If I had to choose a handful of books that made a particular impression, there would be André Breton’s L’amour fou, which I read in 1949, and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which I read in French on a train to Bolivia in the late 1950s, as well as his study of Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Curiously, when reading Moby Dick some fifteen years earlier I had been struck by the very same sentence from which James took his title. Melville and James are marked by the same refusal of injustice I mentioned earlier. I also found it in José María Arguedas, a Peruvian who wrote an extraordinary autobiographical novel called Los ríos profundos, and in the poetry of another Peruvian, César Vallejo. And of course it’s present in Frantz Fanon. I recall buying Les damnés de la terre in Rome, in a bookshop on the via Veneto on 4 December 1961—I remember the day exactly because I read the book in one sitting, and it made a big impact on me. I discovered Gramsci around the same time, during a stay in Italy. I also read the work of Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and the group around Quaderni rossi, and of course the writings of Rossana Rossanda, Pietro Ingrao and the leftist tendencies inside the Italian Communist Party.5 I became familiar with Subaltern Studies and the work of Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee in the late 1980s. I only really read Edward Thompson in the 1990s. His Making of the English Working Class and Customs in Common lay a lot of emphasis on the category of experience, which in my view is extremely important to Marxist thought.

Taken together, all of these works have in common a concern with the preoccupations of the people, based on the impulse to understand their world and what motivates them. The reasons why people rise up in revolution are not incidental, they are substantive. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky writes that the masses didn’t rise up because they were thinking of the future, but because what they were experiencing in the present was intolerable. Walter Benjamin expresses a similar thought in his theses on history. When Guha writes of the ‘autonomous domain’ of the subaltern, and of ways of conducting politics ‘below’ official politics, it comes from his experience as a communist militant in India. In a way, when I wrote on the Mexican Revolution I was concerned with the same phenomena of social life as in Guha’s work, though mine took a more elemental form. Many look at the support for Perón or Cárdenas and say they were Peronists, or Cardenistas. But the parties in question were just the epiphenomenal form taken by the desires of all these people. Parties often think they are the ones organizing and instructing the people on how to mobilize, but that’s not the case—they were the best institutional form for securing particular ends, and the impulse comes from elsewhere, from long years of suffering, from an intolerable reality.

That same year I also spent time in Italy. There I found the Trotskyists to be more focused on political questions—what line should be taken—rather than on the very real changes that had been taking place in the factories. Automation had brought about significant shifts in the labour process, and it seemed to me that there had also been a shift in the mode of domination, which needed to be understood in order to develop different forms of labour organization. When I was there, I witnessed the beginnings of the autonomia movement and workers’ councils. In my view these were similar to the internal commissions set up in factories in Argentina in the 1940s, and which had been misunderstood by much of the Left. The rebirth of these councils in many ways prepared the way for the hot autumn of 1969. The current that seemed to me closer to these preoccupations was the Quaderni rossi group, which developed the form of the ‘worker’s enquiry’. It struck me that the enquiries were focused on the same question that always interested me—what do these people want?

Of course, it was unjust that I was there at all, but the regime was almost like a monastery. It was good to be insulated from all the turbulence of political praxis—which deputy voted how, getting leaflets out, and so on. I had time to read a lot of literature, and read all of Capital again. As an experiment, I read the eleven or twelve volumes of the Marx–Engels correspondence chronologically, from cover to cover, in order to follow the course of the two men’s thought as they were writing to each other. I read Hegel, and reread Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. In a sense, prison also saved my life: one of the Mexican police agents who beat me once or twice told me I should be thankful, since the Guatemalans were ‘real sons of bitches’; and it’s true that all my comrades there were killed by the Guatemalan security services.

I think one has to draw a distinction between the established left parties and the broader Left. The PRD, after all, is at best an anti-neo-liberal nationalist party which originated in the PRI, whereas La Jornada is fed by a much broader left culture. But at present, in Mexico as elsewhere, the space for a classical revolutionary organization of the Left, along twentieth-century lines, is small or non-existent. This is because of the form that capitalism takes today, rather than being the fault of any particular individuals. The place formerly occupied by unions, workers’ and peasants’ organizations and their political reflections has shrunk, and politics has become the exclusive domain of capital and its negotiators. Yet the masters of the world are having to pay a price for this: an expansion of the space occupied by rage and fury. In Mexico, the anger has grown as a result of a series of disasters in the past twenty years: the electoral fraud of 1988; the assassinations of hundreds of PRD activists under Salinas; the violation of the San Andrés Accords by the Zedillo government; the new electoral fraud in 2006; the repression in Oaxaca and Atenco; not to mention the stream of deaths in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere—there are now scores of people being killed every day on the streets, many of them tortured before being killed.

This is the theoretical aim of your present work. But why exactly the choice of Flaubert?

Because he is the imaginary. With him, I am at the border, the barrier of dreams.

Reading Flaubert one is plunged into persons with whom one is in complete disaccord, who are irksome. Sometimes one feels with them, and then somehow they suddenly reject one’s sympathy and one finds oneself once again antagonistic to them. Obviously it was this that fascinated me, because it made me curious. This is precisely Flaubert’s art. It is clear that he detested himself, and when he speaks of his principal characters, he has a terrible attitude of sadism and masochism towards them: he tortures them because they are himself, and also to show that other people and the world torture him. He also tortures them because they are not him and he is anyway vicious and sadistic and wants to torture others. His unfortunate characters have very little luck, submitted to all this.

Yes, because plays are something else again. For me the theatre is essentially a myth. Take the example of a petty bourgeois and his wife who quarrel with each other the whole time. If you tape their disputes, you will record not only the two of them, but the petty bourgeoisie and its world, what society has made of it, and so on. Two or three such studies and any possible novel on the life of a petty-bourgeois couple would be outclassed. By contrast, the relationship between man and woman as we see it in Strindberg’s Dance of Death will never be outclassed. The subject is the same, but taken to the level of myth. The playwright presents to men the eidos of their daily existence: their own life in such a way that they see it as if externally. This was the genius of Brecht, indeed. Brecht would have protested violently if anyone said to him that his plays were myths. Yet what else is Mother Courage—an anti-myth that despite itself becomes a myth?

Is a positive revolutionary culture conceivable today? For me, this is the most difficult problem posed by your question. My frank opinion is that everything within bourgeois culture that will be surpassed by a revolutionary culture will nevertheless ultimately also be preserved by it. I do not believe that a revolutionary culture will forget Rimbaud, Baudelaire or Flaubert, merely because they were very bourgeois and not exactly friends of the people. They will have their place in any future socialist culture, but it will be a new place determined by new needs and relations. They will not be great principal values, but they will be part of a tradition reassessed by a different praxis and a different culture.

So this means taking a second alternative. We aim to try and keep control over the laboratories but to try and control also what kind of research is done in them. Of course, this is difficult, because there are limited funds for anything except military research. It brings the problem of establishing a student–worker alliance to the forefront too. As things stand now, the workers in the laboratories—scientists, technicians, unskilled workers—are terrified of the idea that war research might stop. In fact, when we started picketing, the union there, whose members are mostly machinists and so forth, entered a suit to prevent MIT from dropping war research. You can see the logic behind their action. They do not see any alternatives to war research and development within the New England economy.

We have somehow to get people to see that there are other things technology could be used for, that there is no good reason why the public subsidy they are living on should be used simply for purposes of destruction. We have to keep the issue alive and open. We have to try and reconvert the laboratories. We have to try and build up social and political pressures for a socially useful technology. It means making ideas that sound Utopian at first seem real and possible. It is a big order and we do not expect to do it in a short time.

For instance, in your work in linguistics, you use concepts like ‘freedom’, ‘spontaneity’, creativity’, ‘innovation’ and so on. Is that connected in any way with your political views? Or is it just accidental?

A little of each. It is accidental in that the way these concepts arise in the study of language and the theses they sustain are appropriate or inappropriate, true or false, quite independently of politics. In that sense, it is independent. And similarly, in my opinion, a Marxist-anarchist perspective is justified quite apart from anything that may happen in linguistics. So that in that sense they are logically independent. But I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone’s political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs. Now my own feeling is that the fundamental human capacity is the capacity and the need for creative self-expression, for free control of all aspects of one’s life and thought. One particularly crucial realization of this capacity is the creative use of language as a free instrument of thought and expression. Now having this view of human nature and human needs, one tries to think about the modes of social organization that would permit the freest and fullest development of the individual, of each individual’s potentialities in whatever direction they might take, that would permit him to be fully human in the sense of having the greatest possible scope for his freedom and initiative. Moving along in this direction, one might actually develop a social science in which a concept of social organization is related to a concept of human nature which is empirically well founded and which in some fashion leads even to value judgements about what form society should take, how it should change and how it should be reconstructed. I want to emphasize again that fundamentally the two are logically independent, but one can draw a sort of loose connection. This connection has been made occasionally. Von Humboldt, for example, who interests me particularly, combined a deep interest in human creativity and the creative aspect of language with what were, in the context of his time, libertarian politics.6