9

TOWARD A BETTER SOCIETY

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (MARCH 11, 2016)

“Socialism” was one of the most looked-up words in 2015, and several polls indicate that young people ages eighteen to twenty-nine have favorable views of socialism.1 Are you surprised by that?

Not so much surprised as uncertain. The question is what they mean by it. I suspect they mean something like social democracy, which is essentially New Deal welfare-state capitalism. And if that’s the case, it’s not surprising, because polls have shown for years that this matches widely held goals of most of the population.

You’ve been involved in myriad struggles and actions over the decades. Are there any you feel have lessons for today?

Just about all of them. Take organizing poor people. The civil rights movement has plenty to teach about that, as does the labor movement. There are some common elements to all kinds of organizing; you have to find issues that meet several conditions. First, people have to care about them. Second, the fixes have to be feasible. And third, it has to be possible to convince people that they are feasible, because one of the major impediments to organizing is the feeling of “you can’t fight city hall.” So you have to show that you can fight city hall. The way it’s typically done in successful organizing is to find small things that people recognize could be achieved, see if you can achieve those, then encourage the sense that success is possible, and proceed to the next thing.

Take a real case that I heard of not long ago, about a group working in working-class immigrant communities in South Boston. At the beginning, just to break through the sense of hopelessness, they started with something very simple: women organized to see if they could get the town to put in a traffic light where their kids cross the road to go to school. They worked on the issue, they pressured local officials, and they won. Then they recognized that they could do things if they worked together. And they went on to the next campaign. That’s how you build. That’s organizing and activism.

Let’s talk about Latin America, a region historically under the U.S. thumb. Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. He was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro. What’s your evaluation of what’s happened there?

What’s happened in Venezuela, first of all, is an extreme case of what’s happening in Latin America generally—and it’s pretty tragic. Chávez himself tried to create significant and positive changes, but the way he did it had fundamental flaws. For one thing, it was top-down. It was not coming from the base. There were some efforts to organize popular activism, but it’s very hard to find out—at least I haven’t been able to find out—how successful they were.

Then there was a significant amount of corruption and incompetence that seriously undermined his efforts. How high it went, we don’t know. Finally, there was no real dent in the reliance of the economy on a single resource, oil. In fact, Venezuela probably became even more dependent on it. Venezuela could have a rich agricultural economy, a productive industrial economy, but instead its economy is overwhelmingly reliant on oil exports.

Actually, I think Chávez himself was aware of this. He gave an important talk at the United Nations where he pointed out that Venezuela is a fossil fuel exporter, but said that the producers and the consumers really ought to get together to work out ways of getting the world off fossil fuels, because they are so destructive. That’s a very unusual position to take for someone whose economy relies on fossil fuel production. Chávez was widely ridiculed for calling George W. Bush “the devil” at that meeting, but I didn’t see any reporting of his comments on fossil fuels.2

The combination of initiatives coming from above, the failure to move toward diversification, the corruption, the incompetence—all of those together have led to the collapse of the economy in Venezuela.

As for what’s happening in Latin America generally, it’s highly significant. Latin America is a potentially rich area, with countries that could be wealthy, advanced. Over a century ago, Brazil was considered “the colossus of the South,” parallel to the colossus of the North. These countries have rich resources, don’t suffer from external threats; they have lots of opportunities for development.

But that development hasn’t happened. The main reason is internal. The countries have typically been dominated by small, Europeanized, mostly white elites who are enormously wealthy and linked to the West culturally and economically. These elites do not assume responsibility for their own countries, which leads to horrible poverty and oppression. There have been efforts to break out of that pattern, but they have been crushed.

However, in roughly the last fifteen years, there have been some attempts to address these issues in several countries—Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina. It’s been called the “pink tide,” and it has met with varying success. There’s just a very strong temptation, when you gain a bit of power, to put your hand in the till and live like the elites. This has undermined left governments in case after case. Venezuela is a case in point. Brazil is another. The Workers’ Party had a real opportunity to change not only Brazil but all of Latin America. It did achieve some things, but it also substantially squandered the opportunity.

So my feeling is there are solid gains, and then there’s regression, which eliminates some of those gains. There might be a basis for moving forward again in the future, if the current issues are resolved. But it’s not certain that they will be.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party became president of Brazil in 2003. He was succeeded in 2011 by his protégée, Dilma Rousseff. Corruption scandals, particularly around Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, have sunk her approval ratings. Yet just a few years ago, Brazil was being touted as one of the so-called BRICS economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—that were going to provide an alternative to U.S. domination.

Yes. In fact, Brazil was in many ways one of the most respected countries in the world. Lula himself was very highly respected—by me, too, I should say. Among world leaders, he’s a pretty honorable one, I think. I’m surprised by the corruption charges and a little suspicious of them. I don’t know to what extent this is some sort of right-wing coup and to what extent it’s something real. The charges that have been made public aren’t very convincing. So we’ll wait and see what comes out. I don’t think the facts are clear at this point. But it’s true that the corruption was very serious.

There are parallels between Brazil and Venezuela. Brazil also did not make use of its opportunity to move toward a more diversified economy. In fact, it moved away from it. Brazil benefited temporarily from the very rapid growth of China, and its huge appetite for Brazilian raw materials such as soy and iron. Of course, relying on that has a consequence. It means importing cheap Chinese manufactured goods, which undermine your own manufacturing capacity. The end result was that the Brazilian economy remained resource-based instead of diversifying. This is also true of Argentina and Peru. It’s not a viable mode of economic development.

After the American Revolution, if the United States had followed that path, we’d still be exporting agricultural goods, fish, and fur. In fact, that was the prescription given to us by the leading economists of the day, like Adam Smith, who made much the same arguments that the IMF and neoliberal economic development experts are making to the Third World today. The United States didn’t follow the economists’ advice, because it was independent.

In 2006, Evo Morales, in Bolivia, became the first indigenous person to be elected president of a Latin American country. In 2016, he was defeated in his bid for a fourth term as president.

Partly it’s an anti-caudillist sentiment: let’s not go back to the system of a powerful leader who remains in power forever. To Morales’s credit, he accepted the defeat. I also think some of the same problems I’ve discussed, as well as achievements, exist in Bolivia as well.

Let’s move on to India and the ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Guardian reports, “The government has repeatedly been accused of seeking to repress free speech and encouraging extremist nationalists who systematically intimidate critics.” Students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) have been arrested and accused of “anti-national” activities and sedition.3 What’s going on there?

The students were calling for a free Kashmir, opposing the cruel and bitter Indian repression there. They also supported an activist who was accused of crimes and subsequently executed.

That was Afzal Guru.4

Yes. The students questioned the validity of the charges against him. The police were called in to repress the protests. They arrested a student leader and picked up faculty members for harsh interrogation.5

Similar things have been happening in other universities. And it’s all taking place against a background of increasing Hindu nationalist violence and repression—murdering a Muslim because they claimed he stole a cow, for instance.6 Things like that are going on around the country.

Hindu nationalism, like other forms of extremist nationalism, is a frightening phenomenon. It’s another one of the moves toward authoritarian nationalism and religious extremism that we’re seeing around the world.

Can you talk about India’s growing military ties with the United States and Israel?

That’s a real change. Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India was a core part of the nonaligned countries. Its military links were closer to Russia. In recent years, though, it has increasingly shifted to become part of the U.S. orbit. That includes closer relations with Israel.

A central cause of this shift is the anti-Muslim sentiments common to all three countries: Israel, obviously—where not just any Muslim but any Arab is seen as a threat; India, which has a big Muslim population in a Hindu-dominated state; and the United States, where you have extensive anti-Islamic sentiment among the general population and a so-called war on terror directed against Muslims.

The United States has actually supported the development of nuclear weapons in India, as well as in Israel and Pakistan. Those are the three countries that have not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. According to the terms of the treaty, the United States was not supposed to provide any nuclear assistance to countries that hadn’t signed the NPT; but under the second President Bush, the U.S. went ahead with providing aid to nuclear development in India anyway.7 The U.S. government claims to only support India’s civilian nuclear facilities, but that’s meaningless because, first of all, the aid is transferable from civilian to military uses, and secondly, the aid frees up India to devote more of its own efforts toward nuclear weapons. The Bush administration also succeeded in twisting the arms of other countries, so the Nuclear Suppliers Group went along with essentially building up India’s nuclear weapons power.

By now the U.S.-Indian nuclear alliance is quite tight. At the same time, the United States is also supporting India’s main enemy, Pakistan, as is China. China and Pakistan have a common interest in what’s called anti-terrorism. In the Muslim regions in the western part of China, Uighur areas, there are guerrilla and other actions that China is repressing pretty harshly. Those groups have links to the Pakistani Taliban. So there’s some cooperation between the two governments.

There is a possibility that Chinese aid to Pakistan will actually become developmental in character, which could be positive—in contrast to U.S. aid, which has been overwhelmingly military. The infrastructure that China is slowly constructing throughout Eurasia, which pretty soon will reach all the way to Europe, is a major development in world affairs. Control over Eurasia has been recognized for a long time to be critical to global power, sometimes even regarded as the key to global power.

Turkey is another country that has been sliding toward more and more autocratic and authoritarian rule. Newspaper offices are raided, journalists and academics are threatened and arrested. Erdoğan, the president of the country, mentioned you recently by name and in fact invited you to visit Turkey.8 What is the background of that? And did you make that trip?

I didn’t. As for the background: there was a terrorist bombing in Ankara that killed a lot of people. It was probably ISIS—which Turkey is tacitly supporting, incidentally, in many ways—but Erdoğan blamed it on the Kurds.9 That led to significant repression against the Kurds. There have now been several months of intensive curfews in southeastern Turkey, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. The curfews are very harsh and brutal.10 People can’t leave their houses. There are snipers on the rooftops, heavy military equipment. There have been many deaths. Sometimes dead bodies are left in houses to decay because people can’t remove them.

Turkey provides a kind of a funnel through which jihadi fighters can travel to the so-called Islamic State territories in Syria. It’s exporting oil from ISIS. Some claim it even has hospitals on the Turkish side for ISIS fighters. I don’t know if this is true, but the journalists who reported this were immediately jailed.11 That led to a protest, with a petition against the jailing signed by a thousand or so Turkish academics.12 I was one of the international signatories. And when Erdoğan reacted by attacking the academics, which could have serious consequences for them, he also castigated me personally for this terrible attack on Turkish honor. He said, Why don’t you come here and see what the reality is? I was asked to write a comment, so I wrote a couple of lines.13 But that was the end of that.

In northern Syria, a mostly Kurdish area called Rojava is apparently inspired by the work of Murray Bookchin, a U.S. writer and thinker who died in 2006.14 What’s going on there?

It’s not entirely clear. For one thing, the circumstances are horrible. Syria is just imploding, and the conditions are awful. There’s constant fighting, though a semi-truce exists between the Kurds and the Assad government, which don’t seem to be attacking each other much lately.

The Kurds are perhaps the main ground force defending the population against the ISIS monstrosity. Their leader is Abdullah Öcalan. He came from a strong Stalinist background, but during his time in prison, he shifted his attitudes considerably—at least in his writings—and picked up from Bookchin a kind of communitarian, anarchist approach. Kurdish groups, both the PKK in Turkey and northern Iraq and the Kurds in the Syrian Kurdish area of Rojava, appear to have been influenced by these ideas. To what degree the ideas have actually been implemented is hard to say, though everyone agrees there has been a new emphasis on women’s rights and women’s involvement, as well as some communal programs. It’s pretty remarkable under the circumstances.

Elections are once again front and center. Why aren’t elections in the United States held on the weekend, when people are not working, as in other countries? What about abolishing the electoral college, which seems to be antediluvian? And what about allowing people to vote where they are currently living rather than where they first registered?

There are indeed major differences between elections in the United States and in other capitalist democracies. For one thing, elections here never stop. As soon as one election is over, you start working on the next one. That means the day you walk into your office, you start fund-raising for the next campaign. Of course, that affects policy decisions. In other countries, there’s just a brief period of campaigning, some debate, then people vote.

The role of money in U.S. politics also goes way beyond other Western countries. It’s been significantly increased by a number of Supreme Court decisions, going back to Buckley v. Valeo on the money-is-speech issue, then the Citizens United decision and others. But it goes way back. There’s pretty convincing evidence that campaign funding is a good predictor of policy decisions.15

Then there’s radical gerrymandering—mostly by Republicans, but others, too—as well as major efforts by the Republicans to keep people from voting. There is good reason for them to do this: the people who are most vulnerable are less likely to vote for the Republicans. So the Republicans don’t want Sunday voting, when black churches might take people to the voting booths. They want to require the kind of identification for voting that many poor people, and particularly black people, just don’t have. These are all efforts to maintain power despite minority support.

The most striking example, perhaps, is the House of Representatives, which is almost a Republican lock, even though they get a minority of the votes. In the 2014 election, the popular House vote was in favor of the Democrats, but the Republicans won the majority of seats.16

They won the House because of gerrymandering.

Not just gerrymandering. Demographics also play a role: Democratic voters happen to be primarily urban, while the Republicans have a scattered rural vote. That means that you get a heavily Democratic vote in an area where there are just a few representatives. But that’s not to deny the importance of gerrymandering. And since the Supreme Court threw out the Voting Rights Act, which had protected minority voters in states with a long history of racism and voter suppression, it’s gotten much worse.17 All these things together, I think, are far more significant than, say, the electoral college. Of course, there’s plenty wrong with that institution, but it’s marginal compared with these other factors.

The United States is unusual in that it doesn’t have class-based political parties. It has geographically based parties, and rather odd coalitions. In fact, in many respects, the party system still reflects the Civil War. Take a look at the red and blue states in the 2012 election. It’s almost the Confederacy and the Union, just by different names. A recent study published by Brandeis University actually found a pretty clear correlation between Ku Klux Klan activity not that many years ago and current Republican votes.18

Also, abstention is very high in the United States. Walter Dean Burnham, one of the leading specialists on politics, did an interesting study in the 1960s on who doesn’t vote here.19 It turns out that going by their socioeconomic profile, non-voters in the United States are quite similar to voters in European countries who vote for social-democratic or labor-based parties. Those parties simply don’t exist here, so comparable people don’t vote.

So you have a variety of factors. Lack of proportional representation has a big effect; because of the winner-take-all system, you can’t develop independent parties here. There’s no chance for them to grow slowly and perhaps become dominant over time.

But there are positive sides to our political system, too. For example, freedom of speech is much better protected here than elsewhere. There are serious problems, but it’s not an all-or-nothing story.

You might have heard the joke that if God had meant us to vote, he would have given us candidates.

I understand it, but it’s a bit too cynical. There are differences between the candidates, sometimes significant ones. Incidentally, it’s not all about the party labels. I have voted for Republicans myself, for example. During the 1960s, the Republicans were the ones who were more strongly anti-war in the state elections.

But in recent years, the Democratic Party has been a mildly centrist party, while the Republicans have shifted very far to the right. And they have very significant differences on some issues, though the two biggest ones—life-threatening, species-threatening issues—are barely discussed in the elections by either side. One is global warming; the other is militarization. On those topics, there’s a major difference between the two parties.

In a discussion you had at the Harvard Trade Union Program with activists from around the world, someone asked you about hopeful signs for the future.20 I was taken aback by your answer. You mentioned Egypt, citing a book by Jack Shenker, a former Guardian correspondent there.21 Egypt is going through hell right now.

It is. And when I read Shenker’s book, I didn’t really trust my own judgment. I don’t know that much about Egypt. But I sent the book to friends, some of whom really do know Egypt very well and are very good analysts, and they thought he was pretty accurate. What he found is that although the Sisi dictatorship is driving the country to disaster, nevertheless a good deal remains of the vital activism and achievements of what’s called the Arab Spring—particularly in the labor movement, which he’s looked at quite closely. I think that’s an interesting sign.

The New York Times has a story about the laments of the Egyptian elite, the rich students, people who have benefited from the dictatorship.22 They’re very upset. They have to wait a month to get a Mercedes, and they may not get the kind they want. In general, the benefits of standing with those in power are apparently getting harder to acquire, which is leading to dissent among the elite supporters of the regime. And the regime is in economic trouble. Saudi Arabia is no longer funding the Sisi regime at anything like the level they were.

A journalist friend of mine in Gaza calls me fairly regularly on the phone. He lives near the Rafah border, the Egyptian border, and you can hear the shelling. He says he hears it all the time. The Egyptians have not been able to suppress the Bedouin uprising in the Sinai, which is probably a pretty big drain, too. The downing of that Russian airliner, killing a couple hundred people, also had a major impact on the tourist industry, which they rely on.23

So the regime is in some difficulty. And if Shenker is correct, which he may well be, there are still the germs of what could grow into another one of Egypt’s many efforts over the years to create a more democratic society.

Among the questions you pose in your book What Kind of Creatures Are We?, I want to ask you about two: What would a decent society look like? And what would satisfy our basic needs and rights?24

I’m not smart enough—and I don’t think anyone is smart enough—to sketch what an ideal society would be, but I think we can discuss what would be a much better society. To my mind, it would be primarily a society in which decisions are in the hands of an informed and engaged public. That’s a prerequisite for being reasonable and rational in your choices. As for institutions, it would mean that workers would own and run factories, communities would be under community control, other institutions would be under popular control. Interactions among voluntary associations would lead to broader decision-making, all by representatives who are under direct control from below and subject to immediate recall.

There would also be a fading away of national boundaries, which is certainly conceivable—it’s already taken place to an extent in Europe. In general, it would mean an increasingly global system based on mutual aid, mutual support, production for use rather than profit, and concern for species survival. Those are all directions toward a better society, I think. And they are all feasible.

You said to me recently, “There’s a lot of dry kindling around. If it’s lighted, it could take off.”25 Where do you see that dry kindling?

You see it all over the place. There’s tremendous concern all over the country, all over the world, about repression, violence, domination, hierarchy, illegitimate authority. Take Bernie Sanders, for example. His proposed policies are policies that the public has supported for a long time, often with substantial majorities. In our dysfunctional system, public opinion couldn’t be articulated in the political arena, but as soon as Sanders did so, he received substantial support. That’s an indication of plenty of dry kindling.