5 out of 5 stars!   The People Speak, Kinda 2010-08-10

Let's be clear from the outset, the late Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, narrator and guiding light of the film documentary under review, The People Speak and I were leftist political opponents. I, from the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky -influenced, anti-Stalinist branch of modern Marxism, and he, well, I am not altogether sure what branch but, mainly, some form of anarchism. Although we could share common fights, and did, around anti-war, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and other such perspectives, at the end of the day, we parted company on the strategic, and more importantly, the organizational means to create and order that alternative society that we both, desperately, sought and found passionately necessary to replace the madness of the American imperial state. That said, I nevertheless wrote, around the time of his death earlier this year, an appreciation of his work, especially of his written work, A People's History Of The United States, which forms the basis for this visual and oral companion to that effort. I am reposting that appreciation below for it contains the main positive points about that important work. I will make additional comments below: Howard Zinn's A People's History Of The United States I have remarked elsewhere on the poverty of information about the `making and doing' of the non-ruling classes, their social concerns, and their hopes and aspirations in America in my own high school history classes in the early 1960s. Such locally important events as the creation of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment (led by Robert Gould Shaw) during the American Civil War and the case of the executed anarchist martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, never got onto the radar. This despite the fact that I passed, at one point, the Saint-Gaudens memorial plague to the 54th in front of the State House 54th almost every day and grew up within a stone's throw of where the major events in the Sacco and Vanzetti case took place. All that I know, or almost all that I know, about the micro-history of the American experience (and internationally, as well) came from painfully digging out the information from many scattered sources during my younger political days. A lot of good things happened as a result of the social struggles in the 1960s, or at least well-intended things that we can proudly stand on, and the dramatically increased interest in getting the people's story out was one of them. And that is where one of the best examples, the late Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, and his book under review, A People's History Of The United States comes in. In addition to his up-front radical political activist perspective on the political issues of the day Professor Zinn wrote a number of books, and many articles, about various aspects of the American experience that had been ignored or neglected by those earlier historians who concentrated on the movements of ruling elites, their predilections and their follies or on great events, minus the under classes that bore the brunt of, or carried out, those policies. The most important, of course, is A People's History. Under one roof, and in one place Professor Zinn's A People's History can act as a primer for those who are interested in the underside of history, and, like Zinn, doing something about it. Of course there is more investigation to do, but that is why I used that word primer. Professor Zinn and I were mainly political opponents within the left. However every young reader, every young searcher for the meaning of the American experience, and every just plain thoughtful budding historian owe the professor a debt of gratitude. Hats off to Professor Zinn. This documentary takes the same tack, as various artists and musicians from Danny Glover to Bruce Springsteen, re-enact important speeches, memoir passages, songs and poems from the works of the voiceless in previous histories: slavery and Jim Crow Blacks, anti-imperialist fighters, old and new, women's suffragettes and modern women's liberation fighters, Native Americans of all conditions and tribes, Japanese internment victims, Hispanics, and generation after generation of workers of every color and nationality. And, at least passing glances at various political movements like the early socialists and IWW- style anarchists. But this is where the kinda in the headline to this entry comes in. In almost two hours the word communist, American Communist Party, Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist, New Left communist (an important component as the 1960s drifted on) or anything associated with those words were never uttered. Oh, as in the real American protest experience that communists participated in (and, more often than not led) for a good part of the 20th century they are there, camouflaged. For example, Dalton Trumbo and his excellent anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun. One would never know that he was a leading Communist Party literary supporter and one of the Hollywood Ten victims of the post World War II, Cold War, night of the long knives' red scare. Or that Genora Dollinger, who was one of the leading figures in the Flint auto sit-down strikes and whose memoir was given heavy play here, was a supporter of the Trotskyist branch of communism. Or that many of those anti-eviction parties in the 1930s highlighted here were organized by reds. Or that the unemployed were organized by reds. Or that those great workers strikes of the 1930s that created the modern American organized labor movement had reds under every bed. And so on. Professor Zinn and the producers of this effort are under no obligation to identify known communists in what is after all their own amorous propaganda production, worthy as the overall project is as an educational if not organizational tool. But this is where we come back to political differences. No, more than political differences, political honesty. And that is where the name Leon Trotsky and those who have tried to learn sometime from his struggles comes into the picture. There was a blood line drawn between him and the Stalinists who hunted him down and tried to obliterate him from the history of the Russian revolution. He wrote an important book, among other such writings, entitled The Stalinist School Of Falsification in an effort to write himself and others back into that history. Now I have had no truck for a long time with Stalinists, and their distortions in the Marxist movement. But those Stalinists, organized as the American Communist Party (and in other organizations) formed a part, and important part, of the people's history, warts an all, in the 20th century. They should be written back into that history. So you see the ghost of Professor Zinn and I still have our political differences.
          -- Alfred Johnson boston, ma

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