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Comment by barnaby | Hacker News Reader

I vehemently disagreed with Zinn when I tried reading "A People's History" a few years ago, but I was much more naive then. I have realized that corruption is the norm, and that when people fight back, through organized labor or through revolution, there's usually a good reason for it.

I'm even more skeptical that communism would magically fix the wrongs Zinn railed against, for the same reasons democracy hasn't fixed it. But I do have to say, that I am glad someone like Zinn wrote prolifically to stand up for the little guy, for us. RIP.

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I never got the impression from his writings that communism was the alternative he was advocating.

I could only stomach the first 10 pages, and quit. But that little peak certainly made me think of socialism.

And I don't see how socialism is looking out for the little guy, either. To look out for individuals you need a liberal (in the classical sense) philosophy of individual liberty. Socialism is built on a philosophy of collectivism, doing what's best for the community as a whole ("the needs of the many exceed the needs of the few, or the one"). The rhetoric about helping the little guy is just what monsters like Lenin and Mao find it easiest to use to hoodwink the masses.

I think it's a non corrupt court system that most helps the little guy. Few countries laws are nearly as corrupt as it's institutions.

PS: As an ideology I suspect the roots of Socialism is the idea that no single individual adds as much to his individual well being as his society. In the case of modern industrial society this is clearly true (from an economic prospective), if somewhat misguided because some individuals contribute far more to society than others.

I could only stomach the first 10 pages, and quit. But that little peak certainly made me think of socialism.

10 pages is enough to link the guy to socialism? really?

The rhetoric about helping the little guy is just what monsters like Lenin and Mao find it easiest to use to hoodwink the masses.

Monsters use any rhetoric they think will fit at their historic moment. This is just a red shirted example of Godwin's law.

10 pages is enough to link the guy to socialism? really?

Maybe not to start a conversation. But when chiming in to support someone else's claim, and with the clear caveat, then yes, I think it's perfectly OK.

Monsters use any rhetoric they think will fit at their historic moment.

Show me a monster since the advent of socialism that did not use it as its justification. The only one I can think of is Pinochet in Chile (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_coup_of_1973#Casualties ), and even that needs a very loose definition of monster. Certainly the chart-toppers like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Kim, Pol Pot, Hitler preached socialism. (I'll grant that they generally didn't understand the concept very well, but the point is that it's what they advocated to their partisans and people as the ultimate solution)

Specifically one from my own country,

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

Argentina's story is a bit more brutal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Argentina_(1966%E2%8...

All over South America during the 60~80 there were numerous 'capitalist' brutal dictatorships.

And then there's more, such as

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

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

Never forget, what makes you a monster is not that you killed millions, but that you were willing to do it in order to maintain your power.

I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these. I think you're stretching the "monster" thing here; they're not in the same league as Lenin and Mao.

what makes you a monster is not that you killed millions, but that you were willing to do it in order to maintain your power

But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK? That's nuts.

I'm not finding counts of deaths, nor listings of atrocities, for these.

Argument from ignorance. They were in the same league from the point of view of their victims.

But if you believed that doing so was somehow right (again, the "greatest good" nonsense or something), then it's OK?

I never said that. From available evidence, not one of the people you mentioned did their atrocities for the ``greatest good'', and it would not matter if that was the case, because the willingness to commit atrocities is the monstrous thing.

A lot of his rhetoric seems to based on communism. That is, he sees classes as distinct entities acting with intent. That is a Marxist-like approach to history, at least. I'm not that familiar with Zinn, but I don't think he tended to propose solutions, manifestos or such.

Sure, I can definitely see a Marxist-like critique in his writings, but such a critique can be used to point to variety of alternative solutions, including a purer form of democracy than we currently have in the US.

A purer form of democracy is in fact what many more contemporary American (or Western) socialists such as social libertarians have advocated. Again, I can't think of any instances where Zinn proposes a "solution" other then enlightenment (eg' understand that we, the readers and writers of books have mostly been the jailers'[1]) so I wouldn't charecterise him as part of any of those movements. I think that you would classify his work as a part of the Marxist family of intellectual endeavour for other reasons.

Since the most obvious effects of Communist thought were the political-economic systems inspired by it, we tend to think of Communism as being purely focused on these. But, an approach to historical analysis is as much a part of Marxist thought as economic analysis.

Howard Zinn was a historian.

[1] Quoted roughly & ineloquently from memory.

"American Socialists such as social libertarians"

What? I see that as a contradiction in terms.

A contradiction between which of those two word pairs ;)

Seriously though, if you think of Socialism as a group of ideas across different fields, you find a lot of diversity once you get to the applied level. You can get anarchy (the aforementioned social libertarians and others tend towards anarchism) or totalitarianism. Direct democracy or dictatorship.

Say you accept Marx's characterization of history as a struggle between classes, you are moved to rage by The Communist Manifesto,^ it describes the brutal no-nonsense history of civilization in a way that makes sense. There are lots of directions you can go from there. Obviously marx had some pretty specific applications which I read as leading to something not that far from bolshevism, but you don't have to agree with everything.

^I suggest that you read it. For most people, I suspect you'll quibble with bits and pieces that have since (it's been 150 years, after all) been subject to more trial and scrutiny. As a narrative, it is not without predictive power.

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

I think that's the right distinction to make.

Often times, in discussions such as these, people will associate Marxist-type critiques with an immediate conjunction to Communism (almost in knee-jerk fashion), because of the historical reasons you mention.

I think that's unfortunate because as a critical model, there are valuable insights to be gained from Marxist thought, even if you reject (as I do) the idea of Communism.

Sure. Hopefully we will be able to see it in historical context by the 200 year anniversary of The Manifesto. As a model for describing history, its not hard to see the attraction to Marx. He was, after all, a very smart guy.

I'm fairly certain Zinn was an anarchist. He was certainly heavily influenced by anarchist philosophy.

But he was the nice kind :)

His rhetoric was simpler than that. He was anti-money-grubbing-indian-killing-black-people-killing-chinese-killing-immigrant-killing-worker-killing-racist-corporate-capitalist-unregulated-opportunist. I'm not totally sure what that has to do with marxism or communism.

He was only against Indian-killing when white people did it. He described Indians as "innocent" before white people came to America. I guess Indian-killing is ok when other Indians do it.

Wow, upvotes on this? You're trying to compare local tribal warfare to continent spanning state-condoned genocide. Did you actually read any Zinn?

Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that there actually was continent spanning state condoned genocide?

(Hint: there wasn't. There were all sorts of local wars of conquest. They amounted to diddly squat, however, in comparison to smallpox, which was completely unavoidable.)

Spoken like a true revisionist imperialist. "Since the Indians are dead anyway lets monetize this land which was never monetized before and lets get our government to back us up."

The United States is not a democracy, it is a republic. Democracy is mob rule and is something the founding fathers were very much against.

Ochlocracy is mob rule. As for democracy, it depends very much on which founding father you choose..

That's funny, because the countries highest on the Democracy Index seem anything but governed by mob rule.

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

The democracy index does not measure democracy. It measures a weighted average of electoral process/pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture.

A true measure of how democratic a nation is would exclude civil liberties, functioning of government and political culture.

Recognizing that class distinctions exist in society is not the same as being communist.

Indeed - the classes are sociopaths, clueless and losers:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

Mapping these classes to those in "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

So judging by the comments, I was wrong to have assume he was communist... back in my younger more naive days. I should probably re-read "A People's History"... except it's already reserved solid for the next 6 months in the SF Public Library system. Go figure.

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