A People's History of the United States is the work that opened my eyes to the horrific history of capitalism, and opened the door to socialist theory. Happy birthday, Howard.
Finally had enough time during covid to read A People's History. I had heard this was a must-read, but man -- I never thought I'd literally be brought to tears reading about the working class solidarity of fucking 11 year olds, organizing strikes at the very textile mills where their mothers also worked, and which were burning down with hundreds of people trapped inside. Or the solidarity of striking miners by the thousands taking up arms and fighting private corporate militias and federal troops who came to evict them from their homes because the miners dared to ask for better working conditions. Or peasant farmers who marched to their local jail to demand the release of their friends and neighbors, whose farms had been seized because they had no money to pay their debts.
There are so many dark moments in the book, but the stories of solidarity endlessly remind me of what fucking pussies we are today, how much harder I need to give to our movement, and how dignified our struggle is. Fuck imperialism, fuck the borgeious, fuck the insitutions. Solidarity forever.
Make no mistake, shit is fucked now, but for people to really be burning shit down, shit has to be really fucked. I was reading a little of Hammer and Hoe, and there I saw the first example I could think of where large numbers of Americans were turning to communism. These people, coincidentally, were working constantly but also like starving to death.
I had a based af English teacher in 10th grade that had us read A People's History. I was going through a libertarian phase before I read it and threw out my Ron Paul books half way through finishing it. It made me really think hard about how yes, the US government is fucking awful, but it wasn't so much that its just government was bad. It was who was running it and how evil capitalism and imperialism was that made me think smaller government would somehow fix the things I didn't like.
I was lucky to also have a good friend who was from Russia and actually talked about communism a lot. I didn't really have a strong opinion about communism or socialism like some people do when they're liberals. The red scare stuff died out already, and I had already understood systematic oppression in the US. The more I thought about the boot straps bullshit, the less sense it made just from my own experiences working at a young age. Pretty thankful for that book and my teacher. Maybe I would have figured it out anyways because I was so interested in history, but it helped me be less cringe at 15 so that was good lol
I read this as a lib teenager and somehow didn’t understand that it was anti-capitalist. I thought it was just anti-American. On every single page Zinn is like: “rich people bad, workers good.” But I still didn’t get it. Great book though.
