May 4, 2012 |
Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy
movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention
movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy
Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. His new book,
Occupy, published in the
Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by
Zuccotti Park Press brings
together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign
policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.
From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the
emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous,
cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the
movement’s political impact.
We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to
economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility –
in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a
different way of living.
We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.
LF: Let’s start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we’re in, historically?
NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation.
One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it.
The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into
stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global
stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US,
it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a
shift — a striking shift — from production to financialization.
The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe
it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a
disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s
essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid
of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what
happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the
drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe
more or course;) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story.
There seems to me no easy way out of this….
LF: And politically…?
NC: Again there are differences. In Europe there’s an dangerous
growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who
remembers the history of Europe… and an attack on the remnants of the
welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-
recession
policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. In fact,
some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of
the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in
which he said the social contract’s dead; we finally got rid of it.
In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally
shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private
concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly
over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas. It was
understood by the ad industry in 2008 -- they gave Barack Obama their
marketing award of the year. This year it’s barely a pretense.
The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a
traditional political party. It’s in lockstep obedience to the very
rich, the super rich and the corporate sector. They can’t get votes that
way so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It’s always been
there, but it’s rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the
religious right, but basically it’s the extreme religious population.
The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It’s been increasing
since 1980 but now it’s a major part of the voting base of the
Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions,
opposing women’s rights… The US is a country [in which] eighty percent
of the population thinks the Bible was written by god. About half think
every word is literally true. So it’s had to appeal to that – and to the
nativist population, the people that are frightened, have always been…
It’s a very frightened country and that’s increasing now with the
recognition that the white population is going to be a minority pretty
soon, “they’ve taken our country from us.” That’s the Republicans. There
are no more moderate Republicans. They are now the centrist Democrats.
Of course the Democrats are drifting to the Right right after them. The
Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That
would require a commitment to economic issues and that’s not their
concern.
LF: You describe Occupy as the first organized response to a thirty-year class war….
NC: It’s a class war, and a war on young people too… that’s why
tuition is rising so rapidly. There’s no real economic reason for that.
It’s a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the
first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.
LF: Are comparisons to Arab Spring useful?
NC: One point of similarity is they’re both responses to the toll
taken by the neo lib programs. They have a different effect in a poor
country like Egypt than a rich country like the US. But structurally
somewhat similar. In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant
statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind
of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary
Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only
problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in
the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated,
subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a
huge amount of corruption.
We have a structural analogue here – in fact the same is true in
South America – some of the most dramatic events of the last decade
(and we saw it again in Cartagena a couple of weeks ago) Latin America
is turning towards independence for the first time in five hundred
years. That’s not small. And the Arab Spring was beginning to follow it.
There’s a counterrevolution in the Middle East/North Africa (MENAC)
countries beating it back, but there were advances. In South America
[there were] substantial ones and that’s happening in the Arab Spring
and it has a contagious effect – it stimulated the Occupy movement and
there are interactions.
LF.
In the media, there was a lot of confusion in the coverage of Occupy.
Is there a contradiction between anarchism and organization? Can you
clarify?
NC: Anarchism means all sort of things to different people but the
traditional anarchists’ movements assumed that there’d be a highly
organized society, just one organized from below with direct
participation and so on. Actually, one piece of the media confusion has
a basis because there really are two different strands in the occupy
movement, both important, but different.
One is policy oriented: what policy goals [do we want.] Regulate the
banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental
issues. They’re all very important and the Occupy movement made a
difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action
on these issues.
The other part is just creating communities — something extremely
important in a country like this, which is very atomized. People don’t
talk to each other. You’re alone with your television set or internet.
But you can’t have a functioning democracy without what sociologists
call “secondary organizations,” places where people can get together,
plan, talk and develop ideas. You don’t do it alone. The Occupy movement
did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you
can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and
develop your own health system and library and have open space for
democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are
really important. And maybe that’s what’s causing the media
confusion…because it’s both.
LF:
Is that why the same media that routinely ignores violence against
women, played up stories about alleged rape and violence at OWS camps?
NC: That’s standard practice. Every popular movement that they want
to denigrate they pick up on those kind of things. Either that, or weird
dress or something like that. I remember once in 1960s, there was a
demonstration that went from Boston to
Washington
and tv showed some young woman with a funny hat and strange something
or other. There was an independent channel down in Washington – sure
enough, showed the very same woman. That’s what they’re looking for.
Let’s try to show that it’s silly and insignificant and violent if
possible and you get a fringe of that everywhere.
To pay attention to the actual core of the movement — that would be
pretty hard. Can you concentrate for example on either the policy issues
or the creation of functioning democratic communities of mutual support
and say, well, that’s what’s lacking in our country that’s why we don’t
have a functioning democracy – a community of real participation.
That’s really important. And that always gets smashed.
Take say, Martin Luther King. Listen to the speeches on MLK Day – and
it’s all “I have a dream.” But he had another dream and he presented
that in his last talk in Memphis just before he was assassinated. In
which he said something about how he’s like Moses he can see the
promised land but how we’re not going to get there. And the promised
land was policies and developments which would deal with the poverty and
repression, not racial, but the poor people’s movement. Right after
that (the assassination) there was a march. [King] was going to lead it.
Coretta Scott King led it. It started in Memphis went through the South
to the different places where they’d fought the civil rights battle and
ended up in Washington DC and they had a tent city, Resurrection Park
and security forces were called in by the liberal congress. The most
liberal congress in memory. They broke in in the middle of the night
smashed up Resurrection Park and drove them out of the city. That’s the
way you deal with popular movements that are threatening…
LF:
Thinking of Memphis, where Dr. King was supporting striking sanitation
workers, what are your thoughts on the future of the labor movement?
The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost
destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the
late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it
back. They had to hold off during the war but right after, it began
immediately. Taft Hartley was 1947, then you get a huge corporate
propaganda campaign a large part if it directed at labor unions: why
they’re bad and destroy harmony and amity in the US. Over the years
that’s had an effect. The Labor movement recognized what was going on
far too late. Then it picked up under Reagan.
Reagan pretty much informed employers that they were not going to
employ legal constraints on breaking up unions (they weren’t not strong
but there were some) and firing of workers for organizing efforts I
think tripled during the Reagan years.
Clinton came along; he had a different technique for breaking unions,
it was called NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement.] Under
NAFTA there was again a sharp increase in illegal blocking of organizing
efforts. You put up a sign – We’re going to transfer operations to
Mexico… It’s illegal but if you have a criminal state, it doesn’t make a
difference.
The end result, is, private sector unionization is down to
practically seven percent. Meanwhile the public sector unions have kind
of sustained themselves [even] under attack, but in the last few years,
there’s been a sharp [increase in the] attack on public sector unions,
which Barack Obama has participated in, in fact. When you freeze
salaries of federal workers, that’s equivalent to taxing public sector
people…
LF: And attacks on collective bargaining?
NC: Attacks on collective bargaining in Wisconsin [are part of] a
whole range of attacks because that’s an attack on a part of the labor
movement that was protected by the legal system as a residue of the New
Deal and Great Society and so on.
LF: So do unions have a future?
NC: Well, it’s not worse than the 1920s. There was a very lively active militant labor movement in the late part of the 19
th century, right through the early part of 20
th century.
[It was] smashed up by Wilson and the red scares. By the 1920s
right-wing visitors from England were coming and just appalled by the
way workers were treated. It was pretty much gone. But by 1930s it was
not only revived, it was the core element of bringing about the New
Deal. The organization of the CIO and the sit-down strikes which were
actually terrifying to management because it was one step before saying
“O.K. Goodbye, we’re going to run the factory.” And that was a big
factor in significant New Deal measures that were not trivial but made a
big difference.
Then, after the war, starts the attack, but it’s a constant battle
right though American history. It’s the history of this country and the
history of every other country too, but the US happens to have an
unusually violent labor history. Hundreds of workers getting killed here
for organizing at a time that was just unheard of in Europe or
Australia…
LF: What is the Number One target of power today in your view? Is it corporations, Congress, media, courts?
NC: The Media are corporations so… It’s the concentrations of private
power which have an enormous, not total control, but enormous influence
over Congress and the White House and that’s increasing sharply with
sharp concentration of private power and escalating cost of elections
and so on…
LF: As we speak, there are shareholder actions taking place in Detroit and San Francisco. Are those worthwhile, good targets?
NC: They’re ok, but remember, stock ownership in the US is very
highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it’s like
the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more
protest inside the Communist Party but it’s not democracy. It’s not
going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they’re
mostly symbolic. Why not
stakeholder action?
There’s no economic principal that says that management should be
responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business
economics that they could just as well have a system in which the
management is responsible to stakeholders.
LF: But you hear it all the time that under law, the CEO’s required to increase dividends to shareholders.
NC: It’s kind of a secondary commitment of the CEO. The first
commitment is raise your salary. One of the ways to raise your salary
sometimes is to have short-term profits but there are many other ways.
In the last thirty years there have been very substantial legal changes
to corporate governance so by now CEOs pretty much pick the boards that
give them salaries and bonuses. That’s one of the reasons why the
CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in
contrast to Europe. (They’re similar societies and it’s bad enough
there, but here we’re in the stratosphere. ] There’s no particular
reason for it. Stakeholders — meaning workers and community – the CEO
could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought
to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have
the stakeholders run the industry?
LF:
Worker co-ops are a growing movement. One question that I hear is —
will change come from changing ownership if you don’t change the profit
paradigm?
NC: It’s a little like asking if shareholder voting is a good idea,
or the Buffet rule is a good idea. Yes, it’s a good step, a small step.
Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better
than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have
well-known inherent inefficiencies. They’re very destructive. The
obvious one, in a market system, in a really functioning one, whoever’s
making the decisions doesn’t pay attention to what are called
externalities,effects
on others. I sell you a car, if our eyes are open we’ll make a good
deal for ourselves but we’re not asking how it’s going to affect her
[over there.] It will, there’ll be more congestion, gas prices will go
up, there will be environmental effects and that multiplies over the
whole population. Well, that’s very serious.
Take a look at the financial crisis. Ever since the New Deal
regulation was essentially dismantled, there have been regular financial
crises and one of the fundamental reasons, it’s understood, is that the
CEO of Goldman Sachs or CitiGroup does not pay attention to what’s
called
systemic risk.
Maybe you make a risky transaction and you cover your own potential
losses, but you don’t take into account the fact that if it crashes it
may crash the entire system. Which is what a financial crash is.
The much more serious example of this is environmental impacts. In
the case of financial institutions when they crash, the taxpayer comes
to the rescue, but if you destroy the environment no one is going to
come to the rescue…
LF:
So it sounds as if you might support something like the Cleveland model
where the ownership of the company is actually held by members of the
community as well as the workers…
NC: That’s a step forward but you also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than
production for use. That
means dismantling at least large parts of market systems. Take the most
advanced case: Mondragon. It’s worker owned, it’s not worker managed,
although the management does come from the workforce often, but it’s in a
market system and they still exploit workers in South America, and they
do things that are harmful to the society as a whole and they have no
choice. If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to
survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities,
effects on others.
Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people
to a conception of themselves and society in which you’re only after
your own good, not the good of others and that’s extremely harmful.
LF: Have you ever had a taste of a non market system — had a flash of optimism –– oh this is how we could live?
NC: A functioning family for example, and there are bigger groups,
cooperatives are a case in point. It certainly can be done. The biggest I
know is Mondragon but there are many in between and a lot more could be
done. Right here in Boston in one of the suburbs about two years ago,
there was a small but profitable enterprise building high tech
equipment. The multi-national who owned the company didn’t want to keep
it on the books so they decided to close it down. The workforce and the
union, UE (United Electrical workers), offered to buy it, and the
community was supportive. It could have worked if there had been popular
support. If there had been an Occupy movement then, I think that could
have been a great thing for them to concentrate on. If it had worked you
would have had another profitable, worker-owned and worker managed
profitable enterprise. There‘s a fair amount of that already around the
country. Gar Alperovitz has written about them, Seymour Melman has
worked on them. Jonathan Feldman was working on these things.
There are real examples and I don’t see why they shouldn’t survive.
Of course they’re going to be beaten back. The power system is not going
to want them any more than they want popular democracy any more than
the states of middle east and the west are going to tolerate the Arab
spring… .They’re going to try to beat it back.
LF:
They tried to beat back the sit-in strikes back in the 1930s. What we
forget is entire communities turned out to support those strikes. In
Flint, cordons of women stood between the strikers and the police.
NC: Go back a century to Homestead, the worker run town, and they had to send in the National Guard to destroy them.
LF:
Trayvon Martin. Can you talk for a few minutes about the role of racism
and racial violence in what we’ve been talking about? Some people
think of fighting racism as separate from working on economic issues.
NC: Well you know, there clearly is a serious race problem in the
country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African American
communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities
is almost zero. The history is striking. You take a look at the history
of African Americans in the US. There’s been about thirty years of
relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before
north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the
Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing
up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it. It lasted for about
twenty years, the big growth period in the ‘50s and ‘60s, so a black man
could get a job in an auto plant and buy a house and send his kids to
college and kind of enter into the world but by the 70s it was over.
With the radical shift in the economy, basically the workforce, which
is partly white but also largely black, they basically became
superfluous. Look what happened, we recriminalized black life.
Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof,
overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent.
Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That’s the
history of African Americans – so how can any one say there’s no
problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it’s worse than that…
LF:
Talk about media. We often discern bias in the telling of a particular
story, but I want you to talk more broadly about the way our money media
portray power, democracy, the role of the individual in society and the
way that change happens. …
NC: Well they don’t want change to happen….They’re right in the
center of the system of power and domination. First of all the media are
corporations, parts of bigger corporations, they’re very closely linked
to other systems of power both in personnel and interests and social
background and everything else. Naturally they tend to be reactionary.
LF: But they sort of give us a clock. If change hasn’t happened in ten minutes, it’s not going to happen.
NC: Well that’s a technique of indoctrination. That’s something I
learned from my own experience. There was once an interview with Jeff
Greenfield in which he was asked why I was never asked onto
Nightline.
He gave a good answer. He said the main reason was that I lacked
concision. I had never heard that word before. You have to have
concision. You have to say something brief between two commercials.
What can you say that’s brief between two commercials? I can say Iran
is a terrible state. I don’t need any evidence. I can say Ghaddaffi
carries out terror. Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in
fact it’s one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can’t
say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you
mean. They’ve never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You
have to give background. That’s exactly what’s cut out. Concision is a
technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat
clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic.
LF:
What about media’s conception of power? Who has it, who doesn’t have it
and what’s our role if we’re not say, president or CEO.
NC: Well, not just the media but pretty much true of academic world,
the picture is we the leading democracy in the world, the beacon of
freedom and rights and democracy. The fact that democratic participation
here is extremely marginal, doesn’t enter [the media story.] The media
will condemn the elections in Iran, rightly, because the candidates
have to be vetted by the clerics. But they won’t point out that in the
United States [candidates] have to be vetted by high concentrations of
private capital. You can’t run in an election unless you can collect
millions of dollars.
One interesting case is right now. This happens to be the 50
thanniversary
of the US invasion of South Vietnam – the worst atrocity in the post
war period. Killed millions of people, destroyed four countries, total
horror story. Not a word. It didn’t happen because “we” did it. So it
didn’t happen.
Take 9-11. That means something in the United States. The “world
changed” after 9-11. Well, do a slight thought experiment. Suppose that
on 9-11 the planes had bombed the White House… suppose they’d killed the
president , established a military dictatorship, quickly killed
thousands, tortured tens of thousands more, set up a major
international terror center that was carrying out assassinations ,
overthrowing governments all over the place, installing other
dictatorships, and drove the country into one of the worst depressions
in its history and had to call on the state to bail them out Suppose
that had happened? It did happen. On the first 9-11 in 1973. Except we
were responsible for it, so it didn’t happen. That’s Allende’s Chile.
You can’t imagine the media talking about this.
And you can generalize it broadly. The same is pretty much true of
scholarship – except for on the fringes – it’s certainly true of the
mainstream of the academic world. In some respects critique of the
media is a bit misleading [because they’re not alone among institutions
of influence] and of course, they closely interact.
Former Air America Radio host,
Laura Flanders is the host and founder of GRITtv with Laura Flanders, a
daily talk show for people who want to do more than talk. She is the
author of the New York Times bestseller BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical
Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics
from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). A regular contributor on
MSNBC, Flanders has appeared on shows from Real Time with Bill Maher to
The O’Reilly Factor. Flanders is the editor of At the Tea Party: The
Wing Nuts, Whack Jobs and Whitey-whiteness of the New Republican Right…
and Why we Should Take it Seriously (October 2010, OR books). For more
information, go to LauraFlanders.com or GRITtv.org.
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