by Howard Zinn
first, with simple tools, people had to live cooperatively, in a kind of primitive communism.
How this gave way to the first class divisions, as agriculture developed, and it became
possible for people to produce a surplus beyond their needs, and, therefore, to be exploited
by lords who took the land as their private domain. And how this feudalism, with the further
development of agriculture, of trade, of money as medium of exchange, of commerce, of
cities, and of manufactures, had to make way for a new form of social organization—
capitalism—with strong national governments to subsidize the capitalist corporations and
promote investments, and maintain law and order, so that the system could move ahead,
despite the misery of the working people, without rebel ion.
216
Then came the inspiring message of the Manifesto's sweeping treatment of history: like al previous societies, capitalism was becoming outmoded. It had done a superb job in building
up the forces of production, in developing technology and workers' skil s, and in producing
huge amounts of goods. But it had created an economy it could not control, that went into
periodic crises, and the competition among capitalist nations led repeatedly to wars. The
economy was now international, complex, and social; it was irrational to have it owned and control ed by individual capitalists or corporations. The ownership should now be social, to
match the reality. The system should be internationalized to match the reality that national
boundaries were only hampering progress and provoking wars.
Workers, drawn together by their common grievances, more and more exploited, would see
al this. They would see that what they thought was eternal, the rules of capitalism, the
ideas, the political forms, were temporary, had once come into existence, would one day
come to an end. They would see that the family had been distorted by capitalism and by
money and that women had been treated as instruments to produce children. They would
organize to change the system, would renounce national hatred and build a new
international, cooperative order. "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but
your chains."
The working class, the proletariat, would one day overthrow the capitalist system, and
organize a socialist society, which, after a transition period of "dictatorship of the
proletariat," would do away with the instruments of the state, the police, and the army.
There would be no class conflict requiring this force. Production would be organized
rational y, its products distributed according to people's needs. There would be no need to
work more than a few hours a day, and people would be free to live their lives as human
beings should. It would be the real beginning of human history. Everything that came
before was prelude.
This was the message of the Manifesto.
Years after I started reading the words of Marx, I came across the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts. He had written this five years before the Manifesto, when he was twenty-five and living in Paris and first developing his radical ideas. These manuscripts were never
published during his lifetime. When they final y appeared, in the 1930s, the Soviet Union
dismissed them as Marx's "immature" writings. In fact, the Manuscripts, as I read them, seemed to me among the most profound of Marx's writings.
In them, Marx discusses how labor, under capitalism, is "alienated," "estranged" from the laborer himself. That is, "the worker's activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self." Indeed, how many people work at what they real y want
to do? Some scientists, artists, some skil ed workers, some professionals. But most people
are not free to choose their line of work. Economic necessity forces them into it. So it is
"alienated labor."
Furthermore, most workers produce things or commodities for sale that they did not choose
to produce and that belong to someone else—the capitalist who employed them. Workers
are thus alienated from the product of their labor.
As they work under modern industrial conditions, the atmosphere is not of cooperation, but
competition, not association, but isolation. Workers are, therefore, alienated from one
another. And, brought together in cities and factories, they are alienated from nature.
217
Marx saw a communist society as changing al that. He wrote in the Manuscripts that communism is "the complete return of man to himself as a social being, a human being… .
This communism … equals humanism … . It is the genuine resolution of the conflict between
man and nature and between man and man."
(Marx's ideas on labor and capital are not outrageously radical. They are shared by many
people who are far from Marxism in many ways. For instance, in 1981, Pope John Paul II
issued a papal encyclical On Human Work, in which he said the Church believed in
ownership and private property, but that "Christian tradition has never upheld this right as
absolute and untouchable… . The right to private property is subordinated to the right to
common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.)"19
The ideas of Marx and Engels are profound in their analysis of modern society, inspiring in
their vision of a future, truly human way to live. The Soviet Union, the first revolution to
claim a Marxist heritage, has violated that vision, has given socialism a bad name, which it
does not deserve. Marxism became there an ideology, an orthodoxy of the left, a fixed
package of ideas. It was not subject to criticism. It would be interpreted by the experts of
the Party, as religious fundamentalists saw the Bible as interpreted by the experts of the
Church.
As I read Marx, I was struck by his essential humanism. He was misrepresented in the press
and in much of American culture as a theoretician of violence and dictatorship. But it
seemed clear to me that this was not true to Marx's writings. In one of his articles for the
New York Daily Tribune Marx criticized capital punishment:
Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system
that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a
lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?20
The Soviet Union, China, and other nations cal ing themselves "Marxist" and yet practicing capital punishment should be embarrassed by this statement.
If I can put in one word what has always infuriated me in any person, any group, any
movement, or any nation, it is: bul ying. This was the essence of fascism, the stormtroopers smashing the windows of Jewish storekeepers; in this country, police using their clubs on
people walking picket lines or peaceful y demonstrating; the bul ying by white racists of
black children going to school; abroad, the bul ying by powerful nations of weaker ones,
whether Italy invading Ethiopia, the Nazis invading Czechoslovakia, the United States
destroying Vietnam, or the Soviet Union smashing the Hungarian rebel ion.
When I recognized that quality in the Soviet state, I knew that the ideal of socialism had
been betrayed. The betrayal started early, with the victory of the Bolsheviks in the second
1917 Revolution. The Soviets, the local councils of soldiers, sailors, peasants, and workers,
in which such lively democratic discussions had taken place, were disbanded and replaced
by the ru
le of the Communist party.
While the tone of Lenin's book, State and Revolution, which appeared in 1917, was anti-
statist and libertarian, that same year Lenin, at the head of the new government, began the
centralization of power in the Communist party and the suppression of al opposition. The
revolution against tsarist Russia, for "peace, bread, and land," a genuine popular revolt involving masses of people, grassroots committees, and local Soviets, became transformed
into elitist rule.21
218
Maxim Gorky, the great Russian writer, had welcomed and supported the revolution against the tsar in March 1917. But when the Bolsheviks took power in November, Gorky almost
immediately saw that they were determined to wipe out any opposition and suppress any
criticism. He observed the imprisonment of a number of socialist leaders who disagreed with
the Bolsheviks.
Two months after the Bolsheviks took power, in January 1918, they dissolved the
Constituent Assembly, which had been elected by popular vote and which included
representatives from the various anti-tsarist parties. Gorky was indignant. He became
absolutely furious when workers who demonstrated peaceful y in Petrograd against the
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly were shot down in the streets by government
soldiers.
He wrote in the newspaper that he edited in Petrograd, Novaya Zhizn (New Life) that the
Constituent Assembly represented the century-long Russian dream of democracy. "Rivers of
blood have been spil ed on the sacrificial altar of this sacred idea, and now the 'People's
Commissars' have given orders to shoot the democracy which demonstrated in honor of this
idea." Gorky recal ed the failed 1905 Revolution:
On January 9, 1905, when the downtrodden, il -treated soldiers were firing
into unarmed and peaceful crowds of workers by order of the Tsarist regime,
intel ectuals and workers ran up to the soldiers—the unwil ing murderers—and
shouted point-blank in their faces: "What are you doing, damn you? Who are
you kil ing? Don't you see they are your brothers, they are unarmed, they
bear no malice toward you, they are going to the Tsar to beg his attention to
their needs… . Come to your senses, what are you doing, idiots!"22
Gorky likened this to the shooting that had just taken place in front of the Constituent
Assembly:
And just as on January 9, 1905, people who had not lost their conscience and
reason asked those who were shooting: "What are you doing, idiots? Aren't
they your own people marching? You see there are red banners everywhere,
and not a single poster hostile to the working class, not a single utterance
hostile to you!"
And—like the Tsarist soldiers—these murderers under orders answered:
"We've got our orders! We've got our orders to shoot."
(The scenes Gorky described seem like the ones that took place in Beijing, the capital of
Communist China, in June 1989, when government troops fired at peaceful demonstrators
for democracy, mostly students, kil ing hundreds of them, and bystanders cried out at
them: "We are your brothers! Why are you shooting?")
Around the same time, Gorky noted that of al the letters he received "the most interesting
are those written by women." He commented on "the psychophysiology of a woman":
As a being who incessantly replenishes the losses inflicted upon life by death
and destruction, she must feel both more deeply and more acutely than I, a
man, hatred and aversion for al that reinforces the work of death and
destruction.
Yes, Gorky said, this was idealism, but
219
I find that social idealism is most necessary precisely in an era of revolution…
. Without the participation of this idealism, a revolution—and al of life—would
turn into a dry, arithmetical problem of distributing material wealth, a
problem the solution of which demands blind cruelty and streams of blood, a
problem which, arousing savage instincts, kil s man's social spirit, as we shal
see in our time.23
Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (who was executed by the German police
after an abortive revolution in 1919) admired the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in 1917. But
she criticized the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly. She published a pamphlet, against
the advice of some of her comrades, who said it would play into the hands of counter-
revolutionaries. This has been the standard excuse given for the failure of revolutionaries to
honestly criticize what they see as evil in revolutionary movements: "It wil play into the
hands of… ." Luxemburg wrote,
Socialism, by its very nature, cannot be dictated, introduced by command… .
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and
assembly, without a free exchange of opinions, life dies out in every public
institution and only bureaucracy remains active.24
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, American anarchists who were deported from the
United States to their native Russia for opposing World War I, became observers of the
early years of the Bolshevik regime, from 1919 to 1921, and were soon disil usioned with
what they saw. The culmination of their despair at the betrayal of revolutionary ideals was
the shooting down of the sailors who revolted at Kronstadt, outside Leningrad, asking that
the revolution meet their needs. Trotsky and Lenin supervised the operation, and Goldman
and Berkman left the Soviet Union in disgust.
The extent of Stalin's crimes was final y admitted, three years after his death, when Nikita
Khrushchev shook the several thousand delegates to the Twentieth Congress of the
Communist party, by giving the bloody details of Stalin's murders of his own revolutionary
col eagues. In the Khrushchev era, some reforms took place in the Soviet Union. Censorship
of the foreign press stopped. Many political prisoners were set free. But repression
persisted, the atmosphere of the police state was stil evident. Dissident writers and
speakers were put in prison or given psychiatric examinations, pronounced psychotic, and
put into mental institutions. A news item from Moscow in late 1086:
Anatoly T. Marchenko, one of the best known Soviet political dissidents, has
died in prison, his wife learned here today. He was 48 years old.
Mr. Marchenko had spent more than 20 years of his life in prisons, labor
camps and internal exile. He died in the prison at Chistopol, in the Tatar
republic, while serving a 10-year term for "anti-Soviet agitation and
propaganda."25
A recognition of the terrible things that have happened in the Soviet Union should not lead
us—as it has done to certain ex-Communists—to rush from one pole of fanaticism to
another, to embrace the anticommunism of the U.S. government, to justify its wars, its
control over other countries, its buildup of a genocidal nuclear arsenal at the expense of the
American taxpayer, at the cost of poverty, sickness, and homelessness for tens of mil ions
of Americans.
220
It was precisely such a rush from one hysterical end of the spectrum to another that led some people, indignant at the cruelties of capitalism, the bul ying of smal countries by the
imperial powers, to adopt the Soviet Union uncritical y as the representative of social
ism, of
the future. My own refusal to adopt either Soviet socialism or American capitalism as
models of justice and freedom led me, while participating in the movements of the sixties,
to read more and more about the philosophy of anarchism.
Anarchists, I discovered, did not believe in anarchy as it is usual y denned—disorder,
disorganization, chaos, confusion, and everyone doing as they like. On the contrary, they
believed that society should be organized in a thousand different ways, that people had to
cooperate in work and in play, to create a good society. But, anarchists insisted, any
organization must avoid hierarchy and command from the top; it must be democratic,
consensual, reaching decisions through constant discussion and argument.
What attracted me to anarchism was its rejection of any bul ying authority—the authority of
the state, of the church, or of the employer. Anarchism believes that if we can create an
egalitarian society without extremes of poverty and wealth and join hands across al
national boundaries, we wil not need police forces, prisons, armies, or war, because the
underlying causes of these wil be gone.
Anarchists are ferocious critics of al governments, whether capitalist or "socialist." They believe governments natural y tend to authoritarianism and think that we can have a society
of self-governing, cooperative communities, linked together in ways that wil avoid a central
bureaucracy, yet get things done on a national and international scale.
This is, of course, a Utopian idea; it has existed nowhere, at least not for long. There have
been moments in history when something approaching true democracy existed. One of
those was the Paris Commune of 1871, when Parisians were involved in daily meetings,
discussing every subject under the sun, trying to come to conclusions without governmental
force.
Another such moment was the period of six months or so at the start of the Spanish Civil
War, when certain parts of Spain were in the hands of anarchist groups. One of those places
was Barcelona, where George Orwel , wounded in the Spanish war, visited in December
1936. He was astonished by what he saw:
When one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something
