Author, historian and political commentator Noam Chomsky. (photo: Corbis)
Noam Chomsky: The Kind of Anarchism I Believe In
30 May 13
veryone
knows what one looks like. They've got the leather boots. Maybe some
chains. Trench-coats. They wait in dark alleys with
perfectly-spherical bombs. A lot of ‘em like to spike up their hair, or
shave the side of their head, or do weird things like that to their
appearance. You know what I mean. Everyone knows.
That's what an anarchist looks like.
But the man I'm talking to today, albeit by
voice-over-internet, I'm fairly certain doesn't have a shaved head. No
Mohawk that I'm aware of. He doesn't carry any bombs. Especially not
behind any dark alleys wearing a trench-coat. In fact, when he was
young he tended to wear a nerdy short-sleeved shirt and necktie and
those glasses with the Buddy Holly rims. And the few times I've had the
opportunity to hear him speak in person, he seemed very … average.
Almost disappointingly so. He was more the mild-mannered Clark Kent
than the brazen Superman. His manner of speaking is almost
mesmerizingly professorial - he rarely changes his cadence or pitch,
except perhaps to deliver a satirical remark, and then only using pause,
not inflection. His thoughts often fly into contingent - though
important or descriptive - fields, before returning to the point. One
must use every brain cell to follow his speaking at times since it is so
full of starts, pauses, back-tracks, codas, and re-referencing. This
is not due to lack of confidence on his part, but because, I think, of
all the ideas coming into his mind at once.
If you are absolutely not familiar with who Noam
Chomsky is, you are not alone. He almost never appears in the
mainstream media, due to factors which should become clear as the
interview progresses. Yet his intellectual stature is undeniable:
The New Yorker has ... termed Chomsky "one of the
greatest minds of the 20th Century", while the New York Times has him as
"arguably the most important intellectual alive." But judged by the
range, influence and novelty of his ideas, many argue that Chomsky is,
in fact, the owner of one of the greatest minds in the history of our
species. There is barely a domain of human understanding that has not
been touched in some way by his thought. In the half-century since the
1960s, reverberations from his work have shaken the foundations of
cognitive science, epistemology, media studies, psychobiology, computer
science (to name but a few). Alongside Marx and Shakespeare, he ranks
among the ten most-quoted writers in history. - Matt Kenard, Financial
Times
I remember how shocked people were when I told them I
was going to interview M. I. T. Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky. I
remember how shocked I was when he agreed to a brief interview. But I
also know Professor Chomsky to be a very down-to-earth man, very
approachable, someone who seems to draw from a vast pool of inner
strength to be able to speak not only to large crowds in Universities
around the world, but also to respond to endless individual emails and
letters, while continuing with all his other work of research. (He is
said to read an average of twelve scholarly journals per week, among
dozens of other periodicals and newspapers.) With all the work the man
generates, one begins to wonder if Noam Chomsky, now at the youthful age
of eighty-four, wasn't cloned at some point.
Whatever the case, I had the pleasure of interviewing
him as I sat in Memorial Union and he in his university office in
Boston. So many things have been written about, and discussed by,
Professor Chomsky, it was a challenge to think of anything new to ask
him: like the grandparent you can't think of what to get for Christmas
because they already have everything.
So I chose to be a bit selfish and ask him what I've
always wanted to ask him. As an out-spoken, actual, live-and-breathing
anarchist, I wanted to know how he could align himself with such a
controversial and marginal position.
****
MODERN SUCCESS: You are,
among many other things, a self-described anarchist - an
anarcho-syndicalist, specifically. Most people think of anarchists as
disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men
tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists. Is this an accurate
view? What is anarchy to you?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, anarchism is, in
my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up
in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading
characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and
skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures
of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range,
extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and
it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the
burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on
them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a
reason for it, a justification. And if they can't justify that
authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the
authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and
just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It
takes different forms at different times.
Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of
anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but
primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production.
It took for granted that working people ought to control their own
work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in
which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated
with one another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind
should be the foundational elements of a more general free society. And
then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should
manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist
thinking. I mean it's not at all the general image that you described -
people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows -
but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society,
but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as
little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.
MS: With the apparent ongoing demise
of the capitalist state, many people are looking at other ways to be
successful, to run their lives, and I'm wondering what you would say
anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others ideas - say,
for example, state-run socialism - have failed to offer? Why should we
choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism?
NC: Well what's called libertarian
in the United States, which is a special U. S. phenomenon, it doesn't
really exist anywhere else - a little bit in England - permits a very
high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private
power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes.
The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power
will lead to a more free and just society. Actually that has been
believed in the past. Adam Smith for example, one of his main arguments
for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect liberty,
markets would lead to perfect equality. Well, we don't have to talk
about that! That kind of -
MS: It seems to be a continuing contention today …
NC: Yes, and so well that kind of
libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a call for
some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable private
tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an
elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of
tyranny that's internal to private power concentrations. So why should
we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than
subordination. It's better to be free than to be a slave. Its' better
to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make
decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don't think you
really need an argument for that. It seems like … transparent.
The thing you need an argument for, and should give an
argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that direction? And there
are lots of ways within the current society. One way, incidentally,
is through use of the state, to the extent that it is democratically
controlled. I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the
state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private power, and the
state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and
control - could be much more so. And it provides devices to constrain
the much more dangerous forces of private power. Rules for safety and
health in the workplace for example. Or insuring that people have
decent health care, let's say. Many other things like that. They're
not going to come about through private power. Quite the contrary. But
they can come about through the use of the state system under limited
democratic control ... to carry forward reformist measures. I think
those are fine things to do. they should be looking forward to something
much more, much beyond, - namely actual, much larger-scale
democratization. And that's possible to not only think about, but to
work on. So one of the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th
cent, pointed out that it's quite possible to build the institutions of a
future society within the present one. And he was thinking about far
more autocratic societies than ours. And that's being done. So for
example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a
future society within the present one. And those not only can be
developed, but are being developed. There's some important work on this
by Gar Alperovitz who's involved in the enterprise systems around the
Cleveland area which are worker and community controlled. There's a lot
of theoretical discussion of how it might work out, from various
sources. Some of the most worked out ideas are in what's called the
“parecon” - participatory economics - literature and discussions. And
there are others. These are at the planning and thinking level. And at
the practical implementation level, there are steps that can be taken,
while also pressing to overcome the worst … the major harms … caused by …
concentration of private power through the use of state system, as long
as the current system exists. So there's no shortage of means to
pursue.
As for state socialism, depends what one means by the
term. If it’s tyranny of the Bolshevik variety (and its descendants),
we need not tarry on it. If it’s a more expanded social democratic
state, then the comments above apply. If something else, then what?
Will it place decision-making in the hands of working people and
communities, or in hands of some authority? If the latter, then - once
again - freedom is better than subjugation, and the latter carries a
very heavy burden of justification.
MS: Many people know you because of
your and Edward Herman’s development of the Propaganda Model. Could you
briefly describe that model and why it might be important to the
students at the UW-Madison?
NC: Well first look back a bit - a
little historical framework - back in the late 19th-, early 20th
century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies. At the
peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain. By no means
free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in this
respect. In fact so advanced, that power systems - state and private -
began to recognize that things were getting to a point where they can't
control the population by force as easily as before, so they are going
to have to turn to other means of control. And the other means of
control are control of beliefs and attitudes. And out of that grew the
public relations industry, which in those days described itself honestly
as an industry of propaganda.
The guru of the PR industry, Edward Bernays -
incidentally, not a reactionary, but a Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal -
the maiden handbook of the PR industry which he wrote back in the 1920s
was called Propaganda. And in it he described, correctly, the
goal of the industry. He said our goal is to insure that the
“intelligent minority” - and of course anyone who writes about these
things is part of that intelligent minority by definition, by
stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the only people
capable of running things, and there's that great population out there,
the “unwashed masses,” who, if they're left alone will just get into
trouble: so we have to, as he put it, “engineer their consent,” figure
out ways to insure they consent to our rule and domination. And that's
the goal of the PR industry. And it works in many ways. It's primary
commitment is commercial advertising. In fact, Bernays made his name
right at that time - late 20s - by running an advertising campaign to
convince women to smoke cigarettes: women weren't smoking cigarettes,
this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn't able to kill, so
we've got to do something about that. And he very successfully ran
campaigns that induced women to smoke cigarettes: that would be, in
modern terms, the cool thing to do, you know, that's the way you get to
be a modern, liberated woman. It was very successful -
MS: Is there a correlation between that campaign and what's happening with the big oil industry right now and climate change?
NC: These are just a few examples.
These are the origins of what became a huge industry of controlling
attitudes and opinions. Now the oil industry today, and in fact the
business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns to try to
undermine efforts to deal with a problem that's even greater than the
mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was mass
murder. We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic
climate change. And it's no joke. And [the oil industry is] trying to
impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit
interests. And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the
American Chamber of Commerce - the leading business lobby - and others,
who've stated quite openly that they're conducting … they don't call it
propaganda … but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince
people that there's no real danger and we shouldn't really do much about
it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the
deficit and economic growth - what they call ‘growth' - and not worry
about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which
could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the
destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of
people. And there are many other correlations.
In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is
fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize
that. If you've taken an economics course, you know that markets are
supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You
take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is
that it's purpose? No it's not. It's to create uninformed consumers
making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political
campaigns. It's pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy
by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices. And so
this is only one aspect of the PR industry. What Herman and I were
discussing was another aspect of the whole propaganda system that
developed roughly at that period, and that's “manufacture of consent,”
as it was called, [consent] to the decisions of our political leaders,
or the leaders of the private economy, to try to insure that people have
the right beliefs and don't try to comprehend the way decisions are
being made that may not only harm them, but harm many others. That's
propaganda in the normal sense. And so we were talking about mass
media, and the intellectual community of the world in general, which is
to a large extent dedicated to this. Not that people see themselves as
propagandists, but … that they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into
the principles of the system, which prevent them from perceiving many
things that are really right on the surface, [things] that would be
subversive to power if understood. We give plenty of examples there and
there's plenty more you can mention up to the present moment, crucial
ones in fact. That's a large part of a general system of indoctrination
and control that runs parallel to controlling attitudes and …
consumeristic commitments, and other devices to control people.
You mentioned students before. Well one of the main
problems for students today - a huge problem - is sky-rocketing
tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with
other countries, even with our own history? In the 1950s the United
States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher
education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge
numbers of people. There hasn't been an economic change that's made it
necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a
poor country. And to drive the point home even more clearly, if we
look just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a good
educational system with free tuition. There was an effort by the
Mexican state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there
was a national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and
the government backed down. Now that's just happened recently in
Quebec, on our other border. Go across the ocean: Germany is a rich
country. Free tuition. Finland has the highest-ranked education system
in the world. Free … virtually free. So I don't think you can give an
argument that there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high
increase in tuition. I think these are social and economic decisions
made by the people who set policy. And [these hikes] are part of, in my
view, part of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the
liberatory tendencies of the 1960s. Students became much freer, more
open, they were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights,
women's rights …
and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal
intellectuals condemned this, called it a “crisis of democracy:” we've
got to have more moderation of democracy. They called, literally, for
more commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase … we have
to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of
the young do their work, so we don't have all this freedom and
independence. And many developments took place after that. I don't
think we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but
you can see what happened. One of the things that happened was
controlling students - in fact, controlling students for the rest of
their lives, by simply trapping them in debt. That's a very effective
technique of control and indoctrination. And I suspect - I can't prove -
but I suspect that that's a large part of the reason behind [high
tuitions]. Many other parallel things happened. The whole economy
changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers'
rights and freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal
Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan - St. Alan as he was
called then, the great genius of the economics profession who was
running the economy, highly honored - he testified proudly before
congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was
what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If workers are more
insecure, they won't do things, like asking for better wages and better
benefits. And that's healthy for the economy from a certain point of
view, a point of view that says workers ought to be oppressed and
controlled, and that wealth ought to be concentrated in a very few
pockets. So yeah, that's a healthy economy, and we need growing worker
insecurity, and we need growing student insecurity, for similar
reasons. I think all of these things line up together as part of a
general reaction - a bipartisan reaction, incidentally - against
liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves in the 60s and have
continued since.
MS: With the few remaining minutes
we have left, I'm wondering if you could leave the students with one
thing you'd like to say to them about how they can be successful in the
future.
NC: There are plenty of problems in
the world today, and students face a number of them, including the ones I
mentioned - the joblessness, insecurity and so on. Yet on the other
hand, there has been progress. In a lot of respects things are a lot
more free and advanced than they were … not many years ago. So many
things that were really matters of struggle, in fact even some barely
even mentionable, say, in the 1960s, are now … partially resolved.
Things like women's rights. Gay rights. Opposition to aggression.
Concern for the environment - which is nowhere near where it ought to
be, but far beyond the 1960s. These victories for freedom didn't come
from gifts from above. They came from people struggling under
conditions that are harsher than they are now. There is state
repression now. But it doesn't begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro
in the 1960s. People that don't know about that ought to read and think
to find out. And that leaves lots of opportunities. Students, you
know, are relatively privileged as compared with the rest of the
population. They are also in a period of their lives where they are
relatively free. Well that provides for all sorts of opportunities. In
the past, such opportunities have been taken by students who have often
been in the forefront of progressive change, and they have many more
opportunities now. It's never going to be easy. There's going to be
repression. There's going to be backlash. But that's the way society
moves forward.
Source: RSN