Extra Issue March 12th 2010

Boston Anti-Authoritarian
Movement Newsletter Special Edition
The Ideas of Howard Zinn

Presented in collaboration with

The Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society
The Art of Anarchism Shouldn’t be A World Without
Revolution, Page 3 a Dirty Word, Page 6 Borders, Page 9
BAAM Newsletter - 1
 Remembering Howard
Zinn, the anarchist.
S
ince the death of Howard Zinn, many
have paid tribute to this great think-
er. 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. Newspa-
pers have printed stories full of his deeds: the
campaigns he fought on, the working people’s
history he brought to light, the plays he wrote,
the books he published, and the student’s he
taught. Little, however, has been said about
Howard’s ideas themselves.
Howard Zinn has been celebrated through-
out the mainstream media he so scathingly
criticized. But thus far, the mainstream me-
dia, and even much of the independent, leftist
and progressive medias, have barely touched
on his anarchist ideas. In part this is under-
standable. One of Zinn’s best traits was his
ability to relate to almost everyone, and that
he’s 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-Sam-
sonov wrote for the Havana Times, “(Zinn’s)
biography in Wikipedia includes the ‘uncom-
fortable’ symbol of the A inside the O: a refer-
ence 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”)
BAAM Newsletter - 2
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 phi-
losophies of modern times, is a commentary
on the narrowness of American education.”
Asked in an interview if he was unconfort-
able with the term anarchism, he said “I’m
not uncomfortable...I feel they need clari-
fication. 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, Zinn’s ideas about a better
world have been watered down for political
purpose, to make his work fit nicely into their
own agenda, to use his name to further their
cause or party. But for us, the extent of Zinn’s
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,
we’ve 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 re-
membering Howard Zinn the professor, the
activist, the WWII air force pilot, the play-
write, the speaker, the historian, and the hus-
band, and some even the dock worker from
Brooklyn. This issue is dedicated to remem-
bering Howard Zinn, the anarchist.
In This Issue
-The Art of Revolution,
by Howard Zinn Page 3
-Anarchism Shouldn’t be a Dirty
Word, an Interview. Page 7
A World Without Borders, Page 9
The BAAM Newsletter
is the monthly publication of
the Boston Anti-Authoritarian
Movement, a general union of
Boston anarchists. Our publication
aims to spread anti-authoritarian
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.
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Some excerpts of
The Art of Revolution
By Howard Zinn
The following is part of Howard Zinn’s introduction to the 1971 American
edition of Herbert Read’s collection of writings, Anarchy and Order. The
collection was first published in London in 1954.
T
he word anarchy unsettles most people
in the Western world; it suggests dis-
order, 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 so-
cieties most fearful of anarchy—the 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 sym-
bolized by huge armies, stores of nerve gas,
and stockpiles of hydrogen bombs. Wherever
men, women and children are even a bit con-
scious of the world outside their local bor-
ders, 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
disorder—the national government leaders,
whether capitalist or socialist. The order de-
sired by anarchists is different from the order
(“Ordnung,” the Germans called it: “law and
order,” say the American politicians) of na-
tional governments. They want a voluntary
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, some-
times beautiful. It has the grace of a volun-
tary, 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 destruc-
tive. Politics grates on our sensibilities. It vio-
lates the elementary requirements of aesthet-
ics—it 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 re-
sponsible call this music. The “order” of mod-
ern life is a cacophony which has made us al-
most deaf to the gentler sounds of the universe.
It is fitting that in modern times, around
the time of the French and American Revolu-
tions, exactly when man [sic] became most
proud of his [sic] achievements, the ideas of
anarchism arose to challenge that pride. West-
ern civilization has never been modest in de-
scribing its qualities as an enormous advance
in human history: the larger unity of national
states replacing tribe and manor; parliamen-
tary government replacing the divine right of
kings; steam and electricity substituting for
manual labor; education and science dispel-
ling 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.
Nationalism, promising freedom from out-
side tyranny, and security from internal dis-
order, vastly magnified both the stimulus and
the possibility for worldwide empires over
subjected people, and bloody conflicts among
such empires: imperialism and war were in-
tensified to the edge of global suicide exactly
in the period of the national state. Parliamen-
tary government, promising popular partici-
pation in important decisions, became a fa-
cade (differently constructed in one-party and
two-party states) for rule by elites of wealth
and power in the midst of almost-frenzied
scurrying to polls and plebiscites. Mass pro-
duction did not end poverty and exploitation;
indeed it made the persistence of want more
unpardonable. The production and distribu-
tion of goods became more rational techni-
cally, more irrational morally. Education and
literacy did not end the deception of the many
by the few; they enabled deception to be re-
placed 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 establish-
ment of an independent American govern-
ment, 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 commit-
tees, assemblies, parliaments, did not bring
Graphic taken from the article, “A
People’s History of Howard Zinn”
by Andrew Flood, www.anarchism.
pageabode.com/andrewnflood/peo-
ples-history-howard-zinn
BAAM Newsletter - 3
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 Gravil-
liers 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 Weiss’s play, Marat-Sade, Roux,
straightjacketed, break’s through the censor-
ship 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 master-
piece of Machiavellianism, this revolutionary
government is in fact. For any reasoning be-
ing, Government and Revolution are incom-
patible, at least unless the people wishes to
constitute organs of power in permanent in-
surrection against themselves, which is too
absurd to believe.”
But it is exactly that which is “too absurd to
believe” which the anarchists believe, because
BAAM Newsletter - 4
only an “absurd” perspective is revolutionary
enough to see through the limits of revolution
itself. Herbert Read, in a book with an appro-
priately 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 his-
tory—the great achievements of physics and
astronomy, of geographical discovery and of
human healing, of philosophy and of art—
has been the work of extremists—of thse who
believed in the absurd and dared the impos-
sible...”
The Russian Revolution promised even
more—to eliminate that injustice carried into
modern times by the American and French
Revolutions. Anarchist criticism of that Rev-
olution 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 at-
tempted...to change only institutions and con-
ditions while ignoring entirely the human and
social values involved in the Revolution... No
revolution can ever succeed as a factor of lib-
eration unless the means used to further it be
identical in spirit and tendency with the pur-
poses to be achieved. Revolution is the nega-
tion of the existing, a violent protest against
man’s inhumanity to man with all of the thou-
sand 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, usher-
ing in a transformation of the basic relations
of man to man, and of man to society.”
The institution of capitalism, anarchists be-
lieve, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It
feeds ravenously on the immense resources
of the earth, and then churns out (this is its
achievement—it 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 orga-
nizers and distributers of goods care not about
human need; they are great business enter-
prises, motivated by profit. Therefore, bombs,
guns, office buildings, and deodorants take
priority over food, homes, and recreation ar-
eas. Is there anything closer to “anarchy” (in
the common use of the word, meaning con-
fusion) than the incredibly wild and wasteful
economic system in America?
Anarchists believe the riches of the world
belong equally to all, and should be dis-
tributed 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 1970’s] 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
Brecht’s 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 the products, with their fellow workers, with
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 Gerard Win-
stanley, 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
hath need for any corn or cattle, take from the
next storehouse he meets with. There shall
be no buying or selling, no fairs or markets,
but the whole earth shall be a common trea-
sury for every man, for earth is the lord’s...”
Our problem is to make use of the mag-
nificent technology of out rime, for human
needs, without being victimized by a bu-
reaucratic 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 anar-
chists have suggested: to do away with the
bureaucracy of large-scale industry, charac-
teristic of both capitalism and socialism, and
the consequent unhappiness of the workers
who do not feel at ease with their work, 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 bu-
reaucracies of our time fail, anarchists say,
on their greatest promise: to bring democra-
cy. 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 So-
viet Union. In both situations, there is the pre-
tense of popular participation, by an elaborate
scheme of voting for the representatives who
do not have real power (there difference be-
tween a one-party state and a two-party state
being no more than one party—and 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 place—control
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
needed—in the sense of profound transfor-
mations of our work processes, our decision-
making arrangements, our sex and family
relations, our thought and culture—toward
a humane society. But this kind of revolu-
tion—changing our minds as well as our
institutions—cannot be accomplished by the
customary methods; neither military action
to overthrow governments, as some tradition-
bound radicals suggest; nor by that slow pro-
cess of electoral reform, which traditional lib-
erals 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 rev-
olutionary change...What makes anarchists
unique among revolutionaries, however, is
that most of them see revolution as a cultural,
ideological, creative process, in which vio-
lence would be as incidental as the outcries of
a mother and baby in childbirth. It might be
unavoidable—given the natural resistance to
change—but something to be kept to a mini-
mum while more important things happen....
Anarchism seeks that blend of order and
spontaneity in our lives which gives us har-
mony with ourselves, with others, with na-
ture. 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 de-
termination 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 recog-
nized 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.
BAAM Newsletter - 5
 Howard Zinn: Anarchism
Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word
An Interview with Howard Zinn
By Ziga Vodovnik, CounterPunch, May 17, 2008,
http://www.alternet.org/story/85427/
H
oward Zinn, 85, is a Professor Emer-
itus of political science at Boston
University. He was born in Brooklyn,
NY, in 1922 to a poor immigrant family....Al-
though Zinn spent his youthful years helping
his parents support the family by working in
the shipyards, he started with studies at Co-
lumbia University after WWII, where he suc-
cessfully defended his doctoral dissertation in
1958. Later he was appointed as a chairman
of the department of history and social sci-
ences at Spelman College, an all-black wom-
en’s college in Atlanta, GA, where he actively
participated in the Civil Rights Movement.
From the onset of the Vietnam War he was
active within the emerging anti-war move-
ment, and in the following years only stepped
up his involvement in movements aspiring
towards another, better world. Zinn is the au-
thor of more than 20 books, including A Peo-
ple’s History of the United States that is “a
brilliant and moving history of the American
people from the point of view of those who
have been exploited politically and economi-
cally and whose plight has been largely omit-
ted from most histories” (Library Journal).
Zinn’s most recent book is entitled A Power
Governments Cannot Suppress, and is a fas-
cinating 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 par-
ticipation 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-na-
tional alternative to the present form of glo-
balization and that is equally global. What’s
your opinion about this?
BAAM Newsletter - 6
Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and ac-
cording to anarchist principles nation states
become obstacles to a true humanistic glo-
balization. In a certain sense the movement
towards globalization where capitalists are
trying to leap over nation state barriers, cre-
ates a kind of opportunity for movement to
ignore national barriers, and to bring people
together globally, across national lines in op-
position to globalization of capital, to create
globalization of people, opposed to tradition-
al 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 eco-
nomic 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 or-
ganized 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, depend-
ing 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 pos-
sibly 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 par-
ty politics, or only through alternative means
-- with disobedience, building parallel frame-
works, establishing alternative media, etc.
Howard Zinn: If you work through the
existing structures you are going to be cor-
rupted. By working through political system
that poisons the atmosphere, even the pro-
gressive 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 repre-
sentative government, not in terms of voting,
not in terms of electoral politics, but think-
ing 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 ac-
tually take over the institutions.
Ziga Vodovnik: One personal question.
Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?
Howard Zinn: I do. Sometimes, not al-
ways. It depends. But I believe that it is
preferable sometimes to have one candidate
rather another candidate, while you under-
stand 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 im-
mediate sense, and then I believe trying to get
somebody into office, who is a little better,
who is less dangerous, is understandable. But
never forgetting that no matter who gets into
office, the crucial question is not who is in
office, but what kind of social movement do
you have. Because we have seen historically
that if you have a powerful social movement,
it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is
in office, they could be Republican or Demo-
crat, 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 vot-
ing is not crucial, and organizing is the im-
portant 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 vot-
ing 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 re-
spect rightly opposing representative democ-
racy since it is still form of tyranny -- tyranny
of majority. They object to the notion of ma-
jority vote, noting that the views of the major-
ity 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 over-
rule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled,
“I am an
anarchist, and
according to
anarchist prin-
ciples nation
states become
obstacles to
a true human-
istic globaliza-
tion.”
Drawing by
Eric Gulliver
we could still have slavery. 80% of the popu-
lation 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 peo-
ple, not just needs of the majority, but also
needs of the minority. And also has to take
into account that majority, especially in so-
cieties where the media manipulates public
opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. So
yes, people have to act according to con-
science and not by majority vote.
Ziga Vodovnik: Where do you see the histor-
ical 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 Proud-
hon, 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 anar-
chism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to
anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of
government. If we trace origins of anarchism
in the United States, then probably Thoreau is
the closest you can come to an early Ameri-
can 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 be-
comes publicly known in the United States is
in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair...
Ziga Vodovnik: Most of the creative en-
ergy for radical politics is nowadays coming
from anarchism, but only few of the people
involved in the movement actually call them-
selves “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 com-
mitment that real emancipation needs eman-
cipation from any label?
Howard Zinn: The term anarchism has
become associated with two phenomena
with which real anarchists don’t want to as-
sociate 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 disci-
pline, everybody does what they want, confu-
sion, 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 Com-
mittee -- SNCC. SNCC without knowing
about anarchism as philosophy embodied the
characteristics of anarchism. They were de-
centralized. 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 organi-
zation. 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 author-
ity. 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 sus-
picion 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 be-
haved. John F. Kennedy was not supporting
BAAM Newsletter - 7
the Southern movement for equal rights for
Black people. He was appointing the segrega-
tionists 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 so-
ciety 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 pejora-
tive (mis)usage of the word anarchism is di-
rect consequence of the fact that the ideas that
people can be free, was and is very frighten-
ing to those in power?
Howard Zinn: No doubt! No doubt that an-
archist ideas are frightening to those in pow-
er. 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 anar-
chism to create this impression of anarchism as
violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.
Ziga Vodovnik: In theoretical political sci-
ence we can analytically identify two main con-
ceptions 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 cre-
ate categories and fit movements into catego-
ries, but I don’t think you can do that. Here in
the United States, sure there have been people
who believed in individualist anarchism, but
in the United States have also been organized
anarchists of Chicago in 1880s or SNCC. I
guess in both instances, in Europe and in the
United States, you find both manifestations,
except that maybe in Europe the idea of anar-
cho-syndicalism become stronger in Europe
than in the US. While in the US you have the
IWW, which is an anarcho-syndicalist organi-
zation and certainly not in keeping with indi-
vidualist 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 is-
sue of violence, and I think here anarchists
have disagreed. Here in the US you find a
disagreement, and you can find this disagree-
ment 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 impor-
BAAM Newsletter - 8
tant 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 Gan-
dhi, who believed in nonviolence.
There is one central characteristic of anar-
chism on the matter of means, and that central
principle is a principle of direct action -- of
not going through the forms that the society
offers you, of representative government,
of voting, of legislation, but directly taking
power. In case of trade unions, in case of
anarcho-syndicalism, it means workers going
on strike, and not just that, but actually also
taking hold of industries in which they work
and managing them. What is direct action? In
the South when black people were organizing
against racial segregation, they did not wait
for the government to give them a signal, or
to go through the courts, to file lawsuits, wait
for Congress to pass the legislation. They took
direct action; they went into restaurants, were
sitting down there and wouldn’t move. They
got on those buses and acted out the situation
that they wanted to exist.
Of course, strike is always a form of direct
action. With the strike, too, you are not asking
government to make things easier for you by
passing legislation, you are taking a direct ac-
tion 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 distin-
guishing 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 prop-
er means and ends, to even start “experiment-
ing” in practice?
Howard Zinn: I think it is worth present-
ing ideas, like Michael Albert did with Pare-
con 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 soci-
ety might be like, because then it guides you
somewhat what you are doing today, but only
so long as this discussions about future so-
ciety don’t become obstacles to working to-
wards this future society. Otherwise you can
spend discussing this utopian possibility ver-
sus 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 People’s History
of the United States you show us that our free-
dom, 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 exist-
ing 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 cre-
ate kind of human relationship that should
exist in future society. That would mean to
organize ourselves without centralize author-
ity, without charismatic leader, in a way that
represents in miniature the ideal of the future
egalitarian society. So that even if you don’t
win some victory tomorrow or next year in
the meantime you have created a model. You
have acted out how future society should be
and you created immediate satisfaction, even
if you have not achieved your ultimate goal.
Ziga Vodovnik: What is your opinion
about different attempts to scientifically
prove Bakunin’s ontological assumption that
human beings have “instinct for freedom,”
not just will but also biological need?
Howard Zinn: Actually I believe in this
idea, but I think that you cannot have biologi-
cal evidence for this. You would have to find
a gene for freedom? No. I think the other pos-
sible way is to go by history of human behav-
ior. History of human behavior shows this de-
sire 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 Every-
day Life -- Notes on Anarchism and its For-
gotten Confluences will be released in late
2008.
© 2010 CounterPunch All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alter-
net.org/story/85427/
 Howard Zinn:
A World Without Borders
H
oward Zinn, professor emeritus at
Boston University, is perhaps this
country’s 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 Peo-
ple’s History of the U.S. continues to sell in
huge numbers. His latest work is Original Zinn.
...Barsamian: Donald Macedo, in the in-
troduction to On Democratic Education, men-
tions 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 everybody’s 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 so-
ciety. 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
By David Barsamian
    ZNet Magazine
    May 2006 Issue
An interview with Howard Zinn.
has a right to challenge the teacher, to ex-
press 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 experi-
ences of the student, since every student has a
unique life experience. So the free inquiry in
the classroom, a spirit of equality in the class-
room, is part of a democratic education.
It was very important to make it clear to
my students that I didn’t know everything,
that I was not born with the knowledge that
I’m imparting to them, that knowledge is ac-
quired 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 im-
portant 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 teach-
ing his kids in middle school to be skeptical of
what they had learned about Columbus as the
great hero and liberator, expander of civiliza-
tion. 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
College, my students were African Ameri-
can 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 be-
ings, 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 class-
room, but by how I behaved toward them, by
not indicating that their education had been
poor, which it very often was, by not mak-
ing them feel that they were coming into this
classroom handicapped.
Also by showing them that outside the
classroom I was involved in the social strug-
gle that related to their lives. When they de-
cided 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: You’ve 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 Dick-
ens’s novels. What’s the value of reading?
Zinn: I don’t 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
BAAM Newsletter - 9
Hawaii across from a student at the Universi-
ty of Hawaii and she had a copy of The Color
Purple by Alice Walker. Since Alice Walker
had been my student at Spelman, I didn’t im-
mediately say, “That’s my student.” I sort of
cautiously said, “Oh, you’re reading The Col-
or Purple. What do you think of it?” The stu-
dent 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 People’s History of the United States,
and who’ve said, in ways that I first did not
believe but I’m 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 Steinbeck’s 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 Steinbeck’s
hometown of Salinas, California where they’re
facing record deficits. The town is closing the
three public libraries, including those named
for Steinbeck and one for Cesar Chavez.
Zinn: It’s interesting that that item ap-
peared 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, Califor-
nia, 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-in-
fested 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 re-
ally 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 social-
ists. People become socialists in the way that
I became a socialist when I read Upton Sin-
clair 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 wouldn’t advise them to
immediately plunge into Volume II or III
of Das Kapital, maybe not even Volume I,
BAAM Newsletter - 10
which is formidable. But I think The Commu-
nist Manifesto, although the title may scare
people, is still very much worth reading be-
cause what it does is suggest that the capital-
ist 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 in-
exorably 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 it’s de-
veloped the economy
in an impressive way,
nevertheless did not
distribute the results of
this enormous produc-
tion equitably. So Marx
pointed to a fundamen-
tal 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 coun-
try and yet more than forty-five million peo-
ple 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 Marx’s view that when you look beneath the
surface of political conflicts or cultural con-
flicts, you find class conflict. That the impor-
tant 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 Re-
publican 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.”
That’s 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 ad-
vance of na-
tional power.
Patriotism is
used to create
the illusion of
a common in-
terest that ev-
erybody in the
country has.
I just men-
tioned 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 patrio-
tism does is to pretend to a common interest.
And the flag is the symbol of that common in-
terest. 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 re-
liable 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 mis-
sions 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 re-
porting 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 head-
line, “Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.”
Because the headline was so big, although
I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, I
assumed it must be a huge bomb. And my
immediate reaction was, well, maybe then I
won’t 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 Hiro-
shima when I read John Hersey’s book, Hiro-
shima, which is based on a series of articles
he wrote for the New Yorker. He had gone
to Hiroshima after the bombing and spo-
ken to survivors. You can imagine what the
survivors looked like-people without arms,
legs, blinded, their skin something that you
couldn’t 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 you’re bombing from 30,000 feet, you
don’t see anybody, you don’t hear screams,
you don’t see blood, you don’t know what’s
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: You’re 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 who’s using them. I’m
not uncomfort-
able when you
use them. But if
somebody is us-
ing them who
I suspect does
not really know
what those terms
mean, then I feel
uncomfortable
because I feel
they need clarifi-
cation. After all,
the term anar-
chist 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 govern-
ments that use violence. Since I do not believe
in throwing bombs or terrorism or violence, I
don’t want that definition of anarchism to ap-
ply 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 so-
ciety-decision making, the economy-and in
which the authority of the capitalist is no lon-
ger 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 peo-
ple, and in which people have a say in their
own destinies, in which they’re not forced to
choose between two political parties, neither
of which represents their interests. So I see
anarchism as meaning both political and eco-
nomic 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, social-
ism 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 So-
cial Forum, which is held annually, is “An-
other 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 immigra-
tion 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 ev-
erybody has access to clean water. Yes, that
would take some organization to make sure
that the riches of the earth are distributed ac-
cording 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 eco-
nomic 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 dif-
ferences 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 hu-
man way with others.
Barsamian: You’ve 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 peo-
ple, 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.
BAAM Newsletter - 11
Thank you for your time on this earth,
Howard Zinn (1922-2010),
Presente.

This extra issue of the BAAM Newsletter was created with the
Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society. Together, we
present it as a contribution to a Howard Zinn memorial, on March 12,
2010, called ”A Celebration: The Radical Ideas of Howard Zinn.”

Sacco and Vanzetti Social

Saturday, March 27th
Gather for a cultural celebration, with food, drinks,
information about Tarek Mehanna’s case, and of
course, socializing. At the Community Church,
545 Boylston St, Copley Square, Boston.
www.SaccoandVanzetti.org

Photos by
Fred Clow

www.HowardZinn.org
BAAM Newsletter - 12