I vehemently disagreed with Zinn when I tried reading "A People's History" a few years ago, but I was much more naive then. I have realized that corruption is the norm, and that when people fight back, through organized labor or through revolution, there's usually a good reason for it.
I'm even more skeptical that communism would magically fix the wrongs Zinn railed against, for the same reasons democracy hasn't fixed it. But I do have to say, that I am glad someone like Zinn wrote prolifically to stand up for the little guy, for us. RIP.
I could only stomach the first 10 pages, and quit. But that little peak certainly made me think of socialism.
And I don't see how socialism is looking out for the little guy, either. To look out for individuals you need a liberal (in the classical sense) philosophy of individual liberty. Socialism is built on a philosophy of collectivism, doing what's best for the community as a whole ("the needs of the many exceed the needs of the few, or the one"). The rhetoric about helping the little guy is just what monsters like Lenin and Mao find it easiest to use to hoodwink the masses.
I think it's a non corrupt court system that most helps the little guy. Few countries laws are nearly as corrupt as it's institutions.
PS: As an ideology I suspect the roots of Socialism is the idea that no single individual adds as much to his individual well being as his society. In the case of modern industrial society this is clearly true (from an economic prospective), if somewhat misguided because some individuals contribute far more to society than others.
10 pages is enough to link the guy to socialism? really?
Maybe not to start a conversation. But when chiming in to support someone else's claim, and with the clear caveat, then yes, I think it's perfectly OK.
Monsters use any rhetoric they think will fit at their historic moment.
Show me a monster since the advent of socialism that did not use it as its justification. The only one I can think of is Pinochet in Chile (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_coup_of_1973#Casualties ), and even that needs a very loose definition of monster. Certainly the chart-toppers like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Kim, Pol Pot, Hitler preached socialism. (I'll grant that they generally didn't understand the concept very well, but the point is that it's what they advocated to their partisans and people as the ultimate solution)
I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these. I think you're stretching the "monster" thing here; they're not in the same league as Lenin and Mao.
what makes you a monster is not that you killed millions, but that you were willing to do it in order to maintain your power
But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK? That's nuts.
I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these.
Argument from ignorance. They were in the same league from the point of view of their victims.
But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK?
I never said that. From available evidence, not one of the people you mentioned did their atrocities for the ``greatest good'', and it would not matter if that was the case, because the willingness to commit atrocities is the monstrous thing.
A lot of his rhetoric seems to based on communism. That is, he sees classes as distinct entities acting with intent. That is a Marxist-like approach to history, at least. I'm not that familiar with Zinn, but I don't think he tended to propose solutions, manifestos or such.
Sure, I can definitely see a Marxist-like critique in his writings, but such a critique can be used to point to variety of alternative solutions, including a purer form of democracy than we currently have in the US.
A purer form of democracy is in fact what many more contemporary American (or Western) socialists such as social libertarians have advocated. Again, I can't think of any instances where Zinn proposes a "solution" other then enlightenment (eg' understand that we, the readers and writers of books have mostly been the jailers'[1]) so I wouldn't charecterise him as part of any of those movements. I think that you would classify his work as a part of the Marxist family of intellectual endeavour for other reasons.
Since the most obvious effects of Communist thought were the political-economic systems inspired by it, we tend to think of Communism as being purely focused on these. But, an approach to historical analysis is as much a part of Marxist thought as economic analysis.
Often times, in discussions such as these, people will associate Marxist-type critiques with an immediate conjunction to Communism (almost in knee-jerk fashion), because of the historical reasons you mention.
I think that's unfortunate because as a critical model, there are valuable insights to be gained from Marxist thought, even if you reject (as I do) the idea of Communism.
Sure. Hopefully we will be able to see it in historical context by the 200 year anniversary of The Manifesto. As a model for describing history, its not hard to see the attraction to Marx. He was, after all, a very smart guy.
A contradiction between which of those two word pairs ;)
Seriously though, if you think of Socialism as a group of ideas across different fields, you find a lot of diversity once you get to the applied level. You can get anarchy (the aforementioned social libertarians and others tend towards anarchism) or totalitarianism. Direct democracy or dictatorship.
Say you accept Marx's characterization of history as a struggle between classes, you are moved to rage by The Communist Manifesto,^ it describes the brutal no-nonsense history of civilization in a way that makes sense. There are lots of directions you can go from there. Obviously marx had some pretty specific applications which I read as leading to something not that far from bolshevism, but you don't have to agree with everything.
^I suggest that you read it. For most people, I suspect you'll quibble with bits and pieces that have since (it's been 150 years, after all) been subject to more trial and scrutiny. As a narrative, it is not without predictive power.
His rhetoric was simpler than that. He was anti-money-grubbing-indian-killing-black-people-killing-chinese-killing-immigrant-killing-worker-killing-racist-corporate-capitalist-unregulated-opportunist. I'm not totally sure what that has to do with marxism or communism.
He was only against Indian-killing when white people did it. He described Indians as "innocent" before white people came to America. I guess Indian-killing is ok when other Indians do it.
Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that there actually was continent spanning state condoned genocide?
(Hint: there wasn't. There were all sorts of local wars of conquest. They amounted to diddly squat, however, in comparison to smallpox, which was completely unavoidable.)
Spoken like a true revisionist imperialist. "Since the Indians are dead anyway lets monetize this land which was never monetized before and lets get our government to back us up."
The democracy index does not measure democracy. It measures a weighted average of electoral process/pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture.
A true measure of how democratic a nation is would exclude civil liberties, functioning of government and political culture.
So judging by the comments, I was wrong to have assume he was communist... back in my younger more naive days. I should probably re-read "A People's History"... except it's already reserved solid for the next 6 months in the SF Public Library system. Go figure.
I've always like Howard Zinn and I'm pretty far away from him politically speaking. I'm about as libertarian as they come but I always admired his consistent anti-war tone.
I always get annoyed when people don't like the opposition party's wars but love their party's wars. Zinn was always one of my favorite people on the left because he didn't like any war in American history or see it as a "good war".
I wish him well and think we're all a bit worse off for his absence.
Is there really that much difference between libertarianism and libertarian socialism? Both are anti-authoritarian political ideologies. The main disagreement seems to be about the role of labor unions in our society. There is much more common ground between libertarian socialism and libertarianism than there is between libertarianism and American centrism.
Libertarian socialists, like regular socialists, favor the use of force. They differ from socialists only on exactly who should be empowered to use it (the state vs smaller agencies).
I remember reading "A People's History" during high school and having my mind completely blown. As I got older, I realized my life experiences led me to disagree more and more with Zinn, but I was always thankful that his book had pushed me to see the world through such a different (and easily neglected) point of view. RIP.
> To insist on appending an angry, trashy review on the day the man died is especially graceless.
I'm glad the commentor did, because this will likely be the first and last discussion of Howard Zinn on Hacker News, and the review had some important points.
I thought it was inappropriate, not for questioning Zinn, but for doing so in a way much more biased than Zinn himself. Zinn was a great historian; Daniel J. Flynn is the proud author of Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation’s Greatness.
Flynn loses any remaining credit for calling Zinn a Marxist, continuously. That's a label chosen for its emotional resonance; not its meaning. Zinn was a socialist, a libertarian socialist, an anarchist sympathizer, a leftist... but he didn't go around labeling himself as a Marxist on the back of the books, that's something only done by his critics. I might as well be calling Flynn a fascist.
> I thought it was inappropriate, not for questioning Zinn, but for doing so in a way much more biased than Zinn himself.
Eh, the review was nothing special, but the fact that Zinn left out that the side he labeled as oppressed started the Pequot War with a murder seemed like an important detail. Or the fact that war was primarily Indian tribes vs. other Indian tribes, and the Anglo component was less than 20% of the winning side. But, you can't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
I imagine Zinn himself would agree he was more of an activist than a historian, and he fits history to his activism. The uberpatriot people aren't any better and might well be worse, but the message is more important than the messenger. Pointing out that a man claiming to be a historian is leaving out entirely crucial historical details is important.
By the point of that war the white people had been oppressing the Indians for more than a hundred years. One murder does not justify returning with a massacre, and leaving out various facts from history does not mean much when you are trying to retell a whole lot of history. If people want a different telling of history, there is always Wikipedia.
Also, if you read Wikipedia, you will see that Daniel Flynn's understanding of the Pequot War is completely wrong. I will quote him, and then let you read the Wikipedia article yourself.
>Thus the Pequot violence against whites that led to the war is almost entirely absent from the text. The most Zinn can bring himself to admit is that “Massacres took place on both sides.” In fact, the author details only the atrocities committed by one side: the Puritans.
I'm reading A People's History right now. Like others here have said, I don't agree with much of the underlying ideology, but I appreciate a different view of history that acknowledges that the study of history isn't as simple as "this is what happened". RIP.
I recommend listening to 'A People's History' as an audiobook.
Howard Zinn sets out with the stated objective of narrating a dissident's history. With this, he absolves himself from narrating a completely objective history, which I suspect he sees as an impossible task. You may not agree with many of his assumptions (I don't), but you will gain from the experience.
Headline seems a bit off, but perhaps only because I know quite a few practicing historians whose reaction to his work was "oh, so some guy just made a fortune packaging up all the stuff we've been writing about for years?"
True, but it doesn't mean that he "challenged the status quo", unless by that you mean he wrote the same stuff as everybody else but in an easier-to-read format. The credit Zinn gets for being some sort of maverick attacking a standard view of history is... well, he wasn't. History's complex and often not very nice, as most historians will be happy to tell you, and American history is no exception.
From a purely historical context, you're right of course. I think the "challenged the status quo" part comes from the way he combined the popularization of a history that had previously under-represented in the mainstream consciousness with his activism in a variety of forums.
Absolutely, the best thing that Howard Zinn ever did was tear to shreds the lie that "History is written by the winners". As I recall, he never meant "A People's History of the United States" to be a canonical text but, merely one to read alongside the "standard message" in dialectical* conflict.
*"Dialectical" in Marxist critical theory, not necessarily in political motivation.
Good point - and to further your definition of dialectical - it is not simple opposition of two forces that leads to a 3rd path (I think that is often referred to as Aristotelian dialectic).
The critical theory dialectic you refer to is the ability to observe something in terms of its totality. The moment (for Hegel) that the totality is clear and apparent it begins to 'sublate' which in this context means simultaneously to negate and transcend.
In the preface to Hegels "Phenomenology Of Spirit" one example is the acorn.
It goes through a series of discrete steps of growth. It is hard to say the moment that it ceases to become an acorn and becomes something else. It goes through a process of negation (no longer an acorn) and transcends this to become an oak shoot and then a tree.
There is a moment i am sure - when the shell cracks and a series of small quantitative changes result in a qualitative change.
There was a time in which the highly educated 'saw' the totality. Samuel Johnson was reputed to have read all the available knowledge of his time. (I dont know how one could know this - but for the sake of argument I will take Ben Jonson's word). But it has been 200 years since anyone would even make that claim.
But Zinn was able to hold up a recognizable fragment in which we could get a glimpse of a total image for a brief moment.
How sad.
Because when the older ones die it seems for the first while like the rest of us have no one. No one to look up to, no one to stick up for us.
I, myself, am not a Socialist I tend to vote 3rd party because I believe Nader's basic idea that there is no difference between the two dominant parties - they just serve different corporate interests. But I am in no way a committed Marxist/ Socialist anything. But I feel deeply that so few discussions get it right - in ether the pro or the con.
It is easy to confuse the political realities of Socialism for the underlying ethos. Marx's Socialism at its core sought to put political control in the hands of those who produce society. The ethic defining the movement was to take the advances of the French Revolution (which was essentially a Middle Class revolution) and extend those liberties for all.
It is in that sense that Zinn is a Socialist writer. It is not accurate to characterize him as writing to "help the little guy". I tis accurate that this is a perversion of not only Stalin and Mao (Stalin more than Lenin as Lenin was more about aligning state power with a political party) but also Hitler, Huey Long, David Duke, etc. Demagogery is neither left nor right.
The important work of someone like Howard Zinn is not that he simplified history or wrote for the 'little guy' but that he wrote with awareness of Machiavelli's dictum: "History is written by the victors"
I think - if one is interested in what Zinn was writing towards and can look at things like socialism with a dispassionate eye - it is worth reading Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History". Dense and epigrammatic - like reading Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.
It is easy - and in terms of praxis correct - to lambaste Socialism as a failed attempt which turned into horrific perversion. But there is something vital there still. I would argue that there is much still to be learned from reading Marx and as a thinker he leads back to thinkers like Hegel, Kant, Vico, etc and engaged some of the brilliant minds of the 20th century - like Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, etc
To borrow from one of Adorno's lectures on Hegel in which he attacked Benedetto Croce for the presumption of an early 20th century essay entitled "What is living and what is dead in Hegel". The issue here is not Zinn's relevance to our world but our relevance in terms of the basic Enlightenment tradition.
One thing that is very hard to argue if you are coming from the standpoint of " liberal (in the classical sense) philosophy of individual liberty" (which I agree is the place to start - that is where Marx and Zinn both start in their very different attempts), one thing that is hard to argue is that we are dealing with the Kantian transendental subjectivity that classical liberal philosophy was based on.
We are different. The 20th century changed what it means to be human.
To sum up - I think Howard Zinn was a wonderful figure. I have enormous respect for him. He is not one of my favorite writers or thinkers but I do enjoy listening to his readings. For me he is an example of an ethical person who saw clearly and attempted to educate others. I have similar respect for Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, Philip and Daniel Berrigan even when I entirely disagree with a point or a position. RIP Professor Zinn.
I'm even more skeptical that communism would magically fix the wrongs Zinn railed against, for the same reasons democracy hasn't fixed it. But I do have to say, that I am glad someone like Zinn wrote prolifically to stand up for the little guy, for us. RIP.