I want to remember this.

This was Howard Zinn's answer to a question from David Barsamian. I tend to like Howard Zinn.

You're sometimes described as an anarchist and/or a democratic socialist. Are you comfortable with those terms? And what do they mean to you?

How comfortable I am with those terms depends on who's using them. I'm not uncomfortable when you use them. But if somebody is using them who I suspect does not really know what those terms mean, then I feel uncomfortable because I feel they need clarification. After all, the term anarchist to so many people means somebody who throws bombs, who commits terrorist acts, who believes in violence. Oddly enough, the term anarchist has always applied to individuals who have used violence, but not to governments that use violence. Since I do not believe in throwing bombs or terrorism or violence, I don't want that definition of anarchism to apply to me.

Anarchism is also misrepresented as being a society in which there is no organization, no responsibility, just a kind of chaos, again, not realizing the irony of a world that is very chaotic, but to which the word anarchism is not applied.

Anarchism to me means a society in which you have a democratic organization of society-decision making, the economy-and in which the authority of the capitalist is no longer there, the authority of the police and the courts and all of the instruments of control that we have in modern society, in which they do not operate to control the actions of people, and in which people have a say in their own destinies, in which they're not forced to choose between two political parties, neither of which represents their interests. So I see anarchism as meaning both political and economic democracy, in the best sense of the term.

I see socialism, which is another term that I would accept comfortably, as meaning not the police state of the Soviet Union. After all, the word socialism has been commandeered by too many people who, in my opinion, are not socialists but totalitarians. To me, socialism means a society that is egalitarian and in which the economy is geared to human needs instead of business profits.