PEOPLE:
R.I.P. HOWARD ZINN:
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922-January 27, 2010) has passed on to that great anarcho-syndicalist commune in the sky. Very much self-educated, despite his post WW2 degrees in history, his greatest education was when, as an airman in WW2 he participated in an April 1945 napalm raid on a group of German soldiers trying to wait out the end of the war in Royan France. The raid incidentally fried a number of French civilians and had absolutely no military value beyond racking up "promotion points" for the officers who directed it. This incident set Zinn on a lifetime anti-war commitment that informed his subsequent works as a libertarian activist and historian. His most popular work was 'A People's History of the United States', but his anti-war, civil rights and general anti-government activities spanned decades. While never what one might describe as an "orthodox anarchist", if that is not a contradiction in terms, Zinn embodied what was best in the American tradition of anarchism, a pragmatic and issue focused way of viewing the world. Grand ideological visions were alien to his way of being. The reader can gather an idea of his life and works from this Wikipedia article on him. Here's the notice of his death from CNN. The notice points out how he continued up until his death at 87 years to try and clarify the politics of his native country, especially relevant as the Obama presidency degenerates into the usual imperialism sweetened with an icing of high liberal rhetoric. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
'People's History' author Howard Zinn dead at 87:
From Cristy Lenz, CNN
Howard Zinn's daughter says her father believed that there is no "just war."
(CNN) -- Noted author and social activist Howard Zinn died of a heart attack Wednesday while traveling, his daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn, said.
Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States," was 87. Kabat-Zinn said her father, who lived in Auburndale, Massachusetts," died while traveling in Santa Monica, California.
"A People's History of the United States," first published in 1980, tells a
history not often in seen in other books -- from the perspective of those not in a seat of power.
The book was the inspiration for a 2009 documentary, narrated by Zinn, called "The People Speak." The film highlighted people who spoke up for social change, according to the Web site of the History Channel, which aired the program.
Zinn was a shipyard worker and Air Force bombardier before he went to college under the GI Bill and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, according to his Web site. He taught at numerous universities, including Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Kabat-Zinn said of her father that he lived a "very full and exciting life" and that there were many social issues that were very important to him. Above all, she said, her father believed that there is no "just war."
Zinn's death on the day of
President Obama's first State of the Union address was underscored by his contribution to a recently released special from The Nation magazine called "Obama at One."
"I've been searching hard for a highlight," he wrote. "The only thing that comes close is some of Obama's rhetoric; I don't see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies."
Zinn said he was not "terribly disappointed because I didn't expect that much," noting that he has been "a traditional Democratic president" on foreign policy -- "hardly any different from a Republican" -- and has been cautious in domestic policy.
"On health care, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now," Zinn said.
Zinn also cautioned "that Obama is going to be a mediocre president -- which means, in our time, a dangerous president -- unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."
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'People's History' Author Howard Zinn Dies at 87:
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Howard
Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist ''A People's History of the United States'' became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as
Bruce Springsteen and Ben
Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.
Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass.
Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, ''A People's History'' was -- fittingly -- a people's best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including ''Voices of a People's History,'' a volume for young people and a graphic novel
''I can't think of anyone who had such a powerful and benign influence,'' said the linguist and fellow activist
Noam Chomsky, a close friend of
Zinn's. ''His historical work changed the way millions of people saw the past.''
At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, ''A People's History'' told an openly left-wing story.
Zinn charged
Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from
Andrew Jackson to
Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.
Even liberal historians were uneasy with
Zinn.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: ''I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian.''
In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Zinn acknowledged he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter -- not the last -- of a new kind of history.
''There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,'' Zinn said. ''My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.''
''A People's History'' had some famous admirers, including
Matt Damon and
Affleck. The two grew up near
Zinn, were family friends and gave the book a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for ''Good Will Hunting.'' When
Affleck nearly married Jennifer Lopez,
Zinn was on the guest list.
''He taught me how valuable -- how necessary dissent was to democracy and to America itself,'' Affleck said in a statement. ''He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites. I was lucky enough to know him personally and I will carry with me what I learned from him -- and try to impart it to my own children -- in his memory.''
Oliver Stone was a fan, as well as Springsteen, whose bleak ''Nebraska'' album was inspired in part by ''A People's History.'' The book was the basis of a 2007 documentary, ''Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind,'' and even showed up on ''The Sopranos,'' in the hand of Tony's son, A.J.
Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.
Born in New York in 1922,
Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of
Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.
''Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that,'' he told the AP.
''And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant. ... It was a very shocking lesson for me.''
War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, Zinn joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: ''Never again.''
He attended
New York University and
Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at
Spelman College, an all-black women's school in then-segregated Atlanta.
During the civil rights movement, Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks.
He was loved by students -- among them a young
Alice Walker, who later wrote ''The Color Purple'' -- but not by administrators. In 1963,
Spelman fired him for ''insubordination.'' (
Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at
Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school's president, John
Silber.
Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.
''The happy thing about Howard was that in the last years he could gain satisfaction that his contributions were so impressive and recognized,'' Chomsky said. ''He could hardly keep up with all the speaking invitations.''
Besides ''A People's History,'' Zinn wrote several books, including ''The Southern Mystique,'' ''LaGuardia in Congress'' and the memoir, ''You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train,'' the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn that Damon narrated. He also wrote three plays.
One of Zinn's last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.
'I've been searching hard for a highlight,'' he wrote, adding that he wasn't disappointed because he never expected a lot from Obama.
''I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president -- which means, in our time, a dangerous president -- unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.''
Zinn's longtime wife and collaborator, Roslyn, died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.
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Here's yet another obituary from the Boston Globe via the AK Press Blog. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87:
By AK Press January 27, 2010
Sad news from the
Boston Globe…
—————-
Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87 :
By Mark
Feeney, Globe Staff
Howard
Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John
Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.
“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers —many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out—but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”
Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”
Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979.
After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped, however.
Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.
During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.
Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.
The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.
Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and Democracy” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966).Dr. Zinn was also the author of “The Politics of History” (1970); “Postwar America” (1973); “Justice in Everyday Life” (1974); and “Declarations of Independence” (1990).
In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: “Emma,” about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and “Daughter of Venus.”
Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting.” The title characters, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.
Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”
On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did so.
Dr. Zinn’s wife died in 2008. He leaves a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington; a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaugthers; and two grandsons.
Funeral plans were not available.
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Like most every significant hostorical figure various political farces will try to claim Howard Zinn as their own. This is made particularily easy by the fact that the anarchist position is very much an unknown amongst the general population, except in characture. Zinn was very m7uch an anarchist, though, as I have said, of an unorthodox american strain. Here's an interview from the AK Press Blog with Ziga Vodovnik about Howard Zinn's anarchism.
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Rebels Against Tyranny
By Ziga Vodovnik
Howard Zinn, 85, is("was"-Molly) a Professor Emeritus of political science at Boston University. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1922 to a poor immigrant family. He realized early in his youth that the promise of the “American Dream“, that will come true to all hard-working and diligent people, is just that—a promise and a dream. During World War II he joined US Air Force and served as a bombardier in the “European Theatre“. This proved to be a formative experience that only strengthened his convictions that there is no such thing as a just war. It also revealed, once again, the real face of the socio-economic order, where the suffering and sacrifice of the ordinary people is always used only to higher the profits of the privileged few.
Although Zinn spent his youthful years helping his parents support the family by working in the shipyards, he started with studies at Columbia University after WWII, where he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in 1958. Later he was appointed as a chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College, an all-black women’s college in Atlanta, GA, where he actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement.
From the onset of the Vietnam War he was active within the emerging anti-war movement, and in the following years only stepped up his involvement in movements aspiring towards another, better world. Zinn is the author of more than 20 books, including A People’s History of the United States that is “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories…” (Library Journal)
Zinn’s most recent book is entitled A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, and is a fascinating collection of essays that Zinn wrote in the last couple of years. Beloved radical historian is still lecturing across the US and around the world, and is, with active participation and support of various progressive social movements continuing his struggle for free and just society.
Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a “dilemma”—either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What’s your opinion about this?
Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense, the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization—there is nothing wrong with idea of globalization—in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.
ZV: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: “Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?
HZ: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.
ZV: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means—with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.
HZ: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over —first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.
ZV: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?
HZ: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.
We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.
When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: “I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.”
ZV: Anarchism is in this respect rightly opposing representative democracy since it is still form of tyranny —tyranny of majority. They object to the notion of majority vote, noting that the views of the majority do not always coincide with the morally right one. Thoreau once wrote that we have an obligation to act according to the dictates of our conscience, even if the latter goes against the majority opinion or the laws of the society. Do you agree with this?
HZ: Absolutely. Rousseau once said, if I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority? No, majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok.
That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things—proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. And also has to take into account that majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. So yes, people have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.
ZV: Where do you see the historical origins of anarchism in the United States?
HZ: One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.
ZV: Where do you see the main inspiration of contemporary anarchism in the United States? What is your opinion about the Transcendentalism —i.e., Henry D. Thoreau, Ralph W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, et al.—as an inspiration in this perspective?
HZ: Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.
Unfortunately, today there is no real organized anarchist movement in the United States. There are many important groups or collectives that call themselves anarchist, but they are small. I remember that in 1960s there was an anarchist collective here in Boston that consisted of fifteen (sic!) people, but then they split. But in 1960s the idea of anarchism became more important in connection with the movements of 1960s.
ZV: Most of the creative energy for radical politics is nowadays coming from anarchism, but only few of the people involved in the movement actually call themselves “anarchists”. Where do you see the main reason for this? Are activists ashamed to identify themselves with this intellectual tradition, or rather they are true to the commitment that real emancipation needs emancipation from any label?
HZ: The term anarchism has become associated with two phenomena with which real anarchist don’t want to associate themselves with. One is violence, and the other is disorder or chaos. The popular conception of anarchism is on the one hand bomb-throwing and terrorism, and on the other hand no rules, no regulations, no discipline, everybody does what they want, confusion, etc. That is why there is a reluctance to use the term anarchism. But actually the ideas of anarchism are incorporated in the way the movements of the 1960s began to think.
I think that probably the best manifestation of that was in the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—SNCC. SNCC without knowing about anarchism as philosophy embodied the characteristics of anarchism. They were decentralized. Other civil rights organizations, for example Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were centralized organizations with a leader—Martin Luther King. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were based in New York, and also had some kind of centralized organization. SNCC, on the other hand, was totally decentralized. It had what they called field secretaries, who worked in little towns all over the South, with great deal of autonomy. They had an office in Atlanta, Georgia, but the office was not a strong centralized authority. The people who were working out in the field—in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi—they were very much on their own. They were working together with local people, with grassroots people. And so there is no one leader for SNCC, and also great suspicion of government.
They could not depend on government to help them, to support them, even though the government of the time, in the early 1960s, was considered to be progressive, liberal. John F. Kennedy especially. But they looked at John F. Kennedy, they saw how he behaved. John F. Kennedy was not supporting the Southern movement for equal rights for Black people. He was appointing the segregationists judges in the South, he was allowing southern segregationists to do whatever they wanted to do. So SNCC was decentralized, anti-government, without leadership, but they did not have a vision of a future society like the anarchists. They were not thinking long term, they were not asking what kind of society shall we have in the future. They were really concentrated on immediate problem of racial segregation. But their attitude, the way they worked, the way they were organized, was along, you might say, anarchist lines.
ZV: Do you think that pejorative (mis)usage of the word anarchism is direct consequence of the fact that the ideas that people can be free, was and is very frightening to those in power?
HZ: No doubt! No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.
ZV: In theoretical political science, we can analytically identify two main conceptions of anarchism —a so-called collectivist anarchism limited to Europe, and on another hand individualist anarchism limited to US. Do you agree with this analytical separation?
HZ: To me this is an artificial separation. As so often happens analysts can make things easier for themselves, like to create categories and fit movements into categories, but I don’t think you can do that. Here in the United States, sure there have been people who believed in individualist anarchism, but in the United States have also been organized anarchists of Chicago in 1880s or SNCC. I guess in both instances, in Europe and in the United States, you find both manifestations, except that maybe in Europe the idea of anarcho-syndicalism became stronger in Europe than in the US. While in the US you have the IWW, which is an anarcho-syndicalist organization and certainly not in keeping with individualist anarchism.
ZV: What is your opinion about the “dilemma” of means—revolution versus social and cultural evolution?
HZ: I think here are several different questions. One of them is the issue of violence, and I think here anarchists have disagreed. Here in the US you find a disagreement, and you can find this disagreement within one person. Emma Goldman, you might say she brought anarchism, after she was dead, to the forefront in the US in the 1960s, when she suddenly became an important figure. But Emma Goldman was in favor of the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, but then she decided that this is not the way. Her friend and comrade, Alexander Berkman, he did not give up totally the idea of violence. On the other hand, you have people who were anarchistic in way like Tolstoy and also Gandhi, who believed in nonviolence.
There is one central characteristic of anarchism on the matter of means, and that central principle is a principle of direct action—of not going through the forms that the society offers you, of representative government, of voting, of legislation, but directly taking power. In case of trade unions, in case of anarcho-syndicalism, it means workers going on strike, and not just that, but actually also taking hold of industries in which they work and managing them. What is direct action? In the South when black people were organizing against racial segregation, they did not wait for the government to give them a signal, or to go through the courts, to file lawsuits, wait for Congress to pass the legislation. They took direct action; they went into restaurants, were sitting down there and wouldn’t move. They got on those buses and acted out the situation that they wanted to exist.
Of course, strike is always a form of direct action. With the strike, too, you are not asking government to make things easier for you by passing legislation, you are taking a direct action against the employer. I would say, as far as means go, the idea of direct action against the evil that you want to overcome is a kind of common denominator for anarchist ideas, anarchist movements. I still think one of the most important principles of anarchism is that you cannot separate means and ends. And that is, if your end is egalitarian society you have to use egalitarian means, if your end is non-violent society without war, you cannot use war to achieve your end. I think anarchism requires means and ends to be in line with one another. I think this is in fact one of the distinguishing characteristics of anarchism.
ZV: On one occasion Noam Chomsky has been asked about his specific vision of anarchist society and about his very detailed plan to get there. He answered that “we can not figure out what problems are going to arise unless you experiment with them.” Do you also have a feeling that many left intellectuals are loosing too much energy with their theoretical disputes about the proper means and ends, to even start “experimenting” in practice?
HZ: I think it is worth presenting ideas, like Michael Albert did with Parecon for instance, even though if you maintain flexibility. We cannot create blueprint for future society now, but I think it is good to think about that. I think it is good to have in mind a goal. It is constructive, it is helpful, it is healthy, to think about what future society might be like, because then it guides you somewhat what you are doing today, but only so long as this discussions about future society don’t become obstacles to working towards this future society. Otherwise you can spend discussing this utopian possibility versus that utopian possibility, and in the mean time you are not acting in a way that would bring you closer to that.
ZV: In your A People’s History of the United States you show us that our freedom, rights, environmental standards, etc., have never been given to us from the wealthy and influential few, but have always been fought out by ordinary people—with civil disobedience. What should be in this respect our first steps toward another, better world?
HZ: I think our first step is to organize ourselves and protest against existing order—against war, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create kind of human relationship that should exist in future society. That would mean to organize ourselves without centralize authority, without charismatic leader, in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society. So that even if you don’t win some victory tomorrow or next year in the meantime you have created a model. You have acted out how future society should be and you created immediate satisfaction, even if you have not achieved your ultimate goal.
ZV: What is your opinion about different attempts to scientifically prove Bakunin’s ontological assumption that human beings have “instinct for freedom”, not just will but also biological need?
HZ: Actually I believe in this idea, but I think that you cannot have biological evidence for this. You would have to find a gene for freedom? No. I think the other possible way is to go by history of human behavior. History of human behavior shows this desire for freedom, shows that whenever people have been living under tyranny, people would rebel against that.
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WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER HOWARD ZINN ?:
Molly feels obliged to add this coda to what has been published above in tribute to Howard Zinn. I have to point out that Zinn began his radical career and continued in it under a traditional assumption that there was an "objective reality" that could be uncovered by radical effort. This is something quite different from the fashion in academia and leftism today where it is assumed, like Hitler assumed, that "truth" depends upon its utility. To be quite frank, given the slightest "political pressure" the post-modernist leftists of today will become the fascists of tomorrow. They, after all, have abandoned the idea of objective truth, and their fashions are hardly the sort of thing to die for or even get fired for.
What Zinn represents is an "older radicalism", one that predates the acceptance of one of the fundamentals of fascist thought by "the left" ie that "truth" is relative to interests. To be fair this sort of thought is also Stalinist. Those death camps may be more in the line of genealogy of post-modernism than fascism is, but both fascism and Stalinism share a contempt for objective truth.
Is this degeneration inevitable ? Personally I don't think so, and the last sentence of the above gives me hope. I have always known , for instance, that a large part of human behavior is genetically determined. Forty years ago when I first became a "leftist" such a belief was the occasion of physical assault here in the "west". In years gone by it, and other much more established realities, were the occasional of "death" in 'workers' paradises". Most of those tyrannies are now past, and those that still exist are so pressed for their survival that they don't have the leisure, and self confidence, to imagine that they can govern biology. Only post modernists in American universities have such hubris.
What I will say below is merely "feeling". It may be grossly wrong. Post-modernism is basically 'Stalinism with a human face'. It posits that there is no objective truth beyond some sort of "readings of texts"- to be as crude as the proponents of this view often are. This, of course, is in direct opposition to the usual socialist, anarchist and otherwise, view that there is an objective set of facts that justifies their views. It is, however, very much in tune with the subjectivism of fascism where "facts" have to be interpreted according to a "race", orm some other privileged part of the population-yes this can include "leftist privileged parts of a popukation". Put it in modern terms and you get such things as "gender interpretations" or other transpositions of fascism into modern leftism. By the way, I haven't exited from facts to feelings yet. Here are the feelings.
What I "feel" is that this fashion is passing. I'm sure that there will be academics that will continue to teach in a post-modernist way until their senility or retirement, whichever comes first. I'm also sure-I've had it demonstrated to me in no uncertrain terms- that there will continue to be political efforts within oppositional groups to divert them to the sort of "psychotherapy politics" that is the end result of such ideology. . At the same time I have, over the course of decades, seem such things gradually decreasing, and I can extrapolate into the future that they will decrease even more to the point of extinction. Well, I hope anyhow.
To return to the question...will there be other Howard Zinns in the future ? Frankly I don't know. The present academic mileau gives all sorts of incentive to so-called "radical" views that are actually nothing of the sort, and, worst of all, it denigrates the essential arguement that opposition to power has always depended upon ie that there is an independent reality that can be known logically. Classical fascism, of course, denigrated this argument just as academic leftists do.
On the OTHER HAND...consider that not just Howard Zinn but many other American radicals passed through a purgatory that was equal to the political correctness of today ie the 1950's consensus. What they did others may do as well. THAT is my hope. Perhaps eventualy we may get a common sense radicalism from academia or, if that fails, a common sense intellectualism outside of academia. Either one is possible.
