Howard Zinn on Democratic Education (Series in Critical Narrative) by Howard Zinn & Donaldo Macedo

Author:Howard Zinn & Donaldo Macedo [Zinn, Howard & Macedo, Donaldo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317264446
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-01-07T18:30:00+00:00

6

GREY MATTERS INTERVIEWS HOWARD ZINN

GREY MATTERS: I’d like to start with a question about left intellectuals in general. In a news magazine in Quebec called L’Actualité, there’s a seven-page piece about Quebec’s Marxists–Leninists of the 1970s. The journalist interviewed many of them who are now between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five and who are journalists, professors, union activists, doctors, community organizers, entrepreneurs, politicians, etc. A lot of the people who were interviewed refused to have their names published for fear of being fired or recognized. Yet, these people wanted to change the world. In the past, left intellectuals have supported the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot in Cambodia because they were communists, or the Viet Cong in Vietnam because they were fighting American imperialism or promoting the communist regimes in Albania or China. One of the people interviewed in the article goes on to say that back then, the Left in North America had models (China, Albania). These models don’t exist anymore. What models would you be supporting today?

ZINN: Let me first say that unless you define the Left in the United States as a very narrow group, it’s fair to say that most of the people on the left have not supported Marxist bureaucracies and dictatorships around the world. That stopped really in the 1950s. It stopped with the exposé of Stalin. There was a brief period of illusion about Communist China. I think there was a falling away from that too. If you define the Left more broadly, as people who believe in both socialism and democracy, I think you’ll find only a small number of people on the left who supported leaders of other countries who styled themselves Marxists but who really created bureaucratic and often brutal dictatorships. So I think it’s important to make a distinction between that small number who supported left dictatorships just because they call themselves Marxists. And I think the vast majority of people on the left really repudiated Stalinism and looked toward socialism and a new world order that would be democratic and international in scope. And there’s no one country in the world that leftists today, defining leftists as broadly as I did, that is looked upon as a model. I think it’s fair to say that people on the left in general will find pieces of a model in this country or that country or another country but will not find in any one country an ideal society. Speaking for myself, I can see that in some of the Scandinavian countries, for instance, or in New Zealand there are many socialist features that take care of old people and children and women that go far beyond how they are taken care of in a capitalist society like the United States. I mean, those are models that could be considered part of a new social system. But I think we have yet to find a place in the world that has really combined socialism and democracy in an admirable way.

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