Excerpted from an interview with the late Howard Zinn:
“Nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization — it is nothing wrong with idea of globalization — in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.
Ziga Vodovnik: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: “Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?
Howard Zinn: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.
Ziga Vodovnik: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means — with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.
Howard Zinn: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over — first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.
Ziga Vodovnik: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?
Howard Zinn: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.”
Nations are biological facts, not political constructs. To pretend that humans will not organize as nations is to pretend that a way of reproduction without genes will be put at use 😉
wow … strange that a biological construct did not exist until so late in human history …
Let us not confuse nations with states. A state is a political construct. A nation (Latin natio, to be born) is a biological fact. Humans are multi-cellulars, therefore their reproduction must be sexuated. Sexuated reproduction is the basis of all social behavior in animals, in the case of humans strongly reinforced by the need to raise infants during many years.
Animals and humans spread over a territory. The probability of a woman mating a given man first depends on distance between them. It follows that reproduction condensates in “islands” of beings, as the probability of a given person having both parents from the same “island” is (much) greater than from different “islands”.
Each “island” or “quasi-island” is a nation. Carl Sagan makes a beautiful description of the phenomenon at early times in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.
so, when the different tribes become the Iroquois Federation after the intervention of the “Peacemaker”, that’s a biological event, and somehome the ‘nation genes’ have awakened through a political event? Sorry, this is really gross reductionism … Yes, states and nations are different, and nations can exist without a state, but the state form is equally very old and nations are equally a historical development, strongly related to the state form in any case. Nations are a historical, social and political phenomenom (but of course rooted in the biological life of our species). If you know of any discovery of ‘nation genes’, I’d really be surprised.
Nations engender states and states condition the evolution of nations. Causality becomes circular, yet the root bio reality is there. I’m simply warning that it is there, not unlikely people who warn that there are physical restrictions to economic aims, so give me a try.
In a population closed wrt mating, genetic variety among individuals diminishes along time as the population adapts to environmental conditions. At the same time, its genetic content drifts wrt to other populations. Populations are not fully closed wrt to mating, therefore inter populations mating happens, although at a much lower rate than intra population mating. This state of affairs is very advantageous for the species as a whole – the set of all populations. Each population can be seen as a “probe” that explores a part of the genetic evolutionary space by genetic drift. Inter-population mating assures that “good genetic discoveries” of a population are spread through the species. Evolutionary potential and resilience are maintained as genetic diversity is in a sense maximized. That would not be the case if the species would be reduced to one only mating population with the relative restriction on genetic diversity.
Now, I did not intend to say that there are “nation’s genes”. I do intend to say that there are homogeneities in the variation of genes along individuals; that these homogeneities and their interplay are at the root of the phenomenon that we call “nations”; that both are crucial to human evolution in the long term as far as we know. And that they should not be ignored or dismissed as something old-fashioned to be crushed by economic globalization. And if they are, the results are not good, as with a more general concept of nation one can see in the EMU.
I’m not saying that states or nation-states are the best and terminal stage of socio-political evolution. States are “double-swords” for nations. Nor I’m saying that humanistic globalization is a bad thing. What I’m saying is humanistic globalization must depart from the recognizance of the reality of nations as interlinked genetic, social, cultural aggregates rather than reinforce the neoliberal idea of “national barriers” as obstacles to progressive evolution. Maybe one can generalize the peer to peer concept to nations: the species as a peer to peer relational space of nations.