about 40 percent of Cyprus’ total deposits are by foreigners, mostly Russians, causing extra challenges.

Cypriot banks are widely seen as money-laundering havens for Russian oligarchs, and a straight bailout of the banks would appear to many eyes as a bailout of money launderers. That in itself would not look good. In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces re-election later this year and, given repeated assertions by German right-wingers that Germany is bailing out slothful Mediterraneans, is loath to leave herself exposed to more such charges.

Imposing a “deposit tax” only on deposits greater than the government guarantee would be one way out of this political dilemma, but that would leave Russia angry. Not only does Russian President Vladimir Putin seek to protect his country’s oligarchs, but Russia has previously granted Cyprus a loan on which the Cypriot government hopes to re-negotiate easier terms. As it is, Russia strongly protested the proposed confiscation that would have affected everyone.

The Cypriot government is caught between multiple rocks and hard places — subordinate to Germany, the northern European Union countries that ally with Germany on financial issues, Russia, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It is also subordinate to financial markets, a nice term that really means international financiers and speculators. Countries far bigger than Cyprus are subordinate to financial markets, and even large countries like Germany are not independent of market forces.

Cypriot banks hold assets estimated at eight times the country’s gross domestic product — Cyprus, like Ireland and Iceland, which had similarly bloated banks, can’t sustain a financial sector swollen to such a dangerous size. Cypriot banks offered interest rates far above rates found elsewhere, which attracted foreign depositors but also signaled significant risk. Banks that do not ask questions of people who deposit huge sums of money are not closely regulated. The downside of that risk has materialized, but rather than impose the cost, financiers and the government ministers who represent them prefer to say “never mind” to the deposit insurance counted on by working people and pensioners banking their life savings.

A crisis of financial domination, not national characteristics

The social risk here, in a broader sense, is that the Cypriot crisis will be seen through nationalist lenses. To accuse “slothful Mediterraneans” or “arrogant Germans” is to be blind to the larger structural forces at work, which pay no attention to national borders. Financiers last year imposed new unelected governments on Greece and Italy so that their preferred policies be carried out. If they can topple one government, they can topple other governments; the pious declarations that Cyprus’ confiscation of savers would be a unique event that won’t be repeated rings hollow given those precedents.

Austerity comes in many forms and no country’s workers are exempt — the German manufacturing “miracle” in fact has a down-to-earth cause — a decade of wage cuts for German workers. Germany is ever more dependent on exports as its domestic ability to consume slowly declines due to the steady drop of wage cuts. When those export markets begin to dry up, German workers will not be able to pick up the slack and German manufacturers and financiers will impose stronger austerity on German workers to buoy profits.

For now, German workers are relatively privileged, a difference exploited to foster divisions. Austerity has been much harsher in the eurozone’s Mediterranean countries and Ireland. Thus far, we have seen only the beginnings of any political fightback, in the form of strong electoral showings by Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and the 5 Star Movement in Italy. For the most part, Europeans have continued to alternate among their local dominant parties.

Frequent massive demonstrations demonstrate widespread anger — that is important, as the route to reversing austerity and the system that imposes it lies in mass action. It is a healthy sign of cross-border solidarity that demonstrators in front of the Cypriot parliament carried signs saying (in Italian and Spanish) “today me, tomorrow you.”

But anger without organization ultimately dissipates like steam released from an engine. Such organization has to translate, in part, to challenging political power, which in turn is intimately linked (and subordinate) to economic power. Austerity does not fall out of the sky; it is an expression of power to benefit those in power. Capitalists, including financiers, can remove governments and confiscate savings. What’s next? The return of debtors’ prisons? Mandatory unpaid labor to boost profits? Those might sound far-fetched, but unchecked power has a way of moving toward limitless power. Organizing to reverse this is simply self-defense.

Dangers from a ‘mixed’ economy that brought down Sandinista Revolution exist for Venezuela

A revolution meant to advance the material conditions of large numbers of previously disenfranchised people is necessarily larger than one individual. That is true even when the individual who embodies the revolution is a charismatic leader such as Hugo Chávez.

There is no denying that the death of President Chávez is a setback for Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. That revolution is a process — it is perhaps more akin to a steady evolution than a revolution — and will go forward if Venezuelans continue to see the process as beneficial to them. That was true throughout the 14-year reign of President Chávez and is true whether or not he occupies the presidential palace.

Ultimately, the survival of the Bolivarian Revolution rests on two factors: Effecting a change in economic relations and becoming a constituent component of a larger bloc that effects a similar change in economic relations. Simply put, the Bolivarian Revolution has taken political power away from Venezuela’s capitalist elite but largely has left economic power in the hands of that elite. As Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution of 1979 to 1991 demonstrated, leaving economic power in the hands of a capitalist elite enables that elite to destabilize a revolution.

That represents a larger threat to the future prosperity of Venezuelans than the many-sided struggles going on within the country’s institutions, including disagreements inside unions, government departments and social organizations. The process of the Bolivarian Revolution is hardly straightforward, with some interests, such as union leaderships, that should be behind the socialization of production instead opposed. President Chávez often acted as an arbiter or a court of last resort, able to settle disputes due to his personal authority.

No other person possesses the charisma to arbitrate in such a manner; nonetheless, that personal authority — based on the late president’s popularity and repeated electoral victories — was invoked only in extraordinary circumstances. Such disputes will remain solvable, but may require more negotiation and grassroots struggle. The much larger question of who owns, controls and/or manages production and distribution is what will be decisive, and no one person, no matter how charismatic, can be decisive. This is a social question.

Sandinistas left economic power in hands of capitalists

A generation ago, another Latin American experiment held the world’s attention. The Sandinista Revolution, like the Bolivarian, tended to be seen through ideological prisms. The same hyperventilating language — “dictatorship” “communist” “repressive” — was used to describe Nicaragua during the Sandinista era. It was not a perfect government — is anything of human creation perfect? — but real progress was made despite the many mistakes that are inevitable when people previously blocked from any meaningful participation in their society suddenly find themselves in government.

The Sandinistas never declared that they would implement a socialist economy, and didn’t. For those who cared to pay attention, the Sandinista leadership repeatedly said their goal was a mixed economy. The Nicaraguan economy came to include large enterprises owned by the government; commonly owned collectives; marketing collectives composed of individual privately owned small farms; small-scale private businesses and independent farms; and private big-business manufacturing and agricultural operations left intact from before the revolution.

The property of the Somoza family, which came to personally own large portions of the Nicaraguan economy during its decades-long dictatorship, was confiscated by the Sandinistas following the revolution. Doing so was not necessarily opposed by Nicaragua’s capitalists, who were disgusted with the Somoza dictators because they had forced their way into many business sectors, muscling out capitalists when they saw an opportunity. Because of that, many business leaders came to oppose the dictatorship however much they applauded its ruthless, frequently deadly, suppression of labor.

The last dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, ordered factories owned by capitalists opposed to him bombed, looted the treasury, laid waste to the economy and ultimately killed 50,000 in his bid to retain power. After the Revolution, the remnants of Somoza’s National Guard and the United States government, which had been the Somoza dynasty’s protector, created the terrorist groups known as the “Contras” that inflicted huge damage. The Contras specifically targeted public infrastructure and cooperative enterprises for destruction.

Nicaragua’s capitalists had expected to assume political leadership after the revolution, and when they discovered that the people and organizations that had carried out the revolution and had suffered the most repression would have the majority of political power, they swiftly began to undermine it. Although credit was now available for the first time for small farmers, most loans went to the country’s capitalists, who instead of using the capital for investment, spirited the money to overseas banks and began stripping their factories of assets. A few factories where this took place were nationalized, but the legal process to do so was lengthy and a factory owner determined to de-capitalize an enterprise could do so before the legal system could act.

The contradictions of a mixed economy

Strange as it may appear, the Sandinistas, more than once, imposed austerity on their own country, reducing living standards for working people while continuing to provide subsidies for capitalists. The Sandinistas had sought to raise living standards for working people in the cities and the countryside, provided large subsidies to the capitalists and were forced to fund an expensive military effort to defend the country. These factors were further aggravated by the U.S. embargo, with the resulting shortages fueling inflation. The only way to support all these policies simultaneously was to print more money, which touched off more inflation.

To combat inflation, the government implemented an austerity program in 1985 designed to “rationalize” these competing interests by reducing consumer consumption through reductions in the earning power of wages while increasing subsidies for capitalists and small farmers to induce more production. But since the capitalists controlled a much bigger share of the economy than did small farmers, the result was more subsidies for the already wealthy. Thus, “austerity” meant austerity only for working people — their reduced living standards would pay for the government money that would be channeled into capitalists’ pockets.

Nonetheless, the capitalists continued to refuse to invest, pocketing the money instead. Those local capitalists had strong links with capitalists in the United States and in other advanced capitalist countries, creating a web of interests. Under the impact of the intense military pressure of the Contras and the U.S.-imposed economic blockade, Nicaragua’s mass-participation social groups lost their grassroots characteristics and became more vertical organizations with imposed leaderships; progress on social issues, such as combating discrimination against women, halted because so much effort had to be put into basic defense.

In 1988, the Sandinistas imposed another round of austerity, a program similar to those demanded by the International Monetary Fund, although in this case without the often dubious benefits of the loans nor the debt burden. Speculators and smugglers had taken advantage of price imbalances by buying products cheaply in Nicaragua and selling them for more in foreign markets and, internally, by diverting subsidized food from intended markets and instead selling it at inflated prices, earning themselves windfall profits while increasing costs to consumers.

The country was also hurt by international currency speculators, who drove down the exchange-rate value of its currency, forcing costly devaluations. Wages were reduced in these austerity programs, to the applause of Nicaragua’s capitalists.

A strong contrast to the Sandinistas’ intentions, this was the result of maintaining a “mixed” economy in which economic power was left in the hands of capitalists. Although capitalists did not possess formal political power, political leaders were forced (by the “market”) to implement policies benefiting capitalists and hurting working people in agriculture and industry.

Social successes during the Chávez era

History does not repeat itself neatly, and the Venezuela of the 2010s is a different place than the Nicaragua of the 1980s. With no equivalent of the Contras and a high-priced commodity (oil) that Nicaragua does not have, the Bolivarian Revolution is on firmer ground. Venezuela also has a far larger population, making it is a much less attractive target for armed interventions. Nonetheless, its stated goal of empowering working people on a road to “21st century socialism” is an example that capitalists, and their governments, around the world would like to stamp out.

Venezuela is a country not without problems, although problems such as high crime rates and inflation were part of the Venezuelan fabric well before President Chávez took office. It is legitimate to argue that these problems have not been sufficiently tackled; it is unfair to insinuate that these are new problems caused by the Bolivarian Revolution as the corporate media repeatedly does. There have been many successes, among them these reported by the Center for Economic Policy and Research:

• Annual economic growth of 3.2 percent during the Chávez administration (4.3 percent since 2004, after the government asserted control over the state oil company, PDVSA) as opposed to 1.4 percent annual growth in the 13 years preceding President Chávez.
• Inflation, although high, is less than half of what it was in 1996, two years before President Chávez took office.
• The unemployment rate is now half of what it was during the former PDVSA management’s lockout in 2003 and is far below what it was when President Chávez took office.
• The rate of poverty has been halved, and the rate of extreme poverty reduced by three-quarters.
• The number of higher-education graduates has tripled.
• The number of Venezuelans receiving a pension has quadrupled.

And none other than the International Monetary Fund reports that Venezuela has the lowest level of inequality in the Latin America/Caribbean region, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Venezuela has also made the greatest improvement since 2005 in this widely used metric of any country in its region, at a time when inequality rose in many countries throughout the world.

As I have previously written, although nationalization of the state oil company receives most of the attention, the bedrock of the revolution are the formations of small cooperatives in a variety of industries; the creation of “social production companies” in which existing enterprises were to create co-management structures and create chains of supply with cooperatives; shuttered enterprises that are expropriated by the workers who re-start production; and experiments in “co-management” with workers’ participation conducted in large state-owned resource enterprises.

The transformation of Venezuela’s industry is not only resisted by capitalists, but faces resistance from within government bureaucracies and even inside the Bolivarian movement itself. Resistance from unions, for example, has contributed to setbacks in creating workers’ co-management of the large state-owned resource enterprises.

‘Endogenous development’ in response to sabotage

The Bolivarian process took a step forward in the wake of the PDVSA lockout carried out by the revolution’s opponents, which followed the failure of their 2002 coup against President Chávez. A 2006 Dollars & Sense article written by Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone noted that the need for internal development was a lesson learned from the lockout and coup:

“Cooperatives also advance the Chávez administration’s broader goal of ‘endogenous development.’ Foreign direct investment continues in Venezuela, but the government aims to avoid relying on inflows from abroad, which open a country to capitalism’s usual blackmail. Endogenous development means ‘to be capable of producing the seed that we sow, the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear, the goods and services that we need, breaking the economic, cultural and technological dependence that has halted our development, starting with ourselves.’ To these ends, co-ops are ideal tools. Co-ops anchor development in Venezuela: under the control of local worker-owners, they don’t pose a threat of capital flight as capitalist firms do.

The need for endogenous development came home to Venezuelans during the 2002[-2003 management] oil strike carried out by Chávez’s political opponents. Major distributors of the country’s mostly imported food also supported the strike, halting food deliveries and exposing a gaping vulnerability. In response, the government started its own parallel supermarket chain. In just three years, Mercal had 14,000 points of sale, almost all in poor neighborhoods, selling staples at discounts of 20% to 50%. It is now the nation’s largest supermarket chain and its second largest enterprise overall. The Mercal stores attract shoppers of all political stripes thanks to their low prices and high-quality merchandise. To promote ‘food sovereignty,’ Mercal has increased its proportion of domestic suppliers to over 40%, giving priority to co-ops when possible.”

A new stress on workers’ control of industrial enterprises was one of the responses to the capitalists’ attempts to sabotage the economy during and after the PDVSA lockout, when management halted oil production. Since 2005, enterprises in a range of industries have come under various forms of workers’ control. This has not been a straightforward process. According to analyst Ewan Robertson, who wrote in August 2012:

“The many achievements by workers in taking over and collectively running individual factories, and in driving forward a project of worker control for the state owned heavy industries in [the eastern region of] Guayana, have generated a backlash, not only among the US-backed conservative political opposition, transnational companies and private bosses, but also among a reactionary and bureaucratic faction within the Bolivarian revolution itself.

This is because progress made by workers threatens those who only support Chavez for personal gain and political opportunism, and see their special privileges or vested interests threatened by worker control: there is little need for state managers or union bureaucrats if workers eliminate hierarchies and operate factories themselves in a participatory democratic manner. It also undermines those who hold a more restrictive view of what socialism is and argue that workers are ‘not ready’ to operate factories themselves. Indeed, there are those in the government that hold socialism to be little more than state ownership of industry and central planning from above, with little participation from workers.”

Socialism is the full and free democratic participation of everybody in all spheres of life. In the workplace, that means a concrete and genuine workers’ control whereby all workers have a say in their enterprise’s decision-making, whether the enterprise is fully or partially owned by a government or fully owned by the workers themselves in a cooperative. Understanding the concept of socialism is one part of ongoing Venezuelan struggles. Another part is that about 70 percent of the country’s economy remains in private hands, according to the country’s central bank.

That means that capitalists still have the power to disrupt the economy and undermine the Bolivarian process. Venezuela’s continuing over-dependence on oil exports is another potential source of destabilization. Venezuela remains tied to the logic of capitalism and, no matter how much progress it makes in implementing its “21st century socialism,” it is too small to be a self-contained island of socialism in a vast turbulent sea of capitalism. No country on Earth can be self-sufficient, not even a country with as much exportable mineral wealth as Venezuela.

The Bolivarian Revolution can only advance and stabilize itself as part of a large regional bloc, large enough to withstand the economic, financial, political and military attacks of capitalist powers. But as of today, the furthest description that could be given to the Venezuelan economy is that it is a “mixed” economy. Capitalists hostile to the revolution still retain considerable ability to undermine it. The history of the Sandinista Revolution demonstrates what happens to a mixed economy. History has also demonstrated that an economy held in state hands has its own serious weaknesses.

Venezuela’s stress on workers’ control and cooperative enterprises demonstrates that the latter lesson has been learned; cooperation is at the center of the country’s “21st century socialism.” But there is also the lesson provided by the Sandinistas — that experience, too, should not be forgotten.

Millions without enough food and billionaires with more

Two reports were issued in recent days that make for a jarring, albeit not surprising, juxtaposition. One, the Forbes magazine annual list of the world’s richest people, was met with widespread breathless reporting. The other, a comprehensive survey of the large numbers of people who don’t have enough to eat in the United States, passed almost without a trace.

Because it merits far more attention than it received, let’s start with the second report. Issued by the Food Research and Action Center, the report “Food Hardship in America 2012” found that 18.2 percent of people living in the U.S. have insufficient access to food, based on the number of respondents who answered yes to the question: “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”

That is close to one in five. Or, to put it another way, 57 million people in the United States — the richest country on Earth — face going hungry. In 20 states, representing all regions of the country, more than one in five do not have enough to eat. In a further irony, the U.S. metropolitan area with the highest level of reported hunger is Bakersfield, California, where 26.7 percent did not have enough to eat at some point in 2012. Bakersfield is located in California’s Central Valley, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions.

The Food Research and Action Center also reports that more than 70 percent of people surveyed believed that the federal government should spend more money to alleviate hunger and 75 percent disagreed with congressional plans to cut food-assistance programs, already considered by experts as too small to provide adequate nutrition. These results are in strong contrast to the dominant narrative that cuts to social spending are widely desired.

One of the many corporate-media outlets that consistently cheerlead for more austerity is Forbes. The self-proclaimed “capitalist tool” proudly announced that 1,426 billionaires stride our planet, collectively accumulating net worths totaling US$5.4 trillion — $800 billion more than a year earlier.

To put that $5.4 trillion figure in perspective, there are exactly two countries in the world — the U.S. and China — that have a larger gross domestic product. The two largest economies in the European Union, Germany and France (according to World Bank statistics), have a combined GDP of US$5.5 trillion — barely more than the assets of the world’s 1,426 billionaires.

Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu again tops the list of the world’s richest people, with $73 billion to call his own. And once again, the Walton family, airs to the Wal-Mart fortune, are well represented — four separate Waltons are among the top 17, worth a combined $107 billion. That fortune is built on a ruthless system of sweatshops in the countries with the lowest labor costs and weakest enforcement of labor laws, and a relentless exploitation of its workforce. Wal-Mart is notorious for handing new employees forms to apply for food stamps because its pay is too low for survival.

The unemployment rate in the European Union is currently at 11.9 percent and a disastrous 23.6 percent for people age 25 and younger. Inequality in incomes is on the rise in countries around the world. Stock markets are flirting with record highs, reflecting the financial industry’s giddiness that employees have ever lesser leverage to counter their deteriorating pay and work conditions. Employee wages have been stagnant for more than three decades despite large increases in productivity.

Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

How could we have become so disconnected from the reality of our lives that we can celebrate the totality of all this as the greatest feat of humanity and a monument to efficiency?

‘Transatlantic Partnership’ intended to duplicate secret Trans-Pacific Partnership

Neoliberalism knows no borders, so perhaps it should not come as a bolt out of the blue that the United States and European Union are set to negotiate a “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.”

It might be thought that the Obama administration would have its hands full with the ongoing, top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, but it seems that much can be done in the absence of any pesky oversight. It might be thought that European Union officials would have their hands full with their series of financial crises, but it appears this is an irresistible opportunity to safeguard austerity.

Ah, can’t you just imagine corporate leaders sitting around a camp fire singing, “We are all the Cayman Islands now.” Surely they would be jolly folks and allow the political leaders who so graciously granted their wishes seats close to the fire.

This dystopia is sponsored by the usual corporate organizations. The trans-Atlantic trade agreement evaded all radar until U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement in his State of the Union address but had been in the works for more than a year. To the applause of business groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

No details of any kind have emerged about the trans-Atlantic trade agreement, only generalities. It would seem that holding two sets of negotiations among dozens of countries would be difficult, but then it is remembered that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is designed to be “scalable” — a euphemism meaning that the terms will be final. Any countries not among the present negotiators can join at any time but must accept that no terms already agreed upon are negotiable. Could this be the model for the Trans-Atlantic pact?

Big Business already cheering on the negotiators

A “U.S.-E.U. High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth” was created at a United States-European Union summit meeting in November 2011, tasked with “identifying policies and measures to increase U.S.-EU trade and investment to support mutually beneficial job creation, economic growth, and international competitiveness,” according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It is unknown who sat on the “high-level” group, but it is chaired by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Early in February 2013 — this seems to account for President Obama’s timing — the group said talks should go ahead.

Although it is impossible to be specific about the influences on the working group, the corporate interests who promote and benefit from “free-trade” agreements were not likely absent from the room. Eurochambres, a regional network of European chambers of commerce, published the paper it presented to the working group online. Eurochambres calls for harmonization of regulations, elimination of all tariffs and “the highest possible standards of protection for investors.”

That last wish should set off alarm bells. In pursuit of “protection for investors,” Eurochambres advocates that trade negotiators “Build on the Joint Statement of Principles on the Treatment of Foreign Investment elaborated by business organization on both sides of the Atlantic.” Those “principles” include:

“[T]he rule of law, transparency and predictability in government administration, regulatory fairness, the sanctity of contracts and private property, respect for intellectual property rights, and sound macro-economic policies. … This general approach should apply to the widest possible definition of investments, including all forms of assets and tangible and intangible property; property rights such as leases, mortgages, liens and pledges; intellectual property rights; rights conferred by law or contract, such as licenses and permits; business enterprises and equity and other forms of participation in them; claims to money and to performance; and returns.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a hard-line organization that has never seen a regulation it likes or a tax that is justified — has similarly provided its wish list. The Chamber calls for the same things as its European counterpart, including a “a highest standard investment agreement.” The Chamber did go a bit further by demanding an immediate deal, insisting that negotiators:

“Complete a bilateral investment agreement between the United States and the 27 EU member countries. An updated and comprehensive bilateral agreement would improve the flow of capital, prevent discrimination against investors, and provide protection from expropriation. … The Chamber calls for a swift time frame to avoid delays from election calendars in any participating country.”

Trans-Atlantic echoes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

These demands are staples of “free-trade” agreements, whether bilateral or multi-national. Bland-sounding calls for “equal treatment” for foreign and domestic investors and property rights only thinly mask a thicket of detail-loving devils. These platitudes form the basis of undemocratic, drastically one-sided trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which in turn provides the starting point for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a negotiation being conducted in secret by 11 countries.

These agreements use the same language as that of the Big Business pressure groups quoted just above. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will contain rules mirroring those proposed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP goes beyond NAFTA in several ways, via rules granting additional “rights” to multi-national corporations and further expanding the definition of “investor,” while containing no rules concerning labor, the environment, public health or safety.

For example, the TPP, if ratified, would overturn the policies of countries like Australia and New Zealand that force lower prices on medicines, significantly tighten corporate control of the Internet, and require that speculators be paid the full face value of a government bond even if bought at a deep discount from a third party.

The TPP would require disputes be judged in the International Centre for Settlement of Investor Disputes — a secret tribunal closed to the public that is an arm of, and controlled by, the World Bank. ICSID, and similar tribunals, are bodies that adjudicate disputes between investors and governments, but the judges who sit in judgment are often corporate lawyers who specialize in representing investors in disputes with governments. These tribunals issue a steady stream of rulings favoring corporate interests, and these decisions then become the standards to which future trade agreements will be held, building a floor for subsequent decisions that will be still more harsh.

The rules governing the TPP, if enacted, would require that maximizing corporate profits be the highest priority for governments, by law. Measures to reign in financial speculation, even during economic crises, would be illegal, and rules safeguarding workplace safety or the environment would be struck down as interference with corporate profits.

It is difficult to imagine that the corporations goading on the trans-Atlantic governments intend to settle for anything less. And also at risk for Europeans are laws blocking genetically modified foods — U.S. agribusinesses have sought to eliminate E.U. rules safeguarding food safety and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership may well be their route. “Harmonizing” rules ordinarily means “harmonizing” at the lowest level, and in this case that would mean the weaker safety regulations, and lackadaisical enforcement, of the U.S.

No Trans-Pacific Partnership text has ever been made available; the little that is publicly known is due to leaks published on the Internet by consumer organizations. The White House TPP page offers no substance. In its report on the most recent negotiation round, the White House provides this less than scintillating summary:

“Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators were pleased to report further solid steps forward in closing the remaining gaps between them during the 15th round of negotiations. … [T]he Leaders reaffirmed their mutual priority of concluding a state-of-the-art, comprehensive agreement as quickly as possible.”

The next round of TPP talks is in Singapore from March 4 to 13, where similar communiqués are likely forthcoming. Once again, it must be asked: What is being hidden?

Different ocean, but same concept

Information on the details of the Trans-Atlantic agreement are likely to be as scarce. Nonetheless, European leaders are mostly lining up in support. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, are pushing the idea. The corporate media is also lining up behind it, with “resistance” to an agreement portrayed as “interest groups” stubbornly clinging to parochial concerns. An excellent specimen of corporate ideology at work is provided by the centrist German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which is presented not to single it out but rather because it is typical. Der Spiegel writes of potential opposition:

“Some interest groups have refused to budge. The powerful US agrarian lobby, for example, insists on unlimited access to European markets, including such products as genetically modified produce, which is controversial on the Continent. European companies, for their part, refuse to accept the diktats of US regulatory authorities regarding whether and how they can pursue state contracts. … Furthermore, promoting a trans-Atlantic agreement would allow Obama — on the eve of his planned visit to Berlin in June — to address European concerns that the US has turned away from the Continent in favor of Asia. … But in his Tuesday evening speech, Obama still lauded the benefits of a trans-Pacific trade agreement with Australia and Asian countries before he mentioned the trans-Atlantic deal.”

The primary controversy, a reader might be led to believe, centers on a potential lack of resolve in giving corporations what they want. That there might be interests other than that of corporate profits — say, workers’ ability to have jobs with good pay and dignity, or a desire not eat food untested and unlabeled, or avoiding environmental damage — are not mentioned. Such matters are immaterial, evidently, at most the concern of “interest groups.”

The only clue as to the contents of what a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership might contain are in the final report issued by the High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth. Two key passages in the final report’s six pages state:

“The [High Level Working Group] recommends that a comprehensive U.S.-EU trade agreement should include investment liberalization and protection provisions based on the highest levels of liberalization and highest standards of protection that both sides have negotiated to date. … The HLWG recommends that the two sides explore new means of addressing these ‘behind-the-border’ obstacles to trade, including, where possible, through provisions that serve to reduce unnecessary costs and administrative delays stemming from regulation.” [page 3]

These provision could include:

“[R]educ[ing] redundant and burdensome testing and certification requirements … [and inserting p]rovisions or annexes containing additional commitments or steps aimed at promoting regulatory compatibility.” [page 4]

Stripped of bureaucratic niceties, what the above passages mean is that the most one-sided trade agreements (and tribunal interpretation) will be in force. For now, that arguably means the standards of NAFTA, under which taxation and regulation constitute “indirect expropriation” that require  compensation for corporations. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, however, would supersede NAFTA if implemented, mostly because it would be more draconian but also because Canada and Mexico have formally joined the nine original TPP negotiating countries, making NAFTA superfluous. To add to the complexity, Canada is negotiating its own secret trade pact with the E.U. and, like the U.S. Congress vis-à-vis the TPP, Canadian members of parliament are being left in the dark.

Market forces demand a race to the bottom

In the High Level Working Group’s six-page report, environment and labor safeguards are discussed in one paragraph. Here it is:

“The EU and the United States are both committed to high levels of protection for the environment and workers. The HLWG recommends that the two sides explore opportunities to address these important issues, taking in to account work done in the Sustainable Development Chapter of EU trade agreements and the Environment and Labor Chapters of U.S. trade agreements.” [page 5]

There are no effective environment or labor chapters in U.S. trade agreements, only boilerplate language that is meaningless. If that is the standard, then labor rights, workplace safety rules and environmental safeguards will be under sustained assault under any Trans-Atlantic trade agreement. Protections for the environment and employees are barriers to corporate profits, and will be treated as such. Regulations will be “harmonized” at the lowest level because that is what the “market” demands — the market simply being the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers.

In the context of European Union elites sparring over financial policy, Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that financial harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany so happens to have that tightest policy. Trade harmonization, regardless of where the borders are drawn, will follow a similar dynamic. The United States will seek to impose its looser regulations and weaker labor laws on Europe, and further weaken its own.

That is not because there is something inherently evil about U.S. officials or due to some particular moral failing of the Obama administration, but because the U.S. government, like all capitalist countries, reflect the dominant interests within their countries. Large industrialists and financiers dominate their societies through control of the mass media and a range of other institutions to the point that their preferred policies become, through heavy repetition, the dominant ideas across society and the ideas adopted by the political leaders who become intellectually and financially dependent on them. That is a crucial part of the puzzle as to why governments around the world enter into agreements that are so one-sided against themselves.

Coordinated international struggle is the only counter-force that can block these draconian trade agreements.

Defending Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present has always been a controversial book. We are taught as young students that history is made by monarchs, emperors, presidents, generals and industrialists who created the modern world, the only world that can be. The overwhelming majority of humanity is putty shaped by these great men, and we should all be grateful for what they have bestowed upon us.

Professor Zinn’s work is a direct challenge to such narratives, illuminating the struggles of ordinary people against the dominant classes through long periods of history and the violence that accompanies the creation and maintenance of institutional inequality. The potent challenge that People’s History represents more than 30 years after its first printing is demonstrated by a vitriolic attack on it published in the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, American Educator.

The article, “Undue Certainty,” was brought to my attention by a dedicated New York City high school teacher who is not confident that the AFT will publish a response. The author of the article, Sam Wineburg, could not long maintain his mask of neutrality despite his attempts to root his challenge in a supposed concern for “balance.” A perusal of Professor Wineburg’s curriculum vitae shows no obvious ideological slant, and I shall not attempt to assign him one. Moreover, he took pains to write from a centrist position. Nonetheless, his false equivalences between Right and Left ultimately ring hollow, and his assertions that he is standing up to the “dominant narrative” of People’s History badly at odds with reality.

After acknowledging that traditional school textbooks “too often” hide the history of ordinary soldiers and everyday people, Professor Wineburg’s first critique is that People’s History “is naked of footnotes,” similar to traditional textbooks. It is true that direct footnotes aren’t used, but People’s History contains 18 pages of references, grouped by chapter, and often provides sources in the text, so it is not difficult to find relevant sources.

Questioning the questioning of World War II

The core of Professor Wineburg’s argument centers on a critique of “A People’s War?,” People’s History’s chapter on World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War. (Professor Wineburg uses the 2003 HarperCollins edition while my copy is the 1995 edition, so the page numbers I will cite will vary a bit from those cited in the American Educator article.) The professor begins his critique of the chapter by pouring cold water on the questions raised by Professor Zinn concerning African-American attitudes toward the war, although he does acknowledge that the Black press wrote about the “Double V” — victory over fascism in Europe and over racism in the United States.

Professor Wineburg asserts that Professor Zinn “hangs his claim on [only] three pieces of evidence” — a quote from a Black journalist, a quote from a student and a poem published in the Black press [page 28]. It is strongly implied that these were lone unrepresentative voices. But Professor Wineburg leaves out that the student quote was was read to a crowd of “several thousand people in the Midwest,” according to People’s History, and was met with loud and sustained applause, to the “surprise and dismay” of the NAACP leader who is directly quoted. [page 410]

Moreover, Professor Zinn immediately follows those examples with these two sentences: “But there was no organized Negro opposition to the war. In fact, there was little organized opposition from any source,” save for a handful of very small socialist, anarchist and pacifist groups [page 411]. A page later, the book states, “Public opinion polls show[ed] large majorities of soldiers favoring the draft for the postwar period.” These passages are hardly consistent with Professor Wineburg’s contention that Professor Zinn one-sidedly declares that the U.S. seethed with hostility toward the war.

Professor Wineburg then complains that the number of conscientious objectors was not only low, but that Black C.O.s were proportionally fewer than White C.O.s. He simply uses the raw numbers in these categories without making any attempt to analyze them, an irony when a primary accusation against People’s History is that it is too simplistic. I am not an expert on World War II and am in no position to issue judgments, but a reasonable analysis would take into account the fact that Blacks consistently faced much harsher punishments than Whites, perhaps dampening the willingness to act on ambivalences toward the war. We might also consider the racism that would have made it more difficult for a Black objector to be granted C.O. status by White decision-makers.

Any analysis would surely have to contend with the fact that, as People’s History does but Professor Wineburg does not, the World War I-era espionage act criminalizing dissent was still on the books and the Smith Act passed in 1940 made criticism of the war effort illegal. These acts, while applied ruthlessly against Left critics of the wars, likely would have come down especially hard on African-Americans who publicly objected and wielded as racist object lessons. Would this not have an effect?

War aims and the decision to drop the atomic bomb

Professor Wineburg continues his critique of the World War II chapter by complaining that Professor Zinn asks “yes-no” and “either-or” questions [pages 29-30]. People’s History does ask big questions, but that is rather the point. The book openly asks if an Allied victory would deliver a blow to imperialism and if U.S. post-war policies would match the country’s stated ideals and values. Considering post-war McCarthyism, continued Jim Crow laws and the forcing of women back into the home, these hardly seem irrelevant questions.

Despite ample evidence of hostility to change by the country’s rulers, it is difficult not to conclude that Professor Wineburg is offended by the mere asking of these questions. People’s History presents a long series of evidence of the true U.S. goals of economic dominance covering five pages, backed by quotations directly from U.S. government archives [pages 401-405]. Some of the documents reveal that officials explicitly told Allied governments they would be allowed to keep their colonies.

The U.S. has a long history of interventions in other countries, often to directly benefit U.S. corporations. The U.S. intervened militarily almost 100 times in Latin America alone before 1970 and has a long history of overthrowing governments not to its liking. Does this history truly have no relevance to an analysis of U.S. war aims in World War II? It should not be controversial that the first world war was fought for imperial gains and colonies, nor that a struggle between the U.S. and Germany to be the successor to Britain’s declining world dominance was a factor in early 20th century foreign affairs. World War II did in fact end with the Allies dividing the world among themselves, nor did the Allies exert themselves to stop the Holocaust.

Professor Wineburg is certainly entitled to draw different conclusions than Professor Zinn, but his accusation that People’s History asks one-sided questions to pre-determined answers itself appears to be pre-determined. Professor Wineburg’s subtle contention that Professor Zinn gives insufficient credit to the Allies’ supposed zeal to defend Jews is complemented with a more direct accusation that People’s History fails to acknowledge the suffering of Poles. As I am Slavic and a Marxist intellectual, I need no lectures on Nazi barbarism; I am painfully aware of what the Nazis did to people like me in the Mauthausen death camp. I doubt Professor Zinn needed such lectures, either. Nonetheless, Professor Wineburg writes:

“Zinn is silent about Poland. Instead, he approvingly cites Simone Weil, the French philosopher and social activist. At a time when the Einsatzgruppen were herding Polish Jews into the forest and mowing them down before open pits, Weil compared the difference between Nazi fascism and the democratic principals of England and the United States to a mask hiding the true character of both. … Zinn adds that the real struggle of World War II was not between nations, but rather that the ‘real war was inside each nation.’ Given his stance, it’s no wonder that Zinn chooses to begin the war not in 1939, but a full year later.” [page 30]

That is a heavy charge. Did Professor Weil really say that? When we examine the relevant passage, we find that what she wrote was rather more subtle; neither she nor Professor Zinn is quoted accurately. Here is the relevant passage in People’s History:

“A few voices continued to insist that the real war was inside each nation: Dwight Macdonald’s wartime magazine Politics presented, in early 1945, an article by the French worker-philosopher Simone Weil: ‘Whether the mask is labelled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus — the bureaucracy, the police, the military. … No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.’ ” [page 412]

There are no direct comparisons of countries. Reasonable minds can disagree with Professor Weil’s anti-authoritarian stance or her imagery, but her writing unmistakably is a cri de coeur for democratic values to be honored, an end to oppression everywhere and for people to have control over their lives. That is not unreasonable. Jim Crow and racism was enforced with state-sponsored and -enabled terrorism across the U.S. South, women could hardly be said to have attained equality even if their labor was needed for the war effort and all sorts of national hatreds coursed through the populations of all belligerents.

That the evil of Nazi Germany was a unique menace that had to be eliminated is not an excuse for Allied countries not to take stock of themselves. No Allied country was anywhere near as cruel as the Nazi régime — but is that the bar we wish to set for ourselves?

Finally, Professor Wineburg addresses Professor Zinn’s contention that Japan was seeking to negotiate a surrender in the months before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that it was not necessary to drop them as the dominant narrative has consistently maintained. The complaint here is that Professor Zinn relies on “the two defining texts of the revisionist school, Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy (1967) and Martin Sherwin’s A World Destroyed (1975).” But Professor Zinn also quotes from U.S. government documents that are based on interviews with “hundreds” of Japanese civilian and military leaders, and also notes that the U.S. had broken Japanese codes, revealing that Japanese leaders were talking of surrender.

Moreover, Atomic Diplomacy has a “selected bibliography” of 28 pages and A World Destroyed supports itself with more than 100 pages of notes, sources and documents. It is rather difficult to argue that these books are not well sourced. Nonetheless, Professor Wineburg rests his case on his disbelief that the Japanese had any intention to surrender. He writes:

“The Japanese had been courting the still-neutral [in the Pacific theater] Soviets for months, with airy proposals containing scant details about surrender terms. In fact, as late as June 1945, their backs to the wall and all hope seemingly lost, the Japanese were still trying to barter with the Soviets, going so far as to offer Manchuria and southern Karafuto in exchange for the oil needed to stave off an American invasion.” [page 31]

Is it really so remarkable that the Japanese were maneuvering to avoid a surrender they were becoming reconciled to, even if they had only the slimmest of hopes? This passage “proves” that Japan was willing to try anything to avoid a surrender, not that they were definitively determined to fight on no matter what. For a critic so quick to accuse Professor Zinn of “undue certainty” in the support of a preferred narrative, Professor Wineburg appears to be the one rather casual with documentation.

Is it really ‘neutrality’ that is the issue?

Having built up a head of steam, Professor Wineburg perhaps does not realize the extent to which he reveals an agenda, and not merely disapproval of conclusions supposedly too strong. In different passages, he issues these harsh judgments on People’s History:

“It is here that Zinn’s undeniable charisma becomes educationally dangerous, especially when we become attached to his passionate concern for the underdog. … Instead of encouraging us to think, such a history teaches us how to jeer. … A history of unalloyed certainties is dangerous because it invites a slide into intellectual fascism.” [pages 33-34]

Wow! “Intellectual fascism”? What purpose is the use of such invective by someone who has spent pages claiming to be above any partisan scholarship? The purpose is to dismiss out of hand any real critique of the modern capitalist state and its workings. Professor Wineburg’s lines of attack demonstrate that he identifies strongly with these dominant powers. It is not uncommon for a person with such an identification to react with fury when patterns of domination are challenged because such patterns are so deeply woven into the fabric of society. Here is how he dismisses People’s History:

“Zinn remains popular not because he is timely but precisely because he’s not. A People’s History speaks directly to our inner Holden Caulfield. Our heroes are shameless frauds, our parents and teachers conniving liars, our textbooks propagandistic slop. Long before we could Google accounts of a politician’s latest indiscretion, Zinn offered a national ‘gotcha.’ They’re all phonies is a message that never goes out of style.” [page 33]

So there we have it. How dare Howard Zinn question our great country and its great institutions! There is no reason for anyone to complain, so he writes only to indulge a childish desire to poke people in the eye and only the immature could possibly follow him. Sam Wineburg may have convinced himself that he has “exposed” Howard Zinn, but he has exposed only his own desire to guard the honor of the powerful and keep them safe from criticism.

People’s History is an attempt to write people into the history that they lived. Professor Wineburg’s illogical contention that the Right’s efforts to erase people from history — the ideological re-writing of history in school textbooks in Texas and the elimination of Mexican-American studies in Tucson, Arizona, are merely two of the most recent efforts — is equivalent to the pioneering work of Professor Zinn is unworthy of an educator. And far less removed from such ideologically inspired erasures of history than he would like to believe.