by
Noam Chomsky
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There are plenty of things wrong with the government. But what’s harmful to people about the government is that it’s a reflection of something else. And that other thing you don’t see. Why don’t you see that other thing? Because it’s been made invisible. [...]
There’s a reason why attention is focused on the government as the source of problems. It has a defect. It’s potentially democratic. Private corporations are not potentially democratic. The propaganda system does not want to get people to think, The government is something we can take over and we can use as our instrument of public power. They don’t want people to think that. And since you can’t think that, you get what’s called populism, but is not populism at all. It’s not the kind of populism that says, Fine, let’s take over the government and use it as an instrument to undermine and destroy private power, which has no right to exist. Nobody is saying that. [...]
hmm good point. corporations are instantiated as insulated from democracy by definition so we're less likely to contest their nature. brilliant way to let undemocratic institutions grow
[...] Caterpillar, the U.S.-based one, first of all has profits coming out of its ears. It’s making huge profits, like other major corporations, so it’s got plenty of capital. There’s no problem that way. But furthermore, they’ve been using their profits over the past years to build up excess capacity in other countries. For example, they have plants in Brazil where they can get much cheaper labor and they can keep filling their international orders. Notice that that’s not done for reasons of economic efficiency. Quite the contrary. It’s done for power reasons. You don’t build up excess capacity for economic efficiency, but you do build it up for power reasons, as a threat against the domestic work force. [...]
[...] there has not in history ever been any answer other than, Get to work on it.
There are a thousand different ways of getting to work on it. For one thing, there’s no “it.” There’s lots of different things. You can think of long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that’s what you’re focused on, you’re going to have to take steps towards them. The steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment’s in serious danger. There’s no one thing that’s the right thing to do. It depends on what your interests are and what’s going on and what the problems are and so on. And you have to deal with them. There’s very little that anybody can do about these things alone. Occasionally somebody can, but it’s marginal. Mainly you work with other people to try to develop ideas and learn more about it and figure out appropriate tactics for the situation in question and deal with them and try to develop more support. That’s the way everything happens, whether it’s small changes or huge changes.
If there is a magic answer, I don’t know it. But it sounds to me as if the tone of the questions and part of the disparity between listening and acting suggests—I’m sure this is unfair—Tell me something that’s going to work pretty soon or else I’m not going to bother, because I’ve got other things to do. Nothing is going to work pretty soon, at least if it’s worth doing, nor has that ever been the case.
[...] your goals and your visions are often in direct conflict. Visions are long-term things, what you’d like to achieve down the road. But if we mean by goals that which we’re trying to do tomorrow, they can often appear to be in conflict with long-term visions. It’s not really a conflict. I think we’re in such a case right now. In the long term I think the centralized political power ought to be eliminated and dissolved and turned down ultimately to the local level, finally, with federalism and associations and so on. Sure, in the long term that’s my vision. On the other hand, right now I’d like to strengthen the federal government. The reason is, we live in this world, not some other world. And in this world there happen to be huge concentrations of private power which are as close to tyranny and as close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised, and they have extraordinary power. They are unaccountable to the public. There’s only one way of defending rights that have been attained or extending their scope in the face of these private powers, and that’s to maintain the one form of illegitimate power that happens to be somewhat responsive to the public and which the public can indeed influence. So you end up supporting centralized state power even though you oppose it. People who think there is a contradiction in that just aren’t thinking very clearly.
from an address to an anarchist conference.
reminds me of my anti-figurative politics idea
[...] the classical liberals, the Jeffersons and the Smiths, were opposing the concentrations of power that they saw around them, like the feudal system and the Church and royalty. They thought that ought to be dissolved. They didn’t see other forms of concentration of power which only developed later. When they did see them, they didn’t like them. Jefferson was a good example. He was strongly opposed to the concentrations of power that he saw developing, and warned that the banking institutions and the industrial corporations which were barely coming into existence in his day would destroy the achievements of the Revolution. [...]
[...] He said, I’d better give these guys a decent wage or nobody’s going to buy my cars. So he raised workers’ salaries beyond what he was forced to by market pressures. And others went along. That was on the reasoning that you just outlined, and it made sort of sense in a national economy.
Does it make sense in an international economy? Does it make sense in an international economy where you can shift production to the poorest and most deprived and most depressed regions where you have security forces keeping people under control and you don’t have to worry about environmental conditions and you have plenty of women pouring off the farms to work under impossible conditions and get burnt to death in factory fires and die from overwork and somebody else replaces them and that production is then integrated through the global system so that value is added where you have skilled workers and maybe pay a little more but you don’t have many of them? Finally it’s sold to the rich people in all the societies. Even the poorest Third World country has a very rich elite. As you take this kind of structural Third World model and transfer it over to the rich countries—it’s a structural model, it’s not in absolute terms—they have a sector of consumers that’s not trivial. Even if there’s plenty of superfluous people and huge numbers in jail and a lot of people suffering or even starving. So the question is, Can that work? As a technical question, nobody really knows the answer. And it doesn’t make any difference anyway. We shouldn’t even be allowing ourselves to ask it. The point is that whether it could work or not, it’s a total monstrosity. Fascism works, too. In fact, it worked rather well from an economic point of view. It was quite successful. That doesn’t mean it’s not a monstrosity. So there is the technical question, Will it work? To that nobody knows the answer. But there’s also a human question of whether we should even ask, and the answer to that is, Of course not. That’s not the CEO’s question, but it should be everybody else’s.
referring to the Fordist model of paying your workers enough so they can afford your products
[...] Although one should be very careful about the word “reform.” We don’t call what Hitler did reform. Reform has a nice feel about it. It’s supposed to make things better. So we should never use the word. We should talk about changes. The same with “promise.” Every article you read in the paper says, You may or may not like what the Republicans are doing, but they’re fulfilling their promise to the American people. If I say I’m going to beat you to a pulp, and I do it, that’s not a promise. I didn’t promise to do it. I threatened to do it. So what they ought to say is, The Republicans are keeping their threat to the American people. Especially when we know how the American people feel about it. These are not reforms, any more than we’d say Stalin and Hitler instituted reforms. These are changes. You can like them or dislike them, but they’re not reforms.
One of my daughters teaches in a state college in which the aspirations of most of the students are to become a nurse or a policeman. The first day of class (she teaches history) she usually asks her students to identify their class background. And it turns out there are two answers. Either they’re middle class, or they’re [part of the] underclass. If their father has a job, like as a janitor, they’re middle class. If their father is in jail or transient, then it’s underclass. That’s it. Nobody’s working class. It’s just not a concept that exists. It’s not just here—it’s true in England too. I was in England a couple of months ago at the time of the Cannes Festival, when Michael Moore won, and one of the papers had a long interview with him, and the interviewer was suggesting that Michael Moore wasn’t telling the truth when he said he came from a working-class background. He said he came from a working-class background, but his father had a car and owned a house, so, you know, what’s this crap about coming from a working-class background? Well, his father was an auto worker! I mean, the whole concept of class in any meaningful sense has just been driven out of people’s heads. The fact that there are some people who give the orders and others who follow them—that is gone. And the only question is, How many goods do you have?—as if, if you have goods, you have to be middle class, even if you’re just following orders.
People are trained—and massive efforts go into this—people are trained to perceive their identity and their aspirations and their value as people in terms of the things they amass. Nothing else. And in terms of yourself, not anyone else.… It’s kind of interesting to watch this campaign against Social Security going on, and to see the attitudes. I see it even among students. And the reason certain people hate Social Security so much is not just that if you privatize it, it’s a bonanza for Wall Street. I’m sure that’s part of it, but the main reason for the real visceral hatred of Social Security is that it’s based on a principle that they want to drive out of people’s heads—namely, that you care about somebody else. You know, Social Security is based on the idea that you care whether the disabled widow on the other side of town has enough food to eat. And you’re not supposed to think that. That’s a dangerous sentiment. You’re supposed to just be out for yourself. And I get this from young people now. They say, Look, I don’t see why I should be responsible for her. I’m not responsible for her. I didn’t do anything to her. I mean, if she didn’t invest properly or, you know, something like that, that’s not my business. Why do I have to pay my taxes to keep her alive? And why do I care if the kid down the street can’t go to school? I mean, I didn’t keep him from going to school.
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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.
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