TheMillerCircle.org

The Nation has compiled a number of tributes to Howard Zinn, who died last week at age 87. These are largely from students and friends who themselves have become prominent as writers, politicians and academicians. If you go to that site, you will surely be impressed by the range of people whose views have been impacted and shaped by their friendship with Howard Zinn, his philosophy and take on history. His most famous book, “A People’s History of the United States“ has sold a million copies and has achieved a sense of permanency in American history, as perhaps the real history of America, rather than the faux history to which many of the more senior members of our generation were exposed, including me.

Howard Zinn believed in a permanent state of revolutionary zeal, always challenging the established authority, with movements that begin at the bottom. He did not see the election process as a major solution to our problems, but viewed elections as a cushion used by the ruling elites to soften and absorb the misery of our war-making elitism, carried out within an inequitable society. He gauged success of movements by what they achieved for the disenfranchised, those on the bottom rungs of the ladders of racism and economic disparity. His writing and his personal history emphasized the power of movements that begin at the bottom of society and from there blossom into a populist surge, which inevitably becomes corrupted, absorbed and dampened by the ruling elites. But slowly, these movements have an impact, although the never-ending process must be continuously refreshed from below. Zinn didn’t look at the failure of a social movement to make change as failure per se, but saw such terminal events as indicating the need for new refreshed fomenting from below. The erosion of the middle class in America and the shocking growth of poverty and homelessness are the forces created by the ruling elites to suppress grand social movements from taking root at their historical source, where  social transitions in the past have ignited and changed America for the better. Zinn was only modestly approving of Obama and since his election was highly critical of him for his escalation of the war in Afghanistan. There is at least some discussion about creating a social forum and structure in the name of the two giants that have represented the voices of the people in the latter have of the 20th century–Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Who will follow such influential scholars?

RFM