|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mixedmedia
Perhaps what host is getting at, is that an individual's honesty is perfunctory when they are benefitting from a system that is corrupt.
maybe...
|
I'm throwing the following out here for consideration.... inequity in the distribution of wealth and power (IMO, it's hard to differentiate between the two) is "accepted", and I don't think that the acceptance in the US is a natural condition. I suspect that it doesn't just happen to be that way, and it is intended that objection to the inequity....like mine, triggers a designed response that is not authored by those who express it. The response is designed to place the objector, "on the fringe"....a label for this is "oh!! he is on the "extreme left"!
Here goes....:
Quote:
http://www.caledonia.org.uk/hegemony.htm
Hegemony. This is the term used by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to describe how the domination of one class over others is achieved by a combination of political and ideological means. Although political force - coercion - is always important, the role of ideology in winning the consent of dominated classes may be even more significant. The balance between coercion and consent will vary from society to society, the latter being more important in capitalist societies.
For Gramsci, the state was the chief instrument of coercive force, the winning of consent being achieved by the institutions of civil society eg the family, the Church and the Trade Unions. Hence the more prominent is civil society, the more likely it is that hegemony will be achieved by ideological means.
Hegemony is unlikely ever to be complete. In contemporary capitalist societies, for example, <h3>the working class has a dual consciousness</h3>, partly determined by the ideology of the capitalist class and partly revolutionary, determined by their experience of capitalist society. For capitalist society to be overthrown, workers must first establish their own ideological supremacy derived from their revolutionary consciousness.
[The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (1988)]
["If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves."
[Howard Zinn, historian and author]
....In political thought the term is now as often used in the sense given to it by Gramsci, in which <h3>it denotes the ascendancy of a class, not only in the economic sphere, but through all social, political and ideological spheres, and its ability thereby to persuade other classes to see the world in terms favorable to its own ascendancy.</h3>
Gramsci advocated the construction of a rival hegemony, through the infiltration and transformation of those small-scale institutions by which class ascendancy, once achieved, is sustained. ....
...Drawing on writers such as Machiavelli and Pareto, Gramsci argues that a politically dominant class maintains its position not simply by force, or the threat of force, but also by consent. That is achieved by making compromises with various other social and political forces which are welded together and consent to a certain social order under the intellectual and moral leadership of the dominant class. This hegemony is produced and reproduced through a network of institutions, social relations, and ideas which are outside the direct political sphere.
Gramsci especially emphasized the role of intellectuals in the creation of hegemony. The result is one of the most important, if elusive, concepts in contemporary social theory.....
|
The question....
Quote:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=385
Spring 2004 »
Howard Zinn's History Lessons
By Michael Kazin
....But Zinn's big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence. A People's History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: <h3>why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy</h3> of the capitalist republic in which they live?.....
|
...an answer:
Quote:
http://www.sevenoaksmag.com/commentary/06_zinn.html
The importance of Howard Zinn
March 29, 2004
Dale McCartney
....There is an irony in a professional association of historians inviting a speaker who has spent a significant portion of his career hectoring other professional historians for their failure to engage with politics in any meaningful manner. Regardless of the irony, the topic is a perfect choice for such a speaker.......
....Not only has Zinn established himself as a legend because of his activism among historians, he is the author of the bible of radical American history - A People's History of the United States . A People's History has occasioned considerable comment ever since its publication in 1980, and with his appearance in Boston this weekend, a new collection of critiques has appeared.
The most prominent of these recent reviews was published in the online winter 2004 edition of Dissent magazine (www.dissentmagazine.org). Michael Kazin, himself a prominent labour historian, lashes out at Zinn and his masterwork, deriding it as "bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions." Kazin reads Zinn's work as "better suited to a conspiracy-monger's website than a work of scholarship." His complaints come fast and furious, but they seem to boil down to one complaint formulated in two different ways. Kazin finds Zinn's work reductionist - that is, he complains that Zinn oversimplifies American history both politically and historically. <h3>A People's History , in Kazin's view, is a "painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed."</h3> For Kazin, this sort of narrative fails to account for the historical uniqueness of figures like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, and doesn't do justice to the differing motivations of activists and rebels of the past. <h3>Kazin's head-shaking goes so far that he laments the book's enormous sales, suggesting that it has contributed to keeping "the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life."</h3>
Kazin's review itself oversimplifies the issue, as a careful reading of Zinn's work reveals that he offers a considerably nuanced vision of his subjects. Importantly, and this is the reason for Zinn's success, his subjects are the "ordinary folks," and not the Washingtons and Jeffersons of American history. Zinn's work is not academic history, although Zinn clearly has the breadth of knowledge only possible through a life of study. Instead, the book is a chronicle of ordinary folks, for ordinary folks. Kazin is right to suggest that Zinn has written a political document, as well as an historical one - where he's wrong is in assuming that these are not compatible. Kazin calls the book a polemic, and it's an accurate description. Zinn is not neglecting a more objective perspective on American history; he's rejecting it in favor of an openly political stance that reclaims the history of oppressed peoples, regardless of race or gender. His popularity is testament to both the appeal of such a reading of American history, and the desperate thirst of working class people, people of colour, women and the many other victims of modern society's ravages for a history in which they are at the centre. I would go so far as to argue that not only has Kazin underestimated the importance of this role for Zinn's book, but that the academic tradition of objectivity (read: liberalism that favors white men) has played a key role in marginalizing oppressed peoples and derailing social movements. Zinn's work is an important corrective to this destructive tradition in historical writing.
....In my own experience, the film has been enormously successful. In two summers working at a military museum on Vancouver Island , I learned that the Great Escape was a historical marker for many of our visitors. When, in my first summer there, a prisoner in the camp who had worked on building the tunnels donated his illustrated diary from the time to the museum, it became clear to me how truly significant the film was. It stood in as the primary way in which many people 'remembered' the war. People who had long forgotten the significance of the names Dieppe and Juno remembered details from the escape. The film was a powerful tool for us at the museum, because it was a great way to make the history we were trying to present immediately accessible.
Some historians, undoubtedly Kazin included, would find the power of the film, and Zinn's book, coupled with their inaccurate or political recounting of history, troubling. History has a powerful role in shaping society, though, and is more than a hunt for truth. This is not to say that history based on lies is of any value - but there is power in constructing narratives that celebrate themes of heroism or rebellion, especially when these are constructed so as to privilege the perspectives of rebels, resistors and those traditionally oppressed. Contrary to Kazin's suggestion, this sort of engagement, which Howard Zinn's body of work unflinchingly embraces, <h3>will not marginalize the Left. Instead, it provides the Left with a history that can be used both to understand past resistance and inspire future activism.</h3>
|
To sum it up, the popularity of Zinn and his book owes itself to this, from Gramsci:
Quote:
|
...the working class has a dual consciousness...
|
It needs to be brought out, even as the corporate media works against it's duality. The reception to Zinn's work indicates that that has not yet been accomplished. The resistance to my posted objection to inequity is stronger than I would expect, given the depth of the inequity, and so are the number of votes for republican candidates.
Last edited by host; 04-16-2008 at 12:26 AM..
|