Interview: The Future of History, Part I

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, is one of America’s most distinguished historians. He was an active figure in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. His seminal book, A People’s History of the United States, is widely used in college and university classrooms. He is also the author of Declarations of Independence and You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. His latest book is The Zinn Reader.
For further information about Zinn you can visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

Q. In The Zinn Reader, you write, “Important to me as I was becoming conscious of the crucial question of class was to read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.” Nineteen ninety-eight marked the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. The question arises, Is Marx relevant today?
A.: I don’t know if you know this, but I decided to deal with the question of the relevance of Marx even before the 150th anniversary. I decided to do that by writing a play about him. It’s called Marx in Soho. It’s a monologue in which Marx appears in the present, a kind of fantasy, of course. The reason I wanted to do something about Marx is because there are some things he said in the 19th century that turn out to be inadequate for an understanding of what the world is like today. He had a foreshortened view of how long it would take for a socialist revolution to come about. There was a point where he and Engels thought the revolutions in Europe of 1848 would lead to workers’ revolutions. They did not.
He did not really figure on capitalism’s ability to survive, on the ingeniousness of the system in devising obstacles to revolution, its power in suppressing revolutionary movements, and its ability to wean the working class and its consciousness away from the idea of revolutionary change. Although Marx followed events in the U.S. in the mid-19th century and was a correspondent for a while for the New York Tribune, he could not anticipate that the American system would be able to fend off revolutionary movements by a combination of tactics. I say “tactics” as if they were deliberate, but I think that probably it’s not an accurate description to call them tactics. Let’s say there are a number of developments in American capitalism that made it possible for the system to survive. One of them was the fact that capitalism in the U.S., drawing on the enormous wealth of this country, was able to respond to workers’ movements by giving concessions, respond to unionism by agreeing to raise wages and lower hours. The system responded to economic crises with reforms, as it did in the 1930s under the New Deal. In doing so, it created a more satisfied section of the working class, which has remained content with the system or, when it became discontented, did not become discontented with capitalism as a system but became discontented with specific manifestations of the system. Most working people in the U.S. do not see the problems they have as systemic, but as problems which are correctable by reforms. So the system, by having the wealth sufficient to distribute more goodies to sections of the working class and yet maintain huge profits, has been able to sustain itself.
At the time of World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois, certainly one of the most far-sighted of American intellectuals, saw that the American system was giving some rewards to its workers and was able to do this on the basis of its exploitation of people abroad. He saw the imperialism of World War I, of the Western powers, and he saw that the Western powers, by drawing out the wealth of the Middle East and Latin America and Asia, was able to give some small part of its profits to its own working class and therefore enlist that working class in a kind of national unity which then enabled them to call this working class to war and sustain that war.
There’s a big difference between having a working class that is 80 percent of the population and seething with anger at the system and a working class of which half has been given enough goodies to be content, leaving a minority in desperate poverty. The minority may be an important one, in the U.S. it may be 40 million people who are in desperate circumstances without health care, with a high incidence of child mortality, but still not enough to make the kind of workers’ revolution that Marx and Engels were hoping for.
I think he also did not see, and this was pointed out by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran when they wrote their post-Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the economic crisis that Marxists expected to happen after the end of World War II did not take place because of the militarization of capitalism.
A kind of military Keynesianism was in operation, whereby spending a huge amount of money on military contracts, the government was creating employment and was giving shots of “drugs,” in the long run poisonous but in the short run sustaining the system.
On the other hand, there were analyses that Marx made of the capitalist system which turn out to be very perceptive. Probably the most obvious one is the increasing concentration and centralization of capital on a worldwide scale. What we talk about now as the global economy, globalization, Marx foresaw. He saw the world becoming more and more interconnected economically. He saw the corporations turning into mega corporations and the mergers and the possession of the material resources of the world becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Very often it’s said Marx talked about the immiseration of the proletariat and the concomitant increasing wealth of the upper classes, the polarization of wealth and poverty. Very often they say, Marx was wrong about this. In the U.S. it doesn’t look that clear because of this large middle class that is not at one pole or the other. If you look at it on a worldwide scale, world capitalism has moved in that direction. If you take the wealth of the rich countries as against the wealth of the poor countries, and especially if you take the wealth of the upper income brackets in the rich countries against the 90 percent of the people in the poor countries, you have a polarization of wealth which is more stark than it was in the 19th century.
One of the things Marx pointed out was that once money was introduced into the world economy, the pursuit of wealth became infinite. It was no longer a matter of material possessions, of land, as it was in feudal times, now there was no longer a limit to the accumulation of wealth once money was introduced.
Those who trumpet the virtues of capitalism point out that the USSR appropriated Marx and his name and the good name of socialism. Since the Soviet Union collapsed in disarray both Marx’s analyses and a socialist political philosophy are therefore discredited.
I know that that’s what’s being said. Marxism would only be discredited if the Soviet Union had created the kind of society that Marx and Engels foresaw as a socialist society. But when Marx and Engels talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, they had a very special conception of what that meant. It meant that the majority of the people, the working class, would be in charge of the society. They did not mean by dictatorship of the proletariat that a political party would represent itself as total spokesperson for the working class. In fact, not only would a political party not be the spokesperson, but certainly not a central committee, certainly not a Politburo, certainly not one person. Marx and Engels did not envision that kind of dictatorship.
At one point, Marx was talking about the Paris Commune of 1871 and the remarkably democratic character of the Paris Commune, the communards, the people who gathered and legislated, made decisions in the context of endless daily, hourly, 24-hours- a-day discussions in the streets of Paris by the people of Paris. He said you want to know what I mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Look at the Paris Commune. When Marx talked about what a socialist society would look like, he certainly did not expect that a socialist society would set up gulags, would imprison dissidents and shoot not just capitalists, but fellow revolutionaries, as was done in both the Soviet Union and in China. Marx and Engels saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a temporary phenomenon during which the socialist character of society would become more and more communal, more and more democratic, and that the state, as they said, would become less and less necessary. Marx and Engels talked in The Communist Manifesto about their aim being the free development of the individual.
The Soviet Union and other countries that have called themselves Marxist and have established police states acted contrary to the spirit of Marx’s ideas. So I was very glad that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union you could no longer associate the Soviet Union and socialism, you could no longer say, this is a place where socialism exists. To me it seemed that now the air could be cleared and that we could begin to think of socialism as it was thought of in the early part of the century in the U.S., before the Soviet Union existed, when the Socialist Party in the U.S. was a powerful force, when its candidate for president got close to a million votes. You had socialist newspapers all over the country read probably by several million people. At that time the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, was a very powerful force in organizing strikes and struggles around the country.
It is very interesting that socialism in this country was at its most influential before a Soviet Union existed. Because then the people could, without the imposition of some foreign, distorted example, take a look at the ideas of socialism. It made a lot of sense to them. They could see Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Jack London, and Lincoln Steffens and see admirable people in the U.S. who had turned to socialism because they saw what capitalism was doing to people. Socialism at that time represented a common-sense idea, that you take the wealth of the country and try to use it in a rational and humane way.
Q.: The Reaganites take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. They say Reagan’s aggressive weapons policy and expansion of the military helped to bankrupt the USSR. What’s your take on that? Do you have an alternative view on why the Soviet Union collapsed?
A.: I always have an alternative view. I have no doubt that the militarization of the Soviet economy was a factor in impoverishing the Soviet Union But that was a very long-term development. It didn’t happen only under Reagan. The Soviet Union and the U.S. engaging in an arms race and both countries spending an exorbitant amount of their national wealth on the military. It also has been a factor in causing the U.S. to have a social service structure which is less generous to its people than, let’s say, the social service sector of much poorer countries, like the countries of Scandinavia, New Zealand, France, and Germany with their universal health care systems.
Without pretending to know exactly what caused the Soviet Union to collapse, it seems to me that one of the truly important factors was the growing discontent with the system, with the police state, with the lack of freedom. I’m thinking of the growing ties of the Soviet Union with the rest of the world, you might say the phenomenon that Marx described, that the world would become more interconnected, that people and goods would travel more and more across borders, culture would be disseminated all over the world, people would get to know about what’s happening in other countries. For people in the Soviet Union, as more travel took place, as radio and television brought information to them, I think their society became more distasteful to them. Restrictions on their travel, on their freedom of speech became more onerous. I think they developed an underground of dissent. We know that there was an underground press, underground literature, self- publication, literally, of things that circulated unofficially and spread subversive ideas. All of these had a corrosive effect on a society that was very tyrannical. I guess I believe that tyrannies ultimately, sometimes it takes years, must collapse. Whoever happens to be the leader of a rival country at the time the collapse takes place will take credit for it, as Reagan did in this case.
Q.: Were you struck by the nonviolent transformation of the Soviet Union and its neighboring satellite states, with the exception of Rumania? Here were virtual military dictatorships undergoing a peaceful transfer of government.
A.: I think that’s a very fascinating development and a very important piece of history for us to look at. What it does is reinforce the notion that it is possible to bring about important social change without violence, without a bloodbath. To me, it is a vindication of the notion that we should give up the idea of using military force to bring about social change. In fact, social change can come about by the actions of a great social movement. The resort to military force to bring about social change, the resort to armed insurrection or what the revolutionary movement might call armed struggle is evidence that the revolutionary movement has not built up enough support among the population. I think as soon as you have mass outpourings of people into the streets, and this happened in East Germany, too, and they could see that the resistance was overwhelming, they could not function any more. So to me this is very powerful evidence. Or take the Soviet Union as an example. We came very close in the U.S. to the decision to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in order to destroy it. The tyranny fell by itself, mostly from internal causes.
I think one of the most striking examples of the idea that important social change can take place and should take place without massive violence is what happened in South Africa. It was interesting that the African National Congress, which certainly was ready to engage in sabotage and even individual acts of violence, was not willing to have an all-out civil war in South Africa. They knew that it would result in millions of people being killed; most of them black South Africans. They were willing to spend more time, more energy, utilize a variety of tactics and ultimately apartheid collapsed in South Africa. Who would have predicted that Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years, would become the leader of the new South Africa? While the new South Africa has not solved fundamental problems, no question about that, still, Black political power at least creates the possibility of a change that was not possible under the old regime.
Q.: You got involved in the theater in the 1960s, didn’t you? You wrote a play about Emma Goldman, entitled Emma. It’s been performed in the U.S., Japan, and England. What drew you to her?
A.: I had heard of Emma Goldman from reading a book when I was a teenager called Critics and Crusaders, which is long out of print but had a very important influence on me. It was a book of essays on different radicals in American history. There was a chapter on each one, including Emma Goldman, the anarchist and feminist. I had read that chapter on her, but had pretty much forgotten about it, as she was forgotten by American culture for a long time. She had been a very powerful figure at the turn of the century. She was shoved into the background not just by the general culture, but also by left culture, because the Communist Party was the dominant force in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s. Emma Goldman was anti-Communist. She had written a very strong attack on the Soviet Union as a result of her experiences there. She was relegated to obscurity not just by the establishment, but also by the left.
I did not know anything about her until I encountered at some meeting in Pennsylvania in the mid or late 1960s a fellow historian named Richard Drinnon who told me he had written a biography of her called Rebel in Paradise. His biography of Emma Goldman is stunning. It led me to read her autobiography, Living My Life. What fascinated me was that here we were in the 1960s, the New Left had distanced itself from traditional Communist Party doctrine and, without calling itself anarchist, had many of the anarchist sensibilities in being anti-state, anti-dogmatism, and wanting to make revolutionary changes in the culture simultaneously with changes in the politics and economics. So Emma Goldman fitted, in my view, a New Left conception of the universe.
I found that my students, far from seeing her as an antiquated and irrelevant figure, as I feared at one time when I began to give them her writings, were excited by her ideas and her approach to life, her powerful feminism, her anarchism, her position against the state, against capitalism, against religion, against all of the traditional rules of sexual behavior, of marriage. She was a free spirit. The play was a matter of the desire and the opportunity joining.
Q.: What influenced your play writing? Did you have any models, were you interested in Bertolt Brecht’s work, for example?
A.: There were a number of influences in my life that led me toward play writing. First there were people in my own family who had been involved in the theater. My wife was an actress for a while in Atlanta and here in Cambridge. My daughter did some acting in the Altanta production of the Diary of Anne Frank in 1962. She played Anne Frank and won a prize as the best actress of the year in Atlanta. Our son was a musician and an actor and devoted his life to the theater, which he is still doing, running a little theater in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. We saw the first Broadway productions of Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire.
Brecht’s politics and theatrical imagination spoke to me. When I got involved in theater, I learned a number of things that were very happy learning experiences for me. I learned that when you become a theater person, it’s very different from being an academic. You immediately become part of a group project. The academy, the university, is very isolating. Presumably you’re a member of a department and presumably you have colleagues, but it never works that way. You really are alone. You’re writing your things alone. It’s not a collective enterprise. In the theater it immediately, inevitably becomes a collective enterprise as soon as your play is taken over by the director. The director becomes equal, in fact more than equal, to you. As soon as the actors come in, the set designer and costumer and stage manager come into the picture, you have a little collective working on this project. Everybody is eager to do this well, as you are. So it was very heartwarming to suddenly find myself with a group of people who were all working together on this project. Actors and actresses rehearse for six weeks and go on stage every night for another six weeks and give their all, give their time, their heart, for nothing or for very little because they’re in love with and believe in what they’re doing. I have enormous admiration for these people.
Returning to Brecht, he gave a remarkable, and I have to say, theatrical performance at the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was very funny. Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee was at a time when they were investigating Hollywood. People who want to read the full transcript of it can get Eric Bentley’s book Thirty Years of Treason, which reproduces the transcripts of actors and actresses and writers and directors who appeared before the HUAC in 1947 and 1948. Brecht baffled them. They didn’t know what to do with him. The answers he gave were like conundrums that led them into labyrinths of confusion out of which they never came. They would say, Mr. Brecht, is it true that you wrote the following lines in your play The Good Woman of Setzuan? And he would say, No, I think you don’t have it quite right. Did you read that in the German? You could see the nervous tremors that developed in the members of the committee sitting there. Somebody who watched or listened to that testimony before the HUAC said it was like a zoologist being cross-examined by apes.
Q.: One of the great cultural figures of the 20th century is Charlie Chaplin. The witch hunters in Washington, too, investigated him. Was that politically driven? Wasn’t Chaplin deported?
A.: Chaplin was not an American citizen, and they would not allow him to stay in this country. There’s no question but that it was politically driven on the basis of the fact that he’d been a supporter of various progressive and left-wing causes and because of the films that he made. Although they did not want to declare his films subversive, there’s no question they were. Modern Times was a devastating critique of the capitalist industrial system. Of course, they did not want to admit that his film The Great Dictator was a powerful anti-fascist film at a time when so many leaders of this government were soft on fascism. His other comedies, his silent comedies, were permeated with class-consciousness, with subtle and not-so-subtle critiques of the police and a system that reduced people to poverty—the tramp, and the immigrant. None of that would have endeared him to defenders of the American establishment.
Chaplin’s works were not dry polemics. They were enormously entertaining. They were funny.
That’s what made him even more dangerous. The system can handle dogmatic, dry, and boring critics of the system. But it infuriates them to see somebody who is a critic, who is on the left and whose films are being watched by hundreds of millions of people around the globe, who’s funny, who’s entertaining. There were times when the HUAC deliberately did not call certain people to the stand because these people were too popular. I have a friend, a student activist, who’s the son of Robert Ryan, the actor. He told me, and I don’t think he’d mind me repeating this, that his father, who was a progressive person who supported anti-fascist causes and who had a real consciousness about the American system, was not called before the HUAC, as so many other people were, because he was a popular figure in the movies. He was a kind of John Wayne figure, a hero, a tough guy, 100 percent American. Too many Americans identified with Robert Ryan in that heroic way. He was white Anglo-Saxon, handsome, heroic, didn’t fit the stereotype of the subversive. You might say they preferred to call short Jewish writers to the stand to exemplify communism, which would make it easier for bigotry to become a factor in anti-communism.
Q.: The U.S. gives $98 million a year to the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s fiercely debated. What would be an ideal situation in terms of funding?
A.: There are countries in Western Europe where the government gives 100 times as much money, proportionately, as the U.S. does. Denmark, Holland, Germany, England, and the Scandinavian countries subsidize the arts in a far more important way than the U.S. does. Yet this pitiful amount of money, less than the amount allocated for military bands, becomes the subject of debate on whether art should be subsidized when that art sometimes is outrageous, maybe politically or culturally, because it maybe involves nudity or lesbianism or in some way is offensive to those people who are still living in another century. By another century I don’t mean the 21st century. I mean the 14th. In a decent society art would be subsidized because artists need to be paid, because writers and painters need to survive.
I remember once on a flight from Capetown, South Africa to London, I met a German woman who got on in Frankfurt. It turned out she was an actress. What are you doing in London? I’m going on vacation. She told me that she gets a salary from the German government. They don’t ask her what she’s going to play in, if she’s going to be acting every week of the year. When there are plays, she acts in them. When there are no plays, she goes on vacation. But she is paid an annual salary, just as Congresspeople in this country are paid an annual salary, even though they spend a lot of time doing other things besides being in Congress.
Q.: One school argues that if you accept government funding, you accept government restrictions, controls, and constraints. What side do you come on in that?
A.: The system impoverishes artists.Since a good part of our taxes go for stupid things, like nuclear weapons, I think we have a right to demand that part of our taxes be used for the arts. Sure, when this happens there will be forces in the society which will then try to determine the content of these arts, but that’s another fight that must be waged. So we have a double battle in the culture, one to get the government to subsidize the arts, and the second to make sure that the subsidization is not accompanied by political strings. Z
David Barsamian is the founder and director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado.