6

Community Activists

Based on discussions in British Columbia, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, and Wyoming in 1989 and between 1993 and 1996.

Discussion Circle

. . . I hardly know what to say. What all of you said reflects, I think very accurately, the state that we’re in. Any place I go to, there are people like you. They’re all interested in significant, important problems—problems of personal empowerment, of understanding the world, of working with others, of just finding out what your values are; of trying to figure out how people can control their own lives, and helping each other to do it. We’re all facing essentially the same fact: there’s no structure of popular institutions around within which we can work.

You don’t have to go back very far in history to find that in past days, a group like us wouldn’t have been meeting in a place like this: we would have been meeting in the labor union headquarters. There’s still a residue of that in parts of the world. For instance, I was in England last week giving political talks, and talks in England are not in churches or on college campuses, they’re in a guild hall—because in England there’s still a residue of the period when there was a popular movement, a workers’ movement, with its own media, its own places of gathering, its own ways of bringing people together. There was a time when we had a working-class culture here too. I mean, I can remember it—barely, because I was a child—but there was a live working-class culture in the United States not that long ago. My family was in it, that’s how I got my political education. A lot of it was centered around the Communist Party [U.S.A.], which for the people who were involved in it didn’t mean supporting Stalin’s crimes, it meant saving people’s lives in the South, and unionizing industry, and being at the front of every civil rights struggle, doing everything that was important.

I mean, the American Communist Party had a lot of terrible things about it, but it also had a lot of very good things too. And one of them was this— I mean, that was a life. The Communist Party wasn’t something you voted for, it was something where if you were an unemployed seamstress in New York and you wanted to get away for the summer, they had a summer camp where you could go and be with your friends, get into the Catskill Mountains, that sort of thing. And it was picnics, and meetings, and concerts, fighting on picket lines, demonstrations, the whole business. That was all just normal life, it was very organic.

And they had their own media. In fact, you don’t have to go back too far in the United States, a little earlier than that, to find working-class and community-based newspapers that were roughly at the scale of the mainstream capitalist press. So a journal like Appeal to Reason, which was sort of a socialist journal in the early part of the century, had I think about three quarters of a million subscribers—meaning who knows how many people actually read it.¹ And that was in a much smaller population than today of course, much smaller.

Now, we’re not in anything like that situation: we don’t have parties, we don’t have media, we don’t have stable institutions—so, this group isn’t meeting in a union hall, because there isn’t any such thing. On the other hand, we have other advantages. There’s a tremendous diversity and range of interests and concerns now, and an awful lot of people are involved. And that gives us a kind of strength: an organized, centralized movement can easily be crushed; a very diverse movement that’s rooted all over the society—well, you can get rid of this piece and that piece and the other piece, but it’ll just come back up somewhere else. So there are both strengths and weaknesses, and I think we should recognize that.

My own feeling is that the right approach is to build on the strengths: to recognize what’s healthy and solid about having not hundreds, but thousands of flowers blooming all over the place—people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but at the core sort of similar values and a similar interest in empowerment, in learning, in helping people understand how to defend themselves against external power and take control of their own lives, in reaching out your hand to people who need it. All the things that you people have talked about—that’s a common array of concerns. And the fact that there’s a tremendous diversity can be a real advantage—it can be a real way of learning, of learning about yourself, and what you care about, and what you want to do, and so on. But of course, if it’s going to bring about real change, that broad array of concerns is going to require some form of integration and inter-communication and collaboration among its various sub-parts.

Now, we’re not going to develop that sort of integration through the mainstream institutions—that would be crazy. I mean, you should not expect an institution to say, “Help me destroy myself,” that’s not the way institutions function. And if anybody inside the institution tried to do that, they wouldn’t be inside it much longer. Now, that’s not to say that you can do nothing if you’re already in something like the mass media. People who have seeped in from the popular movements can have effects—and people outside them can also have effects, just by barraging the editors and so on. I mean, the editors don’t like people coming to their doors and causing trouble any more than politicians do, or businessmen do. And if you come and you bother them, and give them material, and pressure them, you can sometimes get results. But in the end, there really are only small changes that can be made within the existing institutions—because they’ve got their own commitments, which are basically to private power. In the case of the media, they have a commitment to indoctrination in the interests of power, and that imposes pretty strict limits on what they can do.

So the answer is, we’ve got to create alternatives, and the alternatives have got to integrate these lots and lots of different interests and concerns into a movement—or maybe not one necessarily, which somebody could then cut the head off of, but a series of interconnected ones: lots of associations of people with similar concerns, who’ve got in mind the other people next door who have related concerns, and who can get together with them to work for changes. Maybe then we can ultimately construct serious alternative media—I mean, not “serious” in the sense that the concerns of existing alternative media aren’t serious, but serious in scale, at the point where they can consistently present people with a different picture of the world, a picture different than the one you get from an indoctrination system based on private control over resources. And as to how you can do that, well, I don’t think there’s any big secret about it—if there’s any big secret about getting social change, I’ve never heard of it.

 

WOMAN: Just keep organizing.

 

Yes—large-scale social change in the past and major social revolutions in the past, so far as I know, have come about just because lots of people, working wherever they are, have worked hard, and have looked around to find other people who are working hard, and have tried to work together with them when they find them. I think every social change in history, from the democratic revolutions to things like the Civil Rights Movement, has worked that way. It’s mostly just a question of scale and dedication. There are plenty of resources around that people can use; they’re very scattered—but part of the way the institutions protect themselves is to keep them scattered. It’s very important for institutions of concentrated power to keep people alone and isolated: that way they’re ineffective, they can’t defend themselves against indoctrination, they can’t even figure out what they think.

So I think it makes sense to look at what the institutions are doing and to take that almost as a key: what they’re trying to do is what we’re trying to combat. If they’re keeping people isolated and separate, well, we’re trying to do the opposite, we’re trying to bring them together. So in your local community, you want to have “unity groups” or whatever they’re called, I don’t know, “ ‘left’ unity groups”—I don’t even like the word. But you want to turn them into sources of alternative action that people can get involved with, and can join in together to fight the effects of atomization. There are plenty of resources around, enormous numbers of people are interested—and if you don’t see organizations that are doing things, well, figure out what you can do, and do it yourself. I don’t think there are any secrets.

 

MAN: The greatest source of information for me in these past couple years has been our co-op radio. And I trust everyone here supports co-op radio—if not, well, you should. Because we have to cultivate and develop any form of alternate media that is working, or that we can think of that will work. So I just want to say, hats off to co-op radio: I’m glad you’re here.

 

It’s certainly true—when you go to towns or communities that have alternative radio or other media that involve community participation, the general mood is strikingly different. And the reason is, people there are constantly challenged with a different point of view, and they can participate in the debates, they’re not just passive spectators. That’s the way you learn, that’s the way you discover who you are, and what you really want, it’s how you figure out your own values and gain understanding. You have to be able to knock ideas off other people and hear them get beaten down in order to find out what you actually think. That’s learning, as distinct from indoctrination—and listener-supported radio is very good in that respect. But the same is true of the whole tremendous network of alternative media that exists by now on just about every imaginable issue, all over Canada and the United States.

For instance, I don’t know how many of you know the journal Z Magazine , but it’s a political journal that’s an offshoot of South End Press, which brings together interests of essentially the sort that you’ve all been raising here. And it’s national, and you read it in one place and see that people are thinking about the same things somewhere else, and you write a letter in, or propose an article and so on—that’s the type of serious intercommunication that we want to foster. After all, we’re living in a world where you don’t have to talk just to the person who lives next door, we have the same interests as people all across the world, and these days we can communicate with them. In fact, as they develop, things like this could really help to unify the popular movements, and they should be pressed as far as they can go, I think.²

The Early Peace Movement and a Change in the 1970s

MAN: Noam, there are two contradictory strains that I can identify in your work on the question of “hope.” On the one hand, you speak about the efforts organizing on behalf of Central America and East Timor and other activist causes—some of the successes that people like us have had. But on the other hand, I hear you always talking about the destructions the U.S. and other powers are causing all over the world, and it seems to me that you draw a picture of an overall global trend which is very despairing. I’m wondering, how do you deal with that tension personally—do you just keep doing what you do because it’s the right thing to do, or do you actually have a sense of hope in it?

 

Do I personally? Well, first of all, I don’t think that matters very much—because that’s only a reflection of my personality and mood, and who gives a damn? But if I try to be realistic about it and ask myself what I could say that would mean something to someone else—well, you know, twenty-five years ago I did it because I thought you just have to do it, you can’t look yourself in the mirror if you don’t do it. I didn’t think that there was any hope at all at the time. I mean, when I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that it would ever have any effect. In fact, the few of us who got involved in the early Sixties confidently expected that the only consequence of what we were doing would be that we’d spend years and years in jail and destroy our lives; I came very close to that, incidentally.

I mean, just to tell you personally, when I got started actively in the peace movement my wife went back to college, because we figured that somebody was going to have to support the kids, I wasn’t going to be able to. And in fact, there were only two reasons why that didn’t happen. One was, the F.B.I. was too incompetent and ideologically fanatic to figure out what I was doing—that’s not a joke actually, and it’s something to bear in mind. And the other was, the Tet Offensive happened in 1968, and it changed U.S. government policy towards the war, so they began to cancel the prosecutions of activists that were under way. In fact, the Tet Offensive even changed people’s heads—you know who was prosecuting those trials? Ramsey Clark, just to illustrate how things have changed. [Clark was President Johnson’s Attorney General and is now a radical political activist.]

But those were pretty difficult days: it was real confrontation with state power, and it was getting ugly, especially if you were involved in resistance, helping deserters, that sort of thing. And it was just impossible at that time to imagine that anything would come out of it. And that was wrong, a lot came out of it—not out of what I did, but out of what lots and lots of people were doing all over the country. A lot came out of it. So looking back, I think my evaluation of the “hope” was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read. And the immediate experience supported it—like, right off, you found that when you tried to give a talk you needed two hundred cops to save you from being lynched. But it didn’t take too long for that to change, and in a couple years it had changed very significantly.

Now, I don’t think what happened with the movements in the 1960s led to very much sophistication and insight, frankly—but I think what happened in the later years did. And exactly how that worked I don’t really understand at all. But something happened in the 1970s that just changed things—people were looking at things differently. It wasn’t just, “I hate that they’re dropping napalm on babies,” it was, “I really want to change the world, and I don’t like coercion and control,” and that kind of thing. That happened in the Seventies, and you can certainly see the consequences. I mean, in the 1960s, I never even talked about the nature of the institutions or capitalism—it was just too exotic. Now I don’t cut corners: I can be giving a talk in eastern Kentucky or in central Iowa or something, and I say exactly what I think. And people understand it—they may not agree, they may be surprised, but they want to listen and think about it, and they take it seriously. So I think there’s reason to be hopeful.

But on the other hand, don’t forget, the people with power in the society are watching all these things too, and they have institutions. They can learn, they can see what didn’t work the last time and do it better the next time—and they have plenty of resources to try out different strategies. On our side what happens is, people forget. I mean, it does take skills to organize, it’s not that simple. You want to organize a demonstration or a letter-writing campaign or do fundraising, it does take skills—and those skills tend to get lost. You can see it happening over and over. The people who do it the first time around work hard and learn how to do things, then get burnt out and drift off to something else. Then another issue comes up, and others with a roughly similar understanding, but maybe a little younger or less experienced, have to start over again and learn all the skills from the beginning. How do you organize a meeting? How do you get leaflets out? Is it worth approaching the press? In what way do you approach them? Well, since we don’t have stable popular institutions, all these things that you kind of get in your bones after a while if you do a lot of organizing do not become part of the common lore that the movements could call on and improve upon, if we only had more integration and more continuity. But for people with power, there is a common lore, and they do improve upon it.

In fact, this is part of an ongoing battle that stretches back to the seventeenth century. If you go back to the beginnings of the modern version of democracy, it’s the same conflict: people are trying to figure out ways to control their own lives, and people with power are trying to stop them. Now, until we dissolve the centers of private power and really get popular control over how the most crucial decisions in the society get made—like the decisions about what’s produced and what’s invested and so on—this battle is always going to go on. But yes, there have been both victories and defeats: you can look at the course of events and see many significant victories by gangsters and murderers and thugs, and you can also see many respects in which people have been able to stop them, and limit their victories, and offer people an opportunity to keep living and to improve their lives. So it doesn’t make sense to be either optimistic or pessimistic, I think. You just look at what’s happening and try to do the best you can under those circumstances.

 

WOMAN: Can I give it a whack? For years I’ve been working with people who are doing twenty-five years in prison and never getting out, that sort of thing. To answer the question, “How do you keep going?”—I figure, the most pessimistic way to look at it is, it’s really bad: fifty thousand nuclear bombs floating around, we don’t need some dumb American President to put his finger on the wrong button. I figure, it’s a miracle that we’re here, realistically, let’s face it.

 

It is.

 

WOMAN: Okay, so if you accept that, you have two choices: you can cut your throat and forget about it, or you can keep fighting. If you’re going to keep fighting, then you’ve got to fight to win, and to survive. So what you do is, you find yourself a corner that you can fight really well from, and that you like, and that you fit in—and you give it the works, have a good time. That way you can keep your sanity, you don’t get overwhelmed with the whole enormous situation, and you can accomplish something. And as I say, you have a good time while you’re doing it—that’s the way I keep going.

 

MAN: But do you ever succeed, or do you just keep fighting?

 

Well, see, you have succeeded—things are better than they would have been if you hadn’t done it.

 

ANOTHER WOMAN: And we should remember that the mainstream media obviously won’t publicize and draw attention to the successes—so we have to keep reminding ourselves of just how much we have achieved. I think we get burned out when we stop reminding ourselves of that.

 

That’s right, we should always bear that in mind—that they’re not going to tell us we’re succeeding, it would be against their interests to tell us that. The media’s part of what popular organizing has to oppose, remember. And they’re not going to function in a way so as to self-destruct.

For instance, take this supposed big phenomenon that swept the country in the 1970s, the “Culture of Narcissism,” and the “Me Generation” and so on. I’m just convinced that that whole thing was crafted by the public relations industry to tell mainly young people, “Look, this is who you are—you don’t care about all this solidarity and sympathy and helping people” that had started to break out. And of course, that’s what they would do. In fact, they shouldn’t get their salaries if they don’t do things like that. We should expect them to do it, we should expect them to tell us: “You guys can’t do anything, you’re all alone, you’re each separate; you’ve never achieved anything, and you never will achieve anything.” Of course they should tell us that—and they should even tell us, “You don’t want to achieve anything, all you want to do is consume more.”

As long as power’s concentrated, that’s what it’s going to tell us—“There’s no point in working to help other people, you don’t care about them, you’re just out for yourself.” Sure it’s going to tell us that, because that’s what’s in its interests. There’s no point in telling ourselves, “They’re lying to us” over and over again. Of course they are; it’s like saying the sun’s setting or something like that. Obviously they are.

So what we want to try to do is develop stable enough structures so that we can learn these kinds of things and not keep getting beaten down by the indoctrination—so we don’t have to keep fighting the same battles over and over again, we can go on to new ones, and bigger ones, better ones. I think that could be done; slowly, over time.

 

MAN: Do you see any of those sorts of continuing progressive structures developing these days in the United States?

 

There isn’t a lot, it’s mostly local. So I’ll go to some place like Detroit, say, and there’ll be a meeting like this with people from different parts of the city who are working on different things—but many of them don’t even know about the others. Everything is pretty much fractionated. Now, if you go to a small town which has listener-supported radio—like Boulder, Colorado, for instance—it’s different, it’s unified. And part of the reason it’s unified is because of one community radio station and a couple of journals and so on that everybody can be a part of. Or I remember going to some town in New Hampshire which happened to have a movement bookstore, and everybody went to the bookstore to find out what was going on, you’d go there and look at what’s on the wall and stick together that way. You do find things like that around the country.

But take Boston, where there’s nothing central to bring people together—there’s no community radio, there’s no community newspaper. I mean, there are lots of people doing all sorts of activist work, but they don’t even know about each other: there’s a group in one section working on Bikes for Nicaragua, there’s a group in another section of the city working on a Sister Cities program for Central America, they don’t even know of each other’s existence.

The Nuclear Freeze Movement

WOMAN: What else do you feel we can learn from organizations you don’t think are going about it the right way?

 

Well, there are plenty of groups around that are doing things I don’t think are very constructive, even though I’m often a member of them and give them support and so on. Take the nuclear freeze campaign, for example: I really thought they were going about it the wrong way. The nuclear freeze campaign was in a way one of the most successful popular organizing movements in history: they managed to get 75 percent of the American population in favor of a nuclear freeze at a time when there was no articulate public support for that position—there wasn’t a newspaper, a political figure, anybody who came out publicly for it.³ Now, in a way that’s a tremendous achievement. But frankly I didn’t think it was an achievement, I thought the disarmament movement was going to collapse—and in fact, it did collapse. And the reason it collapsed is, it wasn’t based on anything: it was based on nothing except people signing a petition.

I mean, if you sign a petition it’s kind of nice—but that’s the end of it, you just go back home and do whatever you were doing: there’s no continuity, there’s no real engagement, it’s not sustained activity that builds up a community of activism. Well, an awful lot of the political work I see in the United States is of that type.

Now, if we had stable popular institutions, we’d be able to remember how we failed the last time, instead of somebody else doing it all over again and making the same mistakes—we’d know that’s not the way to do anything. The nuclear freeze movement amounted to a public opinion poll, basically: they found out that three times as many people want the government to spend the money on Medicare and things like that as want it spent on nuclear weapons. So what? What are they going to do about it? Nothing. So all these nuclear freeze people did was answer a poll question—that’s not organizing.

I think an awful lot of movement activity goes into things like that, and it doesn’t get anywhere—in fact, that’s what leads to burn-out. I mean, you had all these people collecting all these signatures, and they worked hard, they got so many signatures you could show that almost all of the country wants a nuclear freeze. Then they went to the Democratic Party Convention [in 1984] and presented their results, and everybody there said, “Gee, that’s really nice that you did that, we’re going to support you all the way”—then the Democrats went off to the election and never mentioned it again, unless they were talking in some town where they figured they could score some easy points by referring to it: you know, “We’ve got to remember in this town you want to say so on and so forth.” That’s the kind of thing that gets people frustrated, and makes them give up. But that’s because they started with illusions about how power operates and how you effect change—and we shouldn’t have those illusions, any more than we should have illusions about whether the media’s telling you the truth. If you don’t have the illusions, then you don’t get burnt out by the failure—and the way we overcome the illusions is by developing our own institutions, where we can learn from experiences like this.

For instance, if we see a big organizing effort where everybody signs the petitions and some people try to introduce the issue into the ’84 Democratic Party platform, and it has absolutely no effect, and a year later Mikhail Gorbachev [Soviet leader] declares a unilateral nuclear test freeze and still there’s no effect—well, we should be learning something.⁴ Then we should be carrying on to the next step. But that wasn’t the reaction of the nuclear freeze organizers. The reaction among the organizers wasn’t, “Well, we obviously misunderstood the way things work”—it was, “We did the right thing, but we partially failed: we convinced the population, but we didn’t manage to convince the elites, so now let’s convince the elites.” You know, “We’ll go talk to the strategic analysts, who are confused—they don’t understand what we understand—and we’ll explain to them why a nuclear freeze would be a good thing.” And in fact, that’s the direction a lot of the disarmament movement took after that: the people went off and got themselves MacArthur Fellowships and so on, and then they went around “convincing” the strategic analysts.⁵

Well, that’s one of the ways in which you can kid yourself into believing that you’re still doing your work, when really you’re being bought off—because there’s nothing that elites like better than saying, “Oh, come convince me.” That stops you from organizing, and getting people involved, and causing disruption, because now you’re talking to some elite smart guy—and you can do that forever: any argument you can give in favor of it, he can give an argument against it, and it just keeps going. And also, you get respectable, and you’re invited to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, and everybody pays attention to you and loves you, and it’s all great. That’s in fact the direction in which the nuclear freeze movement went—and that’s a mistake. And we ought to be aware of those mistakes and learn from them: if you’re getting accepted in elite circles, chances are very strong that you’re doing something wrong—I mean, for very simple reasons. Why should they have any respect for people who are trying to undermine their power? It doesn’t make any sense.

Awareness and Actions

MAN: A lot of the activists I work with operate under the assumption that if we can just make people aware, everything’s going to work out and there’ll be a change. Even with c.d. [civil disobedience] actions protesting nuclear weapons, that’s been my assumption too: get people to see us doing it, hold up our signs. But it seems like that’s not all that is needed, really—what more, would you say, besides education?

 

Education is just the beginning—and furthermore, there are situations where you can get everybody aware and on your side, and they still won’t be able to do anything. Like, take a look at Haiti. I don’t think there’s much doubt about what 90 percent of the population there wants, and they’re aware of it—they just can’t do anything about it without getting slaughtered. So there’s a whole series of things which have to happen, and they begin with awareness; you don’t do anything without awareness, obviously—you don’t do anything unless you’re aware that there’s something that ought to be done, so that’s the beginning almost by definition. But real awareness in fact comes about through practice and experience with the world. It’s not, first you become aware and then you start doing things; you become aware through doing things.

For instance, you become aware of the limits of reformist politics by trying it. In my view, you should always push all of the opportunities to their limits—partly because sometimes you can get some useful results that help people, but primarily because pretty soon you’ll find out what those limits are, and you’ll understand why there are limits; you’ll gain awareness you can’t gain from a lecture. I mean, you can hear all the lectures you like about the way that power works, but you learn it very fast when you actually confront it, without the lectures. So there’s an interaction between awareness and action—and sometimes the steps you have to take to make changes require taking things to the level of violent revolutionary struggle. Like, if people in Haiti were in a position to overthrow the military there by force, in my opinion they ought to do it. Sometimes it comes to that.

As to the c.d. demonstrations about nuclear weapons, just personally speaking, I had a lot of disagreements with some of my friends on that, people I really respect a lot, like the people in Plowshares [a group active on disarmament issues]. I mean, I think these are all tactical questions—like, I don’t think there’s any question of principle involved in whether you should smash a missile nose-cone or not, it’s not like a contract between you and God or something. The question is, what are the effects? And there I thought the effects were negative. It seemed to me that the effects of what they were doing were, first of all, to remove them from political action, because they were going to be in jail for twenty years, and also to tie up tons of money and effort in courts, which is absolutely the worst place to be. I mean, the worst waste of time and effort and money in the world is a court—so any time you can stay out of courts, you’re well off. But the second thing is, I don’t think that they reached people—because they didn’t prepare the ground for it. Like, if you smash up a missile nose-cone in some town where people are working at the missile plant and there’s no other way they can make a living, and they haven’t heard of any reason why we shouldn’t have missiles, that doesn’t educate anybody, it just gets them mad at you.

So I think these tactical questions have to be very carefully thought through—you can’t really predict with much certainty, but as well as you can, you have to make a guess as to what the effect of the tactic is going to be. If the effect is going to be to build up awareness, that’s good. But of course, awareness is only the beginning, because people can be aware and still not do anything—for instance, maybe they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs. And obviously you can’t criticize people for worrying about that; they’ve got kids, they’ve got to live. That’s fair enough. It’s hard to struggle for your rights—you usually suffer.

Leaders and Movements

WOMAN: As an activist, I think we also have an obligation to get across the fact that we have fun doing this—that we get nurtured by working on these issues which are close to our essence. If we’re looking to the long term, and building up the types of institutions you’re talking about, we have to project that a lot more than we do, almost as a way of recruitment. Too often, people’s image of “the activist” is of someone who’s always burned out. We have to create a culture that is engaging to people and exciting, so that it doesn’t just seem like we’re putting in the hours and chanting radical slogans.

 

See, I think the people who’ve really made social movements successful have been the ones who did those things. They’re gone from history of course: none of the books mention them, nobody knows the names of the people who really made the social movements in history work—but that’s the way it’s always happened, I think.

And this is even true of the recent ones, like the anti-war movement in the 1960s. So there are a lot of books coming out these days that tell you what went on in the S.D.S. [Students for a Democratic Society] office, or what one smart guy said to some other smart guy—but none of that had anything to do with why the peace movement in the Sixties became a huge mass movement. From my own personal experience in it, and that’s only a little piece of it obviously, I know who was doing the really important things, and I remember them—like, I remember that this student worked hard to set up that demonstration, and that’s why I had a chance to talk there; and they were bringing other people in to get involved; they were enjoying what they were doing, and communicating that to others somehow. That’s what makes popular movements work—but of course, that’s all going to be gone from history: what will be left in history is just the fluff on the top.

 

MAN: I’m curious what you think about some of the more famous leaders of change—like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, for instance. You don’t ever seem to mention them when you speak. Why is that?

 

Well, let’s take Martin Luther King. See, I think Martin Luther King was an important person, but I do not think that he was a big agent of change. In fact, I think Martin Luther King was able to play a role in bringing about change only because the real agents of change were doing a lot of work. And the real agents of change were people working at the grassroots level, like S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything—that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

But just take a look at the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, for example—take, say, Rosa Parks [who triggered the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott protesting racial segregation]. I mean, the story about Rosa Parks is, this courageous black woman suddenly decided, “I’ve had enough, I’m not going to sit in the back of the bus.” Well, that’s sort of half true—but only half. Rosa Parks came out of a community, a well-organized community, which in fact had Communist Party roots if you trace it back, things like Highlander School [a Tennessee school for educating political organizers] and so on.⁶ But it was a community of people who were working together and had decided on a plan for breaking through the system of segregation—Rosa Parks was just an agent of that plan.

Okay, that’s all out of history. What’s in history is, one person had the courage to do something—which she did. But not on her own. Nobody does anything on their own. Rosa Parks came out of an organized community of committed people, people who’d been working together for change for a very long time. And that’s how it always works.

The same was true of Martin Luther King: he was able to appear and give public speeches because S.N.C.C. workers and Freedom Riders and others had prepared the ground—and taken a brutal beating for it. And a lot of those people were pretty privileged kids, remember: they chose it, they didn’t have to do it. They’re the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was important because he could stand up there and get the cameras, but these other people were the real Civil Rights Movement. I’m sure he would have said the same thing too, incidentally—or at least, he should have.

As for Gandhi, again it’s the same story. He had a very mixed record, actually—but the point is, it was the people on the ground who did the work that prepared the basis for Gandhi to become prominent, and sort of articulate things. And when you look at any other popular movement, I think it’s always like that.

Levels of Change

MAN: Noam, as we work to build up that kind of movement, what do you think are the best methods we should be using as pressure tactics right now? Should we be doing the traditional reformist kind of steps—lobbying legislators, writing letters, trying to get Democrats into office—or should we go with more of a direct action kind of approach, demonstrations and civil disobedience and so on?

 

Well, those are tactical decisions you have to make—the only people qualified to make that kind of decision are the ones who live in a place, and can see what’s going on. So really it would be ridiculous for me to have an opinion on it.

Demonstrations are often the right thing to do, you just have to make tactical decisions—but keep in mind, they’re just as reformist as lobbying your legislature. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, even if you’re the most extreme revolutionary in the world, you’re going to use whatever methods are available to try to ameliorate things, and then if ultimately you run into limits where powerful institutions will not permit more reform, well, then you go beyond it. But first you have to reach those limits—and there are many ways of reaching them. One way is lobbying your legislator, one may be another political party, others are demonstrations—which simply change the conditions under which powerful people make decisions. But that does have an effect.

Let me just give you an example. There’s a part of the Pentagon Papers [the leaked official Defense Department planning record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam] which is considered politically incorrect—it doesn’t appear in big histories and nobody discusses it, because it’s just too revealing. It’s the part that deals with the time right after the Tet Offensive. Right after the Tet Offensive in 1968, everyone recognized that the Vietnam War was going to take a long time, it wasn’t going to be possible to win it quickly—so major decisions had to be made about strategy and policy. Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked by General Westmoreland, the top American commander in Vietnam, to send 200,000 more troops over to the war—and they refused, they didn’t want to do it. And the reason is, they said they were afraid they might have to use the troops here in the United States to put down a civil war: they said they were going to need the troops at home for “civil disorder control,” as they put it, and therefore they didn’t want to send them to Vietnam.⁷ These guys thought the society was going to crack up in 1968, because people here were just too opposed to what they were doing.

In fact, the “civil disorder” was also one of the reasons why a group called the “Wise Men” came to Washington with a lot of money in their pockets, and shortly after, in an unusually blatant power-play, essentially told President Johnson, “You’re through: you’re not running for reelection.” ⁸ And he didn’t. We started withdrawing from Vietnam, and we entered into peace negotiations, and so on. Well, a lot of public protest here and huge demonstrations and direct actions were a big part of the reason behind that.

So, yes, demonstrations and resistance can have effects—but they’re no more revolutionary than talking to your legislator. They don’t affect power, they don’t change the institutions of power, they just change the decisions that will be made within those institutions. And that’s a fine thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with that, it helps a lot of people. I mean, I don’t think the institutions of power should exist either, but that’s another question for right now.

 

MAN: What would you say are the most important causes for us to be focusing on, then—I mean, what do you think can actually be done by activists working today?

 

Well, everything can be done—everything can be done up to the point of eliminating all structures of authority and repression: they’re human institutions, they can be dismantled. If you ask what’s most important at this point—well, you know, that’s not the kind of thing you just decide right on the spot, those are decisions that come by serious thought and discussion in groups like this, among people who are really trying to institute change.

I mean, you have to start with where the world is. Like, you don’t start by saying, “Okay, let’s overthrow transnational corporations”—because right now it’s just not within range. So you start by saying, “Look, here’s where the world is, what can we begin to do?” Well, you can begin to do things which will get people to understand better what the real source of power is, and just how much they can achieve if they get involved in political activism. And once you’ve broken through the pretense, you just construct organizations—that’s it. You work on the things that are worth working on. If it’s taking control of your community, it’s that. If it’s gaining control of your workplace, it’s that. If it’s working on solidarity, it’s that. If it’s taking care of the homeless, it’s that.

With regard to the domestic scene, take the fact that the criminal justice system increasingly is becoming a system for targeting the poor and minorities, who are being turned into people under military occupation. Look, that’s an easy one to change—you really just have to change public opinion on that one. You aren’t striking at the core of private power when you begin to have a civilized criminal justice system instead of a brutal, barbaric one. So that’s an example of something I think is changeable. Or you could start by getting us to stop torturing people in the Third World, right? Easy things to do are, stop killing children in Cuba, stop massacring people in East Timor, get people in the United States to realize that Palestinians are human beings—those are easy things. So let’s do those, first do the easy things.

On things like what’s taking place in the international economy, you’re getting into harder territory—because there, crucial interests of authoritarian institutions are at stake. And at that point, you’re going to have to face the fact, which sooner or later we’re going to have to face after all, that maybe the most totalitarian institution in human history—or certainly close to it—is a corporation: it’s a centrally-managed institution in which authority is structured strictly from top to bottom, control is in the hands of owners and investors, if you’re inside the organization you take orders from above and transmit them down, if you’re outside it there are only extremely weak popular controls, which indeed are fast eroding. And this isn’t some new insight of mine, incidentally—for example, it was pointed out by Thomas Jefferson in his later years, which were only the early days of corporations. Jefferson warned that if power was going to shift into the hands of what he called “banking institutions and moneyed incorporations,” then the democratic experiment would be over: we’d have a form of absolutism worse than what the colonists had struggled against.⁹

Okay, Thomas Jefferson is not exactly a figure who’s off the mainstream spectrum in American history, so this is not some new off-the-wall insight—it’s as American as apple pie, and we should recognize what Thomas Jefferson could see. But when you do recognize it, you realize it’s a hard nut to crack—because these are enormous agglomerations of power, indeed concentrating, and indeed transnational, which are almost totally protected from public scrutiny and popular participation. And that’s just got to change.

After all, why do corporations have the rights they do? Why are they treated as “immortal persons,” contrary to the warnings of people like Adam Smith and others?¹⁰ It’s not by nature—in fact, these rights weren’t even granted by Congress, this happened because of decisions made in courts by judges and lawyers, which simply changed the world totally.¹¹

So, if you ask what should be done: well, I don’t think any sane human being can look around at the world and not figure out things that have to be done—take a walk through the streets, you’ll find plenty of things that have to be done. So you know, you get started doing them. But you’re not going to be able to do them alone. Like, if you take a walk down the streets and say, “That ought to be done,” nothing’s going to happen. On the other hand, if people become organized enough to act together, yeah, then you can achieve things. And there’s no particular limit to what you can achieve. I mean, that’s why we don’t still have slavery.

 

MAN: Could you mention some specific organizations that we could try to link up with and network with, which are doing a good job of working on these problems?

 

Well, a lot of organizations are involved, from a lot of different points of view. For example, at one level—which is important, though of course superficial—Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen is involved [the group works primarily on consumer issues]. That’s important, like I say, but not really touching the basic structure of power.

Beyond that, if the American labor movement ever recovers the insights that ordinary working people had a hundred years ago, then it will be working on them too. So if you look back a hundred years—and even much more recently than that, in fact—you’ll find that the major goal of the labor movement in the United States was achieving industrial democracy: placing the workplace under democratic control.¹² And it wasn’t because they’d read Marx—people figured that out for themselves long before Marx: it was just the natural response to industrial capitalism. And in fact, Marx didn’t say much about it anyway. So it could be the labor movement that’s doing it.

But there’s a ton of activism going on around the country apart from that—and though right now it’s focused on pretty narrow issues, ultimately the people are all talking about the same thing: illegitimate authority of one form or another. I mean, if you want a list of organizations to contact, it’s easy to find—just write to any of the major progressive funding organizations, like Resist in Boston, for example, and they’ll be delighted to give you a list of the couple hundred groups they’ve funded in the last few years: you’ll find among them groups involved in any political cause you can imagine.¹³ Also, in any major city there’s typically some church which is a coordinating center for all kinds of peace and justice activities—and you’ll find anything in the world there. That happens everywhere, and they’ll be thrilled if you help direct people to them.

Non-Violence

MAN: Mr. Chomsky, I’ve always hoped we could disassemble corporate capitalism through non-violent yet very determined and organized resistance, and the creation of alternative institutions that could someday take over and diffuse power peacefully. I’m wondering, do you think that kind of hope for non-violence is at all realistic—and how do you feel about the use of violence in general?

 

Well, like I say, nobody really knows anything much about tactics—at least I don’t. But I think you have to think through the non-violence question in detail. I mean, anybody is going to try to do things non-violently if possible: what’s the point of violence? But when you begin to encroach on power, you may find that it’s necessary to defend your rights—and defense of your rights sometimes does require violence, then either you use it or you don’t, depending on your moral values.

So take a look at American labor history. Around the first half of this century, hundreds of American workers were simply killed by security forces, just for trying to organize.¹⁴ The United States has an unusually violent labor history, so violent in fact that if you read the right-wing British press in the 1890s—the right-wing British press, like the London Times—they just couldn’t understand the brutality of the treatment of American workers and their lack of rights.¹⁵ And it’s not because the workers were trying to be violent—it’s because people with power were violently protecting their power against people trying to get elementary rights.

Alright, if you’re a pacifist or something, you have to ask yourself some questions at that point: are people allowed to defend themselves by force when they’re attacked by force? Well, okay, people’s values may differ on that, but those are at least the questions.

My own opinion is that popular movements should try a lot of tactics, but even things that are non-violent on their face could become violent. For example, one thing that I think is important is the building of a political party which could enter the political arena and represent the population, not just business interests—I mean, it’s certainly conceivable that there could be a party like that in the United States. But if such a party ever got any power, people with power in the society would defend themselves against it. And at that point everyone’s got to decide: do you use violence to protect your rights or don’t you? Look, violence usually comes from the powerful—people may talk about it coming from the revolutionaries, but that’s typically because they’re attacked and they then defend themselves with violence.

The same question also arises with another thing that I think has to go on now—the building up of alternative media, and of networks of activist organizations which could help bring people together to fight the effects of indoctrination, like we’ve been talking about. Again, that’s non-violent—but only up to the point where it starts to have the effect of undermining corporate power, when then you may discover that it’s not going to be nonviolent anymore, because the rich may find ways of defending themselves with violence. So talking about non-violence is easy, but personally I can’t really see taking it as an absolute principle.

Now, of course, there are also ways of transcending violence. Like, if enough people got together and took over a factory, let’s say, the police would try to stop them—but ultimately the police and soldiers are just other people, and if understanding and solidarity were to spread enough, they wouldn’t stop them. So in a sense, one answer to your question just has to be more solidarity, broader solidarity—so they can’t bring in soldiers from someplace else to smash people up. But that’s going to be hard, we simply have to face that—it’s not just going to happen on its own. The fact that societies today are so stratified and divided by hatreds means that elites don’t have to go very far away to bring in people who are willing to repress you.

But that can change—in fact, it has to change, because there’s a real limit to how much popular movements can defend themselves with violence and still maintain a popular-democratic character, in my opinion. To the extent that the defense would require guns and warfare, I think that any revolutionary developments would probably decline, and the chance of real changes would likely be destroyed. So the hope ultimately lies in more international solidarity, I think, and in the political appeal of what you’re doing to other people in this country, and elsewhere around the world as well.

Transcending Capitalism

MAN: Referring back to your comments about escaping from or doing away with capitalism, I’m wondering what workable scheme you would put in its place?

 

Me?

 

MAN: Or what would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going?

 

Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, “wage slavery” is intolerable. I mean, I do not think that people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically—by their participants, and by the communities in which they live. And I think that through various forms of free association and federalism, it’s possible to imagine a society working like that. I mean, I don’t think you can lay it out in detail—nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you’ve got to experiment. But reasonable principles on which to build such a society are quite clear.

 

MAN: Most efforts at planned economies kind of go against the grain of democratic ideals, and founder on those rocks.

 

Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies—the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a “free market,” but that’s baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts—like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well.¹⁶

And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes—you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don’t even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they’re fascist, they’re state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That’s precisely fascism, it’s not the free market.

Now, that kind of planned economy “works,” in a way—it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don’t work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic—like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.

 

MAN: It would be hard to find a working model of an ideal.

 

Yes, but in the eighteenth century it would have been hard to find a working model of a political democracy—that didn’t prove it couldn’t exist. By the nineteenth century, it did exist. Unless you think that human history is over, it’s not an argument to say “it’s not around.” You go back two hundred years, it was hard to imagine slavery being abolished.

The Kibbutz Experiment

ANOTHER MAN: How could you make decisions democratically without a bureaucracy? I don’t see how a large mass of people could actively participate in all of the decisions that need to be made in a complex modern society.

 

No, I don’t think they can—I think you’ve got to delegate some of those responsibilities. But the question is, where does authority ultimately lie? I mean, since the very beginnings of the modern democratic revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it’s always been recognized that people have to be represented—the question is, are we represented by, as they put it, “countrymen like ourselves,” or are we represented by “our betters”?¹⁷

For example, suppose this was our community, and we wanted to enter into some kind of arrangement with the community down the road—if we were fairly big in scale, we couldn’t all do it and get them all to do it, we’d have to delegate the right to negotiate things to representatives. But then the question is, who has the power to ultimately authorize those decisions? Well, if it’s a democracy, that power ought to lie not just formally in the population, but actually in the population—meaning the representatives can be recalled, they’re answerable back to their community, they can be replaced. In fact, there should be as much as possible in the way of constant replacement, so that political participation just becomes a part of everybody’s life.

But I agree, I don’t think it’s possible to have large masses of people get together to decide every topic—it would be unfeasible and pointless. You’re going to want to pick committees to look into things and report back, and so on and so forth.¹⁸ But the real question is, where does authority lie?

 

MAN: It sounds like the model you’re looking to is similar to that of the kibbutzim [collective farming communities in Israel].

 

Yeah, the kibbutz is actually as close to a full democracy as there is, I think. In fact, I lived on one for a while, and had planned to stay there, for precisely these reasons. On the other hand, life is full of all kinds of ironies, and the fact is—as I have come to understand over the years even more than I did at one time—although the kibbutzim are very authentic democracies internally, there are a lot of very ugly features about them.

For one thing, they’re extremely racist: I don’t think there’s a single Arab on any kibbutz in Israel, and it turns out that a fair number of them have been turned down. Like, if a couple forms between a Jewish member of a kibbutz and an Arab, they generally end up living in an Arab village. The other thing about them is, they have an extremely unpleasant relationship with the state—which I didn’t really know about until fairly recently, even though it’s been that way for a long time.

See, part of the reason why the kibbutzim are economically successful is that they get a substantial state subsidy, and in return for that state subsidy they essentially provide the officers’ corps for the elite military units in Israel. So if you look at who goes into the pilot training schools and the rangers and all that kind of stuff, it’s kibbutz kids—that’s the trade-off: the government subsidizes them as long as they provide the Praetorian Guard. Furthermore, I think they end up providing the Praetorian Guard in part as a result of kibbutz education. And here there are things that people who believe in libertarian ideas, as I do, really have to worry about.

You see, there’s something very authoritarian about the libertarian structure of the kibbutz—I could see it when I lived in it, in fact. There’s tremendous group pressure to conform. I mean, there’s no force that makes you conform, but the group pressures are very powerful. The dynamics of how this worked were never very clear to me, but you could just see it in operation: the fear of exclusion is very great—not exclusion in the sense of not being allowed into the dining room or something, but just that you won’t be a part of things somehow. It’s like being excluded from a family: if you’re a kid and your family excludes you—like maybe they let you sit at the table, but they don’t talk to you—that’s devastating, you just can’t survive it. And something like that carries over into these communities.

I’ve never heard of anybody studying it, but if you watch the kids growing up, you can understand why they’re going to go into the rangers and the pilot programs and the commandos. There’s a tremendous macho pressure, right from the very beginning—you’re just no good unless you can go through Marine Corps training and become a really tough bastard. And that starts pretty early, and I think the kids go through real traumas if they can’t do it: it’s psychologically very difficult.

And the results are striking. For example, there’s a movement of resisters in Israel [Yesh G’vul], people who won’t serve in the Occupied Territories—but it doesn’t have any kibbutz kids in it: the movement just doesn’t exist there. Kibbutz kids also have a reputation for being what are called “good soldiers”—which means, you know, not nice people: do what you gotta do. All of these things are other aspects of it, and the whole phenomenon comes pretty much without force or authority, but because of a dynamics of conformism that’s extremely powerful.

Like, the kibbutz I lived in was made up of pretty educated people—they were German refugees, and a lot of them had university degrees and so on—but every single person in the whole kibbutz read the same newspaper. And the idea that you might read a different newspaper—well, it’s not that there was a law against it, it was just that it couldn’t be done: you’re a member of this branch of the kibbutz movement, that’s the newspaper you read.

 

MAN: Then how can we build a social contract which is cooperative in nature, but at the same time recognizes individual humanity? It seems to me that there’s always going to be a very tense polar pull there.

 

Where’s the polar pull—between what and what?

 

MAN: Between a collective value and an individual value.

 

I guess I don’t see why there has to be any contradiction there at all. It seems to me that a crucial aspect of humanity is being a part of functioning communities—so if we can create social bonds in which people find satisfaction, we’ve done it: there’s no contradiction.

Look, you can’t really figure out what problems are going to arise in group situations unless you experiment with them—it’s like physics: you can’t just sit around and think what the world would be like under such and such conditions, you’ve got to experiment and learn how things actually work out. And one of the things I think you learn from the kibbutz experiment is that you can in fact construct quite viable and successful democratic structures—but there are still going to be problems that come along. And one of the problems that people just have to face is the effect of group pressures to conform.

I think everybody knows about this from families. Living in a family is a crucial part of human life, you don’t want to give it up. On the other hand, there plainly are problems that go along with it—nobody has to be told that. And a serious problem, which becomes almost pathological when it arises in a close-knit group, is exclusion—and to avoid exclusion often means doing things you wouldn’t want to do if you had your own way. But that’s just a part of living, to be faced with human problems like that.

Actually, I’m not a great enthusiast of Marx, but one comment he made seems appropriate here. I’m quoting, so pardon the sexist language, but somewhere or other he said: socialism is an effort to try to solve man’s animal problems, and after having solved the animal problems, then we can face the human problems—but it’s not a part of socialism to solve the human problems; socialism is an effort to get you to the point where you can face the human problems. And I think the kind of thing you’re concerned about is a human problem—and those are going to be there. Humans are very complicated creatures, and have lots of ways of torturing themselves in their inter-personal relations. Everybody knows that, without soap operas.

“Anarchism” and “Libertarianism”

WOMAN: Professor Chomsky, on a slightly different topic, there’s a separate meaning of the word “anarchy” different from the one you often talk about—namely, “chaos.”

 

Yeah, it’s a bum rap, basically—it’s like referring to Soviet-style bureaucracy as “socialism,” or any other term of discourse that’s been given a second meaning for the purpose of ideological warfare. I mean, “chaos” is a meaning of the word, but it’s not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant “chaos”—in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that’s organized democratically from below.

 

WOMAN: It seems to me that as a social system, anarchism makes such bottom-line sense that it was necessary to discredit the word, and take it out of people’s whole vocabulary and thinking—so you just have a reflex of fear when you hear it.

 

Yeah, anarchism has always been regarded as the ultimate evil by people with power. So in Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare [a 1919 campaign against “subversives” in the U.S.], they were harsh on socialists, but they murdered anarchists—they were really bad news.

See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power. That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I mean, there’s a big literature about the Sixties, and it’s mostly written by intellectuals, because they’re the people who write books, so naturally it has a very bad name—because they hated it. You could see it in the faculty clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the idea that students were suddenly asking questions and not just copying things down. In fact, when people like Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind] write as if the foundations of civilization were collapsing in the Sixties, from their point of view that’s exactly right: they were. Because the foundations of civilization are, “I’m a big professor, and I tell you what to say, and what to think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you repeat it.” If you get up and say, “I don’t understand why I should read Plato, I think it’s nonsense,” that’s destroying the foundations of civilization. But maybe it’s a perfectly sensible question—plenty of philosophers have said it, so why isn’t it a sensible question?

As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Sixties—but that’s the only thing that makes it into history: the crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on are out of history—and that’s because they had a kind of libertarian character, and there is nothing more frightening to people with power.

 

MAN: What’s the difference between “libertarian” and “anarchist,” exactly?

 

There’s no difference, really. I think they’re the same thing. But you see, “libertarian” has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what’s called “libertarianism” here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that’s always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract”—but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve,” that’s not a choice—it’s in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of “libertarianism” is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: “No, I’m a libertarian, I’m against that tax”—but of course, I’m still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [American academic]—and if you just read the world that they describe, it’s a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don’t have roads because you don’t see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you’re not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don’t like the pollution from somebody’s automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It’s a world built on hatred.¹⁹

The whole thing’s not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn’t function for a second—and if it could, all you’d want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it’s not really serious.

Articulating Visions

MAN: You often seem reluctant to get very specific in spelling out your vision of an anarchist society and how we could get there. Don’t you think it’s important for activists to do that, though—to try to communicate to people a workable plan for the future, which then can help give them the hope and energy to continue struggling? I’m curious why you don’t do that more often.

 

Well, I suppose I don’t feel that in order to work hard for social change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in any kind of detail. What I feel should drive a person to work for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved. Now, you may not know in detail—and I don’t think that any of us do know in detail—how those principles can best be realized at this point in complex systems like human societies. But I don’t really see why that should make any difference: what you try to do is advance the principles. Now, that may be what some people call “reformism”—but that’s kind of like a put-down: reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction. And to push in that direction, I don’t think you have to know precisely how a future society would work: I think what you have to be able to do is spell out the principles you want to see such a society realize—and I think we can imagine many different ways in which a future society could realize them. Well, work to help people start trying them.

So for example, in the case of workers taking control of the workplace, there are a lot of different ways in which you can think of workplaces being controlled—and since nobody knows enough about what all the effects are going to be of large-scale social changes, I think what we should do is try them piecemeal. In fact, I have a rather conservative attitude towards social change: since we’re dealing with complex systems which nobody understands very much, the sensible move I think is to make changes and then see what happens—and if they work, make further changes. That’s true across the board, actually.

So, I don’t feel in a position—and even if I felt I was, I wouldn’t say it—to know what the long-term results are going to look like in any kind of detail: those are things that will have to be discovered, in my view. Instead, the basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it’s justified—it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five-year-old kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation: it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case, I think you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it—invariably. And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else—they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.

So I think that whenever you find situations of power, these questions should be asked—and the person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that. As far as I can see, it’s just the point of view that says that people have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom then you’ve got to justify them. Sometimes you can—but of course, anarchism or anything else doesn’t give you the answers about when that is. You just have to look at the specific cases.

 

MAN: But if we ever had a society with no wage incentive and no authority, where would the drive come from to advance and grow?

 

Well, the drive to “advance”—I think you have to ask exactly what that means. If you mean a drive to produce more, well, who wants it? Is that necessarily the right thing to do? It’s not obvious. In fact, in many areas it’s probably the wrong thing to do—maybe it’s a good thing that there wouldn’t be the same drive to produce. People have to be driven to have certain wants in our system—why? Why not leave them alone so they can just be happy, do other things?

Whatever “drive” there is ought to be internal. So take a look at kids: they’re creative, they explore, they want to try new things. I mean, why does a kid start to walk? You take a one-year-old kid, he’s crawling fine, he can get anywhere across the room he likes really fast, so fast his parents have to run after him to keep him from knocking everything down—all of a sudden he gets up and starts walking. He’s terrible at walking: he walks one step and he falls on his face, and if he wants to really get somewhere he’s going to crawl. So why do kids start walking? Well, they just want to do new things, that’s the way people are built. We’re built to want to do new things, even if they’re not efficient, even if they’re harmful, even if you get hurt—and I don’t think that ever stops.

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists. And if you’ve been lucky enough to have had that opportunity, you know it’s quite an experience—and it doesn’t have to be discovering Einstein’s theory of relativity: anybody can have that pleasure, even by seeing what other people have done. For instance, if you read even a simple mathematical proof like the Pythagorean Theorem, what you study in tenth grade, and you finally figure out what it’s all about, that’s exciting—“My God, I never understood that before.” Okay, that’s creativity, even though somebody else proved it two thousand years ago.

You just keep being struck by the marvels of what you’re discovering, and you’re “discovering” it, even though somebody else did it already. Then if you can ever add a little bit to what’s already known—alright, that’s very exciting. And I think the same thing is true of a person who builds a boat: I don’t see why it’s fundamentally any different—I mean, I wish I could do that; I can’t, I can’t imagine doing it.

Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely—instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are objectively available, but also options that are subjectively available—like, how are people allowed to think, how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society—not because we’re incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That’s what indoctrination is about in the first place, in fact—and I don’t mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a “proper” life and a “proper” set of values are, and that’s all indoctrination.

So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to people—both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that’s one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the “choices” forced on them by some arbitrary system of power.

“Want” Creation

MAN: But you could say that “to truck and barter” is human nature—that people are fundamentally materialist, and will always want to accumulate more and more under any social structure.

 

You could say it, but there’s no reason to believe it. You look at peasant societies, they go on for thousands of years without it—do those people have a different human nature? Or just look inside a family: do people “truck and barter” over how much you’re going to eat for dinner? Well, certainly a family is a normal social structure, and you don’t see people accumulating more and more for themselves regardless of the needs of the other people.

In fact, just take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself: look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken—conscious efforts—to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. It’s happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It’s very dramatic to look at cases like these.

For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica—which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, “It’s not paying anymore.” So within a couple years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called “free” economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same—and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slaves have to become the happy workers—somehow we’ve got to work it all out.

Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn’t want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, “How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they’re no longer enslaved into it?” Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn’t really want a lot of things—they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate—the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn’t then desire, so then the only way they’d be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations. ²⁰

There was very conscious discussion of the need to create wants—and in fact, extensive efforts were then undertaken to do exactly what they do on T.V. today: to create wants, to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don’t really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society. And that pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism.²¹ In fact, what the whole history of capitalism shows is that people have had to be driven into situations which are then claimed to be their nature. But if the history of capitalism shows anything, it shows it’s not their nature, that they’ve had to be forced into it, and that that effort has had to be maintained right until this day.

Dissidents: Ignored or Vilified

MAN: Noam, if I can just change the topic a bit. You’ve been called a neo-Nazi, your books have been burned, you’ve been called anti-Israeli—don’t you get a bit upset by the way that your views are always distorted by the media and by intellectuals?

 

No, why should I? I get called anything, I’m accused of everything you can dream of: being a Communist propagandist, a Nazi propagandist, a pawn of freedom of speech, an anti-Semite, liar, whatever you want.²² Actually, I think that’s all a good sign. I mean, if you’re a dissident, typically you’re ignored. If you can’t be ignored, and you can’t be answered, you’re vilified—that’s obvious: no institution is going to help people undermine it. So I would only regard the kinds of things you’re talking about as signs of progress.

And in fact, it’s gotten a lot better since the 1960s. Again, we don’t remember—younger people, in particular, don’t appreciate—just how much it’s changed. Let me just give you an illustration. Boston’s a pretty liberal city, and the first major anti-Vietnam War action there was in October 1965, the “International Days of Protest,” it was called. There was a public demonstration on the Boston Common—which is like Hyde Park, Union Square, it’s where you give talks—and I was supposed to be one of the speakers. Well, the meeting was completely broken up: we never said one word. There were thousands of counter-demonstrators, mostly students marching over from the universities—and I was very pleased that there were hundreds of cops there, otherwise we would have been lynched.

The media were just irate about the demonstration. The front page of the Boston Globe had a big picture of a wounded war veteran on it, and the rest of the page was all condemnations of these people who dared to get up and say that we shouldn’t bomb North Vietnam. All of the radio programs were deluged with denunciations of these Communists and traitors. The liberals in Congress denounced the “utter irresponsibility” of the demonstrators, who were questioning the right of the United States to bomb North Vietnam—this was in 1965.²³ Incidentally, I should say that those demonstrations were so tepid it’s embarrassing even to think about them—we weren’t even criticizing the attack on South Vietnam, which was much worse, we were only talking about the extension of the bombing to the North.

The next big demonstration was in March ’66, that was the second International Days of Protest. We figured there was no point in having a public demonstration, because we’d get killed, and we didn’t want to have it at a university because the university would probably get smashed to dust, so we decided to have it in a church. So there was a march from Harvard Square down to the Arlington Street Church in downtown Boston, the Unitarian Church which was kind of the center of the movement activities, and the march was pretty well protected—guys on motorcycles were driving up and back trying to keep people from getting slaughtered and so on. Finally we got down to the church and went in: the church was attacked—there were big mobs outside throwing projectiles, tomatoes, cans. I mean, the police were there, and they were preventing people from getting killed, but they weren’t doing much more than that. That was in 1966.

There’s been a big change since then—a big, big change. All of that stuff is inconceivable today, absolutely inconceivable.

 

MAN: What I’m struck with in each of the three major misunderstandings that are used against you—the Faurisson affair [Chomsky made public statements in 1979 and ’80 that a French professor who denied the Holocaust should not be jailed for his writings by the French government, and was denounced as a defender of the man’s views ²⁴], your statements about Cambodia [Chomsky compared the genocide in Cambodia to that in East Timor, corrected numerous statistical falsifications about Cambodia, and was labeled an apologist for Pol Pot ²⁵], and your stance on the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict ²⁶—is how much your views have been distorted and oversimplified by the press. I don’t understand why you’d want to keep bringing these ideas to the mass media when they always insist on misrepbringing these ideas to the mass media when they always insist on misrepresenting them.

 

But why is that surprising? First of all, this is not happening in the mass media, this is happening in the intellectual journals. And intellectuals are specialists in defamation, they’re basically commissars [Soviet officials responsible for political indoctrination]—they’re the ideological managers, so they are the ones who feel the most threatened by dissidence. The mass media don’t care that much, they just ignore it, or say it’s crazy or something like that. In fact, this stuff barely enters the national media; sure, you’ll get a throwaway line saying, “this guy’s an apologist for this that and the other thing,” but that’s just feeding off the intellectual culture. The place where it’s really done is inside the intellectual journals—because that’s their specialty. They’re commissars: it’s not fundamentally different from the Communist Party.

And also, I’m a particular target for other reasons—a lot of what I write is a critique of the American liberal intellectual establishment, and they don’t like that particularly.

 

WOMAN: You also criticize Israel, right?

 

Yeah, the most sensitive of these issues has to do with the Middle East. In fact, there are organizations which are just dedicated to defamation on that issue. I mean, I didn’t even get involved in writing about the Middle East at first, although that was always my main interest since childhood, partially for this reason—because they’re very Stalinist-like, and I knew how they worked from the inside. In fact, I was one of the people who was doing it when I was a kid; you sort of get absorbed in this stuff, you know. And they’re just desperate to prevent discussion of the issues.

So for example, the Anti-Defamation League [of B’nai B’rith], which masquerades as a civil rights organization, is in fact just a defamation organization. The office in Boston happens to be a rather leaky place, and I’ve been leaked a lot of stuff from there by people working in the office who are just outraged by what goes on. For instance, they leaked me my file a couple years ago—it had hundreds of pages of material, because whenever I speak anywhere, they’ve got a spy working for them who’s taking notes and sending them back to some central office. So somebody will be here, say, taking notes on what I’m saying, and some version of it will get into my file and then be circulated around to their offices in the rest of the country: there are intercepted communications, and fevered inter-office memos, “he said so-and-so at such-and-such”—all kinds of schmutz, as they call it in my culture [“schmutz” means “dirt” in Yiddish]. ²⁷

But if any of you have ever looked at your F.B.I. file through a Freedom of Information Act release, you’ve probably discovered that intelligence agencies are in general extremely incompetent—that’s one of the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures: they just never get anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. And part of it is because the information they get typically is being transmitted to them by agents and informants who are ideological fanatics, and they always misunderstand things in their own crazy ways. So if you look at an F.B.I. file where you actually know what the facts are, you’ll usually see that the information has some relation to reality—you can sort of figure out what they’re talking about—but by the time it’s worked its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence system, there’s been all sorts of weird distortion. And that’s true of the Anti-Defamation League’s intelligence too.

But this stuff certainly is circulated around—like, probably somebody in this area received it from the regional office, and there’ll be some article in the local newspaper tomorrow that’ll pull a lot of junk out of the file, that’s what usually happens when I go places. And the point is that it’s used to close off the discussion: since they can’t deal with the issues, they’ve got to close off the discussion—and the best way to do it is by throwing enough slime so that maybe people will figure, where there’s smoke there’s fire, so we’d better not listen.

Well, the A.D.L. is an organized group where that’s their main job.²⁸ But there are plenty of others who do the same sort of thing—because this is really the institutional task of the whole intellectual community. I mean, the job of mainstream intellectuals is to serve as a kind of secular priesthood, to ensure that the doctrinal faith is maintained. So if you go back to a period when the Church was dominant, the priesthood did it: they were the ones who watched out for heresy and went after it. And as societies became more secular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the same controls were needed: the institutions still had to defend themselves, after all, and if they couldn’t do it by burning people at the stake or sending them to inquisitions anymore, they had to find other ways. Well, over time that responsibility was transferred to the intellectual class—to be guardians of the sacred political truths, hatchet-men of one sort or another.

So you see, as a dissident, you shouldn’t be surprised to get all of this stuff done to you, it’s in fact a positive sign—it means that you can’t just be ignored anymore.

 

WOMAN: You’re really not discouraged by the fact that your work almost never gets portrayed accurately to the public or reviewed in a serious way by the press?

 

No, not at all—and we really shouldn’t get discouraged by that kind of thing. Look, I am not expecting to be applauded by people in editorial offices and at Faculty Clubs—that’s not my audience. I mean, I was in India a little while ago and visited rural self-governing villages, and the people there were happy to see me. I was in Australia at the invitation of Timorese refugees, and they were glad that I was trying to help them. Recently I gave talks at a labor federation in Canada, and I’ve done that in the United States often—those are the people that I want to talk to, they’re the audience I’d like to address.

Now, it’s interesting and worth pointing out that the media in the United States are different in this respect—I do get pretty easy access to national media in other countries. In fact, it’s only in the United States and the old Soviet Empire that I haven’t had any real access to the major media over the years. And it’s not just me, of course: the major media in the U.S., as was the case in the former Soviet Empire, pretty much exclude anybody with a dissident voice. So I can have interviews and articles in major journals and newspapers in Western Europe, and in Australia, and all up and down the Western Hemisphere. And often I get invitations from leading journals in other countries to write for them—like, recently I had an article in Israel’s most important newspaper, Ha’aretz, which is kind of the equivalent of the New York Times: it was an invited critique of their foreign policy, and of the so-called “peace process.” ²⁹ Or in Australia, I gave a talk at the National Press Club in the Parliament Building, which was nationally televised twice on Australian World Services, their version of the B.B.C.—they wanted me to speak about Australia’s foreign policy, so I gave a very critical talk to a national audience, and I spoke to Parliamentarians and journalists and so on, and was all over the press and papers there. And the same thing is true in Europe; I’m often on the C.B.C. nationally in Canada; and so on. Well, as you say, that’s all unheard of in the United States—and the main reason, I think, is just that what people think, and are allowed to think, is much more important here, so the controls are much greater. ³⁰

 

MAN: I heard something vaguely about your books being burned in Canada once. Were you there? What was that like for you?

 

That was in Toronto. Yeah, I was there. I mean, I think people have a right to burn books if they want. I was in fact interviewed about it, I said the obvious thing—I’d rather they read them than burn them, but if they want to burn them, I don’t care. Actually, you don’t really have to worry about burning books—burning books is virtually impossible. Books are like bricks: they’re very hard to burn.

 

MAN: Was that a popular rabble or something? How did it happen?

 

It was actually Vietnamese refugees. There’s a Vietnamese refugee community that heard, or decided, or whatever, that I was . . . I don’t know what. It was impossible to find out what they’d heard. They obviously knew that I was against the Vietnam War, and they were obviously very pro-war—you know, they thought the Americans should have stayed in and won it, that’s why they’re Vietnamese refugees. So they burned the books—which is fine, it’s a reasonable form of protest. Now, if the government burns books, that’s a different story, or if a corporation burns books, that’s a different story.

In fact, just as an aside, I should say that I’ve had much worse destruction of books than that. You know how there’s been all this business all over the front pages recently about big media mega-mergers, and there’s all kinds of thoughtful discussion about whether this is going to harm the freedom of the press and so on? I really have to laugh. The first book that Ed Herman and I wrote together was published in 1974 by a rather profitable textbook publisher which happened to be owned by Warner Communications. Well, one of the executives at the corporation [William Sarnoff] didn’t like the advertising copy that he saw about it, and he asked to see the book—and he was horrified by the book, and wouldn’t let the publisher distribute it. Then came a long hassle, in which the people who ran the publishing company tried to insist on their right to publish, and in the end Warner Communications just put the publisher out of business, they decided that the easiest way to deal with the situation was just to terminate them. That meant that not only was our book destroyed, but everybody’s books were destroyed. That does the Ayatollah one better: that’s way beyond burning a book, that’s destroying every book by this publisher to prevent one particular book, which had already been printed, from being distributed.³¹ Now, that I would regard as much more serious than a number of people burning a book for symbolic reasons. If they want to do that, fine.

 

WOMAN: How significant do you think these media mega-mergers really are in the end?

 

Well, the first chapter of our book Manufacturing Consent does talk a bit about the corporate concentration of the media—and that part actually was written by Ed Herman, who’s a specialist in corporate control; I didn’t have anything to do with it. But my own feeling is that that particular issue is not quite as important as it’s sometimes made out to be. I mean, if there were fifty media corporations instead of three, for example, I think they’d do about the same thing they do now—just because they all have basically the same interests. Maybe there’d be a little bit more competition, but probably not much. That’s my view of the question, at least.

 

MAN: Have you ever had your linguistics work censored or impeded in publication because of your politics?

 

Never in the United States—but in the rest of the world, sure. For instance, I’ll never forget one week, it must have been around 1979 or so, when I was sent two newspapers: one from Argentina and one from the Soviet Union. Argentina was then under the rule of these neo-Nazi generals, and I was sent La Prensa from Buenos Aires, the big newspaper in Argentina—there was a big article saying, “You can’t read this guy’s linguistics work because it’s Marxist and subversive.” The same week I got an article from Izvestia in the Soviet Union which said, “You can’t read this guy’s linguistics work because he’s idealist and counter-revolutionary.” I thought that was pretty nice.

 

MAN: Noam, aren’t you at all afraid of being silenced by the establishment for being so prominent and vocal in speaking out against U.S. power and its abuses?

 

No, not really—and for a very simple reason, actually: if you look at me, you’ll see what it is. I’m white, I’m privileged, and that means I’m basically immune from punishment by power. I mean, I don’t want to say that it’s a hundred percent immunity—but the fact of the matter is that these two things mean that you can buy a lot of freedom.

Look, there isn’t any true capitalist society in the world, it couldn’t survive for ten minutes, but there are variations on capitalism, and the U.S. is towards the capitalist end of the world spectrum—not very far towards it, I should say, but towards it at least in values. And if you had a truly capitalist society, everything would be a commodity, including freedom: there would be as much of it as you can buy. Well, since the U.S. is towards that end of the spectrum, it means there’s an awful lot of freedom around if you can afford it. So if you’re a black organizer in the ghetto, you don’t have much of it, and you’re in trouble—they can send the Chicago police in to murder you, like they did with Fred Hampton [a Black Panther assassinated by the F.B.I. in 1969]. But if you’re a white professional like me, you can buy a lot of freedom.

And beyond that, I also happen to belong to a sector of the society where those who have real power are going to want to protect me—I mean, they may hate everything about me and want to see me disappear, but they don’t want the state to be powerful enough to go after people like me, because then it could go after people like them. So the fact of the matter is that in societies like ours, privileged people like me are pretty well protected. It’s not a hundred percent, but there’s a lot of leeway around.

Teaching About Resistance

WOMAN: Do you have any thoughts about how best to begin helping people understand some of these ideas—like about the media institutions and how they prevent people from thinking freely for themselves?

 

Well, I don’t think any of it’s very hard, to tell you the honest truth—I mean, intellectuals make a career of trying to make simple things look hard, because that’s part of the way you get your salary paid and so on. But the fact of the matter is, the social world—to the extent that we understand it at all—is more or less right there in front of you after you sort of peel away the blinders a little. It’s an extremely hard thing to understand if you’re all alone trying to do it, but through the kinds of interactions and groups we’ve been talking about, you can do it pretty easily.

So when you have a chance to meet with people or talk with them, I think the thing to do is to try to get them to learn how to explore things for themselves—for example, to help them learn for themselves the way that the media shape and frame issues for the purpose of manipulation and control. Now, there’s not much point in doing it abstractly—you know, like some theory of how it works. What you have to do is look at cases. So take cases that people are interested in, and just teach them how to do research projects—research projects are very easy to do, you don’t need a Ph.D.; maybe in physics you do, but not in these topics. You just have to have common sense. You have to have common sense, you have to look carefully at the facts; it may be a little bit of work to find the facts—like usually you’re not just going to find them right there in the headlines or something. But if you do a little work, you can find out what the facts are, you can find out the way they’re being distorted and modified by the institutions. And then the purposes of those distortions quickly become clear.

 

MAN: It’s hard to know the best way to stimulate people’s interest as a teacher or an organizer, but certainly there are ways of not doing it, even while appearing to do it. Earlier, in response to the question about civil disobedience, you mentioned people lecturing on resistance—that would seem to me to be an example of not doing it, while pretending to do it.

 

Well, I’m not so convinced that that’s not a way to do it, actually. Like, I think there are things to teach people about resistance—I’ve personally liked to listen to people who have had experiences with it, and who may have ideas about it that I don’t have. If you want to call that “lecturing,” okay—but it’s not necessarily wrong: there are lots of things you can learn from other people who have thought about subjects and had experiences.

 

MAN: But what I’m wondering is, what else do you think would go into teaching people about resistance, and activism in general?

 

First of all I don’t think you should mislead people: you should get them to understand that if they’re going to be independent thinkers, they are probably going to pay a cost. I mean, one has to begin with an understanding of the way the world works: the world does not reward honesty and independence, it rewards obedience and service. It’s a world of concentrated power, and those who have power are not going to reward people who question that power. So to begin with, I don’t think anybody should be misled about that.

After you understand that, okay, then you make your own choices. If your choice is that you want to be independent anyhow, even though you recognize what’s involved, then you should just go ahead and try to do it—but those can be extremely hard choices sometimes. For instance, I know that as an older person who often gets approached by younger people for advice, I’m always very hesitant to give it on these sorts of decisions (even though sometimes the circumstances are such that I have to)—because I’m in no position to tell anybody else what to decide. But what I think one can do is to help people understand what the objective realities are.

Look, you can gain a lot by activism, like all of you were saying earlier—but there are also many things that you can lose. And some of those things are not unimportant, like security for example—that’s not unimportant. And people just have to make their own choices about that when they decide what they’re going to do.

Isolation

WOMAN: To stay on a personal level for a moment, Noam, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by how you find the time to write books and articles, and teach, give talks all over the country, have a family life, be the leading figure in linguistics, you document your work very thoroughly—are you in some kind of a time warp, where you experience something other than a 24-hour day like the rest of us?

 

No, it’s just pure, ordinary fanaticism—and in fact, a lot of things go. Anybody who’s pretty seriously involved in political activity or organizing knows that a lot of other things just go, like personal lives sometimes. I mean, yeah, I try to keep my personal life going—so my grandkids and children were over a few nights ago, and I played with them, that sort of thing. But personal relationships do suffer. For instance, if I see my closest personal friends, whom I’ve known for fifty years, we’re extremely close and so on, once or twice a year, it’s a good year. But that’s the way it goes: you can’t do everything, so you just have to make choices.

Actually, it was kind of striking to watch it during the Sixties—all of a sudden a lot of people really threw themselves into activism, and when I think about it, very few of the couples made it through. Very few. Not because they hated each other or anything—it was just that it was too much of an emotional burden, even if both of them were involved, and something snaps. In fact, it was like a tidal wave right through that period, particularly after some of the big political trials. So couples would stick together for as long as the trial was going on, and immediately afterwards get divorced—it was just too much. And that’s a reflection of what tends to happen in general when you get really seriously involved.

I mean, it’s extremely hard to lead a deeply committed life in several different areas and have them all work. Some of them give, and one of the ones that gives often is personal life—and that’s hard to deal with, because you just can’t go on that way. I don’t really know what the answer is to that, actually; people have found different answers.

 

MAN: It’s comforting for me that you experience the same thing.

 

Oh, everybody does.

 

MAN: I feel very isolated when I get so involved in activism that my personal life becomes nonexistent—I really feel a void, not connecting with people.

 

Oh yeah, it’s a terrible void—and it then makes it impossible for you to work. After all, we’re not automata: we function as part of a matrix of human relations, and need to connect with other people.

 

MAN: And the personal isolation then reinforces the political isolation.

 

It’s tough, yeah. I mean, partly the problem is a result of the fact that we’re all so isolated: if we had live, ongoing popular organizations, this wouldn’t be so true. The history of the labor movement in the United States is interesting in this respect, actually: when people were really working together organizing, that overcame the isolation. In fact, it even overcame things like racism and sexism to a great extent. And this goes way back.

I mean, about a century ago in the United States, the labor movement was getting smashed all over the place: they were only defeated, there were no victories. But in the course of those defeats—things like, say, the Homestead strike [an 1892 strike at a Carnegie Steel plant in Pennsylvania]—it’s amazing what happened. Homestead’s an interesting case, actually, because it was a working-class town, and the strikers simply took the place over: they took over the town and ran everything. And this was during a very racist period, remember—there weren’t a lot of blacks around right there, but there was real racism directed at Eastern Europeans. So, what were called “Huns” (which could be Slovaks or anybody, it didn’t have to be Hungarians) were treated sort of the way blacks are treated—and the racism was very vicious. But it all collapsed in the middle of the Homestead strike. And also, women were running all sorts of things too, a lot of the sexism was broken down as well. And that’s what tends to happen when people join together in common struggles. ³²

It also happened in the formation of the C.I.O. [a union for mass-production industries formed in 1935]—black and white workers worked together to create the C.I.O. And it happened in the Civil Rights Movement—S. N.C.C., for example, was very open, it was white, black, anything. A lot of the unpleasant aspects of life disappear, and you can compensate for them, in the course of some kind of common struggle. In fact, an old friend of mine who was in the Polish resistance in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation—and lived through that time and survived—always used to say that it was the best period of his life. I mean, it was extremely dangerous—you could end up in a gas chamber and everybody knew it—but there was a sense of community that he’d never felt before, and never had after.

So the best answer, I suspect, is just the same as for everything else—we have to develop stable popular organizations, and a culture of concern, and commitment, and activism, and solidarity, which can help to sustain us in these struggles, and which can help break down some of the barriers that have been set up to divide and distract us.

Science and Human Nature

MAN: Noam, could you elaborate a little more on what your own opinions are about human nature—for instance, do you see humans as more destructive than constructive, or is it maybe the other way around?

 

Well, first of all, my opinion about it is no better than yours: it’s just pure intuition, nobody really understands anything about human nature. Look, people don’t understand much about big molecules—when you get beyond that to things like human nature, anybody’s guess is as good as anyone else’s.

 

MAN: But you’ve studied a lot of the results of human nature.

 

Yeah, but if you look at the results of human nature, you see everything: you see enormous self-sacrifice, you see tremendous courage, you see integrity, you see destructiveness, you see anything you want. That doesn’t tell you much.

 

MAN: It seems like a great deal of your research documents the destructive nature of humans, though.

 

Well, but a lot of it documents other things too. I mean, my general feeling is that over time, there’s measurable progress: it’s not huge, but it’s significant. And sometimes it’s been pretty dramatic. For instance, take the sort of “original sin” of American history—what happened to the native population here. It’s a remarkable fact that until the 1960s, the culture simply could not come to terms with that at all. Until the 1960s, with very rare exceptions, academic scholarship was grossly falsifying the history, and suppressing the reality of what happened—even the number of people killed was radically falsified. I mean, as late as 1969, in one of the leading diplomatic histories of the United States, the author Thomas Bailey could write that after the American Revolution, the former colonists turned to the task of “felling trees and Indians.” ³³ Nobody could say that now—you couldn’t even say that in a Wall Street Journal editorial now. Well, those are important changes, and it’s part of a lot of other significant progress too. Slavery was considered a fine thing not long ago.

 

MAN: So you think that human nature is individually kind of destructive, but overall it’s constructive?

 

I don’t know—like, they didn’t have gas chambers in the nineteenth century, so you can find all kinds of things. And if you want to look for scientific answers, it’s zilch, nobody knows a thing: the answers mostly come from history or intuition or something. I mean, science can only answer very simple questions—when things get complicated, you just guess.

 

ANOTHER MAN: People often ask you about the connections between your scientific work in linguistics and your politics, and you tend to say something about, “Yes, there are a few tenuous connections.” Would you amplify on that? I myself have been thinking that maybe part of our political problem is that the human brain is very good at seeing things in competitive terms like “more” and “less,” and it’s not very good at conceptualizing “enough.”

 

Well, that may be true—but these are topics where the scientific study of language has nothing to say. I mean, you know as much about it as the fanciest linguist around.

 

MAN: Where are they, then—even the tenuous connections?

 

Not there; the tenuous connections are somewhere else.

First of all, we should remember that the kinds of things that any sort of science can shed light on are pretty narrow: when you start moving to complicated systems, scientific knowledge declines very fast. And when you get to the nature of human beings, the sciences have nothing to say. There are a few areas where you can get a lot of insight and understanding, and certain aspects of language happen to be one of those areas, for some reason—but that insight still doesn’t bear on questions of real human concern, at least not at a level which has any consequences for human life.

The connections are quite different—and they are tenuous. The only reason for stressing them is because they’ve been pointed out many times through the course of modern intellectual history, and in fact they lie right at the core of classical liberalism. I mean, contrary to the contemporary version of it, classical liberalism (which remember was pre-capitalist, and in fact, anti-capitalist) focused on the right of people to control their own work, and the need for free creative work under your own control—for human freedom and creativity. So to a classical liberal, wage labor under capitalism would have been considered totally immoral, because it frustrates the fundamental need of people to control their own work: you’re a slave to someone else.

Well, in trying to locate sort of a core in human nature for a right to free, creative work and control over it, some classical liberal philosophers looked at other aspects of human intelligence, and one aspect that had indeed been studied since the seventeenth century, and had a lot to do with Cartesian thought as well [i.e. after the French philosopher Descartes], was language—where it was recognized, quite accurately, that sort of an identifying criterion of possession of a mind in the human sense (as distinct from an animal or an automaton) is the free creative aspect of the normal use of language.

So for example, a central part of Descartes’ argument for a sharp, even ontological distinction between humans and everything else in the world was that if you pose a question to a human being about a new topic using phrases that the person has never heard before, they can give you a new response relevant to what you said, which is not caused by their internal state and not caused by any external circumstances, but which somehow comes out of some creative capacity of their mind. But the same thing won’t be true of an automaton or an animal or anything else—like, if you take a machine and set it in a certain environment and push a button, what will come out is predetermined; or if you give a pigeon a certain stimulus, its actions also are going to be predetermined. But in human language, the product that comes out is not predetermined—it’s undetermined, but still somehow appropriate to situations.

Well, to Descartes, that was the crucial aspect of the human mind. And there was an attempt right through the classical liberal period, by Rousseau, and Humboldt, and others, to link up these elements and identify sort of a need and a right to freedom, an “instinct for freedom,” it was sometimes called, something at the cognitive core of human nature: free creative thought and its expression.

Now, that’s pretty metaphoric—like I say, nobody really knows anything about human nature, so certainly you don’t know whether there’s an instinct for freedom or not. I mean, if somebody wants to say that humans are born to be slaves, they can give as much of a scientific argument as Rousseau could when he said they’re born to be free—it’s like where your hopes are, it’s not that there’s any scientific knowledge.

And the same thing is true today: like, you can read any book you want about sociobiology [theory that specific social behaviors and not just physical characteristics result from evolution], and it’s mostly just fairy tales—I mean, it’s all fine when it’s talking about ants; when it goes up to the level of mammals, it starts being guesswork; and when it gets to humans, it’s like, say anything that comes to your head. But I think you can see a possible connection of that sort—a potential connection. Whether that connection can actually be made substantive, who knows? It’s all so far beyond scientific understanding at this point that you can’t even dream about it. So that’s the main reason why I don’t talk about these things much. I just think they’re interesting ideas, which are maybe worth thinking about in the back of your mind, or maybe writing poems about or something. But they’re simply not topics for scientific inquiry at this point.

Charlatans in the Sciences

WOMAN: Noam, there’s an idea in behavioral science, tied in with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, that human compassion is a learned quality [the Swiss psychologist Piaget believed that mental development in children progresses through four genetically-determined stages]. Some politicians have seized upon this idea to promote the death penalty being used more often: like, either you catch the boat or you don’t, either you learn human compassion or you don’t—so if these murderers haven’t learned it, well, then it’s impossible to teach it to them now. I’m sure you’re familiar with these arguments?

 

This stuff doesn’t even rise to the level of idiocy—literally. I mean, if people want to have a fraudulent reason for defending the death penalty, fine, but there is no scientific basis. Take Piaget: Piaget’s work on developmental psychology was interesting, he had some interesting experiments and so on—the whole edifice has totally collapsed, nobody believes a word of it anymore. It turned out that all of the developmental “stages” are false: as you got better experiments, you could show that tiny infants could do all the things he postulated they couldn’t do at that stage. I mean, it was an interesting set of ideas, it wasn’t stupid—and people learned from the experimental work. But there’s nothing left of the picture. Zero.

As far as compassion being learned, any one of you knows as much as the fanciest scientist—and what you know is what you know by intuition and experience: you’ve seen children, maybe you’ve had children, you’ve played with them, you see the way they grow up. That’s what anybody knows, nobody knows any more than that. And the sciences have nothing more to tell you—and furthermore, there’s no indication that they ever will: it’s just way too far away. I mean, they may give you some statistical evidence, or maybe someday somebody will be able to show that this kind of background leads to more compassionate people than some other kind of background, that’s entirely possible. But that doesn’t mean there’s ever going to be an understanding of it.

Look, as science progresses, there will be attempts to draw political conclusions from it—but they’re going to be like this Piaget and the death penalty thing: that is, people who have some political agenda will find some total charlatan in the sciences who will tell them, “this is the basis for it.” But in terms of actual scientific knowledge, we aren’t even within super-telescope distance of touching any of these questions—there’s just nothing there. I mean, it’s not that you can’t do research on them: you can do descriptive research, you can do therapy, you can try to extend insights by making them a little bit more careful and controlled—but that’s about it.

It’s kind of like psychotherapy: some people say they get something out of psychotherapy, and maybe they do and maybe they don’t—but if they do, it’s not because there’s any science behind it: there’s no science behind it, any more than there is behind faith-healing. It’s just that somehow, various kinds of human interactions sometimes seem to work.

I remember an anthropologist friend of mine who’s worked in Southwest American Indian communities once described to me people being healed in tribal healing ceremonies: he said that if he didn’t see it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. So some person will be really ill—I mean, very serious problems, physical symptoms, he’s not making it up—and they will go through some community-type ritual which involves dancing, and singing, this and that and the other thing, and the person just gets better: you see it happening, nobody knows why it’s happening; maybe it’s something about empathy, or being part of a community, whatever it might be. Well, there’s about as much scientific understanding in that as there is in psychotherapy.

Or even just take narrow questions of medicine. You know how they decide what kinds of drugs are worth giving to you, say for heart problems? It’s not because the science of it is understood—they just do epidemiological studies with controlled populations, to see if one of the sample populations takes this drug and the other sample population takes that drug, which one lives a little bit longer. I mean, you can call that “science” if you like—but it’s the kind of science that can be done by anybody who can count basically, or who knows something about studying samples and things like that. It’s not because anyone understands the biology of these things—usually that’s barely understood, if at all.

So I think that whenever you hear people talking about things like “learning of compassion” and so on, a big red flag should go up.

 

WOMAN: You don’t think science will ever have much to say about human behavior—there’s just something spiritual at the human level that is undefinable by science?

 

It’s not just about humans that scientific insight is very limited—even simple physical things can’t be dealt with either. For instance, there’s a “three body problem” in physics: you can’t really figure out what happens when three bodies are moving, the equations are just too complicated. In fact, a physicist I was talking to recently gave me another example—he said if you take a cup of coffee with cream swirling around in it, presumably all of the natural laws are known, but you can’t solve the equations because they’re just too complex. Alright, that’s not human beings, that’s cream swirling around in a cup of coffee: we can’t figure out what’s going on.

The point is, we may know the laws, but the possibility of applying them, or of solving the equations, or of working out the problems, or of understanding what’s going on, declines very fast when we get past only the very simplest things.

Also, we probably don’t know all the laws—I mean, it’s very unlikely that we really do know the laws, even at the core of science. A physicist will tell you much more about this than I can, but take, say, the matter in the universe: more than 90 percent of the matter in the universe is what’s called “dark matter”—and it’s called “dark” because nobody knows what it is. It’s just sort of postulated that it exists, because if you don’t postulate it, everything blows up—so you have to assume that it’s there. And that’s over 90 percent of the matter in the universe: you don’t even know what it is. In fact, a new branch of physics has developed around superconductivity [“superconductivity” refers to the complete disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids at ultra-low temperatures], and while I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the claims, what some of the physicists working on it say is that they can now virtually prove (I mean, not quite prove, but come quite close to proving) that in this domain of highly condensed matter, there are principles which are literally not deducible from the known laws of nature: so you can’t reduce the principles of superconductivity to the known laws of nature. And again, that’s talking about really simple things, nothing like a complex organism.

Then when you begin to talk about how organisms develop—well, people say it’s “natural selection,” and that’s not false: undoubtedly Darwin was sort of right. But it could be that natural selection is only a very peripheral part of the development of organisms. So, there’s a channel of physical possibilities that physical laws make available, and within that channel of physical possibilities only certain things can happen—and within the range of those things that can happen, you are going to get effects due to natural selection. But the structure of the channel is totally unknown: I mean, nobody knows what kinds of laws apply to complex organisms, there are just the bare beginnings these days of the studies of self-organizing systems—how systems develop structure and complexity just by virtue of their nature. These things are just barely beginning to be understood—and we’re talking about things way simpler than human beings.

For instance, in neurophysiology, the organism that people study is a little worm called nematodes—and the reason they study nematodes is because they’re tiny, for one thing: they have a thousand cells, a three-day gestation period, three hundred neurons, and the entire wiring diagram of the three hundred neurons is known, so we know exactly how they’re all linked up together. But still, nobody can figure out why the stupid worm does what it does, whatever it does—I don’t know, probably turn left or something. Whatever it does is so far unexplained on the basis of a three-hundred-neuron system, where the entire structure of it is known, and the whole gestation period is completely known. It’s just too complicated, too many things are going on, there are too many chemical interactions. And this is three hundred neurons—it’s not 10¹¹ neurons, like in your head. So the difference is just so qualitatively huge that the fall-off in understanding when it comes to human beings is extremely dramatic.

And this is again why the study of language is so particularly interesting, because for some reason it seems like things in the inorganic world: there are aspects of it you can study by the methods of the sciences, which is curious—but still it’s like a little laser beam of light that goes through human behavior, leaving most things about language out. Like, science has nothing to say about what you and I are doing now—only about the mechanisms that are involved in it, not about how we do it. About that, there’s nothing to say, except again you can write poems. So the reach of scientific understanding is highly specific: very deep in the few areas where it goes, but they’re limited areas.

Now, when you say that human behavior might be beyond our inquiry, that’s possible—but I wouldn’t say that’s because of a “spiritual” property we have: the same thing might be true of large parts of nature. So there’s some capacity of the brain, some faculty of the mind that nobody understands, which allows us to do scientific inquiry—and like any other part of biology, it’s highly structured: it’s very good at certain things, and consequently very bad at other things. I mean, you can’t be good at something if you’re not bad at something else, those two things necessarily go together—like, if you’re a great weight-lifter, you’re going to be a rotten butterfly. You can’t be both, right? So if a human embryo can become a human being, it can’t become a fly—it’s too “weak” to become a fly, if you like, because it’s “strong” enough to become a human being: by a matter of logic, those things go together. So if you have a great capacity in one area, you’re going to have lousy capacities in another area. And if the human science-forming capacity is good enough to figure out quantum theory for some completely unexplained reason, it’s also going to be so bad that it’s not going to figure out lots of other things. And we don’t know what those other things are—but they might very well be most everything that we’re really interested in.

So when someone comes along claiming a scientific basis for some social policy or anything else having to do with human beings, I’d be very skeptical if I were you—because the knowledge just isn’t there right now, and may never be, either.

Adam Smith: Real and Fake

MAN: You said that classical liberalism was “anti-capitalist.” What did you mean by that?

 

Well, the underlying, fundamental principles of Adam Smith and other classical liberals were that people should be free: they shouldn’t be under the control of authoritarian institutions, they shouldn’t be subjected to things like division of labor, which destroys them. So look at Smith: why was he in favor of markets? He gave kind of a complicated argument for them, but at the core of it was the idea that if you had perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality—that’s why Adam Smith was in favor of markets.³⁴ Adam Smith was in favor of markets because he thought that people ought to be completely equal—completely equal—and that was because, as a classical liberal, he believed that people’s fundamental character involves notions like sympathy, and solidarity, the right to control their own work, and so on and so forth: all the exact opposite of capitalism.

In fact, there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism—and that’s why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now spout in his name.

So if you read George Stigler’s introduction to the bicentennial edition of The Wealth of Nations—it’s a big scholarly edition, University of Chicago Press, so it’s kind of interesting to look at—it is diametrically opposed to Smith’s text on point after point.³⁵ Smith is famous for what he wrote about division of labor: he’s supposed to have thought that division of labor was a great thing. Well, he didn’t: he thought division of labor was a terrible thing—in fact, he said that in any civilized society, the government is going to have to intervene to prevent division of labor from simply destroying people. Okay, now take a look at the University of Chicago’s index (you know, a detailed scholarly index) under “division of labor”: you won’t find an entry for that passage—it’s simply not there.³⁶

Well, that’s real scholarship: suppress the facts totally, present them as the opposite of what they are, and figure, “probably nobody’s going to read to page 473 anyhow, because I didn’t.” I mean, ask the guys who edited it if they ever read to page 473—answer: well, they probably read the first paragraph, then sort of remembered what they’d been taught in some college course.

But the point is, for classical liberals in the eighteenth century, there was a certain conception of just what human beings are like—namely, that what kind of creatures they are depends on the kind of work they do, and the kind of control they have over it, and their ability to act creatively and according to their own decisions and choices. And there was in fact a lot of very insightful comment about this at the time.

So for example, one of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von Humboldt (who incidentally is very admired by so-called “conservatives” today, because they don’t read him), pointed out that if a worker produces a beautiful object on command, you may “admire what the worker does, but you will despise what he is”—because that’s not really behaving like a human being, it’s just behaving like a machine. ³⁷ And that conception runs right through classical liberalism. In fact, even half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville [French politician and writer] pointed out that you can have systems in which “the art advances and the artisan recedes,” but that’s inhuman—because what you’re really interested in is the artisan, you’re interested in people, and for people to have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives they have to be in control of what they do, even if that happens to be economically less efficient.³⁸

Well, okay—obviously there’s just been a dramatic change in intellectual and cultural attitudes over the past couple centuries. But I think those classical liberal conceptions now have to be recovered, and the ideas at the heart of them should take root on a mass scale.

Now, the sources of power and authority that people could see in front of their eyes in the eighteenth century were quite different from the ones that we have today—back then it was the feudal system, and the Church, and the absolutist state that they were focused on; they couldn’t see the industrial corporation, because it didn’t exist yet. But if you take the basic classical liberal principles and apply them to the modern period, I think you actually come pretty close to the principles that animated revolutionary Barcelona in the late 1930s—to what’s called “anarcho-syndicalism.” [Anarcho-syndicalism is a form of libertarian socialism that was practiced briefly in regions of Spain during its revolution and civil war of 1936, until it was destroyed by the simultaneous efforts of the Soviet Union, the Western powers, and the Fascists.] I think that’s about as high a level as humans have yet achieved in trying to realize these libertarian principles, which in my view are the right ones. I mean, I’m not saying that everything that was done in that revolution was right, but in its general spirit and character, in the idea of developing the kind of society that Orwell saw and described in I think his greatest work, Homage to Catalonia—with popular control over all the institutions of society—okay, that’s the right direction in which to move, I think.³⁹

The Computer and the Crowbar

MAN: Noam, given what you were saying before about our limited understanding of human nature and social change, don’t you think there’s a caution there in general for people intervening in social patterns involving human beings?

 

Yes—any kind of drastic intervention in a human being, or a human society, is very dubious. Like, suppose you’ve got a personal computer and it isn’t working—it’s a bad idea to hit it with a crowbar. Maybe hitting it with a crowbar will by accident fix it, but it’s by and large not a good tactic—and human societies are much more complex than computers, as are human beings. So you really never understand what you’re doing. People have to carry out changes for themselves: they can’t be imposed upon them from above.

Take the Spanish Revolution again. I mean, that was just one year in a rather undeveloped country (though it had industry and so on), so it’s not like a model for the future. But a lot of interesting things happened in the course of it, and they didn’t just happen out of the blue—they happened out of maybe fifty years of serious organizing and experimentation, and attempts to try it, and failures, and being smashed up by the army, and then trying again. So when people say it was spontaneous, that’s just not true: it came from a lot of experience, and thinking, and working, and so on, and then when the revolutionary moment came and the existing system sort of collapsed, people had in their heads a picture of what to do, and had even tried it, and they then tried to implement it on a mass scale. And it was implemented in many different ways—there wasn’t any single pattern that was followed, the various collectives were experimenting on their own under different conditions, and finding out for themselves what worked.⁴⁰ And that’s a good example of how I think constructive change has to happen.

On the other hand, if an economist from, say, Harvard, goes to some Eastern European country today and tells them, “Here’s the way to develop,” that’s worse than hitting a computer with a crowbar: there are a million different social and cultural and economic factors they don’t understand, and any big change that’s pressed on people is very likely to be disastrous, no matter what it is—and of course, it always is disastrous. Incidentally, it’s disastrous for the victims—it’s usually very good for the people who are carrying out the experiments, which is why these experiments have been carried out for the last couple hundred years, since the British started them in India. I mean, every one of them is a disaster for the victims and they’re invariably good for the guys carrying out the experiments.⁴¹ Well, as far as people who are interested in social reform are concerned, what that suggests is, people better do it themselves, and a step at a time, under their own control. That’s in fact what was being attempted on a fairly local scale in Barcelona, and I think it’s the kind of thing we have to work towards now.