Extra Issue

March 12th 2010

Boston Anti-Authoritarian Movement Newsletter

Special Edition

The Ideas of Howard Zinn

The Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society

The Art of Revolution, Anarchism Shouldnt be Page 3 a Dirty Word, Page 6 Zinn: A World Without Borders, Page 9
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Presented in collaboration with

Remembering Howard Zinn, the anarchist.

In This Issue
-The Art of Revolution, by Howard Zinn Page 3 -Anarchism Shouldnt be a Dirty Word, an Interview. Page 7 A World Without Borders, Page 9

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ince the death of Howard Zinn, many have paid tribute to this great thinker. Howard Zinn as a historian was a teacher of the world that was, and as a radical, a teacher of the world that could be. Newspapers have printed stories full of his deeds: the campaigns he fought on, the working peoples history he brought to light, the plays he wrote, the books he published, and the students he taught. Little, however, has been said about Howards ideas themselves. Howard Zinn has been celebrated throughout the mainstream media he so scathingly criticized. But thus far, the mainstream media, and even much of the independent, leftist and progressive media, have barely touched on his anarchist ideas. In part this is understandable. One of Zinns best traits was his ability to relate to almost everyone, and that hes been embraced by so many may be one reason why his specific political beliefs have been downplayed. He always gave his energy and natural gifts to the most just causes, and his words resonated with so many people searching for a real change to the old order of things. Another reason his revolutionary beliefs have been downplayed may be that anarchism is largely misunderstood and taboo in the Western world. As Dimitri Prieto-Samsonov wrote for the Havana Times, (Zinns) biography in Wikipedia includes the uncomfortable symbol of the A inside the O: a reference to the axiom Anarchy is Order and the emblem of the anarchist movement of which he was an adherent. Uncomfortable? yes. Only a few thinkers today dare to proclaim themselves anarchists. Howard Zinn was one of them. Indeed, anarchism is probably the most misunderstood political ideology in the United States. Howard wrote in the opening words of Chapter 7 (entitled Anarchism)

of his book, The Zinn Reader, That I could get a Ph.D from a major American university without knowing anything about anarchism, surely one of the most important political philosophies of modern times, is a commentary on the narrowness of American education. Asked in an interview if he was unconfortable with the term anarchism, he said Im not uncomfortable...I feel they need clarification. After all, the term anarchist to so many people means somebody who throws bombs...Anarchism to me means a society in which you have a democratic organization of society--decision making, the economy--and in which the authority of the capitalist is no longer there... I see anarchism as meaning both political and economic democracy, in the best sense of the term. Lastly, for some, Zinns ideas about a better world have been watered down to make his work fit into their world view, to use his name to further their cause or party. For us, hoever, the extent of Zinns radicalism is a testament to his brilliance, and that through the course of his long and very active life, he never gave up daring to believe that the world could be drastically better. An integral part of the life and legacy of Howard Zinn are the contributions he made to revolutionary thought. Instead of telling you what we think Howard Zinn believed, weve brought together a few works in which he described his beliefs with his own words. So many have already, in these few weeks since his passing, strung together words remembering Howard Zinn the professor, the activist, the WWII air force pilot, the playwright, the speaker, the historian, and the husband, and some even the dock worker from Brooklyn. This issue is dedicated to remembering Howard Zinn, the anarchist.

is the monthly publication of the Boston Anti-Authoritarian Movement, a general union of Boston anarchists. Our publication aims to spread antiauthoritarian ideas and practices, and to report on the social struggles of workers, tenants, students, radicals, and others resisting the repression of the state, bosses, landlords and banks. In striving to make our publication sustainable, we are offering yearly subscriptions, sent to your door for the sliding scale cost of $12-15. We also provide free email subscriptions. Email Jake at Trenchesfullofpoets@riseup.net for more information, or send checks (leaving pay to the order of field blank) or well-concealed cash to: BAAM c/o Boston ABC, PO Box 230182, Boston, MA, 02123

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Some excerpts of

The Art of Revolution

By Howard Zinn

The following is part of Howard Zinns introduction to the 1971 American edition of Herbert Reads collection of writings, Anarchy and Order. The collection was first published in London in 1954.
forming of human relations, arising out of the needs of people. Such an order comes from within, and so is natural. People flow into easy arrangements, rather than being pushed and forced. It is like the form given by the artist, a form congenial, often pleasing, sometimes beautiful. It has the grace of a voluntary, confident act.... The order of politics, as we have known it in the world, is an order imposed on society, neither desired by most people, nor directed to their needs. It is therefore chaotic and destructive. Politics grates on our sensibilities. It violates the elementary requirements of aestheticsit is devoid of beauty. It is coercive, as if sound were forced into our ears at a decibel level such as to make us scream, and those responsible call this music. The order of modern life is a cacophony which has made us almost deaf to the gentler sounds of the universe. It is fitting that in modern times, around the time of the French and American Revolutions, exactly when man [sic] became most proud of his [sic] achievements, the ideas of anarchism arose to challenge that pride. Western civilization has never been modest in describing its qualities as an enormous advance in human history: the larger unity of national states replacing tribe and manor; parliamentary government replacing the divine right of kings; steam and electricity substituting for manual labor; education and science dispelling ignorance and superstition; due process of law canceling arbitrary justice. Anarchism arose in the most splendid days of Western civilization because the promises of that civilization were almost immediately broken.

he word anarchy unsettles most people in the Western world; it suggests disorder, violence, uncertainty. We have good reason for fearing those conditions, because we have been living with them for a long time, not in anarchist societies (there have never been any) but in exactly those societies most fearful of anarchythe powerful nation-states of modern times. At no time in human history has there been such social chaos. Fifty million dead in the Second World War. More than a million dead in Korea, a million in Vietnam, half a million in Indonesia, hundreds of thousands dead in Nigeria, and in Mozambique. A hundred violent political struggles all over the world in twenty years following the second war to end all wars. Millions starving, or in prisons, or in mental institutions. Inner turmoil symbolized by huge armies, stores of nerve gas, and stockpiles of hydrogen bombs. Wherever men, women and children are even a bit conscious of the world outside their local borders, they have been living with the ultimate uncertainty: whether or not the human race itself will survive into the next generation. It is these conditions that the anarchists have wanted to end: to bring a kind of order to the world for the first time. We have never listened to them carefully, except through the hearing aids supplied by the guardians of disorderthe national government leaders, whether capitalist or socialist. The order desired by anarchists is different from the order (Ordnung, the Germans called it: law and order, say the American politicians) of national governments. They want a voluntary

Nationalism, promising freedom from outside tyranny, and security from internal disorder, vastly magnified both the stimulus and the possibility for worldwide empires over subjected people, and bloody conflicts among such empires: imperialism and war were intensified to the edge of global suicide exactly in the period of the national state. Parliamentary government, promising popular participation in important decisions, became a faade (differently constructed in oneparty and two-party states) for rule by elites of wealth and power in the midst of almostfrenzied scurrying to polls and plebiscites. Mass production did not end poverty and exploitation; indeed it made the persistence of want more unpardonable. The production and distribution of goods became more rational technically, more irrational morally. Education and literacy did not end the deception of the many by the few; they enabled deception to be replaced by self-deception, mystification to be internalized, and social control to be even more effective than ever before, because now it had a large measure of self-control. Due process did not bring justice: it replaced the arbitrary, identifiable dispenser of injustice with the unidentifiable and impersonal. The rule of law, replacing the rule of men, was just a change in rulers. In the midst of the American Revolution, Tom Paine, while calling for the establishment of an independent American government, had no illusions about even a new revolutionary government when he wrote, in Common Sense, Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. Anarchists almost immediately recognized that the fall of kings and the rise of committees, assemblies, parliaments, did not bring

Graphic taken from the article, A Peoples History of Howard Zinn by Andrew Flood, www.anarchism. pageabode.com/andrewnflood/peoples-history-howard-zinn

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democracy; that revolution had the potential for liberation, but also for another form of despotism. Thus, Jacques Roux, a country priest in the French Revolution concerned with the lives of the peasants in his district, and then with the workingmen in the Gravilliers quarter of Paris, spoke in 1972 against the senatorial despotism, saying it was as terrible as the scepter of kings because it chains the people without their knowing it and brutalizes and subjugates them by laws they themselves are supposed to have made. In Peter Weisss play, Marat-Sade, Roux, straitjacketed, breaks through the censorship of the play within the play and cries out:
Who controls the market who locks up the granaries who got the loot from the palaces who sits tight on the estates that were going to be divided between the poor

before he is quieted. A friend of Roux, Jean Varlet, in an early anarchist manifesto of the French Revolution called Explosion wrote What a social monstrosity, what a masterpiece of Machiavellianism, this revolutionary government is in fact. For any reasoning being, Government and Revolution are incompatible, at least unless the people wishes to constitute organs of power in permanent insurrection against themselves, which is too absurd to believe. But it is exactly that which is too absurd to believe which the anarchists believe, because

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only an absurd perspective is revolutionary enough to see through the limits of revolution itself. Herbert Read, in a book with an appropriately absurd title, To Hell with Culture (he was seventy: this was 1963, five years before his death), wrote: What has been worth while in human historythe great achievements of physics and astronomy, of geographical discovery and of human healing, of philosophy and of art has been the work of extremistsof thse who believed in the absurd and dared the impossible... The Russian Revolution promised even moreto eliminate that injustice carried into modern times by the American and French Revolutions. Anarchist criticism of that Revolution was summed up by Emma Goldman (My Further Disillusionment in Russia) as follows: It is at once the great failure and the great tragedy of the Russian Revolution that it attempted...to change only institutions and conditions while ignoring entirely the human and social values involved in the Revolution... No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the means used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against mans inhumanity to man [sic] with all of the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and

brutality. It is the herald of new values, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man [sic] to society. The institution of capitalism, anarchists believe, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It feeds ravenously on the immense resources of the earth, and then churns out (this is its achievementit is an immense stupid churn) huge quantities of products. Those products have only an accidental relationship to what is most needed by people, because the organizers and distributers of goods care not about human need; they are great business enterprises, motivated by profit. Therefore, bombs, guns, office buildings, and deodorants take priority over food, homes, and recreation areas. Is there anything closer to anarchy (in the common use of the word, meaning confusion) than the incredibly wild and wasteful economic system in America? Anarchists believe the riches of the world belong equally to all, and should be distributed according to need, not through the intricate inhuman system of money and contracts which have so far channeled most of the riches into a small group of wealthy people, and into a few countries. (The United States [in the 1970s] with six percent of the population, owns, produces, and consumes fifty percent of the world production.) They would agree with the Story Teller in Bertholt Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in the final words of the play:

Take note what men of old concluded: That what there is shall go to those who are good for it Thus: the children to the motherly, that they prosper The carts to good drivers, that they are well driven And the valley to the waterers, that it bring forth fruit.

It was on this principle that Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers in seventeenth century England, ignored the law of private ownership and led his followers to plant grain on unused land. Winstantly wrote about his hope for the future: When this universal law of equity rises up in every man and woman, then none shall lay claim to any creature and say, This is mine, and that is yours. This is my work, that is yours. But everyone shall put to their hands to till the earth and bring up cattle, and the blessing of earth shall be common to all: when a man [sic] hath need for any corn or cattle, take from the next storehouse he [sic] meets with. There shall be no buying or selling, no fairs or markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man, [sic] for earth is the lords... Our problem is to make use of the magnificent technology of out time, for human needs, without being victimized by a bureaucratic mechanism. The Soviet Union did show that national economic planning for common goals, replacing the profit-driven chaos of capitalist production, could produce remarkable results. It failed, however, to do what Herbert Read and other recent anarchists have suggested: to do away with the bureaucracy of large-scale industry, characteristic of both capitalism and socialism, and

the consequent unhappiness of the workers who do not feel at ease with their work, with the products, with their fellow workers, with nature, with themselves. The problem could be solved, Read has suggested, by workers control of their own jobs, without sacrificing the benefits of planning and coordination for the larger social good.... Both the capitalist and the socialist bureaucracies of our time fail, anarchists say, on their greatest promise: to bring democracy. The essence of democracy is that people should control their own lives, by ones or twos or hundreds, depending on whether the decision being made affects one or two or a hundred. Instead, our lives are directed by a political-military-industrial complex in the United States, and a party hierarchy in the Soviet Union. In both situations, there is the pretense of popular participation, by an elaborate scheme of voting for the representatives who do not have real power (the difference between a one-party state and a two-party state being no more than one partyand that a smudged carbon copy of the other.) The vote in modern societies is the currecy of politics as money is the currency of economics: both mystify what is really taking placecontrol of the many by the few.... What a waste of the evolutionary process! It took billions of years to create human beings who could, if they chose, form the materials of the earth and themselves into arrangements congenial to man, woman, and the universe. Can we still choose to do so? It seems that revolutionary changes are neededin the sense of profound transformations of our work processes, our decisionmaking arrangements, our sex and family relations, our thought and culturetoward a humane society. But this kind of revolutionchanging our minds as well as our

institutionscannot be accomplished by the customary methods; neither military action to overthrow governments, as some traditionbound radicals suggest; nor by that slow process of electoral reform, which traditional liberals urge on us. The state of the world today reflects the limitations of both these methods. Anarchists have always been accused of a special addition to violence as a mode of revolutionary change...What makes anarchists unique among revolutionaries, however, is that most of them see revolution as a cultural, ideological, creative process, in which violence would be as incidental as the outcries of a mother and baby in childbirth. It might be unavoidablegiven the natural resistance to changebut something to be kept to a minimum while more important things happen.... Anarchism seeks that blend of order and spontaneity in our lives which gives us harmony with ourselves, with others, with nature. It understands the need to change our political and economic arrangements to free ourselves, for the enjoyment of life. And it knows that the change must begin now, in those everyday human relations over which we have the most control. Anarchism knows the need for sober thinking, but also for that action which classifies otherwise academic and abstract thought. Herbert Read, in Chains of Freedom, writes that we need a Black Market in culture, a determination to avoid the bankrupt academic institutions, the fixed valued and standardized products of current art and literature; not to trade our spiritual goods through the recognized channels of Church, or State, or Press; rather to pass them under the counter. If so, one of the first items to be passed under the counter must surely be the literature that speaks, counter to all the falsifications, about the ideas and imaginings of anarchism.

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Howard Zinn: Anarchism Shouldnt Be a Dirty Word

An Interview with Howard Zinn By Ziga Vodovnik, CounterPunch, May 17, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/story/85427/

oward Zinn, 85, is a Professor Emeritus of political science at Boston University. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1922 to a poor immigrant family....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 womens 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 Peoples 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). Zinns 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. The 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. Whats your opinion about this?

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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 -- it 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. Ziga Vodovnik: 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? Howard Zinn: 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. Ziga Vodovnik: 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. Howard Zinn: 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. Ziga Vodovnik: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote? Howard Zinn: 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

I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization.
-Howard Zinn

Drawing by Eric Gulliver

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 doesnt 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 candi-

date 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. Ziga Vodovnik: Anarchism is in this respect rightly opposing representative democracy since it is still a 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? Howard Zinn: 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 a 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. Ziga Vodovnik: Where do you see the historical origins of anarchism in the United States? Howard Zinn: 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 Thoreaus 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... Ziga Vodovnik: 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? Howard Zinn: The term anarchism has become associated with two phenomena with which real anarchists dont 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

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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. Ziga Vodovnik: Do you thing 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? Howard Zinn: 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. Ziga Vodovnik: 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? Howard Zinn: 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 dont 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 become 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. Ziga Vodovnik: What is your opinion about the dilemma of means -- revolution versus social and cultural evolution? Howard Zinn: I think there 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 wouldnt 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 nonviolent 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. Ziga Vodovnik: 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? Howard Zinn: 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 dont 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. Ziga Vodovnik: In your Peoples 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? Howard Zinn: 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 dont 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. Ziga Vodovnik: What is your opinion about different attempts to scientifically prove Bakunins ontological assumption that human beings have instinct for freedom, not just will but also biological need? Howard Zinn: 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. Ziga Vodovnik is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, where his teaching and research is focused on anarchist theory/praxis and social movements in the Americas. His new book Anarchy of Everyday Life -- Notes on Anarchism and its Forgotten Confluences will be released in late 2008. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/85427/

Howard Zinn: A World Without Borders

By David Barsamian ZNet Magazine May 2006 Issue

An interview with Howard Zinn.
College, my students were African American and I was one of a few white teachers. For most of my students I was the first white teacher they had ever encountered. I tried to have them realize that my values and ideas were different from those of the white-supremacist society they had grown up in, that I believed in the equality of human beings, and that I took the claims of democracy seriously, not only to try to break down the barrier between us by what I said in the classroom, but by how I behaved toward them, by not indicating that their education had been poor, which it very often was, by not making them feel that they were coming into this classroom handicapped. Also by showing them that outside the classroom I was involved in the social struggle that related to their lives. When they decided to participate in this struggle and go to Atlanta and try to desegregate the public library or when they decided to follow the example of the four students in Greensboro, North Carolina and sit in, I was with them, I was supporting them, I was helping them, I was walking on picket lines with them, I was engaging in demonstrations with them, I was sitting in with them. More than anything, I tried to create an atmosphere of democracy in our relationship. Barsamian:Youve been a lifelong reader from the time when as a kid you found Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar in the street with the first few pages torn out. Later, your parents got you the complete collection of Charles Dickenss novels. Whats the value of reading? Zinn: I dont know if my experience agrees with the experience of other people-I have talked to people, young people especially, who would say to me, This book changed my life. I remember sitting in a cafeteria in

oward Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, is perhaps this countrys premier radical historian. He was an active figure in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s. Today, he speaks all over the country to large and enthusiastic audiences. His book, A Peoples History of the U.S. continues to sell in huge numbers. His latest work is Original Zinn. ...Barsamian: Donald Macedo, in the introduction to On Democratic Education, mentions the Tom Paxton song, What Did You Learn in School Today? He quotes a couple of the lyrics.I learned that Washington never told a lie/I learned that soldiers seldom die/I learned that everybodys free. What does a democratic education mean to you? Zinn: To me, a democratic education means many things: it means what you learn in the classroom and what you learn outside the classroom. It means not only the content of what you learn, but also the atmosphere in which you learn it and the relationship between teacher and student. All of these elements of education can be democratic or undemocratic. Students as citizens in a democracy have the right to determine their lives and to play a role in society. A democratic education should give students the kind of information that will enable them to have power of their own in society. What that means is to give students the kind of education that suggests to the students that historically there have been many ways in which ordinary people can play a part in making history, in the development of their society. An education that gives the student examples in history of where people have shown their power in reshaping not only their own lives, but also in how society works. In the relationship between the student and the teacher there is democracy. The student

has a right to challenge the teacher, to express ideas of his or her own. That education is an interchange between the experiences of the teacher, which may be far greater than the student in certain ways, and the experiences of the student, since every student has a unique life experience. So the free inquiry in the classroom, a spirit of equality in the classroom, is part of a democratic education. It was very important to make it clear to my students that I didnt know everything, that I was not born with the knowledge that Im imparting to them, that knowledge is acquired and in ways in which the student can acquire also. Barsamian: How do you as a teacher foster that sense of questioning and skepticism and how do you avoid its going over to cynicism? Zinn: Skepticism is one of the most important qualities that you can encourage. It arises from having students realize that what has been seen as holy is not holy, what has been revered is not necessarily to be revered. That the acts of the nation which have been romanticized and idealized, those deserve to be scrutinized and looked at critically. I remember that a friend of mine was teaching his kids in middle school to be skeptical of what they had learned about Columbus as the great hero and liberator, expander of civilization. One of his students said to him, Well, if I have been so misled about Columbus, I wonder now what else have I been misled about? So that is education in skepticism. Barsamian: When you taught at Spelman College, and later at Boston University, you were teaching kids just coming out of high school. They come with a lot of baggage, a lot of embedded ideas. How difficult was it for you to reach them? Zinn: In the case of teaching at Spelman

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Hawaii across from a student at the University of Hawaii and she had a copy of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Since Alice Walker had been my student at Spelman, I didnt immediately say, Thats my student. I sort of cautiously said, Oh, youre reading The Color Purple. What do you think of it? The student said, This book changed my life. And that startled me, a book that changed your life. And also, I must say, in all modesty, that I have run into a number of students who have read A Peoples History of the United States, and whove said, in ways that I first did not believe but Im almost beginning to believe now, You know, your book changed my life. There are books that have changed my life. I think reading Dickens changed my life. Reading Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath changed my life. Reading Upton Sinclair, yes, changed my life. ...Barsamian:The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that the paradox of the U.S. was private wealth and public squalor. There is a story on page 16 in the New York Times describing how in John Steinbecks hometown of Salinas, California where theyre facing record deficits. The town is closing the three public libraries, including those named for Steinbeck and one for Cesar Chavez. Zinn: Its interesting that that item appeared on page 16. It should have appeared on page 1 because it might have alerted more people to what is a horrifying development today. What is happening in Salinas, California, should be a wake-up call. Barsamian: But this attack on libraries, on schools, is it part of a pattern of undermining the commons? Zinn: Let me interject my own personal note because I grew up in a cockroach-infested tenement in New York and we had no books in our house. I would go to a library in East New York on the corner of Stone and Sutter. I still remember that library. That was my refuge. It was a wonderful eye-opener and mind-opener for me. But your question is a larger one. And that is, what is happening to the public commons? That is what Galbraith pointed to when he wrote The Affluent Society. What has been really one of the terrible consequences of the militarization of the country is the starving of the public sector, education, libraries, health, housing. This is why people become socialists. People become socialists in the way that I became a socialist when I read Upton Sinclair and when I read Karl Marx. Barsamian: There are lots of distortions and misrepresentations attached to Marx. Should people be reading Marx today? Zinn: Yes, but I wouldnt advise them to immediately plunge into Volume II or III of Das Kapital, maybe not even Volume I,

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which is formidable. But I think The Communist Manifesto, although the title may scare people, is still very much worth reading because what it does is suggest that the capitalist society we have today is not eternal. The Communist Manifesto presents an historical view of the world in which we live. It shows you that societies have evolved from one form to another, one social system to another, from primitive communal societies to feudal societies to capitalist societies. That capitalist society has only come into being in the last few hundreds years and it came into being as a result of the failure of feudal society to deal with the change in technology which was inexorably happening-the commercialization, industrialization, new tools and implements. Capitalist society was able to deal with this new technology and to enhance it enormously. But what Marx pointed out-and I think this is a very important insight-is that capitalist society, while its developed the economy in an impressive way, nevertheless did not distribute the results of this enormous production equitably. So Marx pointed to a fundamental flaw in capitalism, a flaw that should be evident to people today, especially in the U.S. Here is this enormously productive and advanced technological country and yet more than forty-five million people are without health insurance, one out of five children grow up in poverty, and millions of people are homeless and hungry. I think another thing that would be important is Marxs view that when you look beneath the surface of political conflicts or cultural conflicts, you find class conflict. That the important question to ask in any situation is, Who benefits from this, what class benefits from this? If Americans understood this Marxian concept of class then, when they went to the polls and they had to choose between the Republican and Democratic Party, they would ask, Which class does this party represent? Barsamian: There was a parade in Taos, New Mexico on February 15, 2003. The lead banner read, No Flag Is Large Enough to Cover the Shame of Killing Innocent People. Thats a quote from you. How is patriotism being used today? Zinn: Patriotism is being used today the way patriotism has always been used and that is to try to encircle everybody in the nation into a common cause, the cause being the

support of war and the advance of national power. Patriotism is used to create the illusion of a common interest that everybody in the country has. I just mentioned about the necessity to see society in class terms, to realize that we do not

have a common interest in our society, that people have different interests. What patriotism does is to pretend to a common interest. And the flag is the symbol of that common interest. So patriotism plays the same role that certain phrases in our national language play. Barsamian: The U.S. is the only country in history to use weapons of mass destruction. The year 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That anniversary, incidentally, came amid reports that the U.S. was redesigning atomic weapons that would be sturdier and more reliable and last longer. Where were you when the bombs were dropped and what were your thoughts at the time? Zinn: I remember it very clearly because I had just returned from flying bombing missions in Europe. The war in Europe was over, but the war in Asia with Japan was still on. We flew back to this country in late July 1945. We were given a 30-day furlough before reporting back for duty with the intention that we would then go to the Pacific and continue in the air war against Japan. We were there waiting at the bus stop and

there was this newsstand and the big headline, Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima. Because the headline was so big, although I didnt know what an atomic bomb was, I assumed it must be a huge bomb. And my immediate reaction was, well, maybe then I wont have to go to Japan. Maybe this means the end of the war on Japan. So I was happy. I began to question the bombing of Hiroshima when I read John Herseys book, Hiroshima, which is based on a series of articles he wrote for the New Yorker. He had gone to Hiroshima after the bombing and spoken to survivors. You can imagine what the survivors looked like-people without arms, legs, blinded, their skin something that you couldnt bear to look at. Hersey spoke to these survivors and wrote down their stories. When I read that, for the first time the effects of bombing on human beings came to me. I had dropped bombs in Europe, but I had not seen anybody on the ground because when youre bombing from 30,000 feet, you dont see anybody, you dont hear screams, you dont see blood, you dont know whats happening to human beings. When I read John Hersey, it came to me, what bombing did to human beings. That book changed my idea not just about bombing, but it changed my view of war because it made me realize that war now, in our time, in the time of high-level bombing and long-range shelling and death at a distance inevitably means the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people and cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems. Barsamian: Youre sometimes described as an anarchist and/or a democratic socialist. Are you comfortable with those terms? And what do they mean to you? Zinn: How comfortable I am with those terms depends on whos using them. Im

not uncomfortable when you use them. But if somebody is using them who I suspect does not really know what those terms mean, then I feel uncomfortable because I feel they need clarification. After all, the term anarchist to so many people means somebody who throws bombs, who commits terrorist acts, who believes in violence. Oddly enough, the term anarchist has always applied to individuals who have used violence, but not to governments that use violence. Since I do not believe in throwing bombs or terrorism or violence, I dont want that definition of anarchism to apply to me. Anarchism is also misrepresented as being a society in which there is no organization, no responsibility, just a kind of chaos, again, not realizing the irony of a world that is very chaotic, but to which the word anarchism is not applied. Anarchism to me means a society in which you have a democratic organization of society-decision making, the economy-and in which the authority of the capitalist is no longer there, the authority of the police and the courts and all of the instruments of control that we have in modern society, in which they do not operate to control the actions of people, and in which people have a say in their own destinies, in which theyre not forced to choose between two political parties, neither of which represents their interests. So I see anarchism as meaning both political and economic democracy, in the best sense of the term. I see socialism, which is another term that I would accept comfortably, as meaning not the police state of the Soviet Union. After all, the word socialism has been commandeered by too many people who, in my opinion, are not socialists but totalitarians. To me, socialism means a society that is egalitarian and in which the economy is geared to human needs instead of business profits. Barsamian: The theme of the World Social Forum, which is held annually, is Another World Is Possible. If you were to close your eyes for a moment, what kind of world might you envision?

Zinn: The world that I envision is one in which national boundaries no longer exist, in which you can move from one country to another with the same ease in which we can move from Massachusetts to Connecticut, a world without passports or visas or immigration quotas. True globalization in the human sense, in which we recognize that the world is one and that human beings everywhere have the same rights. In a world like that you could not make war because it is your family, just as we are not thinking of making war on an adjoining state or even a far-off state. It would be a world in which the riches of the planet would be distributed in an equitable fashion, where everybody has access to clean water. Yes, that would take some organization to make sure that the riches of the earth are distributed according to human need. A world in which people are free to speak, a world in which there was a true bill of rights. A world in which people had their fundamental economic needs taken care of would be a world in which people were freer to express themselves because political rights and free speech rights are really dependent on economic status and having fundamental economic needs taken care of. I think it would be a world in which the boundaries of race and religion and nation would not become causes for antagonism. Even though there would still be cultural differences and still be language differences, there would not be causes for violent action of one against the other. I think it would be a world in which people would not have to work more than a few hours a day, which is possible with the technology available today. If this technology were not used in the way it is now used, for war and for wasteful activities, people could work three or four hours a day and produce enough to take care of any needs. So it would be a world in which people had more time for music and sports and literature and just living in a human way with others. Barsamian: Youve said that you became a teacher for a very modest reason: I wanted to change the world. How close have you come to achieving your goal? Zinn: All I can say is, I hope that by my writing and speaking and my activity that I have moved at least a few people towards a greater understanding and moved at least a few people towards becoming more active citizens. So I feel that my contribution, along with the contribution of millions of other people, if they continue, and if they are passed on to more and more people, and if our numbers grow, yes, one day we may very well see the kind of world that I envision.

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In celebration of your time on this earth, Howard Zinn, Presente! (1922-2010),

This extra issue of the BAAM Newsletter was created with the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society. Together, we present it as a contribution to the Howard Zinn memorial held on March 12, 2010, at the Community Church of Boston, entitled A Celebration: The Radical Ideas of Howard Zinn. We envite you to our next event:

Sacco and Vanzetti Social

Gather for a cultural celebration, with food, drinks, information about Tarek Mehannas case, and of course, socializing. At the Community Church, 545 Boylston St, Copley Square, Boston.

Saturday, March 27th

www.SaccoandVanzetti.org

Photos by Fred Clow

www.HowardZinn.org

BAAM Newsletter - 12