Occupy the Future

October 31, 2011

This article is adapted from Noam Chomsky’s talk at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square on October 22, 2011. He spoke as part of the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series held by Occupy Boston’s on-site Free University.

Delivering a Howard Zinn lecture is a bittersweet experience for me. I can’t help but regret that he’s not here to take part in and invigorate a movement that would have been the dream of his life, and for which he laid a lot of the groundwork.

The Occupy movements are exciting, inspiring. If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained and carried forward through a long, hard period ahead—victories don’t come quickly—the Occupy protests could mark a truly significant moment in American history.

I’ve never seen anything quite like the Occupy movement in scale and character, here and worldwide. The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that’s already coming.

The Occupy movement is in many ways unprecedented. That is natural enough, because this is an unprecedented era, not just at this moment but since the 1970s.

The 1970s marked a turning point for the United States. Since the country began, with ups and downs it had been a developing society, not always in very pretty ways, but with general progress toward industrialization, prosperity and expansion of rights.

Even in dark times, the expectation was that the progress would continue. I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, even though the situation was objectively much harsher than today, the spirit was quite different.

A militant labor movement was organizing, the CIO, and workers were even moving on to stage sit-down strikes, which are just one step from taking over the factories and running them themselves, a very frightening development for the business world.

Under popular pressure, New Deal legislation was passed, which didn’t end the Depression, but substantially improved the lives of many people. The prevailing sense was that we would get out of the hard times.

Now there’s a sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. During the 1930s, working people could anticipate that the jobs would come back. Today, if you’re a worker in manufacturing, with real unemployment practically at Depression levels, you know that those jobs may be gone forever if current policies persist.

That change in popular understanding has evolved since the 1970s, when major changes took place in the social order.  One was a sharp reversal as several centuries of industrialization turned to de-industrialization. Of course manufacturing continued, but overseas—very profitable, though harmful to the workforce.

The economy shifted to financialization. Financial institutions expanded enormously. A vicious cycle was set in motion.  Wealth concentrated in the financial sector.  The cost of campaigns escalated sharply, driving political leaders ever deeper into the pockets of wealthy backers, increasingly in financial institutions.

Naturally, the funders were rewarded by the politicians they put into office, who instituted policies favorable to Wall Street: deregulation, tax changes, relaxation of rules of corporate governance and other measures that intensified the concentration of wealth and carried the vicious cycle forward. The new policies led very quickly to financial crises, unlike earlier years when New Deal legislation was in place and there were none.  From the early Reagan years, each crisis has been more serious than the last, leading finally to the latest collapse in 2008.  The government once again came to the rescue of Wall Street firms judged to be too big to fail—the implicit government insurance policy that ensures underpricing of risk—with leaders too big to jail.

Today, for the one-tenth of 1 percent of the population who benefited most from these decades of greed and deceit, everything is fine, while for most of the population, real income has almost stagnated or sometimes declined for thirty years.

In 2005, Citigroup—which once again has been saved by government bailout—released a brochure for investors that urged them to put their money into what they called the Plutonomy Index, which identified stocks in companies that cater to the wealthy. The brochure informed investors that the index has greatly outperformed the market ever since the mid-1980s, when the Reagan-Thatcher regime was settling in.

“The world is dividing into two blocs—the plutonomy and the rest,” Citigroup summarized. “The U.S., U.K. and Canada are the key plutonomies—economies powered by the wealthy.”

As for the non-rich, they’re sometimes called the precariat—people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. The “periphery,” however, has become a substantial proportion of the population in the United States and elsewhere.

So we have the plutonomy and the precariat: the 1 percent and the 99 percent, in the imagery of the Occupy movement—not literal numbers, but the right picture.

The historic reversal in people’s confidence about the future is a reflection of tendencies that could become irreversible. The Occupy protests are the first major popular reaction that could change the dynamic.

I’ve kept to domestic issues. But two dangerous developments in the international arena overshadow everything else.

For the first time in human history, there are real threats to the survival of the human species. Since 1945 we have had nuclear weapons, and it seems a miracle we have survived them. And policies of the Obama administration and its allies are encouraging escalation.

The other threat, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps to do something about it. The United States is taking steps backward. Large-scale propaganda operations, openly announced by the business community, seek to convince the public that climate change is all a liberal hoax: Why pay attention to these scientists? Congressional Republicans are now dismantling the limited environmental protections put in place by the Nixon administration, a graphic illustration of how power centers have regressed since the 1970s reversal.

If these tendencies persist in the richest, most powerful country in the world, catastrophe won’t be averted.

Something must be done in a disciplined, sustained way, and soon. It won’t be easy to proceed. There will be hardships and failures—it’s inevitable. But unless the process that’s taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world continues to grow and becomes a major force in society and politics, the chances for a decent future are bleak.

You can’t achieve significant initiatives without a large, active, popular base. It’s necessary to get out into the country and help people understand what the Occupy movement is about—what they themselves can do, and what the consequences are of not doing anything.

Organizing such a base involves education and activism. Education doesn’t mean telling people what to believe—it also means learning from them and with them.

Karl Marx famously said that the task is not just to understand the world but to change it. A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean just listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas and plans as to how to move forward.

The most exciting aspect of the Occupy movement is the construction of the linkages that are taking place all over. If they can be sustained and expanded, Occupy can lead to dedicated efforts to set society on a more humane course.