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DEMOCRACY AND POWER
Democracy and Power
The Delhi Lectures
Noam Chomsky
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© 2014 Noam Chomsky. Introduction © 2014 Jean Drèze.
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Contents
Introduction: Chomsky in India vii
Jean Drèze
1. World Orders, Old and New 1
2. The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 39
3. The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 65
4. The Nationality Question in the Contemporary World 97
5. Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 117
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 151
Introduction: Chomsky in India
Jean Drèze
Sometime around 1991 I wrote to Noam Chomsky and invited him to give
some lectures in India. It felt like wishful thinking – for one thing, I had no
idea how his visit would be financed, if he agreed. I did not even expect
him to reply, flooded as he must have been with more important mail. So I
was pleasantly surprised to receive a short letter from him just a few days
later (these were the good old times when real letters were delivered at
home by a live postperson). He wrote that he would be happy to come, and
that the first week he was free was January 1996 – several years down the
line. I wrote back that January 1996 would be fine, and that’s when he came.
Easy Guest
Astonishing as it may seem today, Chomsky was not particularly well
known in India at that time. Even among left intellectuals, few had paid
serious attention to his writings. That was, in fact, one of the reasons
why I was hoping that he would accept my invitation. I felt that his ideas
needed to be better known in India, where the tenets of Marxism did not
do justice to the country’s rich experience of popular struggles. There is
certainly much to learn from Marx, but it requires some serious suspension
of common sense to think that the key to India’s social problems today
lie in the writings of a nineteenth-century German philosopher. India, of
course, has its own galaxy of inspiring thinkers, within as well as outside
the Marxist tradition. Yet Chomsky’s ideas seemed to me to fill some
important gaps. Beyond that, I was hoping that Noam’s visit to India
would lead to a better appreciation of anarchist thought, which tends to be
widely misunderstood.
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.07
viii Democracy and Power
These hopes have been fulfilled to some extent – Chomsky and other
anarchist thinkers are much better known in India today than they were
twenty years ago, and I think that his visits have contributed to this.
Some leading left intellectuals in India, notably Arundhati Roy (herself
strongly influenced by Chomsky), even seem to have anarchist leanings.
But there has been some resistance too: in 2001, when Noam visited India
again, the venue of one of his lectures had to be shifted from Jawaharlal
Nehru University (JNU) to Delhi University at the last minute due to firm
opposition from a few faculty members at JNU who seemed to think of him
as some sort of “left deviationist.”
Others had doubts of a different sort. In October 1997, my friend
Milan Rai (who wrote an excellent book on Chomsky’s Politics) gave a
seminar on Chomsky’s life and thought at the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies in Delhi. He talked, among other things, about
Chomsky’s propaganda model and the subversion of democracy. Ashis
Nandy commented, “All this is fine, but why do we in India need Noam
Chomsky?” I am not sure whether he meant that Chomsky’s arguments
did not apply in India, or that relying on them would reflect a colonized
intellectual mindset. I felt that his question contained its own answer.
For the bulk of his Indian audience, however, Noam Chomsky was
mainly a famous scholar they had vaguely heard of. It did not take long
for him to win the interest and affection of the Indian public. Soon after his
arrival in India on 11 January 1996, his interviews received wide publicity
and his lectures attracted larger and larger crowds. After a few days in Delhi
he went to Kolkata in West Bengal, where the ruling Communist Party of
India (Marxist) made up for the reluctance of some of their comrades at
JNU by receiving Noam as a state guest. From there his lecture tour took
him to Hyderabad, Chennai, and Thiruvananthapuram, in that order. This
book, however, covers the Delhi lectures only.
Noam was a very easy and accommodating guest. He was never
worried about where we would put him up, what he would eat or what
class he would be travelling. His main concern seemed to be to make good
use of his time. When I sent him a draft schedule for his visit, he replied,
“One lecture a day is not a full day for me.” So we packed more lectures
and other engagements in his programme. On 17 January 1996, he gave
three lectures in Hyderabad: one on “Intellectuals in the Emerging World
Order” at 9.30 am, one on “Globalization and Media” at 3.15 pm and one on
“American Foreign Policy” at 7 pm. When I apologized for the low (virtually
Introduction: Chomsky in India ix
nil) sight-seeing content of his India programme, Noam wrote back: “No
problem... I’ll save that for some time when it’s more relaxed.” I guess that
time is yet to come, if it ever does.
I hasten to clarify that Noam did not come to India as a kind of preacher,
and certainly not as a preacher of anarchism (none of his lectures were on
that subject). He came to share his ideas as well as to learn. The discussion
sessions that followed his lectures were always lively and often lasted well
beyond the anticipated time (ample extracts are included in this book). In
between these engagements, Noam had occasions to learn in other ways. For
instance, in West Bengal he spent some time with a rural Gram Panchayat
(village council), an experience he greatly appreciated. Alas, much of this
happened outside Delhi and is not reflected in this book.
Time Frame
The text printed in this book is very close to the original transcripts of Noam
Chomsky’s Delhi lectures. Quite a few years have passed since the lectures
were delivered. Aside from serial dilly-dallying on my part, publication
was delayed because Noam was keen to update these lectures but never
got round to it due to innumerable pressing demands on his time (he did
correct the original transcripts).
Despite the passage of time, these lectures have not lost their relevance.
Along with the question-answer sessions that followed, and the interview
reprinted at the end of this book, they cover a vast canvas and provide lasting
insights into many aspects of democracy and power in the contemporary
world. They can also be seen as an enlightening retrospective on the big
events of the twentieth century. Beyond this, the book provides a useful
introduction to Chomsky’s essential ideas. By the end of it, one feels like
a person who had a cataract operation and sees the world in a new light.
In some respects, the interest of these lectures has grown – not diminished
– with the passage of time. For instance, they shed useful light on the events
that followed the end of the Cold War – events that cast a long shadow on
what is happening in the world today. At a time when it was the norm among
intellectuals to expect a huge “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War,
Noam Chomsky recognised the situation for what it was, with characteristic
clarity: “the disappearance of the Soviet deterrent opened new opportunities
for decisive and rapid destruction of much weaker enemies [by the United
x Democracy and Power
States].” This comment goes back to the early 1990s, but it was developed in
the Delhi lectures and has applied ever since.
There are many other interesting examples of prescient thoughts in these
lectures. Few people in 1996 had a clear sense of the perils of unregulated
financial markets – we know something about that today, from bitter
experience. Chomsky not only saw the danger but also understood the
politics of reckless deregulation better than most economists did at that
time (including those who later wrote to the Queen of England, when a
financial crisis took them by surprise in 2008, that this was “a failure of
the collective imagination of many bright people”). Similarly, there are
far-sighted lines in these lectures about the dangers of global warming
and environmental destruction. Long before climate change became a
household term, Chomsky raised forceful questions about humanity’s
ability to survive much longer if things continue the way they are. “The
prevailing value system,” he said eighteen years ago, “is that hegemony is
more important than survival.” This is all the more true today.
Democracy and Power
It would be presumptuous on my part to attempt a summary of the
central ideas of this book. The lectures are packed with insightful
thoughts, and what stands out as the central ideas is likely to differ
from reader to reader. All I can do is mention a few ideas that seem to
be well worth registering.
The lectures are grounded in Noam Chomsky’s principled opposition
to the concentration of power – whether it is state power, or corporate
power, or for that matter the power of the upper castes in Indian society,
of men over women in the family, of an unaccountable party leader, or
of the boss in the workplace. This is an old anarchist commitment, but
Chomsky’s formulation of it is particularly appealing: “... any structure of
hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden of justification, whether
it involves personal relations or a larger social order. If it cannot bear
that burden – sometimes it can – then it is illegitimate and should be
dismantled.” This sounds to me like a practical and far-reaching principle
of thought and action.
Another overarching theme of the lectures, related to the first, is that
the concentration of power and privilege is a major threat to democracy.
Introduction: Chomsky in India xi
This, again, is not a new idea, but Chomsky has taken it further than most
and applied it with great clarity in numerous contexts. In India, the conflict
between democracy and the concentration of power was a major concern of
Dr. Ambedkar, who always emphasized that political democracy would be
incomplete without economic and social democracy. “Social and economic
democracy,” he wrote, “are the tissues and the fibre of a political democracy.
The tougher the tissue and the fibre, the greater the strength of the body.”1
In this respect, Chomsky and Ambedkar are on the same wavelength, even
if their respective ideas also diverge in important ways (for instance, on
the role of the state in bringing about economic democracy). It is possibly
of interest that both Chomsky and Ambedkar were strongly influenced by
John Dewey, who was also deeply concerned with the conflict between
democracy and the concentration of power.
A third theme is the specific threat posed by the growth of corporate
power and the “new despotism of state-supported private power.”
Chomsky is uncompromising in his view of private corporations as
“unaccountable private tyrannies.” Corporate capitalism, as he sees it, is
the last survivor of three systems of tyranny that have common roots. The
point is well summed up in his concluding comment at the end of the last
question-answer session in the book:
In the twentieth century, three forms of totalitarianism developed:
Bolshevism, fascism, and corporations. They really are three forms of
totalitarianism. And in fact they have... much the same intellectual roots.
They come out of neo-Hegelian ideas about the rights of organic entities over
individuals – a big attack on classical liberalism. Well, two of those forms of
totalitarianism were overthrown. The third one is rampant. But it’s no more
engraved in stone than the other two. In fact, I think it’s weaker. It doesn’t
have the same kind of coercive force behind it. So it can be overthrown, too,
in favour of democratic control.
How “democratic control” is to be exercised is not something for which
Chomsky has a formula or blueprint. Rather, democratic control is a general
principle that we can have some hope of applying in gradually widening
spheres of social life. This includes replacing authoritarian modes of
economic organization with alternative institutions based, for instance, on
worker management, voluntary cooperation, participatory planning and
the federation principle.
1 Ambedkar, B.R. (1946), What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables
(Bombay: Thacker & Co), p. 207.
xii Democracy and Power
A fourth essential idea is the role of propaganda in enabling private
corporations and other centres of power to undermine democracy and
maintain their dominance. In his exposition of the basic idea early on in
the book, Chomsky quotes the Australian scholar Alex Carey, who inspired
his own work on corporate propaganda: “The twentieth century has been
characterized by three developments of great political importance: the
growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of
corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy.”2 The idea that propaganda is a pervasive tool of control in
democratic societies may sound far-fetched to those who are not familiar
with Chomsky’s writings, because it sounds like a conspiracy theory. But
corporate propaganda is not an organised conspiracy. It works mainly
through a sort of filtering process whereby those who say the right things
(the sort of things corporate bosses like to hear) are able to climb the ladder
and the rest are left behind.3 As a result, a corporate-sponsored mass-media
system that superficially looks pluralistic and adversarial actually restricts
public debate to a narrow framework that suits the privileged and powerful.
As Chomsky points out, the propaganda system includes not only the mass
media but also related sectors such as the entertainment industry, and even
“extends to a good deal more of scholarship than its practitioners like to
admit”: scholarly ideas that suit the privileged and powerful (such as the
odd notion, common in economics, that rationality and self-interest are
more or less synonymous) tend to flourish while ideas that threaten their
interests get sidelined. The process is obvious enough, but we are so used
to the illusion of a propaganda-free society that it takes some reflection to
liberate ourselves from it.
These ideas were developed largely with reference to the United
States, the country Noam Chomsky knows best and often focuses on in
these lectures. But they are highly relevant to India, too, increasingly so
2 Carey, Alex (1997), Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus
Freedom and Liberty (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press), p. 18.
3 The point was nicely made, in a different context, by C. Wright Mills: “The fit
survive, and fitness means... conformity with the criteria of those who have
already succeeded. To be compatible with the top men is to act like them, to look
like them, to think like them: to be of and for them – or at least to display oneself
to them in such a way as to create that impression. This, in fact, is what is meant
by ‘creating’ – a well-chosen word – ‘a good impression.’ This is what is meant
– and nothing else – by being a ‘sound man,’ as sound as a dollar.” See Mills, C.
Wright (1956), The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 141.
Introduction: Chomsky in India xiii
as time goes by. Indeed, India is becoming more and more like the United
States (the Indian elite’s odd model of what a “developed” society looks
like). It is certainly in danger of becoming a “business-driven society,”
as Chomsky aptly describes the United States. And while India is still a
vibrant democracy in some respects, the growth of corporate power adds
to the fundamental contradictions discussed by Dr. Ambedkar sixty-five
years ago. While Chomsky is careful, in these lectures, not to proffer expert
advice on India, his ideas are of great help in understanding what is going
on in this country.
Just to illustrate, I have found Chomsky’s ideas quite helpful in decoding
the literature on social programs in the Indian business media. The general
refrain (a virtual “party line”) is that social programs are a waste of public
money – they should be phased out or privatized. This line is followed with
remarkable consistency by a long list of seemingly independent columnists
who write under the garb of learned and impartial commentators. The
real, unspoken script is this: social programs are against business interests,
because higher social spending means higher taxes, or higher interest
rates, or less public money for corporate handouts (“incentives” as they
are called). Business columnists who want to do well (get invitations to
corporate-sponsored seminars or TV shows, for instance) have a pretty
good idea of what they have to write. Many of their articles have little
intellectual merit, whether in terms of arguments or evidence, yet they get
a wide hearing because they serve privileged interests. Some are relatively
cogent and well-informed, and their authors may believe in good faith
that social programs are a waste of money. But even they tend to do well
because they say the right things and abstain from advocating (say) higher
taxes or minimum wages. It is hard to believe that their interests do not
color their views. The outcome is a relentless propaganda war that makes
it virtually impossible to have a rational public debate on social programs.
This brief preview would be incomplete without mentioning that the
book is not just about the subversion of democracy by unaccountable
powers. It is also about how this subversion can be resisted through
popular struggles. Chomsky’s forthright indictment of concentrated power
always goes hand in hand with a basic confidence in the ability of ordinary
people to change the world. Indeed, their struggles have already made the
world a better place in many ways. Looking to the future, there are vast
possibilities for further progress toward “democratic control by ordinary
people of every institution, whether it is industry, colleges, commerce, etc.”
– provided that humanity survives, which is far from guaranteed.
xiv Democracy and Power
Anarchist Thought and India
Before concluding, let me return briefly to the relevance of anarchism – or
rather anarchist thought – to Indian politics and social movements. In India
as elsewhere, anarchist thought is widely misunderstood. As Bhagat Singh,
one of the few Indian revolutionaries who had explicit anarchist leanings,
put it: “The people are scared of the word anarchism. The word anarchism
has been abused so much that even in India revolutionaries have been
called anarchist to make them unpopular.”
How and why the anarchist tradition came to be comprehensively
sidelined in India is not entirely clear. The fact is that very few left leaders,
writers or activists in India think of themselves as anarchists. And yet it
seems to me that many of them have drawn inspiration from anarchist
thought in one way or another, and that we would greatly benefit from a
more explicit recognition of this anarchist influence – actual and potential.
There are varieties of anarchist thought (some are pretty weird), just
as there are varieties of socialist thought; my concern here is with what
one might call cooperative anarchism or libertarian socialism. This is more
or less the opposite of what anarchism is often claimed to mean by those
whose aim, as Bhagat Singh put it, is to make revolutionaries unpopular.
This aim is typically achieved by portraying anarchists as impulsive bomb-
throwers who want to destroy the state through violent means.4 Resistance
to state authority and oppression is certainly one of the core principles of
anarchism. It is also true that many anarchists believe in the possibility of
a stateless society, and perhaps even in the need for a violent overthrow of
the state. But anarchist thought certainly does not start from there. In fact,
as Chomsky has argued, it is even possible for a committed anarchist to
lend temporary support to some state institutions vis-à-vis other centres
of power: “In today’s world, I think, the goals of a committed anarchist
should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them,
while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public
participation – and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free
society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.”5
4 Bhagat Singh did throw a bomb once (in the chamber of the Central Legislative
Assembly), but it was little more than a firecracker and the gesture was largely
symbolic. There were no casualties.
5 Chomsky (1996), Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the
Social Order (London: Pluto), p. 75. This statement must be read in light of the
Introduction: Chomsky in India xv
If anarchist thought does not begin with the idea of a stateless society,
let alone the violent overthrow of the state, where does it start from? It
starts, I believe, from the same point as these lectures – a deep suspicion
of all authority and a principled opposition to the concentration of power,
whether it is the power of the state, the corporation, the church, the landlord
or the head of a family. As Chomsky argues, this does not mean that all
authority and power is illegitimate, but it does mean that if it cannot be
justified, it must be dismantled.
Some people believe, against all evidence, that power becomes harmless
if it is exercised on behalf of the working class. This is the basis of the hope
that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would pave the way for the withering
away of the state and a stateless society. The dangers of this idea were
exposed early on by anarchist thinkers such as Bakunin, a contemporary
of Karl Marx, who said: “I wonder how he [Marx] fails to see... that the
establishment of such a dictatorship would be enough of itself to kill the
revolution, to paralyze and distort all popular movements.”6
The fact that anarchist thinkers predicted with great clarity what would
happen in societies based on an apparent dictatorship of the proletariat is
not the least reason why it is worth paying more attention to them. Similarly,
anarchist thought can help us develop a healthy suspicion of various forms of
vanguardism, including the notion that left intellectuals are the vanguard of
the proletariat. This notion is of course a terrific deal for intellectuals, since it
puts them in command. Vanguardism found fertile soil in India with its long
traditions of Brahminism, guru worship, and deference to authority in general.
It is, however, at variance with the spirit of anarchism, which includes a basic
faith in people’s ability to take charge of their own lives and struggles.
Indeed, anarchist thought and libertarian socialism are not limited to a
fundamental critique of power and authority – far from it. They also build
on constructive ideas about social relations and economic organization,
including voluntary association, mutual aid, self-management, and the
principle of federation. The basic idea is that a good society would consist,
distinction Chomsky makes between “goals” and “visions” (p. 70): “By visions,
I mean the conception of a future society that animates what we actually do, a
society in which a decent human being might want to live. By goals, I mean the
choices and tasks that are within reach, that we will pursue one way or another
guided by a vision that may be distant and hazy.”
6 Michael Bakunin, letter to La Liberté, 5 October 1872; reprinted in Dolgoff, S. (ed.)
(1971), Bakunin on Anarchy (New York: Vintage Books).
xvi Democracy and Power
as John Dewey put it, of “… free human beings associated with one another
on terms of equality.”
One of the most eloquent exponents of the power of free association and
voluntary cooperation was Kropotkin, the nineteenth-century anarchist and
author of Mutual Aid. A zoologist and geographer by profession, Kropotkin
spent many years in Siberia, where he noted countless examples of mutual
aid among animals. Just to give one example, he observed how, right before
the winter, large numbers of deer would gather from hundreds of miles
around and congregate at the precise point of a river (the Amur) where it was
narrow enough for a large herd to cross safely and reach greener pastures
on the other side.7 He concluded that cooperative behaviour is a plausible
outcome of biological evolution – an idea that is being rediscovered today by
evolutionary biologists and game theorists.
Kropotkin went on to study cooperation in human societies (which
involves much more than biological evolution) and documented in great
detail how mutual aid played a pervasive role at all stages of human history,
despite being often repressed by the privileged and powerful. More than
a hundred years after the publication of Mutual Aid, we have many more
examples of human activities and institutions based on principles of
voluntary association and mutual aid. Anarchist principles of political
action have played an important role in the international peace movement,
the environmental movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring,
the Chiapas uprising, the World Social Forum and the right to information
movement in India. There have been vibrant experiments with workers’
cooperatives and self-management in Spain, Argentina, and Kerala, and
there are other examples of economic applications of anarchist principles
such as the free software movement. In India, the social organization of
many tribal communities is still based on a strong tradition of mutual
aid and participatory democracy, evident for instance in institutions like
exchange labor and Gram Sabhas.
Even the edifice of electoral democracy rests on a simple act of mutual
aid, namely participation in elections: voting does not involve any personal
gain for anyone, since a single person’s vote cannot influence the outcome
of elections, and yet most people do vote, often losing a day’s wages and
braving long lines, harsh weather or even physical danger. Without mutual
cooperation, there would be no democracy, not even the most elementary
7 Kropotkin, Peter (1902), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann),
Chapter 2.
Introduction: Chomsky in India xvii
form of electoral democracy. As this example illustrates, mutual cooperation
does not necessarily require altruism or self-sacrifice; it can also build on
simple habits of thought (specifically, habits of sociability and public-
spiritedness) that an enlightened society should be able to foster.
Coming back to the left tradition in India, elements of anarchist thought
can be found in one form or another in the life and writings of many Indian
thinkers, even if they never thought of themselves as anarchists, and indeed
were not anarchists. I have already mentioned Bhagat Singh, who had clear
anarchist sympathies. To give just a few more examples, Ambedkar was not
an anarchist by any means and yet we can find traces of anarchist thought in
his writings, for instance his notion of democracy as a “mode of associated
living” based on “liberty, equality and fraternity.” I think that many anarchists
would also be proud of Periyar, who taught people to resist the oppression
of caste, patriarchy and religion and to have faith in themselves. Even some
leading Marxist thinkers belong here: for instance, Ashok Rudra’s critique
of “the intelligentsia as a ruling class” has some affinity with Chomsky’s
analysis of the role of intellectuals in the modern world.
Also within the Marxist tradition, here is something K. Balagopal (one
of India’s most committed and thoughtful left activists) wrote around the
end of his lifelong engagement with a variety of popular struggles:
What seems to be required are ‘localised’ (both spatially and socially)
movements that are specific enough to bring out the full potential and
engender the full self-realisation of various oppressed groups, subsequently
federated into a wider movement that can (in a free and democratic way)
channelise the aroused energies into a broad movement. This is quite
different from the Leninist notion of a single vanguard party that would
centralise all knowledge within itself and direct (top down) the struggles
of the suppressed masses. In such an effort, the suppressed masses would
not even be half awakened to their potential. Even if such a party were
to claim that it learns from the people, and even if [it] were to honestly
try to do so, the very strategy would be inadequate. If there can at all be
a single ‘party’ which would lead a movement for social transformation,
it can only be a federally structured organisation, whose free and equal
units would be the political units, centred on the self-directed struggles of
various sections of the deprived.8
This sounds to me like anarchist thought par excellence. As I have illustrated,
anarchist principles are alive not just in Indian political thought but also in
8 Balagopal, K. (2011), “Popular Struggles: Some Questions for Communist Theory
and Practice,” in Ear to the Ground (New Delhi: Navayana), p. 375.
xviii Democracy and Power
social life and popular movements. None of this is to say that the time has
come to embrace anarchism (or libertarian socialism) and give up other schools
of thought. But greater openness to anarchist ideas would certainly bring
some fresh air. For instance, I believe that anarchist thought could help us to
think more clearly about the relation between caste and class, beware of all
authoritarianism, enlarge our understanding of democracy, and open our eyes
to the workings of power (for instance, patriarchy and caste discrimination)
within our own movements. Last but not least, anarchist thought can inspire
us to change the world without waiting for state power, and give us confidence
that democratic struggles here and now can be, as Bakunin put it, “the living
seeds of the new society which is to replace the old world.”
Acknowledgements
These lectures would not have seen the light of day without the help of a
few people who generously gave their time to transcribe the recordings,
suggest editorial corrections and read successive proofs. Special thanks are
due to Reetika Khera, Swati Narayan and Jessica Pudussery. I also take
this opportunity to thank all those (too numerous to list) who facilitated
Noam Chomsky’s visits to India in 1996 and 2001. Different parts of his
1996 lecture tour were kindly sponsored by the Centre for Development
Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, the Centre for Applied
Linguistics and Translation Studies (University of Hyderabad), the Indian
Institute of Technology (Madras), the Centre for Development Studies
(Thiruvananthapuram) and Frontline magazine. Finally, I am grateful to
Anthony Arnove and Alessandra Tosi for facilitating the publication of
these lectures by Open Book. It was a pleasure to cooperate with this new
publishing venture, which fits well with the spirit of Noam’s writings.
An agreeable feature of publishing with Open Book is that it makes it
easy to produce new editions with updated material from time to time. We
are eagerly hoping that Noam Chomsky will visit India again in early 2015,
and if so, an updated edition will be prepared. And who knows, perhaps
Noam will get a chance to do some sight-seeing this time!
Jean Drèze
Ranchi, India, October 2014
1. World Orders, Old and New*
What I want to do today is to focus attention on the current scene, but also
on its origins, which I think are important for understanding it. So, I want
to talk about the world order that arose from the ashes of the Second World
War, which is when the current system was established, pretty much in
its present form. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the world
order that was constructed from the ruins of that catastrophe was to an
unusual extent (maybe to a unique extent) the product of quite careful and
sophisticated planning on the part of business and political leaders, mostly
American for obvious reasons. Their planning was quite realistic at that
time, as well as being sophisticated and quite successful.
From the turn of the century, the US had been the leading industrial
power in the world. It also had enormous resources. During the Second
World War, industrial production in the US more than tripled; meanwhile
its major competitors were either severely weakened or virtually destroyed.
The US had the world’s most powerful military force, and had a position of
strength and security that probably had no historical parallel. It had firm
control of the western hemisphere, it controlled both oceans and beyond
the oceans.
The US also largely took control of the Middle East. That was a matter
of great significance and remains so to this day. The reason is that, as was
understood at that time by the State Department and President Eisenhower,
the region is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the
greatest material prizes in world history,” as well as “probably the richest
economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment.” And the
US was going to take it over; nobody else was going to interfere there. So
the US immediately displaced its traditional rulers. France was simply
* Lecture delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) on 13 January 1996.
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.01
2 Democracy and Power
expelled. Britain, for its part, was assigned a certain role which gradually
declined as a sort of natural consequence of changes in power relations.
Britain became a “junior partner,” as the British Foreign Office recognized
in an internal document, although illusions about a “special relationship”
still persist. The term, not taken very seriously on one side of the Atlantic,
was taken quite seriously on the other. On my side of the Atlantic, if you
look at the secret documents, Britain is described by a senior advisor of
the Kennedy administration as “our lieutenant, the fashionable word is
‘partner,’” so let’s just hear the fashionable word.
The commitment to control the world’s energy resources was
perfectly understandable. In fact, it reiterated a very traditional principle.
One century earlier, in the 1840s, a leading policy concern of the US
government was to try and gain control of the most important resources.
In those days, that meant cotton. Texas was conquered (later about half
of Mexico) in large part to gain a monopoly of cotton. And the point was,
quite explicitly, to try to paralyze England, the superpower rival of the
day (the “deterrent” force), and also to intimidate Europe. President Tyler
explained that “by securing the virtual monopoly of the cotton plant,” the
US had acquired “a greater influence over the affairs of the world than
would be found in armies however strong, or navies however numerous.”
“That monopoly, now secured, places all other nations at our feet,” he
said after the conquest. The same monopoly power neutralized British
opposition to the conquest of the northwest territories and established
the US in its present form. The plans of the Jacksonian Democrats were
pretty much the same as those that were attributed to Saddam Hussein
in the 1990s, in the most fantastic products of the propaganda system,
but in that case the plan was quite realistic, in fact implemented, and
very much like Washington’s actual position on the primary resources
of the twentieth century. Since the Second World War it has been able
to implement that. So, there are very close parallels between the two
episodes, and they follow the same policy concerns.
As far as oil is concerned, the US of course had – and still has –
substantial oil resources of its own, and in the Gulf of Mexico under US
control. North America has been a major energy producer. Venezuela was
the single leading oil exporter till the 1970s, when it was surpassed by
Saudi Arabia, and in 1995, Venezuela was the leading oil exporter to the US.
The Woodrow Wilson administration had expelled Britain from Venezuela
around 1920. The reason was that Venezuela was so rich (it had plenty of
World Orders, Old and New 3
other resources too), so, no nonsense there. Saudi Arabia later replaced it,
again as a virtual US colony with no interference tolerated.
Post-World War II control over the world’s energy resources had
another effect. It gave the US what was called “veto power” over rivals,
as pointed out by George Kennan, head of the State Department planning
staff and one of the leading architects of the post-World War order. He
was just echoing the Jacksonian Democrats of a century earlier, whose
idea was that a monopoly of cotton would give the US veto power over
its rivals, primarily the British enemy, bringing them to its feet. The basic
policy guidelines with regard to energy are quite interesting. They were
outlined in secret by the State Department in 1944. They said that US policy
must insist on “preservation of the absolute position presently obtaining”
in the western hemisphere, meaning we keep total control, and therefore,
“vigilant protection of existing concessions in United States hands, coupled
with insistence upon the Open Door principle of equal opportunity for
United States companies in new areas.” Illusions aside, that’s about as clear
an articulation of “really existing free market doctrine” as you can have:
what we have, we keep and close doors to others, and what we do not
yet have, we take under the principle of the Open Door – that’s the ideal
market policy. In one or another form, and to various degrees, something
approximating the ideal is a natural goal, domestically and everywhere
else. One of the jobs of intellectuals is not to know that. So if you’re looking
for a job in the future, make sure you forget what I just said.
US planners were well aware of the extraordinary power in their
hands – they naturally intended to use it to construct a world order which
conformed to their conception of the national interest. The US, I’m now
quoting, “assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the
world capitalist system,” as put recently by respected diplomatic historian
Gerald Haines, who also happens to be the senior historian of the CIA. This
is quite an accurate description. There are conflicting versions of what was
intended by the planners, but the most plausible version in my view is the
one that they themselves articulated. The US is a very open society, with
very rich documentary records, so we can learn a lot about these matters.
Take George Kennan again, who was very influential. One of the primary
architects of the world order, he headed the State Department policy
planning staff which developed very comprehensive plans for most of the
world, assigning each part of the world what was called its “function” in the
new system. They were adapting plans that had been worked out during
4 Democracy and Power
the Second World War by top planners of the State Department and the
Council of Foreign Relations, which represents the more internationally-
oriented sectors of the business community. They had been meeting from
1939 to 1945 in the War-Peace Studies Program. Their plans and discussions
are interesting, and were largely implemented in the years that followed.
There has been very little academic study of their important work, but it’s
there if you want to find out about it. The only serious study I know is by
Lawrence Shoup and William Mintner. Kennan’s position is articulated in
an important planning document of 1948, which was rather comprehensive.
Kennan pointed out that the US had half of the world’s wealth, and that the
real task is to “maintain this position of disparity” between the US and
the rest of the world. He argued, therefore, that the US should put aside
“unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards,
and democratization” – referring specifically to the Far East, but the point
was general – and must “deal in straight power concepts” without being
“hampered by idealistic slogans” and recognizing that we cannot “afford
today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.” That’s another sort
of thing that you immediately tend to forget, if you’re looking for a job in
the academic profession or in the political world. Kennan was considered
too soft-hearted and sentimental for this harsh world, and he was soon
replaced by Paul Nitze, who was made of sterner stuff. But his guiding
principles weren’t forgotten. Now, they’re not studied, but they are known
inside, and for that matter, they certainly weren’t original at all.
A very similar conception of world order was outlined at the same
time by Winston Churchill in public. He explained, in 1945, that “the
government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who
wished nothing more for themselves than what they had... We were like
rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations,” and since “our power
placed us above the rest,” we must use that power to keep the “hungry
nations” under control and prevent them from endangering our satisfied
existence. That’s another principle of world order. Earlier in the century, at
the peak of British power before World War I, Churchill had spelled out
this realistic vision more fully to the British Cabinet. He said: “We are not
a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have
engrossed to ourselves... an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth
and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim
to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions,
mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less
reasonable to others than to us.” So we must teach them regular lessons in
World Orders, Old and New 5
reasonableness: he was calling for an increase in the military budget. Well,
the British Foreign Office recognized this was not proper fare for ordinary
citizens, so that was kept secret for eighty years. Churchill understood it too:
he did publish a sanitized version of this statement, but with the offending
phrases removed, and one may safely assume that they will continue to be
hidden away along with the equally realistic prescriptions of Kennan, and
many others. One of the nice things about living in a free society is that if
you are a real fanatic, if you are willing to dedicate your entire life to it, you
can find out what planners are really thinking. It takes some work, but the
record is there.
The more humane among the conquerors did not find the methods
that were used all that reasonable. Adam Smith, for instance, bitterly
condemned what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans.” He saw
quite clearly that they were brutally creating the First World-Third World
divide that is now so dramatic and was very much less so at that time.
Smith was particularly harsh in condemning the British atrocities in Bengal,
which were hardly a secret. He wasn’t alone in that. Another person who
chose to know was Richard Cobden, one of the rare advocates of free trade.
While John Stuart Mill was explaining the need for England to conquer
more of India for the benefit of the “barbarians” (and, incidentally, to gain
near-monopoly control over opium so as to force its way into China and
create the greatest narco-trafficking enterprise in world history), Cobden
was denouncing Britain’s crimes in India, and expressed his hope that
the “national conscience...will be roused ere it be too late from its lethargy,
and put an end to the deeds of violence and injustice which have marked
every step of our progress in India.” He hoped in vain. There has been
no “timely atonement and reparation” for which he called, and contrary
to his concerns, no “punishment due for imperial crimes.” Rather, they are
mostly lauded in a more attractive version of history constructed for the
“satisfied nations.”
Returning to the post-World War II period, there is no time to discuss
what happened from 1950 to 1990. Adopting the illusions of that period,
it was natural to expect that with the Cold War over, the US would at
last be free to tend to the problems of the world’s impoverished nations,
their critical debt burdens, fragile political structures and related human
rights violations, without the distortions of the East-West prism. Many
prominent analysts and institutions anticipated that, for the first time in
the history of imperial powers, the US would now at last be able to act with
benevolence and altruism and in accord with its own true nature, which
6 Democracy and Power
had been well-hidden for the preceding 200 years. The predictions were
instantly falsified (quite standard incidentally), and the harsh policies that
they deplored continued without any change, in fact even intensified as
new opportunities arose.
The campaign of terror and economic warfare against Cuba is a pretty
dramatic example. For about thirty years, it had been justified as self-defense
against this menacing outpost of Soviet power which was ready to conquer
the US. Apart from the absurdity, it’s long been known that the formal
decision to overthrow the government of Cuba was taken in March 1960,
at a time when Castro was anti-communist, and there were no meaningful
Soviet connections. With the Soviet deterrent removed in 1990, US policies
became still harsher, and the ideological system didn’t skip a beat. You’ll
have to look pretty hard to find anyone who would see the obvious, namely
that the attack on Cuba became harsher with the Soviet deterrent gone –
mimicking what had happened a hundred years earlier. When the British
deterrent was removed, the US was finally able to conquer Cuba. It was a
policy that had been proposed back in the 1820s, but the British were in the
way. That was no longer true at the end of the nineteenth century, so the US
intervened to prevent Cubans from liberating themselves from Spain, and
then took Cuba over, granting it “independence,” but in effect as a virtual
US colony and plantation. And now again, with the Russian deterrent gone
the policies became harsher ‒ the opposite of the predictions – in accord
with the way world order actually works.
As for the problems of the world’s impoverished nations, Washington
did turn its attention to them but not quite in the manner that had been
predicted. Rather, it did so by slashing its aid program, which was already
the most miserly in the developed world. The timing was elegant. Congress
passed legislation slashing support for the poor on the day the UNICEF
press conference released its 1995 report, which estimated that 13 million
children die each year from easily treatable diseases and malnutrition that
could be dealt with for pennies a day (that’s an increase of 2 million since
their previous report). It’s a “silent genocide” (as the head of the World
Health Organization called it), which can now be intensified, with the
propaganda needs of the Cold War gone, under what’s now conventionally
called “donor fatigue.” None of this is a problem for the doctrinal
institutions. And so it continues, on and on.
Nothing substantial changed after the Cold War, exactly as a serious person
would have expected, except that things got harsher because there were new
possibilities. In the real world, the perceived task of the US remained as it
World Orders, Old and New 7
had been in 1945, when it “assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for
the welfare of the world capitalist system,” as Haines described, though
there were now new contingencies that required different tactics. After the
Cold War, as before, planners acted on the basis of rational thinking and
also historical experience as they saw it. It’s important to remember one
aspect of the historical experience which was so conventional among states
and other power systems that it’s a virtual cliché, namely the doctrine that
our preponderance of power is both our right and our need. It’s a right
because of our nobility, which is unique in history, and it’s our need because
we are surrounded by fiendish enemies who are bent on our destruction.
That’s close to a universal principle of the educated classes, so of course it
applied in this case. It happens to be deeply rooted in US history from the
early cleansing of the continent to the present, and too familiar here and
elsewhere to require elaboration. And of course, no US innovation.
Another highly relevant aspect of the historical experience is perhaps
less familiar than it should be. It bears on India and most of the world. I
am referring to the fact that from its origins, the US has been “the mother
country and bastion of modern protectionism.” I am quoting the eminent
economic historian Paul Bairoch, who proceeds to document his more
general conclusion that “it is difficult to find another case where the facts
so contradict a dominant theory” as the doctrine that free markets were
the engine of growth, or, for that matter, that the powerful adhere to their
principles except for temporary advantage.
The fact that the so-called late developers have departed from market
principles has been quite familiar to economic historians at least, certainly
since the work of Alexander Gershenkron some years ago. The same is also
true of early developers. The US had always been extreme, from its origins,
in rejecting market discipline. That’s how it developed in the first place,
beginning with textiles and then on to steel, energy, chemicals, computers
and electronics, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, agribusiness, in fact
every sector of the functioning economy, and gained enormous wealth and
power; instead of pursuing its comparative advantage in the export of furs,
as the doctrines of economic rationality would have dictated ‒ doctrines
that were taught to the rest of the world by force.
The American developmental state broke no new ground at all. Britain
had done exactly the same thing. They did turn to free trade in 1846, after 150
years of protectionism had given them such an enormous advantage that a
“level playing field” seemed a pretty safe bet, and even then continuing to
rely on the fact that forty percent of its exports could go to the Third World,
8 Democracy and Power
which means mostly their colonial world. For British textiles, for instance,
the biggest export market was India, not because India was unable to
develop its own textile industry or shipbuilding or steel or other industries,
but because imperial force simply barred the way. The same was true in
Egypt and elsewhere. During the era of railway building (the latter part of
the last century), the US steel industry boomed, relying in no small measure
on the fact that tariffs were so prohibitive that higher-quality and cheaper
British goods could be kept out. In addition to that, there were military
contracts and other state subsidies. Not in India, however, even though
Indian production of iron had matched that of western Europe a century
earlier, and Indian steel-making for shipbuilding and military production
was more advanced than Britain as late as the 1820s, when British engineers
were studying Indian techniques to try to close the technological gap.
One may note, in passing, that there are many contemporary analogues.
The Reaganites, noted for their exalted free market rhetoric, were in fact
the most protectionist administration in postwar US history, virtually
doubling import restrictions, and also pouring public funds into high-tech
industry, often under the traditional cover of “defense.” The goal was to
“reindustrialize America,” which was falling behind Japan (and Germany)
because American management had failed to understand their new efficient
production techniques. To help overcome the gap, the Reaganites again
turned to the military, as conventionally in the past, setting up a program
of “Management Technology” in which the technological gap was studied
and management was brought up to date at public expense, one of many
such mechanisms.
Returning to nineteenth-century India, Britain spent vast sums on
railway projects in India, favoring those expenditures over irrigation and
agricultural improvement, but with little linkage effect for the Indian
economy. Railway engines were produced in Bombay at that time at
reasonable cost, but they were imported from England instead, not by
the choice of Indians. Later, British steel was completely priced out of the
international market, but the imperial preference system kept the Indian
market and others open, while what were called discriminating protection
principles denied similar support to Indian industry. All that was on the
altar of free trade, a conveniently flexible doctrine.
It can hardly escape notice that outside of Europe the only countries
that developed are those that escaped the rule of Europe. The first one was
the US, later it was Japan and some of its own colonies – it’s not easy to find
World Orders, Old and New 9
an exception. It’s true from the origins of Europe’s industrial revolution,
when Daniel Defoe, expressing a common perception in 1728, warned that
England faced an uphill struggle in attempting to compete with China
and India, which have “the most extended Manufacture, and the greatest
variety in the World; and their Manufactures push themselves upon the
World, by the mere Stress of their Cheapness.” So naturally protection
and violence were necessary to overcome those unfair advantages. The
more advanced countries in Asia might also have had the highest real
wages in the world, at the time, and the best conditions for working class
organization, so the most detailed recent scholarship indicates, contrary
to long-standing beliefs. “Britain itself would have been de-industrialized
by the cheapness of Indian calicoes, if protectionist policies had not been
adopted,” concludes the same work, a very interesting PhD dissertation at
Harvard by Prasannan Parthasarathi. And that extends to other industries
as well. England faced the same problems in China in the mid-nineteenth
century, overcoming them by the vicious Opium Wars, right at about the
time of England’s worst atrocities in India.
Defiance of market principles has always been a significant factor in
economic development. That includes the post-World War II period. For
instance, Europe, Japan, and the newly industrializing countries on its
periphery all received a crucial economic stimulus from US military
adventures. US military Keynesianism probably had a larger effect in
revitalizing European economies than the Marshall plan, some political
economists argue. The postwar Japanese economy was stagnant until the
Korean War gave it a big shot in the arm. The Vietnam War did the same
for Japan and for South Korea as well. Today’s First and Third Worlds, as
I said, were much more alike in the eighteenth century. One reason for the
enormous difference between them today is that the rulers were in a position
to avoid the market discipline that they rammed down the throat of their
dependencies. Bairoch, in his own study, concludes that the compulsory
economic liberalism forced on the colonies in the nineteenth century is a
major element in explaining the delay in their industrialization. Sometimes,
in fact, it was de-industrialization, as in the Indian case. That’s a story that
continues into the present under various guises, often with the cooperation
of elite elements in Third World countries; because however much their
countries may suffer they themselves benefit. These approaches do lead
to highly stratified societies, in which some sectors do very well. Bairoch
and other economic historians have studied these matters extensively.
10 Democracy and Power
Economists don’t pay much attention to it, but in economic history itself
it’s pretty well known.
Economic theory considerably understates the role of state intervention
for the wealthy. One reason is that attention is focused on a very narrow
category of market interference. If you look at the studies, you see only the
study of protectionism, but that’s only one form of market interference and
not necessarily the most important one. Just to mention one kind of obvious
omission, the industrial revolution in Britain and the US was fuelled by
cheap cotton. What made cotton cheap was the violent elimination of the
indigenous population of the southeast US and bringing in slaves – neither
of these actions exactly an attribute of market orthodoxy. But that’s not
counted when one talks about market interferences. The crucial matter
of control of energy, that I mentioned, is another example. And so the
story continues to the present. It’s rather striking in Bairoch’s history, not
just because he is a very distinguished economic historian, but because
it’s a very good history. He limits himself to protectionist measures and
concludes, therefore, that after the Second World War, the US at least
moved towards liberal internationalism, after a long history of leading
the way in violating these principles, including in its most rapid growth
periods. And there is an element of truth in this picture. The truth is that
leading sectors of the US economy, particularly the more capital-intensive
sectors, high-tech industry and the financial sector, did come to favor the
liberal international principles from around the middle of the century for
much the same reasons that motivated their British predecessors a century
earlier: it looked like they could win any competition, so let’s have free
competition. But that picture is seriously misleading, because it’s far too
narrowly focused. American business leaders had learned a very important
lesson from the enormous success of the semi-command economy during
World War II. The lesson was that state subsidy and coordination could
preserve and expand the system of private profit. That lesson was taught to
the right people – the corporate executives who flocked to Washington to
run the war-time economy. They haven’t forgotten it since. By the late 1940s,
the business world recognized quite frankly that high-tech industry could
not survive in a free enterprise economy, and that the government had
to be what was called “the savior.” For quite convincing reasons, having
to do more with power than efficiency, military Keynesianism was much
preferred to alternatives, one reason being that it was much easier to sell, as
the first Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington (a liberal Democrat),
World Orders, Old and New 11
pointed out to Congress. He said the word to use is not “subsidy,” the word
to use is “security,” and so it remains. You don’t tell people that they are
paying their taxes to the rich. What you tell them is that you are in danger
of being destroyed, so you have to put your money in the pockets of the
rich – indirectly, by processes you don’t see and are not publicly discussed,
though anyone involved in science, technology, and the business world
knows them very well from first-hand experience.
There is hardly a sector of the functioning economy that doesn’t rely
very heavily on these measures. That’s one of the main reasons why the
Pentagon budget today remains roughly at Cold War levels. In fact, it is
increasing – not because any danger is increasing but because it’s needed.
I should say that my friends in the disarmament movement, I think, have
sometimes misled people by writing about how many schools we could
build if we didn’t have so many jet planes, and so on. Sure, that’s true. The
business world understood that perfectly well back in the 1940s and even
wrote about it. But they want the jet planes and not the schools, because
that’s the way you get public funding for metallurgy and avionics and the
aeronautical industry, and so on and so forth. There are fluctuations to
be sure, and the statist reactionaries of the Reagan years, as I mentioned,
broke new records for protectionism and public subsidy. They also boasted
about it quite frankly to the business audience. And while the free trade
enthusiasts and fiscal conservatives were preaching economic liberalism
to everyone else (including the general population at home), they doubled
import restrictions, increased public subsidies to the rich and shifted
wealth to them by fiscal and other policies, while also undermining the
labor movement, and also quickly transformed the world’s leading creditor
into its leading debtor, again for reasons having to do with power – not
efficiency. If the Reaganites had permitted market forces to function in the
1980s, there would probably be no steel or automobile industries in the
US today, nor machine tools or semiconductors or automation or robotics,
or much else. The Reagan administration effectively closed the door to
Japanese competition and poured in plenty of public funds under the
usual guise of security. No such measures were needed to safeguard the
leading civilian export industry, namely aircraft, or the huge and profitable
tourism industry, which is aircraft-based. These are largely an offshoot of
the Pentagon system, which is by far the most important component of the
welfare state, I mean in terms of magnitude (now growing at the hands of
still more fanatical fiscal conservatives).
12 Democracy and Power
Well, if economics and economic history didn’t have such a narrow
focus, these would be primary topics of investigation, and if you look at
them it’s simply not true that the US turned to liberal internationalism after
1945. It did it in a highly selective manner, with plenty of state subsidy and
support at home under the guise of defense. And given all this, it is entirely
natural that, say, when Bill Clinton showed up at the Asia-Pacific economic
conference in Seattle back in 1993, and described his grand vision of the free
market future, he did it in the hangar of the Boeing corporation and selected
Boeing as the model for this grand market of the future. This makes perfect
sense, you could hardly find a finer prototype of the publicly-subsidized
private-profit economy that’s called free enterprise. Boeing is a publicly
created and publicly subsidized enterprise, and it is indeed the country’s
leading civilian exporter, but that’s because what it exports (the planes you
fly in, including the one I just came here on) are modifications of military
design, with the electronics and the avionics and the metallurgy and much
else paid for by the public, under the guise of security – in much earlier
years. Equally important was Clinton’s prime illustration of the miracles of
the market at the Jakarta session a year later, namely Exxon, another stellar
example of entrepreneurial value which won a 35 billion dollar contract to
develop natural gas fields in Indonesia. Incidentally, that was called “jobs
for Americans,” and sure there were some US managers and some skilled
workers and a few others. Exxon’s stocks shot up right after that, because of
the great joy built up by the prospect of the new jobs for Americans. “Jobs”
has become the technical term for “profits”: it’s considered improper to
mention the word “profits” in public discourse, so you say “jobs” instead
and the important people understand that it means profits.
All these victories for free market capitalism elicited great awe and
acclaim, as one would expect of a well-behaved society. Equally natural
is the fact that Newt Gingrich, head of the conservative revolution who
preaches what’s called “tough love” to the weak and the destitute, is also
the country’s leading welfare enthusiast. He brings more federal subsidies
to his wealthy constituents than any comparable district in the country.
And that contradiction poses no problem, passes with, at most, occasional
mention. The reason is that both political parties, as well as respectable
opinion generally, are committed to the same doctrine, the same double-
edged conception of the free market, namely market discipline is just right
for the poor at home, the defenseless Third World and everybody else, but
the wealthy have to be protected. That’s a principle of world order that
goes back a couple of hundred years, and it’s not going to change.
World Orders, Old and New 13
I should stress that there is nothing special about the US. In this respect,
the reliance on state power is quite general. If you want an example of
what’s misleadingly called capitalism, here is one from the London Financial
Times, one of the world’s leading business newspapers. A couple of days
ago, it had a review of a new study of the top 100 global corporations in
the Fortune list. It found that, out of 100, all had benefited from industrial
and trade policies of their national governments, and at least twenty would
not have survived if they had not been saved outright by government
intervention. That’s what is called “capitalism.” Meanwhile, everybody
else has to endure market discipline, because real science tells us that.
Now, this historical dedication to protectionism and state power, and
these remarkable successes of military Keynesianism during World War
II, provided a good part of the intellectual equipment of the architects of
the new world order of 1945. That remains true of those who are reshaping
the system today, both domestically and internationally, under some new
conditions. Going back to the postwar era, the first task was to restore the
industrial societies with their traditional order pretty much intact. That
meant restoring Nazi and fascist collaborators in the business community,
and marginalizing and dispersing the anti-fascist resistance. This was often
done with considerable violence. In South Korea, about 100,000 people
were killed before what’s called the Korean War; they were mostly the
anti-fascist resistance forces. The American occupying army actually used
Japanese police forces to help, as well as collaborators. The same is true in
many other places.
The second task, closely related to the first, was to assign to the various
parts of the South what were called their “functions” in the service of these
goals. The guidelines were pretty much the same as outlined by Kennan and
Churchill, and they remained very stable. If you look at high-level planning
documents, the primary threat to US interests is consistently depicted as
what are called “radical” and “nationalist” regimes that are responsive to
popular pressure for “immediate improvements in the low living standards
of the masses” and development for domestic needs. That’s called “radical
nationalism,” or sometimes “economic nationalism,” and these tendencies
conflict with the demand for a “political and economic climate conducive to
private investment” with adequate repatriation of profits and “protection of
our raw materials” – “our” raw materials, which by accident happen to be
somewhere else. Opposition to economic nationalism was kind of a reflex
(when it came to other countries, of course, not at home, where we have an
extreme form of economic nationalism). Britain agreed. So the British Foreign
14 Democracy and Power
Office, in 1949, feared that the fall of China might lead to a type of economy
in which there was no place for the foreign manufacturer, the foreign banker,
the foreign trader – which is of course an unacceptable outcome.
US planning principles were most clearly illustrated in Latin America,
where there was no interference, and US planners could do what they wanted.
So there the values and ideals and goals come out with considerable clarity.
In February 1945, the US called a hemispheric conference, where it presented
the “economic charter of the Americas.” Its basic principle was the elimination
of economic nationalism “in all its forms.” That was a problem because, as
the State Department recognized, all of Latin America was overcome at the
time with what was called “the philosophy of the new nationalism,” which
“embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth
and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” Furthermore, “Latin
Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a
country’s resources should be the people of that country.” Accordingly, they
had to be instructed in the principles of economic rationality, which dictate
that the first beneficiaries of a country’s resources are the US investors.
Latin America was supposed to provide resources, markets, investment
opportunities, cheap labor and all that sort of thing, but it was not to undergo
what Washington called “excessive industrial development.” Both the
Truman and the Eisenhower administrations allowed only what was called
“complementary development.” So for instance, Brazil would be permitted
to produce steel, but only the kind that US industry was interested in (you
know, cheap, labor-intensive steel). And as far as possible, the principle
was extended to the whole world. It is the basis for aid programs and so on:
only complementary development, not the kind of development that would
interfere with US-based private power.
Of course, Washington’s position prevailed at the hemispheric conference
– a major reason why Latin America has the highest inequality in the world
and has been a political and socio-economic disaster for the vast majority of
the population. These consistent disasters are particularly instructive when
we recall that this is an area with very rich resources and potential. The
region faces no external threat – it’s had the benefit of close supervision
by the worlds’ richest and most powerful country, which was establishing
what are called “testing areas for scientific methods of development” and
“showcases for democracy and capitalism.” It has had repeated “economic
miracles,” including in the two major economies of the region. Brazil up
to six years ago and Mexico until December 1994 were both heralded as
World Orders, Old and New 15
success stories for American-style capitalism until the (standard) collapse
of the economic miracle, at which point the same measures that were hailed
as proof of the marvels of capitalism become proof of the statist deviation
from market principles, if not Marxism. The miracles have indeed been
miraculous at least for some, at least for US investors and for Latin American
elites who live in tremendous luxury. Meanwhile, the general population
has sunk deeper into misery and despair. In large measure, this is because
of the ways in which Latin America was opened to international markets,
and the internal policies that result in part from the historical rapacity of
Latin American elites and in part from external pressures.
If we compare Latin America with East Asia, there are a lot of differences,
so I don’t want to be too glib about it, but some differences are striking. They
developed more or less along the same lines till around 1980, when they
split very sharply. Latin America entered into a huge fiscal crisis, a debt
crisis, and so on. East Asia keeps developing. Why? Well, there are some
striking differences. There’s an enormous capital flight from Latin America
– it’s open to international markets, and the wealthy are quite free to export
capital. If Latin Americans could control the wealthy they wouldn’t have
a debt crisis. That’s not a problem in East Asia. There the state is powerful
enough to control capital as well as labor, which it controls everywhere.
In South Korea, you could theoretically get the death penalty for capital
flight, and there wasn’t any capital flight. That’s not necessarily a feature of
autocratic societies. Britain has instituted similar measures against capital
flight several times, including after the Second World War (in accord with
the Bretton Woods principles of the postwar economic order, and also
the IMF rules, still technically in effect). But Latin America didn’t have
that advantage. It’s open to international markets. Another factor is this
tremendous inequality, much worse than East Asia, which means lots and
lots of luxury imports – plenty of Mercedes-Benz are coming in, and those
sorts of things. That means huge imports, and huge trade deficits, and so
on. These two factors are a big part of the crisis out there – just a simple
consequence of a particular form of openness to international markets.
These very same scientific methods that brought those results in Latin
America are now being applied in much of eastern Europe, with similar
effects. There’s a lot of puzzlement in the West over the fact that most of the
population of Russia and even the former empire appear to be looking back
at the pre-reform period (as it is called) as a kind of a golden age. There’s
a lot of talk about why that is – you know, perhaps the past looks better as
16 Democracy and Power
it recedes into the background, they forget what it was, or something like
that. I don’t think that’s what is happening. There isn’t much yearning to
return to Stalin’s dungeon either. It’s not so much that they see something
receding, as something approaching. What they see approaching is Brazil
and Mexico. Awful as the Soviet system was, what the US and its European
allies imposed on the Third World was an even worse monstrosity, and the
restored eastern European Third World is coming to learn that lesson.
Back to 1945, other parts of the world were also assigned their roles.
Southeast Asia, according to the Kennan policy planning studies, was to
fulfill its main function as a service area for the reconstruction of western
industrial capitalism that now included Japan. Japan was to be granted
its new order in East Asia, what Kennan called the “empire toward the
south,” all now safely under US control. Independent nationalism had to
be demolished for the usual reasons, as was done with usual brutality and
power. Africa, the US didn’t much care about, it didn’t count much. It was,
therefore, to be handed over to Europe to “exploit,” as Kennan put it, for
the reconstruction of Europe. He also thought that exploiting Africa would
give Europe a kind of psychological shot in the arm, which they needed,
being sort of gloomy in those days. You could imagine a different relation
between Europe and Africa, but that never occurred to anyone; all this has
been public for many years, but there’s no comment about it. As for the
Middle East, it was to be incorporated directly within the US system. The
local management of the Middle East was to be assigned to the British in
those days, with what in earlier days Britain and the US called “an Arab
façade,” submissive family dictatorships that would ensure that the huge
profits from oil flow primarily to the West (mainly the US and Britain), not
to the people of the region. That’s their crucial job (they are permitted to
live in super-luxury themselves, a common feature of dependencies under
imperial rule as well). If they don’t carry out their jobs, they’re out of the
window; if they do, they can be as brutal as they want. The US also has to
keep its finger on the nozzle, for reasons I mentioned.
As for South Asia, it was not a major area of US planning concern, so the
documentary record indicates. There the primary concern was to prevent
what Kennan called “infection” from a potentially communist Indonesia or
China. In 1948, these processes were taken very seriously. So seriously that,
in 1948, Kennan considered Indonesia to be the primary problem facing
US policy in the world. It was a judgment reiterated by the Eisenhower
government a decade later. Eisenhower identified three major crisis areas in
World Orders, Old and New 17
the world. One was Indonesia, another was North Africa, and the third was
the Middle East – all oil producers, all Islamic, though then secular. The fear
about Indonesia was that advocates of independent development might
win a political victory. That meant the one mass political party, namely
the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party). And Indonesia specialists
these days consider this possibility not at all unrealistic. One of the leading
specialists is the Australian scholar Harold Crouch, who wrote the standard
book for the period. He writes that “the PKI had won widespread support
not as a revolutionary party but as an organization defending the interests
of the poor within the existing system,” developing a “mass base among
the peasantry” through its “vigor in defending the interests of the... poor.”
American internal documents for that period have been released recently
(very selectively). They reveal great fear that the democratic processes, if
allowed to function, would come out the wrong way, so they had to be
stopped. First, they were stopped by a huge campaign of CIA subversion
and support for civil rebellion in the outer Islands, in 1958. They were finally
terminated by the huge slaughter in 1965 of hundreds of thousands, maybe
a million people, mostly landless peasants. The one mass-based political
party, the PKI, was finally destroyed, and an end was put to the danger of
democracy in Indonesia. That slaughter elicited enormous euphoria in the
West – you have to read it to believe it.
Similar fears lie behind the US attack on South Vietnam, later all of
Indochina, and the overthrow of parliamentary governments in Guatemala
and Brazil and Chile and a lot more. None of these involved any meaningful
security threat from Russia or China, though that was the reflexive pretext
by the government and commentariat. Radical and nationalistic regimes
are intolerable in themselves, even more so if they seem to be succeeding
in terms that might be meaningful to other people facing similar problems.
In that case, they become what Kissinger termed viruses that can infect
others, or as Acheson put it, they become “rotten apples that might spoil
the barrel.” For the public, they are “dominoes” that are going to topple by
aggression and conquest. Internally the absurdity of this picture is often
conceded, and the real threat is recognized. When Henry Kissinger moaned
that the contagious example of Chile would infect not only Latin America
but also southern Europe, he didn’t really anticipate that Allende’s hordes
were going to descend on Rome, but rather that Chile’s example would send
Italian voters the wrong message – namely that democratic social reform was
a possible option. The same is true quite generally. When you detect a virus,
18 Democracy and Power
you take action to destroy it, and potential victims have to be immunized:
typically, by state repression and terror. That pattern repeats itself over and
over again through the years. It continues without notable change after the
Cold War – that’s a substantial core element of modern history.
Take a look at the Cold War itself. What’s that? Well, to a large extent
it falls into the very same pattern. The Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917,
extricated the Soviet Union from the western-dominated periphery
(remember that this was the original Third World, going back to the
fifteenth century in pre-Columbian times), and it set off the inevitable
reaction, beginning with instant military intervention. From the outset,
those have been basic elements of the Cold War. The underlying logic was
not fundamentally different from Guatemala or Grenada. Of course, the
scale of the problem was enormously different. So Grenada you can take
care of over the weekend. The Soviet Union is a different story. It took
seventy years. Bolshevik Russia was what is called radical nationalist –
communist in the technical sense – unwilling “to complement the industrial
economies of the West,” in the semi-official phrase which I am quoting.
In fact, it was no more communist or socialist than it was democratic, in
the literal sense of these terms, and furthermore there were no conceivable
military threats. The Bolshevik example did have undeniable appeal, not
only in the Third World but even in the rich societies. That was a fact that
very greatly concerned Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George at that time,
as we now know from released records, and it continued to be a concern
right into the 1960s (that’s when the documentary record runs dry). At this
point, Kennedy and Macmillan are discussing the danger that Russian
success will be just too influential for others. In short, the Soviet Union was
a gigantic rotten apple. It wasn’t Stalin’s monstrous crimes that bothered
western leaders, any more than in the case of Mussolini or Hitler or others
who got plenty of support till they stepped out of line (Saddam Hussein
is a recent case). Truman liked and admired Stalin. So did Churchill. Right
through the Yalta conference Churchill was defending Stalin in internal
discussions at the British Cabinet. Truman felt that the United States would
have no problem whatsoever with the bloodthirsty tyrant if the US were
to get its way eighty-five percent of the time. Well, it couldn’t get that –
so the virus had to be destroyed. The ultra-nationalist threat was greatly
enhanced after Russia’s leading role in defeating Hitler left it in control of
eastern Europe, separating these regions too from the domains of western
control – again those are traditional Third World resource, market, and
investment areas for western Europe. In this case, the rotten apple was so
World Orders, Old and New 19
huge (and after the World War so militarily powerful too) and the virus
was so dangerous that this particular facet of the North-South conflict took
on a life of its own from the very outset. And in my view that’s the major
character of the Cold War.
Similar concerns drove US policies in South Asia. There is one
comprehensive scholarly study of this, a very good one by Robert
McMahon, running through recently released documents. His
conclusion, that of a very conservative scholar, is that western policies
are what brought the Cold War to Asia – destroying Nehru’s vision of a
zone of peace. Pakistan was set up as a military base, in large part as a
component of the regional enforcement system directed at the Middle
East. McMahon does keep to the conventional doctrine that US policy
was “driven not by pursuit of material gain or geopolitical advantage
as the policies of so many expansionist powers of the past had been,”
but rather by “largely illusory military strategic and psychological
fears.” Curiously, the same foolish and unnecessary errors were made
everywhere in the world, under the same illusory fears that go from
the terrifying threat of Grenada or Nicaragua to panic about Ho Chi
Minh setting off on a world conquest and so on. The real concern that
McMahon’s work points to was that China might win the economic
competition with India, thus discrediting the capitalist democratic path
of development. In fact, what he calls Washington’s irrational sense of
insecurity, when you look at it case by case, turns out to be the perfectly
rational concern that unless the world is totally under control, the rotten
apples may spread unwanted messages, and the interests of the real
rulers may be damaged, if only slightly. It’s an interesting fact about
the intellectual culture (in the United States and Britain and most of the
world to my knowledge) that highly consistent actions that prove very
successful for their designers are consistently criticized in retrospect
as foolish and naive and based on illusory fears. Apparently, it’s more
acceptable to attribute to the planners consistent irrationality, verging
on literal insanity, than it is to recognize the truth of the principles
enunciated by Churchill and Kennan and others, at least in internal
documents where they are, in fact, particularly well-articulated.
With the Cold War over, things continue pretty much as before.
Eastern Europe is being driven back to its earlier status. Parts that
belonged before to the industrial West, like the Czech Republic and
western Poland, are pretty much returning to that status. Others are
drifting back towards something resembling their Third World origins,
20 Democracy and Power
as illustrated by economic and social indicators. Just to mention one,
the number of extra deaths in Russia alone is estimated at over half
a million a year by 1993; that’s rather successful killing as a result of
the capitalist reforms that were instituted in 1989 (this is from a study
by UNICEF, which supports the so-called reforms). This picture is very
easily recognized by anyone familiar with Brazil and Mexico and so on,
and will doubtless be lauded as another economic miracle, as indeed it
will be to the people who count.
A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the White House
submitted its annual request to the Congress for the military budget.
The text had been the same for years – we need a huge military budget
because of the Russians. One thing has changed – the reason. It was no
longer the awesome Russian threat that required enormous expenditures
for what was called the “defense industrial base” and the intervention
forces aimed primarily at the Middle East. Rather, it was frankly conceded
that in the Middle East the threats to US interests “could not be laid at
the Kremlin’s door” (contrary to many lies now withdrawn, no longer
being serviceable), and it turns out that the general threat that required
the United States to spend as much on the military as the rest of the world
combined was the “technological sophistication” of Third World powers.
That’s what the threat is, which the US is incidentally trying to increase
as much at it can by being the largest arms seller in the world, which of
course means that we are facing potential threats for which we need more
arms to protect ourselves, and so on. None of this elicits any ridicule. In
fact, it didn’t even elicit news report or comment. So everything proceeds
on course, which isn’t at all surprising when you think about the real
character of the Cold War.
If you want to determine the true nature of the Cold War, it’s a useful
idea to ask a simple question. Take a look at the end and ask who’s cheering
and who’s despairing. That tells you something about the real nature of the
conflict. So let’s try it in this case. The Cold War is over – who’s cheering?
Well, in the East there are some people cheering – the old Communist Party
hierarchy. They are extremely happy; they’re now taking on the standard
role of the highly privileged elite that cooperates with western power.
They’re called the capitalists – rich beyond their wildest dreams – and they
won the Cold War. So the communist party leadership, they’re the winners.
Among the losers are the general population, sinking into typical Third
World misery and dreaming vainly of the days before they rejoined the
World Orders, Old and New 21
Third World. They were doubtless released from tyranny, and are grateful
at least for that. So, that tells you who won and who lost in the East. Who
won and who lost in the West? There are very large cheers from investors,
who regained their privileged access to the economy of the former Soviet
empire – markets, investment opportunities, cheap labor, the whole
business. The international business press, incidentally, is very frank about
this. Surveying the wreckage, the London Financial Times had a report
headlined “Green Shoots in Communism’s Ruins,” meaning everything is
pretty rotten but there are a couple of good things. Green shoots turn out
to be new opportunities for western corporations, now that the capitalist
reforms have caused “rising unemployment and pauperization of large
sections of the industrial working class.” That means a submissive and
disciplined labor force is available (also healthy and educated, so things
have changed from the days when eastern Europe was a typical Third
World service area for the West). They’re willing to work longer hours
than what the Financial Times calls the “pampered” western workers, at
much lower wages and with much fewer benefits, and that’s kept that way
by the very tough anti-labor policies of these repressive neo-liberal states.
General Motors, Benz and others now have a new weapon to use against
the pampered workers at home, who will have to abandon their “luxurious
lifestyles,” the business press tells us cheerily. Once again, that tells you
who won and who lost the Cold War. In the West, the ones who lost are the
pampered western workers who now have a new weapon against them –
meaning most of the population. They lost the Cold War. Those who won
the Cold War are the executives and investors of Benz, General Motors, and
the rest. That tells you not only what it was about to a large extent, but also
why everything else persists.
I should add that as elsewhere western investors in eastern Europe
understand the free market as they always did. So General Motors and
Benz and the rest will invest there, but they’ll demand tax holidays, stiff
tariffs to ensure market control and the usual amenities, leaving the new
Third World countries with the debts, and the pollution, and the task of
providing infrastructure, and all that stuff. Benz recently worked out a
similar deal with the state of Alabama, southeast United States, which
indeed does offer something like Third World conditions, structurally
speaking.
Well, there certainly have been important changes in world order – I’ll
finish briefly with these. One of the biggest changes was deregulation of
22 Democracy and Power
financial markets. Back in the early 1970s, that was a primary factor in the
huge explosion of speculative financial transactions and manipulations
(speculation against currencies, things like that), which now constitute
about ninety-five percent of foreign exchange transactions. According
to a recent UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development) report, it was ten percent of a far smaller total in 1970.
That’s a very radical change, and those consequences were understood
right off. In 1978, James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, pointed
out (in his presidential address to the American Economic Association)
that these changes (then just beginning) were going to drive the world
towards a low-wage, low-growth equilibrium and also high profits. A
recent study, which was directed by Paul Volcker (head of the Federal
Reserve), attributes about half of the slowdown of growth since the early
1970s to just this factor. When capital is not being used for investment and
commerce, but is being used for speculation against currencies and so on,
this drives down growth in several ways. For one, capital is withdrawn
from productive uses. For another, it’s a weapon against stimulative
policy. If any government, even in a country like the United States, tries
to do something to stimulate the economy and increase growth, which
threatens to bring with it inflation and so on, there’s the threat of huge
capital flight, which is not trivial with a trillion dollars moving across
financial markets on an average day. That’s a powerful weapon even
against the US, certainly against any Third World country. And it’s a
major factor in the attack against democracy, since national economic
planning becomes much harder, even if populations can get some control
over their own governments in some fashion.
There have been other developments that contribute to these tendencies.
The telecommunications revolution took place around the same time
(that’s another offshoot of the state system), and of course it facilitated
the globalization of industry and finance. It made it possible for corporate
headquarters to be in New York, financial operations in some tax haven,
and production wherever people can be beaten down most efficiently (say
Indonesia, where wages are about half the level of China – it’s called an
economic miracle too). Corporate executives have also learned that this
new information technology allows much more effective command and
control, BusinessWeek reports, failing to add that the same technology
differently used could radically reduce superfluous layers of management
and devolve decision-making to working people. If you look at the history
World Orders, Old and New 23
of automation, which has been well studied, it was so inefficient that it
was developed through the state system (the Air Force for instance); but
after decades of development, it was handed over to industry for private
profit. That’s standard. But the point here is that the way it was developed
was not in the interests of economic efficiency, but in the interest of power:
automation could have been used to put decision-making power into the
hands of (let’s say) skilled machinists and eliminate management; or it
could be used to intensify management control and to deskill machinists.
The second way was adopted in the state system for reasons of power
and class war and not economic efficiency. One of the nice things about
the state system is that you can do that without anyone knowing about it
(unless they happen to have read David Noble’s fine study of the topic).
Also, you don’t have to worry about costs as the public is paying for it. And
the same is true of the telecommunication systems that are allowing for
more effective command and control.
The end of the Cold War contributed to these tendencies, as I mentioned,
by adding new weapons to the armory, and by reducing the slight space
that was available for non-alignment and independence in the Third World.
A new version of the world order is taking shape. It has effective power
transferred, to an unprecedented extent, to private tyrannies that are
internally immune to the threat of democracy and generally unaccountable.
Along with democracy, markets also are under attack, even if we put
aside the massive state intervention. Increasing economic concentration
offers endless devices to evade and undermine market discipline. Just
to mention one aspect: about forty percent of what’s called world trade
is actually not trade at all in any meaningful sense – its intra-firm, like a
single corporation shipping something somewhere else and then shipping
it back, never entering anybody’s market. This is called “trade” because
it has to cross international borders – that’s forty percent of world trade,
and over fifty percent of trade for the US and Japan. These, of course, are
estimates; investigating private tyrannies is no easy matter. Operations
internal to corporations are carefully managed by a very visible hand and
they offer all sorts of mechanisms to undermine market discipline, leading
to what’s properly being called a system of “corporate mercantilism” in
the international arena. That system is rife with the kinds of conspiracies
of the “masters of mankind” which Adam Smith warned against, not to
speak of the traditional reliance on state power and public subsidy, and
it’s pretty well recognized. Today, BusinessWeek perceives what they call
24 Democracy and Power
a mega-corporate state in which there will be a few global firms within
particular economic sectors. The vast majority of the world’s population is
supposed to be subjected to market discipline and be told how wonderful
it is. They are not supposed to hear things like this – this is for the readers
of the business press and people who care about running the world.
Well, that partly skims the surface. It’s pretty easy to see why the masters
now perceive a real hope of achieving the kind of end of history that they’ve
often announced in the past (always wrongly so far). It is also easy to see the
reasons for the mood of anxiety and hopelessness that prevails in every part
of the world, including the industrial societies, although there are also many
signs of resistance all over the place, and I think they offer plenty of hope.
It’s certainly possible to reverse this course. Human institutions and human
decisions made within them are not engraved in stone, and there are ways
to change them. You have to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion;
you have to learn the truth about the world, to organize, to act, to change.
It’s never been easy, it’s never been impossible. There are new challenges
now, as well as new possibilities of international solidarity that weren’t there
before. There’s rarely been a time in history when the choice of whether to
undertake these struggles carried such fateful human consequences.
World Orders, Old and New 25
Question and Answer Session
Question: There is a wide gulf between the First World and the Third World, and
the aim of the Bush team is to sustain and perpetuate US hegemony. What are
the prospects for alliances among nationalities of the Third World to break this
hegemony?
Chomsky: Well, there are plenty of opportunities for solidarity within the
South, but it’s important to recognize other things that are going on. One
of the striking features of this world order is the extension to industrial
societies of something like the Third World model. So the US is also being
subjected to a kind of structural adjustment, and the same with England.
More and more of these rich countries are taking on the look of Third
World countries: highly stratified, with a superfluous population, the
usual picture. And that creates both a need and a possibility for alliances
that cross the traditional North-South divide – because a good part of the
population of the North is becoming like the South, at a different absolute
level but in structural terms. That is beginning to happen, and I think it’s
offering promising avenues for international solidarity. So, for the first time
ever, there has been cooperation, for example, between North American
and Central American labor. The US unions have traditionally opposed the
Central American labor unions (and even supported brutal attacks on them),
but now they are supporting them and sometimes doing pretty effective
work in solidarity with working people in Central America. Indeed, they
have common interests, and that extends over the whole world. General
Motors can move not only to Mexico but to Poland, and this means that
the reaction to this form of tyranny also has to be international. It calls for
popular internationals of a kind that hasn’t existed for a long time, and in fact
never really existed. I think the prospects for that are unprecedented. The
same kind of technology (like telecommunications and so on) that allows
centralized control also facilitates the spread of information and common
action among people who want to resist it. And after all, the powers we
face are very fragile. Take, say, corporations. Corporations exist on the
basis of an extremely thin reed. In the US, they are given charters, charters
that can be revoked. And they can be eliminated by simple parliamentary
decisions – parliamentary decisions that could be part of major changes in
the whole structure of the world order. Nothing like this would be easy,
26 Democracy and Power
but the main reason why it’s not easy is that people don’t understand the
power they have in their hands. I think that’s the hard thing to overcome,
and it is within reach. That can be changed, not only internally within the
Third World, but also across North-South borders.
Question: Why do you think that the world order is maintained only by physical
powers, like military and economic power? What about spiritual powers (not
necessarily religious)?
Chomsky: I think it’s quite right, that these powers help to maintain
world order. I agree with that very strongly. In fact, this point has been
understood for a long time. It was explained rather nicely by one of my
favorite figures, David Hume – a very conservative, very smart analyst,
a contemporary of Adam Smith and a friend of his. He wrote down the
principles of government. The first principle he introduced by talking
about what he regarded as a paradox of government. The paradox, as he
put it, is that “force is in the hands of the governed,” not the governors. He
said that’s true of most societies, even the most authoritarian ones. From
totalitarian societies to free societies, force is in the hands of the governed,
and that’s the paradox – how come they don’t throw out their rulers, who
are oppressing them? Well, the answer must be that power rests, in part, on
the control of opinion. It is by opinion only that the population is controlled,
he argued – that’s spiritual power. That means imposing a range of hopes,
and aspirations, and assumptions, and goals, and so on that keep people
from acting to overthrow the powers that are oppressing them. Because
force is indeed in the hands of the governed, there is no doubt about that.
So the US, which is in many ways the freest society in the world, is also
the one where the most effort is put into controlling opinion. That costs
about a trillion dollars a year in just plain marketing, which is not only
a means of creating artificial wants, but also a big device of control. So
is state propaganda. The business world has understood for a long time
that the public mind is the major threat facing corporate power. The US
has a huge public relations industry, which is designed to control thought
and attitudes, and its leaders are very frank about it. They have to fight
what they call “the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” indoctrinate
people with the capitalist story and so on. Those are very strong techniques
of control – trapping people in artificially-created needs, and also simply
indoctrinating them. Huge efforts go into that, and those are spiritual
World Orders, Old and New 27
powers. They shouldn’t be left out; they play a crucial role in the system of
domination, and also in overcoming it.
Question: Is there any possibility of struggle within the First World societies?
Chomsky: Sure. In fact it’s critical, because of their power. And the
population faces somewhat similar problems. Inside the US and England,
inequality has been growing very sharply. Real wages in the US (median real
wages) have been declining since 1980. From 1980 until the last figures that
are available, about ninety-five percent of families have lost real incomes.
That’s right through a period of considerable growth. Meanwhile, profits
are shooting through the roof. Under those conditions, something like the
structure of a Third World society is being created. Just as a small example,
take the city where I live, Boston – a very wealthy city. It has a hospital that
caters to the general population, Boston City Hospital, not for rich folks,
but for everybody else. A couple of years ago they had to establish a clinic
for malnutrition because for the first time they were getting cases of Third
World-type malnutrition, mostly among children. They have to actually
learn from Third World specialists how to deal with these things. They’ve
been doing studies, and it turns out that there’s a relationship between
cold spells and malnutrition: a couple of weeks after a cold spell (Boston
is very cold in the winter), the number of kids suffering from malnutrition
increases. There are articles in medical journals about this. The reason is
obvious: parents have to make an agonizing choice – do we heat our homes
or do we feed our children? And you can’t do both, because you’re being
forced down to Third World standards.
Well, under these conditions there are many prospects for struggle
inside the First World societies, and I think this goes back to the question
of spiritual powers. Many people are very upset and angry in the US, that’s
why the people in power often lose elections. People don’t want the new
guys, but they want to get rid of the guys in power. What emerges from
this anger is a very complicated thing. In part it’s very irrational, there’s
a proliferation of cults of every imaginable kind, religious fanaticism,
paramilitary organizations, all kinds of social disorders. On the other hand,
there are also signs of more constructive resistance, and which of those is
going to win is a matter of what the earlier question called spiritual powers
– what you come to understand and believe, what you are committed to and
so on. Those are not predictable things; they are things to work on.
28 Democracy and Power
Question: What is your view on the peace process in the Middle East?
Chomsky: Actually, if I may say something unkind about India and
other countries, this is not a bad example of spiritual powers. The term
“peace process in the Middle East” is interesting in itself. In the US, the
term “peace process” is used in a technical sense, to refer to whatever the
US government has been doing. For instance, undermining peace, which
it is often doing, is called “the peace process.” Now, it’s understandable
that this terminology is used inside the US doctrinal system, but what is
striking is that it’s used everywhere.
Now take the Middle East, which is a fairly dramatic example. For
twenty-five years, the US has been standing in the way of any peace
process there. That began in 1971, when President Sadat of Egypt offered
a full peace treaty to Israel in terms which were exactly the American
official policy at the time. Israel didn’t accept it, and the US had to make a
choice – either go along with its ally or accept Egypt’s offer and pursue its
former policy. There was an internal debate over that – Henry Kissinger
won, the US rejected Sadat’s offer and instituted a policy that he called
“stalemate,” meaning no negotiations, no diplomacy, just violence. From
that point till today, the US has stood virtually alone in the world in
opposing every diplomatic initiative – that’s called the peace process.
The US vetoed Security Council resolutions, voted alone (with Israel,
sometimes Dominica or some other client state) every year in the UN
General Assembly and so on. Okay, finally the US position won. There are
two basic points here. One is that the US was opposed to the withdrawal
condition of UN 242, the basic document Washington had initiated in
1967 but rejected in 1971 (in practice, not formally). Secondly, it was
opposed to Palestinian national rights. Palestinians don’t have wealth or
power; therefore they have no rights, that’s elementary statecraft. Again,
the US stood virtually alone in the world in opposing this. That’s called
the peace process – twenty-five years of activity to prevent any political
settlement in the Middle East. And the US peace process finally won – the
Oslo agreements simply ratify US rejectionism.
If you take a look at Oslo II, the interim agreement that has just been
enacted and is being hailed as a great success (even in the Indian press, I
noticed), what it does is to break up the West Bank into four regions. One
of them is Greater Jerusalem, which is granted to Israel. If you take a look
at the maps published in (say) the New York Times or in Israel, they just
World Orders, Old and New 29
include that as a part of Israel. That’s one zone. The second zone Israel just
takes, period. That’s seventy percent of the West Bank, totally under Israeli
control. A third zone is granted to Palestinian authorities. That’s two percent
of the West Bank – mainly the municipal areas of various towns; Israel is
delighted to give them up. The rest (the fourth zone) is called the region
of autonomy. If you take a look at the map, it consists of about a hundred
scattered regions inside the Israeli area of total control. In exchange for this
magnanimous agreement, which is about as extreme as any proposal that
has been made in the Israeli-US spectrum, the Palestinians have to accept
the legality (present and future) of Israeli settlements and Israeli sovereign
rights in state lands, absentee lands which could mean up to ninety percent
of the autonomy territory. That’s the settlement.
In fact, Israel is finally doing what is sensible. Instead of trying to run
the Occupied Territories themselves, they want to run it the way the British
ran India. The British didn’t run India with the British army. They ran it
with the Indian army: most of the troops that were controlling India were
Indian troops, usually taken from one territory to beat up people of another
territory. And that’s the sensible mode of colonial control. In South Africa
and Rhodesia, the same thing is true – the worst atrocities were carried out
by the Black mercenaries. Central America is run the same way: the US army
goes when needed, but mostly it is run by state security forces (basically
terrorist forces, mercenaries like the British colonial army). And now Israel is
finally doing the same thing – it’s the only sensible way to run colonies. So the
Palestinian mercenaries will control the population for them. They are pretty
frank about it. Prime Minister Rabin, right after signing Oslo I, explained to
the Israeli Parliament why there wouldn’t be any security problems in Israel.
Limited withdrawal was contemplated, he said, and when the Palestinian
security forces come in and run the place there won’t be any problems with
appeals to the high court, or protests by human rights organizations or other
bleeding hearts. These problems are going to end, because the mercenaries
will be in charge. Well, that’s standard imperial policy, certainly in India
everybody ought to know it by heart. That’s what they are instituting in
those tiny areas they’re going to withdraw from. Meanwhile, they keep the
resources, most of the land, and so on.
This is a tremendous victory for power, and also a spiritual victory
(to use that word again) because the world, amazingly, has accepted it. I
discovered in interviews around the world, in Brazil, and western Europe,
and so on, that people have forgotten what they believed themselves five
30 Democracy and Power
years ago – namely they were advocating rights of self-determination for
the Palestinians. Those rights have been lost, destroyed in the treaty, and
that’s called the peace process. That’s a tremendous doctrinal victory – not
just a victory for the rule of force on the ground but a victory of cultural
hegemony, which is pretty impressive and it tells you something.
Question: Do you have any comments on the World Bank, the IMF and the World
Trade Organization in the context of structural adjustment programs for the Third
World?
Chomsky: Let me add to that, if I may, that the structural adjustment
programs are also for the First World – with a somewhat different
character, but rather similar in conception. On the World Bank, the IMF,
the WTO and others like it, let me quote my favorite journal again, the
Financial Times of London. A couple of years ago, it pointed out, I think
accurately, that a “de facto world government” is taking form in “a new
imperial age.” That de facto world government is based on a few powerful
states and an array of multinational corporations that rely on them and are
closely linked to them and often to one another, and a set of transnational
structures of governance including the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, all
operating pretty much without inspection – that’s part of their beauty. I
mean, theoretically you can figure out what’s going on in the WTO, but
for 99.9 percent of the population it’s a total secret. This de facto world
government is coalescing around the system of economic power. That’s
pretty much the way nation-states developed around national economies,
and now it’s happening around the global economy. It’s a kind of quasi-
governmental structure, immune from public accountability or even public
awareness, serving the interests of global financial, industrial, service and
other institutions. These global institutions are of course nationally rooted
and rely heavily on state power – that they largely control – all that’s quite
important. They even have to be regularly bailed out by the national states,
meaning the domestic population; otherwise many of them would collapse.
So they are nationally rooted but global in character, and they need some
kind of organizing structure around them. That’s what this entire network
is about, and why there are major attacks on democracy as well as markets.
If you look at the Uruguay Round and other recent negotiations,
you find a mixture of liberalization and protectionism, very carefully
World Orders, Old and New 31
crafted to serve the needs of its primary constituents (mainly investors).
The protectionist measures, as you know better than I do, are very
much discussed in India, primarily because of the likely impact of the
new intellectual property rights regime, a highly protectionist measure
designed to destroy things like the Indian pharmaceutical industry, so
that drug prices can shoot up, and so on and so forth. That’s the way
these things are crafted and they make perfect sense for that reason – they
are serving the interests of the people who are designing them. These
institutions have no legitimacy, and they are all fundamentally weak.
They could be broken down by concerted popular action, but again that
involves understanding what is going on and being willing to dedicate
oneself to change it.
Question: What are your comments on so-called economic liberalization in India?
Chomsky: I don’t feel competent to talk about the specific case of India.
But we can see what happened in history and elsewhere. There are regular
consequences of this so-called economic liberalization. For one thing,
it’s not liberalization. It’s a mixture of liberalization and protection and
subsidy, a kind of complicated transfer of resources and power. The effects
are pretty marked. They often lead to reasonable macroeconomic statistics,
so you get these economic miracles, but also to consistent decline in the
social and economic health of a large majority of the population. And great
success for a sector that’s connected with international capital, and so on
and so forth. Those are very consistent effects through Latin America and
Africa, and I presume the same applies here in India.
Question: With the end of the Cold War and the coming into being of a multipolar
world, the US’s self-proclaimed role is to continue to lead even through a decline in
its economic competitiveness, which affects its ability to dictate global outcomes...
Chomsky: I’m not sure what the question is, though the picture is certainly a
common and understandable one. It’s partly true, but partly misleading. For
instance, when you talk of US economic decline you have to be rather cautious.
Whether this is happening is a matter of definition. It depends on what you
mean by the United States. If you mean the geographical area, yes there
32 Democracy and Power
is an economic decline, for example the US share in world manufacturing
has declined, there is a big trade deficit, and so on. On the other hand, if by
US you mean the goods and services produced by US-based capital, then
you get totally different results. If you look at US-based manufacturing
corporations, their share in global production has not declined; in fact, it has
probably increased. If you recalculate the US trade balance, as the Commerce
Department recently did, by looking at exports of US corporations from
overseas branches and affiliates as US exports, the US has a positive trade
balance, not a trade deficit. From the point of view of the rulers, that’s the
way to do it. The Wall Street Journal has pointed that out. The people who are
doing the bookkeeping for the transnationals do not care about the national
border. They care about what their corporation is doing. If it’s exporting
from Brazil, that’s as good as if it’s exporting from Nevada, and the same is
true globally. So, if by US you mean the people who run the show in the US,
the US economy is not declining, in fact it may well be expanding its power.
Similarly, the multipolar system appears in a different light if you look at
the linkages across the big blocs, say Japan and the US and Europe. They are
very closely interlinked at the level of real power, in all sorts of complicated
ways, and those are the things that matter for people who run the show. If
you think that through, you get a different picture; it’s a complicated story,
but I think that’s the way to look at it.
Question: Countries tend to favor the status quo as long as they perceive
themselves as beneficiaries of it. They want change when they are on the other side.
Even Indian criticism of the present discriminatory arrangement of the Security
Council might change if India were made a permanent member. So it’s basically a
question of which side one is on.
Chomsky: But I don’t think one should talk of things like India as relevant
entities in these matters. Here I think we should at least recognize what was
obvious to, say, Adam Smith about two hundred years ago – that nations
aren’t entities. They are divided. As he put it, the “principal architects of
policy” will make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended
to,” whatever the impact on others. He was talking about England, where
the principal architects of policy were the merchants and manufacturers.
His point was that policy is made by the merchants and manufacturers,
and they’re making sure that they do fine, however grievous the impact
World Orders, Old and New 33
on the people of England. That generalizes, and unless you accept those
elementary truisms (ideas that later came to be called class analysis, but
were trivialities two hundred years ago), you can’t even talk realistically
about the world. So for most of the people of India, does it matter if India
is a member of the Security Council? What difference will it make? If they
have a seat in the Security Council, then they’ll do what the US tells them to
do in the Security Council instead of somewhere else. To ninety percent of
the people of India, it doesn’t make any difference. Many probably won’t
even know about it. So, who cares? I mean, there are big problems in the
UN, but they don’t have anything much to do with who has a seat in the
Security Council.
I really feel that people should think about the questions quite differently.
The framework of the discussion is part of the technique of control of opinion,
by which power remains stable. You should always ask yourselves, like you
do in the sciences, whether the framework of discussion is acceptable. Most
of the time, it’s completely wrong; it’s designed to confuse, and control, and
marginalize. If you just think the problem through, it appears in a new light.
So there are problems with the UN, but the question is not who are the
permanent members in the Security Council. The obvious question to ask
is why there should be any. Well, the system was designed to make sure
that the superpowers at that time, and this primarily meant the US, would
run the show completely. That’s part of what is wrong about the UN. But
changing the names of the placards isn’t going to change that fact.
Question: The leadership of the world has moved from the Netherlands to Britain
to the US, and perhaps Japan next. One thing they share, one component of this
global leadership since the industrial revolution, is the exploitation of nature
through gross materialism (and thus development). How long can the earth survive
that exploitation? Hasn’t the time come for the historical struggle for existence to
give way to cooperation and coexistence?
Chomsky: Well, I don’t really think that Japan is going to be the next big
power center. We could discuss that. However, the general point certainly
has something right about it, but that is only a concern for people, not for
those who make decisions. If you are, say, running a business and you
want to stay in this business, you can’t be paying attention to whether the
civilization is going to survive twenty years from now. You have to be paying
34 Democracy and Power
attention to what the profits are going to be tomorrow, and if you don’t pay
attention to that, somebody else will eliminate you. That’s the nature of a
partially competitive system. There is some degree of competition in the
system, and to the extent that competition exists, it drives people towards
making short-term decisions which are quite irrational, in human terms.
So these problems are definitely real. Global warming, for example, is not a
joke. It could flood large parts of India, it’s perfectly conceivable. Scientists
don’t know, they can just guess, but it could be really bad. But those things
cannot be the concern of elements within the system that are seeking to
maximize short-term gains. Therefore, they have to be the concern of
someone else, and that concern can be implemented only in so far as
unaccountable power is dissolved. If it remains in force, these problems
will not be dealt with. And they are not trivial problems. If they are not
dealt with in the near future, we may be faced with irreversible disaster.
Question: How do you explain the Sino-US collaboration in the 1960s and 1970s?
Chomsky: This is not a big problem. After gaining independence in the
1940s, China was interested in collaboration with the West. And the West
would have accepted it on the same terms as Truman would have accepted
collaboration with Russia, meaning we get our way eighty-five percent of
the time, with China opened up to western penetration, investment and
access to cheap labor and resources and so on. Within the US, there was a
conflict in the 1950s, an important conflict about how to deal with China.
You know the issue was a kind of hawk-dove conflict. Both groups had
the same goal – to reintegrate China into the western-dominated world
system. But the question was – do you do it better with a soft touch or a
hard line? So should we be very hostile to China, drive it into an alliance
with the Russians and smash them all up, or should we entice China into
our system by trade and commerce or some other means? There are some
good academic studies on this. It was a big issue in the 1950s. But by the
1960s the softer line was beginning to prevail. And incidentally, just to show
how little the political labels mean, remember it was implemented by the
hawks, namely Nixon and Kissinger. They’re the ones who shifted policy
towards incorporating China into the US system in the soft manner. And
this happened to coincide well with things that were going on in China. So
you get this collaboration. It was partly related to Great Power problems as
World Orders, Old and New 35
well. The Sino-Soviet conflict was always real, real even back in the 1940s,
and it had become quite severe by the early 1960s. So I don’t see much
problem in explaining that.
Question: How do you envisage the trajectory of “socialism” now? Once the
rotten apple gets power, may it not become as imperialistic and interventionist as
the US is argued to be?
Chomsky: Well, first of all I think that putting the word “socialism” in
quotes is quite appropriate. The Soviet Union claimed to be “socialist” and
“democratic.” It was about as socialist as it was democratic. The West laughed
properly at it being a “people’s democracy,” but it happily applauded the
self-image of socialism because that’s a good way to defame socialism. But
both terms were equally accurate. The first thing that Lenin and Trotsky did
when they took power in 1917 was to dismantle every socialist institution
that had begun to develop spontaneously in the pre-revolutionary period.
So factory councils, Soviets, everything was demolished. It was done on
quite principled grounds. They were orthodox Marxists of a particular
type; from their point of view, it didn’t make sense for socialism to come
to a pre-industrial society. The historical role of capitalism, according to
this story, is to develop the industrial system in a cruel but efficient fashion.
And then socialism comes along and makes it democratic and free and so
on, so there’s no place for socialism in Russia, a backward peasant society
for which they had mostly contempt. They were carrying out a holding
action, waiting for the revolution to take place in Germany – the advanced
capitalist country where it was supposed to come about. There was an
uprising, but it was crushed. They were left with power. Lenin at once
turned to state capitalist methods (the new economic program), believing
that socialism was just not possible, and nothing changed.
There was nothing socialist about the Soviet Union; in fact, it was one of
the least socialist countries in the world, if socialism means what it always
meant, namely at least workers’ control over production. I mean, that’s
the beginning, and you had more of it in the West than you had in the
Soviet Union, so there was no question of socialism. Naturally, it was a
power system. It became imperialistic, like any other power system, so
the prospects for socialism, I think, improved after the fall of the Soviet
Union, just as they improved with the fall of fascism. A barrier to socialism
36 Democracy and Power
had been removed, namely another system of autocracy and domination
had been eliminated. Well, if you’re a socialist surely you should celebrate
that. Part of the victory of western doctrine has been to reinforce the belief,
the crazy belief, that the system was socialist – so that people who are
committed to socialist values are left kind of confused and disturbed and
upset by the collapse of the Soviet Union, though in fact, it was one of the
barriers to the achievement of socialism.
Question: In this US-invented new world order, how much place does the
Huntingtonian thesis of a “clash of civilizations” occupy?
Chomsky: Well, with the collapse of the Cold War, a technique of doctrinal
control collapsed. Until that point, any rotten thing that you did to the
general population or abroad could be explained as an “unfortunate
deviation from our traditional benevolence because of the Cold War.” First
of all, it’s not the US. Let’s go back to this notion of the “US-invented new
world order.” Actually, the phrase “new world order” appears over and
over again – it appeared in 1990, actually twice in 1990, and here’s another
example of the influence of controlled opinion. In 1990, the term “new
world order” was used for the first time in many years. It was used by the
South Commission in their very important book, The Challenge of the South –
that’s the Commission that represents (more or less) the former non-aligned
countries (something that India ought to know about given its history). The
South Commission came out with an important volume, in which it called
for a new world order based on global justice, and equity, and so on. Well,
that one went over like a lead balloon. I wrote about it, and looked hard for
something else, but could find virtually nothing. Who cares about studies
produced by an organization devoted to interests and concerns of the vast
majority of the world’s population, but not its privileged and powerful
sectors? A couple of months later, George Bush announced a “new world
order,” which he defined (to his credit) very simply: he said that in the new
world order “what we say goes.” That was while bombs were falling on
Baghdad. So there are two versions of the new world order. It’s not a US
notion – it became a US notion because the voice of most of the population
of the world never made it through the doctrinal barriers. I don’t think the
South Commission study, which was quite perceptive and interesting, was
ever reviewed in the US. I don’t know whether it was reviewed in India.
But that was the first call for a new world order.
World Orders, Old and New 37
Okay, what about the Huntington thesis? First, the doctrinal system
needs something new with the convenient Cold War pretexts gone. In
fact, right through the 1980s, when it was pretty obvious that the Russians
weren’t going to be around for too long, there was an increasingly desperate
search for some alterative technique of controlling the population. So if
you look through the 1980s, the threat was changing. It was international
terrorism, or crazed Arabs, or Hispanic narco-traffickers, or one thing
or another. Huntington is a big thinker, the Professor of “the Science of
Government” at Harvard. He came along with Clash of Civilizations. It has
a sort of nice ring to it, though it didn’t mean anything, though with some
effort it could be created. There is no more of a clash of civilizations today
than there ever was. He’s talking about an alleged conflict between the
US (between the western civilization) and Islam, but if you look at the
connections, they cross all over the place. One of the leading US allies is
the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world, namely Saudi
Arabia. As long as the rulers of Saudi Arabia understand what their duty
is, namely to ensure that the profits from oil production go to the West,
they can be whatever they like – Islamic fundamentalists or whatever they
please. The most populous Islamic state is Indonesia, which has been a
close friend and ally ever since Suharto came to power with a huge mass
slaughter of mostly landless peasants, also destroying the mass-based
political party that represented their interests, and turned the country into a
“paradise for investors.” The Reaganites gathered the most extreme radical
fundamentalists they could find anywhere in the world, brought them to
Afghanistan, armed and trained them – not to defend Afghanistan, which
could have been legitimate, but to harm the Russians. They left Afghanistan
to their tender mercies, once the task was over. Meanwhile, the Reaganites
supported Zia ul-Haq as he brought extreme Islamic fundamentalism to
Pakistan. They even pretended they didn’t know he was building nuclear
weapons.
Let’s continue with the 1980s. Well, the great enemy of the US
in Central America was the Catholic Church. Large segments of the
Catholic Church in Latin America had undertaken what they called the
“preferential option for the poor.” They were organizing peasants and
helping them to set up base communities and peasant associations. That
is impermissible: it might lead to democracy and desperately needed
social reform in these horror chambers. Accordingly, it set off a massive
campaign of state terrorism effectively based in Washington. The decade
opened with the murder of an Archbishop by elements closely aligned
38 Democracy and Power
with the US, and ended with the murder of six leading Jesuit intellectuals
by an elite battalion armed and trained by the US. And in between, you
had very much the same story. So, was that a clash of civilizations? The
US versus Catholicism? No, it was the usual clash, in fact the old North-
South clash. Here was a part of the service areas which was trying to seek
an independent role – that’s not allowed. They can be Catholic, or Islamic,
or secular democrats, whatever you want. It’s the independence and
particularly the danger of successful development on an independent
path – that’s just not acceptable. So I don’t see any reason to believe in
any clash of civilizations. There is just the old clash that always has to be
disguised. It has to be disguised, because however well you understand
it internally, the general public isn’t supposed to understand it. In fact,
Huntington himself has been very clear about that. He’s pointed out
frankly and honestly that during the whole Cold War period, US military
intervention abroad often had to be justified by pretending that there
was a conflict with the Russians, to mask it from the general population.
He said that – in approximately those words – and it’s accurate. And he
understands that well enough to understand it in the case of the new
clash of civilizations.
Question: If power rules the roost and it’s too bad (the leading examples are
the USA and the USSR), then are you welcoming Hitler? If not, what is your
alternative?
Chomsky: That’s an interesting array of alternatives. The question is which
gangster should order us around? There is another alternative – no gangster
orders us around. We’ll get rid of all of them, and try to move towards
democracy. That’s the alternative that I would suggest. It’s a pretty obvious
one – there is nothing profound about it. And it is within reach.
2. The Vicissitudes of
Democracy: Part 1*
The current period, as you know, is commonly described as a period of
unprecedented flourishing of democracy and markets. Let me begin by
clarifying my own point of view on this general topic. In my view, the most
striking feature of the current period is not the flourishing of democracy and
markets, but a major attack on democracy, human rights and even markets.
One aspect of this is a kind of experiment, an unprecedented experiment,
to extend to the rich industrial societies (primarily the US, England, the
Anglo-American societies) something like the structural model of the Third
World. By this, I mean societies that are sharply stratified into a small
sector of extreme wealth and power, a huge mass of people who are living
somewhere between unpleasantness and utter misery, and another group
of people who are simply superfluous for profit-making, and therefore
have no rights, and have to be disposed of in some fashion or other.
You can’t take a walk in an American city or most British ones without
recognizing the Third World. Things look somewhat different, because
these cities are obviously much richer. But the structure is there, and is
being imposed by conscious social policy. It has nothing to do with the
laws of nature, or the market and its infinite wisdom, or various things to
which this is attributed. It is perfectly deliberate social policy, making use
of institutional possibilities that have existed for some years, and are being
used for this purpose. Well, I want to fill in some of the pieces of that point
of view – but let me begin with the concept of democracy, which I think is
at the heart of the whole matter.
* Lecture delivered at the Delhi School of Economics on 12 January 1996.
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.02
40 Democracy and Power
Democracy, like many other terms of political discourse, has become
so abused in recent years as to be virtually useless. Recall, for instance, the
“people’s democracies” of eastern Europe. Recognizing the absurdity of that
use of the term democracy, one might be surprised by a recent article by one
of the outstanding students of contemporary American democracy, Robert
McChesney (professor at the University of Wisconsin), who writes that in
the second half of the twentieth century, only the former USSR, among the
industrial countries, approached the US for its level of mass depoliticization.
He says it’s one of the reigning paradoxes in social theory, since the US has
perhaps the most solidly established democratic institutions of any country
and is sometimes even described as “an inspiration for the triumph of
democracy in our time” (I’m quoting the editors of The New Republic, at
what’s considered the liberal end of the mainstream spectrum). Well, the
vast majority of the American population disagrees with the standard elite
perception and accepts the rather dim view that McChesney describes. So
eighty percent of the population in the US believe that the government, in
the wording of the polls, works for the few and the special interests, not
for the people. This proportion has sharply increased, from a fairly steady
fifty percent that have given that answer for some years now; similarly,
over eighty percent regard the economic system as inherently unfair (in the
wording of the polls), and half the population thinks that both the political
parties should be disbanded. Voting is low; it has been declining through
the years.
The same is true of participation in the kinds of secondary organizations
that are the foundation of any functioning democracy. That’s part of a more
general and striking phenomenon that Harvard political scientist Robert
Putnam has called the strange disappearance of civic America. In the past
thirty years of increasing cynicism and alienation, people’s participation in
any form of social activity has declined by about half. That’s a substantial
fall, and it includes everything, from participation in various political and
social groups to parent-teacher associations, listening to talks, even joining
bowling leagues – it’s fallen very radically. There are, in fact, counter-
trends, very clear and significant, but they are not studied much because
they have a dissident character, so they’re outside the domain of inquiry
for a respectable study. Nevertheless, the general phenomenon is quite real,
and it is true to say, as Putnam does, that civil society has pretty much
collapsed – a dramatic and striking fact. The mass depoliticization that
McChesney is talking about is part of that.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 41
Quite generally, public attitudes differ substantially from the way they
are portrayed. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory,
which was called a popular mandate for conservatives. And indeed, he
was chosen as a “real conservative” by a section of the voters, actually four
percent of the voters, which means that two percent of the electorate chose
him because he was a real conservative. That’s what is called a landslide
victory for conservatives in contemporary rhetoric. About sixty percent of
voters hoped that his legislative programs would not be enacted. In general,
Reagan’s popularity was mostly a media fabrication – it was nothing special,
and by 1992 he was ranking right with Nixon as the most unpopular living
ex-President. Public opinion studies, right through the so-called period
of conservatism, showed a steady drift towards vaguely New Deal style –
roughly “social democratic welfare state” – liberalism, even willingness to
accept higher taxes if they are used for public social spending (for health,
education, environmental protection, helping the poor, and so on). The
major priority of the population, steadily in the polls, is for stimulative
activities on the part of the government to create decent employment – that
has been the highest priority and remains so. All these attitudes persist
without substantial change. However, these concerns and attitudes of the
general population are simply not articulated in the political arena. The
divorce has always been significant, and by now, it’s dramatic. That’s one
reason why voting has been so limited and declining, and also why it’s so
skewed toward the wealthy (the richer you are, the more likely you are to
vote). Another aspect of this is that political campaigns are pretty much
a form of marketing, which nobody takes seriously, except the political
commentators, newspapers, and intellectuals, who are paid to take it
seriously – the population doesn’t.
These factors were very dramatic in the latest election (November
1994). Quite regularly, campaign spending is a pretty good predictor of
electoral victory. In 1994, you could predict who was going to win with
ninety percent accuracy if you simply asked who spent more than his or
her opponent. The voting was skewed toward the wealthy, even more than
usual. That probably accounts for most of the shift in votes from 1992 when
Clinton won. This 1994 election is called a conservative landslide – in fact,
the percentage shift was about two percent. About twenty percent of the
electorate, which means a bare majority of participants (participants are
a little over a third of the population), voted for the Republicans. One out
of six voters considered the election to be an affirmation of the Republican
42 Democracy and Power
agenda. Only a quarter of the population had ever heard of the famous
“Contract with America,” the Republican agenda. This was actually a PR
stunt, cooked up at the last minute, and a large majority of the population
opposed its individual provisions when they were asked about them. The
leader of this “political earthquake,” as it is called, Newt Gingrich, was
quite unpopular at the time, and his rankings have dropped very severely
since. He is now one of the most unpopular figures in American politics.
The people who chose to participate in the 1994 elections were mostly
voting the rascals out, and that’s the way it usually is. People don’t really
care what their stand is, just get rid of them. Anybody can do better. There
were a few candidates, not many, who tried to mobilize the traditional
popular Democratic coalition (labor, minorities, the poor, etc.). They
actually did quite well in the 1994 elections. The ones who got smashed
were the Clinton New Democrats, whom the population regards, rightly,
as less extreme Republicans – they lost very badly. If you take a look at
non-voters, which is a majority of the population, their opinion profiles
match very closely with those of voters who voted Democratic. But there’s
just very little participation on the part of people who would support a
populist left coalition committed to equitable economic growth and
political democracy, if such an opinion were allowed to intrude into the
political arena, which it is not. In its absence, many people are turning to
religious fanaticism, which is quite extraordinary in the US, probably the
most fundamentalist country in the world, more than Iran, I assume. Cults
of every imaginable kind, including paramilitary organizations, all sorts of
irrationality are flourishing. These are pretty ominous developments, they
have precedents, which we remember without much pleasure, and, by now,
these developments are beginning to concern even corporate executives,
who otherwise approve very highly of the actions of the Gingrich army and
their dedication to the rich and privileged.
The new Congress, claiming this popular mandate, moved very quickly
to dismantle sixty years of social spending. This is a dramatic illustration
of the paradox of mass depoliticization within well-established institutions
of formal democracy. In general, government policy and public attitudes
are quite at variance, but, as I said, the discrepancy in the last few years
has been really startling. When this conservative mandate was allegedly
granted last November, about sixty percent of the population wanted an
increase in social spending. Large majorities are in favor of high social
spending for health, education, environmental protection, and so on.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 43
There is hardly a single issue on which policy even resembles public
opinion. A striking example relates to balancing the budget. That’s the
central issue in Washington; as you probably know, the government’s
been closed down for a couple of months. It’s the highest priority for both
political parties – they agree about balancing the budget and differ only on
the time frame, say, whether it should be seven years or seven and a half
years. The numbers change around a little bit, and so on. If you listen to the
US press or radio, you hear endlessly that Americans voted for a balanced
budget – that is false. Or, let’s be more precise ‒ half false. The US is a very
heavily polled society. Business wants to keep its finger on the public pulse.
But polls have to be read very carefully. In their design, there’s usually
one set of questions for headline writers, and another set of questions for
people who want to know how to design propaganda properly. They want
to know what the people are thinking; and the budget is a good case. There
is a question that says, “Would you like to have the budget balanced?”
and everybody says, “sure.” It’s like saying, would you like your debts
magically eliminated? Then comes the next question, which is the serious
question: would you like to have your debts eliminated if it means you lose
your house, car, and refrigerator, and your children can’t go to school? And
everybody says, “no.” It’s the same with that question here. If people are
asked, “Do you want the budget balanced under any realistic conditions?”
‒ an overwhelming majority oppose it. But that, as I said, is for people who
want to know how to package and market things. The first question, do
you want the budget balanced, is for the headline writers, and they aren’t
lying when they say that people want their debts magically eliminated.
In fact, what the population continues to want are stimulative programs
for job growth, the growth of decent jobs. The standard welfare package
remains very popular.
Now, there remains a section of the population that thinks that
balancing the budget is the highest priority. It’s five percent. That’s the
same as the proportion that think that homelessness is the highest priority.
However, that five percent happens to include the people who count in the
political system, namely the corporate and financial community. So if you
read the business press, say BusinessWeek, there’s a headline saying that
“American business has spoken, Balance the budget.” That’s based on a poll
of business executives, and when business speaks, the political class listens,
the intellectuals say what they’re supposed to say, and the press tells you
that’s the story, which it is ‒ for the people who matter.
44 Democracy and Power
Why does business want the budget balanced? As an economic policy, it
really does not make a lot of sense. Aside from conforming to very narrow
short-term profit interests, budget balancing is mainly a weapon that can
be used against social programs. These have been declining quite severely
for some years. There was something called a war on poverty, which is
supposed to have failed, but what’s not usually mentioned is that the war
was barely even a skirmish that lasted about two to three years, and it
ended with Nixon, who was the last liberal President. By the early 1970s,
welfare programs were declining very sharply, and with quite harmful
effects. Part of the Third World character of much of urban society is the
result of that. Of the current debt, about eighty percent comes from the
Reagan years. The Reagan administration succeeded, within a few years,
in turning the nation from the world’s leading creditor nation into the
world’s leading debtor, and that was quite consciously intended as a
weapon against social spending. The weapon can now be used to ensure
that government programs are focused even more narrowly on the welfare
of the people who count – the rich and the privileged, who have a huge
welfare state which not only remains, but is increasing without any concern
for balancing the budget. I’ll return to those steps. But they should, they’re
intended to, and doubtless will, increase the huge profits of the past years.
The business press is utterly euphoric about the prospects and describes
them as dazzling, stupendous, and so on.
The US has been a business-run society pretty much from its origins,
and the scale is impressive. Every year, Fortune, the leading business
monthly, publishes a list called Fortune 500 – the 500 biggest corporations.
This year, the Fortune 500 controlled two-thirds of the GDP, as well as a
very substantial portion of the international economy, and that’s why we
know so much about public attitudes. These guys who run the place want
to know what the public is thinking. One of their major activities, in fact, is
marketing. About a trillion dollars a year are spent simply on marketing –
that’s one-seventh of GDP. Its practitioners understand very well (and they
are kind enough to tell us, if we read their publications to one another) that
marketing is mainly a matter of manipulation and control. That doesn’t
mean only creating artificial wants and making people buy goods they
don’t need or want; it also involves marketing ideas and attitudes. The
PR industry is a huge industry. Its leading figure was Edward Bernays,
who was incidentally a good Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal. In the
1920s, he described the “engineering of consent” as the “very essence of
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 45
the democratic process,” “the freedom to persuade and to suggest.” Now,
of course, as you recognize, freedom happens to be concentrated in a few
hands. But that’s just the notion of free society that we all have drilled into
us from childhood. There are many illustrations of this. One of the most
striking is the history of the electronic media in the United States. The US
is unusual, perhaps unique, in that radio was very quickly handed over
to private corporations with scarcely any gesture toward public interest.
It was interesting to watch the discussion about it. Even progressives or
so-called civil libertarians regarded this giveaway of radio to private power
as a victory for democracy – as power to the people, namely RCA, GE, and
so on. The same was true about TV without even any discussion. Just a
couple of weeks ago, the internet, which, of course, was publicly created,
was handed over to private power as well. What about the print media?
They aren’t controlled by private power, rather, they are huge corporations,
parts of bigger conglomerates – they are in business, like everything else.
They sell a product – the product is audiences, which they sell to other
businesses, called advertisers. The elite press, which sets the agenda for
most of the rest, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, is made
up of big corporations which sell privileged audiences to other businesses.
And, not surprisingly, the picture of the world that emerges from this
interaction reflects the interests of the sellers, the buyers and the product.
It would be pretty amazing if it didn’t. This non-surprising fact has been
documented beyond serious dispute, and the effects are often pretty
remarkable.
It also comes as no big surprise that “politics is the shadow cast on society
by big business” – I’m quoting America’s leading twentieth- century social
philosopher John Dewey, who added quite realistically that “attenuation of
the shadow will not change the substance.” And in its own way, the public
grasps this, as the facts mentioned earlier indicate; although with mass
depoliticization, the collapse of civil society, and narrowly constrained
doctrinal institutions, public perceptions are often very confused and quite
irrational. On the other hand, the business world has tight organization,
ample resources, and a high level of class consciousness. They see
themselves as fighting a bitter class war, and have done so for a long time.
Business has long understood that what it calls the “public mind” is “the
only serious danger confronting the company,” AT&T in this case, but
the AT&T corporate executive, quoted early in the century, is expressing
a much more general view, among those whom Adam Smith called “the
46 Democracy and Power
masters of mankind.” The people who spend trillions of dollars a year
in marketing ideas, as well as goods, have long understood the lesson
expressed by Bernays, who wrote an influential manual for the rising PR
industry in 1928, in which he explained that “the conscious and intelligent
manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in democratic society... It is the intelligent minorities
which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.”
The intelligent minorities aren’t intelligent because they have high IQs
or anything like that, but because they have the good sense to serve the
proper masters – that’s the criterion of intelligence, and, of course, it’s not
a special feature of the US. The term propaganda was used quite openly in
those more frank days. Today, after the Nazis and the Second World War,
people don’t like the word, so they call it something else. Back in the 1920s
and 1930s, it was straightforwardly called “propaganda,” which it is.
To control the public mind, you need to know what people are thinking,
and what their attitudes are. This is the reason for the heavy polling – it’s
a side benefit for the people who want to know the truth, because we
can look at the business journals where the polls are, and find out what
people are thinking. So take, say, this “Contract with America,” which is
run through Congress, and it’s going to have a big effect on American life.
It’s constantly described as poll-driven; they say Washington is simply
responding to public will in a pluralist democracy. Here we have another
paradox – polls show clearly that the public overwhelmingly opposes the
policies that are enacted under public pressure. Social spending has been
cut, when people want it to go up, and military spending is going up, when
people are opposed to that by six to one – that’s the last thing that people
want raised in all the polls.
How can the Republican agenda then be called poll-driven? That’s not
false, and the answer was given by the polling specialist of the Gingrich
Republicans, Frank Luntz, and reported in the business press under the
headline “GOP pollsters never measure popularity of ‘Contract’, only
slogans.” Luntz told reporters that a majority of Americans supported
each of the ten parts of the Contract. What he meant, he conceded, is that
a majority liked the slogans that were being used to package it. So the
public opposes slashing the health system, but it favors “protecting the
health system.” Slashing the health system is called “protecting the health
system,” and it turns out that people favor that, and so on, down the line.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 47
All this is quite natural in a society dominated by institutions of private
power, which are devoted to undermining the threat of democracy for
perfectly good reasons. That’s the resolution of the apparent paradox
of mass depoliticization within democratic institutions. In fact, it’s the
resolution that’s pointed out in the article I mentioned earlier. McChesney
was reviewing an important book by an old friend of mine who died
recently, an Australian social scientist named Alex Carey. The book
is called Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. Carey pioneered the study of
corporate propaganda, and his book is a collection of essays, which are
largely unknown, just as the topic itself is rarely studied. Actually, the
first academic study of corporate propaganda appeared in the US just a
few months ago, which is a very remarkable fact. There is no doubt that
corporate propaganda is a leading feature of modern society and culture,
but it is almost never studied, and the reason is clear enough. The shadow
that’s cast over the political system by private power extends to every other
part of the social order as well. The last thing that those who cast it want is
for people to understand what they’re up to, and that’s understood in the
political science community as well. So there’s a position at Harvard, one
of my favorite titles, called the Professorship of the Science of Government,
which is held by Samuel Huntington, a good source of quotes, who wrote
an important book called American Politics, in which he pointed out that
“the architects of power in the United States must create a force that can
be felt, but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark.
Exposed to the sunlight, it begins to evaporate.” This is a useful message,
but for the general public, different mantras are preferred.
Alex Carey opens his most important essay by formulating and at once
resolving the paradox of depoliticization under democracy, and he puts
it succinctly and correctly. Carey writes that “the twentieth century has
been characterized by three developments of great political importance:
the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth
of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy.” And that conclusion extends very broadly, it extends to much
of what reaches the general public through the media and the journals of
opinion, and, in fact, it extends to a good deal more of scholarship than
its practitioners like to admit. Individual attitudes remain resilient, as the
polls I mentioned earlier indicate, and remarkably so, given the fact that
they receive no support. People don’t hear them; people just feel them,
48 Democracy and Power
and they’re held in isolation, but nevertheless, that propaganda offensive
has taken its toll. The striking fanaticism in the country (cults, religious
fanaticism and that sort of thing) is one effect of the success of corporate
propaganda, as is the collapse of civil society. The people who would have
been working, say, sixty years ago, to build industrial unions are now
joining paramilitary organizations. Look at the people who are accused of
blowing up the federal building, take a look at their social profiles, class
backgrounds, and so on. They’re much the same people who would’ve
been working to create the CIO sixty years ago. They are angry, and
that’s understandable (their lives have fallen apart), but they are also very
confused. So over eighty percent of the population thinks that working
people don’t have influence on what goes on, but only twenty percent
think that unions don’t have enough influence. In fact, about forty percent
consider them too influential – workers don’t have enough influence, but
unions have too much influence. That’s the general view.
Take NAFTA, the seriously mislabeled North American Free Trade
Agreement (the only thing that’s true about that description is that it had
to do with North America). NAFTA was strongly opposed by the general
public, despite a huge propaganda barrage. However, the same people who
opposed NAFTA condemned the unions that were lobbying for, very much,
the positions that they held. Although of course, they really couldn’t know
that, because the positions of the labor movement were simply excluded
from the media, in pretty remarkable ways.
Take foreign aid. It’s supposed to be very unpopular, and, on the surface,
it does look very unpopular. However, when you look a little more closely,
you discover several things. Firstly, people vastly overestimate how much
foreign aid the US gives, and when they’re asked how much they think the
US should give, they say more than it actually is. People are even willing
to accept higher taxes if there is foreign aid that goes to the poor. They
correctly understand that it doesn’t, even if they don’t know the details.
They do oppose foreign aid, but they want it to be higher than it is. And
certainly, they don’t know that the US foreign aid program is the most
miserly in the developed world. It virtually disappears if you eliminate
the biggest component, which happens to go to a rich society. Very few
people know that foreign aid is basically a form of export promotion. In
most countries, foreign aid is aid from the taxpayer to domestic-based
corporations that happens to pass through some other country, which may
incidentally benefit from it or may not.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 49
The same is true of welfare at home. People vastly overestimate its scale.
They think that the government has the responsibility to help the poor, but
they want welfare cut back – very similar to the attitude towards unions.
And, of course, very few people are aware that the Pentagon system is
primarily a welfare system for the rich. What has happened? What has
happened is that people are inundated with propaganda (including movies,
TV, newspapers) that depicts unions as enemies of the worker, black
mothers on welfare breeding like rabbits and driving Cadillacs, liberal
elites and petty bureaucrats stealing money and interfering in our lives,
and the whole familiar refrain. All of that has left attitudes pretty much
unchanged, but it has left people very confused.
The current mood is conventionally and accurately described as
the mood of anti-politics. That says – get the rascals out, get rid of the
government. Intensive propaganda has succeeded in erasing from people’s
minds an understanding of the most elementary aspect of contemporary
reality, namely that politics may be bad but the reason is that it’s the
shadow cast by business over society. And naturally, you’re not supposed
to see what casts the shadow, only the shadow. That’s what the propaganda
focuses on, and it makes good sense for those who cast the shadow to focus
people’s attention on the government. Propaganda focuses on the evils
of the government, because one of the good things about government is
that, at least in principle, and sometimes even in fact, it can be influenced
by the general public. That’s not true of the private tyrannies (basically,
totalitarian institutions) that cast the shadow. They can’t be influenced
even in principle. So, to the extent that power can be shifted to them, the
threat of democracy is reduced.
This has been going on for a long time. After the First World War,
Woodrow Wilson carried out a Red Scare, which was quite something. It
decimated the labor movement and pretty much eliminated independent
thought. At that point, the business world, and the self-designated
“intelligent minorities” who serve its interests, thought that the game was
over, that we’ve reached the end of history. Well, a couple of years later,
there was an unexpected and substantial popular mobilization, which
demonstrated that the euphoria over the end of history was wrong – not
the first time, and not the last. Business reacted to this with considerable
alarm. In the mid-1930s, when the US was kind of being brought into the
industrial world with standard welfare programs, business publications
warned of what they called “the hazards facing the industrialists in the
50 Democracy and Power
newly realized political power of the masses.” Incidentally, the tone of this
should not surprise you. Business publications read like vulgar Marxist
tracts, with the values reversed but the same kind of terminology. Words like
“the masses” can’t be used in general discourse today, except by business.
So they were worried about the newly realized power of the masses: “we
are definitely heading for adversity” unless their thinking is directed to
more proper channels. This is the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM); its PR budget increased by a factor of twenty between 1934 and
1937, right at the time when the New Deal measures were being passed.
And that hazard only grew in severity with the Second World War, as the
US population joined the social democratic currents that were sweeping
the better part of the world, and the business world knew it. One leading
PR firm warned, in 1947, that our present economic system and the men
who run it had three years, maybe five at the outside, to resell our preferred
way of life as against competing systems. The chairman of the PR advisory
committee for the NAM called for a huge campaign to win “the everlasting
battle for the minds of men” and to “stem the current drift towards
socialism.” The NAM distributed 18 million pamphlets from 1946 to 1950,
about forty percent of them to the workforce, as part of what the business
press described as an extensive program to indoctrinate employees. The
rest mostly went to students, community leaders, and business leaders.
Business propaganda was reaching about 70 million people, Fortune
editor Daniel Bell wrote at the time, along with other propaganda that he
called “staggering” and prodigious in its scale: by the early 1950s, about 20
million people a week were reported to be watching business-sponsored
films. Another PR executive explained that the entertainment industry
was enlisted for the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider
disrupting the harmony of the American way of life, and otherwise helping
to indoctrinate the citizens with the capitalist story. In fact, every aspect of
social life was targeted – schools, universities, churches, even recreational
programs. To indicate the scale, by 1954, one third of the material that
students were using in public schools was designed and funded by
business. At that time there still was a labor press, and it sought to combat
what it called the plan “to sell the American people on the virtues of big
business.” They recognized that the commercial media world would follow
the policy of “damning labor at every opportunity, while carefully glossing
over the sins of the banking and industrial magnates who really control
the nation.” Those are quotes from some of the 800 labor papers which,
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 51
at that time, still reached about 20-30 million people, and had survived
for about a hundred years. A hundred years earlier, they were more or
less on the scale of the capitalist press. In the 1950s they were seeking, in
their own words, to expose racial hatred and “all kinds of anti-democratic
words and deeds,” and to provide “antidotes for the worst poisons of the
kept press.” But, of course, working people entirely lacked the resources
to compete, and this independent press disappeared shortly afterwards,
and is forgotten from memory.
The story continues to the present, including the “concerted efforts” of
corporate America “to change the attitudes and values of workers” and
convert “worker apathy into corporate allegiance,” and Advertising Council
campaigns “saturating the media and reaching practically everybody,” as
the business press describes the campaigns. “Chairs of Free Enterprise”
and other measures have been initiated to subvert the educational system.
There is no time to review here the impressive array of measures that have
been deployed by a highly class-conscious business community, which has
always seen itself as fighting a bitter class war, and for whom cost is no
consideration. So effectively has functioning civil society been dismantled
that Congress can now ram through programs opposed by large majorities,
who are left in fear, anger, and hopelessness.
The achievement is real. Yale University labor historian David
Montgomery has pointed out that, “For working people, the most
important part of the Jeffersonian legacy was the shelter it provided to free
association, diversity of beliefs and behavior, and defiance of alleged social
superiors in society.” The structures of civil society “obstructed bourgeois
control of American life at every turn.” That is the basic motivation for the
unremitting campaigns to demolish the independent press and effective
forms of community solidarity, from trade unions to political clubs and
organizations. They have been conducted with passionate intensity and
considerable success.
The history of the labor movement is probably the most important part
of the story in the US. As you know, society’s working class organizations
have traditionally been the main mechanism by which ordinary people
have been able to pool their very limited resources and act in their own
common interests, which is the interest of the large majority – that’s
been a major factor in the extension of democracy and human rights.
US labor history is interesting. For one thing, it is very violent, more so
than in other industrial societies. It was not until the Great Depression in
52 Democracy and Power
the 1930s that elementary rights were won, and they have been steadily
eroded in the postwar years, very dramatically in the Reagan years. The
Reaganites openly fostered corporate crime, outright corporate crime, to
destroy the remnants of the industrial union years, as the business press,
incidentally, has recorded rather accurately. This idea of democracy as
a threat is not obscure. In the public domain, more exalted rhetoric is
preferred, but for the “intelligent minority” the idea is commonplace. So
at the time when Bernays was teaching the business world about the need
to manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses, one of the
leading public intellectuals, Walter Lippmann, was writing his influential
“Progressive Essays on Democracy,” in which he describes the new modes
of “manufacture of consent” as a revolution in the practice of democracy.
Like Bernays, Lippmann had served in the first government propaganda
organization, established by Woodrow Wilson to try to turn a mostly
pacifist population into jingoist fanatics and warmongers, a purpose in
which it was extremely successful. That feat impressed Lippmann, as it
impressed Bernays, and also others, among them Hitler, who writes
about it quite bitterly. Hitler felt that Germany was never able to combat
the powerful and effective Anglo-American propaganda systems, and he
vowed that, next time around, Germany would be ready to compete. Going
back to Lippmann, he develops a theory of democracy. The public, he says,
are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who must not be allowed to
intrude in the management of public affairs. They do have what he calls
a “function” in a democracy, namely “spectators” but not “participants.”
They are permitted to select, now and then, among responsible men. That
point was elaborated by one of the founders of modern political science,
leading liberal thinker Harold Lasswell. He has an entry on “propaganda”
in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (this is pre-war, they still used the word),
where he warns that we should not “succumb to democratic dogmatisms
about men being the best judges of their own interests” – they’re not. They
must be reduced to mass depoliticization for their own good.
These are very conventional ideas and they continue more recently. In
the 1970s, for instance, the first study of the Trilateral Commission was
devoted to what it called the “crisis of democracy” in the US, Europe, and
Japan (the trilateral regions). The crisis was very frankly explained. In the
1960s, large sections of the population that are usually passive and apathetic
began to organize and articulate their interests, and tried to get them into
the public arena and press for them. Well, if you’re naive, you might think
that’s democracy. If you are the intelligent minority, you understand that
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 53
this is a crisis of democracy that has to be overcome. People have to be
restored to passivity and obedience in the name of democracy. Therefore,
the Commission suggested mass depoliticization, perhaps even a return to
the good old days when “Truman had been able to run the country with
the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and
bankers,” so we had real democracy. That was a quote from the Professor
of Science of Government at Harvard. Maybe such nostalgia involves a
little bit of exaggeration, but he got the point right.
All the opinions that I’ve been sampling so far are from the democratic
end of the spectrum, the liberal end, in the American sense of the word
“liberal.” At the other extreme, you get reactionary ideas of the Reagan-
Gingrich variety (mislabeled “conservative”). They don’t agree that the
“ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” should even be spectators. That
is why they have such a fascination with secrecy, deceit, clandestine
operations and other methods to undermine the functioning of democracy.
Take, say, clandestine operations. The extent to which a country is involved
in clandestine operations is usually a pretty good measure of elite hatred of
democracy, because clandestine operations aren’t secret from everybody.
They are certainly not secret from the victims. They know all about it. Take
for example the huge clandestine operations that the Reagan administration
was running in Central America in the 1980s. Obviously, the people of
Central America knew all about it, people were getting slaughtered. They
were well known to the big international terrorist network that the US set
up. Remember that the US is a big player. It’s not like Libya. Libya may
hire individual terrorists, but the US hires terrorist states. That’s what you
do when you’re a big guy, so that the terrorist network included Taiwan,
Israel, England, Saudi Arabia – big terrorist states. They all knew about
it. In fact, the truth of the matter is that the clandestine operations were
even known to the press, but they were sort of behind enough clouds, so
that you could pretend shock and dismay over this terrible thing when
something leaked out. Well, that’s what these clandestine operations are
all about. They’re mostly to keep the domestic population in ignorance, out
of an understanding that the population is not going to be pleased if they
know about it. And the Reaganites went to extremes in this, as in other
methods of undermining democracy, because they don’t believe that the
public ought to be spectators.
There have been a lot of changes since (say) the days of David Ricardo,
but few in the mainstream disagree with Ricardo’s principle that the
franchise is okay as long as it is limited, in his words, “to that part of [the
54 Democracy and Power
people] which cannot be supposed to have any interest in overturning the
right of property.” And you need heavier restrictions, he said, if “limiting
the elective franchise to the very narrowest bounds” would guarantee
more “security for a good choice of representatives,” who have a proper
understanding of the rights of property – the main right. The fact that
unaccountable private power would undermine democracy is not new
either, that was well understood by classical liberal opinion. Thomas
Jefferson, for example, warned in his later years that the rising “banking
institutions and moneyed incorporations” would destroy the freedom
won in the American Revolution. They would become the “single and
splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions,
and moneyed incorporations,” which would enable the few to be “riding
and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry,”
destroying democracy and restoring a form of absolutism if given a free
hand, as indeed they were, to a degree that exceeded Jefferson’s worst
nightmares, although not through the expression of popular will. Those
corporations achieved their extraordinary power primarily through courts
and lawyers, acting in what we might call “technocratic insulation” from
the general public, to borrow some World Bank lingo. That’s what is
supposed to happen: in the end the governments are supposed to act in
technocratic insulation, so that the public doesn’t know what’s going on
and can’t get in the way. A few years after Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville,
in his famous writings on democracy in America, expressed his concern
that “the manufacturing aristocracy, which is growing up under our eyes,”
and which “is one of the harshest that has ever existed in the world,” might
escape its confines, spelling the end of democracy. Like Jefferson and other
classical liberals, Adam Smith and de Tocqueville understood equality
of condition, not equality of opportunity, to be the necessary condition
for democracy, and valued it in its own right. That’s standard classical
liberalism, and if you look back at the much misunderstood Adam Smith,
he framed his rather nuanced arguments for markets on the assumption
that, under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would tend towards
perfect equality. That’s the moral justification for them, whatever you think
of the argument.
It should also be recalled that Jefferson and his radical democratic ideals
were very far from the thinking of the founders of American democracy,
and they left very little impact on political thinking since, although they
had considerable impact on popular culture. The present fragmentation
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 55
and isolation, which is such a striking feature of American society, should
actually be understood as a realization of the ideals on the basis of which
the country was founded – the ideals of the founding fathers. Before saying
something about that, it’s worth bearing in mind that the US (which is really
the paradigm example of modern democracy, the most important one to
look at, aside from its power) is about as close to a tabula rasa as anything
this complicated world permits. It was an invented society. The native
population was eliminated, removed, and a New World was constructed,
with very little residue from traditional institutions and structures. That’s
one of the reasons, I think, for the big difference between the US and other
parts of the industrial world. It’s also the reason for the lack of an authentic
conservative tradition in the US – there isn’t any because the conservative
institutions never existed. What’s called conservatism is actually
reactionary statism. I think it’s also probably the reason for the relatively
weak social support system. If you look at how these actually developed in
other parts of the industrial world, to a significant extent they developed
out of very reactionary traditional social forms that had a pre-capitalist
ideology. Remember, before the great innovations of Ricardo, Malthus, and
classical economists (what’s now called neo-liberal economics), before that
period, people had the odd idea that humans have a right to live. In feudal
society, people had a place, maybe a lousy place, but some sort of a place
and the right to live in that place. Ricardo, Malthus, Nassau Senior and
others thought that was a mistake – they had no right to life. The only right
they have is what they can gain in the market. And if you can’t survive by
those means, then you must go somewhere else – and in those days, that
meant going to America and killing the natives, or to Australia and doing
the same, and so on. And now there is the same message, but nowhere
else to go. The principle is the same. The traditional institutions did have
this strange conception that people had the right to life, and that reflected
itself in the emergence of various kinds of social welfare systems. People
somehow couldn’t get it into their heads that they had no right to life, and,
instead of accepting the instruction provided to them by the science of the
new economics (which had the certainty of the laws of gravitation, they
were informed), they concluded that if we have no right to live, then you
have no right to rule. The result was labor struggles and organization, the
rise of the Chartist movement, and other threats to authority. Fortunately,
the science is flexible and was soon adapted to permit measures to alleviate
the grimmest hardships of the market system, merging it with residues of
56 Democracy and Power
traditional institutions and later something like the welfare state, taking
different forms in different societies.
Now of course, this new doctrine of modern capitalism (“no rights,
just what you get in the market”) – the rulers never accepted that for
themselves. What they actually adopted is what we might call a “really
existing free market doctrine” – which means market discipline for the
poor and the weak, but plenty of state protection and subsidy for the
rich and the privileged. In the United States, the weakness of traditional
institutions created, or helped to create at least, the climate in which these
harsh rules could be applied to an unusual degree. I don’t want to suggest
that the US is sui generis, but it’s a little more in that direction than most
other industrial societies for historical reasons. The political institutions of
American society were quite consciously designed, and it makes sense to
look back at the thinking, the very articulate thinking, of the people who
designed them – the framers of the Constitution.
The most influential among those, as everyone knows, was James
Madison, an important political thinker, who laid out the principles of
governance very clearly, primarily in the debates at the Constitutional
Convention in 1787. He emphasized there that the prime responsibility
of the government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the
majority.” Democracy he regarded as a threat that has to be diminished for
that reason. Madison was no fool – he saw that there would be an increase in
“the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and
secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings,” and he already
saw signs of the “symptoms of a leveling spirit,” which give “warning of
the future danger.” The problem he faced in designing the constitutional
system was to find a way “to secure the rights of property,” meaning the
privileged personal right to property, “against the danger from an equality
of universality of suffrage, vesting complete power over property in hands
without a share in it.” Those “without property, or the hope of acquiring
it,” he reflected many years later, towards the end of his life, “cannot be
expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights, to be safe depositories
of power over them.”
Now, Madison’s perspective was different from that of his friend,
Jefferson, one of the few radical democrats in the crowd. Jefferson warned
against the “aristocrats,” those who “fear and distrust the people, and
wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.”
He contrasted them with the “democrats,” who “identify with the people,
have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the honest and safe...
depository of the public interest,” if not always “the most wise.” Madison
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 57
felt differently. The people, he felt, were not safe depositories of “the
permanent interests of the country,” because they would not sufficiently
sympathize with the rights of property. So Madison insisted that political
power must be in the hands of what he called “the more capable set of
men” who come from and represent “the wealth of the nation.” And
his convictions prevailed – the Constitutional Convention was nearly
unanimous in support of them, and that’s become conventional. Of course,
Madison was thinking of England (that was the model of the day), and
he pointed out that if universal suffrage were granted, landed proprietors
might be subjected to what we nowadays call agrarian reform. And in the
new society that was being designed, he felt that it was necessary to ward
off the danger of that injustice by restricting democracy in various ways.
It may be worth mentioning that in the first major study of political
theory, his Politics, Aristotle discussed the same dilemma: in a society with
concentrated wealth, democratic choice would infringe on the rights of
property owners. Aristotle’s solution was to reduce inequality by what we
would call “welfare state measures.” Facing the same dilemma, Madison chose
to reduce democracy. And the constitutional system reflects that decision.
What Madison sought, some contemporary scholars argue, was a
fragmented society with no hope of fraternity, equality or community, a
political system designed to minimize citizen participation. The twentieth-
century version is that the “meddlesome outsiders” can make their
occasional choices among the “responsible men.” At the Constitutional
Convention, Madison’s ideas prevailed. They were articulated with great
clarity by his colleague John Jay, President of the Convention and first
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His favorite maxim was that “those
who own the country ought to govern it.” That is, politics not only is, but
ought to be, “the shadow cast on society by big business.” Well, a lot has
changed in 200 years, but these principles have remained in force, though
they are continually adapted. Legal historian Jennifer Nedelsky argues that
the Madisonian legacy helps to explain the weakness of the democratic
tradition in the US and its failure to deal with the interpenetration of
economic and political power. That’s not quite right, I believe. It really has
succeeded in dealing with that problem, but in a very specific way – by
sanctifying and privileging the rights of those who own the country. That
is what is meant by democracy in actual usage, and that’s why you get
these apparent paradoxes.
I should say that this picture of the Madisonian system is unfair to its
founder. Like Smith and Jefferson, Madison was a pre-capitalist figure.
His roots were in the Enlightenment and therefore, like the others, he was
58 Democracy and Power
anti-capitalist in spirit – strongly so. The wealthy he had in mind were
aristocrats who, he expected, would act as what he called “enlightened
statesmen” and “benevolent philosophers” for the good of everyone. Well,
he quickly discovered otherwise, and apparently with some shock. Within
a few years, he found that the opulent minority were abusing the power he
had handed over to them, and that they were acting in the way that Adam
Smith had described – namely by following what Smith called “the vile
maxim of the masters of mankind, all for ourselves and nothing for other
people.” Those are the guiding principles that we are taught to admire and
revere, as traditional values are eroded under unremitting attack. Watching
this, 200 years ago, Madison deplored what he called “the daring depravity
of the times,” as the “stockjobbers will become the praetorian band of the
government – at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesse, and
overawing it by clamors and combinations.” It’s pretty hard to improve on
that description as we turn to the present.
There are people who expressed a much richer conception of democracy,
and different values and attitudes. Some of them are very well known, say,
John Dewey again, or Bertrand Russell. Russell disagreed with Dewey on a
great many things, but agreed with him on what he called the “humanistic
conception,” or, to quote Dewey, the belief that “the ultimate aim of
production” is not production of goods, but of “free human beings associated
with one another on terms of equality.” The goal of education, as Russell
saw it, is “to give a sense of the value of things other than domination,”
to help create “wise citizens of a free community” in which both liberty
and “individual creativeness” will flourish, and working people will be
the masters of their fate, not tools of production. Illegitimate structures of
coercion have to be unraveled – the central one, again in Dewey’s words,
being domination by “business for private profit through private control of
banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents
and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Unless that’s achieved,
democratic forms lack substantive content. People will work “not freely
and intelligently, but for the sake of the work earned,” a condition that he
said is “illiberal and immoral.” Accordingly, industry has to be changed
from “a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control
and free association. That’s in the general range of a style of thought that
also includes, along with many anarchists, guild socialists like G.D.H. Cole
and left anti-Bolshevik Marxists like Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg
and others. Russell’s views were quite similar in this regard.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 59
These problems were the very focus of Dewey’s thought and direct
engagement. He is the leading American social philosopher of the twentieth
century, and he was straight out of mainstream America, as American as
apple pie. It is therefore of some interest that the ideas he expressed, not
many years ago, would be regarded today, and in much of the intellectual
culture, as outlandish or even anti-American, to use one of the terms that’s
been borrowed from totalitarian cultures.
It is useful to recognize how sharp and dramatic is the clash of values
between this humanistic conception and the kind that we’re taught to
admire today. So you go from somebody like, say, Adam Smith (a pre-
capitalist figure who stressed sympathy and solidarity, the goal of liberty
with equality, and the basic human right to fulfilling work and a fair
share of the product) to the values that are expressed by people who,
often shamelessly, invoke Smith’s name today. Let’s put aside the more
vulgar performances and turn to somebody you can take more seriously,
like Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who is a leading
libertarian, in the American sense of the word. He states the following
principle as an authoritative fact: “Any person’s ideal situation is one
that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others
so as to force adherence to his own desires. That is to say, each person
seeks mastery over a world of slaves.” Smith would have regarded such
a thought as pathological, as would Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart
Mill or anyone associated with the classical liberal tradition. But that is
everyone’s fondest dream – if you hadn’t noticed it for yourself, and if you
think it is not, you’re wrong, because economic theory demonstrates it.
We hear a very different voice when we turn to the authentic
Enlightenment and classical liberalism, or to serious modern commentators,
or, still more interesting in my opinion, to the independent working-class
press, which flourished from the mid-nineteenth century until it was
finally destroyed by private power not so long ago. The nineteenth-century
journals (which, again, are rarely studied) were run by what were called
factory girls, young women from the farms, Irish immigrant artisans, and
other working people. Their press condemned the “degradation and the
loss of that self-respect, which had made the mechanics and laborers the
pride of the world,” as free people were forced to sell themselves, not what
they produced, becoming “menials” and “humble subjects” of “despots”
under wage slavery, not very different from the chattel slavery of Southern
plantations, they felt. They described the destruction of “the spirit of free
60 Democracy and Power
institutions,” with working people reduced to a “state of servitude” in which
they “see a moneyed aristocracy hanging over us like a mighty avalanche
threatening annihilation to every man who dares to question their right to
enslave and oppress the poor and unfortunate.” They bitterly condemned
what they called “the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but
self,” a demeaning and shameful doctrine that no decent person could
tolerate. Particularly dramatic, and again relevant to the current onslaught
against democracy and human rights, was the attack on high culture that
they deplored under the new spirit of the age. The factory girls, mechanics
and others were used to spending their time reading classics; they were
part of high culture. And that persisted. I can remember this from my own
childhood among the working class communities in New York City, where
immersion in literature, the arts, science, and so on was considered natural
for unemployed working people. Driving out all that from people’s minds
was no small task. It’s an achievement that you have to respect.
Going back to the working class press, “they who work in the mills
ought to own them,” they wrote, incidentally without the benefit of any
radical intellectuals. In that way, they would overcome the “monarchical
principles” that were taking root “on democratic soil.” Years later, that
became a rallying cry for the organized labor movement. At the 1893
convention of the American Federation of Labor, which belongs to the
more conservative wing of the labor movement, Henry Demarest Lloyd
gave what labor historian David Montgomery calls a “clarion call.” He
declared that the “mission of the labor movement is to free mankind
from the superstitions and sins of the market, and to abolish the poverty
which is the fruit of those sins. That goal can be attained by extending to
the direction of the economy the principles of democratic politics.” “It is
by the people who do the work that the hours of labor, the conditions of
employment, the division of the produce is to be determined.” “It is by the
workers themselves,” Lloyd continued, that “the captains of industry are
to be chosen, and chosen to be servants, not masters. It is for the welfare of
all that the coordinated labor of all must be directed... This is democracy.”
Well, those are values and insights that have only recently been
suppressed, and they can be recovered.
These values would have seemed quite natural to the founders of
classical liberalism. If you look at Adam Smith’s sharp attack on the
division of labor – not what one usually reads, but it is there – he attacked
it because the division of labor would turn human beings into the most
“stupid and ignorant” creatures that could be imagined. Therefore, “in any
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 61
civilized society,” the government would have to do something to stop this.
It’s intolerable to a pre-capitalist Enlightenment figure like Smith, as it was
to de Tocqueville and others. De Tocqueville asks, “what can be expected
of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins?”
“The art advances, the artisan recedes,” he said, which is why he opposed
inequality of condition and the threat of the manufacturing aristocracy.
And it’s taken a lot of work for the principles of Ricardo and Malthus and
the rest to win this “everlasting battle for the minds of men” and drive
these thoughts from the mind – though not very far, I believe.
Dewey and Russell are two of the major twentieth-century inheritors
of this rich tradition, which also includes a lot of liberal, anarchist, and
left Marxist thought. But I think, most vividly, it’s captured both in the
writings and in the inspiring struggles of men and women, as they sought
to maintain and expand the sphere of freedom and justice in the face of this
new despotism of state-supported private power, which they understood
well enough. And it is worth remembering that this private power is
tyrannical and totalitarian – it’s long been understood. The intellectual
origins of these institutions have been studied by Harvard University
legal historian Morton Horwitz, in standard works. He points out that
early in this century, when corporations were granted their extraordinary
rights, there was a great deal of fascination with corporate entities – that is,
social organisms that had rights over and above mere individuals, a sharp
attack on fundamental principles of classical liberalism. These ideas grew
from more or less the same neo-Hegelian soil, and they took three major
forms, one being Bolshevism, the other fascism, and the third, modern
corporations, which were granted extensive rights by courts and lawyers,
often with the support of the progressives, reflecting those same attitudes.
Two of those systems have succumbed; the third not only remains, but is
expanding its sway and dominance. It’s an extreme form of unaccountable
tyranny and totalitarianism. It works in different ways, but is similar in its
roots and functioning to the other outgrowths of these conceptions.
There are plenty of divisions and conflicts within the world of
unaccountable concentrated power, but there is similarity in general
conceptions. Quasi-governmental institutions are developing around them,
designed in large measure to protect the wealthy and powerful from market
discipline, and to socialize cost and risk. That is, or should be, familiar. But
their role in establishing the Madisonian principles in a new guise has been
much less noticed, and I think it is quite fundamental to understanding the
world that’s taking shape around us.
62 Democracy and Power
Question and Answer Session
Question: You have talked about the problems of democracy in the so-called
capitalist countries, but you did not say anything about the socialist countries. Do
you give any credit to their achievements in the field of social justice? Now that
they have collapsed and that only capitalism remains, is capitalism really the way
of the future, the end of history?
Chomsky: Well, to respond to this, one has to recognize that the terms of
political discourse don’t have much meaning anymore. So we can’t talk of
socialist and capitalist countries, because there aren’t any, at least in any
very clear or recognizably traditional sense of these terms. Neither socialist,
nor capitalist. There certainly aren’t any capitalist industrial societies. I
mean, a good part of the Third World is capitalist, that’s why it’s the Third
World, but the rich and powerful countries have never accepted it, that
goes from England up to the newly industrializing countries in East Asia,
and, dramatically so, the US. They have never accepted capitalism; they
are all state-capitalist countries with a very powerful and significant state
component.
With regard to socialist countries, there certainly aren’t any. And, in fact,
nobody understood that better than Lenin and Trotsky. Whatever you think
of them (and I don’t think much myself), they were orthodox Marxists, and
did not regard socialism as possible in this backward, peasant, impoverished
country. They were carrying out a kind of holding action in the hope
(well, you know the routine) that the iron laws of history would lead to a
revolution in the advanced capitalist world, which meant Germany. But
revolution didn’t come in Germany, and they were left in charge of this pre-
capitalist, pre-industrial society (from their point of view). Lenin moved on
to a form of state capitalism. The first step that Lenin and Trotsky took was to
demolish every working class organization in Russia, consciously, because
that was the right thing to do, again, from their point of view. There was no
place for factory councils and Soviets in this pre-industrial society – it was
capitalism, according to the routine, that was supposed to industrialize and
democratize, and that sort of thing. In the other so-called socialist countries,
it was the same. It’s striking that all these countries later called themselves
socialist and democratic. So they were the best democracies and the most
socialist countries. In the West, everybody ridiculed the claim to democracy,
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 1 63
but western propaganda loved the equally ridiculous claim to socialism
as a technique for undermining socialism. Therefore, the idea that these
were socialist countries was not only accepted, but – for obvious reasons –
became the dominant principle in the West. On the other hand, the equally
ridiculous claim that they were democratic was laughed at. Both claims are
equally absurd, but the claim that they were socialist has caught on. When
both of the world’s two major propaganda systems agree on something, it’s
kind of difficult for ordinary individuals to extricate themselves from it. So
there were no big moves towards socialism. There are moves towards social
democracy, and sometimes considerably more all over the world, welfare
systems, collectives, all sorts of things, but they are scattered here and there,
and when they really try to reach a large scale, they get smashed. Probably the
most advanced case was the Spanish Revolution of 1936, which was jointly
attacked by the communists, fascists and liberal democracies. It wasn’t until
they wiped out that plague of freedom and socialism that they got back to
the less significant question of who picks up the spoils. So the question really
can’t be answered as it is posed.
On the other hand, if you look at the anti-socialist, anti-democratic
societies of eastern Europe, they had some achievements of social justice.
In the western industrial world, the standard story about the collapse of
the Soviet Union is not just that it committed crimes, but that it was very
inefficient and didn’t work. Well, by what standards didn’t it work? The
usual argument is, look at eastern Europe and western Europe – at how
advanced western Europe is and how poor eastern Europe is. You’ll see
what a failure eastern Europe was. That makes about as much sense as if
somebody were to look at the schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts and
say what a failure the kindergartens are – just see how much quantum
physics these kids know as compared to how much they know when they
come out of MIT. This is the same argument. If you have to compare two
systems of development, you have to start at a point at which they are
more or less alike. And the last time that eastern and western Europe were
alike is the fifteenth century. After that, they diverge, with eastern Europe
becoming the regional “Third World.” And that decline, relative to the
West, continued up to the First World War. For a meaningful comparison,
you want to compare countries that are more or less at par when the two
experiments began in the twentieth century: say Russia and Brazil, Bulgaria
and Guatemala, or something like that. Those would be more or less fair
comparisons; actually, unfair to Russia because Brazil and Guatemala had
many advantages. There is a good reason why nobody carries out that
64 Democracy and Power
comparison. It teaches absolutely the wrong lesson. It tells you that however
monstrous the eastern European command economies might have been,
what the West has imposed on the rest of the world is much worse. For
more than eighty percent of the population of Brazil, eastern Europe would
look like a paradise. And that’s something that people are not allowed to
think about. It takes a remarkable amount of brainwashing to get the whole
West, almost without exception, not to see this. Even the left can’t hear it
when you point it out. But it’s pretty elementary – as elementary as the
comparison of the Cambridge kindergartens to MIT.
In answer to your question, did they achieve something – yes. That’s
why eastern Europe is not called the Third World anymore. It’s called
the Second World. It used to be the Third World, it’s not anymore. Well,
something happened there. It’s now being driven back to the Third World,
consciously. That’s what the Cold War was about. It was to get them back
to the Third World. They achieved certain goals, in a brutal and cruel
fashion: they did industrialize the society, create a high degree of education
and health by Third World standards, and were relatively egalitarian as
contemporary societies go. In fact, up until the 1960s, the primary fear of
the West was that eastern Europe was too successful. If you look at the
internal records, it’s quite different from what the intellectuals talk about.
US and British leaders were worried that it looked too successful. That was
the real problem.
Coming to the second part of the question, there isn’t any capitalism, so
it can’t be the wave of the future. Is state-supported transnational corporate
capitalism the wave of the future? Well, if you let it be, yes. Nazism would
have been the wave of the future if you let it be. But there’s no particular
reason why anybody should agree to that. It’s a monstrous system from
every point of view, a failure from a social and economic point of view,
and unviable and unsustainable, at least in anything like its current form,
not to speak of the fundamental defects of the system – to put it mildly –
that were clear enough to poor working people in the early days of the
industrial revolution.
3. The Vicissitudes of
Democracy: Part 2*
Yesterday, I was talking about James Madison’s vision for the country, and
his distress shortly afterwards, when he saw the fate of the constitutional
system he had devised. I recalled that in Madison’s pre-capitalist vision,
power was to be put in the hands of more capable people, the wealthy, but
they were not supposed to act as gangsters and robbers. They were supposed
to be benevolent gentlemen and wise philosophers and act for the benefit
of all, while of course understanding that the prime responsibility of the
government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,”
and to ensure that property rights are privileged. In principle, all people (at
least, free white males) were to have the same rights, but property owners
were granted special rights, misleadingly called “rights of property.” They
were expected to understand that, but in an enlightened fashion. And he
was concerned, as I mentioned, with the threat of democracy. That’s the
basis on which the modern democratic states are established. They are
founded on the basis of the threat of democracy, and the need to contain it,
and to ensure that the prime responsibility of the government is fulfilled.
Madison, as I said, was concerned about the levelling spirits among
the growing number of people who “labor under all the hardships of
life, and secretly sigh for more equal distribution of its blessings.” And
then he lamented when he saw that the powerful behaved in the way
one would expect, deploring “the daring depravity of the times” as the
rising business classes became at once the “tools and tyrants” of the
government, overwhelming it with their power and benefiting from
its bribes and largesse. I mentioned this because these are the standard
* Lecture delivered at the Delhi School of Economics on 13 January 1996.
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.03
66 Democracy and Power
views of classical liberalism – anti-capitalist in spirit and in character,
very much in favor of insisting upon equality of condition, and also
opposed to the division of labor which will destroy people, critical of
capital export, and nuanced with regard to trade. There is a big difference
between the actual ideals of classical liberalism with their Enlightenment
roots and the modern version, called neo-liberalism, which is virtually
the opposite in most important respects. This is why the early Marx
drew quite heavily on the French and German Enlightenment and also
on Romantic philosophy, which was imbued with much the same spirit.
Apart from the stateliness of Madison’s rhetoric, what he said about
the rising business classes as the tools and tyrants of government, and
the daring depravity of the times is a good description of Washington or
London or other capitals today. To see the way it’s described in modern
terms, I’ll just quote from BusinessWeek, reviewing the year since the
electoral triumph of the Gingrich army in November 1994. BusinessWeek
reports that most CEOs feel that “the 104th Congress represents a
milestone for business: Never before have so many goodies been
showered so enthusiastically on America’s entrepreneurs,” who are
by now quite openly designing the legislation, without even the usual
pretenses. The number of corporate lobbyists has exploded. There is no
secret about it anymore.
The headline of the BusinessWeek article is “Return to the trenches.” In
other words, yes, we’ve got more goodies than ever before in history, but
it’s not enough, you can get more. The article goes on to describe “the
more” that we’ve got to get, now that we’ve got so much. The first thing
is a reduction of taxes on financial gains – that’s extremely important
in countries where taxes are collected. For the wealthiest one percent of
the population, financial gains are about half their income. So half their
income has to be completely exempt from taxes. Now, this is supposed
to be necessary to stimulate investment. But that doesn’t make any sense
from an economic point of view. If you want to stimulate investment, the
obvious way to do it is to put money in the pockets of working people,
so they can consume and increase demand, and that would stimulate
investment. That’s particularly true when the country is absolutely
awash in capital. It’s not that there is any shortage of investment capital,
it’s just that there is weak demand and there are better ways to make
money (by financial speculation and so on), and promoting those can’t
help to increase investment.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 67
The real purpose is quite different – it is to increase the Third World, to
stimulate the development of a society of the Third World structural type.
That is, to increase the enormous inequality that has been growing steadily
since the mid-1970s, but spectacularly so since the Reagan takeover in the
1980s. The level of inequality in the US is now back to what it was around
the 1920s – right before the big crash in 1929. By 1980, which was the turning
point, the level of inequality in the US was comparable to the worst in the
industrial world – it was among the worst, but not off the spectrum. Now,
it’s completely beyond any other industrial society, as is the proportion of
people living under conditions of poverty, the incidence of starvation among
children and the elderly, and other standard indices which are familiar
to the Third World. Those conditions are being established, of course, at
higher levels, since it’s a rich society. But the conditions are structurally
quite the same, and the point of the reduction of taxes on financial gains
is simply to accelerate these developments. It’s striking when you look at
it case by case. Take New York City – the richest city in the world. Over
forty percent of children live below the official poverty level, which means
they are deprived of any possibility of a productive future life. The level
of inequality in New York City is the same as in Guatemala, which is the
worst in the world for any country where there are statistics.
Guatemala is an interesting case, because you may recall that they had
a brief experiment with democracy until 1954, when it was overthrown by
a US government-backed military coup. At that time the US was going to
turn Guatemala into a showplace for capitalism and democracy. A couple
of hundred thousand corpses later, Guatemala has perhaps the worst
inequality in the world and child starvation. And yes, tremendous wealth.
It is a showcase of a kind, and New York City now has approximately the
same level of inequality.
The second major task for which business has to go back to the trenches is
deregulation. It is important – it imposes very severe costs on the population
and, of course, on future generations. Because deregulation has obvious costs,
but it’s good for short-term profits. And if there is trouble, you can go to the
taxpayer to bail you out. That’s taken for granted. In fact, if you look at the
cases and see what happens, deregulation is being done in a very intelligent
fashion. They are not dismantling the system piece by piece – they want to
destroy it all at once. So the technique that is being used is to introduce what
economists call cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis. As any honest economist
will tell you, that it is something you can’t do. The situation is much too
68 Democracy and Power
complex. And you can’t carry out any sensible measure of things like cost-
benefit analysis in a complex system. That’s very significant. Because the
current legislation is that before any regulatory legislation is introduced, it
must be demonstrated that the gains are not exceeded by the cost, in terms
of growth or profits or whatever. Any corporate lawyer with half his brain
functioning can keep the courts tied up for years trying to work out what
that means. This essentially means no regulation, by the highest scientific
principles. Of course, to carry any of this out requires a huge government
bureaucracy. But that’s no problem, that’s not funded. So yes, we have
enormous bureaucratic costs, but we don’t fund them, so they can’t be
carried out. We impose tests on regulatory processes which can’t possibly
be met. This means the system collapses. Now, when it collapses, it leads to
disasters, but there is an answer to that too, you turn to the public to bail you
out, that’s what happens in case after case.
The Savings and Loan crisis in the US was a perfect example of that. In the
early 1980s, the government deregulated these Savings and Loan banks, but
it also gave them incentives to carry out very high-risk loans, by increasing
the insurance for the banks. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will
happen – huge scandals, great profits, collapse, hundreds of billions of dollars
of losses, but that’s simply passed over to the taxpayer. Another example is
right in the works now; the securities markets are being deregulated. The
head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Reagan, a great
liberal who was in charge during the 1987 crash, points out this is going
to be a disaster. What they are doing is reducing liabilities, freeing brokers
from liabilities for fraudulent practices when they sell stocks, which is just
an invitation to disaster. The Congressional Budget Office, which is a very
conservative outfit, estimates that in order to deal with the fraud that is going
to follow from this they will have to double or triple the case load against the
Securities and Exchange Commission. Again, a huge bureaucracy. But that’s
no problem because they are cutting the budget for it, so they won’t be able
to do these things. And then when the collapse comes, very simple – you just
go back to the taxpayer to bail you out.
That just happened again in Mexico. Mexico was what is called an
economic miracle: disaster for the majority of the population, but a dream
for the rising number of billionaires who were being given state assets for a
fraction of their value under privatization, and for foreign investors (mostly
speculators). And when the bubble bursts, as obviously it is going to – very
simply, go to the American taxpayer who will end up paying 30-40 billion
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 69
dollars’ worth of pay-offs. Not to the Mexicans – it doesn’t go to them. It
goes to the investment bankers and speculators to protect them from losses.
They incidentally happen to be the same kind of people who, by and large,
staff Clinton’s cabinet. And so on, in case after case.
There is a dramatic case right now. In the middle of this frenzy about
deregulation, last December the Commerce Department in the US had to
close down Georges Bank. Georges Bank is the richest fishing area in the
world. It had to be virtually closed to commercial fishing. The reason was
that, in the early 1980s, under the excitement about deregulation, they
deregulated the fishing industry. But they did it in the way it is done in
“really existing free markets”: they also gave the fishing industry subsidies
to increase the fishing. So you subsidize the fishing industry and you
deregulate it, and again it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will
happen – over-fishing. They destroyed the ground fish, and now there is a
danger of wiping out the edible fish. Today, New England is importing cod
from Norway. It is just like Australia importing kangaroos from Central
Asia. But nobody can understand why. Something went wrong. Actually,
one person did understand why – the Governor of Massachusetts, William
Weld, a rising star of conservatism. He went to Washington, hat in hand,
asking for a federal handout to pay the costs at the expense of the taxpayer.
His argument was that the government should declare this a national
disaster, which means that federal funds then pour in. And as to why it
is a national disaster, he found some scientists who were willing to tell
him that some predatory fish had probably come to Georges Bank and was
eating all the ground fish. He said that they hadn’t been able to find it yet,
but they were pretty sure it was there, so therefore the taxpayer ought to
pay off the cost – because it is a national disaster.
This goes on, in case after case. The Reagan administration bailed out
the Continental Illinois Bank, the biggest nationalized bank in American
history. They got into trouble, and the taxpayer bailed them out. This is a
standard feature of neo-liberal economics. Take Chile, which is hailed as
one of the greatest economic miracles in history since the Pinochet takeover
in the 1970s. It was an economic miracle run by the smartest economists
around, the “Chicago boys” as they were called, who followed all the rules.
They were able to do this very easily, because the fascist dictatorship was
able to murder, torture, and imprison those who objected to the human
consequences. That made it easy to carry out the neo-liberal agenda, and
it was considered a huge economic success until 1982, when everything
70 Democracy and Power
collapsed, and Chile had the worst economic disaster in fifty years. At that
point, libertarian think-tanks simply advised the government to take over
the assets of all the failed banks, and industries, and so on, which they did,
and it turned out that the Chilean government acquired more control over
the economy than at the peak of the Allende government. Until, of course,
the taxpayer had resolved the crisis, at which point the giveaway began
again, and you return to the principles of neo-liberalism. It’s an awful scam,
but that’s exactly what you’d expect when power is transferred, more and
more, into the hands of those who have every reason to make law and
government the combination of the rich against the poor – exactly what’s
happening. So, that’s deregulation.
The third major policy to be pursued is devolution – reducing power
down from the federal government to the state level. There have been
philosophical debates about federalism versus central government, and
so on and so forth, and the idea of devolution is supposed to be that the
conservatives believe in moving power to the people, and that means
getting it down to the state level. Well, that’s just shameless cynicism as
everyone knows, but nobody will say. The point of giving power to the state
(say, by giving block grants to the state governments instead of specified
funding for health, and education, and so on, at the federal level) is very
straightforward. State governments are much weaker than the federal
government, which means that even medium-sized business can play one
state against the other: say, threaten to transfer across state borders if you
don’t give them some extra benefits. Only the really big guys can play that
game with national states (say, by moving from Mexico to Poland unless
some benefits are given), but moving from Massachusetts to Tennessee is
quite easy.
Take the Raytheon Corporation, which is the biggest employer in
Massachusetts and is part of what’s called the defense industry – meaning,
the public pays for it but the profits are privatized. The only defense that
anybody can detect is defense of the minority of the opulent against the
majority at home – that is apparently the function. It’s part of a system
where the public pays the cost of high-tech industry. Anyway, Raytheon
recently informed the state of Massachusetts that it would move to
Tennessee unless it got more tax benefits and subsidies. The legislature
passed laws that exempt the defense industry from taxes, even more so
than before, and gave other amenities amounting to 80 billion dollars a
year. That’s the kind of thing that a middle-sized business can do. As I say,
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 71
only the big corporations can do that with national states. That’s exactly the
point of devolution: if you can devolve power down to the state level, you
can be more confident that the limited funding going to education, health,
shelter, transport and other economically irrational things will not trickle
down (as it sometimes does) to people who need it, but will be transferred
by some combination of regressive fiscal measures and outright subsidies
into the very deep pockets of the opulent minorities. That’s devolution in
the real world.
The next thing that has to be pursued is total reform – change the
legal system. That means elimination of liability for criminal action by
corporations, and that’s important because they carry out plenty of criminal
action. In fact, the biggest corporate funder for the Gingrich army happens
to be Philip Morris Corporation, the biggest tobacco firm, which needs
protection from its many millions of victims. It is killing people on a scale
that the whole narco-trafficking industry in the world can’t come close to.
There are all sorts of legal cases demanding compensation for this, and the
idea is to cut them off, similarly to other forms of corporate crime. Not only
must private tyranny be publicly subsidized, its activities also have to be
decriminalized – this is total reform.
The next priority is a very interesting one – it is health care. Business
is running back to the trenches to change the health care system. As
I mentioned yesterday, the US is unusual in a lot of ways for historical
reasons. One of the effects of this somewhat different history is that the US
is the only major industrial country without any comprehensive national
health care system. In the 1960s, two programs were introduced – Medicare
and Medicaid – to provide health support to the elderly and the poor. The
idea now is to get rid of those programs. The nature of the reforms being
introduced has been described pretty accurately in a headline of the Wall
Street Journal. The headline says, “Unequal treatment – Medicare Bill would
end egalitarian approach,” and the story reports that the wealthy stand
to gain, the poor may be hurt and there will be trade-offs for the middle
class. This is more or less true, but you have to understand what these
words mean. First of all, it’s not that the poor may be hurt, they are almost
certain to be hurt. That’s the point of it – to eliminate support for medical
aid to the poor. Approximately 40 million lack any insurance at all. They
are dumped. There are dumping grounds for them called public hospitals.
The poor and the uninsured are taken care of in public hospitals, but public
hospitals have to be eliminated. That’s part of the system, and in fact, the
72 Democracy and Power
same day, in the New York Times the lead headline was “Public Hospitals
Facing Deep Cuts in Medicare Bill.” The subhead reports that there will
be “less for teaching programs and for services to the poor.” Some may
have to close down, and others will lose resources, because we don’t want
these dumping grounds around. These are disposable people, in the Third
World sense. It doesn’t make sense to keep them alive. Therefore, cutting
back the limited medical aid that they have makes a good deal of sense.
Any economist can explain that to you, and in the Third World domains of
the West, say Latin America, that is done all the time. So it is the poor who
will be hurt – not may be hurt.
As for the middle class, it is getting a trade-off. The term “middle class”
does not mean the people around the median. It means the almost very
rich, but not quite very rich. So the middle class is all those right below
the top, but well above the median. And for them, there will be a trade-off.
So the wealthy will gain, and for the ones below them, there will be trade-
offs. The poor, which are a large majority of the people – they’ll be hurt.
Furthermore, the health care system which remains mostly for the rich is
being handed over much more than before to private businesses. And as
Milton Friedman – or anyone else sensible – says, they are not benevolent
organizations. They are in the business of making profits. Now, if you are
a health-maintenance management organization, and you want to make
profits, what you do is micro-manage the doctors. Introduce extensive
levels of managerial bureaucracy to make sure that the patients get the
least possible care and attention, and at minimal costs. You don’t need to
go to a school of management to understand that. That’s the point of micro-
management, and the costs are enormous. There are all sorts of costs which
wouldn’t be there in a rational system – and aren’t there in the national
health care system, say, of Canada next door. For one thing, a large part
of the health cost which will increase is just high profits. Another is the
high level of bureaucratization, micro-management, complex accounting
procedures, and so on. Right now, the administrative costs and profits of
the HMOs (Health Management Organizations) are about seven times as
high as the comparable costs of Medicare or any public system anywhere.
There is a huge amount of advertising – open the newspaper in the US and
you will see big advertisements for joining some HMO. Well those are costs
– of course, they are not real costs to the corporation because advertisements
are tax free, so the public pays part of the cost of the propaganda. Another
cost is lobbying, which is also tax deductible. So the lobbying which gets
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 73
these things through is partially paid by the public, who suffer from it.
Then there are huge salaries, stock options, and so on. Well, all these are
ways of transferring costs. They don’t cut costs, they transfer costs from the
hands of some private power to the public, and that’s understood.
There is a conservative commission called the Bipartisan National
Leadership Coalition, chaired by a couple of ex-presidents, which estimates
that the current costs in the government health programs are going to
take 67 billion dollars out of wages or income, hitting mostly the poorer
people because it takes a much bigger percentage from them. They also
estimate that these programs may raise the number of uninsured to about
54 million or so individuals in the next seven years. It will be 46 million
with no cuts, which is bad enough. Well, those are among the costs and
they are extreme. Medicare has been the major support so far for nursing
homes for the elderly, etc. If Medicare disappears, the elderly will have
nowhere to go unless private families take care of them. Right now, there
are laws which say that if you put your parents under nursing care, you
can apply for federal support without losing your personal assets – that
means your house, car, etc., won’t be taken. If that legislation is eliminated,
people will be faced with agonizing choices like, do I lose my home and
send my children out in the streets in order to keep my parents from dying?
But that is not the kind of thing that counts when you use the yardstick of
economic rationality and other forms of lunacy that we are told to admire.
Well, that’s a part of the cost-shifting that goes on, which will give figures
showing that medical costs are being controlled, but only by transferring
them over to the public.
Take deregulation, again. Deregulation has already allowed increased
pollution – so you can dump toxic wastes, and somebody else pays the
costs. By dumping wastes you damage sewage and water systems. How do
you deal with it? You raise the cost of using water. But that simply transfers
the cost to private families and individuals and takes it away from the
industrial polluters. Deregulation is then described as being economically
very efficient – look how it’s cutting costs, and so on. In fact, it’s just shifting
the cost, in a highly regressive fashion, to people who pay it themselves.
This has become so brazen that the new legislation requires the taxpayers
to reimburse industrial polluters who have created toxic wastes and have
been compelled to clean them up to meet federal standards. They now
have to be reimbursed by the taxpayer for the cost of cleaning up the toxic
wastes they have created. And so it goes on.
74 Democracy and Power
The City and State of New York have announced big tax cuts. If you
take a look at them, almost all go to business and the wealthy. But tax cuts
are good for the economy. The only trouble is while they have introduced
tax cuts, they have also introduced tax hikes to compensate for the tax cuts,
except that they don’t called them tax hikes – they call them reduction in
subsidies for mass transportation and education. This is a funny notion, that
when people’s money goes to enable them to have a transportation system
and a school, it is a subsidy. What happens when we reduce subsidies to
mass transportation and public education? What happens is that the costs
of mass transportation, which were already very high, get higher – they just
shot up by twenty percent. But those costs are paid by poor people. People
who drive limousines don’t care if subway rates go up. But the children
who have to get to school and poor people trying to get to work – they care
a lot. If costs go up at city colleges, poor people are hit. The rich are sending
their kids to private institutions. So all this is another radically regressive
shift in taxes. It’s called a tax cut, but it is really tax shifting, taxes becoming
more regressive than they already are. There is a lot of talk about flat taxes,
overlooking the fact that they are already flat, and they’ve been flat since
the Reagan years, if you take a look at the whole tax system. So making
them flat simply means making them radically regressive, instead of just
very regressive. All this is very familiar in India’s own history: sixty-five
years ago the British had to raise funds for the Indian government and had
a choice of raising income tax or salt tax; you know the choice they made,
and that is exactly the same thing. Income tax hurts the rich, salt tax just
hurts the poor – that’s the kind of tax you want, with consequences I’m
sure you remember.
It is instructive to see how all this stuff is portrayed. Here is one example.
The mayor of New York City (a well-known conservative) had a press
conference in which he explained that the city is just not wealthy enough
to support poor people anymore. The basis for that judgment, repeated
as front-page story in the New York Times, was an investment report by JP
Morgan Bank, the fifth largest financial institution in New York. JP Morgan
was suffering from, I think, a mere 1.4 billion dollars in profit last year, and
they came out with this report saying New York is not rich. So it’s necessary
to cut things like transport and education subsidies, care for the disabled and
elderly, all this stuff. The headline under which this appeared was “Giuliani
Sees Welfare Cuts Providing a Chance to Move.” The article explains that
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 75
Giuliani’s welfare cuts really are for the benefit of the poor: the cuts “enable
them to move freely around the country.” At last, they are liberated from
their chains – homes to live in, food to eat, and medical care if they get sick –
so they are free to go somewhere else. It’s straight benevolence: free to move,
the chains are gone! Well, that is one way to do it.
Turning to another example, there was a recent op-ed by a specialist
at the Hoover Institute at Stanford (a very respectable and conservative
academic institute) talking about the health care problem and describing
a philosophical flaw in the President’s position on health care. Why?
Liberals favor a nationally-guaranteed level of benefits and redistribution
of income through entitlements. Conservatives prefer to transfer power to
the states in the belief that policies should be closer to the people. These are
profound philosophical differences, he says. But for reasons I’ve already
mentioned, no sane observer can fail to understand that when you move
closer to the people, i.e., states, you are actually transferring power away
from the people into the hands of private institutions that can manipulate
and control the state. And if anyone is unable to understand this, he or she
can turn to the report released the same day explaining that Fidelity, the
biggest investment firm in Massachusetts, is demanding a cut in state taxes
and warning that unless it gets even more subsidies it will move next door
to Rhode Island, where it would have a much lower tax burden, though it
wouldn’t be so easy to move, say, to Zurich. Massachusetts capitulated, and
that means tax rates increase for the poor, so that Fidelity can make use of
the services of the city, but the poor people pay for it. That’s called creating
a better environment for business, being more economically rational and so
on. And that’s the philosophical difference.
There is one real success story – an economic miracle – in the US
(not just Mexico or Brazil). It’s the state of Wisconsin. That’s the state
that pioneered creative approaches to getting rid of welfare, eliminating
all these horrors of a welfare state. And it is praised by liberals for its
achievements. In fiscal 1994, the state of Wisconsin spent 1.16 billion dollars
on what BusinessWeek calls “the goodies” showered on entrepreneurs
– that whole array of subsidies and benefits. That kind of corporate
welfare has grown astronomically since the 1970s, when the conservative
experiment began. Meanwhile, the state economy has scarcely grown at
all. Real wages have dropped for non-supervisory workers. They are now
the lowest in the entire Midwest manufacturing region. The tax burden
76 Democracy and Power
has shifted dramatically to individual households. But all these huge gifts
to corporations have not led to any expansion of employment, and the
reason is very simple: there are better ways to make money – speculation,
mergers, and all kinds of things.
The day I left the US, there was a little news item in the back pages, which
reported a study of educational expenditure in Wisconsin. It said that there
has been a big increase in public funding for wealthy communities and
sharp cutbacks for the working class and the poor. Well, that’s an economic
miracle – that’s what the term means in its technical sense. Just about every
place that’s called an economic miracle has those properties – they are
quite familiar throughout the Third World. Now we’ve got a couple of such
miracles at home – New York, Wisconsin, and so on. There are, of course,
similar tendencies at the national level, but it all gets sharply accentuated
when you move down to the state level, where there are weaker public
defenses against private power.
Let’s go back to that BusinessWeek message, “back to the trenches, we
haven’t got enough.” Who does that go to? Well, it goes to the 23,000
corporate lobbyists in Washington, as compared with less than 700 of them
in 1970. That’s one reflection of the massive attack on democracy and rights
that has taken place during this period. The number of corporate lawyers
has expanded at a similar rate. The business press is absolutely euphoric
about what the BusinessWeek commentary calls “spectacular profits.” Last
year was the fourth straight year of double-digit profit growth. There was
very little sales growth, and very little change in employment, but return on
capital has skyrocketed, executive pay has gone up about sixty-six percent
since 1980, and capital gains about the same. Just as I was about to leave
the US, the record came up for 1995. The New York Times reported record
profits, while real wages and benefits decline – so the frenzy continues.
As I left the city, I had to pick up some cash from the bank. So I went
to the Bank of Boston, the biggest bank in Massachusetts, and picked up
a little leaflet they had for people. Record net-income earnings, up by
about twenty to twenty-five percent over 1994, which was a bumper year.
They’ve just become the biggest foreign bank in Argentina. They quote the
chief economist of the Bank of Boston saying the economy is doing just
great – there is low growth, huge profits. Inflation is under control and
“fortunately” wage increases have been remarkably restrained. That means
they’ve declined, indeed median wages have been declining steadily since
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 77
around 1980. The decline continued through the Clinton recovery – that’s
unprecedented. There’s been an economic recovery in the last couple of
years, growth has been faster than in the Reagan years, but the median
real wages have kept going down. That’s the “fortunate” fact, that they’ve
been remarkably restrained. The Wall Street Journal called it “a welcome
development of transcendent importance,” no less. Labor costs in the US
have reached the lowest level in the industrial world, next to England,
where Thatcher did an even better job in crushing poor people. In 1985,
they were the highest, but now they are the lowest next to England, so
that’s of transcendent importance.
All this has been happening at a time of spectacular profits, double-digit
growth of profits, and so on. I should add that aside from the loss of income
and wages, there is also much less security. Since 1980 or so, the number
of workers under contracts has declined, unions have declined, and the
number of temporary workers has shot up. One of the biggest employers
in the US now is called Manpower Incorporated – its sales are temporary
workers. People who don’t get benefits, and don’t need to be given a job
tomorrow, and so on. In the technical literature, this lowering of wages and
elimination of contracts is called “flexibility of labor markets,” which is
good for the health of the economy.
On the other hand, it’s not that the government is being cut back. The
taxes are just being shifted. So there are parts of the government that are
going up. The biggest and most important one is the Pentagon. The Gingrich
army and the Heritage Foundation (the right-wing libertarian foundation
that more or less sets the agenda) have called for and have got an increase
in the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon budget is roughly at Cold War levels
in absolute terms, but it’s going up. Not because the country is under any
risk or threat – nobody can believe that. But because of the function of
the Pentagon system, which is well understood. It is not studied in the
academic literature, but it is well understood in the business community.
In the late 1940s, business understood very well that, as Fortune magazine
put it, high-tech industry cannot survive in an unsubsidized, competitive,
free-enterprise economy. The government must do something about it.
BusinessWeek added that the government must be the savior. The natural
mechanism to save big business was the military system. There are many
reasons for this, but one reason is that defense is easy to sell to the public –
frighten the public and then they’ll pay for it.
78 Democracy and Power
The first Secretary of the Air Force under Truman, a liberal Democrat,
pointed out that the word to use is “security,” not “subsidy.” So when you
give a subsidy to a high-tech industry you call it security, and that goes
through the Pentagon system. It is kept away from any public control or
public scrutiny, because it is secret, and has every possible advantage. It
goes up under more statist elements like the Reaganites, just as protection
did. Maybe the most dramatic example of this influence is Gingrich
himself, who heads a conservative revolution. You can find many press
reports on the new rise of conservatism in the US that focus on the fiery
leader of the revolution, Newt Gingrich, who is full of enthusiasm about
entrepreneurial values and how people want to get the nanny state off their
back. Gingrich describes the Georgia county he represents as a Norman
Rockwell world – Rockwell is a painter who paints happy middle-class
people – “a Norman Rockwell world with fiber optic computers and jet
planes,” just a wonderful place – “A Suburban Eden Where the Right Rules,”
a New York Times headline tells us, and where “conservatism flowers
among the malls,” where happy people shop. That’s what happens when
you’re a free entrepreneur, liberated from the nanny state. There is a little
footnote to that, sort of in the background somewhere, which is that this
very affluent district right outside of Atlanta gets more federal subsidies
than any suburban county in the country, with the exception of the federal
system itself (Arlington, Virginia, across the river from Washington, where
the Pentagon and other federal agencies are located, and Brevard County,
Florida, the home of the Kennedy Space Center). And the computers,
fiber optics, and jet planes are also primarily a gift of the nanny state. The
county’s largest employer is Lockheed Corporation, which it would be
inaccurate to describe as state-subsidized, since it is closer to a part of the
federal government which happens to record private profits. It’s really
easy to talk about getting the nanny state out of your hair, to triumphantly
proclaim libertarian values, and so forth, as long as you are feeding at the
public trough. But it’s not enough – back to the trenches.
In fact, things have reached a point where the concept of capitalism
has disappeared from the business world. They don’t understand it any
more. You can see this if you read the business press, like the Wall Street
Journal. A couple of weeks ago, it had a lead story about business strategies.
It compared the business strategies of two different states, Virginia and
Maryland. They had different approaches (just like India and Brazil),
different methods of bringing in investment and having development. And
the article talked about which approach is better, which one worked and
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 79
which one did not. It turned out that for a while Maryland was better and
now Virginia is better. Maryland had been banking on biotechnology, and
genetic engineering, and the biology-based industries. And Virginia, which
they said had a better business climate and more supportive individual
entrepreneurs, was developing computers and telecommunications:
Virginia is doing better, and that shows the values of capitalism, better
business climates, and so on. Now, as it happens, Maryland and Virginia
are the two states next to Washington, and if you read the story, it turns
out that these investment efforts are not being made by Maryland and
Virginia but by areas around Washington (suburbs of Washington). And
the difference in business strategy is that Maryland was banking on putting
its hand in the public pocket through the parts of the federal government
that subsidize biology-based industries, while Virginia had the smarter
idea of putting its hands into the deeper pockets of the part of the federal
government which pays the costs of the high-tech industry – namely the
defense system. Well, that turned out to be a better strategy, so the better
technique for private enterprise is to make sure you smartly pick the public
funds you’re going to rob. That’s regarded, without comment, as the way
capitalism should work. And that is the way it does work. If you look
back in history, that is the way it generally worked. All this continues and
expands on and on.
There is a lot more to say about this, but I’m going to save time for
discussion. Let me just say that this is not the first time we find ourselves
in this situation. About a hundred years ago, William Morris, the famous
British revolutionary socialist writer, told an Oxford audience that, “I know
it is at present the received opinion that the competitive, or ‘Devil take the
hindmost’, system is the last system of economy which the world will see;
that it is perfection, and therefore finality has been reached in it; and it is
doubtless a bold thing to fly in the face of this opinion, which I am told is
held even by the most learned men.” And he goes on to say that if history
is really at an end as most learned men proclaim, then “civilization will
die.” But all of history tells us, he says, that it is not so. And despite what
the learned men tell him he will continue to fly in the face of this opinion.
And he was right. History was not over. There were continuing popular
struggles, many achievements; the world is, in many ways, a much better
place today than it was then.
That pattern has been repeated. In the 1920s again, in the US there
was a belief that perfection had been reached, finality had come, with a
utopia for the masters. But the masters and learned men turned out to be
80 Democracy and Power
wrong – a couple of years later there was mass mobilization, coming close
to worker takeover of factories, later moves into the welfare state system,
and so on. And so it continues. There is still plenty of leeway for action;
these human institutions are under control. If “the daring depravity of
the times” does last, and history comes to an end, and civilization dies,
we’ll know exactly who is to blame – namely ourselves, because there is
plenty that can be done about it.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 81
Question and Answer Session
Question: As you know, countries like India, China and Indonesia are competing
for capital and hoping to become part of this wonderful system that you just
described. California and other states are competing with them, too. But do you
see any signs of popular struggle – a hope of democracy? Do you see any struggle
emerging that we can gain some hope from?
Chomsky: There are plenty of people like William Morris who don’t
accept the opinion of the most learned men. Sure, there are struggles all
over the place. France just had big general strikes. The poorest country
in the western hemisphere is Haiti, which had a remarkable example of
democratization a couple of years ago. It is really an instructive lesson. This
is a highly impoverished country – I was there at the height of the terror,
and the poverty is incredible. You see it in India, but there it is everywhere.
Incidentally, Haiti used to be a rich country – a source of a good deal of
Europe’s wealth. But now it’s miserable and impoverished. A couple of
years ago, to everyone’s surprise, the general population (people in slums,
peasants in the hills) had succeeded on their own in developing a vibrant
and lively civil society with grassroots organizations, popular initiatives,
and so on. A lot of it was impelled by liberation theology, which has had
a big effect in the region. And to everyone’s amazement, they managed to
sweep their own president into office with quite a popular program. Of
course, a coup came along and it got crushed. The US pretended to oppose
it, but in fact backed it. Finally the US came back in and re-instituted the
program that the population had thrown out. That was the condition
under which the president was allowed to return: that he adopt the harsh
neoliberal program of the defeated US candidate in the election, who
received fourteen percent of the votes. That is what is now hailed as proof
of Washington’s awe-inspiring dedication to democracy. However, the
Haitian population, despite three years of terror and lots of killings, are still
resisting it. This is another country that has resisted structural adjustment,
resisted it to the extent that the World Bank and the US government have
started cutting off the aid they were giving. But Haiti is much too small to
be able to resist. In France too, the working class and general public are not
strong enough to resist on their own. Everywhere you look, there are these
signs of resistance and they do involve the overwhelming majority of the
82 Democracy and Power
population. And this struggle is going to require a level of mobilization
and commitment beyond what happened in the past. Society is much more
globalized today and that means struggle has to be more international,
solidarity has to be across borders. That is coming too, but the question is,
is it fast enough?
Let me give you another example closer to home for me – the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). To start with, NAFTA is
misnamed. It certainly was not an agreement, least of all an agreement
involving the general population of the three countries (Mexico, Canada
and US). The population was strongly against it. So if it was an agreement,
it was between somebody else and not the population of these countries.
And it was not about free trade. It was about strengthening investor rights,
which is quite different from free trade. In fact, at that time, about half
of US exports to Mexico didn’t even enter the Mexican economy. They
are called “trade” by economists, because it happens to cross national
boundaries. But if the Ford Motors company shifts components across the
border to employ cheaper labor and evade environmental restrictions, and
then sends them back across the border for adding more value, that is not
trade in any meaningful sense of the word.
Coming back to NAFTA, the purpose was to raise investor rights. In
order to get it through (the partners are democratic countries), they had
to put in some side provisions about labor rights and environmental
protection and so on. They are not meant seriously, but they are there.
Right after NAFTA was enacted, General Electric and Honeywell, two big
investors in Mexico, fired a good part of the labor force that was involved in
union organizing. This is a radical violation of labor rights. Well for the first
time ever, the American labor unions (which have had quite a reactionary
leadership) stepped in and insisted that a case be brought before the US
Labor Department. They instituted proceedings against these firms. Of
course they lost: this is just cosmetic. But it happened, for the first time ever.
A labor-based organization which until recently has been pretty marginal
has been organizing pressures to demand elementary labor rights in the
areas where US investments go. It’s by now fairly successful. They have
just compelled GAP, the big clothing manufacturers, to modify labor
practices in Central America, where women are miserably exploited by
textile manufacturers and the electronics industry. This may turn out to
be cosmetic again (we don’t know yet), but they have created a national
scandal about it, and a lot of public pressure. GAP had to do something.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 83
They may find a way around it, but those things are happening more and
more. This is the kind of international, cross-country solidarity that can
compete with transnationals.
But it has to go much further, to the extent of realizing that the whole
system is fundamentally illegitimate. There is no justification for private
corporations to exist. They would have horrified classical liberal opinion.
You can already see that insofar as classical liberals (like Jefferson) still
existed at the time when the corporations were rising, they were bitterly
condemned. They came to power in the early part of this century and they
have no right to that power, and certainly no right to the transnational
power that they have. They have to be dismantled. That is going to take a
big effort. But it’s no bigger an effort than overthrowing feudalism. These
things take long, committed, dedicated popular struggle. There are plenty
of signs of it all over the place. But it is certainly not going to be simple.
Anyone who wants a general strategy to do it by tomorrow had better look
somewhere else. There is no new one, just the old strategies which worked
in the past. There is no reason why they should not succeed again.
Question: Those of us who were students forty years ago admired Nehru’s
socialism – which meant a state-controlled, or at least state-regulated, economy.
Now we have moved consciously or unconsciously to a liberalized regime, where
we are welcoming multinational companies. Even Jyoti Basu and Laloo Prasad
Yadav, champions of the poorer sections, are welcoming this new regime. What
is your advice for a country like ours? Is it just that we alternate between state
control and multinationals, until some balance emerges?
Chomsky: I don’t presume to give advice to other people, and in particular,
to other countries. They have their own complicated problems, which you
have to work out yourself. Advising you about it would be ridiculous, as
you know more about it than I do. However, there is something general
going on. It was pointed out rather well by Bakunin about 150 years
ago. He made one of the few significant predictions in the social sciences
that’s ever come true, and it ought to be studied for that reason alone. He
predicted that within the rising industrial world there would be a new
class of intelligentsia. They would fall into two categories. One category,
he said, would try to use popular struggles to gain power for themselves
and become a “red bureaucracy.” It would create the most brutal tyrannies
84 Democracy and Power
that humanity had ever seen, all in the name of the people (state socialism).
The other category of intellectuals would recognize that instead of taking
power to exploit popular struggles, it makes more sense to serve people
who already have power. As he put it, they would “beat the people with
the people’s stick,” in what we would now call state capitalist democracies.
These would be the two major categories of intellectuals. For one of them,
the way to beat the people is to take power and introduce something called
socialism which means smashing every popular organization and keeping
people under control. That’s the red bureaucracy. The other category
prefers to serve the powerful and beat the people with the people’s stick,
called democracy.
I think his prediction was right – those have been the two methods
of beating the people. But do we need either of them? Why? If we look
way back at the origins of modern democracy, if you look at the English
revolution in the seventeenth century when you have the first modern
democratic revolution, you find a pattern which has shown up again and
again in every popular struggle I know of (and it goes further back in
history). When you study in school about the English revolution, you learn
that it was a conflict between King and Parliament as to who was going to
take power, which is not false. But it is only partially true, because as in
every other civil conflict that I’ve ever heard of, it wasn’t just two parties
contesting for power. It was three. There was also the general population,
which didn’t want either. As they put it in their own pamphlets, they wanted
to be ruled by “countrymen like ourselves.” They wanted to take control
over their own institutions, without knights, gentlemen, parliaments, etc.
They made some gains, and what there is of English democracy reflects
these gains. The same happened with the American Revolution.
Are there alternatives to the two forms of tyranny? Sure there are –
democratic control by ordinary people of every institution, whether it is
industry, colleges, commerce, etc. There is no reason why these institutions
can’t be under popular control. It’s true that this would not leave any
place for the intellectuals. They wouldn’t be able to take power as a red
bureaucracy, or to serve private power and get the benefits that it offers
for the service. Therefore intellectual opinion is overwhelmingly opposed
to popular control, which makes good sense given their class interests. But
there is no particular reason why anybody should accept this.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 85
Question: I think the whole debate is misplaced. Some people support the
concentration of wealth in a few hands, others the concentration of rights. Both
believe in concentration. The debate should shift from there, and the state should
be called upon to eliminate injustice.
Chomsky: The rights that are concentrated in the existing society relate
primarily to the right to property. There are plenty of other rights, and
they are important and have been won by popular struggle. For instance,
freedom of speech is an extremely important one, which has been achieved
in the US beyond any other country in the world. And it was achieved
recently. It is written in the Bill of Rights, but that’s meaningless. All sorts
of things are written in the Constitution. Freedom of speech was actually
achieved in the 1960s, even formally when the Supreme Court struck down
the law of seditious libel – the law which protected the state against criminal
assault by words. Just about every society has that in some form. England
still has it, so does Canada – in fact everyone I know of. But it was finally
struck down in the US, which means that state authorities are no longer
protected from assault by words. The courts went on to achieve further
libertarian standards, also unique to my knowledge, while allowing certain
narrow departures from full protection of freedom of speech, which I think
are legitimate, namely that speech ought to be protected up to incipient
criminal action. For instance, if someone comes to a store with a gun and
you tell him “shoot,” that speech is not protected. But up to criminal action,
freedom of speech exists and it’s a very important right. Those kinds of
rights are not concentrated – they are general rights to, say, freedom of
speech. Everybody can use it. Now in fact, only a few people can use it,
namely the people who have property, but that’s because of property
rights which allow other rights to be actually enjoyed by people who are
privileged. It’s no argument about other rights. It’s an argument for getting
rid of the concentration of power. So I don’t see the conflict you described.
Some rights ought to be general, and other rights that are concentrated, like
property rights, ought to be eliminated so that all rights become general.
As to calling upon the state to eliminate injustice, I don’t understand
what that means. States are exactly the way Adam Smith described them,
combinations of the rich and the government to oppress the poor. You
don’t call upon that combination to get rid of injustice, what you do is
86 Democracy and Power
dismantle it. This doesn’t mean tomorrow. What you want to do is to place
power and authority, ability to make decisions, in the hands of popular
groups. That doesn’t mean calling on the state to eliminate injustice, it
means getting enough power either through or over the state, or after the
state is dismantled in anything remotely like its existing forms, so that
people can eliminate injustice – like instituting freedom of speech. But you
don’t call on a power system to eliminate injustice – that’s like calling on a
corporation to be benevolent. It doesn’t make sense.
Question: There are of course many examples of organized resistance to global
liberalization outside the US. But since your primary concern has been with the
US, what are the possibilities for organized resistance within the US?
Chomsky: I mentioned yesterday that, in all this talk of mass depoliticization
in the US, there is one oversight – namely that there has been a lot of
organization and politicization, though it’s rarely studied. In fact, there
has been a tremendous amount in the past thirty, thirty-five years, and
that’s quite important. What the elite calls “the crisis of democracy” is very
real. There has been considerable change from the apathy and obedience
of 1960 to much more activism today, and it shows up in all sorts of areas.
It started in the 1960s, and took off in the 1970s and 1980s. The big popular
movements that have made a lot of difference, like the feminist movement
or the environmentalist movement or the solidarity movements, are
movements of the 1970s and 1980s. There is little talk about them, because
you are not supposed to let it be known that there is resistance. Remember,
you’re supposed to make people believe that everything is hopeless. But
these movements take place, on an enormous scale. And they have led to
major changes in the country; outside educated circles – which are mostly
untouched for obvious reasons – the general population is simply very
different.
The Vietnam War is a striking example. In 1962, J.F. Kennedy started
sending the US Air Force to bomb South Vietnam. Before that, South
Vietnam had been a standard Latin American-style terrorist state. The US
had instituted a terror state there, which was slaughtering the population
but couldn’t control popular resistance, so the US had to move in directly.
So the US Air Force started bombing, and Americans went into combat
operations. And nobody batted an eyelash. You couldn’t get two people
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 87
together in a living room to talk about it. It’s not that it was a secret. You
could read in the New York Times about the bombing missions carried out
by the US Air Force. But so what, we want to bomb another country, that’s
their problem. In fact, the operation was so widely supported, not only in
the US but all over the world, including India, that people do not know that
the US attacked South Vietnam. Ask your sophisticated friends when the
US attacked South Vietnam, and very few will know what you are talking
about, because the idea that the US was attacking South Vietnam was
inconceivable to general opinion at that time. If the US wanted to attack
another country, that’s its prerogative. In the US this was unquestioned.
And it remained unquestioned among elites. So among educated sectors,
opposition to the war was always on “pragmatic” grounds. A noble cause,
but costs too much, can’t get away with it. The whole flak about McNamara’s
book was about that. He says it cost us too much. And then the whole
debate was – did he go too far? Maybe it was right for him to say that? A
total scandal. It doesn’t matter how much it costs you. It matters how much
it cost those several million people you killed. But that’s not an issue among
educated sectors. On the other hand, that’s not true among the population.
Since around the early 1970s, when polls started asking people about their
attitude towards the Vietnam War, about seventy percent steadily said that
the war is fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. That is the
position which everyone holds on their own. Nobody says it, they’ve never
heard it. The most that anyone who has got a good education can say is,
the war was a mistake, but for seventy percent of the population it was
not, it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” That runs right through
the Reagan years into the early 1990s. Those are big differences, compared
with the situation in 1961, and they show up in everything else.
When Ronald Reagan came in 1980, he was trying to duplicate Kennedy,
his model. I should say, when people talk about Reagan they have to
remember that he was like the Queen of England – who opens Parliament
with a message, but nobody cares that she understands it, it’s a symbolic
position. When Reagan came in, they tried to duplicate the Kennedy
operations, this time in Central America where the same situation had
developed: they had terror states which couldn’t control the resistance
any longer. It looked like the US would have to invade, just like in South
Vietnam. In fact, they announced it. As soon as they came in, they duplicated
what Kennedy did, but the reaction was very different from 1961: there
was a public uprising. There were spontaneous demonstrations all over
88 Democracy and Power
the place, many of them centered on church and solidarity organizations.
In fact, there was so much resistance that they had to back off. They told
the press, forget it, we didn’t mean it seriously. Instead, they moved to
clandestine terror. That’s bad enough, a couple of hundred thousand
people got slaughtered, and four countries were nearly destroyed. But
B-52s were far worse. The difference between B-52s and clandestine terror
doesn’t look like a great advance, but it is. So the Central American terror
of the 1980s was not direct aggression, and it wasn’t like Vietnam, where
they sent the American army to wipe the place out. It was clandestine
terror, and resistance was far beyond the 1960s. I mean, not only was it
much broader, but it was deeper, rooted in the population and right in the
mainstream. The main resistance was coming from churches, people in the
Southwest – many were culturally conservative. But it happened all over
the place, and at a level that was far beyond not only the 1960s but anything
in the history of western imperialism. Remember, thousands of well-to-do
mainstream Americans went to Central America to do things like living
in villages, on the assumption that a white face around might restrict the
terror against these people. That has never happened in the history of
imperialism. Nobody ever dreamed of going to live in a Vietnamese village
to protect people against marauding soldiers in the 1960s.
There was another dramatic example in 1992. It was 500 years since the
“liberation” of the hemisphere, and they counted on a big celebration. They
couldn’t do it, not because of the radicals, but because the population just
would not tolerate it – treating the initiation of mass genocide as liberation
of anything. So they had to back off. Had it been thirty years earlier, no
doubt there would have been a great extravaganza. In fact, all this hysteria
about political correctness developed right at that time, and I suspect this
was the reason for it. Among educated elites there was a real outrage that
the population would simply not accept this, and the reaction was hysteria
about the left takeover, political correctness and all that.
Well, those are very substantial changes. The country is very different
from what it was, a lot more civilized in many ways. On the other hand, it
is also a lot more irrational and hysterical. There has been destruction of
resistance, the reaction has been very powerful and effective, but it is still
there. That’s what conflicts are like; much is going on on both sides. The
people in paramilitary organizations etc., they could very easily switch. They
could be a mass base for fascism, or a popular base for very constructive
developments. It’s like Germany in the 1930s – it could have gone either way.
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 89
Question: The business world, if not the poorer classes, knows it’s all class war.
Do you think that any non-violent resolution of this class war is possible? Secondly,
you have been a persistent critic of both the capitalist world and socialist countries.
Would you like to elaborate on the alternative system you propose and how to
achieve it?
Chomsky: No sane person wants violent change. Of course, pathological
people may want violence, but not people in their right minds. You do
want to see more freedom, justice and democracy, but not violence. So
when does it get violent? Well, it becomes violent if people who have
power refuse to respond to calls for justice and freedom, and use violence
to protect their power. So the question becomes whether it is possible to
expand the realm of freedom and justice without running into state terror
and other forms of repressive violence. That is not in the hands of people
who are trying to expand the realm of freedom and justice. Naturally, they
will try to do it non-violently and hope that they can. Many times, it has
been done. If you look at the history of Scandinavian social democracy, they
got that way quite fast, from pretty reactionary systems, and it has been
done non-violently. Sometimes it’s done with violence, and sometimes
without. Generally, resorting to violence has very negative consequences
for everybody. So if it does happen, it’s a regressive step. It depends on
the response you get from people with power. If people with illegitimate
power use violence to protect their power, yes, there will be violent conflict.
Regarding the second question, about what alternative society will look
like, I think you can sketch it out at various levels of detail, but it’s not a
particularly wise move. We do not understand enough about complicated
systems. Incidentally, that begins around the level of big molecules – from
that level on, understanding tails off very fast. So there is no point trying
to design complicated systems, like alternative societies, in any detail. You
can talk about principles they should try to realize. And you can debate
the principles they ought to follow, and think of ways of implementing
them in particular places. I think there are reasonable principles, which
have been discussed for centuries. For example, workers’ control over
industry – that’s perfectly reasonable. There is no reason why industrial
enterprises should not be under the control of working people and the
communities in which they live.
How would you work that out? We can give all sorts of details. First,
we can find examples which partially realize workers’ control, and think
90 Democracy and Power
of ways to modify them. And then, to an extent, market principles should
be allowed to operate. I have friends who are very confident about it and
have very strong beliefs. But I don’t see how they know, how anybody can
be smart enough to know, whether we can completely eliminate market
principles or just allow them free reign. You can see the consequences
of some of those extreme choices, they are pretty bad. But there’s a big
range where you have to experiment. Should you use market principles
for shadow pricing – not affecting what gets to people but determining
where demand is? Maybe. I don’t see that there is a principled argument
about that. You have to explore and see what happens when you try. You
are talking about extremely complex and poorly understood mechanisms,
namely human society. And here, I think, it makes sense to be conservative
– to try changes and see what happens. If they work, fine. But hitting a
system you don’t understand with a monkey wrench and saying it will get
better usually doesn’t work well.
So we can talk quite reasonably about principles and explore ways to
implement them. In concrete situations, where we have a specific problem
to deal with, we can work out detailed tactics – but they might be quite
different in the next situation, and I think these are just learning experiences.
You try and hope to do better the next time.
Question: How do you place the war with Iraq or, more generally, against
Muslim fundamentalism? Do you see it as a popular struggle? Do you see it as a
democratic movement or something of that kind?
Chomsky: Well, some sort of “clash of civilizations” is supposed to be
going on between the civilized West and uncivilized Muslim world – that’s
the new enemy. However, let’s be a little careful. First of all, the US has
absolutely nothing against religious fundamentalism. It’s probably the most
religious fundamentalist society in the world. I’m not exaggerating. If you
look at fanatical religious belief, it’s hard to find any country that has more
of it than the US. Literally half of the population in the US (an educated
country where people go to school) believes that the human species was
created a couple of thousand years ago. I don’t know what the figure is
in Iran, but it’s unlikely to be higher. People in the US have born-again
experiences, religious cults, and so on – it’s beyond belief. So the US has
absolutely nothing against fundamentalism. Does it have anything against
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 91
Islamic fundamentalism? Again, certainly not. The most extreme Islamic
fundamentalist state in the world, and another monstrosity, happens to be
a great US ally – namely Saudi Arabia. Does the US have anything against
Saudi Arabia? No, as long as they do their job, and their job is to make sure
that the wealth of oil production goes to the West instead of the population
of the region. As long as they do that job, they can be as fundamentalist as
they like. Nobody cares.
So what the US is against is independence. If an Islamic fundamentalist
state or movement happens to be independent, yes sure, they’re against it.
But they’re just as much against the Catholic Church. The war in Central
America in the last decade (in the 1980s) was primarily a war against the
Church, the Catholic Church. If you think about it, it’s kind of symbolic
(but more than symbolic) that the decade of the eighties in Central America
began with the murder of an Archbishop and ended with the murder of six
leading Jesuit intellectuals – in both cases by elite forces trained and armed
by the US. This went on right through the period, and a very substantial
part of that war was in fact a war against the Church. Why? Well, the
Church had shifted from its historical vocation of serving the rich, and a
very impressive section of it sided with the poor. As an old atheist, this is
odd for me to say, but I ended up staying in the Jesuit House in Nicaragua
when I visited (at the invitation of the Jesuit university, incidentally). These
were really marvelous and courageous people who undertook what they
called “the preferential option for the poor,” meaning the Church would
work for the poor and not the rich. That called forth a war of terror and
slaughter, not because there is a clash of civilizations between the US and
the Catholic Church, but because they were just working for the wrong
people. That’s the background for the story of Islamic fundamentalism.
The real issue is that efforts to extricate oneself from a global system of
domination are unacceptable, whether they are Islamic or Christian or
right-wing or left-wing or parliamentary.
So, what was going on in the Iraq war? First of all, Iraq was a secular
state. Saddam Hussein was considered a great guy by the US. He was a
major friend and ally. If he wanted to gas Kurds, and purge dissidents,
and so on, that was his own problem, but it was certainly not going to
stop the US. The US intervened directly in the Iran-Iraq war in order to
make sure that Iraq won, as it did. In fact, that intervention turned really
extreme towards the end of the war. If you recall, the US naval forces in
the Persian Gulf intervened openly on the side of Iraq, and even carried
92 Democracy and Power
out one of the major acts of terrorism. The U.S.S. Vincennes shot down
an Iranian airliner in commercial Iranian airspace. Incidentally, this is no
secret. There have already been two major articles in the US Naval Institute
Proceedings, the official journal of the Navy Department, going through that
incident in close detail and giving enough evidence to indicate that it was
an act of state terrorism: they shot down the plane purposely and seem to
have known what they were doing. That’s the point at which Iran finally
backed off. They realized that the United States is not going to stop. After
that, Saddam Hussein remained a leading trading partner and ally, getting
big credits from the US to purchase more agricultural goods, and so on,
and everything was just fine until 2 August, 1990, when he made a mistake
that a lot of dictators make. One of the dangers of being so dictatorial is
that, because you are totally isolated from any interaction, you develop
a completely distorted view of the world. So Saddam Hussein thought
that he was free to go on and do anything he felt like. He completely
misinterpreted some instructions that came from the State Department. I
don’t believe, as many people do, that the US instigated the war. I think
that if you look back at those April Glaspie exchanges, and so on, what
happened is that the US was telling Saddam Hussein, look, if you want to
rectify the border with Kuwait and do something to raise oil prices, we’re
not going to make a fuss. And this was perfectly true, because the US did
not care about any of those things. Saddam Hussein misinterpreted that to
mean “take Kuwait.” Well, that’s not permitted.
It is not permitted, because of something that the intellectuals of the
world have been very careful to conceal. If you look at the literature on
the Iraq war, it’s enormous, but one thing is missing from it – even in the
scholarly studies – and that is a look at the declassified records. We have a
rich declassified record of British and American planning documents that
bear quite directly on this, and they’re the first thing that any sane person
would look at. These records are very interesting, they’re about thirty
years old, but they go through the relevant period, namely the late fifties,
when Iraq broke out of the Anglo-American system of domination of oil,
causing a huge uproar in Washington and London. The British Foreign
Secretary flew to Washington: they had big consultations. We have records
of those, and the records lay out the background for the Iran-Iraq war. It
took considerable discipline for scholarship and journalism not to look at
any of this stuff. When you look at it, what you find out is that they took
crucial decisions. One decision was to grant nominal independence to
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 93
Kuwait. Kuwait had been a total colony, but they were worried that this
nationalism from Iraq might spread to Kuwait, and the way to contain it
was to grant them nominal independence. Kuwait would remain under
British rule, but with various trappings of independence which would
dampen the nationalist fervor.
They made various other plans, and one of them was that Britain
reserved the right “ruthlessly to intervene” (that was the phrase they used)
if anything happened to upset the order in Kuwait. Why Britain? Well, in
the postwar international settlement the US took over the Middle East
for itself, but Britain was considered our “lieutenant,” as a high Kennedy
advisor put it, adding that “the fashionable word is ‘partner.’” The British
prefer to hear the fashionable word, so they have various illusions about a
“special relationship,” but in fact it was our lieutenant. With all its history
of knowing how to smash Third World people in the face, Britain would
be a useful lieutenant. So Britain was allowed to take control of some of
the smaller things like Kuwait. Kuwait has a lot of wealth, but it’s not
like Saudi Arabia. US took over the big stuff, so Saudi Arabia – that’s
ours. But Britain gets the small things like Kuwait, and that was quite
important. If you look at the planning records, you see that both Britain
and the US recognized that profits from Kuwait were critical to maintain
sterling, and the British economy, and so on, just as the profits from
Saudi Arabia and Gulf oil are critical for maintaining the US economy.
It’s not the oil that they care about so much, but the profits from it, and
if anything happens to disrupt this arrangement Britain would ruthlessly
intervene in Kuwait. The US reserved the right to intervene ruthlessly in
the region if anything more happened. That’s the basis for what went on.
Something happened that was going to disrupt the arrangement, so they
ruthlessly intervened, as they said they were going to do, and for exactly
those reasons. That had nothing to do with any threat to the control of oil,
nobody was going to change that, but it definitely had to do with a threat
to the profits from oil.
There’s something pretty striking about the history of oil. In fact, some
economic historians have suggested it’s the reason why the oil companies
were never much interested in India. Oil development happens mostly in
countries where you don’t have to worry about the domestic population,
so that they’re not going to get the wealth from it. If you look at the
prospects in India, the wealth may go to the people in India, which is just
not worth it. On the other hand, the Persian Gulf region is fine in that
94 Democracy and Power
respect. Profits have to go to the West, that’s the arrangement. The West
means the US and its lieutenant, primarily, and the big oil companies that
are mostly American, though some are British, Dutch, and so on. That’s
the background.
Now as soon as he invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein realized that he
had made a bad mistake. One of the things we know about this by now is
that, within a couple of days, Iraq started offering to withdraw. But the US
and England did not want Iraq to withdraw. In fact, what they called the
“nightmare scenario” was that Iraq would withdraw and leave behind a kind
of puppet regime, which would mean that the arrangements for control
over the system would have changed. Notice that if Iraq had withdrawn
and left behind a puppet regime, it would have done exactly what the US
had just done in Panama a couple of months earlier – invaded, stuck in
a puppet regime and withdrawn. But of course, that’s the prerogative of
power. It’s fine if the US does it, but certainly not Iraq or anybody who
disrupts an area that’s so crucial to the health of the international economy,
which means the wealth of the powerful in the West. That’s like readjusting
the arrangements for distribution of oil profits. Therefore, things were
set up from that point on to make sure that there would be a war, that
Iraq would not withdraw. Withdrawal offers were blocked, negotiations
were blocked, the international press (including the European press) had
to completely conceal this, and it did. There were a few leaks in the US,
virtually none in Europe. Discipline was perfect, to my knowledge, except
a couple of articles – I wrote one in the Guardian, and there were a couple of
others, but virtually nothing on the Iraqi withdrawal offers and the refusal
to accept them.
Finally, they got the war they wanted, and that established, as George
Bush put it pretty frankly, that “what we say goes” and people ought to
understand that. You don’t step on the toes of real power. If you do, you
get smashed. And that’s going to continue. The reason why the sanctions
are so severe is that you have to make an example. That’s something any
mafia don would understand perfectly well. Suppose that somebody from
the mafia runs a particular neighborhood and gets protection money from
the local storekeepers. Then some store-keeper refuses to pay protection
money. First of all, you send in the goons to take the money. But you don’t
stop there; you have to make an example of it. So you beat him up or kill
him, or kill his family, or something like that, so that others get the idea that
this is not the way to behave. The same lesson applies in the international
The Vicissitudes of Democracy: Part 2 95
arena. That’s the reason for the almost hysterical hatred of Cuba, Nicaragua,
Vietnam – anybody who stands up and does anything wrong really has to
be punished.
So that’s the Iraq war. Not that Saddam Hussein is a nice guy. He is a
murderous killer, but that’s not the reason for the war. His crimes were
mostly committed during the period when he was a great friend and ally.
It’s not the crimes that matter, and it was the same with Stalin, Hitler, and
everyone else. If you look back at the records, Truman and Churchill had no
objection to Stalin’s crimes. In fact, they admired him. In internal discussions,
they were defending him; they talked about him as a man of honor, and
that sort of thing. The question is, will he subordinate his domain to western
interests? If he does, he can rule any way he likes. If not, he is an enemy.
4. The Nationality Question in
the Contemporary World*
This talk was arranged at short notice, rather spontaneously, and my
feeling is that the best thing to do in this short session may be to devote
most of the time to interchange and discussion. I’m sure you have lots of
things in mind, and I would be happy to try to address the issues you are
interested in. This is an extremely broad topic, and instead of my speaking
about it, it would be more constructive for me to react to what you think
is important. However, since I was asked to speak, I will start with a few
general comments on this very broad issue.
The question I was asked to address is how imperialist forces have
been repressing national struggles. Fine topic. There’s another topic
that could also be discussed, and I think should at least be brought into
consideration. The topic is how nationalist struggles, when they succeed,
suppress the populations that were mobilized to carry out these struggles.
Because one striking feature of nationalist struggles, over the centuries,
including this century, is that while they often present a liberatory face
and use revolutionary rhetoric, they are generally rather conservative,
even reactionary. Very often, a reactionary nationalism presents itself
as revolutionary, and in a sense, it is so in the context of liberation from
foreign oppression, but it is led by ideologies and leaders who themselves
institute new forms of domination and authoritarianism. You don’t have
to look very far from your own experience to see that – simply look at the
recent history of India. But that’s repeated, over and over again. I have had
close personal involvement with many Third World liberation struggles
and domestic ones of a similar character, I have been deeply engaged with
* Informal talk at Shankar Lal Hall (Delhi University) on 14 January 1996.
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.04
98 Democracy and Power
them for many years, and I have rarely seen an exception to this. However
radical and revolutionary the rhetoric may seem, it is usually a cover for
new forms of repression and domination that take over once the national
struggle ceases. That’s another aspect of the whole question that should
be borne in mind. A nationalist struggle may be entirely justified, but that
does not mean that it is revolutionary, even if its rhetoric is revolutionary.
So there is one question, as to what extent nationalist struggles
themselves are opening the way to new forms of repression of the general
population. Putting that topic aside, another question is, how great powers
(those who are in a position to manipulate and dominate the world order)
use their power to repress efforts at liberation and independence, including
nationalist struggles. So take the last half-century, when the United States
has been a dominant force in the world, although the pattern goes way
back. The US simply took over from England, France, Holland, and others,
who had been doing the same thing for centuries. In this last half-century,
the US has been a sort of guardian of the interests of the wealthy sector of
the industrial world. It has been interested in suppressing any challenge
to that system of domination and control. That means it has been opposed
to nationalist struggles, and it doesn’t matter what their political character
is – they can be from what’s called the left, or the right, or anywhere.
The US will oppose them if they seek independence or autonomous
development. The official phraseology is that they refuse to act in a way
that is complementary to the needs of the industrial West, meaning the
dominant elements in the industrial West. So if some radical revolutionary
movement is willing to subordinate its interests, in political and economic
development, in a fashion that will be complementary to the interests of
the West, it’s tolerable. On the other hand, if a parliamentary democracy,
following all the proper rules, attempts to pursue a course of independent
development, it will be crushed. That’s the history of the past half-century,
case after case. I can run through particular examples, but I think you must
be familiar with them.
Let me turn to a related issue, namely how the dominant ideologies
of intellectual classes (not only in the First World but also in the Third
World) mask the repression of independence, and nationalist struggles,
and create other illusions. There is a kind of consensus position about what
is happening in the world today. It was expressed, for example, in a review
of the world situation, on New Year’s Day in the New York Times, by a
respected commentator. Reviewing the world scene, he says something like
The Nationality Question 99
this – with the end of the Cold War, it was broadly assumed that we would
have new opportunities for entering a period of justice, freedom, and all
sorts of wonderful things, and then it quickly became clear that this wasn’t
true, because of the savage ethnic conflicts that arose, mostly in the former
communist world. It became clear that we are now in the era of resurgent
nationalism, and there are now new challenges to the civilized West. So
we are back in trouble again. Bright hopes for the future have been dashed.
The consequence of this, and that’s an accurate account of the international
consensus, is that the civilized countries of the West must adopt a new
position towards intervention. They must now consider the need for a new
category of intervention, namely humanitarian intervention. That means
radically revising the theoretical framework of international law and
world order. I stress “theoretical,” because it’s never observed in practice.
The core element of the framework of international law expressed in the
United Nations Charter is that the use of force is excluded in international
affairs, except in a very narrow category of cases, in particular, in self-
defense against armed attack from another state. So if someone attacks
you along the border, you’re allowed to use force in self-defense, until the
Security Council acts. That’s it. Period. Apart from that, the use of force
in international affairs is excluded, except under explicit Security Council
authorization. Well, if you look at the past half-century, you’ll see how well
that law has been kept. But anyway, that’s the theoretical framework. The
picture now is that we have to revise the theoretical framework and accept
the responsibility for humanitarian intervention on the part of the civilized
powers, in reaction to this new period in which savage ethnic conflicts are
arising, primarily in the former communist world. That’s the consensus,
and this was an accurate description of it.
This description raises some questions of fact and some questions
of value. The questions of fact are very quickly answered. They include
whether it is, in fact, true that there is a new period of savage ethnic conflict,
particularly within the former communist world. The main question of
value is, if that’s true, does it authorize the self-defined civilized countries
to institute humanitarian intervention to save the poor people of the world,
the barbarians, from their mutual slaughter?
As I said, the factual questions are very quickly answered – namely, it’s
all total and utter nonsense. There are major changes in ethnic conflicts, but
they don’t have much to do with what’s being discussed. The major change
actually took place around fifty years ago. Ethnic and national conflicts
100 Democracy and Power
actually go back to the origins of recorded history, there’s nothing new
about that. But there was a major change in 1945. Up until then, the worst
ethnic conflicts in the world were internal to the industrial world itself.
It was Europe that was the locus of most of the violence and destruction.
Europe was very destructive in the rest of the world too, but what it
was doing internally was much worse. So for centuries the French and
Germans were dedicated to slaughtering one another, and so on, across
every combination that you can find inside Europe. It goes back to the pre-
imperial and pre-colonial period. It goes back a thousand years.
Well, that came to an end in 1945, and that’s a big change in the history
of ethnic conflict. You can be quite confident that there will be no further
savage ethnic conflict internal to the industrial world. And it’s not because
of any spiritual transformation, or anything of that kind. It’s simply that
the means of destruction have become so extraordinary, that the next time
Europeans try to slaughter one another it will mean the end of everyone.
There can’t be another war, because they have constructed such devastating
means of mutual slaughter that another episode in this long history of
ethnic conflict would lead to a cataclysmic end. It is for this reason that
savage ethnic conflict among the resurgent nationalisms of the industrial
world declined – in fact pretty well terminated. That is a major change in
the history of ethnic conflict, but it’s not much discussed, although it’s by
far the most dramatic change.
Within Europe, this led to two contrary developments of much interest. I
won’t go on about it, because that’s not what you are interested in, but they
are quite significant. One is a move towards federalism, and the other is a
contrary move towards regionalism. Both of these are happening in Europe
today. On the one hand, there is a general move towards a European Union
– a kind of federal Europe with a good deal of centralization of power,
particularly financial power in the Central Bank, which could become a
major economic and political force in the world. On the other hand, there is
also a striking increase in localized regionalism: a revival of local languages
and traditions, separatism, devolution – a move towards what’s sometimes
called a Europe of the regions, in which the currently existing states will
themselves break up. That’s already happening to an extent in Spain, it
may happen in England and there are tendencies in that direction in other
parts of Europe. It is, in part, a reaction to the centralizing trend, which is
suppressing national identities and boundaries in a broader union. So these
two tendencies are developing sort of in parallel, and there is plenty of
The Nationality Question 101
internal conflict. Take a country like Belgium. The internal conflicts within
Belgium, religious and linguistic and so on, are very bitter, and if it was a
poor country you would see mass slaughter there. In a rich country, these
things are sublimated and modified into other forms, mainly for the reason
I mentioned, that mass slaughter is far too dangerous. So that’s Europe –
big changes inside Europe.
What about the rest of the world? Has there been resurgent nationalism
and savage ethnic conflict since the end of the Cold War? Not at all. If you
take a look at ethnic conflicts around the world today, virtually none of
them have to do with the end of the Cold War. There are a few, but almost all
precede that. In fact, about the only ones that have any connection with the
end of the Cold War are those that are internal to the former Soviet empire.
Inside the former Soviet empire, you find some rise of ethnic and national
conflict after the empire collapsed – in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, the Caucasus,
Armenia, among other examples. But there is nothing very special about
that. It’s perfectly normal, in fact inevitable, that when a system of tyranny,
oppression and domination collapses, there will be turmoil within what
was formerly subdued and controlled. Every imperial system that has
eroded, or withdrawn, or collapsed has been followed by such violence
and conflict. You know what happened when the British Empire collapsed,
here and everywhere else. The same happened with the French empire and
Dutch empire. The end of empire typically opens up opportunities that had
been subdued under imperial control, which often take the form of ethnic
conflict and national rivalry. In contrast with the ends of the European
empires, the end of the Soviet empire has been remarkably peaceful. There
has been plenty of violence, but nothing there even begins to compare
with the end of European empires in the past fifty years. I won’t talk about
England, France and Holland, which you know. But take the most recent
European empire – just twenty years ago the Portuguese empire collapsed.
This was one of the earliest empires, but one of the weaker ones. Its collapse
instantly led to a huge outburst of ethnic conflict, violence, massacre and
slaughter far exceeding anything that has followed the end of the Soviet
empire. The Portuguese empire was both in Africa and in Southeast Asia,
and in both places huge massacres instantly began.
In Africa, this took the form of South African-based attacks against
Angola and Mozambique, designed to make sure that they would not
separate themselves and follow an independent course. Angola and
Mozambique were controlled by the Portuguese. Once the Portuguese
102 Democracy and Power
empire collapsed, they started moving in an independent direction and
South African-based attacks immediately began, backed by the US and
England. The UN Commission on Africa made an estimate of what the
damage had been, and they estimated that in the Reagan years alone (in
1980-88, during the period of so-called “constructive engagement”) the US
and UK-backed South African attacks in Angola and Mozambique caused
over a million and a half deaths, and 60 billion US dollars in damage.
That’s a huge amount of destruction, and the sources of it are essentially
the industrial West: Britain and the US, with some support from France,
and other countries too, including some Third World countries operating
through South Africa as the medium. Somehow, that’s not supposed to
count in the history of ethnic conflict, although it vastly exceeds anything
that followed the end of the Russian empire. In Angola, it’s still going on.
Well, that’s Africa. What about East Asia? Exactly the same story. In
Southeast Asia there was one Portuguese colony that immediately began
to move towards independence – namely East Timor. It was instantly
attacked by Indonesia, within days of the Portuguese withdrawal. And
that is the worst slaughter since the Holocaust, relative to population, far
exceeding any other. If you look at the per capita death rates in East Timor
in the late 1970s, they were much higher than in any other country. Now,
the terror has subsided somewhat, and during the last couple of years East
Timor has been perhaps second to Liberia in terms of per capita death rate.
That’s still very high. Now, why doesn’t that count? Well, the reason is
that Indonesia was the proxy for the western powers in Southeast Asia, in
the same sense as South Africa was in Africa. So the Indonesian attack on
East Timor was decisively backed by the US, which provided most of the
arms and diplomatic support, and later by England, which took over as the
leading supporter. Other countries supported it also, including regional
powers. You might have a look at India’s role, it’s not too pretty. This is the
Southeast Asian analogue of what happened in Africa: huge massacres, far
exceeding anything that’s followed the end of the Cold War. But it doesn’t
count, and there’s a simple reason for it, namely agency. In the case of the
end of the Portuguese empire, the terror and destruction trace right back
to western powers, and therefore, they are immune from discussion by
respectable intellectuals. Incidentally, that includes respectable Third World
intellectuals; I don’t want to suggest that this is a western phenomenon.
They do the dirty work, but that’s because they have more power.
Now, let’s take a look at the post-Cold War period – the period when
this new era of ethnic conflicts is supposed to have emerged. Obviously,
The Nationality Question 103
the list does not include any of these cases, because they happened earlier
and have to do with the end of other empires. In the former Soviet empire,
yes, there are some conflicts. I mentioned the cases; they are significant,
but not enormous compared with the conflicts that arose at the end of
other empires. The major ethnic conflict that occurred since the end of the
Cold War has been Rwanda; that’s by far the biggest massacre. But that
has nothing to do with the end of the Cold War. That’s been going on for
twenty or thirty years, and it has to do with the end of the Belgian, and
French, and British empires – they are all involved there. There was a big
slaughter in Burundi twenty years ago, part of the same conflict, and there
was another one this year. The European powers were involved in various
complicated ways – mostly France, in this case. But again, that has nothing
to do with end of the Cold War.
The conflict that has received most of the attention is in the former
Yugoslavia. That’s been very brutal, particularly in Bosnia, although
nothing like the scale of any of the others. For example, with all its horrors,
the conflict in Bosnia does not begin to compare with what happened in
Angola in the same years. But that’s where the focus is – on the former
Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Here again, it has nothing to do with the
end of the Cold War. The former Yugoslavia was a western, mostly US,
client. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the conflicts that took place there
have a good deal more to do with structural adjustment programs that
were instituted in the 1980s, and their usual disruptive effects, than with
anything related to the end of the Cold War. Since Yugoslavia broke up, the
western powers and Russia have been maneuvering and trying to figure
out how to reconstruct it in a way that will restore their own domination.
Now, they don’t have quite the same interests. Russia is not strong enough
to be part of the game, but even the European Union and the US have a
somewhat different picture of how Yugoslavia ought to be reconstructed.
They both want to have control, so Germany would like to control it, and
so does the US, and they have somewhat conflicting interests. But basically,
they agreed for some time that the way to resolve the conflict would
involve a partition of Bosnia between a Greater Croatia and a Greater
Serbia, and then the question is who is going to control Greater Croatia and
Greater Serbia. Well, the US (by far the stronger among the two contending
powers) has apparently won that. The US waited until the conflict had sort
of simmered down, with the two sides more or less balanced in military
force and exhausted after plenty of mutual slaughter. At that point, the US
moved in to separate the warring parties and to institute a plan, in effect
104 Democracy and Power
a partition. They may call it something else, but it amounts to a partition
between a Greater Croatia, which is already pretty much a US client, and
a Greater Serbia which it is hoped will become a US client. If that works
out, the US would have effectively restored the situation that existed before
the break-up of Yugoslavia, with US dominance in the Balkans. And that’s
quite important for US strategic planning.
That part of southern Europe has always been regarded as the periphery
of the Middle East. In fact, until the mid-1970s, Greece was actually within
the Middle East section of the State Department. It wasn’t even considered
a part of Europe, and pretty much the same applies to the Balkans: it’s
part of the peripheral system surrounding the Middle East oil reserves,
which is quite a system. It goes from the Portuguese Azores, where there
are military bases, through southeastern Europe, Turkey, Israel, Pakistan
(reconstructed as a part of this system), Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean
and off to naval bases in the Pacific. This global system is the base for
possible intervention in the Middle East, to preserve US control over the
world’s major energy resources. Southeast Europe is a part of that system,
and the US would like to reconstruct it as a kind of a base, and is hoping to
do it right now. There is more to it than that. There’s also a conflict, again,
between Europe and the US on how to gain control over the restored Third
World in the East. With the Cold War over, most of East Europe is being
returned to its traditional Third World status, from which it attempted to
escape. And the question is, who is going to dominate and control it? So
there’s the same kind of conflict between Europe and the US there as there
was over Latin America and other places, and a base in the Balkans gives a
certain leverage. So there’s global planning behind all this.
There is no need to go further into this, the main point is that it has
nothing to do with the end of the Cold War, and the same is true if you run
through the other cases. As far as humanitarian intervention is concerned,
let me just mention that the idea is not as new as has been claimed. It goes
back at least 150 years, and its origins are interesting. The first discussion
of humanitarian intervention that I know of is particularly interesting,
because of the unusual integrity and intelligence of the person who was
responsible for it, namely John Stuart Mill. It would be hard to find a
person of such honesty and integrity in educated circles today. And he did
write a paper on humanitarian intervention in 1859. If you change a few
names, that paper says everything that is being said today, and it’s kind of
interesting to look at it.
The Nationality Question 105
The question that arose in 1859 was whether England should intervene
in the conflicts in Europe, or follow the moral principles, which are now
called international law, and say that you should not use force unless you
are attacked. Mill opposed the dominant position in England which said,
look, it’s none of our business, we’re not being attacked – let those guys
fight it out. He opposed this on the grounds that England was not a normal
country. It was a saintly and angelic power. It had no base motives, it was
completely blameless, it wanted only equality and fraternity among people.
In fact, he said England is so angelic that nobody can understand us; they
attribute to us all sorts of base motives and don’t see that we are just saintly
creatures. Nevertheless, despite the fact that people are attributing to us
these bad motives because they can’t understand our magnificence, we
should overcome our natural tendency to keep away from their struggles
and should intervene. In particular, we have to understand that in conflicts
between civilized nations and barbarians, the barbarians have no rights.
Therefore, it is absurd to criticize the British for what they do in India
or the French for what they do in Algeria, because that’s arguing on the
assumption that they are conflicts between civilized nations. They are
not, they are conflicts between civilized nations and barbarians, where
barbarians have no rights, and it’s our duty as angels and Knights of the
Round Table to intervene and solve the problems.
That was in 1859, and the timing is as interesting as the content. John
Stuart Mill was a high official in the East India Company, as had been
his father, the great liberal James Mill, and he certainly knew what was
going on in India. You remember what was going on in India about that
time, it was right after the suppression of the “Indian Mutiny” (as it’s
called in the West) with extreme barbarism, and the facts were very well
known in England. There were parliamentary enquiries, and protests,
and so on. Right after this episode of extraordinary barbarism, and with
the horrendous second Opium War underway in China, a person who is
almost unparalleled in integrity and understanding is capable of writing
about how this saintly power has a right to intervene to defend civilization,
and to defend the barbarians themselves from their uncivilized ways. Well,
unfortunately, that’s like what is happening today, except that it involves
an even higher level of dishonesty. One can give other examples.
Going back to humanitarian intervention, this term is remarkable for its
vacuity. You can’t easily find examples of it in history – there may well be
no such thing. When power systems use force, it is not for humanitarian
106 Democracy and Power
purposes. If you can think of an exception to this, I would like to hear about
it. Of course, every intervention is described as humanitarian, no matter
what it is, including the Nazi conquests. But the fact of the matter is that
these stories are untenable.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been involved in five military
operations: Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia and now Bosnia. I won’t talk
about it unless you’re interested, but there is not a single case that can be
described with a straight face as impelled by humanitarian motives. In each
case, the usual narrow considerations of self-interested powers are the ones
that motivate the intervention, despite the pretenses. In that respect, there
has been no change. So the consensus picture seems to me to have no merit
whatsoever. In fact, it is a tribute to the obedience of educated classes that
this absurd story can be presented without ridicule. Again, I don’t mean
just the West here.
These are the kinds of illusions that mask the repression of independence
and nationalist struggles. As I said, there is also a complementary question
about the nature of nationalist struggles, and whether they are really
liberation struggles, or struggles to institute new forms of oppression. That
seems to be the sort of issue that should be considered when one thinks
about the ethnic question in the contemporary world.
The Nationality Question 107
Question and Answer Session
Question: What is nationalism, and how do we define a nation? Is language the
criterion, or religion, or ethnicity? If so, then every few thousand people make up
a nation. Please comment. Also, we face a dilemma because many people feel that
this nation-state with its European historical basis is an outdated concept. At the
same time, every nationalist struggle takes political guarantee for its identity. How
do you resolve this dilemma?
Chomsky: Well, the question about the criteria for nationhood has no
answer in my opinion. The only way to decide whether some group of
people deserves to be considered a nation is to ask them. If they say we’re a
nation, okay they’re a nation. Beyond that, there are virtually no criteria. If
you look at the things that are called nations, they are so in every imaginable
fashion. So I don’t think it’s a meaningful question. People seek modes
of identification and association with one another. They do it in all sorts
of conflicting ways; they do it on the basis of friendship, religion, talking
the same language, living near each other, whatever. Now, you also have
transnational associations among people working in the same discipline,
people who never met one another but are communicating all the time.
There are all sorts of modes of mutual association. Some of them have been
codified in things called nations, but it’s not a meaningful concept. If people
say they are a nation, and call for a right of self-determination, basically
they have that right. Then you get into the question of conflicting rights,
but that’s a general problem. Any effort to assert legitimate rights will,
quite commonly, run into the fact that it interferes with other legitimate
rights. That’s human life. That’s the way relations among people work, and
in a sort of civilized setting you try to work it out the best way you can.
Now, the nation-state was one form of answer to this question, and
yes, it was a European invention. It emerged from centuries of terror,
massacres, slaughter and devastation; you know the Hundred Years
War, Thirty Years War, and so on. To impose the nation-state system in
Europe was a brutal and bitter affair, which took hundreds of years and
finally resolved itself in 1945, but only for the reason that I mentioned:
the next effort to change the nation-state system would have led to total
destruction. Therefore, the nation-state system was established. But it’s
a very unnatural system. You can see that from the savagery with which
it was imposed, or sort of emerged. It is only very loosely related to
108 Democracy and Power
people’s natural interests. Therefore, it had to be imposed and redefined
and reconstructed, and so on, by extreme violence. If you look at the
history of the European conquest of most of the world, you find the
same thing. It did leave a residue of nation-states, but they so radically
cross-cut the natural forms of association that the imposition of nation-
state systems has simply bred new and destructive forms of violence,
which kind of reconstruct the internal history of Europe.
Is there a way out of this? Well, I think in the longer term the way
out of it would be to try to erode the nation-state system altogether. I
mentioned this move towards a Europe of the regions, devolution of the
states into regional areas with some loose kind of federalism among them.
It’s probably a healthy development. To carry it out will not be a simple
matter in Europe, and it will be even less simple in other parts of the
world, but it’s a pretty natural way for these questions to be ultimately
resolved. However, that requires an erosion of other forms of domination
and control, because this nation-state system is only one, remember. It’s
one that happens to have coalesced around another form of domination,
national economies, which are themselves based on extreme forms of
coercion and domination. Now, we have the systems of transnational
corporate capitalism, which are state-based but quite global in character,
and are developing their own forms of government at a transnational
level. That’s what the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank
and World Trade Organization (WTO) are, in effect. So all sorts of
complex structures of hierarchy and authority, illegitimate authority, are
interlinked, and in my opinion, they all ought to be dismantled. But that is
going to require very extensive and committed popular struggle. Maybe
at some point it ought to take the form of national liberation struggles,
but if so, that should be done with question marks. And it’s only one part
of a much bigger story.
Question: Do you think that there is a change in imperialism’s strategy vis-à-
vis the Third World states, in the context of the end of the Cold War and also of
economic globalization?
Chomsky: Well, you know, these categories I don’t think are awfully
helpful. Is there a new strategy for imperialism? Well, there is, there are
new strategies reflecting new situations. I mean, the same principles
operate, but there are new contingencies, so there are new strategies for
The Nationality Question 109
dealing with them. On the other hand, the category of imperialism itself is
pretty misleading, in my opinion. Take, say, the US, which is the dominant
world power, so we could say that “imperialism” means anything the US is
doing. However, US power is, to a very large extent, directed towards the
US population. Is that imperialism? I don’t know. It’s what is happening.
And there’s nothing novel about the fact that a large part of the victims
of US power is the population of the US itself. The same was true for the
British Empire. If you do a sort of cost-benefit analysis of the British Empire,
what Britain gained and lost from it, people have tried to do this and it
sort of balances. The costs and benefits of empire appear to be pretty well
balanced, a conclusion which seems reasonable.
If you ask whether America won or lost the Vietnam War, it’s a
meaningless question. Some in America gained, namely the ones who
designed the policy, and some in America lost, namely the ones who did the
work for them. That’s a pretty common pattern. So when you ask what is
the strategy of imperialism, this question presupposes that the nation-state
is an entity that acts in world affairs, but that’s not really true. The nation-
state has to be looked at in terms of its internal structures of domination
and control. When you look at those, you get quite a different picture, and
that becomes even clearer when you move to a more globalized system of
domination, as in the period of transnational corporations. For example,
take a simple question, such as whether the United States is declining in its
economic power in the world. It is very commonly said that US economic
power is declining, relative to other countries. That’s true, if you take the US
to mean the geographical area, what is called the US on the map. If you look
at the share of this geographical area in, say, manufacturing production, it
is declining. On the other hand, if you define the US as a corporate power
based in the US, if you take General Motors to be part of the US even when
it operates in Poland or Mexico or whatever, and of course, that’s the way
it is thought of by the people who run the country, then it turns out that
the US share in manufacturing production is not declining, it’s probably
increasing. It’s just that these entities are distributing themselves, so as to
gain cheaper labor and avoid environmental regulations, and so on, but the
profits come back to the same sector in the US. The accountants for General
Motors don’t care whether exports are from Mexico or Michigan – it’s the
same thing. From that point of view, defining the US that way, its economic
power is not declining, and that’s a reasonable way to think about it.
Now, if we think about power systems as being class identified, then yes,
their strategies change. One of the major developments in the contemporary
110 Democracy and Power
world is that in the US and England, and increasingly in other industrial
countries, the dominant classes (the ones who fundamentally run the place)
are conducting a war against their own population. In fact, they are trying
to turn around their societies into societies more or less on the Third World
model. That’s an important part of the new strategy of imperialism, which
means that for a good part of the working population in the US, the country
is moving towards Third World conditions. Being such a rich country, it’s
not going to look like India or Mexico, but the structures are more and
more similar. That’s the new strategy.
As far as running the international order is concerned, the use of violence
is a last resort. You use it if you have to; if there are other techniques of
control, you use them. And in the past twenty years or so, other techniques
of control have come into operation. For instance, throughout the Third
World, elite elements (including those who led nationalist struggles, I should
say) are increasingly interested in associating themselves with international
imperialism and serving as its agents, and instituting in their own countries
policies that will benefit the privileged sectors of the world internationally
and harm the mass of the population of the world internationally. That’s
called structural adjustment, which is being advocated by elite elements who
will benefit from it themselves throughout much of the world, including
India. That’s the new strategy, and this new strategy has a lot of power behind
it because of very substantial changes in the international economic order.
These are new strategies designed for new contingencies, but I think that
looking at it in terms of an imperial power dominating other countries misses
a lot; for instance, it misses the role of Third World elites in implementing the
same system for their own benefit.
Question: World order seems to be a perennial obsession with the western rulers
(from Alexander to the Ottoman, British and French empires), whereas in the East,
this has not been the case. What accounts for this difference?
Chomsky: The statement is just not true. If you look at the history of the
East you get the Mongol invasions, the Mughals, and so on – it simply is
not true. I mean, if you look at the last couple of hundred years, yes, the
major power centers have come from a fringe of northwest Europe. That’s
a historical fact. But it certainly is not a fact about long-term world history,
not by any means. The Persian Empire, for instance, did not come from the
West. Every power that’s existed has tried to extend its sway in one or the
The Nationality Question 111
other form. There were periods of relative openness, for example, in East
and Southeast Asia in the period before European colonialism (probably
the only period in which something like a free trade regime actually was
in place over substantial time). Not that it was pretty – it was very brutal
and ugly, but it happened to be a relatively free trading area. Well, the
Europeans broke into it and disrupted it and introduced new forms of
violence, and so on, but the idea that the effort to control the world came
from the West is not true. It’s not sustained by a look at world history.
Question: How does South Africa fit into your analysis, with the end of apartheid,
and the fact that South Africans are no longer good facilitators for western capital?
Chomsky: Well, South Africa is one case where a liberation struggle
succeeded. It was very bitter and hard won, but it did have a level of success,
and towards the end it didn’t meet much opposition from the traditional
rulers (the US and Britain, and even the South African elites – white elites
– were sort of willing to go along with it). I think the reasons were several.
One reason is that they didn’t have much of an alternative except extreme
forms of violence which would have been harmful to themselves. And
secondly, because they assumed, possibly with justice (we’ll see in the
next few years), that the black leadership would assimilate itself to their
system and become stratified in such a way that they would join. They
would simply model the traditional system of domination with some of
their own faces in the executive boardrooms. There is a likelihood that this
will happen. There is a big internal struggle in the black community now
in South Africa over this issue, and how it will work out you can’t tell. But
if it does happen, it will be very typical of nationalist struggles. Your own
history is an example.
Question: Lenin says that every state power is essentially an instrument of
oppression of one class by another. Hence the need for evolution of state power per
se. Do you agree with this?
Chomsky: First of all, I wouldn’t particularly call that Lenin’s thesis; it’s
been everyone’s thesis. For instance, it was stated very explicitly, in almost
the same words, by Adam Smith long before Lenin, when he pointed out
that laws and governments are combinations of the rich to oppress the poor.
112 Democracy and Power
Basically the same point with different words, and that’s like a truism of
history. That’s what laws and governments are: instruments of oppression
by which those who are able to control decision-making, for whatever reason
(either they have more guns or they control the economy or whatever it may
be), try to oppress everyone else. So it’s not Lenin’s thesis.
On the other hand, to mention Lenin is relevant, because he is a prime
example of how it works. The vanguard party that took power in Russia
in 1917 was dedicated to crushing the popular movements and turning
them into what Lenin and Trotsky called a “labor army” that would serve
the authoritarian leadership. That was their goal. That was the ideology,
that is what Bolshevism was. It was a perfect example of a system of
highly authoritarian domination masking itself in the rhetoric of popular
struggle, and its real nature became clear instantly. The first thing that
Lenin and Trotsky did was to crush every spontaneous working class
or other organization or association that had developed in the pre-
revolutionary period, from factory councils to Soviets and everything
else. And they did it in a very principled way, the reason being their
ideology. You can’t accuse them of misleading anyone. It goes right back
to the origin of Lenin’s thought – that the mass of the population was
too stupid and ignorant to do anything for themselves, so they have to
be beaten into a better future by us, because we are the smart guys and
know how to do it. That’s what vanguard party theories are all about.
Lenin was bitterly condemned for that by the mainstream of the Marxist
movement, people like Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and others,
even Trotsky, in the early part of the century. His thought was deeply
anti-popular, anti-democratic and authoritarian, and as soon as he took
power, he implemented it. So I think Leninism is a perfect example of
the phenomenon that’s being described. And when I was referring to the
fact that nationalist struggles often mask their deeply reactionary and
oppressive character in revolutionary rhetoric, this is one case that merits
careful attention from that point of view.
If we look at the history of Lenin’s thought, it’s kind of interesting. In
the early years it’s very authoritarian. That’s when Lenin was sharply
condemned by people like Luxemburg and others, for developing a concept
which would put the party as the ruler of the working class, the central
committee as the ruler of the party, and the maximal leader as the ruler of
the central committee – which is exactly what happened; it was a very good
prediction from the mainstream Marxist movement. That’s characteristic
of Lenin’s thought from his early days until 1917, and from 1918 on. If
The Nationality Question 113
you look at the intermediate period of 1917, you get a different Lenin. His
1917 writings, like the April Theses and State and Revolution, have a kind
of libertarian-left, anarchist character to them. That ended as soon as he
took power. There are various ways of interpreting that. The natural way,
I think, is that Lenin was a supreme tactician, and he realized that in order
to gain popular support during a period of conflict he had better express
the ideas of the masses, so he moved to the left. But as soon as he took
power, he moved back to the right where he’d been all along. That’s one
interpretation, but I think a fair one, and not untypical of nationalist and
revolutionary movements, I should say.
Question: Going back to the US, what about ethnic conflicts, involving the Blacks,
Hispanics, and so on? Will the melting pot eventually blow its lid off?
Chomsky: These are not predictable things. I happened to be talking, at
breakfast this morning, with an Indian meteorologist who was describing
some of his work to me. He said that it is now well-accepted that it is
theoretically impossible to predict tomorrow’s weather. It’s not just
because of lack of data; there are principled reasons (having to do with
non-linear systems and chaos theory) why you can’t predict tomorrow’s
weather now. That’s probably true. Similarly, it’s impossible to predict the
results of conflicts within very complex systems like human society. You
can see the conflicts, try to understand them, and do something to resolve
them, but these are not things you can predict.
These ethnic conflicts in the US are somewhat misinterpreted, usually
because of a failure to recognize that race and class are closely correlated.
Race is a funny notion; it doesn’t have any real meaning. What’s called race,
you know, like Black, Hispanic, that sort of thing, versus White, is very
closely related to class differences. And a lot of what are called racial conflicts
are, in fact, class conflicts. In the US, this is masked by the fact that class
is an illegitimate word. The only people who are allowed to use it are the
business world. They use it all the time. They’ve always thought in terms of
classes, crushing the masses, and so on. In fact, if you look at the business
press, it looks like vulgar Marxist literature with all the values reversed.
But outside the business world, one of the things you are taught when you
become educated is that the United States is a classless society, everyone is
middle class and there are no class conflicts. And US cultural domination in
the world is such that most of the rest of the world adopts the same illusion.
114 Democracy and Power
But of course there are class conflicts in the US, as the business world knows
very well, and they happen to be closely correlated with race conflicts. So
when people talk about race, it’s often a mask for class.
The commitment to denial of class struggle in the United States
is so extreme that the census bureau does not even provide statistics
related to class. It’s one of the few countries where you can’t find out
what the mortality rate from heart disease is among working people,
because there are no statistics for class. There are statistics for race,
and people who have tried to work through the statistics have found
significant differences, say, between Blacks and Whites in nutrition,
mortality rates, and all these standard quality-of-life indices. But when
you extract the class factor, you find that a large part of those differences
are class differences. Within each class, there are also race differences,
but they are small relative to the class differences, and that runs through
everything. When people talk about the race and ethnic problem in the
US, they are really talking fundamentally about the class problem, with
racial and ethnic overtones to it that complicate it further. One can try to
understand this, and try to do something about it, but predicting what
will happen is impossible.
Question: We know the problems, but do you have the solution? Also, you have
been rightly critical of professional academics in the US and elsewhere. In Third
World countries with a high proportion of illiterate people, what role do you
envisage for the educated middle class?
Chomsky: To start with, I’m skeptical about people knowing the problems.
I don’t think we know the problems; there are many illusions in the way
we look at the problems – all of us. And I think it’s a major task to extricate
ourselves from systems of illusion and distortion, and to figure out what
the problems are. I don’t know of any area where that is not true. We are
all victims of tremendous amounts of ideological domination; I really think
the problems have to be thought through. So one part of the solution is
to try to get a sensible understanding of what’s going on. Now, that’s not
the kind of thing that intellectuals do in a seminar room. If you do that in
a seminar room, you will end up with some other distortion having to do
with the privilege of people of power, their right to rule and all that stuff.
The Nationality Question 115
You can predict that without any trouble at all. The way you learn what the
problems are is by engaging yourself with people who are struggling.
That brings us to the question of the role of intellectuals. Well, it’s not
to talk to each other: that may be fun, but it’s a waste of time. Their role,
if people are illiterate, which is indeed a huge problem, is to help them
overcome illiteracy. And first of all, what are intellectuals? I do not even
know what the word means. Most of the people who have intellectual
positions, let’s say professors in universities, most of them do clerical work.
They are called intellectuals for all sorts of reasons, but it’s not because of
the quality of the work they do. I have known taxi drivers who are more
intellectual, so it simply doesn’t correlate. Intellectuals are people who
use their minds. Well, everybody uses their minds. Some people are in a
position where they can’t do it very much, because they are forced to kill
themselves to survive. When you have to work fourteen hours a day to put
food on the table for your children, you don’t have much time to use your
mind. If you’re forced to perform repetitive tasks over and over again for a
long time, you even lose your mind. Again, that’s an insight that goes back
to people like Adam Smith from classical liberalism. Which is why Adam
Smith, contrary to what everyone is taught, opposed the division of labor.
He said that in any civilized country the government is going to have to do
something to block it, because it will turn people into creatures “as stupid
and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be.” So you can’t be an
intellectual if you have lost your mind by being forced into degrading tasks.
Now, the people we call intellectuals are those who have a sufficient degree
of privilege and authority to be able to use their minds if they feel like it.
The job of those people is the same as that of anyone else who has privilege
that he or she shouldn’t have. The people in this hall, including myself,
have privilege we shouldn’t have. Well, we’ve got it, and there’s no point
pretending that we don’t – we have education, and training, and too much
money, and that sort of thing, and we should use it to try to help people
who don’t. That means learning from them, working with them, offering
them what we can from our own resources. So that they can find out what
the problems are, and help us find out what the problems are and work out
common solutions. I have my own ideas as to what kinds of solutions there
are, but people have to work out their own ideas.
5. Militarism, Democracy and
People’s Right to Information*
It is no great insight that we live in a world of conflict and confrontation, and
that one crucial element of it is class war. Class war has many dimensions
and complexities, but in recent years, the lines have been drawn very sharply.
To oversimplify, but not too much, on the one side there are concentrated
power centers, state and private, very closely linked. On the other side
is much of the population, worldwide. Though one can’t estimate with
any precision, I think it is fair to guess that a large majority of the world
population is unable to get involved in issues of broad significance, as this
requires a degree of privilege. As for concentrated power centers, they
pursue their war relentlessly. They never stop. They use every opportunity
to press their agenda forward in the harshest possible way. In particular,
they use crises, whether it’s an earthquake, or a war, or September 11th
and its aftermath. And in such circumstances, you can expect, and you
discover, that they exploit the atmosphere of fear and anguish. They hope
that their popular adversary will be distracted, focus attention elsewhere,
and be frightened, while they continue to pursue their programs without
any pause – in fact intensifying them, using the window of opportunity.
And that’s what is happening right now.
The adversary should, of course, refuse to accept this cynical framework. It
should focus its efforts, also relentlessly, on the primary issues, which remain
as they were before the latest crisis. The issues include the threat of militarism,
which is indeed a threat to the survival of the species at this point, and a far-
reaching assault against democracy and freedom, which has been part of the
core of the neoliberal program for the past twenty, twenty-five years.
* Lecture delivered at the Delhi School of Economics on 5 November 2001, at the
invitation of the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information.
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.05
118 Democracy and Power
Well, those are the things I’d like to talk about. Everything, of course, is
open for later discussion, so don’t feel constrained by that. But I can’t really
bring myself to turn to those topics without at least a word on the immense
human tragedy that is unfolding before us right now. This tragedy is being
planned and implemented very consciously by the United States and its
allies since September 11th. The High Commissioner for Human Rights of
the United Nations, Mary Robinson, was not exaggerating when she pleaded
with the United States to stop the bombing of Afghanistan and warned
that if it continued there could be a Rwanda-style slaughter. In fact, she
might have been underestimating. According to US estimates, the number
of people at risk of starvation, which was about 5 million, has increased
by fifty percent since the bombing started. That’s 2.5 million people who
are being pushed right across the border of death from starvation. Mary
Robinson’s appeal was of course rebuffed. It was also unrecorded. Literally,
it received three scattered sentences in the entire US press. Other appeals
from senior UN officials, aid agencies and others were not even mentioned.
On September 16th, that’s just five days after the terrorist attacks in New
York and Washington, the US demanded of Pakistan that it terminate food
supplies to Afghanistan. The country has been on a kind of a lifeline. And as
one aid worker said afterwards, we’ve just cut the lifeline. The decision on
September 16th to cut food supplies was a conscious, determined decision
to starve several million people to death. Again, there was no reaction.
The next day, as it happens, I was on national radio and television around
Europe. No one was aware of this decision or could think of a single reaction
to it in their own country. There was no reaction in the United States. So
apparently it’s considered entirely normal for western civilization to make
a decision to kill 2.5 million people within a few months. And that shouldn’t
surprise anyone who is familiar with history. It is in fact normal, which is
why there is no reaction to the silent genocide that may be under way.
Already before the bombing, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) had warned that the threat of bombing had driven out the aid
agencies, and driven people out of the cities into the countryside, in fear
and desperation, and that a humanitarian catastrophe was taking place.
After the bombings began, the Food and Agriculture Organization further
reported that about eighty percent of the crop plantings had been disrupted,
which means an even more severe famine for the next spring. The bombing
itself has turned major cities into ghost towns. About seventy percent of the
population has fled. As in other cases, like Iraq and Serbia, the bombing is
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 119
directed against power stations, electrical supplies, water supplies, sewage
systems, and so on. That’s a form of biological warfare. That’s exactly what
it means to do this in an urban area. The population either flees to the
borders, which are mostly closed, or to the countryside, where they are
heading into the most heavily mined areas in the world. Even in normal
times, the mines cause ten to twenty deaths or injuries every day, often
among children. Now the casualties are increasing sharply. One reason is
that the UN has been compelled to terminate its mine-clearing operations.
Another reason is that the mines are now superseded by much more lethal
weapons, namely the cluster bombs dropped by the US. These are anti-
personnel weapons, which are designed to murder people. They don’t affect
tanks or buildings or anything like that. They are little things that a child
will pick up or a farmer will hit with a hoe, and then they explode and send
flashes that tear them to shreds. And they’re extremely hard to dismantle.
Some areas where they’ve been used in the past – like Vietnam and Laos,
in what was then the heaviest bombing in history, in an isolated peasant
society – are still littered with millions of cluster bombs, and hundreds or
thousands of people are killed there every year. The manufacturer says,
twenty to thirty percent of them don’t explode, which can mean only
one of two things: either incredibly incompetent quality control or else a
purposeful concern to murder civilians. You can form your own view.
All this is happening essentially without comment, because in a way it’s
kind of normal, that’s what the West has been doing to the rest of the world
for hundreds of years. But the millennium begins with two monstrous
atrocities: the terrible terrorist crime of September 11th, and an even worse
atrocity that’s following it, namely a purposeful, conscious program of
mass murder, which may have excruciating dimensions. And while this
is regrettably normal business in Europe and its offshoots, it’s kind of
remarkable to see that a country like India, which has been subjected to
this torture for hundreds of years and might be expected to have some
appreciation of what it means, is nevertheless enthusiastically joining the
bandwagon.
These accumulating horrors bear very directly on the question of
people’s right to information. It’s extremely important to ensure that
that right is denied. So the facts I have just mentioned, though not really
controversial, are almost totally unknown in the United States. Not one
person in a million is aware of them. And there is a good reason for that:
if people did have the slightest idea of what is being done in their names,
120 Democracy and Power
there would be mass protests and policies would have to change. The
United States is a very free country, it’s uniquely free – I think, the freest
country in the world – with regards to the right to information. And the
task of suppression of that right is not undertaken by the state. The state
may try now and then, but it is pretty ineffectual. The task of depriving
the population of information is the solemn duty of the intellectuals, of
the educated classes. It is what you’re trained for when you go to a good
university. Ensuring that the right to information is denied is also the
task of the free press. That’s why facts like these remain unknown. You
can’t carry out a mass genocide if the population is aware of what is being
done. And when these controls break down, you do get strong popular
reactions. Well, we’re now living through this, it’s not the first case by
any means; we’re living through an illustration which is so shocking
that words fail, at least my words. It’s not novel, we should be aware of
that, and nor is it restricted to the United States and Europe. It goes back
through history, as does the role of the priesthood, either religious or – in
modern days – secular priesthood.
Well, with these hopelessly inadequate words on a crime that we
should be working day and night to try to bring to a quick end, let’s turn
to the topics at hand. Perhaps the best way to approach them is within
the framework of this fashionable notion of globalization. But before doing
that, it’s important to clarify what globalization means. Like most terms
of political discourse, this one has a literal meaning and a propagandistic
meaning. In the literal sense, globalization just means international
integration, mostly economic integration. And that’s neither good nor
bad in itself; just as trade is neither good nor bad in itself. It depends on
what the human consequences are. It can be done in many different ways.
That’s the general meaning. The propagandistic meaning of globalization,
which is used and enforced by concentrated power, refers to a very specific
form of international integration: one which has been implemented with
considerable intensity in the past twenty-five years or so, and which is
designed in the interests of private concentrations of power. The interests
of others are incidental. They may gain, they may lose; it doesn’t really
matter. The fact of the matter is that most of them lose, but that’s just an
incidental consequence.
So that’s the propagandistic sense of globalization. And with that
ridiculous terminology in place, the great mass of the people of the
world who object can be labelled as “anti-globalization.” They must
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 121
be primitivists who want to go back to the Stone Age and are resisting
inevitable forces. They want to harm the poor. I’m sure you’re familiar
with these and other terms of abuse. Opponents of globalization, I think,
make a very great mistake if they accept this framework of power and
agree to call themselves “anti-globalization.” No one sensible is opposed
to international integration, least of all the left. The left has been animated
by a vision of globalization since its origins, certainly its modern
origins. The whole vision of the left has been one of internationalism,
of international solidarity and cooperation. And there have been very
important strides in this direction, many achievements in recent years.
We should be committed to that. We should be committed to far-reaching
globalization, but designed to improve the lives and opportunities of
people, of the people of the world, and the people of future generations.
That’s a task that cannot be put off. These are not empty words. The
possibilities for moving forward are very real; they are illustrated in many
ways. By now, the annual meetings at Porto Alegre in Brazil are important
expressions of this. They bring together a very broad international
constituency: Brazilian workers, the landless workers’ movement, North
American unionists, environmentalists, peasant movements, women’s
rights activists, many others. A very wide range of people who in the
past have had nothing much to do with one another. They went on
separate paths, but are now moving forward together in impressive ways,
thanks to a constructive form of globalization that we ought to support,
and this is part of the traditional vision of the left. Their actions are in
part defensive, defending themselves against attack, but in part quite
constructive, working on ways to dismantle concentrated power systems
to extend popular control worldwide. That’s the form of globalization
that should be pursued, at least by people who want to create a world in
which a decent person would want to live.
The specific form of globalization that is being officially pursued is quite
different. That’s called, as you know, neoliberal. That term, too, is highly
misleading. What it refers to is not new, and by no means liberal. That
should be obvious in India, more than any other place. The whole history
of India, for the last several hundred years, is a classic example of how
liberalism can be distorted into an instrument of power and destruction.
And the current version of neoliberalism is similar to what destroyed India,
based on a combination of imposed liberalization on India alongside of
massive state power and protectionism in the imperial power. The current
122 Democracy and Power
version of neoliberalism also adopts the traditional double-edged doctrine
of liberalism and free trade. This doctrine says, free trade is fine for you,
so that I can demolish you. But for myself, I’m going to insist on state
protection and other devices to avoid the costs of market discipline, except
when the playing field is levelled, to use the standard term, which means
when it’s tilted so sharply in my favor that I am confident that I can win. In
that case, I’ll favor free trade.
The fact that the new doctrines adapt the traditional ones to current
circumstances should not be very surprising. Actually, it’s exactly what you
would expect if you look at the designers. The designers are the richest and
most powerful states, the international financial institutions that follow their
directives, and an array of huge corporations which are tending towards
oligopoly and anti-market principles in most sectors of the economy. These
mega-corporations rely heavily on the state sector, which is very dynamic
in the rich and powerful countries like the United States. They rely on the
state sector to socialize costs and risks, to privatize profits, and to maintain
the dynamism of the economy. That’s the real world economy. It’s quite
different from what you study in an economics class.
The designers of the system modestly call themselves the “international
community.” But maybe a more appropriate term is that used by the world’s
leading business journal, London’s Financial Times, which described them as
“the masters of the universe.” That was last January when they were meeting
in Davos, Switzerland, to organize the world. Maybe that was intended as
ironic, I don’t know, but it’s accurate. The masters of the universe profess
to be admirers of Adam Smith, so you might expect them to abide by
his description of their behavior, although he only called them “masters
of mankind” – but that was before the space age, remember. Smith was
referring to the “principal architects of policy” in England, merchants and
manufacturers, who, as he put it, attended to their own interests carefully
and made sure that they were satisfied, no matter how grievous the effects
on others, including the people of England, but, incidentally, primarily
India. He wrote with particular anger about the savagery of the English in
India and especially Bengal. He stated that the principal architects followed
what he called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,” namely all for
ourselves and nothing for anyone else. That’s an accurate description of the
masters of today’s universe, who follow this model, not noticing that Smith
was denouncing them, not providing a model for them.
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 123
In subsequent developments over time that would have appalled Adam
Smith or any other classical liberal, these huge concentrations of power have
emerged, which are basically tyrannies. The courts have assigned to them
the rights of persons, immortal persons, and proceeded to attribute the rights
of persons to corporate management. That’s true in the United States, and
I think elsewhere. In recent agreements, mislabeled trade agreements, the
rights of these private tyrannies have gone way beyond the rights of persons.
For example, General Motors can now demand and receive, under WTO
rules, what’s called “national treatment” in Mexico. They have to be treated
as a national company. On the other hand, if a Mexican of flesh and blood
tried to obtain national treatment in New York, he wouldn’t last very long, if
he could even make it that far. So the corporate entities, the immortal persons,
now have rights far beyond human beings. They’re a strange sort of person,
apart from their massive scale and immortality. The recent agreements give
them even further rights, which are being explored and implemented for
corporate entities to undermine regulatory legislation in the United States,
Canada, and other countries, on the grounds that these regulations are what
is called “tantamount to expropriation.” To take a recent case that was won,
a US corporation wanted to store toxic wastes somewhere in Mexico. The
people of Mexico objected, they didn’t want toxic waste stored there, and
they turned the area into a national park. The corporation, Metalclad, charged
Mexico with actions that are “tantamount to expropriation,” because they
infringe on future profits of the corporation. And they won. They won in
a NAFTA hearing and finally in a judicial hearing, and the judicial hearing
was correct, because the NAFTA rules do permit that. This is under an
imaginative doctrine called “regulatory takings.” Any regulation is a taking
of people’s rights, meaning corporate rights, because it might reduce their
future profits. Well, those are no rights that a person of flesh and blood can
think of, but they apply to these totalitarian institutions that dominate the
international system, the masters of the universe.
All this is simply one part of a very dedicated assault against popular
sovereignty, which means democracy. This assault is expected to become
more severe. In the western hemisphere, there are now plans for a Free
Trade Area of the Americas. There was a summit of the countries of the
western hemisphere, last April in Quebec, with plenty of disruption and
violent protest. The plans are being kept secret. Nobody knows in any
detail what the plans are for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and it’s
124 Democracy and Power
important to ensure that they remain secret, because if they become public,
opposition will be overwhelming. I’ll come back to that interesting exercise
in thought control in a free society.
Well, the crucial point is that the public has to be kept unaware. That’s
been true all along. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement,
is now seven years old. To this day, the press has refused to publish the
official position of the labor movement on the form that NAFTA should
take. That goes back to 1992, almost ten years. The press has also refused to
publish the analysis of NAFTA that was done by Congress’ own research
bureau, the Office of Technology Assessment, which is very much like that
of the labor movement. The reason is that this analysis was critical of the
form of international integration that was being imposed by the masters of
the universe, and therefore the public better not know about it. Because if
the public knew about it, the already majority opposition to NAFTA would
grow substantially, as people came to understand that their own individual
criticisms were in fact well-grounded in substantial institutions. A central
part of the neoliberal reforms is to reduce the threat of democracy – in this
and other ways.
I mentioned that the one participant in the class war always exploits
every opportunity to institute harsh and regressive measures, with
unrelenting intensity. That’s happening right now. The victims are told
that they have to be subdued and acquiescent out of patriotism. On the
other hand, patriotism does not prevent the masters of the universe from
using the opportunity to give new tax breaks to Enron, to mention a
company you’ve heard of around here; to increase the military budget
substantially while nobody is looking; even to institute what’s called
“fast-track legislation.” It’s interesting how the US trade representative
Robert Zoellick announced, immediately after the September 11th attacks,
that the best way to combat terrorism is to implement fast-track legislation.
What is fast-track legislation? Well, it’s legislation that literally turns the
United States into the Kremlin under Stalin. The legislation grants the
executive branch the right to negotiate international treaties in secret,
with no Congressional participation and, of course, no public knowledge.
And then Congress is allowed to say yes. That’s the degree of public
participation. So that’s fast-track legislation. It’s often called “free trade
legislation,” and that’s not entirely untrue. You couldn’t pass legislation
that’s mislabeled free trade if the public had any participation. So it has
to be done Kremlin-style. Undoubtedly, Osama bin Laden will just be
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 125
shaking in his boots if this legislation is passed. It’s such an obvious attack
against international terrorism. Well, that’s the kind of thing that it makes
sense to press through when you have a window of opportunity, and the
general public can be induced to keep quiet out of so-called patriotism or
fear or whatever.
All this does raise a question. It’s been very obvious over the past
years that opposition to corporate-led globalization is overwhelming
across the world. That’s been particularly dramatic in the South, where
the main opposition developed. It later spread to the North, where it
becomes harder to ignore – so when it reaches Seattle, you can’t pretend
it’s not happening. This raises the question of why there is such massive
public opposition in the United States, in England, everywhere else. It
seems paradoxical because globalization, so-called, as we are told every
day, has led to enormous prosperity. In the United States particularly,
it has led to what’s called a fairy-tale economy. Just to give one quote
from the extreme left of the admissible spectrum, Anthony Lewis, writing
last March in the New York Times, said that globalization has created the
greatest economic boom in American history, in fact the greatest economic
boom in world history. So, why are people opposed? Well, it’s admitted
that the process has some flaws. Not everyone is participating in the
glorious experience, and since we’re good-hearted people, you know,
especially the left, we have to be concerned about this. We have to worry
about these people who lack the skills to join us in participating in the
greatest economic boom in world history. And that also poses a dilemma.
Why is it that this enormous prosperity that’s developing and leading to
fairy-tale economies is also leading to inequality? What do we do about
that? Well, that picture is so conventional that it takes a bit of a wrench
to recognize that it is entirely false in every respect, except one. The one
true statement is about rising inequality. Everything else is totally and
uncontroversially false. During the economic boom in the United States in
the nineties, per-capita economic growth was about the same as in Europe.
It was much less than in the pre-globalization period, the period before
the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s. It was vastly less than during World
War II, which saw the greatest economic boom in American history under
a semi-command economy. So the question is how can the conventional
picture be so different from the absolutely uncontroversial facts? Well, the
answer is very simple, and you know it very well in India. A small sector
of the society has in fact benefited enormously. And that sector happens
126 Democracy and Power
to include the people who tell everybody else the wonderful news. And
they’re not being dishonest. You can’t accuse them of dishonesty. They
have every reason to believe what they are saying. They can read it every
day in the journals for which they write. Furthermore, it’s exactly what
they see around them. You go to an elegant restaurant or the Faculty club,
or the editorial office, or wherever you hang out. That’s what you see.
People who are enjoying a fairy-tale economy. So there’s no reason to
doubt it. It’s only the world that’s somehow different, and who knows
about that.
Let’s take a quick look at the historical record on this. Economic
integration – globalization in the neutral sense – increased very rapidly
in the half-century or so before World War I. It stagnated between the
two world wars. Then it began to pick up again after World War II. By
now, it’s reached a level which is more or less comparable to about a
century ago in gross measures, but only gross measures. If you look
at the finer structure, it’s quite different in interesting respects. Prior
to World War I, there was much more international integration at the
level of people. That is, movement of people was much freer, and those
of you who care about free trade may recall that “free circulation of
labor” is a foundation of free trade, according to old-fashioned radicals
like Adam Smith. So the movement of people is cut back a lot by state
regulation. On the other hand, the free flow of short-term speculative
capital has risen to astronomical levels, way beyond anything in the past.
This contrast reflects the central features of contemporary globalization.
It expresses the relative value of people and capital. Capital has
priority and people are incidental. Note that this is exactly the opposite
of classical economics, from Adam Smith to David Ricardo. Both
insisted that people should be mobile, and capital should be immobile.
Everyone’s heard of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and how wonderful
it is. But apparently, not many people have read the one passage in
The Wealth of Nations where he uses the phrase. It appears once, and
it appears in the course of an argument against capital mobility and
imports – against neoliberalism. He argues that the invisible hand will
prevent this disaster from happening. Somehow, this passage has been
suppressed. There are other interesting differences between economic
integration in these two periods; I’ll come back to some of them.
There is also a more technical definition of globalization, whereby
globalization is measured by convergence to a single market, to a single
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 127
price and wage around the world. Well, that’s exactly the opposite of what
has happened. Globalization has gone in exactly the opposite direction,
creating enormous inequality. So there’s a theory on one side, and there’s
a real world on the other side. And that’s expected to continue. The US
Intelligence Services recently put out a document, a projection for the next
fifteen years, with the cooperation of academic specialists in the business
world. The document describes various possible scenarios for what’s ahead.
The most optimistic scenario, it says, is that globalization will continue “on
course,” I’m quoting now, “its evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic
financial volatility and a widening economic divide.” That means there’ll
be less globalization in the technical sense, but more globalization in the
doctrinally-approved sense – wealth for the rich. Financial volatility, of
course, means slower growth. So the best scenario, best possible scenario
is even slower growth and much less globalization in the technical sense,
meaning more globalization in the sense that they like.
Military planners adopt exactly the same assumptions. There’s
now a vast expansion of armaments going on, primarily in the United
States. Since September 11th, it’s been escalated, using the window of
opportunity. And there’s a reason. If you look at the planning documents
of the past years, they make the same prediction: they predict, in contrast
with economic theory, but consistent with reality, that globalization is
going to lead to an increasing divide between a small number of haves
and a large number of have-nots. And that raises a problem, a problem
that has the technical name “enforcing stability.” Here stability means,
“you do what I tell you or else,” and it’s hard to enforce stability when you
have a growing mass of have-nots who are disruptive and unpleasant.
Accordingly, it’s necessary to have a huge expansion of the military.
The United States is already far in the lead in conventional forces
and weapons of mass destruction. Actually, it outspends the next fifteen
countries. But that’s not enough; it has to move to a new frontier which
hasn’t been militarized yet – space. That requires a violation of the Outer
Space Treaty of 1967, which has been observed so far. It has prevented the
militarization of space. The United Nations is aware of this, in fact the world
is aware of this, so there’s been a reaffirmation of the Outer Space Treaty
for the last few years, passed almost unanimously with two abstentions:
the United States and Israel (and probably India next year, which is keen
to join the race to destruction, for reasons you can explain to me). The UN
Conference on Disarmament has been stalled all year for the same reason
128 Democracy and Power
– it is trying to put a restriction on the militarization of space, and the US
blocks this. All this goes unreported in the American press, for the usual
reason. It’s not wise to allow citizens to know of plans that put the survival
of the species at serious risk. Extending the arms race to space is, in fact,
the core program, and it has been for years – it’s not just Bush. “Race” is
not a very good term since the United States is racing alone for the moment,
though there are others eager to join – India, for example, has won a lot of
respect from hawks and jingoists in the United States for its enthusiasm
about this, which is in fact unique.
The plans to cross the last frontier to militarization of space are sometimes
disguised as “missile defense,” ballistic missile defense. Anybody should
understand that when you hear the word “defense,” you think “offence.”
Any offensive action is always called defense, and it’s pretty straight in
this case. One of the goals of militarization of space is to place offensive
weapons, destructive offensive weapons, in space. And the goal is very
frankly expressed. It takes real discipline for the educated classes to keep
people from knowing this. It’s all in public documents, very frank and clear
for years, you can even read them on the internet. The goal, as the US Space
Command documents explain, is to obtain global dominance, “hegemony”
as they call it, and the purpose is (I’m quoting) “to protect US interests and
investments.” They also give a history. They say that in the past, countries
constructed armies and navies to protect and enhance commercial interests,
but now there’s a new frontier we can cross. We can take the next step
in protecting and enhancing commercial interests and investment, namely
the militarization of space.
Now, this is known to be extremely threatening. There’s no question
about this, because of the predicted reaction among potential adversaries,
or for that matter because of what are called “normal accidents” in the
technical literature. A normal accident is the kind of accident you know
is going to take place in any complicated system, you just can’t tell when.
And what’s being planned are systems of great complexity, weapons
of destructive power comparable to nuclear weapons, laser weapons
powered by nuclear power, which itself is extremely dangerous in space.
These weapons are to be on a hair-trigger alert, with automated launch-
on-warning systems, because you can’t take any chances. If anyone starts
shooting down your satellites, your system is gone. So you have automated
systems of massive destructive power, which are likely to undergo normal
accidents, and maybe wipe everyone out. This could be stopped, nobody
doubts that it could be stopped, namely by treaty. But to stop it would be
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 129
inconsistent with the prevailing value system. The prevailing value system
is that hegemony is much more important than survival. And that’s not
new, in fact, it’s the history of hundreds of years, but the change now is that
the stakes are far, far greater.
Back to globalization, the crucial point here is that these decisions are
motivated by the expectations for globalization. Globalization is expected to
lead to a widening divide, meaning failure in the technical sense but success
in the doctrinal sense, and that requires weapons of mass destruction
targeting the growing number of have-nots that globalization is expected to
produce, and severely raising the threat to survival. And it’s all very rational,
within the framework of a kind of lunatic system of institutions.
Well, let’s return to “the greatest economic boom in American and
world history.” Remember that this was written before the crash, before
the fiscal bubble crashed early this year, at a time when things really looked
fantastic. Since World War II, there have been two sharply different phases
in the world economy. There was a phase called the Bretton Woods period,
from shortly after the Second World War to the early 1970s, and then the
neoliberal phase which followed it, when the Bretton Woods regulations
were broken down. The Bretton Woods system in the first period was
based on regulation of capital flows, so states could regulate outflows and
inflows of capital, and currencies were fixed pretty closely to one another.
That was terminated in the seventies. Of these two periods, it’s the second
that’s called “globalization,” though, in fact, international integration
proceeded more quickly during the first period. But remember, this is a
propagandistic sense of the term globalization, interpreted as neoliberal
globalization. These two phases are quite different. Economists commonly
refer to the first phase, the Bretton Woods phase, as a golden age, and to
the second phase, the neoliberal phase, as a leaden age. And if you look at
standard macroeconomic indicators, that’s exactly what you find. They all
decline considerably during the globalization period. That’s true of the rate
of growth of the economy, of productivity growth, of capital investment. In
fact, even trade – the growth of trade has declined during the globalization
period. The interest rates have gone way up because countries, especially
in the South, have to protect their currencies from attack. That slows
down growth, increases financial volatility, and has many other harmful
consequences.
Let’s come back to that profound dilemma everyone’s worried about:
what are we going to do about the fact that globalization has created
this enormous prosperity, but also led to rising inequality? Well, there’s
130 Democracy and Power
no dilemma. There’s nothing to answer. There’s no prosperity. In fact,
globalization has reduced prosperity, even by standard macroeconomic
measures, which are highly ideological, but even by those. And it’s not
controversial. Many economists attribute the severe economic deterioration
during the globalization period to the liberalization of capital flows (Eatwell
and Taylor, to mention two prominent ones). You can debate that. So little
is understood about the international economy that the causal relations are
hard to establish. But the correlation is pretty clear, down to fine detail in fact.
What is even clearer is that financial liberalization does lead to an
attack on democracy. That’s not controversial. In fact, that was the primary
reason why the framers of the Bretton Woods agreement, back in the 1940s,
insisted on capital controls and regulation of currencies. They understood
that this would provide some space within which countries could
pursue social democratic policies, welfare state policies, without being
overwhelmed by obstructive market forces. And they were right; capital
control is needed to protect that space. Free movement of capital creates
what’s sometimes called a “virtual parliament,” a parliament of investors
and lenders who have veto power over government decisions, sharply
restricting democratic options. Actually, I’m quoting from technical papers
in the economics literature. Free capital movement creates what’s called a
“dual constituency.” Namely, voters as one constituency, and investors and
lenders as the other constituency. And the investors and lenders conduct
“moment by moment referendums” on government policy. If they don’t
like a policy because it’s harming them, they veto it by withdrawing capital
from that country or attacking the currency. And of course, the second
constituency, the investors and lenders, prevails over the first constituency.
The voters can’t compete with them, even in the rich countries. And
that’s one of the most striking differences between the current phase of
globalization and the phase before World War I.
Again, this is well understood. Let me just quote from a standard history
of the international financial system by a highly-regarded American
economist, Barry Eichengreen. He points out that before World War
I, government policy had not yet been “politicized” by universal male
suffrage and the rise of trade unions and parliamentary labor parties.
Therefore, the very severe costs of market discipline, the costs imposed
by the virtual parliament, could be transferred to the general population.
Notice that the logic is exactly the same as that of structural adjustment in
poor countries today: you impose the costs on the poor, and they can’t do
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 131
anything about it. Now, that’s the way it was a hundred years ago. But that
luxury was no longer available during the more democratic Bretton Woods
period, after the Second World War. There was universal male suffrage,
and parliamentary labor parties and unions, and furthermore the world
population was very radical at that time. People had been greatly radicalized
by the war, and there was enormous popular support, including in the
United States, for a welfare state program. Therefore, it was necessary to do
something. What Eichengreen points out is that limits on capital mobility
substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market
pressures, which is quite true. The limits on capital mobility allowed
democracy to function. He doesn’t follow the argument to the next step,
but we easily can. Dismantling the Bretton Woods agreement should lead
and has led to a sharp attack on substantive democracy, just as you would
expect. This is particularly striking in the United States and Britain, which
are in the lead on this, but in fact it’s happening worldwide.
This attack on democracy is a very significant feature of the current
phase of globalization. And there are other components of the “Washington
consensus” with the same consequences. The basic idea of neoliberalism is
to shift decisions, socioeconomic decisions, to unaccountable concentrations
of power. That’s a central feature of the neoliberal reforms, privatization
for example. But remember, the powerful state remains to protect the
masters. They need state protection. Another attack on democracy is being
negotiated right now, in secret as always, at the Geneva negotiations on
GATS (General Agreement on Trade and Services). What is this general
agreement on trade and services? What are these “services”? Services are
anything that could be within the public arena: education, health, welfare,
water resources, communication, anything like that. There’s no meaningful
sense in which what is at stake is “trade in services.” It’s just called “trade”
so that you can put it under the trade agreement. If you privatize these
government services, you can have a perfectly functioning democracy, and
it will do nothing, because nothing is left in the public arena. So privatizing
services, which is what these negotiations are about, essentially eliminates
from the public arena anything (or virtually anything) that might be subject
to popular decision-making. That’s called “trade in services,” and naturally
you have to negotiate that in secret. To the extent that anything leaks out
about it, there is a huge public uproar.
The importance of protecting the public from information was revealed
very dramatically at the April Summit of the Americas. Every editorial
132 Democracy and Power
office in the United States had on its desk two major publications, which
were timed for release at the summit. One was by Human Rights Watch, the
main human rights organization in the US. The second was by the Economic
Policy Institute, a major economic analysis institute in Washington. Both
studies investigated in depth the effects of NAFTA on working people in
the three countries (the United States, Canada and Mexico). Now, NAFTA
was presented at the summit as a tremendous triumph, that’s what George
Bush said, and that’s how the headlines read, and it’s very easy to see why
both studies were totally suppressed. The Human Rights Watch report
described, in extensive detail, how labor rights were harmed in all three
countries. The Economic Policy Institute report studied in detail how the
wages, working conditions, etc., of working people were harmed in all
three countries. This is one of those rare trade agreements which succeeded
in harming everybody, in all three countries, at least apart from the people
who count – they did fine.
If you look at the effects on Mexico, they are particularly instructive
for countries like India, or for any place in the South. There, the effects
of NAFTA were particularly severe. In fact, Mexico began the neoliberal
reforms about twenty years ago, and wages have declined steadily since
then. That continued after NAFTA, with a twenty-five percent decline for
salaried workers and a forty percent decline for the self-employed. And
these are underestimates, because they don’t take into account the fact that
the number of unsalaried workers increased greatly. So the actual effects
were even worse. Foreign investment, for its part, grew after NAFTA –
big headlines. There were no headlines for the fact that total investment
declined. So foreign investment went up, but domestic investment went
way down, and the economy was transferred into the hands of foreign
multinationals. The minimum wage lost fifty percent of its purchasing
power. Manufacturing declined and development stagnated, it may have
reversed. Meanwhile, trade between the US and Mexico did increase.
However, this increase related mainly to the component of trade that
is internal to a firm, and that is centrally administered by a totalitarian
system. That’s called “trade” by economists, but it is not trade in any
meaningful sense. If General Motors moves something to Mexico to be
assembled and sends it back to the United States for sale, that’s not trade.
If you discount that, trade between Mexico and the United States may
well have declined after NAFTA. Agriculture suffered a particularly
severe blow for the usual reasons: Mexican farmers can’t compete with
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 133
highly subsidized US agribusiness. These findings confirm what had
been reported in the business press and academic studies, and the story
is familiar around the world.
Most of this had been predicted by critics of NAFTA, but they were
wrong in one respect. Most critics, including me, anticipated that there
would be a sharp increase in Mexico’s urban-rural ratio after NAFTA, as
hundreds of thousands of peasants were driven off the land. In fact, this
did not happen. The urban-rural ratio remained the same. The reason,
apparently, is that conditions deteriorated so badly in the cities that there
was a huge flight of people to the United States, from both countryside
and city. And those who survived the crossing (many did not) work for
very low wages, without benefits, under awful conditions. The effect is
to destroy lives and communities in Mexico, but that’s not counted when
you measure the effects of trade agreements. And it improves the US
economy. One study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation points out that
consumption in the United States is subsidized by impoverishment of farm
workers both in the United States and in Mexico. So it’s a benefit for the
economy, for the health of the economy.
These are the costs of NAFTA and of neoliberal corporate globalization
generally. But those are costs that professional economics chooses not to
measure. It’s a choice. You could measure those costs, if you wanted to.
They’re called “externalities.” We don’t count them. But even by the highly
ideological standard measures, which dismiss these, the costs have been
very severe. And from what I’ve read, I understand that the same is true
in India. But none of this was allowed to disturb the celebration of NAFTA
and the Free Trade Agreement at the Summit of the Americas. In fact, unless
people are connected to activist organizations, they cannot know any of
this. They may know in their own lives or in the lives of people near them,
but they can’t know that this is the general situation. And one effect of this
is to make people feel like failures. There’s a fairy-tale economy out there,
but my income is declining, and the people around me work harder, and
so on. So there must be something wrong with us. In fact, “us” happens to
be almost everybody. For about seventy-five percent of the US workforce,
wages have stagnated or declined over the last twenty-five years, and
the only way incomes are kept up is by increasing working hours. That’s
globalization in the richest country in the world. People around the middle
of the American working class – who are called middle-class Americans
– work about a month extra a year per family just to keep wages stagnant.
That’s by now, perhaps, the highest workload in the industrial world.
134 Democracy and Power
That picture generalizes around the world, with some variations. The
main exceptions are countries which did not follow “the religion that
markets know best.” I’m quoting here from the latest Nobel Prize Laureate
in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, in an article he wrote just before he was
appointed Chief Economist of the World Bank, a position which he did
not keep very long, because he kept making such annoying statements.
He was kicked out. But what he said is correct. The countries that didn’t
follow the religion that markets know best did succeed in extensive growth
during the neoliberal period. Almost everywhere else, it was as I have just
described, worse for countries like Mexico than for the United States.
Furthermore, this is expected to continue. If you look at the provisions
of the World Trade Organization, they deprive countries of exactly the
mechanisms that were used for development. All of them are based on
market interference. There isn’t a single rich, developed country that didn’t
rely crucially on extensive market interference. That holds from England
up to the East Asian NICs (Newly Industrialized Countries), and the
United States dramatically. If the United States had followed the principle
of comparative advantage that the poor must accept under contemporary
neoliberalism, it would now be exporting fish. It would certainly not be
exporting textiles. The only way it could develop textiles was through
extremely heavy protectionist barriers that kept superior British textiles
out. Actually, the reason Britain was producing textiles is because it did
the same thing to India. It imposed heavy duties to keep Indian textiles
out, and not just textiles, but also ships, steel, iron, manufacturing, all
sorts of things, because they couldn’t compete. Meanwhile, India was
compelled to follow liberal rules. It became what economic historians
call “an ocean of liberalism,” and the results are obvious. Countries like
the United States couldn’t have developed a steel industry, for the same
reason. British steel was superior, just as Indian iron had been superior to
British iron a century earlier, and it was changed the same way. And this
goes right up to the present.
Often a military cover is used for this. The dynamic source of the US
economy is under the cover of the military system. It’s a massive state
sector of the economy. That includes just about everything, the whole “new
economy,” you know, electronics, computers, internet, telecommunications.
You just go through the list; it’s mostly developed under a military cover.
And if you look at the WTO rules, you’ll notice that they have a way of
dealing with this. They allow for what’s called a national security exemption.
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 135
So you’re allowed to violate the rules on grounds of national security. Okay,
for Haiti that doesn’t help much. But for the United States it helps quite a
lot, because it includes virtually the whole economy. The whole economy
can be developed within a national security exemption, by placing it under
the cutting edge of the military, and that’s exactly what is done. You can
hear Alan Greenspan speaking about the wonders of the entrepreneurial
economy and rugged individualism and so on, and he even lists examples
of these things. If you look at these examples, every single one of them
was developed in the state sector, extensively, over a long period. And it’s
inconceivable that he doesn’t know this, this is common knowledge, but
it’s not the kind of information that people have the right to.
All this is dramatically clear from economic history. Just ask yourself
the simple question: which countries developed? Well, the countries
that developed were Europe, North America, Japan, a couple of the
countries in the Japanese colonial system, and that’s about it. The rest
of the world not only didn’t develop, but it was pretty much destroyed.
There’s a characteristic in common to the countries that developed
– they maintained their sovereignty; they were not colonized. And the
correlation is extremely close; there are few correlations like that in history.
Countries that maintained their own sovereignty and were able to violate
the rules and integrate themselves into the economic system on their
own terms, many of them did develop. Countries that lacked sovereignty
and were subjected to external control, with only marginal exceptions,
did not develop. Again, it takes a lot of discipline for economists and
other intellectuals not to notice this fact. It’s quite striking. Under the
contemporary versions, Britain succeeded in developing a textile industry
by destroying the superior Indian textile industry, by protectionist devices
and state intervention. But textiles were based on cotton, and cotton was
cheap, and why was cotton cheap? Well, cotton was cheap because of an
institution called slavery. Slavery is a rather severe market interference.
But when you study market economies, you don’t count that. You don’t
count the fact that there was a massive market interference, based on state
violence of the most extreme kind, that kept the basic commodity cheap.
Cotton was like oil today, and in fact, oil is kept cheap the same way. A
huge part of the Pentagon budget is directed towards maintaining the
price of oil within a certain range. A few studies count that about thirty
percent of the oil price is a subsidy, and there are plenty of other energy
subsidies. Well, those things just aren’t counted.
136 Democracy and Power
But even if you take the things that are counted, the facts are very
clear. Under the current version of traditional mechanisms, about half the
population of the world right now is literally in receivership. That means
their economic policies are managed by bureaucrats in Washington. But
even in the rich countries, democracy is under attack by virtue of the shift
of decision-making from governments, which may be partially responsible
to the population, to private tyrannies that don’t have those defects. They
are unaccountable, so they’re fine. Shift decisions to them, everything’s
great. And that has very striking effects.
Take, say, Latin America. Latin America has undergone a wave of
democratization in the past fifteen years. Military dictatorships were
replaced by democracies. But academic specialists who follow this closely
have been observing for years that as democracy is extended in Latin
America, disillusionment with democracy is increasing. And that trend
continues. A recently-released study revealed that about half the population
of Latin America would now support democracy, and about half would be
willing to accept military dictatorship. The military dictatorships in Latin
America were extremely brutal affairs, but after the wave of democratization
about half the population wouldn’t mind if they came back. And the
reasons are very clear. They’re reported, in fact, even in the business press.
Commenting on this, the London Financial Times said that the reason is
an alarming trend, which links declining economic fortunes with a lack
of faith in the institutions of democracy. And the reason is that this much-
praised new wave of democracy happened to coincide with neoliberal
economic programs, which undermine democracy. So you get more formal
democracy and more disillusionment with democracy. And indeed Latin
America, which has followed the rules most religiously, has been one of
the regions that had the worst economic record. It’s a correlation that holds
world-wide.
That also holds for the United States. I’m sure you read a lot about the
big clamor about the “stolen election” of November 2000, you know those
Florida votes, the Supreme Court, and so on. If you read closely you’ll
notice that there was a huge issue for the press and elite commentators:
they were very surprised about the fact that the public just didn’t care.
The public expressed no concern over the fact that the election was stolen.
And the reasons are very clear from extensive public opinion studies. They
reveal that on the eve of the election (well, before the Florida shenanigans),
about seventy-five percent of the population regarded the whole process
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 137
as a farce. It was a game played by rich corporations who do the funding,
party leaders who are all crooks, and the public relations industry, which
is just crafting candidates to say things that you can’t believe even if you
can understand them. So who cares what happens? If it’s stolen, what’s the
difference? It doesn’t make any difference anyway. As these same studies
reveal, there is a measure of what they call “helplessness,” an inability
to affect anything that happens. That’s been going up very fast. It hit its
highest level last November, with about half the population saying that
people like us have little or no influence on what government does. That’s a
very sharp rise right through the neoliberal period. Where there are issues
that separate the public from the business world, they simply don’t appear
on the agenda. Take international economic issues. The public has very
strong feelings on this, and business has very strong feelings, but they’re
opposite feelings. Accordingly, these issues cannot arise in the campaign.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas, for example, could not be mentioned
in the campaign. And that’s true in general of these things called “free
trade agreements.” Actually, the business press more accurately calls them
“free investment agreements.” That’s what we ought to call them. The
free investment agreements are opposed by the public, supported by the
business world and elites generally, therefore they cannot appear as issues
in electoral campaigns.
The constitutional system in the United States was actually designed,
very consciously, to have this effect. James Madison, who was the main
framer at the Constitutional Convention, explained that the goal of
government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
To achieve this, he said, political power must be placed in the hands of the
“wealth of the nation,” men who can be trusted to secure “the permanent
interests of the country,” which are the rights of the property owners, and
to defend these interests against what he called “the levelling spirit” of
the general population. And that continues to the present. It takes various
forms, but that same principle is a leading principle of progressive political
thought. Technical political scientist-types who write about these things say
that it is wrong to describe the United States as a democracy, it should be
described as a polyarchy. That is, a system where elites rule and the public
ratifies. The public is supposed to show up every couple of years and say,
you make the decisions, and then go home and buy shoes or something like
that. That’s the ideal system, and from that point of view the November
2000 election didn’t reveal a flaw of American democracy, but revealed its
138 Democracy and Power
triumph. And that triumph has been greatly enhanced by the neoliberal
programs.
Throughout all this, a crucial element is restriction of information.
That’s why there is a huge public relations industry. They tell you what
they are doing, it’s not a secret. Back in the 1920s, one of the founders of
the PR industry (a kind of Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal) wrote in a classic
manual that the goal of the industry is to regiment the public mind every
bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. Indeed, that’s
necessary, you can’t have democracy otherwise. Unless the population is
totally regimented, you can’t allow democracy, because the population
will do what they want, and that won’t be securing the permanent interests
of the country, namely the rights of the rich who have to be protected from
the majority. This is quite conscious, there’s nothing secret about it. It’s the
standard political science literature, supported by major figures like Joseph
Schumpeter, Walter Lippmann and others.
The struggle to impose that regime takes many forms, and it never
ends. It’s going to continue as long as there are high concentrations of
power controlling decision-making. And it’s only reasonable to expect the
masters to exploit every opportunity that they have, at the moment the
fear and anguish in the face of the terrorist attacks. But there’s absolutely
no reason to accept those rules, and fortunately many people are rejecting
them. There has been a very impressive increase of opposition, in recent
years, taking totally new forms. It mostly developed in the South, with the
North joining recently. The masters of the universe are very scared. They
recognize what is happening. The meeting in Qatar, I’m sure you know,
is an expression of the fear that the public may become involved. If they
could figure out how to meet in a space shuttle, they’d meet there. Just keep
the public away, because it’s too dangerous. Every time the public breaks
through, there is panic in the business press, literal panic. They know their
control is extremely fragile; it can be destroyed at any time. It’s mainly a
matter of not accepting the injunction to be passive and acquiescent, and
realizing that power actually is in the hands of populations, particularly in
the more free and democratic societies, where it’s impossible to use really
massive force and violence to suppress the general population. These
popular movements are unprecedented in scale. There’s been nothing like
them in history, in the range of constituency and in international solidarity.
And I think the future, to a very large extent, lies in their hands – and it’s
very hard to overestimate what is at stake.
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 139
Question and Answer Session
Moderator: There are many questions, about fifty, so they’ve been classified into
four broad categories. The first set of questions, Professor Chomsky, refers to the
so-called “clash of civilizations.” I’ll read one of them, and there are several like that:
“Do you think that the present conflict between the Taliban and the US and its allies
can take the shape of a clash of civilizations, as expected by Samuel Huntington?”
Along with that there are related questions about the concept of religious fanaticism,
and how fundamentalist tendencies around the world can be stopped.
Chomsky: Let’s start with the first question, whether the US-Taliban
confrontation has something to do with Huntington’s thesis of the clash
of civilizations. Remember the context of Huntington’s thesis, the context
in which it was put forth. This was after the end of the Cold War. For fifty
years, both the US and the Soviet Union had used the pretext of the Cold
War as a justification for any atrocities that they wanted to carry out. So if
the Russians wanted to send tanks to East Berlin, that was because of the
Cold War. And if the US wanted to invade South Vietnam and wipe out
Indochina, that was because of the Cold War. If you look at the history of
this period, the pretext had nothing to do with the reasons. The reasons
for the atrocities were domestically based in power interests, but the Cold
War gave an excuse. Whatever the atrocity carried out, you could say it’s
defense against the other side.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pretext is gone. The policies
remain the same. In fact, the policies continue about as before, with slight
changes in tactics, but you need a new pretext. In fact, there’s been a search
for pretexts for quite a long time. Actually, it started twenty years ago.
When the Reagan Administration came in, it was already pretty clear that
the pretext of the Russian threat was not going to work for very long. So
they came into office saying that the focus of their foreign policy would be
to combat the plague of international terrorism. That was twenty years ago.
There’s nothing new about this. We have to defend ourselves from other
terrorists. And they proceeded to react to that plague by creating the most
extraordinary international terrorist network in the world, which carried
out massive terror in Central America and southern Africa and all over
the place. In fact, it was so extreme that its actions were even condemned
by the World Court and Security Council. With 1989 coming, you needed
140 Democracy and Power
some new pretexts. And it was very explicit. Remember, one of the tasks
of intellectuals, the solemn task, is to prevent people from understanding
what is going on. And in order to fulfill that task, you have to ignore the
government documentation, for example, which tells you exactly what’s
going on. And this is a case in point.
Just to give you one illustration. Every year, the White House presents
to Congress a statement of why we need a huge military budget. Every
year, it used to be the same: the Russians are coming. The Russians are
coming, so we need this monstrous military budget. The question that
anyone who is interested in international affairs should have been asking
himself or herself is what are they going to say in March 1990? That
was the first presentation to Congress after the Russians clearly weren’t
coming – they were not around anymore. So that was a very important
and extremely interesting document. And of course, it is not mentioned
anywhere, because it’s much too interesting. That was March 1990, the first
Bush administration giving its presentation to Congress. It’s exactly the
same, as every year. We need a huge military budget. We need massive
intervention forces, mostly pointed at the Middle East. We have to protect
what’s called the “defense industrial base” – that’s a euphemism for high-
tech industry. We have to ensure that the public pays the costs of high-tech
industry by funneling it through the military system, under the pretext
of defense. So it’s exactly the same as before. The only difference was the
reasons. It turned out that the reason we needed all this was not because the
Russians were coming, but – I’m quoting – because of the “technological
sophistication of Third World powers.” That’s why we need the huge
military budget. The massive military forces aimed at the Middle East still
have to be aimed there, and here comes an interesting phrase. It says that
they have to be aimed at the Middle East, where “the threat to our interests
could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.” In other words, sorry, I’ve been
lying to you for fifty years, but now the Kremlin isn’t around anymore,
so I’ve got to tell you the truth: the threat to our interests could not be
laid at the Kremlin’s door. Remember, it couldn’t be laid at Iraq’s door
either, because at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend and ally
of the United States. He had already carried out his worst atrocities, like
gassing Kurds and everything else – but he remained a fine guy, hadn’t
disobeyed orders yet, the one crime that matters. So nothing could be laid
at Iraq’s door, or at the Kremlin’s door. In fact, the threat had to be laid
right at the door where it always had been: subjugated nations might take
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 141
control of their own destiny, including their own resources. And that can’t
be tolerated, obviously. So we have to support brutal, oppressive states
like Saudi Arabia and others, to make sure that they guarantee that the
profits from oil – it’s not so much the oil as the profits from oil – flow
to the people who deserve it: rich western energy corporations or the US
Treasury Department or Bechtel Corporation, and so on. So that’s why we
need massive military forces. Other than that, it’s the same.
What does this have to do with Huntington? Well, he’s a respected
intellectual. He can’t say this. He can’t say, look, it’s exactly the same as
before. It’s always the method by which the rich run the world, and the
major confrontation remains what it has always been: small concentrated
sectors of wealth and power versus everybody else. You can’t say that. And,
in fact, if you look at those passages on the clash of civilizations, he says
that in the future the conflict will not be on economic grounds. So let’s put
that out of our minds. You can’t think about rich powers and corporations
exploiting people, that can’t be the conflict. It’s got to be something else. So
it will be the “clash of civilizations” – the western civilization and Islam
and Confucianism.
Well, you can test that. It’s a strange idea, but you can test it. You can test
it, for example, by asking how the United States, the leader of the western
civilization, has reacted to Islamic fundamentalists. Well, the answer is,
it’s been their leading supporter. For instance, the most extreme Islamic
fundamentalist state in the world at that time was Saudi Arabia. Maybe it
has been succeeded by the Taliban, but that’s an offshoot of Saudi Arabian
Wahhabism. Saudi Arabia has been a client of the United States since its
origins. And the reason is that it plays the right role. It ensures that the
wealth of the region goes to the right people: not people in the slums of
Cairo, but people in executive suites in New York. And as long as they
do that, Saudi Arabian leaders can treat women as awfully as they want,
they can be the most extreme fundamentalists in existence, they’re just fine.
That’s the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world.
What is the biggest Muslim state in the world? Indonesia. And what’s
the relation between the United States and Indonesia? Well, actually the
United States was hostile to Indonesia until 1965. That’s because Indonesia
was part of the Non-Aligned Movement. The United States hated Nehru,
despised him in fact, for exactly the same reason. So they despised
Indonesia. It was independent. Furthermore, it was a dangerous country,
because it had one mass-based political party, the PKI, which was a party of
142 Democracy and Power
the poor, a party of peasants, basically. And it was gaining power through
the open democratic system; therefore it had to be stopped. The US tried
to stop it in 1958, by supporting a rebellion. That failed. Then they started
supporting the Indonesian army. And in 1965, the army carried out a coup,
led by General Suharto. They massacred hundreds of thousands, maybe
a million people (mostly landless peasants) and wiped out the only mass-
based party. This led to unrestrained euphoria in the West. The United
States, Britain, Australia – it was such a glorious event that they couldn’t
control themselves. The headlines were, “A gleam of light in Asia,” “A hope
where there once was none,” “The Indonesian moderates have carried out
a boiling bloodbath,” “The greatest event in history.” I mean, they didn’t
conceal what happened – staggering mass slaughter. The CIA compared
it to the massacres of Stalin and Hitler, and that was wonderful. Ever
since that time, Indonesia has been a favored ally of the United States. It
continued to have one of the bloodiest records in the late twentieth century
(mass murder in East Timor, hideous tortures of dissidents, and so on),
but it was fine. It was the biggest Islamic state in the world, but it was
just fine. Suharto was “our kind of guy,” the way Clinton described him
when he visited in the mid-1990s. And he stayed a friend of the United
States, until he made a mistake. He made a mistake by dragging his feet
over IMF orders. After the Asian crash, the IMF imposed very harsh orders,
and Suharto didn’t go along the way he was supposed to. And he also lost
control of the society. That’s also a mistake. So at that point, the Secretary
of State, Madeleine Albright, gave him a telephone call and literally said,
“We think it’s time for a democratic transition.” Four hours later, merely by
accident, he abdicated. But Indonesia remained a US favorite state.
So that’s two of the Islamic states. What about the most extreme Islamic
fundamentalist non-state actors? Let’s say the Al Qaeda network. Who
created them? That’s the creation of the CIA, British intelligence, Saudi
Arabian funding, Egypt, and so on. They brought the most extreme radical
fundamentalists they could find anywhere in north Africa and the Middle
East – trained them, armed them, nurtured them to harass the Russians,
and not to help the Afghans. These guys were carrying out terrorism from
the very beginning (they assassinated President Sadat twenty years ago),
with the support of the United States. So where is the clash of civilizations?
Let’s move a little further. During the 1980s, the United States carried out
a major war in Central America. A couple of hundred thousand people were
killed, four countries almost destroyed, I mean it was a vast war. Who was
the target of that war? Well, one of the main targets was the Catholic Church.
The decade of the 1980s began with the assassination of an archbishop. It
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 143
ended with the assassination of six leading Jesuit intellectuals, including
the rector of the main university. They were killed by basically the same
people – terrorist forces, organized and armed and trained by the United
States. During that period, plenty of church people were killed. Hundreds
of thousands of peasants and poor people also died, as usual, but one of
the main targets was the Catholic Church. Why? Well, the Catholic Church
had committed a grievous sin in Latin America. For hundreds of years, it
had been the church of the rich. That was fine. But in the 1960s, the Latin
American bishops adopted what they called a “preferential option for the
poor.” At that point, they became like this mass-based political party in
Indonesia, which was a party of the poor and the peasants, and naturally it
had to be wiped out. So the Catholic Church had to be smashed.
Coming back to the beginning, just where is the clash of civilizations? I
mean, there is a clash alright. There is a clash with those who are adopting
the preferential option for the poor, no matter who they are. They can be
Catholics, they can be communists, they can be anything else. They can
be white, black, green, anything. Western terror is totally ecumenical. It’s
not really racist – they’ll kill anybody who takes the wrong stand on the
major issues. But if you’re an intellectual, you can’t say that. Because it’s
too obviously true. And you can’t let people understand what is obviously
true. You have to create deep theories that can be understood only if you
have a PhD from Harvard or something. So we have a clash of civilizations,
and we’re supposed to worship that. But it makes absolutely no sense.
Moderator: Firstly, people seem to be very keen to know what you see as an
alternative. What kinds of people’s movements do we need, and is there any hope of
breaking this concentration of power and influence? That’s one. As for the other set
of questions, I’ll just read one, which captures many others: “How many students
whom you have taught continue to follow or act upon your teachings? And in
essence, is there some kind of mass hypnosis, or what kind of reaction do you get to
your speeches in the United States?”
Chomsky: Well, the second question is easier, so let me start with that. I
teach graduate courses in linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. I’ve been involved in things like this most of my
life. I’ve been involved in resistance, in and out of jail, all sorts of things. But
I don’t let it interfere with teaching. So it does not enter into my teaching. If
students know about that side of my life, it’s because they come to talks, or
read what I write, or something. So essentially, the influence on students,
144 Democracy and Power
say, in my own department is the same as it is everywhere else. It’s nothing
to do with anything that happens in a graduate seminar. You can argue
about this approach, but in my view that’s the way it ought to be done.
Anyhow, that’s what I’ve done.
As for my influence on others, well, you know the way the United
States works. It’s a very free country. There is very little state repression by
comparative standards, especially if you’re more or less privileged, as I am,
like most of us are. But you can be excluded. So you’re excluded from the
mainstream, especially the parts that are more to the left-liberal side. Those
are the real connoisseurs. They have to make sure that you go this far and
not one millimeter further. So there are blocks. On the other hand, there
are plenty of opportunities to reach other people. I mean, a few days before
I came here, I gave a talk in Boston which had an audience of about two
or three thousand people and was broadcast live over the internet, and all
sorts of things. And that goes on all the time. And it’s not just me. It’s other
people who spend their lives the same way. So there’s very large outreach.
Today’s gathering is also part of it. This doesn’t create popular movements
by any means. In fact, it responds to them. It’s the popular movements that
create the opportunities for things like this. All these hundreds of talks I give
all over the place are organized by somebody; they’re organized by local
people who are carrying out some kind of work. It may be with women or
working people or the homeless or immigrants or a million other things,
and they want somebody to come and give a talk for a fundraiser, or take
part in a demonstration, whatever it may be. Those are the opportunities,
and they reach huge numbers of people. It is because of these activities
that the country has changed radically in the last thirty or forty years. It’s
a totally different country, much more civilized than it was forty years ago.
That’s why the sixties are so hated, so denounced in elite discussion. The
reason is that they had a very substantial civilizing effect on the society, in
many different ways. Women’s rights, environmental issues, opposition to
aggression, the anti-nuclear movement, and so on – all this goes back to the
sixties. It was there before, but it really took off after the sixties.
In fact, a striking indication of this civilizing effect of the sixties is
that this is the first time in US history, after hundreds of years, that some
attention was paid to the fate of the indigenous population. Remember,
that country was built on massive ethnic cleansing. Millions of people were
exterminated. There were 7 or 8 million indigenous people, maybe more.
They’re not around anymore. They were just exterminated. And this was
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 145
never an issue, never discussed. Textbooks, if they talked about it, praised
it. When I grew up, as a kid we would play cowboys and Indians, where
we were the cowboys, and we’d kill the Indians. That was just normal. The
leading diplomatic history of the United States, by Thomas Bailey, a liberal
historian writing in 1969, describes how the colonists, after kicking out the
British, turned to their next task, namely “felling trees and Indians and
expanding their natural borders.” So there were trees in the way, and there
were Indians in the way, and we sort of knocked them all down and expanded
the national borders. That wasn’t considered an odd thing to say at that
time. I mean, it’s so deeply rooted that some of the things that happened are
mind-boggling. For example, think about the Israeli helicopters being used
to assassinate Palestinian political leaders. Two questions: Where did the
helicopters come from? Israel doesn’t produce helicopters. They were sent
by Clinton and Bush for that purpose, knowing that that’s what they are
for. Furthermore, what’s the name of the helicopters? Tomahawk, Apache,
that sort of thing. In fact, the weapons of war in the United States are
named after the victims of genocide. If in Germany these days they named
the helicopters of the Luftwaffe “Jew” and “Gypsy,” people would think
there’s something wrong with that culture. But this goes on, and nobody
notices it. Well, thirty years ago nobody would have noticed it. Now, some
people do notice it. And there is some concern over what happened. That’s
part of the civilizing effect of the sixties.
And out of this grew mass popular organizations of all kinds. The
Central American solidarity movements of the 1980s were something
completely new in the history of imperialism. First of all, they were huge.
Secondly, people didn’t just protest. They didn’t just have demonstrations.
They went and lived with the victims. There were people who went and
lived in Salvadoran villages, partly in the hope that they could help, but
also because they thought that perhaps if there is a white face around it will
restrain the state terrorists that their own country was organizing. This had
never happened before. I mean, in no imperial war that I can remember did
massive numbers of citizens go to protect the victims of their own country.
That level of engagement is quite new. Thirdly, it’s also interesting that
this was not coming from the left. Some of it was, but not most of it. In fact,
it was mainly rooted in conservative Christian mainstream communities,
many of them were fundamentalists – in fact, Christian fundamentalists. It
was very deeply rooted in mainstream US society, right out of main street
Iowa. And it was very courageous and very honorable, something totally
new. Well, that’s another reflection of the same developments.
146 Democracy and Power
And this does not come from nowhere. We all know where it comes from.
It comes from people organizing in their own community, or their own
workplace, or whatever group they happen to be involved in, integrating
with one another, making bigger organizations, linking up. By now, the
linkages are worldwide. The major movements, by far, are in the South, in
countries like India, and Brazil, and others. They’re not noticed much in the
West, because who cares what those people are doing, but that’s the source
of the anti-corporate globalization movement and plenty of other things. I
don’t have to tell you, you know way more about it than I do. That’s the
way things change. Every significant change in history has come about that
way. And the next ones will too. And I think the next big changes are closer
than we think, because the system of domination is extremely fragile, as
I mentioned. And they know it. That’s why it is based on such extensive
secrecy. If you let people know what’s going on, it’s going to collapse. That
can hold together for a while, but it’s a fragile system, and we know just
how to change it – by popular organization. It’s not just a matter of opposing
what’s going on, but also of creating – I’ll quote Bakunin – “the facts of the
future in the present society.” You build up the kinds of institutions that
should exist in the future society, and let them begin to work and to flourish.
Whether they are workers’ control in industry, or cooperative villages, or
women’s groups, whatever they may be. Start building them. Let them
work and function, and they’ll be the future, once concentrated power is so
weakened that it can’t survive. How you get the changes, you can’t predict,
but that’s the path that’s worked in the past. That’s why we don’t live under
feudalism, and slavery, and all kinds of horrors of the past that are mostly
gone. And that’s the way you go on.
Moderator: The fourth set of questions focuses on globalization. Here is one that
subsumes many others: “What do you think would be the effect if India continues
with the present policies of globalization and integration with the global economy?”
Chomsky: What would be the effect if India continues with accepting
neoliberalism and integrating into the global economy on neoliberal terms?
Well, I think there are a couple of centuries of history that give you an
answer to that. There are differences of course, but in many ways that’s
what happened since the eighteenth century. England imposed a very
liberal regime on India. Meanwhile, England itself maintained a very
powerful state, the most powerful in Europe, with very high protection.
Its labor management system was also quite different from India’s; in
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 147
fact, there is some very interesting scholarly work just coming out on
this. The Cambridge University series on Indian history and society has
just published a book by Prasannan Parthasarathi, based on a Harvard
dissertation, I forget the title, but it’s about weavers in South India in the
eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, the weaving economy
in South India was a total disaster story. The bones of the weavers were
bleaching the plains of India, and all that. In the eighteenth century, they
were doing quite well. In fact, his investigations show, fairly convincingly,
that they were better off than workers in England. They had higher
purchasing power. They had much more control of their work. They were
mobile. This was ended by British state power. The British came in first
through the East India Company, which basically was a state outfit, and
then just by force, and they introduced British-style labor management
rules. That meant cutting back mobility, so that workers can’t resist by
going somewhere else, imposing tight restrictions, breaking down the
market relations which did exist in India. And that smashed the weavers.
So within a century you get a disaster, which still continues. And if you
look at history, that’s the way it has been. Countries that were compelled
to adopt real market principles were destroyed, and those that were able
to control their own destiny by resisting colonization, and invariably relied
quite heavily on state intervention for development (often in brutal ways),
those countries developed.
If India decides to go back to what it was in the eighteenth century, you
can predict what will happen. Right through the Raj, there was a sector of
Indian society that was very wealthy. The Raj was run by Indians, not by
the British. The British were in the background, but the place was mostly
run by Indians, even the army. Until the 1857 Anglo-Indian war, the
army was mostly sepoys. They were controlling the Indian population.
Furthermore, that’s the way it is in every other country too. So there’ll
be a sector of Indian society that will do fine. Most of the population will
suffer. The general economy will be reliant on outsiders, won’t be able to
control itself. And you’ll somehow probably relive the past. That’s what I
would suspect. On the other hand, of course, the world isn’t the same as
it was two hundred years ago, so it’s not going to be a duplicate. But the
patterns are pretty clear.
Just think about it, there’s not a single society that is rich and
developed today that followed liberal principles. Every single one of
them radically violated them, including England. I mean, England did
finally turn to free trade in 1846, but at that time England had already
achieved twice the per capita capitalization of any other country, so the
148 Democracy and Power
playing field looked level – you know, tilted in our direction. By that time,
Indian manufacture had been pretty much destroyed. And even in the
free trade period, England didn’t rely on free trade. I mean, I think about
forty percent of English exports went to India, its own colony. That’s not
free trade. When England could no longer compete with Germany in
manufacturing, it still had the controlled Indian market. This continued
until the 1920s. In the 1920s, England was no longer able to compete with
Japanese manufacturing, so they simply called the whole game off. In
1932, England closed off the Empire, including India, to Japanese imports.
That’s part of the background for the Pacific War. The Dutch did the same
in what was then the East Indies. The United States did the same in the
Philippines. That’s part of the background for the Second World War. I
mean, everybody’s perfectly happy with free trade, as long as we’re going
to win. If it looks like there’s some problem, then you stop it.
The United States is the perfect example. I mentioned the national
security exemptions. The national security exemptions in the WTO are
just a way for the United States to have a very dynamic state sector, which
is the innovative part of the economy, where the public pays the costs.
Look at Ronald Reagan – nobody was more full of passionate rhetoric
about free trade than the Reaganites. Yet they were the most protectionist
government in postwar US history. They doubled the barriers to imports.
They were bitterly denounced by the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the WTO, for having led the assault
against free trade. But that didn’t stop them from spouting the wonders
of free trade for other countries. And it’s the same right up to the present.
Moderator: We’ll end with two questions from the press. The first one is:
“Mr. Chomsky, could you tell us something about the depoliticization process
associated with the involvement of Non-Governmental Organizations and
funding agencies in Third World countries?”
Chomsky: Yes, I understand. Well, I mean, all of you know, it’s a very
double-edged kind of business. There are many NGOs that do really good
things. On the other hand, one effect of the NGOs, quite commonly, is to take
decisions away from the communities, and also to give the state an excuse
not to be concerned with the things it ought to be concerned with, like health
and education and so on. Serious NGOs, those that are concerned with
Militarism, Democracy and People’s Right to Information 149
authentic development and democratization and rights (a lot of them are just
kind of power agencies, agencies of some state, or corporations, or whatever),
have to be very wary of this. They should follow the lead of the communities,
not dictate to them. And they should not provide a means for the governing
authorities to transfer power to corporations and say, we’re not going to care
about health and welfare. And there’s no simple answer. I mean, they deal
with these things in different ways. Some of them, I think, do pretty well.
Like, take Oxfam. As far as I’m aware, around the world, it’s handled these
problems reasonably well. In other cases, the results are not so good.
Moderator: Here is the final question, again from the press: “Do you suggest
some change in the political system? You oppose democracy, you oppose
communism, so what kind of political system should we have so that all these
issues are taken care of?”
Chomsky: Well, I think democracy might be a good idea. This reminds
me of a statement attributed to Gandhi. I don’t know if he actually said it
or not, but he is supposed to have been asked what he thought of western
civilization, and to have answered, “It would be a good idea.” And I think
you can say the same about democracy. True, functioning democracy,
meaning local control of decision-making in every structure (community,
a workplace, a collective, a peasant association, whatever), that should
be the basis of a decent, reasonable society, with further integration and
federation from the bottom up, as is feasible and beneficial, all the way to
international organizations. This is just the traditional anarchist idea. It’s
not a novel idea; I’m not saying anything new. And it’s the natural direction
in which a commitment to democracy ought to lead, I think. There are
plenty of barriers to it, but they can be overcome. In fact, just think of the
barriers. In the twentieth century, three forms of totalitarianism developed:
Bolshevism, fascism, and corporations. They really are three forms of
totalitarianism. And in fact they have the same, pretty much the same
intellectual roots. They come out of neo-Hegelian ideas about the rights of
organic entities over individuals – a big attack on classical liberalism. Well,
two of those forms of totalitarianism were overthrown. The third one is
rampant. But it’s no more engraved in stone than the other two. In fact, I
think it’s weaker. It doesn’t have the same kind of coercive force behind it.
So it can be overthrown, too, in favor of democratic control.
Appendix: An Interview with
Noam Chomsky*
NOAM CHOMSKY, eminent linguist and social critic, visited India in
January 1996 and gave a series of lectures in Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad,
Madras and Thiruvananthapuram. His visit, sponsored by the Centre of
Development Economics at the Delhi School of Economics in collaboration
with Frontline, the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies
(University of Hyderabad), the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) and
the Centre for Development Studies (Thiruvananthapuram), has been rightly
described as a major intellectual event. Speaking on a wide range of subjects,
from democracy and human rights to the role of intellectuals in society, he
captivated audience after audience with his lucid challenge of accepted
political analyses, his uncompromising commitment to social equality and
individual freedom, the breadth of his scholarship, and the engaging style of
his lectures. Back at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he responded
by email to some questions relating to the major themes of his India lectures.
The World Order
What do you mean exactly when you say that democracy and human rights are
under attack in many countries?
I’ll keep to the US, by far the most important case because of its enormous
power and because it represents itself, and is regarded (not without reason)
as in the forefront of the defense of democracy and human rights.
* First published in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 13, no. 31 (30 March 1996),
available at http://www.epw.in/commentary/chomsky-india-interview.html
hp://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0050.06
152 Democracy and Power
Before turning to the factual questions, we have to clarify what we
mean by “democracy” and “human rights.” In the latter case, there is
an international standard: the UN Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UD, December 1948), recognized by US courts as “customary
international law,” hence binding on the US government. On democracy,
the issue is more complex. The UD is solemnly acclaimed by all states
though supported by none, to my knowledge. The US, for example, has
one of the worst records in the world even in ratifying international
conventions designed to implement the UD, and its few ratifications are
conditioned so as to make them unenforceable. Contrary to much pretense,
the US denies the universality of the UD: specifically, it rejects all Articles
pertaining to socio-economic rights. These facts, not controversial, passed
virtually without comment during the impressive accolades for US
leadership at the Vienna conference of 1993 celebrating the UD, where
Washington thundered against the “Third World relativists” who dare to
question its universality.
Turning to the parts of the UD that the US at least claims to support,
we also find instructive gaps. Consider Article 14, which states that
“Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum
from persecution”; Haitians, for example, locked into a prison of terror
and torture by an illegal US blockade while Washington was producing
impressive rhetoric at the Vienna conference, indeed returned to that
torture chamber by force during its proceedings.
Or consider Article 13, by far the best known provision of the UD, in the
US. It states that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including
his own, and to return to his country” (my italics). This Article was invoked
annually on Human Rights Day, December 10, with demonstrations led by
distinguished law professors and civil libertarians issuing angry appeals
to the Soviet Union to let Russian Jews leave. To be exact, half of Article
13 achieved such fame and renown; the words italicized were invariably
omitted, for the simple reason that they are forcefully rejected by those
who condemned the Soviet Union for its violations of the first half of Article
13. The significance of the omitted words was spelled out on December 11,
1948, the day after the UD was passed, in UN Resolution 194, also passed
unanimously, which affirms the right of Palestinian refugees who had fled
or had been expelled during the 1948 fighting to return to their homes.
Resolution 194 continued to be endorsed by the US until 1993, when the
Clinton administration broke from the traditional (and purely formal)
advocacy of Resolution 194, voting alone (with Israel) against it; as usual,
there was no report in the press.
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 153
This last example is a minor one in the general context of human rights
violations, though it does illustrate with some clarity the utter hypocrisy of
the advocacy of human rights: advocated with much passion as a weapon
against someone else, rarely otherwise.
Let’s turn to the core Articles that the US endorses: so-called “anti-
torture” rights. As repeated studies have shown, US foreign aid is highly
correlated with torture – not because the State Department likes torture,
but because it likes a “favorable business climate,” and that is often
improved by murder of priests working for the poor, torture of union
leaders, massacre of peasants, etc. Hence the secondary correlation between
aid and torture. That continues. The leading human rights violator in
the western hemisphere, as one can learn from (unreported) inquiries by
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Church and others, is
Colombia, with a horrendous record of atrocities. It also receives half of
US military aid and training for the hemisphere, increasing under Clinton,
under pretexts taken seriously by no knowledgeable observer. Again, one
will find nothing of this in the press or mainstream journalism.
The attack on human rights is systematic, rooted in institutional needs,
and continuing. Sometimes the attack by Washington is far more direct
and violent, as during the 1980s, when the US-run terrorist wars in Central
America (condemned, irrelevantly, by the World Court and the UN Security
Council) left hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses
and four countries in ruins, with dubious prospects for survival – to no
slight extent a war against the Roman Catholic Church, which had dared to
interpret the Gospels as implying a “preferential option for the poor.” Or in
Africa in the same years, where terrorist forces from South Africa backed by
the US and UK caused more than 1.5 million dead and 60 billion dollars in
damage from 1980 to 1988, under the rubric of “constructive engagement.”
Sometimes the methods are more indirect, for example, programs of “aid”
and “development” that are not unrelated to the fact that 800 million people
in the world suffer malnutrition and that 13 million children die each year
from easily treatable diseases; or that such shocking conditions can even be
found in the richest country in the world, with unparalleled advantages, as
a result of conscious social policy. All of this in radical violation of the UD,
not to speak of elementary moral principles.
Let’s turn to democracy. Here we have to distinguish between the US
record abroad and at home. The most instructive examples abroad are of
course in the regions with greatest US influence: Latin America. Here the US
has regularly overthrown parliamentary regimes and instituted the rule of
brutal torturers, carried out or supported murderous terrorism, and turned
154 Democracy and Power
potentially rich and productive areas into some of the world’s worst horror
chambers. The record was characterized accurately by one of the leading
specialists on US policy and democracy in Latin America, Thomas Carothers,
who writes as both a scholar and an insider, having been in the Reagan
State Department, working on its “democracy enhancement” programs,
which have received much acclaim. Carothers regards these as “sincere,”
but a “failure”; a remarkably systematic failure, as he concedes. Where US
influence was least, there was progress towards democracy, resisted by the
Reaganites though they claimed credit for it when it could not be stopped.
Where US influence was greatest, progress was least, and the US was willing
to tolerate “only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not
risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the US has long
been allied,” radically antidemocratic structures, as he observes.
That continues today. The US fulminates impressively (and accurately)
about Cuba’s lack of democracy. Meanwhile it lauds democracy in
Colombia, where there is even an independent political party. Since it
was formed ten years ago, about 2,500 of its leading activists have been
murdered, mostly by the state authorities and their paramilitary associates,
including presidential candidates, mayors, and others – a small fraction of
the victims of state terror in this stellar democracy. Nothing comparable
can be attributed to Cuba. Again, all this passes without comment.
Turning to the US itself, it has perhaps the most stable democratic
institutions in the world, but it is important to bear in mind the principles
on which US democracy was founded. The constitutional system was
based on the principle that the prime responsibility of government is “to
protect the minority of the opulent from the majority,” as Madison, the
leading framer, explained at the Constitutional Convention. Therefore, he
elaborated, power must be in the hands of the wealthy, while the public is
fragmented and scattered so that the threat of democracy is reduced and
the country can be “governed by those who own it,” as declared by John
Jay, the president of the Convention and first Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court. With all the changes that have taken place over two hundred years,
that principle has been maintained, and indeed reiterated, particularly in
the twentieth century, when leading Wilsonian liberals (Walter Lippmann,
Howard Lasswell, etc.) explained that the “ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders” (the general public) have no business interfering in the public
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 155
arena – their “function” is solely to lend their weight now and then to
one of the “responsible men” (elections). That message was forcefully
reiterated twenty years ago by the Trilateral Commission, representing the
more liberal internationalist currents among elites from western Europe,
Japan and the US, in their study Crisis of Democracy. The “crisis” was that
during the ferment of the 1960s, the public began to depart from its normal
apathy and passivity. The study recommends means to drive people back
to their spectator role, so that “democracy” can be protected. Recall that
this is the liberal side of the spectrum; the mislabeled conservatives are far
more strongly opposed to democracy. Social policy and propaganda since
have been directed to the goal of overcoming “the crisis of democracy”
by sharply reducing participation in democratic institutions. The public
grasps that in some manner; by now, an unprecedented eighty percent of
the public regards American democracy as non-functional.
The major attack on democracy is the effort to shift decision-making
even more than before into the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies:
the corporate world, which is fundamentally totalitarian in character, as
long understood by business historians and political economists. That is
the goal of the current efforts to weaken those elements of the national
government that serve public needs, while expanding those that serve
business power, notably the Pentagon system, which was designed in
large measure as a device to transfer public funds to advanced sectors of
industry under the guise of “security,” and continues to serve that function.
Another powerful weapon against democracy is the astronomical
growth of financial capital, which is now able to undermine democratic
national planning by transferring masses of capital away from countries
that seek to depart from the preferred model of low growth, low wage,
high profit social policy. Even the US is not immune: Clinton proposed a
very mild economic stimulus in 1993, but withdrew it quickly under the
threat of the bond market – though whether this was a necessity or a choice
is another question.
There is much to say about these matters. Without placing them at the
focus of attention, one is not discussing the real world. And that world
is one in which human rights and democracy are under serious attack,
not only from the recognized leader of “the campaign for democracy and
human rights,” but elsewhere as well.
156 Democracy and Power
Would you say that the attack on democracy and human rights applies in India,
too? And if so why?
I would not presume to discuss India on the basis of my limited knowledge.
But to answer your question: yes, I think so, for very much the same reasons,
though, of course, the socioeconomic projects that undermine human
rights and democracy have a much harsher impact in a country like India
than in the US.
Is there a “new world order” after the Cold War? And if so, how does it differ from
the old world order?
“New world orders” are constantly proclaimed, sometimes with reason.
There was a substantial change, of course, with the Second World War.
The most significant changes, in my opinion, were in the early 1970s.
Nixon’s dismantling of the Bretton Woods system was a major factor in the
huge explosion of financial capital, enhanced by the telecommunications
revolution and the sudden flow of petrodollars. The same tendencies
contributed to a new phase of transnational capital, with actual or
threatened transfer of production abroad. These developments have
placed powerful new weapons in the hands of the private tyrannies that
have been seeking to dismantle residual democratic forms and even
to undermine markets, as we find if we take an honest look. The end of
the Cold War, returning most of eastern Europe to its traditional role as
a Third World service area, has provided still more weapons to private
power. Huge conglomerates can now undermine what the business press
calls the “luxurious life-style” of the “pampered western workers” not only
by transferring operations to Mexico and Indonesia, but also to Poland and
Hungary – of course demanding high tariff protection and other subsidy,
on the usual interpretation of “free markets.”
So yes, there is another phase of world order, with the same basic
structure (because dominant institutions remain highly stable and
unchallenged), though with modifications that are quite significant for
human life: for example, for the majority of Americans, whose family
incomes and security have been steadily declining for fifteen years, and for
those elsewhere who suffer far more severely from the same developments.
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 157
How does the domestic political situation in the US today affect the rest of the
world?
Since the Second World War, the US has been by far the richest and most
powerful country in the world. While the recovery of Europe and Japan
(with its periphery) created a more complex “tripolar” global economy,
US power remained pre-eminent. The options for some measure of
independence have declined markedly in the Third World, in part for the
reasons just mentioned. Though it is hard to give a precise measure, it seems
clear that US cultural and doctrinal influence is even more overwhelming
than its economic power in much of the world, certainly western Europe,
and much of the Third World too. In the light of such facts, anything that
happens in the US is of great significance for the rest of the world.
What is your reading of the current “peace process” in West Asia?
The term “peace process” itself is an interesting reflection of US doctrinal
hegemony. The facts are clear and uncontroversial. The June 1967 war
brought the world close to dangerous superpower confrontation, and led
to diplomatic efforts to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict. The result was UN
242 (November 1967), which established the principle of full peace in return
for full Israeli withdrawal from conquered territories (with at most minor
and mutual border adjustments). In the light of subsequent propaganda, it
is important to stress that the US explicitly advocated this interpretation,
which it helped craft, as demonstrated very clearly by the documentary
record. The Arab states rejected full peace; Israel rejected full withdrawal.
The impasse was broken in February 1971 when President Sadat
of Egypt accepted official US policy (and UN 242) with regard to Israel
and Egypt, saying nothing about the West Bank and Golan Heights (or
Palestinian rights, which at that time were unmentioned). Israel recognized
this as a “genuine peace offer” but refused to withdraw. The US had to
decide whether to persist with its official policy, or to support Israel. In
the internal debate, Kissinger prevailed, and the US instituted his policy of
“Stalemate” (his word): no negotiations, only force. That led directly to the
1973 war, which undermined the Israeli- Kissinger assumption that Egypt
had no military option. US tactics were adjusted, aiming to neutralize Egypt
158 Democracy and Power
so that Israel could continue to integrate the territories and attack Lebanon
without fear of Egyptian reprisal. That is precisely what happened, with
massive US support, as a result of the Camp David agreements (1978-79).
Meanwhile, by the mid-seventies the international consensus had
shifted, now recognizing Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza.
From January 1976, the US has therefore, been compelled to veto Security
Council resolutions, vote alone (with Israel, and occasionally some other
client state) against annual General Assembly Resolutions, and block every
other diplomatic initiative: from Europe, the Arab States, the PLO, the
Third World, whatever.
In brief, from 1971, and even more clearly from the mid-1970s, the US
has led the rejectionist camp, and has effectively blocked diplomatic efforts
to resolve the conflict. In the US the crucial facts are entirely suppressed
in the media and journals of opinion, often even in scholarship. These are
instructive features of “free institutions” that are either owned outright by
private tyrannies closely linked to state power or heavily dominated by them:
admittedly a somewhat extreme case of voluntary subordination to power,
though not unique. Washington’s disruption of any diplomatic settlement is
what is called “the peace process,” a technical term that refers to whatever
the US government happens to be doing, often blocking peace. The Gulf War
established that “what we say goes” – George Bush’s proud words as he
proclaimed his “new world order.” At last, the US was able to extend the
Monroe Doctrine to West Asia, temporarily at least. Immediately after the
Gulf War, the US initiated its own unilateral and rejectionist “peace process”
at Madrid. This has been consummated in the Oslo Agreements, which
effectively rescind UN 242 and all other relevant international agreements.
Oslo II (September 1995) leaves Israel in full control of seventy percent of
the West Bank and thirty percent of the Gaza Strip, and effective control
of the rest, including the water and other resources. It retains “veto power”
over the Palestinian Administration that is granted limited local autonomy
and, in return for this gift, must recognize the legality of Israeli settlements
in the territories and Israeli sovereignty over the parts it will choose to
retain, unilaterally (thanks to US support). With huge US subsidies, Israel is
expanding development projects designed to establish irrevocably a version
of the programs it announced in 1968: to take over some forty percent of
the territories and to leave the rest under effective Israeli control, but local
(or Jordanian) administration. That is pretty much the traditional colonial
pattern: the British in India, whites in southern Africa, etc.
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 159
The outcome is a dramatic reaffirmation of the rule of force in international
affairs, and also of the power of American doctrinal institutions. I’ve been
astonished to see the extent to which Europeans and Third World elites
have accepted and internalized US propaganda, even forgetting positions
they themselves had advocated only a few years ago. I was rather surprised
to find that in India, though my experience is limited. There are important
lessons here, which should be carefully considered.
Structural Adjustment
How do you interpret the current wave of structural adjustment programs in
different countries?
The current wave of “neoliberalism,” applied now to the rich societies as well,
is in my opinion a reflection of the shift of power towards private tyrannies in
the past twenty-five years. But we should bear in mind that there is nothing
fundamentally new about “structural adjustment.” For hundreds of years,
what we might call “really existing free market doctrine” has had a dual
form: for you, but not for me, except for temporary advantage. From England
to the US to the “late developing” industrial societies and on to today’s NICs,
a crucial factor in development has been protection from market discipline.
Import barriers are only one element of such protection; the US Pentagon
system, to take only one case, has been a far more significant element in the
past half-century. At the same time, market discipline has been imposed on
those who could not resist it. Today’s First and Third Worlds were much
more similar in the eighteenth century; “really existing free market doctrine”
is one factor in their sharp divergence since.
Today’s “structural adjustment” is a new variant of the traditional dual
conception of free markets. The Reagan administration produced most
impressive odes to the wonders of the free market – for others. Meanwhile, it
introduced more import barriers than all postwar administrations combined
while pouring public funds into hi-tech industry under the usual pretext
of “security,” a conscious fraud as we know from the documentary record.
Today’s “conservatives” demand that hungry seven-year old children be
denied free lunches at school so that they will learn “responsibility” and
“family values.” But their leader Newt Gingrich funnels to his super-rich
160 Democracy and Power
constituents more federal subsidies than to any suburban district in the
country apart from the Federal system itself; and the ultra-right Heritage
Foundation, while calling for sharp cuts in government programs that
serve the great majority, also demands an increase in the Pentagon budget,
not because the US faces any threat, but because the “conservatives”
understand well that advanced sectors of industry rely heavily on the
nanny state. In material that reaches the public, including its educated
sectors, one will have to search diligently for any hint of these elementary
features of contemporary US society.
The latest phase of “free market doctrine” reflects the changes in
power already mentioned. The principles themselves are familiar. As
for the impact of these programs, it is mixed and complex, though some
features are evident. Advocates of the “Washington consensus” concede
that among the most important factors in development are relative equality
and improvement of “human capital” (health, education, etc.), all radically
undermined by the programs they demand. The World Bank also calls
for a shift to agro-export and opening of markets to subsidize western
agricultural imports, surely knowing that the effect is to place primary
producers in competition with one another, with obvious consequences,
and to undermine food production for domestic needs. The Bank’s
economists can also read the recent report of the FAO warning the poorer
countries of the danger of failure to develop indigenous sources of food.
Structural adjustment yields repeated “economic miracles” – as in Brazil,
Mexico, and elsewhere. But it pays to look at their character.
Generalizations are of doubtful validity. Honest economists recognize
that little is understood about these matters, and that a great deal depends
on specific contingencies. There is, however, historical and contemporary
evidence that should not be simply dismissed in favor of a theoretical
apparatus based on unrealistic assumptions and with little empirical
support; and – not coincidentally I think – that undergirds policies that
are highly supportive of established power and privilege. One of the
most consistent consequences of “structural adjustment,” as of other
“experiments” in social engineering back to the eighteenth century, is that
the designers do very well, however others may suffer.
Do you have any views on India’s own structural adjustment program?
As is well known, India has been undergoing forms of “structural
adjustment” for most of its modern history – one reason why India is India,
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 161
while England is England, having become willing to toy for a time with
laissez-faire, after 150 years of protectionism and destruction of competitors
had given it huge advantages. While development was barred by “free
market principles” in India (and by British force in Egypt and elsewhere),
the US was able to develop textiles, steel, and later a full modern economy
by leading the world in protectionism and extensive state intervention in
the economy. It is hard to miss the fact that the two parts of the South to
develop are the two that escaped colonial rule and the market discipline it
imposed: the US and Japan, with some if its colonies in tow. As for current
policies, one has to evaluate them on their merits, in the light of the options
available. That’s a complex question, and one should be skeptical about the
advice of self-proclaimed experts. I would not hazard any specific advice
without closer study, and if I were to, no sensible person should pay any
attention to it. The same holds far more broadly, in my opinion.
India in the World
In your assessment, where does India fit in the US foreign policy agenda?
In the postwar period, India was not a central issue in US policy. The US
was strongly opposed to Nehru’s neutralism and efforts at independent
development. As recognized by diplomatic historians, the US brought the
Cold War to South Asia by arming Pakistan, in large part out of concerns about
West Asia, it seems. By the 1950s, and particularly in the Kennedy period, the
US was becoming more concerned with the demonstration effect of Chinese
development, and supported India as the “democratic alternative,” though
always with considerable reluctance because of India’s relative independence
and its links to the USSR. Today, the US hopes to incorporate India within
the global system dominated by the TNCs (transnational corporations) and
the powerful states in which they are based, and the quasi-governmental
institutions taking shape around them: the international financial institutions,
the World Trade Organization, G7, etc.
Do you support India having a permanent seat on the Security Council?
It’s not a bad idea, but I think the matter is peripheral to the problems faced
by the UN. The more fundamental question is whether the US (or any great
162 Democracy and Power
power) will permit an independent voice in world affairs, one that it does
not control. So far, the record on that is bleak, a reflection of the weakness
of functioning democracy, in my opinion.
There is intense debate here, at the moment, about whether India should sign the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Do you have any comments on this?
That the CTBT is hypocritical at its core is plain enough. It is an attempt
to keep a monopoly of force in the hands of the US and its allies – to the
extent possible (thus Israel, a US client, is under no pressure to abandon its
nuclear program, which the US has in fact supported). On the other hand,
nuclear weapons are an extraordinary danger, and proliferation may spell
the end of human life. Within such unpleasant but real conditions, India
has to make choices. I don’t feel in any position to give advice.
Socialism and Democracy
The end of the Cold War has been widely interpreted as the victory of capitalism
over socialism. Is this accurate?
It is not only inaccurate, but ludicrous. First, there are no “capitalist”
countries; rather various forms of state capitalism. Capitalism would
hardly be able to survive, for reasons discussed by Karl Polanyi years ago;
and the business world has never been willing to accept market discipline
except for temporary advantage, always demanding state protection when
needed. Merely to give one indication, a recent study of the hundred
leading TNCs (reported in the London Financial Times) found that all had
benefited from the intervention of the state in which they are based, and
twenty “would not have survived” without such state support.
As for “socialism,” Soviet leaders did call the system they ran “socialist”
just as they called it “democratic” (“peoples democracies”). The West
(properly) ridiculed the claim to democracy, but was delighted with the
equally ridiculous pretense of “socialism,” which it could use as a weapon
to batter authentic socialism. Lenin and Trotsky at once dismantled every
socialist tendency that had developed in the turmoil before the Bolshevik
takeover, including factory councils, Soviets, etc., and moved quickly to
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 163
convert the country into a “labor army” ruled by the maximal leader. This
was principled at least on Lenin’s part (Trotsky, in contrast, had warned
years earlier that this would be the consequence of Lenin’s authoritarian
deviation from the socialist mainstream). In doctrinal matters, Lenin was an
orthodox Marxist, who probably assumed that socialism was impossible in
a backward peasant society and felt he was carrying out a “holding action”
until the “iron laws of history” led to the predicted revolution in Germany.
When that attempt was drowned in blood, he shifted at once to state
capitalism (the New Economic Policy, or NEP). The totalitarian system he
had designed was later turned into an utter monstrosity by Stalin.
At no point from October 1917 was there a willingness to tolerate
socialism. True, terms of discourse about society and politics are hardly
models of clarity. But if “socialism” meant anything, it meant control by
producers over production – at the very least. There wasn’t a vestige of that
in the Bolshevik system.
The Cold War, in my opinion, falls to a large extent within the traditional
“North-South conflict,” to use the contemporary euphemism. Eastern
Europe was the West’s original “Third World,” separating the West from
pre-Columbian times; the West beginning to develop, the East becoming its
service area. Russia was declining relative to the West until the First World
War; much the same was true elsewhere in the region. Of course, Russia
was a very unusual part of the Third World; thus the Czar had a huge
and menacing military force. But the basic logic of the North-South conflict
holds rather well. The service areas are to pursue only “complementary
development,” their primary “function” being to provide markets,
investment opportunities, resources, cheap labor, and other amenities.
The crime of independence becomes even more severe if it seems to be
succeeding in terms that might influence others facing similar problems,
in which case the criminal is termed a “rotten apple that might spoil the
barrel,” a “virus” that might “infect” others, etc. The Cold War began in
1918 (as reputable scholarship recognizes: George Kennan, for example).
And for basically these reasons (as it does not recognize).
The logic is not fundamentally different from Grenada or Nicaragua,
though the scale was radically different, so the conflict took on a life of its
own. With the end of the Cold War, the status quo ante is being pretty much
restored. Sectors of eastern Europe that were part of the industrial West
(the Czech Republic, western Poland, etc.) are returned to it. Most of the
rest is assuming standard Third World characteristics. These are only first
approximations, of course, but fairly close ones, I think.
164 Democracy and Power
After the collapse of the communist regime in the former Soviet Union and eastern
Europe, what are the prospects for socialism today?
The collapse of Soviet tyranny is a small victory for socialism, for the same
reason that the collapse of fascism was. It removed a barrier to socialism. Or
so it should be regarded, in my opinion. It isn’t, because much of educated
opinion worldwide succumbed to the illusions fostered by the world’s two
leading propaganda systems, which agreed in calling this radical attack
on socialism “socialism” (the USSR, so as to gain what advantage it could
from the moral appeal of socialism, the West, so as to defame socialism).
That is tragic, but it should be within our power to reverse these gross
misinterpretations.
What went wrong with the socialist program in “communist” countries?
There were never any socialist programs, so nothing could go wrong
with them. As to what happened, we have to first settle the standards of
evaluation. The usual standard is to compare eastern Europe with the
West – which is about as sensible as comparing kindergartens in Boston
with local universities, than grandly proving that the former is a failure
because children there know less quantum physics than graduate students
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a remarkable comment of
western intellectual life that this farce can even proceed.
If one wants to make sensible comparisons, one begins with countries
that were at a more or less comparable state of development and prospects
before the Bolshevik system was instituted: perhaps Russia and Brazil, or
Bulgaria and Guatemala. Such comparisons, the only realistic ones, are
notable by their absence; I’ve presented some in several books, but the
only reaction has been silence or outrage. One can understand why. The
Bolshevik system was a monstrosity, but a close look shows that what the
US has done to the regions under its control is even worse, for the majority
of the population, though the conditions for successful development were
far more favorable.
That’s not an acceptable conclusion, so what is offered is a comparison
that scarcely rises to absurdity. Recall that Brazil, a country with enormous
potential and vast advantages, was taken over by the US fifty years ago as
a “testing area” for scientific methods of development, and was considered
a great “success story” for American capitalism as recently as 1989. And
Guatemala was going to be a “showcase for democracy and capitalism”
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 165
after a US-run coup overthrew its first democratic government forty years
ago and installed a regime of neo-Nazi killers who have been devastating
the place since. And so on down the list. A look at the facts is instructive,
too much so to be allowed to enter the canon.
The Bolshevik system of forced industrialization was a human
catastrophe, and the totalitarian socio-political system prevented progress
beyond early stages. By the 1960s, the economy was beginning to stagnate,
harmed even more by the militarization program undertaken in response
to the vast Kennedy program of armament and confrontation. As to what
might have happened had the western reaction been different, one can only
speculate.
Why does Leninism have so much appeal among revolutionary movements?
Leninism definitely has an appeal among those who declare themselves
the leaders of revolutionary movements. As for its appeal among the actual
movements, that’s a different matter, not easy to determine without close
inquiry that goes beyond the pronouncements of intellectuals. I’m skeptical.
Anyway, the distinction is crucial.
Leninism declares that “radical intellectuals” should take control
of popular movements and use their struggles to gain power, then rule
with an iron hand. The consequences are hardly a surprise. They were
predicted by Bakunin long before Lenin appeared on the scene, and
Leninist doctrine was condemned for these reasons early in the century
by Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and intellectual leaders of the Marxist left
like Anton Pannekoek and others. The effects were very quickly recognized
by Luxemburg and Pannekoek, and by independent leftists like Bertrand
Russell, and of course, by the libertarian left.
Why should this doctrine appeal to intellectuals who appear on the
scene with the message of “I’m your leader”? The answer is pretty clear
I’m afraid, and not very attractive.
Does libertarian socialism have any relevance for popular movements in the Third
World today?
Libertarian socialism begins by recognizing, with all serious forms of
socialism, that socialism will be free or it will not be at all. Beyond that,
it consistently questions power and authority. It seems to me of great
166 Democracy and Power
relevance to any person or popular movement interested in defending
human rights and expanding the sphere of freedom and justice. That
includes the First World as well.
Westerners have had it drilled into their heads that rule by private
tyrannies is “freedom.” In the US the power of this propaganda has
been extraordinary. One illustration is the fate of the media. When radio
appeared in the 1920s, in most countries it was placed under public
authority, and was as democratic as the society was: zero in the USSR,
quite considerable in the case of BBC. In the US, perhaps uniquely, it was
handed over to powerful corporations, though not without a struggle. The
takeover by private tyranny was supported by liberals and civil libertarians
on the grounds that it contributes to democracy. After all, what could be
more democratic than control by huge unaccountable corporations? The
public relations industry, the world’s major propaganda organization by
far, is dedicated to that message. While in India, I happened to turn on
the BBC World Service, and to my astonishment, saw a statement by the
Advertising Council (part of the corporate propaganda system) explaining
how commercial advertising creates freedom. What could we desire
beyond freedom to choose between two commodities we don’t want and
can’t afford?
Free minds should not succumb to this crude and vulgar propaganda.
Unaccountable private tyrannies have no intrinsic rights, and expansion
of their power is hardly a contribution to freedom. The rights they are
granted are, it is true, extraordinary, but also rather recent, and without
justification in my opinion – a conclusion that used to be close to a truism
among popular movements and leading intellectuals.
Libertarian socialism, or anarchism, questions all kinds of power: state,
private, personal, whatever. It is, in my view, a natural outgrowth of
Enlightenment and classical liberal ideas that were wrecked on the rocks
of emerging industrial capitalism, as Rudolf Rocker observed sixty years
ago. I think these ideas have substantial validity. They naturally have to
be reshaped to apply to today’s world. But I think it makes good sense to
adopt the principle that any form of authority carries a heavy burden of
justification. If it cannot provide a justification, it is illegitimate, and should
be dismantled. That’s true of everything from personal relations to social,
economic, and political institutions. Libertarian socialism is guided by this
principle, and seeks to apply it to every domain of existence. That’s not
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 167
only of relevance, but of crucial significance for decent people everywhere,
in my opinion.
In western countries, Marxism has lost much of its appeal, even in radical circles.
In India, however, it continues to dominate revolutionary thought and action. How
do you interpret this contrast?
Marxism is a curious notion like Freudianism. These are, in my opinion,
forms of organized religion, which treat individuals as gods, or maybe
idols. In disciplines that have passed beyond the most primitive stage,
there is (or should be) nothing comparable. There is no “Einsteinism” in
physics, for good reasons.
Marx was a human being, with virtues and faults. He had a good deal
to say about many topics; incidentally, not socialism, about which he had
only a few rather conventional remarks, as far as I know. Sane people will
learn from him what they can, discarding what is wrong or irrelevant.
The fact that Marxism, as a form of idolatry, has lost its appeal is all to
the good. It is not to the good that it has been replaced by other forms
of religious fundamentalism – a term that I am afraid applies all too well
to much of what passes for “free market doctrine” and “neo-liberalism.”
In countries that are more effectively under the control of state capitalist
doctrinal systems, “Marxism” was never very influential and has now
pretty much disappeared. In countries that are less disciplined, it remains
more influential. In my opinion, “Marxism” (though not Marx’s work)
should disappear everywhere, but not to be replaced by new dogma and
secular religion; rather, by independent thought.
What are the positive insights we can gain from Marxism?
Marx had important things to say about economic history and contemporary
affairs, and interesting ideas about a certain rather abstract model of
capitalism. Certainly, what he wrote should be taken quite seriously, and
one will learn from it what one can. Beyond that loose comment, it is a
matter of looking closely at particular ideas and analyses, something I
cannot attempt here. I should say that some of what I personally find most
168 Democracy and Power
appealing in Marx, namely, the early manuscripts, is drawn rather directly
from aspects of the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions that I think
have much to offer, something I’ve written about.
How do you interpret the popularity of communist parties today in the former
Soviet Union and eastern Europe?
We should distinguish two kinds of “communists” in eastern Europe. Some
are the “Nomenklatura capitalists,” rich beyond their wildest dreams as
they assume the role of Third World elites. Others, no less opportunistic,
are seeking power on the basis of the terrible human consequences of the
huge social engineering projects that were designed by people who knew
little about the society and were surely not relying on any well-established
theoretical understanding – projects that, as usual throughout history, offer
great advantages to the institutions that grant authority to the designers,
and are called “reforms” because of the favorable connotation (we don’t call
Stalin’s innovations “reforms”). The “reforms” may help the population or
harm them, but that is incidental.
I doubt very much that eastern Europeans want to return to the Stalinist
dungeon. Nevertheless, they increasingly regard the Brezhnev era as a
kind of “golden age.” Western-run polls are pretty clear about that, I don’t
think this is nostalgia for a disappearing past as much as it is recognition of
what is approaching: Brazil and Mexico, and other long-term beneficiaries
of tutelage by the industrial powers of the West. The historical pattern is
not exceptionless. One striking exception is Japan, a brutal imperial power,
which, however, developed its colonies rather than ruining them. Formosa
(Taiwan) and Korea developed approximately as Japan itself did during
the period of Japanese rule, a course of development that picked up again,
under rather special circumstances, from the 1960s. The devil is very much
in the details in such cases.
You are sometimes described as an anarchist, or as a libertarian socialist. Do you
accept any of these designations? If not, how would you summarize your basic
political beliefs?
I’m happy with the designation “libertarian socialist” or “anarchist,”
though like all terms of political discourse, these (particularly the latter)
are used broadly and inconsistently. I frankly don’t care much what term
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 169
is used, and rarely use standard terminology at all because it has become
so vulgarized. What’s important is the ideas, analyses, and proposals,
whatever one chooses to call them. And here there is plenty of complexity.
Take myself. As an anarchist, I think that the state is fundamentally
illegitimate and should be dismantled. But at the moment, I’m in favor
of strengthening the federal government in the US – not the sectors, like
the Pentagon, that are part of the welfare system for the rich, but other
sectors that can be responsive to popular will and can stand as a barrier to
private tyranny. That’s not strictly a contradiction: rather, a reflection of
the complexity of the real world.
Are there important practical experiences of libertarian socialism in recent history,
and what can we learn from them?
There are very instructive applications. The most significant, I think, are
the achievements of the anarchist revolution in Spain in 1936 before
it was crushed by the combined forces of the communists, fascists, and
western democracies. Like most civil strife, the Spanish civil war was not
just a conflict between the official “two sides”: in this case, the republic
and the fascists. There was a “third side” that had deep popular roots after
decades of organizing, education, and struggle. In this case, the “third side”
was highly significant, with real achievements to its credit in industrial
Catalonia, rural Aragon, and elsewhere. Though the popular revolution
was demolished by force, its impact survived even through the brutal
fascist repression that followed. I think one can detect this influence in
the highly successful Mondragon worker-owned complex in the Basque
country, the largest in the world, combining industry, banking and social
and community services. Its immediate origins are in the left populist
church, but it appears to have deeper anarchist roots.
One finds libertarian tendencies far more broadly. In the seventeenth
century English revolutions, for example. Hannah Arendt once pointed out
the spontaneous appearance of variants of council communism, anarchist
in spirit, in almost all modern revolutions. One example she discussed
was the Hungarian revolution of 1956, where the councils were crushed
by Soviet tanks, much as in Spain twenty years earlier. Though I hesitate
to draw conclusions from limited experience, my impression in the West
Bengal panchayat I visited was that very similar tendencies have been
taking shape, in part spontaneously, it seems. Green shoots of this nature
arise all over the place, sometimes with considerable impact, which often
170 Democracy and Power
withstand harsh repression. One can make a case that a good part of the
progress of civilization reflects such popular tendencies.
Who are the great libertarian socialist thinkers, in your opinion, and what are their
essential insights?
As you know, I’m not overly impressed by “great figures.” Modern
libertarian socialist thought has roots in the Enlightenment and classical
liberalism, perhaps most strikingly Wilhelm von Humboldt. There were
important contributions by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and many
others, also by left Marxists like Luxemburg and Pannekoek, and leading
twentieth-century philosophers like Bertrand Russell. But the most
important contributions were in the constructive work done by people
who have disappeared from history, who developed such ideas and
applied them in labor organizing, educational and social activities of all
kinds, and institutions they created and defended. The leading insights?
The primary one, as old as the hills, is the illegitimacy of authority, unless
it can be justified. That insight then works itself out in a critical analysis of
all human relations and institutions, with consequences depending on time,
place, and topic. Some have constructed very detailed pictures of how a
libertarian society or “participatory economy” might work. The ideas are
interesting, but I’m personally a bit skeptical about far-reaching programs.
I don’t think enough is understood about complex systems; even in the
hard sciences, understanding drops off pretty quickly when we move much
beyond big molecules. I think there is ample room for experimentation, and
though I naturally have my own ideas as to where it might lead, I think the
general principles are clearer than the specific applications, which simply
have to be explored.
You have persistently highlighted how democratic institutions, in the US and
elsewhere, tend to be systematically subverted by corporate interests and privileged
classes. Does this mean that there is no point in engaging in democratic politics?
Elite opinion and the doctrinal institutions try very hard to discourage
political participation, except for the very narrow matter of choosing
among candidates representing one or another coalition of investors. They
do so because of the fear of the potential of democratic politics, a leading
Appendix: An Interview with Noam Chomsky 171
theme of democratic principles and theory from the Founding Fathers of
American democracy to the present, underscored again by the study of
the Trilateral Commission that I mentioned. For the same reason, people
should reject the propaganda (sometimes force) that tries to keep them out
of the political arena, and should use, to the extent possible, the political
opportunities that are formally available in relatively free societies like
the US. They should also proceed well beyond this, aiming to dismantle
the illegitimate power of private tyrannies – a rather recent development
incidentally, hardly graven in stone. But that is a separate matter. What
private power naturally fears is what an organized public should cherish:
conversion of the political system into an instrument to serve the interests
of the general population, not its tiny sectors of privilege and private power.
During the last ten days, you have visited six different cities of India. What are the
main impressions that you retain from this visit?
I have strong and vivid impressions, but l frankly do not see why people in
India should pay any attention to them. I’m willing to discuss them, but only
on the understanding that these are superficial impressions, necessarily.
One day in the West Bengal countryside left me with quite positive
impressions about village self-government. One could not mistake the
eager and enthusiastic involvement of people in running their own affairs,
the overcoming of caste, tribal and gender discrimination, the use of simple
but critically important technology (women installing and maintaining
pumps for drinking water), a women’s dairy co-operative, etc. I’d like to
learn more, but the little I saw was impressive in comparison to what I’ve
seen elsewhere, or read about.
Most of my impressions, however, are from lecture halls and discussions.
The lively intellectual atmosphere, cultural depth, and very high level of
competence are apparent, and most exhilarating. On the other hand, it is
painful to see heart-wrenching misery alongside great opulence, the notable
persistence of feudalist attitudes, the extreme and wasteful inefficiency,
the huge and destructive black economy that surely undermines economic
development, and the pitiful waste of rich human and material resources.
More narrowly, it is distressing to see outstanding scholars, some of the
best in the world, unable even to obtain books and journals: apart from
everything else, not a good portent for Indian society and culture. So, it’s
very much a mixed story; but I stress, these are superficial impressions.
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Democracy and Power
The Delhi Lectures
Noam Chomsky
With an Introduction by Jean Drèze
Noam Chomsky visited India in 1996 and 2001 and spoke on a wide range
of subjects, from democracy and corporate propaganda to the nature of the
world order and the role of intellectuals in society. He cap vated audiences
with his lucid challenge to dominant poli cal analyses, the engaging style of
his talks and his commitment to social equality as well as individual freedom.
Chomsky’s early insights into the workings of power in the modern world
remain mely and compelling. Published for the rst me, this series of
lectures also provides the reader with an invaluable introduc on to the
essen al ideas of one of the leading thinkers of our me.
Chomsky makes the world a more intelligent place. He is a marksman whose
eye never wanders and whose aim never lets him down.
Arundha Roy
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