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"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" -

Preamble:
--Zinn filled in for that History 12 class taught by that one critical high school teacher which sadly I did not attend because I was duped into 3 blocks of marketing/entrepreneurship. True story. This history teacher had a running argument with the marketing teacher regarding the need to teach (in the marketing classes) how goods were sourced and their labor practices. That did not happen.
--Later, I stumbled across Zinn in the library, shortly after being introduced to Chomsky (and self-directed learning). Not an uncommon introduction to American radicalism. And here I am revisiting a decade later�

The Brilliant:
--It turns out my self-directed teachers were pretty bad-ass. “History� ranges from the mind-numbing litany of dates and names, to the dynamic ebbs and flows of struggle and possibilities.
--Furthermore, history is a manifestation of our social imagination; it acts as our footing and serves as a guiding light for how we build our present and future. Thus, it is a source of power for social control mostly written and disseminated by victors; if we cannot imagine change, how can we act on it?
--Zinn’s �People’s History� disrupts the social control narratives of history by starting from the bottom up, applying class analysis and emphasizing the political nature of recounting history (i.e. which “facts� are important and how should they be framed).
--Several points on the book’s conclusion:
1) I was reminded how Zinn missed the Occupy Movement by under 2 years. Had he lived, he could have seen the 99% slogan that he finished this book with spread in the cities he lectured in and beyond.
2) Powerful characterization of the middle class/academics as guards, and working/poor as prisoners, stuck in a system that rules by divide-and-conquer.
3) “Absentee authority�. What a great phrase.

The Good:
--“History� of this type is tricky. Historical details are useful for small case studies. For grand narratives, I tend to prefer political economy that really dives into the different layers and interactions between sociopolitical power and socioeconomic structures. But this method cannot possibly cover all the pieces of history that Zinn sets out to do here, so Zinn remains more on the surface resulting in an accessible (critical) History 101 book. Examples of in-dept political economy syntheses:
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (yes, "A People's History", there's a connection with Zinn)
-And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

--I wanted to revisit Zinn’s perspectives on several topics in particular; only one did I get surprising findings:
1) Labor power during Great Depression/New Deal era:
-Going in, I was conflicted over this view of Yanis Varoufakis�: responding to the assertion that FDR was forced into the New Deal compromises by a well-organized labor movement, Varoufakis contends that labor’s bargaining power had vanished when the Great Depression hit, with the working class then lining up willing to do anything for employment.
-So, Zinn's Ch.15 “Self-Help in Hard Times� adds an interesting twist, and ended up reading like the heart of his book. Zinn portrays the significance of sitdown strikes during this time, driven by the rank-and-file against union leadership. Zinn further contends that the labor movement won most from rank-and-file spontaneous disruptions instead of through the organization of unions which was easier for State Capitalism to absorb into reformism. So much to unpack here� How much I would love to hear Varoufakis, Zinn, and global south communist Vijay Prashad discuss this together�

--These other topics were good intros, but need to look elsewhere for more depth:
2) Labor history during late-19th century: booms, busts, strikes� this is where political economy synthesis can really add shape to the events.
3) Capitalist crises' relationship with wars: good hints�
4) Race/“whiteness� as divide-and-conquer for settler colonialism/slave trade: hoping Gerald Horne can go more in-depth�

The Missing:
--I’m much faster recycling through old favorites than new reads, but I seriously need to get a move on all the global south perspectives I want to explore. Up next:
-favorite author Vijay Prashad’s sequel: The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
-A Theory of Imperialism
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital