Howard Zinn interview on his Life and Career (2010)

[Music] I wonder if I could start by asking you how your own personal background has shaped your politics well I think with everybody it's always a very difficult thing to trace your personal background and see how its affect your politics because know what I find I find there very often are people who seem to have similar personal backgrounds and different politics and yet obviously there must be a connection in my case I think I think it's a fact the fact that I grew up in a working-class family struggling family my father was a waiter and he met my mother when they were both immigrants factory workers in New York and and I grew up in tenements and miserable slices and one step ahead of the landlord in the the Depression years and and so home was not a nice place to be I remember the first time I walked into somebody's home who had a piano and and house looked clean and the heat I thought wow this is very nice I've never saw anything like this no home was no place to be if crowd is messy and and so we lived out on the street really I mean that's you know in poor neighborhoods that's what you have you have street life kids are out on the street that's where they have their fun that's where they meet their friends and that's why when you walk out here and the suburbs and in middle class neighborhoods you don't see anybody on the street to have nice homes so yeah yeah I suppose that's you growing up in the Depression years seeing people having a hard hard time seeing people evicted from their homes I have a vivid memory of seeing furniture piled up on the sidewalk outside of this family home and crowd gathering and and then the crowd facing off the police and moving a furniture back into the house a very dramatic conflict and but this was a this is the kind of scene that that I thought you don't forget so you might say I was class conscious at an early age without ever hearing the word class and at the age of 18 I instead of going to college I went in to work in a shipyard in Brooklyn Navy art and kids in my neighborhood never went to college say they graduated from high school they dropped out of high school they went to work families needed the money and families couldn't afford the cinema to college you if there was a free college even though it was City College you know no they needed the kids little salaries and so I went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard 14:40 a week and and worked there for three years but in the meantime I had become politically interested involved radicalized I think by encountering young radicals on my street and communists and members of the young Communist League and they were very political and very smart they know all about what was going on in Mexico I was impressed by how much they knew and I was interested in these things but I didn't know as much as they did I was reading books I read as an early age I I think this is one of the important influences in my life just starting to read it in early age so I'm going to read Dickens and Mark Twain when I was 13 or 14 you know my parents didn't know about books there was no book in the house not a single book in the house no movie magnets mother it yeah but no no books but picked up books on the street and unread and so I was interested I was reading about fascism and socialism and and and so yes by the time I went to the Navy Yard to work I was already political person well in fact just before that I been in a demonstration Times Square which my which my communist friends took me to my first demonstration and it was exciting I didn't know what a demonstration was I thought going to Times Square will be fun and so there were all these people milling around in Times Square in a certain moment they unfurled banners and to this day I don't even know what the banner said probably stop fascism stop war or something like that sounded okay to be and and then I heard sirens and this I thought this must be a fire so wait no of course that the police attack II the crowd and this was Portland revelation to me I got police attacking these people him not doing anything just marching him holding placards before I knew it I was spun around knocked on the head knocked unconscious actually woke up in a doorway who knows when an hour later Times Square was as it had been before nobody quiet no demonstration no it was real eerie eerie but it was a radicalizing moment for me it's a while much these guys these radicals they're right you know the state is not neutral the police are not neutral there is no real free speech in America not a few you know antagonize the the establishment anyway so I guess so what I'm saying is that even before I went to work in the shipyard at the age of eighteen I was already politicized in a certain way and then in their shipyard in Brooklyn maybe out I encountered three other young fellows who are also young radicals in the four of us set out to organize the young workers in the shipyard and we did we fought because we were excluded from the Union the Union was an alpha valuing in craft Union they only took in skilled workers which meant that they were excluding blacks because the black workers in in the Navy Yard were the unskilled workers and but divid the heaviest work riveters and shippers and you know nasty work so the the young apprentices were outside the Union we organized the admin and I meanwhile though the war in Europe was going on and soon the United States was in the war and then my friends outside of the Navy Yard were going into the military and it was if you were in the Navy odd you didn't have to go and military you doing important war work you know building ships I worked on the USS Iowa and USS Missouri Missouri was later became famous because that's where the Japanese surrender was signed so on yeah so we're doing important work but I didn't want to stay on the navy odd I wanted to get into the fray fascism I almost said fascism better than no but the war against fascism betterand and men some of my friends were already in the military and so yeah so I enlisted in the Air Force and how did that experience shape your political outlook well that's an interesting interesting question of how the war itself shaped my political outlook because I entered the war entered the Air Force as an enthusiastic Bombardier that's why I became a Bombardier on heavy bomber stationed in England and flying missions over Germany and Hungary and Czechoslovakia even France and it was a good war that's why I enlisted war against fascism it was very clear they were the bad guys we were the good guys but I began to have doubts small doubts doubts first put into my head by a guy who's on another crew young fellow who's he was a gunner on another crew and we became friends yes we became friends because we were both readers weren't too many readers in the Air Force and and so we exchanged books and ideas and talked and and once he said to me said you know we are fighting in an imperialist war I was startled yes what do you mean as if both sides are imperialist fascists are terrible no what about our side you know the British Empire the French Empire the Dutch Empire the American Empire Soviet Union Stalin know what makes us think we really good guys know that both sides are fighting for imperial interests it was shocking to me to hear that I was so totally imbued with the idea we're on the right side I mean to this day of course I understand how soldiers make a decision at the beginning I'm on the right side once you make that decision you want it to think anymore you don't have to examine what you do from that point on everything you do is right you can kill you can drop bombs on Hiroshima and then you fee you're on the right side so I I listen to this guy and I said well if that you believe that why are you here he said well I'm here to talk to guys like you if this startled me to the idea that wow this guy's risking his life you know to be you might say to embed himself in the military and to speak out against the war in which is risking his life ironically tragically this guy didn't return from a mission some weeks later you know amazing he gave me a book called the yogi and the commissar by author Kessler no book that's not well known these days but Tesla oh the God that failed yeah he was in the God that failed and but and so a lot of people know that but they don't know the yogi and the commissar but just let fought in Spain you had the credentials of a of a left-winger so I could listen to him and he was anti-soviet critical of the Soviet Union and and the yogi and the commissar is so it started me I think on the road to examining the war I was in but I didn't do that until after the war when when after the war I picked up John Hershey's book on Hiroshima and I had seen the headlines of the bombing of Hiroshima when I had flown from Europe back to the United States with my crew and we were having a 30-day furlough before going on to the Pacific and we're gonna continue bombing missions in the Pacific and I had been married but just before I went over season and wife and I was gonna spend this 30-day furlough out in the country and stopped at a bus stop and there was this newspaper with this headline the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima we would go ahead oh wow this is great what's a telling wrong we didn't know just another bomb I have been dropping bombs maybe this is a bigger bomb but it sounds like this might end the war so this is good you know that was my attitude that the moments and then I read John Hershey's book about Hiroshima and then it came home to me what that was you know he interviewed the survivors in Hiroshima that and you can imagine what the survivors looked like the people without eyes without faces with out legs without arm I mean and and the reality of bombing suddenly came home to me and I was horrified because I had been bombing I've never seen anybody down below I didn't know what was happening to people under my bombs as you fly from 30,000 feet high you don't see any human beings jizz it's his mechanical distant operation which is with so much of modern warfare is like people killing at a distance people killing non-human objects you know it and so I began to think about that no and then we got to think about Dresden and you know and and the bombing we had done and Europe wasn't till actually years later that I learned about the bombing of Tokyo I think to this day most of Americans do not know that several months before Hiroshima we fire bombed Tokyo until the hundred thousand people in one night so all these all of these experiences made me reconsider the idea of the good war is there such a thing as a good war if World War two which is the best source the most clear-cut moral war fascism and so on if the this the most clear-cut bar war needed to be examined then surely all the other Wars and so I yes I that experience turned me against war period and no after after I came back from the Air Force and my wife and I lived in a little rat-infested apartment that is Brooklyn I hope you know people in Brooklyn won't take offense at this but yeah there are rats infested apartments in every big city this happened to be in Brooklyn and and it's interesting how you leave the military and you go back to your life before and if your life before was in a working class even though you've been in the military you've been an officer and you've warned good uniform is an eating good food that yeah you're at all as they say an officer and a gentleman and then the war ends and you're back in the working class working at our jobs which is where I was doing you know I went back to the maybe odd for a while didn't like it but there's a ditch-digger work as a waiter worked as this work that you know and that was my life I'm back to my working-class light decided to go to college under the GI Bill and and yeah so I went to college under the GI Bill I went to college in the daytime and worked four to twelve shift in a warehouse loading trucks goes where the GI Bill was wonderful and generous you might say and was it still wasn't enough to keep you alive so I had to work and my wife had to work and now that we had two little kids and they were in the nursery and so on so I went to Columbia graduate school got a PhD at Columbia and then my first teaching jobs at Spelman College in Atlanta and the next seven years were in the south and living in the black community of Atlanta 1956 to 1963 which was them when the civil rights movement was starting cheers yeah yeah those were those were very important years because I had no idea when I went down there what it would be like I was just looking for a job it wasn't that I was looking for teaching of black college you know and no I'm just looking for a job and this job came along Oh a Negro College never heard of it you know but a job so we packed up our little Chevy and went down and then that was a probably the most educational experience of my life being in the south and those particular years you know went down in 56 which was a year after the Montgomery bus boycott and stayed until 63 and and could see the development of the movement and became involved became involved became involved with my students even before the sit-ins we were making little forays with students I little forays into Atlanta to against symbols of racial segregation and you know and it was instructive we instructed it showing actually that you could win little victories if you know you stuck at it and my students decide they wanted to desegregate the Atlanta Public Library libraries were segregated like schools were segregated and the main library in Atlanta called the Carnegie Library was only for whites they decide they're gonna try to get after him and they would go to the library and ask for books we don't have these books in the black box right we'd like John Locke an essay on human understand if if we like just John Stuart Mill on Liberty that we like etc it's you know the librarians are getting more and more embarrassed librarians are sensitive people and so that's why they become librarians right librarians you know that was it they're not gonna get angry and say get out of here that find all sorts of excuses you know but this campaign went on and then finally they broke down and and they desegregated the library which is no the victory amazing victory just a handful of students and succeeded in doing it was a lesson I became involved with a student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in which was formed in 1960 and the sit-ins had taken place and starting for February in Greensboro North Carolina and and and sit-in spread to other cities in the South spread to Atlanta the next month and my students my Spelman College students were very polite controlled Spelman College was like a nunnery and was like you know the students yeah it was you know certain to go to Chapel six times six morning's a week compulsory Chapel yeah they couldn't double date I'm still you know that they you know it was it was a very controlled place the idea was to take these young black girls from the south and move them into the middle class teach them manners really a finishing school teach them how to pour cheek wear white gloves really amazing and what happened is when they got involved in the movement they broke out of Spelman College and went into the city with it never really gone be the city was a forbidding places Kitely Atlanta was as tightly segregated as Johannesburg South Africa and but they went into a city and they sat in and they got arrested and when they came back to the campus they were on fire and were bailed against the administration against the rules and regulations it was fascinating to see the change from passivity and courtesy and deportment and from that to rebellion and anger so yeah I became involved with a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which had formed out of the various sit-ins that taking place throughout the south and and the snick Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked me to be on their executive board along with one other person they considered and adults we were the two adult advisors I am a woman named Ella Baker a black woman a very remarkable woman with a history of organizing in Harlem and with the n-double-a-cp and very wise so yeah I became a I guess a kind of writer and participant in the movement doing both at the same time going around from Atlanta Georgia to Albany Georgia where demonstrations were taking place to Selma Alabama there is towns and Mississippi had his burg in Greenville and Greenwood in Jackson and yeah writing about this and participating in it and and as I said it was an educational experience for me you were ultimately dismissed from specialists I like that we're dismissed we don't say fired in the economic world we actually rarely say dismissed we say do we say we say oh this contract was not renewed but yes I was fired let's put it bluntly and you had ten years so I had 10 euros ago professor I was chair well when you asked how is that possible when you have tenure it's like asking how could a policeman hit you with a club when we have a constitution the law is one thing power is another thing and when I began teaching at Boston University I taught a course called law and justice in America and that was the theme of the course this is law and this is justice this is the law and this is power and very important thing to learn so yeah I was fired despite the fact that I had tenured was chair of the department and was a full professor and and I was fired and they didn't send me my letter until June they wanted to wait until all students were off campus and that everything was quiet and that's when the axe came down so my family I picked up by belongings and went north oh well I there was a sort of consolation prize that we along with the letters telling me goodbye there was a said well we'll give you one year's salary $7,000 so we could live for the next year on $7,000 I wish we did actually moved up to Boston and had a year in which I did some writing and kept going back to the south and so on and after that time you became more deeply involved in opposing the war in Vietnam yeah very good timing so tell us about the work that you did and perhaps culminating in your trip to North Vietnam with Daniel Berrigan oh you which running involved in the war well seemed natural and and here I was coming up north in 63 64 and there was the mortis of 64 the gulf of tonkin and sent wishes the precipitating incident that brings the escalation of the war but as I said I was still going down my wife and I spent the summer of 64 Mississippi Freedom Summer with people came from all over the country to work on the right to vote to black people and set up freedom schools for kids and did all sorts of things and and that was the summer in which that infamous incident took place with the murder of three civil rights workers one black two whites Chaney Schwerner Goodman that took place in June least they disappeared in June their bodies weren't found until late July beginning of August yeah because we had at the beginning of August we had a memorial ceremony for them in Philadelphia Mississippi which is where they had been arrested and from which they were dragged out and executed and and people came people in the movement and the sole rights woman came from various parts of Mississippi to this memorial meeting was held out of doors was a actually a beautiful day and and mrs. Cheney the mother of James Chaney and one of the guys was killed was there and Bob Moses who is the organizer it's the snick organizer and Mississippi is a fabled organizer and they're quiet but very courageous and [Music] he got up on the platform at the Memorial meeting and he held up a newspaper and it was that morning's Jackson Mississippi newspaper and the headline said LBJ says shoot to kill in the gulf of tonkin he said so ready to shoot to kill in the gulf of tonkin half a world away and federal government will not send anybody down here to Mississippi to protect civil rights workers three of whom have just been killed it was a very dramatic moment you might say that the beginning in a certain sense of the anti-war movement but convergence of the two movements and in fact you know the half time war movement drew a lot from the civil rights movement drew a lot of the spirit and feeling and and hostility to the national government and and and people who were in the civil rights movement became involved in the anti-war movement and so you know I was there that that day and and became involved after Jean in what became a slowly growing movement against the war in the spring of 65 which is a moment of important escalation in the war we had a rally on the Boston Common against the war and I spoke and heard Mike who says the political philosophers spoke a hundred people war has been a very big big turnout I tell people about that when they walk when they complain that oh man you know we're not having a big demonstration on the comedy people showed up people get disconsolate that's all that's yeah hundred people but then it grew it's grew and grew you know three and a half years later another meeting on the Boston Common and a hundred thousand people there so so yeah I became involved in I just began I was teaching at Bush University I offered a job when I came that year that I was living luxuriously on our $7000 I was invited to teach at Boston University and so I was teaching at Boston University at the same time very active and the anti-war movement and therefore wasn't easy for me to get tenure at Boston University because of that was very tricky thing but ultimately I did well though that's a story in itself but I won't go into this one of those academic stories you know not boring academic story as well but yeah I'm doing a lot of speaking writing wrote an article for the nation called Vietnam the logic of withdrawal and beacon press which had published my book on snick suggested I write a book by that name Vietnam the logic food or all because there was no book fair amount had been written about the Vietnam War by 1967 but no book called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam that was considered too radical people talked about oh we can't withdraw precipitously I love that word to sip even after you've been at war for seven years if you believe they say oh we're nothing to be precipitous so that's how they say now what the war in Iraq right we we well you know we've been now yeah six years no no we must no mustn't be precipitous Afghanistan we've been 88 9 you know so yeah so I wrote this book Vietnam the logic of a draw and I had just before writing the book I'd been to Japan I've been I'm invited by Japanese anti-war group called baharon Japanese anti-war group invited to do a lecture tour of Japan about the war sort of representing the peace the anti-war movement in the United States and and they invited me and then a young black guy named Ralph Ellison who lit I had worked with and snick in the south to Louis to this lecture tour sort of thirteen Japanese cities and thirteen days from Hokkaido and the north down to Okinawa and so all the way through Japan every night a different City and that was a great experience the Japanese were far more aggressive Vietnam War then the United States I mean interesting when you think of it all vietnam communism and vietnam a threat well yeah japan is much closer if anybody might be threatened oh japan you know but know that the japanese didn't seek communism of the threat and they saw the war for what it was an attempt to extend American power in Asia so yeah so I had been to Japan and so I wrote this book Vietnam logical withdrawal which immediately went to like seven printings and and was distributed at an anti-war rally ISM and was taken up in you know we've got a fair amount of publicity of one thing I I the last chapter of the book was a speech I wrote for Lyndon Johnson of course he didn't ask for it I'm sure not but you know that wasn't gonna stop me I'm gonna write a speech for him and the idea of the speech was because everybody said well if we don't we shouldn't be in Vietnam but how can we get out just what you hear now about Iraq a knife that's it no we shouldn't be there but surely we can't just leave no and you know it's as if somebody broken into your house to defend it said get out just leave and the so I wrote the speech for Lyndon Johnson oh gee he explains to the American people why he is ordering our troops to leave very convincingly convinced me but parently convinced other people and do it they reprinted the speech note in newspapers and there was a businessman and Ohio who distributed copies of my book to every member of Congress and President and vice-president because it didn't stop war but so I was writing writing speaking and that's what my life consisted of him and in early 1968 the North Vietnamese invited what they described as a responsible member of the American peace movement to come to Hanoi and to pick up three American prisoners of war flyers would be the first ones released by the North Vietnamese it was January of 68 is a time of the Tet holiday also the time of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam that in honor of the holiday they wanted make a goodwill gesture they said they would release three prisoners if some responsible remember the American people come and so I was considered a responsible member of the American people and I'm Daniel Berrigan also so two responsible members that's better and I had never met that barrier but I met him I met him on the morning that we were going to take the flight to Hanoi together met him in an apartment in Greenwich Village where we mean briefed by David Dellinger and Tom Hayden both of whom had been to Vietnam to North Vietnam and so yeah so Dan Berrigan and I flew or halfway around the world to him I stopping at six different cities on the way and spent the weekend Laos because the plane that was supposed to take us from the in China Laos to and I had not arrived because it had was supposed to take off from Saigon there was a certain special plane ICC international control Commission plane set up by the Geneva Accords and and that plane flew six times a month to Hanoi that that's a regular schedule why six times a month well it was dangerous to fly to Hanoi and it flew from Saigon to Phnom Penh and Cambodia to be in China and Laos to analyte and didn't arrive when we're supposed to arrive in be in town where we were going to take it to Illinois didn't arrive because the Tet Offensive had held it up in Saigon the Vietcong had taken over the airport consolute F was in Saigon but finally yet we the plane arrived after an interesting weekend being child with Dan Berrigan I got to be real friends that's a real no another and and then we flew to annoy we picked up district prisoners brought them back to being channel then anyway after that Dan Berrigan became very involved in the anti-war mention you know Catonsville nine have all sorts of actions of civil disobedience continues to be involved in the movement and one thing that quite a few people may not know is that you and through you Noam Chomsky played a role in the release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg is of course being the documents top-secret US documents that documented the United States intentional misleading of the US public around Vietnam tell us about how you became involved in the release of the Pentagon Papers which really galvanized against the war well I'd like to exaggerate my role of course but I'll try to tell the truth I I got to know Dan Ellsberg when he left around cooperation I left two governments and had a kind of some sort of fellowship at MIT and missus I suppose this is around 1970 69 70 and so I met him at one of his anti-war rallies and we we hit it off we came friends and he and his wife Pat and I and my wife Jim Jen going out play together and and one time we were visiting him he and Pat had an apartment in Cambridge me um Howard square I don't know you know this area but the we visited them in their apartment gin and then said I'd like to show you [Laughter] yeah yeah you have a sense of drama you know Dan Ellsberg is very dramatic guy actually he does dramatic things which hardly required overdramatizing but that's not going to stop him he will dramatize the already dramatic anyway so he told me he said you know I and my friend asked me over so who also worked for the RAND Corporation they had ordered this secret history to be put together of the Vietnam War which do it for the Defense Department I had worked on it in Tony Russo and we decided we would photocopy 7,000 pages and makes it public and when he brought out a bunch of paper so would you like that so it's like you know like we got like never drink something like that polite thing I said yeah so anyway I took charge of some of these papers and and then and shortly after that I guess it was you know early 71 that dam began Ellsberg Ian and his wife Patton in the Roz and I were going out to a movie together we're going to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which I think and Ellsberg had seen six times and and and when they came over to pick us up we had a little apartment in Newton and when they came to pick us up Dan Ellsberg was very obviously agitated what's the matter well I said you know I gave copy depending on papers to all these newspapers at times and the post so on and none of them had done anything with it but tomorrow morning The Times is going to print bunch of the paper so I said why you upset he said you didn't tell me perfect and this is Saturday night Sunday that's Sunday the next day The Times big headline and it was finish the government began looking frantically for the person who would released these papers and for a while wasn't known then somebody exposed the fact that was Dan Ellsberg and then began looking for everybody went underground and and in the meantime while he was underground some of us were distributing his papers to other newspapers and I played a part and distributing the copy of papers to the Boston Globe which then printed it and and and and then he have a certain point he decided to surrender to the FBI and those little mites a little party in front of the Federal Building and Boston we being Pat's showed up and the FBI was there and they were a little embarrassed because they hadn't known where he was in they and so he was arrested and then just put on trial and from Los Angeles and and I was asked to be a witness in the trial because one of the things that had to be done in the trial was to explain to the jury what was in the Pentagon Papers because a jury was being told by the government to release these documents a danger to the security of the United States I mean that's the basis for the indictments and he was indicted on 13 different counts for 10 years each 130 years in jail and his friend Tony Russo had helped him he was also indicted and his trial out in LA and in 73 and I win out le to testify in the trial my job was to tell the jury what was in the Pentagon Papers so I actually had an opportunity to like to give a four hour lecture to the jury on the history of the Vietnam War to explain to them how this releasing this was not dangerous to the national security it was just embarrassing to the US government and that's why they didn't want the police and told them what was in because they the jury did not have the papers in front of them papers had to be introduced as exhibits you see so I had a job to tell him you know this is what's in the papers this tells you that the United States created the government of South Vietnam which we claim we over coming in to help that no we we brought mr. cm the head of the south and he's gone from New Jersey to Vietnam set him up gave him something to drink and so so the trial took place and interesting trial that government put on witnesses to say yeah this is a danger and so on and but then in midst of the trial the scandal broke around the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal and and turned out that Nixon had ordered to see his team of official thugs to break into the psychiatrist's office and Ellsberg's psychiatrists and yes and Nixon wanted to get something to show he was a nut right if somebody has visited psychiatrist he must be in that not like Nixon so the breaking news of the break-in and the judge in the trial said now we can't let the tribe wants it's tainted by what the government did so that was the end of the trial so that Dan Ellsberg since then has been very very active and movement against nuclear weapon Wilson been arrested many times you are perhaps most famous to the general public as the author of the people's history of the United States which was published in 1980 and which is a form of history from below I wanted to ask you if you were influenced or what your assessment is of another academic and activist EP Thompson who wrote the making of the English working class which was published in 1963 hmm another form of history yes Trimble oh yeah well I was aware of EP Thompson is EP Thompson was to be an unimportant figure and so an example of of how you dig beneath the official history and look at what working-class people are doing so yes I mean it's not that that precipitated me but but it was in my consciousness so I had read it and admired it and you know I was probably influenced not by any academic work not by any piece of writing I was really influenced by my experience my experience in the South especially in my experience in the anti-war movement both experiences having persuaded me that the histories of these of our country were inadequate that they left out the the people who made history the working people of black people Native Americans women and so yeah I mean for instance talking about the influences my experience in the south and getting me to write the book I when I was in Selma Alabama I I contacted Columbia University which where I had my PhD it I knew they had an oral history project I also knew what they were all history project why there wasn't historical project it was a project where they interviewed famous people sex secretaries of state ex-generals etc and recorded out their interviews but I wrote to them I said you know this is you're an oral history project there's real history going on down here it's really interesting people to talk to not as generals not ex secretaries of state just people involved in a very important and dramatic movement so whatever send somebody down here with a tape recorder I got a letter back from Columbia versus a very good idea when somebody starts off with that's a very good idea you know they're not enough do you think a very good idea but we don't have the resources to do that Columbia University doesn't have the resources you know as well it's like the United States government doesn't have the resources to build another school you know they don't have the resources so anyway I I started taping I was taping interviews with people in the movement taping the evening and and Selma Alabama and and and yeah I think that helped so germinate the idea in me of the history from below you are of course a playwright as well as a historian and you've written a play about Marx Marx in Soho what's your relationship intellectually with Marx and Marxism well when I was I suppose 1718 and maybe was by communist friends in the neighborhood who were always giving out literature and gave me a copy of the Communist Manifesto I read the Communist Manifesto I thought wow that explains a lot yeah yeah after all comments manifesto is you know it's not a scholarly complex thing it's very relatively simple and clear you know here shows you the historical development of the human race from primitive communism through feudalism and capitalism and until I just capitalism and shows you why capitalism fails and what's wrong with it and and how it's it's a historical phenomenon it's not a permanent fixture and in our history it came into being at a certain point it will leave at a certain point would be replaced by a different Society Associates aside and he would all made sense to me you might say me a sense of my own life and so I when I got together with my other three radical shipyard workers we met once a week and read books we read Marx and Engels we read all sorts of things and discussed them so yeah later on I read Volume one of capital even tried to read volume two and about u3o that maybe that led me to conclusion that better natural rights long and complex and difficult things right things that people can understand and so in my play for instance that you know my play but but you know the sort of exchange between Marx and his wife Jenny and she sort of shakes her head about the chapters capital no no this she reads the first sentence of that's capital which is so forbidding history or society's history of commodities in this net and she said no that won't do I have to write like the Communist Manifesto anyway I know I was very interested in Marxist theory when I was teaching I was teaching political theory I I taught Marxism soon I was teaching a seminar in Marxism and mannerism comparing their ideas and so yes I I guess yet though with that interest in Marxism led me to you right display you also wrote a play about Emma Goldman mmm and I understand that you identify as an anarchist uh at what point did anarchist ideas start influencing you well it's interesting that you say I identify as an anarchist I don't think I've ever specifically identified myself as an amicus maybe I don't specifically identify myself as anything because I I'm cautious about labeling myself and when people don't know what the label means you know because the word 'anarchist suggests so many different things so I don't want people to get the wrong impression I want them to think I'm a bomb thrower I'm a peaceful person and we but probably of all the political philosophies that there are probably anarchism comes closest to my way of thinking and I think we're trying to think of when did I become interested in it maybe even both well even before I began specifically reading anarchist ideas even before I read Emma Goldman squatter biography I was already well for one thing I was disaffected from the Soviet Union from that idea of socialism and and therefore I was open to the idea that all governments are dangerous to human freedom and that we need a society that's free of our Authority but my specific introduction activism came in the 60s when I encountered a fellow historian named Richard Drennen who had written a biography of Emma Goldman and I didn't know that but you know to academics get together said oh what have you written oh I just wrote this biography of him a golden no I actually had read a little about Emma Goldman vaguely I knew anarchist you know but I decided I would read his book rebel and paradise the wonderful book and excited me by Emma Goldman then I read on read went on to read her autobiography living my life as we should one was a great autobiographies and later I would always recommend to my students and and so I and then I you know read but couldn't get and so yeah I was more and more more and more attracted to anarchism because it was anti-authoritarian and there's a talking about labeling yourself and and/or describing what you believe in and as I say I always have trouble saying well I'm a socialist or I'm a Marxist or I'm this one of that well I will say oh I believe in socialism so long as I can explain what I mean I'm a Marxist long as I can explain what I mean and but sometimes I will say well there's a three word description of how I feel I got this from Dalton Trumbo bellum Trumbo the Hollywood writer who was blacklisted and wrote one of my favorite books Johnny got his gun and great anti-war novel and Dalton Trumbo son once asked well we're you a communist what do you mean you know what how do you justify yourself so what I believe in there's socialism without jails three words I thought yeah that's good so yeah so I would play about Emma Goldman and play was a longest-running play in Boston in 1970 sad it was interesting to me is it I mean anarchism is presumably a political philosophy held by very few people you know and anarchists are on the fringes of society but if you present analysts ideas will present them through a fascinating character like Emma Goldman people are all for it they're interested do you think that a synthesis of Marxism and anarchism of the red and the black so to speak yes would be fruitful for the left now I think it would yes yes take the analysis of Marxism of capitalism and and his call to action is called for philosophers to change the world and not simply record it and and take the anarchist idea of being suspicious of Authority and centralized power and and yeah i think that i think that blending of marxist and anarchist ideas is something that is a good idea I've read that you see the Paris Commune that experiment that happened short political but in 1871 in Paris that you see it as perhaps a model for what a future society might look like I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the Paris Commune and why you view it that way you know well the Paris Commune was it a situation in which I guess taking advantage of the fact that France and Germany were at war and it was an opportunity for workers to seize the city of Paris and to take charge of the city and to set up a commune and they're called the commune arts and they and and they created a cooperative egalitarian society in Paris where people traded things and people and where there's no crime or really the people have nothing to be it to be criminal about now there was and where decisions were made by clusters of people gathering the streets and and then passing on their ideas to the members of the sort of the leaders of the community leaders that come you know what people who didn't get a salary which was greater than an ordinary worker's salary and they they created schools for women there's no such thing as education for women at that time they had free admission to the theatre of a yeah they made things available to to everybody on an egalitarian basis and they made decisions based on people getting together and talking and discussing and and it was an admirable society while it lasted and that it was crush but there have been other instances like that in history which had models in the sense that well they give us at least a glimpse of what is possible you know Barcelona in 1936 early months of the Spanish Civil War as described by George Orwell in his book homage to Catalonia again people sharing things noble crime and what's interesting because in The Grapes of Wrath which we were talking about before at the very end Tom Joad who certainly doesn't know anything about political theory never at anything about any of these things but he talks about how in the government camps that was set up to help migrant workers that people helped one another and he said there are no cops keeping order no and we had a better order than any cop could bring us you know and so I thought I think it's something that people kind of society people would welcome how do you think fundamental change can come about do you think that for thoroughgoing transformation of society towards something like mmm the Paris Commune or something else very different than what we have now do you think that it would require some sort of thoroughgoing revolution or do you subscribe more to the notion that gradual change can come at from building a new society within the show of the old no no I don't think I don't think a revolution in the old sense of seizing power of the capital that no we've had enough experience with that to suggest that that's dangerous and corrupting and yes I think build institutions it's a slower process building free institutions within the old society and so liberating the ground one by one you know liberating this institution and that institution and you know work is taking over industry students taking over and universities people in neighborhoods taking over the running of the neighborhoods and and the security of the neighborhood I think yeah I think that will come not gradualism in the sense of you know waiting too long but but yes working to liberate society piece by piece from within well in your life you've been very engaged with the question of organizing and how how does one get how does one move forward and you've argued that small moments can add up to the achieving of a great deal of social change now reflecting with the really wide knowledge that you have of social movements over decades and your historical perspective on social movements over centuries do you think that we can learn lessons now in the left or the radical left from the past in terms of organizing in a different way to engage people I'm thinking for example about the anti-war movement and you've mentioned how people can get frustrated about the lack of effect but you do have a situation where the society at large and many people within the society at large are against the current us occupations and yet transferring it transforming it into a movement that can bring an end to these occupations has been hard so what lessons from from the past do you think we should drawing now and in thinking about organizing for the long term yeah yeah I don't think it's a matter of finding some dramatically different techniques of organizing a protest you know because you know there but it's but I think I think the idea of of people resisting in various ways people refusing developing certain other certain tactics which are the most effective confronting power based on the idea that the people in power hold their power only because they are obeyed when people withdraw their obedience when people withdraw their their support from the institutions people who control these institutions become powerless motors with a strike there's a fundamental weapon because no matter how powerful the corporation if work has gone strike the corporation is helpless this is what happened in 1930s people thought oh you can't fight General Motors or Ford look at the rich they're big workers leave the factory and I can't function they are helpless when same thing was consumed and when she was boycott this is a not sufficiently used weapon was used by Chavez on the west coast the farm work is the boycott of grapes and abrupt farm growers these very wealthy powerful farm growers they have to recognize the Farm Workers Union when Jesse Jackson threatened to call a boycott of Texaco because they had been guilty of racist practices Texaco immediately caved in they're worried you know norway's this is this is what they depend on they depend on people to buy their products you stop buying their products they had scared and then of course when soldiers refused to fight with which is what happened in the Vietnam War they couldn't count on the military anymore you know that's a aspect of the anti-war movement that has been under played but the fact is this GI resistance in the Vietnam War was crucial in making the US government decided it could not carry on war so where I'm saying is we have to think about tactics that can overcome power I have to think about what it is that holds these people in power these institutions of power and and so developing Lee's strike the boycott that the refusal of soldiers in the military and the building of institutions the building of cooperative institutions yes the building of cooperatives all kinds of cooperatives farmers cooperatives consumers cooperatives housing cooperatives I mean all of that you know yeah it's a long process but I I think you know I think it can be done do you think we should also evaluate and think about new ways of reaching people you have yourself well obviously been deeply engaged in teaching and combining teaching and activism but also I understand that you studied the use of documentary film educating people do you think that perhaps the arts might be a more effective way of bringing people who are from outside of the immediate left in and is that why you write your place oh yeah I think the arts are enormous ly important is the arts what the arts are do is they bring passion emotion to ideas and so the ideas are simply not dry prosaic statements but but the ideas come alive on the stage or in music and and you know when I heard Paul Robeson sing when I was a teenager Wow Pete Seeger and then in the 60s Dylan and Joan Baez and and no music theater movies then art is art has its various special and powerful role to play because it enhances people's feelings and it gives strength to people's ideas inspires people so yeah I think that that that's one way in which people will be moved moved and we have to consciously think about that in the future yeah I want to thank you so much for talking with me oh well thank you good questions

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Id: vG8PC8bsY5Q

Length: 73min 53sec (4433 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017