An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

progressive

An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism - Rebels Against Tyranny

(Tue, 13 May 2008 18:36:20 -0500 (CDT)) ---
www.counterpunch.org

An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism - Rebels Against Tyranny

By ZIGA VODOVNIK

Howard 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. 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
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)

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 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.

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 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
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 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.

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 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 Seven 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 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?

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 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-sindicalist
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 wouldnt move. They got on those busses 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 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.

ZV: In your A 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?

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 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.

ZV: 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?

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.

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.

"Tom Davos" (tomdavos@yahoo.com).

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