Howard Zinn 1996 - Beyond electoral politics - Toward Social Change

This talk by Howard Zinn author of "A People’s History of the U.S.” Titled “Beyond Electoral Politics: Toward Social Change;” the talk was presented at MIT in 1996. Zinn’ s thesis is essentially this – Voting has its place (he is quite cynical of the benefits of voting), but much more important is political organizing and activism. Mass movement and mass actions do much more to move society in a progressive direction than voting for the lesser of various evils in an election. Some of the newer political movement – such as the New Party – have their positive aspects, Zinn says, but political action is more important than elections.

Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist, is quoted as saying that women would gain equality “by Direct action,” not by voting. Zinn points out that the U.S. constitution and government has from the beginning represented the interests of the wealthy and powerful. In earlier years, for example, government protected merchants, slave owners, railroads and manufacturers, often to the detriment of the working class. Zinn outlines many movements which made progress through struggle in the streets – such as union and labor struggles, abolition of slavery, civil rights, women’s liberation and the anti-war movement.

Personal note: This is a great talk. Everything he mentions in this talk is a valid concern, and he paints his stories with such passion and wit that I get chills listening to this 24 years after I first did so. More to the point, I am a long time Zinn fan. I audited Zinn's class at Boston University in the mid 1980s. I was a complete devotee, but listening to this talk today in 2020, I am alarmed and confused. Sure he's a socialist, but much of this talk sounds libertarian. It is a bizarre mix. While the Framers weren't perfect people, he paints them as utter devils, and completely trashes the Constitution without providing alternatives either in his writing or his talks. He rails into the notion of big government, but that is such an odd cue for a communist or socialist, where government is everything. Most importantly, he seems to have no concept of Montesquieu and the enlightenment – notions which form the foundation of modern liberal democracies everywhere. Montesquieu's genius was to see not (as Zinn seems to assume) that humans are good, but instead to embrace greed, jealousy and selfishness as engines of government. So when Zinn rails at these characteristics in many politicos of the past one wonders how much he has studied the events and philosophy that led up to the Constitution, and formed its foundation.