Sharing the Wealth

How can we narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country? What concrete steps can be taken now to abolish poverty in America? There are a number of things that President Nixon could do immediately, if he wanted to. In terms of our own grape pickers' strike, he could tell the Pentagon to stop shipping extraordinary amounts of grapes to Vietnam--the Government's most obvious tool in its attempt to break our strike. And he could improve the lot of all the farmworkers in the Southwest--easily, under existing legislation--by putting an end to the importing and exploitation of cheap foreign labor. The Immigration Service has allowed almost 500,000 poor Mexicans to flood across the border since 1965. Absorbing this number of resident aliens would not be detrimental if they actually became residents, but most of these workers return to Mexico after each harvest season, since their American wages go much farther there than they would in this country. They have no stake in either economic or political advances here; it is the domestic farmworker who wants our union, who wants better schools, who wants to participate in the political system. Our poor Mexican brothers who are allowed to come across the border for the harvest are tools in the Government's and the growers' attempts to break our strike.

In the still larger framework of all the country's poor, President Nixon should acknowledge that the War on Poverty programs of the Sixties have failed. The Office of Economic Opportunity pumped out propaganda about "community action programs" through which the poor were supposedly going to have a say in the solution of their own problems. Then, just as the communities were organizing for meaningful change through these programs, the money was suddenly yanked away. Washington seemed to realize that if it lived up to its rhetoric, it would actually be encouraging real political participation and building real economic power among the poor, and got cold feet. The Government and the power class will never allow their money to be used to build another power class--especially if they are convinced, however wrongly, that their own economic security and self-interest would be jeopardized.

It might be expected for me to propose that the anti-poverty programs be continued--but with better financing and with complete control over them given to representatives of the communities and the people involved. I could also plead for the money that has been spent in the past few years on anti-poverty programs to be simply distributed among the poor. But neither of these sensible alternatives is going to come to pass under an Administration that made it perfectly clear last fall that it intended to channel all Federal funds through local governments, no matter how corrupt.

Nothing is going to happen until we, the poor, can generate our own political and economic power. Such a statement sounds radical to many middle-class Americans, but it should not. Though many of the poor have come to see the affluent middle class as its enemy, that class actually stands between the poor and the real powers in this society--the administrative octopus with its head in Washington, the conglomerates, the military complex. It's like a camel train: The herder, way up in front, leads one camel and all the other camels follow. We happen to be the last camel, trudging along through the leavings of the whole train. We see only the camel in front of us and make him the target of our anger, but that solves (continued on page 252)Sharing the Wealth(continued from page 127) nothing. The lower reaches of the middle class, in turn, are convinced that blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Indians and poor whites want to steal their jobs--a conviction that the power class cheerfully perpetuates. The truth of the matter is that, even with automation, there can still be enough good-paying jobs for everyone in this country. If all of us were working for decent wages, there would be a greater demand for goods and services, thus creating even more jobs and increasing the gross national product. Full and fair employment would also mean that taxes traceable to welfare and all the other hidden costs of poverty--presently borne most heavily by middle-income whites--would inevitably go down.

At one time, we would have searched for ways to bring about a direct change in the course of the camel driver. That was the situation in the Thirties, when President Roosevelt initiated such massive programs as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. At that time, most Americans were poor, white and nonwhite alike; but most were white. The union movement was fighting to win gains for its members, then an underclass. (Now it feels it has to fight to protect the economic independence it has since achieved.) And there was only a relatively small upper class trying to frustrate change. But today the majority of Americans--most of them still white--are relatively well off financially. The country's policies naturally respond to the desires of the majority, and that majority--having joined the comfortable middle class--is no longer motivated to eliminate poverty.

The forces in control today at the top, furthermore, are so immense, powerful and interlocked that it would be absurd to expect dramatic change from them. The Pentagon, for example, has a hand-in-glove relationship with the same industrialists who manufacture tractors, reapers and mechanical grape harvesters. How can we expect the Defense Department to do anything but undermine our battle with the growers? The poor today, finally, are not only impoverished; most of them are also members of minority races. Thus, as a class, we are racially as well as economically alienated from the mainstream.

Despite this alienation, however, and despite the magnitude of the forces opposing us, the poor have tremendous potential economic power, as unlikely as that may seem. That power can derive from two facts of life: First, even though our numbers are much smaller than they were in the Thirties, we are still a sizable group--some 30,000,000. Perhaps even more important, we have a strong sense of common indignation; the poor always identify with one another more than do the rich. What instruments can we use to win this power? Perhaps the most effective technique is the boycott. Most Americans realize that the black civil rights revolution of the late Fifties and early Sixties effectively began with Dr. Martin Luther King's successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. This tool is being perfected, for blacks, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in Chicago. Our own nationwide grape boycott is hurting corporate agriculture so much that the growers are eventually going to have to deal with us, no matter how hard the power class tries to weaken the boycott's effectiveness.

Another powerful tool is the strike. Attacking the unions is fashionable today, but the labor movement, for all its faults, is one of the few institutions in the country that I see even trying to reach down to us. The universities, thanks to some student organizations, and the churches, thanks to a few radical groups, are the only other institutions making a real attempt to alleviate our plight. With their help, we farmworkers are now trying to build our own union, a new kind of union that will actively include people rather than exclude them. A man is a man and needs an organization even when--in fact, especially when--a machine displaces him. The poor are also beginning to experiment with cooperatives of all kinds and with their own credit unions--that is, with the creation of our own institutions, the profits from which can go to us rather than to the wealthy. And, at least in the Southwest, we are looking at ways to give the farmworkers plots of land they can call their own, because we know that power always comes with landownership.

We need greater control of important noneconomic institutions, too. We have very little to say, for example, about the attitude of our churches to economic and political problems. We are looking for ways to get the church involved in the struggle, to make it relevant to our needs. The poor also need control of their schools and medical facilities and legal defenses; but these advances are all subsidiary, in my opinion, to the need for developing strictly economic power. Economic power has to precede political power. Gandhi understood this when, in 1930, he and his followers resolved to defy the British government's salt monopoly by making their own salt from the sea; this boycott was one of the crucial steps in the Indian fight for independence. We, the poor of the United States, have not yet hit upon the specific issue around which we can bring all of our boycotting and striking capabilities to bear. But we will.

The poor are badly prepared to participate in the political arena. Entire nations of us, such as the American Indians, have never had more than token representation in Federal, state, county or city government. Migratory farmworkers are almost always disenfranchised by voter-registration residency requirements. Minority immigrants face long waits for citizenship papers and the additional barrier of literacy tests. And even if they qualify, it is prohibitively expensive for many of the poor to vote. A farmworker putting in long hours simply can't afford to take half or all of a weekday off to travel to the polls.

In a society that truly desired full participation, all 18-year-olds and convicts would be given the franchise; the whole practice of voter registration would be scrapped; immigrants would automatically be given a citizenship certificate at the end of one year if their record was clean, whether or not they were literate in English or in their own language; elections would last up to 72 hours and would include Saturdays and Sundays.

These are some of the simpler things that could be done to increase participation. But they aren't being done and they won't be done unless the poor can change the political status quo. Our vote simply doesn't matter that much today. Once we give it away, we lose it because we can't control the men we elect. We help elect liberals and then they pass civil rights bills that defuse our boycotts and strikes, taking the steam out of our protest but leaving the basic problems of injustice and inequality unsolved. Or, worse, we elect a candidate who says he will represent us and then discover that he has sold out to some special interest.

I propose two reforms that would go a long way toward a cure. First, the whole system of campaign financing should make it as easy for a poor man as for a millionaire to put his case before the people. Second, the various minority groups--as well as such pockets of poor whites as the Appalachians, who make up a distinct economic subculture--should be given a proportionate number of seats in every governing body affecting them. Black people should have 43 or 44 seats in the House of Representatives and 10 or 11 seats in the Senate. In California, where ten percent of the population is Mexican American, eight seats in the state assembly should be set aside for us; there is now only one Mexican American assemblyman. This same procedure should be followed all the way down the line, through the county level down to the school and water districts. In each case, the electorate would be allowed to vote for whomever they pleased--even if he weren't of the same race as the majority of voters--but the representative would clearly be an advocate of their needs. Though this system may seem alien to many Americans, something like it already works in the cities, where tickets are often drawn up to reflect the racial balance of the community. And the idea of special representation for minority political groups is common in foreign countries. Once the minority group or the economic subculture is completely assimilated, of course, the need for special representation will wither away.

These are the kinds of reforms we will work for once we have an economic base established; they certainly aren't going to come about as long as we remain powerless. But we will remain powerless until we help ourselves. I know that there are men of good conscience in the affluent society who are trying to help. Many of them are middle-class people who remember the Depression, or unionists who wear scars of the battle to liberate workingmen. They are like a large army of guerrillas within the establishment. We are depending on them to hear our cry, to respect our picket lines and to support our grape boycott, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy's Poor People's Campaign and the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket. And we hope that they will understand how crucial it is that the vote become truly universal. As long as democracy exists mainly as a catchword in politicians' speeches, the hopes for real democracy will be mocked.

In the final analysis, however, it doesn't really matter what the political system is; ultimately, the results are the same, whether you have a general, a king, a dictator or a civilian president running the country. We don't need perfect political systems; we need perfect participation. If you don't participate in the planning, you just don't count. Until the chance for political participation is there, we who are poor will continue to attack the soft part of the American system--its economic structure. We will build power through boycotts, strikes, new unions--whatever techniques we can develop. These attacks on the status quo will come not because we hate but because we know America can construct a humane society for all of its citizens--and that if it does not, there will be chaos.

But it must be understood that once we have substantial economic power--and the political power that follows in its wake--our work will not be done. We will then move on to effect even more fundamental changes in this society. The quality of compassion seems to have vanished from the American spirit. The power class and the middle class haven't done anything that one can truly be proud of, aside from building machines and rockets. It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.