7

Intellectuals and Social Change

Based primarily on discussions at Woods Hole and Rowe, Massachusetts, in 1989, 1993 and 1994.

The Leninist/Capitalist Intelligentsia

MAN: Your vision of a libertarian socialism is a very appealing one—I’m wondering, what’s gone wrong?

 

First of all, maybe nothing’s gone wrong. You could argue that we haven’t been ready for it yet—but there was also a period when we weren’t ready for ending slavery either; when conditions, including subjective conditions, were such that abolition just wasn’t in the cards. So one could argue that conditions today are such that we need the degree of hierarchy and domination that exists in totalitarian institutions like capitalist enterprises, just in order to satisfy our needs—or else a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or some other authoritarian structure like that. I mean, I don’t believe a word of it—but the point is, the justification for any kind of power system has to be argued and proven to people before it has any claim to legitimacy. And those arguments haven’t been made out in this case.

If you look at what’s actually happened to the various efforts at libertarian socialism that have taken place around the world, the concentration of force and violence present in those situations has just been such that certain outcomes were virtually guaranteed, and consequently all incipient efforts at cooperative workers’ control, say, have simply been crushed. There have in fact been efforts in this direction for hundreds of years—the problem is, they regularly get destroyed. And often they’re destroyed by force.

The Bolsheviks [political party that seized power during the Russian Revolution and later became the Communist Party] are a perfect example. In the stages leading up to the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, there were incipient socialist institutions developing in Russia—workers’ councils, collectives, things like that [i.e. after a popular revolution first toppled the Tsar in February 1917]. And they survived to an extent once the Bolsheviks took over—but not for very long; Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated their power. I mean, you can argue about the justification for eliminating them, but the fact is that the socialist initiatives were pretty quickly eliminated.

Now, people who want to justify it say, “The Bolsheviks had to do it”—that’s the standard justification: Lenin and Trotsky had to do it, because of the contingencies of the civil war, for survival, there wouldn’t have been food otherwise, this and that. Well, obviously the question there is, was that true? To answer that, you’ve got to look at the historical facts: I don’t think it was true. In fact, I think the incipient socialist structures in Russia were dismantled before the really dire conditions arose. Alright, here you get into a question where you don’t want to be too cavalier about it—it’s a question of historical fact, and of what the people were like, what they were thinking and so on, and you’ve got to find out what the answer is, you can’t just guess. But from reading their own writings, my feeling is that Lenin and Trotsky knew what they were doing, it was conscious and understandable, and they even had a theory behind it, both a moral theory and a socio-economic theory.¹

First of all, as orthodox Marxists, they didn’t really believe that a socialist revolution was possible in Russia, because Russia was just a peasant backwater: it wasn’t the kind of advanced industrial society where in their view the coming socialist revolution was supposed to happen. So when the Bolsheviks got power, they were hoping to carry out kind of a holding action and wait for “the iron laws of history” to grind out the revolution in Germany, where it was supposed to happen by historical necessity, and then Russia would continue to be a backwater, but it would then develop with German help.²

Well, it didn’t end up happening in Germany: there was a revolution, in January 1919, but it was wiped out, and the German working class was suppressed. So at that point, Lenin and Trotsky were stuck holding the bag—and they basically ended up trying to run a peasant society by violence: since Russia was such a deeply impoverished Third World society, they thought it was necessary just to beat the people into development. So they took steps to turn the workers into what they called a “labor army,” under control of a “maximal leader,” who was going to force the country to industrialize under what they themselves referred to as “state-capitalism.” ³ Their hope was that this would carry Russia over the early stages of capitalism and industrialization, until it reached a point of material development where then the iron laws of history would start to work as the Master said they were going to, and socialism would finally be achieved [i.e. Karl Marx theorized that history progresses according to natural “laws,” and that the advanced stages of capitalism will inevitably lead to socialism].

So there was a theory behind their actions, and in fact a moral principle—namely, it will be better for people in the long run if we do this. But what they did, I think, was to set the framework for a totalitarian system, which of course Stalin then accelerated.

 

MAN: Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolsheviks’ actions as an honest mistake, a “historical accident” maybe—or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show?

 

Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself—the very idea that a “vanguard party” can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they’re too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it’s going to lead them towards is “I rule you with a whip.” Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves—I think that’s kind of like an obvious sociological truism.

And actually, if you look back, that was in fact Bakunin’s prediction half a century before—he said this was exactly what was going to happen. [Bakunin was a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, and with Marx a leading figure in the main socialist labor organization of the time, the First International.] I mean, Bakunin was talking about the people around Marx, this was before Lenin was born, but his prediction was that the nature of the intelligentsia as a formation in modern industrial society is that they are going to try to become the social managers. Now, they’re not going to become the social managers because they own capital, and they’re not going to become the social managers because they’ve got a lot of guns. They are going to become the social managers because they can control, organize, and direct what’s called “knowledge”—they have the skills to process information, and to mobilize support for decision-making, and so on and so forth. And Bakunin predicted that these people would fall into two categories. On the one hand, there would be the “left” intellectuals, who would try to rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements, and if they could gain power, they would then beat the people into submission and try to control them. On the other hand, if they found that they couldn’t get power that way themselves, they would become the servants of what we would nowadays call “state-capitalism,” though Bakunin didn’t use the term. And either of these two categories of intellectuals, he said, would be “beating the people with the people’s stick”—that is, they’d be presenting themselves as representatives of the people, so they’d be holding the people’s stick, but they would be beating the people with it.⁴

Well, Bakunin didn’t go on with this, but I think it follows from his analysis that it’s extremely easy to shift from one position to the other—it’s extremely easy to undergo what’s called the “God That Failed” syndrome. You start off as basically a Leninist, someone who’s going to become part of what Bakunin called the “Red Bureaucracy,” you see that power doesn’t lie that way, and then you very easily become an ideologist of the right, and devote your life to exposing the sins of your former comrades, who haven’t yet seen the light and shifted to where power really lies. And you barely have to change at all, really, you’re just operating under a different formal power structure. In fact, we’re seeing it right now in the former Soviet Union: the same guys who were Communist thugs, Stalinist thugs two years back are now running banks, they’re enthusiastic free-marketeers, praising America and so on. And this has been going on for forty years—it’s become kind of a joke.

Now, Bakunin didn’t say it’s the nature of people that this will happen. I mean, I don’t know how much he thought it through, but what we should say is that a Red Bureaucracy or its state-capitalist commissar-class equivalent is not going to take over because that’s the nature of people—it’s that the ones who don’t do it will be cast by the wayside, the ones who do do it will make out. The ones who are ruthless and brutal and harsh enough to seize power are the ones who are going to survive. The ones who try to associate themselves with popular organizations and help the general population itself become organized, who try to assist popular movements in that kind of way, they’re just not going to survive under these situations of concentrated power.

Marxist “Theory” and Intellectual Fakery

WOMAN: Noam, apart from the idea of the “vanguard,” I’m interested why you’re so critical of the whole broader category of Marxist analysis in general—like people in the universities and so on who refer to themselves as general—like people in the universities and so on who refer to themselves as “Marxists.” I’ve noticed you’re never very happy with it.

 

Well, I guess one thing that’s unattractive to me about “Marxism” is the very idea that there is such a thing. It’s a rather striking fact that you don’t find things like “Marxism” in the sciences—like, there isn’t any part of physics which is “Einsteinianism,” let’s say, or “Planckianism” or something like that. It doesn’t make any sense—because people aren’t gods: they just discover things, and they make mistakes, and their graduate students tell them why they’re wrong, and then they go on and do things better the next time. But there are no gods around. I mean, scientists do use the terms “Newtonianism” and “Darwinism,” but nobody thinks of those as doctrines that you’ve got to somehow be loyal to, and figure out what the Master thought, and what he would have said in this new circumstance and so on. That sort of thing is just completely alien to rational existence, it only shows up in irrational domains.

So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They’re theology, so they’re whatever you think of theology; I don’t think much of it. In fact, in my view that’s exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.

So part of my problem is just its existence: it seems to me that even to discuss something like “Marxism” is already making a mistake. Like, we don’t discuss “Planckism.” Why not? Because it would be crazy. Planck [German physicist] had some things to say, and some of them are right, and those were absorbed into later science, and some of them are wrong, and they were improved on. It’s not that Planck wasn’t a great man—all kinds of great discoveries, very smart, mistakes, this and that. That’s really the way we ought to look at it, I think. As soon as you set up the idea of “Marxism” or “Freudianism” or something, you’ve already abandoned rationality.

It seems to me the question a rational person ought to ask is, what is there in Marx’s work that’s worth saving and modifying, and what is there that ought to be abandoned? Okay, then you look and you find things. I think Marx did some very interesting descriptive work on nineteenth-century history. He was a very good journalist. When he describes the British in India, or the Paris Commune [70-day French workers’ revolution in 1871], or the parts of Capital that talk about industrial London, a lot of that is kind of interesting—I think later scholarship has improved it and changed it, but it’s quite interesting.⁵

He had an abstract model of capitalism which—I’m not sure how valuable it is, to tell you the truth. It was an abstract model, and like any abstract model, it’s not really intended to be descriptively accurate in detail, it’s intended to sort of pull out some crucial features and study those. And you have to ask in the case of an abstract model, how much of the complex reality does it really capture? That’s questionable in this case—first of all, it’s questionable how much of nineteenth-century capitalism it captured, and I think it’s even more questionable how much of late-twentieth-century capitalism it captures.

There are supposed to be laws [i.e. of history and economics]. I can’t understand them, that’s all I can say; it doesn’t seem to me that there are any laws that follow from it. Not that I know of any better laws, I just don’t think we know about “laws” in history.

There’s nothing about socialism in Marx, he wasn’t a socialist philosopher—there are about five sentences in Marx’s whole work that refer to socialism. ⁶ He was a theorist of capitalism. I think he introduced some interesting concepts at least, which every sensible person ought to have mastered and employ, notions like class, and relations of production . . .

 

WOMAN: Dialectics?

 

Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually—I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels.⁷ And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about “dialectics”—I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know.

I’ll tell you the honest truth: I’m kind of simple-minded when it comes to these things. Whenever I hear a four-syllable word I get skeptical, because I want to make sure you can’t say it in monosyllables. Don’t forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really hard to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.

So take what’s called “literary theory”—I mean, I don’t think there’s any such thing as literary “theory,” any more than there’s cultural “theory” or historical “theory.” If you’re just reading books and talking about them and getting people to understand them, okay, you can be terrific at that, like Edmund Wilson was terrific at it—but he didn’t have a literary theory. On the other hand, if you want to mingle in the same room with that physicist over there who’s talking about quarks, you’d better have a complicated theory too that nobody can understand: he has a complicated theory that nobody can understand, why shouldn’t I have a complicated theory that nobody can understand? If someone came along with a theory of history, it would be the same: either it would be truisms, or maybe some smart ideas, like somebody could say, “Why not look at economic factors lying behind the Constitution?” or something like that—but there’d be nothing there that couldn’t be said in monosyllables.

In fact, it’s extremely rare, outside of the natural sciences, to find things that can’t be said in monosyllables: there are just interesting, simple ideas, which are often extremely difficult to come up with and hard to work out. Like, if you want to try to understand how the modern industrial economy developed, let’s say, that can take a lot of work. But the “theory” will be extremely thin, if by “theory” we mean something with principles which are not obvious when you first look at them, and from which you can deduce surprising consequences and try to confirm the principles—you’re not going to find anything like that in the social world.

Incidentally, I should say that my own political writing is often denounced from both the left and the right for being non-theoretical—and that’s completely correct. But it’s exactly as theoretical as anyone else’s, I just don’t call it “theoretical,” I call it “trivial”—which is in fact what it is. I mean, it’s not that some of these people whose stuff is considered “deep theory” and so on don’t have some interesting things to say. Often they have very interesting things to say. But it’s nothing that you couldn’t say at the level of a high school student, or that a high school student couldn’t figure out if they had the time and support and a little bit of training.

I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren’t transparent—because the fact of the matter is that in most areas of life, we just don’t understand anything very much. There are some areas, like say, quantum physics, where they’re not faking. But most of the time it’s just fakery, I think: anything that’s at all understood can probably be described pretty simply. And when words like “dialectics” come along, or “hermeneutics,” and all this kind of stuff that’s supposed to be very profound, like Goering, “I reach for my revolver.”

 

MAN: I find it very reinforcing that you don’t understand the word “dialectics,” it sort of validates me.

 

I’m not saying that it doesn’t have any meaning—you observe people using the term and they look like they’re communicating. But it’s like when I watch people talking Turkish: something’s going on, but I’m not part of it.

Actually, occasionally in interviews I’ve said this about not understanding “dialectics,” and I get long letters back from people saying, “You don’t understand, here’s what ‘dialectical’ is”—and either it’s incomprehensible, or else it’s trivial. So maybe I’ve got a gene missing or something—like people can be tone-deaf, they just can’t hear the music. But everything I encounter in these fields either seems to be sort of interesting, but pretty obvious once you see it—maybe you didn’t see it at first, and somebody had to point it out to you—or else just incomprehensible.

I’m skeptical: I think one has a right to be skeptical when you don’t understand something. I mean, when I look at a page of, say, quantum electrodynamics, I don’t understand a word of it. But I know what I would have to do to get to understand it, and I’m pretty confident that I could get to understand it—I’ve understood other complicated things. So I figure if I bothered to put myself through the discipline, and I studied the early stuff and the later stuff, I’d finally get to the point where I understood it. Or I could go to someone in the Physics Department and say, “Tell me why everybody’s excited about this stuff,” and they could adapt it to my level and tell me how to pursue it further. Maybe I wouldn’t understand it very deeply, or I couldn’t have invented it or something, but I’d at least begin to understand it. On the other hand, when I look at a page of Marxist philosophy or literary theory, I have the feeling that I could stare at it for the rest of my life and I’d never understand it—and I don’t know how to proceed to get to understand it any better, I don’t even know what steps I could take.

I mean, it’s possible that these fields are beyond me, maybe I’m not smart enough or something. But that would have kind of a funny conclusion—it’s nothing to do with me. That would mean that somehow in these domains people have been able to create something that’s more complex than physics and mathematics—because those are subjects I think I could get to understand. And I just don’t believe that, frankly: I don’t believe that literary theorists or Marxian philosophers have advanced to some new intellectual level that transcends century after century of hard intellectual work.

 

MAN: Do you think the same thing about philosophy in general?

 

There are parts of philosophy which I think I understand, and it’s most of classical philosophy. And there are things that I don’t understand, because they don’t make any sense—and that’s okay too, these are hard questions. I mean, it’s not necessarily a criticism to say that something doesn’t make sense: there are subjects that it’s hard to talk sensibly about. But if I read, say, Russell, or analytic philosophy, or Wittgenstein and so on, I think I can come to understand what they’re saying, and I can see why I think it’s wrong, as I often do. But when I read, you know, Derrida, or Lacan, or Althusser, or any of these—I just don’t understand it. It’s like words passing in front of my eyes: I can’t follow the arguments, I don’t see the arguments, anything that looks like a description of a fact looks wrong to me. So maybe I’m missing a gene or something, it’s possible. But my honest opinion is, I think it’s all fraud.

 

MAN: I think you may be glorifying the scientists a bit by projecting them as somehow kind of pure. For example, take Newtonian mechanics: Einstein came along and showed how it was wrong, but over the years the scientific community did refer to it as “Newtonian” mechanics.

 

That’s an interesting case, because Newtonian mechanics was treated as kind of holy—because it was such a revolutionary development. I mean, it was really the first time in human history that people ever had an explanation of things in any deep sense: it was so comprehensive, and so simple, and so far-reaching in its consequences that it almost looked like it was necessary. And in fact, it was treated that way for a long time—so much so that Kant, for example, regarded it as the task of philosophy to derive Newtonian physics from a priori principles, and to show that it was certain truth, on a par with mathematics. And it really wasn’t until the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century that the fallacy of those conceptions became quite clear, and with that realization there was a real advance in our conception of what “science” is. So science did have kind of a religious character for a period, you’re right—and that was something we had to get ourselves out of, I think. It doesn’t happen anymore.

Ideological Control in the Sciences and Humanities

MAN: Would you say that as academic disciplines, the sciences are fundamentally different from the humanities and social sciences in terms of ideological control? There don’t seem to be the same kinds of barriers to inquiry or the same commitment to indoctrination in the scientific fields as there are in other areas, like in economics or political science, for instance.

 

Well, I think there was an ideological control problem in the sciences, it’s just that we transcended it—Galileo faced it, for example [the Italian astronomer and scientist was arrested by the Roman Catholic Church in 1633 and compelled to renounce his conclusion that the earth revolves around the sun]. You go back a couple centuries in the West and the ideological control problem in the sciences was severe: Descartes is alleged to have destroyed the final volume of his treatise on the world, the one that was supposed to deal with the human mind, because he learned of the fate of Galileo. That’s the analog to death squads—the Inquisition was doing precisely that. Okay, that’s passed in the West at least, but not everywhere.

 

MAN: But why has it passed?

 

Well, I think there are a few reasons. One is just a general increase in freedom and enlightenment, won through popular struggles over centuries—we’ve become a much freer society than we were in absolutist times. And intellectuals have often played a role in that, breaking down ideological barriers and creating kind of a space for greater freedom of thought, for instance during the Enlightenment [in the eighteenth century]. That often took a lot of courage and quite a struggle, and it goes on until today.

There are also utilitarian reasons. It turns out that, especially since the mid-nineteenth century, the ability to gain a deeper understanding of the physical world through modern science has interacted critically with modern industrial development: progress in the sciences has contributed materially to private profit-making, private power. So there are utilitarian reasons for allowing freedom of scientific inquiry, but I wouldn’t over-exaggerate them—I think what’s happened with the sciences is a lot like the process that’s led to freedom in other domains, like why we don’t have slavery, let’s say, or why after 150 years of American history women won the right to vote [in 1920].

And also, remember, after the great scientific revolutions that led to the Enlightenment, it got to the point where you couldn’t do science anymore if you were subjected to the kinds of doctrinal controls that remain quite effective in other fields. I mean, if you’re a physicist after Newton trying to spin off ideological fanaticism, you’re just out of the game—progress has been too much. That’s very different from the social sciences and the humanities—you can tell falsehoods forever in those fields and nothing will ever stop you, like you don’t have Mother Nature around keeping you honest. And the result is, there’s a real difference in the two cultures.

So when you go to graduate school in the natural sciences, you’re immediately brought into critical inquiry—and in fact, what you’re learning is kind of a craft; you don’t really teach science, people sort of get the idea how to do it as apprentices, hopefully by working with good people. But the goal is to learn how to do creative work, and to challenge everything. That’s very different from the humanities and the social sciences, where what you’re supposed to do is absorb a body of knowledge, and then pick yourself a little area in it and for the rest of your life work on that. I mean, the way you become a highly respected scholar in the humanities, say, is to pick some arcane area, like English novels from 1720 to 1790, and get to know more of the data about that than any other human being in history. So you know who copied this word from that, and so on. A lot of it is kind of mindless, but that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to know. And there’s really very little intellectual challenge: the only way you could be wrong is if you got a comma out of place—and in fact, that’s considered the worst crime. I’m kind of caricaturing it a bit—but frankly I think it works this way. And certainly the sciences are very different.

The Function of the Schools

WOMAN: But I guess I don’t quite see how this ideological control mechanism actually works in the humanities and social sciences—I mean, how exactly is it that the schools end up being an indoctrination system? Can you describe the process in more detail?

 

Well, the main point I think is that the entire school curriculum, from kindergarten through graduate school, will be tolerated only so long as it continues to perform its institutional role. So take the universities, which in many respects are not very different from the media in the way they function—though they’re a much more complex system, so they’re harder to study systematically. Universities do not generate nearly enough funds to support themselves from tuition money alone: they’re parasitic institutions that need to be supported from the outside, and that means they’re dependent on wealthy alumni, on corporations, and on the government, which are groups with the same basic interests. Well, as long as the universities serve those interests, they’ll be funded. If they ever stop serving those interests, they’ll start to get in trouble.

So for example, in the late 1960s it began to appear that the universities were not adequately performing that service—students were asking questions, they were thinking independently, they were rejecting a lot of the Establishment value-system, challenging all sorts of things—and the corporations began to react to that, they began to react in a number of ways. For one thing, they began to develop alternative programs, like I.B.M. began to set up kind of a vocational training program to produce engineers on their own: if M.I.T. wasn’t going to do it for them the way they wanted, they’d do it themselves—and that would have meant they’d stop funding M.I.T. Well, of course things never really got out of hand in the Sixties, so the moves in that direction were very limited. But those are the kinds of pressures there are.⁸

And in fact, you can even see similar things right now. Take all this business about Allan Bloom and that book everybody’s been talking about, The Closing of the American Mind.⁹ It’s this huge best-seller, I don’t know if you’ve bothered looking at it—it’s mind-bogglingly stupid. I read it once in the supermarket while my . . . I hate to say it, while my wife was shopping I stood there and read the damn thing; it takes about fifteen minutes to read.

 

MAN: You read two thousand words a minute?

 

I mean, “read”—you know, sort of turn the pages to see if there’s anything there that isn’t totally stupid. But what that book is basically saying is that education ought to be set up like some sort of variant of the Marine Corps, in which you just march the students through a canon of “great thoughts” that are picked out for everybody. So some group of people will say, “Here are the great thoughts, the great thoughts of Western civilization are in this corpus; you guys sit there and learn them, read them and learn them, and be able to repeat them.” That’s the kind of model Bloom is calling for.

Well, anybody who’s ever thought about education or been involved in it, or even gone to school, knows that the effect of that is that students will end up knowing and understanding virtually nothing. It doesn’t matter how great the thoughts are, if they are simply imposed upon you from the outside and you’re forced through them step by step, after you’re done you’ll have forgotten what they are. I mean, I’m sure that every one of you has taken any number of courses in school in which you worked, and you did your homework, you passed the exam, maybe you even got an “A”—and a week later you couldn’t even remember what the course was about. You only learn things and learn how to think if there’s some purpose for learning, some motivation that’s coming out of you somehow. In fact, all of the methodology in education isn’t really much more than that—getting students to want to learn. Once they want to learn, they’ll do it.

But the point is that this model Bloom and all these other people are calling for is just a part of the whole method of imposing discipline through the schools, and of preventing people from learning how to think for themselves. So what you do is make students go through and sort of memorize a canon of what are called “Good Books,” which you force on them, and then somehow great things are supposed to happen. It’s a completely stupid form of education, but I think that’s part of why it’s selected and supported, and why there’s so much hysteria that it’s been questioned in past years—just because it’s very functional to train people and discipline them in ways like this. The popularity of the Bloom thing, I would imagine, is mostly a reaction to the sort of liberating effect that the student movement of the Sixties and other challenges to the schools and universities began to have.

 

WOMAN: All of Allan Bloom’s “great thoughts” are by elite white males.

 

Yeah, okay—but it wouldn’t even matter if he had some different array of material, it really wouldn’t matter. The idea that there’s some array of “the deep thoughts,” and we smart people will pick them out and you dumb guys will learn them—or memorize them at least, because you don’t really learn them if they’re just forced on you—that’s nonsense. If you’re serious about, say, reading Plato,¹⁰ it’s fine to read Plato—but you try to figure out what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s a better way of looking at it, why was he saying this when he should have been saying something else, what grotesque error of reasoning did he make over here, and so on and so forth. That’s the way you would read serious work, just like you would in the sciences. But you’re not supposed to read it that way here, you’re supposed to read it because it’s the truth, or it’s the great thoughts or something. And that’s kind of like the worst form of theology.

The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how you read it. Now, I don’t mean comic books, but there’s a lot of cultural wealth out there from all over the place, and to learn what it means for something to be culturally rich, you can explore almost anywhere: there’s no fixed subset that is the basis of truth and understanding. I mean, you can read the “Good Books,” and memorize what they said, and forget them a week later—if it doesn’t mean anything to you personally, you’d might as well not have read them. And it’s very hard to know what’s going to mean something to different people. But there’s plenty of exciting literature around in the world, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that unless you’ve read the Greeks and Dante and so on, you’ve missed things—I mean, yeah, you’ve missed things, but you’ve also missed things if you haven’t learned something about other cultural traditions too.

Just take a look at philosophy, for example, which is a field that I know something about: some of the best, most exciting, most active philosophers in the contemporary world, people who’ve made a real impact on the field, couldn’t tell Plato from Aristotle, except for what they remember from some Freshman course they once took. Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t read Plato and Aristotle—sure, there are millions of things you should read; nobody’s ever going to read more than a tiny fraction of the things you wished you knew. But just reading them does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow, otherwise it just passes through your mind and disappears. And there’s nothing valuable about that—it has basically the effect of learning the catechism, or memorizing the Constitution or something like that.

Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves—and that’s a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you’re looking at has to somehow catch people’s interest and make them want to think, and make them want to pursue and explore. And just regurgitating “Good Books” is absolutely the worst way to do it—that’s just a way of turning people into automata. You may call that an education if you want, but it’s really the opposite of an education, which is why people like William Bennett [Reagan’s Secretary of Education] and Allan Bloom and these others are all so much in favor of it.

 

WOMAN: Are you saying that the real purpose of the universities and the schools is just to indoctrinate people—and really not much else?

 

Well, I’m not quite saying that. Like, I wouldn’t say that no meaningful work takes place in the schools, or that they only exist to provide manpower for the corporate system or something like that—these are very complex systems, after all. But the basic institutional role and function of the schools, and why they’re supported, is to provide an ideological service: there’s a real selection for obedience and conformity. And I think that process starts in kindergarten, actually.

Let me just tell you a personal story. My oldest, closest friend is a guy who came to the United States from Latvia when he was fifteen, fleeing from Hitler. He escaped to New York with his parents and went to George Washington High School, which in those days at least was the school for bright Jewish kids in New York City. And he once told me that the first thing that struck him about American schools was the fact that if he got a “C” in a course, nobody cared, but if he came to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal’s office—and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what’s valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line, even if it’s an intellectual assembly line. The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told, and to be where you’re supposed to be. The values are, you’re going to be a factory worker somewhere—maybe they’ll call it a university—but you’re going to be following somebody else’s orders, and just doing your work in some prescribed way. And what matters is discipline, not figuring things out for yourself, or understanding things that interest you—those are kind of marginal: just make sure you meet the requirements of a factory.

Well, that’s pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that’s a tragedy, that’s a crime—because you’re not supposed to think, you’re supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require.

And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years—that’s the way I did it, for example. Like, you’re told by some stupid teacher, “Do this,” which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you your letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, “Okay, I’ll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead”; others do it because they’ve just internalized the values—but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you’re out: you ask too many questions and you’re going to get in trouble.

Now, there are also people who don’t go along—and they’re called “behavior problems,” or “unmotivated,” or things like that. Well, you don’t want to be too glib about it—there are children with behavior problems—but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don’t like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I’ve taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don’t take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they’re a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That’s what real education would be about, in fact.

Actually, I happen to have been very lucky myself and gone to an experimental-progressive Deweyite school, from about the time I was age one-and-a-half to twelve [John Dewey was an American philosopher and educational reformer]. And there it was done routinely: children were encouraged to challenge everything, and you sort of worked on your own, you were supposed to think things through for yourself—it was a real experience. And it was quite a striking change when it ended and I had to go to the city high school, which was the pride of the city school system. It was the school for academically-oriented kids in Philadelphia—and it was the dumbest, most ridiculous place I’ve ever been, it was like falling into a black hole or something. For one thing, it was extremely competitive—because that’s one of the best ways of controlling people. So everybody was ranked, and you always knew exactly where you were: are you third in the class, or maybe did you move down to fourth? All of this stuff is put into people’s heads in various ways in the schools—that you’ve got to beat down the person next to you, and just look out for yourself. And there are all sorts of other things like that too.

But the point is, there’s nothing necessary about them in education. I know, because I went through an alternative to it—so it can certainly be done. But given the external power structure of the society in which they function now, the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated—and as long as the schools fulfill that role, they’ll be supported.

Now, of course, it doesn’t work a hundred percent—so you do get some people all the way through who don’t go along. And as I was saying, in the sciences at least, people have to be trained for creativity and disobedience—because there is no other way you can do science. But in the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, that’s much less true—there people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much. So you really do get a very different kind of education. And people who break out of line are weeded out or beaten back in all kinds of ways.

I mean, it’s not very abstract: if you’re, say, a young person in college, or in journalism, or for that matter a fourth grader, and you have too much of an independent mind, there’s a whole variety of devices that will be used to deflect you from that error—and if you can’t be controlled, to marginalize or just eliminate you. In fourth grade, you’re a “behavior problem.” In college, you may be “irresponsible,” or “erratic,” or “not the right kind of student.” If you make it to the faculty, you’ll fail in what’s sometimes called “collegiality,” getting along with your colleagues. If you’re a young journalist and you’re pursuing stories that the people at the managerial level above you understand, either intuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to work at the Police desk, and advised that you don’t have “proper standards of objectivity.” There’s a whole range of these techniques.

Now, we live in a free society, so you don’t get sent to gas chambers and they don’t send the death squads after you—as is commonly done, and not far from here, say in Mexico.¹¹ But there are nevertheless quite successful devices, both subtle and extreme, to ensure that doctrinal correctness is not seriously infringed upon.

Subtler Methods of Control

Let me just start with some of the more subtle ways; I’ll give you an example. After I finished college, I went to this program at Harvard called the “Society of Fellows”—which is kind of this elite finishing school, where they teach you to be a Harvard or Yale professor, and to drink the right wine, and say the right things, and so on and so forth. I mean, you had all of the resources of Harvard available to you and your only responsibility was to show up at a dinner once a week, so it was great for just doing your work if you wanted to. But the real point of the whole thing was socialization: teaching the right values.

For instance, I remember there was a lot of anglophilia at Harvard at the time—you were supposed to wear British clothes, and pretend you spoke with a British accent, that sort of stuff. In fact, there were actually guys there who I thought were British, who had never been outside of the United States. If any of you have studied literature or history or something, you might recognize some of this, those are the places you usually find it. Well, somehow I managed to survive that, I don’t know how exactly—but most didn’t. And what I discovered is that a large part of education at the really elite institutions is simply refinement, teaching the social graces: what kind of clothes you should wear, how to drink port the right way, how to have polite conversation without talking about serious topics, but of course indicating that you could talk about serious topics if you were so vulgar as to actually do it, all kinds of things which an intellectual is supposed to know how to do. And that was really the main point of the program, I think.

Actually, there are much more important cases too—and they’re even more revealing about the role of the elite schools. For example, the 1930s were a period of major labor strife and labor struggle in the U.S., and it was scaring the daylights out of the whole business community here—because labor was finally winning the right to organize, and there were other legislative victories as well. And there were a lot of efforts to try to overcome this, but one of them was that Harvard introduced a “Trade Union Program.” What it did was to bring in rising young people in the labor movement—you know, the guy who looks like he’s going to be the Local president next year—and have them stay in dorms in the Business School, and put them through a whole socialization process, help them come to share some of the values and understandings of the elite, teach them that “Our job is to work together,” “We’re all in this together,” and so on and so forth. I mean, there are always two lines: for the public it’s, “We’re all in this together, management and labor are cooperating, joint enterprise, harmony” and so on—meanwhile business is fighting a vicious class war on the side. And that effort to socialize and integrate union activists—well, I’ve never measured its success, but I’m sure it was very successful. And the process was similar to what I experienced and saw a Harvard education to be myself.

Or let me tell you another story I heard about twenty years ago from a black civil rights activist who came up to study at Harvard Law School—it kind of illustrates some of the other pressures that are around. This guy gave a talk in which he described how the kids starting off at Harvard Law School come in with long hair and backpacks and social ideals, they’re all going to go into public service law to change the world and so on—that’s the first year. Around springtime, the recruiters come for the cushy summer jobs in the Wall Street law firms, and these students figure, “What the heck, I can put on a tie and a jacket and shave for one day, just because I need that money and why shouldn’t I have it?” So they put on the tie and the jacket for that one day, and they get the job, and then they go off for the summer—and when they come back in the fall, it’s ties, and jackets, and obedience, a shift of ideology. Sometimes it takes two years.

Well, obviously he was over-drawing the point—but those sorts of factors also are very influential. I mean, I’ve felt it all my life: it’s extremely easy to be sucked into the dominant culture, it can be very appealing. There are a lot of rewards. And what’s more, the people you meet don’t look like bad people—you don’t want to sit there and insult them. Maybe they’re perfectly nice people. So you try to be friends, maybe you even are friends. Well, you begin to conform, you begin to adapt, you begin to smooth off the harsher edges—and pretty soon it’s just happened, it kind of seeps in. And education at a place like Harvard is largely geared to that, to a remarkable extent in fact.

And there are many other subtle mechanisms which contribute to ideological control as well, of course—including just the fact that the universities support and encourage people to occupy themselves with irrelevant and innocuous work.

Or just take the fact that certain topics are unstudiable in the schools— because they don’t fall anywhere: the disciplines are divided in such a way that they simply will not be studied. That’s something that’s extremely important. So for example, take a question that people were very worried about in the United States for years and years—the economic competitiveness of Japan. Now, I always thought the talk about “American declinism” and “Japan as Number 1” was vastly overblown, just as the later idea of a “Japanese decline” is wildly exaggerated. In fact, Japan retains a very considerable edge in crucial areas of manufacturing, especially in high tech. They did get in trouble because of a huge stock market and real estate boom that collapsed, but serious economists don’t believe that Japan has really lost competitiveness in these areas.¹²

Well, why has Japan been so economically competitive? I mean, there are a lot of reasons why, but the major reason is very clear. Both Japan and the United States (and every other industrial country in the world, actually) have essentially state-coordinated economies—but our traditional system of state coordination is less efficient than theirs.

Remember, talk about “free trade” is fine in editorials, but nobody actually practices it in reality: in every modern economy, the taxpayers are made to subsidize the private corporations, who then keep the profits for themselves. But the point is, different countries have different ways of arranging those subsidies. So take a look at the competitive parts of the U.S. economy, the parts that are successful in international trade—they’re all state-subsidized. Capital-intensive agriculture is a well-known case: American capital-intensive agriculture is able to compete internationally because the state purchases the excess products and stores them, and subsidizes the energy inputs, and so on.

Or look at high-technology industry: research and development for high technology is very costly, and corporations don’t make any profits off it directly—so therefore the taxpayer is made to pay for it. And in the United States, that’s traditionally been done largely through the Pentagon system: the Pentagon pays for high-tech research and development, then if something comes out of it which happens to be marketable, it’s handed over to private corporations so they can make the profits. And the research mostly isn’t weapons, incidentally—it’s things like computers, which are the center of any contemporary industrial economy, and were developed through the Pentagon system in the United States. And the same is true of virtually all high tech, in fact. And furthermore, there’s another important subsidy there: the Pentagon also purchases the output of high-technology industry, it serves as a state-guaranteed market for waste-production—that’s what contracts for developing weapons systems are; I mean, you don’t actually use the weapons you’re paying for, you just destroy them in a couple years and replace them with the next array of even more advanced stuff you don’t need. Well, all of that is just perfect for pouring continuous taxpayer subsidies into high-tech industry, and it’s because of these enormous subsidies that American high tech is competitive internationally.

Well, Japan has run its economy pretty much the same way we do, except with one crucial difference. Instead of using the military system, the way they’ve worked their public subsidies in Japan is they have a government ministry, M.I.T.I. [the Ministry of International Trade and Industry], which sits down with the big corporations and conglomerates and banking firms, and plans their economic system for the next couple years—they plan how much consumption there’s going to be, and how much investment there’s going to be, and where the investment should go, and so on. Well, that’s more efficient. And since Japan is a very disciplined and obedient society culturally, the population there just does what they tell them, and nobody ever asks any questions about it.

Alright, to see how this difference played out over the years, just look at the “Star Wars” program in the United States, for example. Star Wars [the Strategic Defense Initiative] is the pretext for a huge amount of research and development spending through the Pentagon system here—it’s our way of funding the new generation of computer technology, lasers, new software, and so on. Well, if you look at the distribution of expenses for Star Wars, it turns out that it was virtually the same allocation of funding as was made through the Japanese state-directed economic system in the same time period: in those same years, M.I.T.I. made about the same judgments about how to distribute their resources as we did, they spent about the same proportion of money in lasers, and the same proportion in software, and so on.¹³ And the reason is that all of these planners make approximately the same judgments about the likely new technologies.

Well, why was Japan so competitive with the U.S. economically, despite highly inauspicious conditions? There are a lot of reasons. But the main reason is that they directed their public subsidy straight to the commercial market. So to work on lasers, they tried to figure out ways of producing lasers for the commercial market, and they do it pretty well. But when we want to develop lasers for the commercial market, what we do is pour the money into the Pentagon, which then tries to work out a way to use a laser to shoot down a missile ten thousand miles away—and if they can work that out, then they hope there’ll be some commercial spin-offs that come out of it all. Okay, that’s less efficient. And since the Japanese are no dumber than we are, and they have an efficient system of state-coordination while we have an inefficient one, over the years they succeeded in the economic competition.

Well, these are major phenomena of modern life—but where do you go to study them in the universities or the academic profession? That’s a very interesting question. You don’t go to the economics department, because that’s not what they look at: the real hot-shot economics departments are interested in abstract models of how a pure free-enterprise economy works—you know, generalizations to ten-dimensional space of some nonexistent free-market system. You don’t go to the political science department, because they’re concerned with electoral statistics, and voting patterns, and micro-bureaucracy—like the way one government bureaucrat talks to another in some detailed air. You don’t go to the anthropology department, because they’re studying hill tribesmen in New Guinea. You don’t go to the sociology department, because they’re studying crime in the ghettos. In fact, you don’t go anywhere—there isn’t any field that deals with these topics. There’s no journal that deals with them. In fact, there is no academic profession that is concerned with the central problems of modern society. Now, you can go to the business school, and there they’ll talk about them—because those people are in the real world. But not in the academic departments: nobody there is going to tell you what’s really going on in the world.¹⁴

And it’s extremely important that there not be a field that studies these questions—because if there ever were such a field, people might come to understand too much, and in a relatively free society like ours, they might start to do something with that understanding. Well, no institution is going to encourage that. I mean, there’s nothing in what I just said that you couldn’t explain to junior high school students, it’s all pretty straightforward. But it’s not what you study in a junior high Civics course—what you study there is propaganda about the way systems are supposed to work but don’t.

Incidentally, part of the genius of this aspect of the higher education system is that it can get people to sell out even while they think they’re doing exactly the right thing. So some young person going into academia will say to themself, “Look, I’m going to be a real radical here”—and you can be, as long as you adapt yourself to these categories which guarantee that you’ll never ask the right questions, and that you’ll never even look at the right questions. But you don’t feel like you’re selling out, you’re not saying “I’m working for the ruling class” or anything like that—you’re not, you’re being a Marxist economist or something. But the effect is, they’ve totally neutralized you.

Alright, all of these are subtle forms of control, with the effect of preventing serious insight into the way that power actually works in the society. And it makes very good sense for a system to be set up like that: powerful institutions don’t want to be investigated, obviously. Why would they? They don’t want the public to know how they work—maybe the people inside them understand how they work, but they don’t want anybody else to know, because that would threaten and undermine their power. So one should expect the institutions to function in such a way as to protect themselves—and some of the ways in which they protect themselves are by various subtle techniques of ideological control like these.

Cruder Methods of Control

Then aside from all that, there are also crude methods of control. So if some young political scientist or economist decides they are going to try to ask these kinds of questions, the chances are they’re going to be marginalized in some fashion, or else be weeded out of the institution altogether. At the extreme end, there have been repeated university purges in the United States. During the 1950s, for example, the universities were just cleaned out of dissident thought—people were fired on all kinds of grounds, or not allowed to teach things. And the effects of that were very strong. Then during the late 1960s, when the political ferment really got going, the purges began again—and often they were just straight political firings, not even obscured. ¹⁵ For instance, a lot of the best Asia scholars from the United States are now teaching in Australia and Japan—because they couldn’t keep jobs in the U.S., they had the wrong ideas. Australia has some of the best Southeast Asia scholars in the world, and they’re mostly Americans who were young scholars in the Sixties and couldn’t make it into the American academic system, because they thought the wrong things. So if you want to study Cambodia with a top American scholar, you basically have to go to Australia.¹⁶ One of the best Japan historians in the world [Herbert Bix] is teaching in a Japanese university—he’s American, but he can’t get a job in the United States.

Or let me just tell you a story about M.I.T., which is pretty revealing. A young political science professor—who’s by now one of the top people in the field, incidentally [Thomas Ferguson]—was appointed at M.I.T. as an assistant professor right after he got his Ph.D. from Princeton; he’s very radical, but he’s also extremely smart, so the department just needed him. Well, one day I was sitting in my office and he came over fuming. He told me that the chairman of his department had just come into his office and told him straight out: “If you ever want to get tenure in this department, keep away from anything after the New Deal; you can write all of your radical stuff up to the New Deal, but if you try and do it for the post-New Deal period, you’re never going to get tenure in this department.” ¹⁷ He just told him straight out. Usually you’re not told it straight out, but you get to understand it—you get to understand it from the reactions you receive.

This kind of stuff also happens with graduate students. I’m what’s called an “Institute Professor” at M.I.T., which means I can teach courses in any department of the university. And over the years I’ve taught all over the place—but if I even get near Political Science, you can feel the bad vibes starting. So in other departments, I’m often asked to be on students’ Ph.D. committees, but in Political Science it’s virtually never happened—and the few times it has happened, it’s always been Third World women. And there’s a reason for that: Third World women have a little bit of extra space to maneuver in, because the department doesn’t want to appear too overtly racist or too overtly sexist, so there are some things they can do that other people can’t.

Well, a few years ago, one very smart woman graduate student in the Political Science Department wanted to do her dissertation on the media and Southern Africa, and she wanted me to be on her Ph.D. committee. Okay, it’s a topic that I’m interested in, and I’ve worked on it probably more than anybody else there, so there was just no way for them to say I couldn’t do it. Then the routine started. The first stage in the doctoral process is that the candidate has a meeting with a couple of faculty members and presents her proposal. Usually two faculty members show up, that’s about it. This time it was different: they circulated a notice through the department saying that every faculty member had to show up—and the reason was, I was going to be there, and they had to combat this baleful influence. So everybody showed up.

Well, the woman started presenting her dissertation proposal, and you could just see people turning pale. Somebody asked her, “What’s your hypothesis?” —you’re supposed to have a hypothesis—and it was that media coverage of Southern Africa is going to be influenced by corporate interests. People were practically passing out and falling out the windows. Then starts the critical analysis: “What’s your methodology going to be? What tests are you going to use?” And gradually an apparatus was set up and a level of proof demanded that you just can’t meet in the social sciences. It wasn’t, “I’m going to read the editorials and figure out what they say”—you had to count the words, and do all sorts of statistical nonsense, and so on and so forth. But she fought it through, she just continued fighting. They ultimately required so much junk in her thesis, so much irrelevant, phony social-scientific junk, numbers and charts and meaningless business, that you could barely pick out the content from the morass of methodology. But she did finally make it through—just because she was willing to fight it out. Now, you know, you can do that—but it’s tough. And some people really get killed.

The Fate of an Honest Intellectual

I’ll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here’s a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial.¹⁸ It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it.¹⁹ Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it.²⁰ That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.²¹

Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: “Here’s what I’ve found in this book, do you think it’s worth pursuing?”

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it’s an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you’re going to get in trouble—because you’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they’re going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it’s preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people’s lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

Well, he didn’t believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn’t know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it.²² Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned out to be bad advice: I suggested that he shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figured he’d at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn’t get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D.—he’s very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University. I mean, sometimes you have students for whom it’s hard to write good letters of recommendation, because you really didn’t think they were very good— but you can write something, there are ways of doing these things. This guy was good, but he literally cannot get a letter.

He’s now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he’s a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he’d done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he’d be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he’s working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year.²³ That’s a lot better than a death squad, it’s true—it’s a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around.

But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story. Finkelstein’s very persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New York Public Library, where he went through every single reference in the book—and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well, the New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and pretty soon everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a fraud and it was going to be exposed sooner or later. The one journal that was smart enough to react intelligently was the New York Review of Books—they knew that the thing was a sham, but the editor didn’t want to offend his friends, so he just didn’t run a review at all. That was the one journal that didn’t run a review.

Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, “Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we’ll take care of you, we’ll make sure you get a job,” all this kind of stuff. But he kept doing it—he kept on and on. Every time there was a favorable review, he’d write a letter to the editor which wouldn’t get printed; he was doing whatever he could do. We approached the publishers and asked them if they were going to respond to any of this, and they said no—and they were right. Why should they respond? They had the whole system buttoned up, there was never going to be a critical word about this in the United States. But then they made a technical error: they allowed the book to appear in England, where you can’t control the intellectual community quite as easily.

Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein’s work to a number of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East—and they were ready. As soon as the book appeared, it was just demolished, it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review saying, this doesn’t even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy. A lot of the criticism used Finkelstein’s work without any acknowledgment, I should say—but about the kindest word anybody said about the book was “ludicrous,” or “preposterous.” ²⁴

Well, people here read British reviews—if you’re in the American intellectual community, you read the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review, so it began to get a little embarrassing. You started getting back-tracking: people started saying, “Well, look, I didn’t really say the book was good, I just said it’s an interesting topic,” things like that. At that point, the New York Review swung into action, and they did what they always do in these circumstances. See, there’s like a routine that you go through—if a book gets blown out of the water in England in places people here will see, or if a book gets praised in England, you have to react. And if it’s a book on Israel, there’s a standard way of doing it: you get an Israeli scholar to review it. That’s called covering your ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you’re pretty safe: no one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff works.

So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the New York Review assigned it to a good person actually, in fact Israel’s leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua Porath], someone who knows a lot about the subject. And he wrote a review, which they then didn’t publish—it went on for almost a year without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of pressure not to publish it. Eventually it was even written up in the New York Times that this review wasn’t getting published, so finally some version of it did appear.²⁵ It was critical, it said the book is nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn’t say what he knew.²⁶

Actually, the Israeli reviews in general were extremely critical: the reaction of the Israeli press was that they hoped the book would not be widely read, because ultimately it would be harmful to the Jews—sooner or later it would get exposed, and then it would just look like a fraud and a hoax, and it would reflect badly on Israel.²⁷ They underestimated the American intellectual community, I should say.

Anyhow, by that point the American intellectual community realized that the Peters book was an embarrassment, and it sort of disappeared—nobody talks about it anymore. I mean, you still find it at newsstands in the airport and so on, but the best and the brightest know that they are not supposed to talk about it anymore: because it was exposed and they were exposed.

Well, the point is, what happened to Finkelstein is the kind of thing that can happen when you’re an honest critic—and we could go on and on with other cases like that. [Editors’ Note: Finkelstein has since published several books with independent presses.]

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they’re likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won’t make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they’ll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it’s not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that’s how they got there. And that’s pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that’s the basic story of how it operates, I think.

Forging Working-Class Culture

MAN: Noam, I want to turn for a moment to people who weren’t sent through the ideological control system of the schools, to see what kind of independent minds people today should be struggling to foster. I’ve often heard you talk about the insights that guided the early labor movement in the United States at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1820s. You say that social movements today are going to have to start by regaining some of that understanding. My question is, who were those people exactly—was it mostly European immigrants to the United States?

 

No, it’s what were called at the time the “Lowell mill-girls”—meaning young women who came off the farms to work in factories. In fact, a good deal of the labor organizing in the nineteenth century in the United States was done by women, because just like today in the Third World, it was assumed that the most docile and controllable segment of the workforce was women—so therefore they were the most exploited.

Remember, the early industrial revolution was built on textiles. It took off around here—it was in Lowell and Lawrence [Massachusetts], places like that. And very extensively the labor force was made up of women. In fact, some of the main labor journals at the time were edited by women, and they were young women mostly. And they were people who wanted to read, they wanted to learn, they wanted to study—that was just considered normal by working people back then. And they wanted to have free lives. In fact, many of them didn’t work in the mills for very long—they’d work there for a couple years, then go back to some other life. But in the early stages of the American labor movement, it was the Lowell mill-girls, or farmers who were being driven off their farms by industry, who were the ones who built up the early working-class culture.

When the big waves of European immigrants began to arrive in the United States, the story started to change a bit, actually. See, the major wave of immigration to the United States happened around the middle of the nineteenth century, and the immigrants who were arriving were fleeing from extremely impoverished parts of Europe—like Ireland, for example. That was at the time of the Irish famine [of 1846-51], and Ireland was being absolutely devastated by it, so a lot of people just escaped to North America if they could.

People often forget, Ireland’s the oldest colony in the world: it could have been a rich place, just like England, but it’s been a colony for 800 years, and it’s one of the few parts of the world that was not only underdeveloped , like most colonies, but also depopulated—Ireland now has about half the population it had in the early nineteenth century, in fact. And the Irish famine was an economists’ famine—Ireland was actually exporting food to England during the famine, because the sacred principles of Political Economy said that that’s the way it has to be: if there’s a better market for it in England, that’s where the food has to go, and you certainly couldn’t send food to Ireland, because that would have interfered with the market.²⁸

So there was mass starvation taking place in Ireland, and the Irish immigrants who were coming to the United States were desperate for work, so they could be forced to work for essentially nothing—the same was also true of a lot of the people who were coming here from Southern and Eastern Europe. And that undercut the early labor movement to a significant extent—I mean, the Lowell mill-girls could not, or would not, work at the level of the millions of immigrants who were coming in. So it took a long time before you started to get the growth of labor organizing here again, because the domestic workforce could just be displaced whenever it started to protest.

And the poor immigrants who came here were treated like dogs—I mean, miserably treated. So for example, Irish women were used for experimentation in Mengele-style experiments in the United States in the nineteenth century [Mengele was a Nazi doctor who “experimented” on live human beings]. That’s not a joke—gynecological surgery was literally developed by Mengeles, who used subjects like indigent Irish women or slaves, and just subjected them to experiment after experiment, like thirty experiments, to try to figure out how to make the procedures work. In fact, doctors exactly like Joseph Mengele were honored for that in the United States—you still see their pictures up on the walls in medical schools.²⁹

So it wasn’t a European input that brought about the American labor movement, quite the opposite. But I mean, these were just natural reactions: you didn’t have to have any training to understand these things, you didn’t have to read Marx or anything like that. It’s just degrading to have to follow orders, and to be stuck in a place where you slave for twelve hours a day, then go to a dormitory where they watch your morals and so on—which is what it was like. People simply regarded that as degrading.

It was the same with craftsmen, people who had been self-employed and were now being forced into the factories—they wanted to be able to run their own lives. I mean, shoemakers would hire people to read to them while they were working—and that didn’t mean read Stephen King or something, it meant read real stuff. These were people who had libraries, and they wanted to live lives, they wanted to control their own work—but they were being forced into shoe-manufacturing plants in places like Lowell where they were treated, not even like animals, like machines. And that was degrading, and demeaning—and they fought against it. And incidentally, they weren’t fighting against it so much because it was reducing their economic level, which it wasn’t (in fact it was probably raising it)—it was because it was taking power out of their hands, and subordinating them to others, and turning them into mindless tools of production. And they didn’t want that.

In fact, if you want to do some really interesting reading, one book I would suggest is the first book of labor history that was written—ever, I think. It came out in 1924, and it was just republished in Chicago: it’s called The Industrial Worker, by Norman Ware, and it’s mostly excerpts from the independent labor press in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. ³⁰ See, there was a big independent workers’ press in the United States at the time—it was about at the scale of the capitalist press, actually—and it was run by what were called “factory girls,” or by craftsmen. And it’s extremely interesting to look at.

Right through the nineteenth century, working people in the United States were struggling against the imposition of what they described as “degradation,” “oppression,” “wage slavery,” “taking away our elementary rights,” “turning us into tools of production,” everything that we now call modern capitalism (which is in fact state-capitalism) they fought against for a full century—and very bitterly, it was an extremely hard struggle. And they were calling for “labor republicanism”—you know, “Let’s go back to the days when we were free people.” “Labor” just means “people,” after all.

And in fact, they also were fighting against the imposition of the mass public education system—and rightly, because they understood exactly what it was: a technique to beat independence out of the heads of farmers and to turn them into docile and obedient factory workers.³¹ That’s ultimately why public education was instituted in the United States in the first place: to meet the needs of newly-emerging industry. See, part of the process of trying to develop a degraded and obedient labor force was to make the workers stupid and passive—and mass education was one of the ways that was achieved. And of course, there was also a much broader effort to destroy the independent working-class intellectual culture that had developed, which ranged from a huge amount of just outright force, to more subtle techniques like propaganda and public relations campaigns.

And those efforts have been sustained right to this day, in fact. So labor unions have by now been virtually wiped out in the United States, in part by a huge amount of business propaganda, running from cinema to almost everything, and through a lot of other techniques as well. But the whole process took a long time—I’m old enough to remember what the working-class culture was like in the United States: there was still a high level of it when I was growing up in the late 1930s. It took a long time to beat it out of workers’ heads and turn them into passive tools; it took a long time to make people accept that this type of exploitation is the only alternative, so they’d better just forget about their rights and say, “Okay, I’m degraded.”

So the first thing that has to happen, I think, is we have to recover some of that old understanding. I mean, it all starts with cultural changes. We have to dismantle all of this stuff culturally: we’ve got to change people’s minds, their spirits, and help them recover what was common understanding in a more civilized period, like a century ago on the shop floors of Lowell. If that kind of understanding could be natural among a huge part of the general population in the nineteenth century, it can be natural again today. And it’s something we’ve really got to work on now.

The Fraud of Modern Economics

MAN: Noam, you mentioned Ireland being forced to export food to England during the Irish famine because of the supposed demands of the free market. How exactly did that kind of “free market” economic thinking get instituted as legitimate in the universities and in the popular ideology as a whole over the years—for instance, the work of the Social Darwinists [who claimed that natural selection and “survival of the fittest” determine individual and societal wealth], and of Malthus [early-nineteenth-century economist who argued that poverty was inevitable and population growth should be checked by famine, war, and disease], and others who in various ways blamed the poor for being poor?

 

Malthus gets kind of a bad press, actually: he’s singled out as the guy who said that people should just be left to starve if they can’t support themselves—but really that was pretty much the line of classical economics in general. In fact, Malthus was one of the founders of classical economics, right alongside of guys like David Ricardo.

Malthus’s point was basically this: if you don’t have independent wealth, and you can’t sell your labor on the market at a level at which you can survive, then you have no right being here—go to the workhouse prison or go somewhere else. And in those days, “go somewhere else” meant go to North America, or to Australia, and so on. Now, he wasn’t saying it was anyone’s fault if they were poor and had to remove themselves; he was saying, it’s a law of nature that this is the way it has to be.³² Ricardo in fact said that it was true at the level of “the principle of gravitation”—and of course, to try to interfere with a law of nature like that only makes things worse.³³

So what both Malthus and Ricardo were arguing, sort of in parallel, was that you only harm the poor by making them believe that they have rights other than what they can win on the market, like a basic right to live, because that kind of right interferes with the market, and with efficiency, and with growth and so on—so ultimately people will just be worse off if you try to recognize them. And as you suggest, those ideas are basically still taught today—I don’t think the free-market ideology that’s taught in university economics departments right now is very much different. Sure, you have more mathematical formulas and so on today, but really it’s pretty much the same story.

 

MAN: But how did that thinking get instituted?

 

How did it get instituted? As a weapon of class warfare. Actually, the history of this is kind of intriguing—and as far as I know, there’s only one book about it: it’s by a good economic historian named Rajani Kanth, who was just rewarded for his efforts by being thrown out of the University of Utah. But he goes through it all, and it’s very revealing.³⁴

You see, during the early stages of the industrial revolution, as England was coming out of a feudal-type society and into what’s basically a state-capitalist system, the rising bourgeoisie there had a problem. In a traditional society like the feudal system, people had a certain place, and they had certain rights—in fact, they had what was called at the time a “right to live.” I mean, under feudalism it may have been a lousy right, but nevertheless people were assumed to have some natural entitlement for survival. But with the rise of what we call capitalism, that right had to be destroyed: people had to have it knocked out of their heads that they had any automatic “right to live” beyond what they could win for themselves on the labor market. And that was the main point of classical economics. ³⁵

Remember the context in which all of this was taking place: classical economics developed after a period in which a large part of the English population had been forcibly driven off the land they had been farming for centuries—that was by force, it wasn’t a pretty picture [i.e. intensive enclosure of communal lands by acts of Parliament occurred between 1750 and 1860]. In fact, very likely one of the main reasons why England led the industrial revolution was just that they had been much more violent in driving people off the land than in other places. For instance, in France a lot of people were able to remain on the land, and therefore they resisted industrialization more.³⁶

But even after the rising bourgeoisie in England had driven millions of peasants off the land, there was a period when the population’s “right to live” still was preserved by what we would today call “welfare.” There was a set of laws in England which gave people rights, called the “Poor Laws” [initially and most comprehensively codified in 1601]—which essentially kept you alive if you couldn’t survive otherwise; they provided sort of a minimum level of subsistence, like subsidies on food and so on. And there was also something called the “Corn Laws” [dating in varying forms from the twelfth century], which gave landlords certain rights beyond those they could get on the market—they raised the price of corn, that sort of thing. And together, these laws were considered among the main impediments to the new rising British industrial class—so therefore they just had to go.

Well, those people needed an ideology to support their effort to knock out of people’s heads the idea that they had this basic right to live, and that’s what classical economics was about—classical economics said: no one has any right to live, you only have a right to what you can gain for yourself on the labor market. And the founders of classical economics in fact said they’d developed a “scientific theory” of it, with—as they put it—“the certainty of the principle of gravitation.”

Alright, by the 1830s, political conditions in England had changed enough so that the rising bourgeoisie were able to kill the Poor Laws [they were significantly limited in 1832], and then later they managed to do away with the Corn Laws [in 1846]. And by around 1840 or 1845, they won the elections and took over the government. Then at that point, a very interesting thing happened. They gave up the theory, and Political Economy changed.

It changed for a number of reasons. For one thing, these guys had won, so they didn’t need it so much as an ideological weapon anymore. For another, they recognized that they themselves needed a powerful interventionist state to defend industry from the hardships of competition in the open market—as they always had in fact. And beyond that, eliminating people’s “right to live” was starting to have some negative side-effects. First of all, it was causing riots all over the place: for a long period, the British army was mostly preoccupied with putting down riots across England. Then something even worse happened—the population started to organize: you got the beginnings of an organized labor movement, and later the Chartist movement [an 1838-48 popular campaign for Parliamentary reform], and then a socialist movement developed. And at that point, the elites in England recognized that the game just had to be called off, or else they really would be in trouble—so by the time you get to the second half of the nineteenth century, things like John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which gives kind of a social-democratic line, were becoming the reigning ideology.

See, the “science” happens to be a very flexible one: you can change it to do whatever you feel like, it’s that kind of “science.” So by the middle of the nineteenth century, the “science” had changed, and now it turned out that laissez faire [the idea that the economy functions best without government interference] was a bad thing after all—and what you got instead were the intellectual foundations for what’s called the “welfare state.” And in fact, for a century afterwards, “laissez faire” was basically a dirty word—nobody talked about it anymore. And what the “science” now said was that you had better give the population some way of surviving, or else they’re going to challenge your right to rule. You can take away their right to live, but then they’re going to take away your right to rule—and that’s no good, so ways have to be found to accommodate them.

Well, it wasn’t until recent years that laissez-faire ideology was revived again—and again, it was as a weapon of class warfare. I mean, as far as I can see, the principles of classical economics in effect are still taught: I don’t think what’s taught in the University of Chicago Economics Department today is all that different, what’s called “neo-liberalism” [an economic stance stressing cutbacks in social services, stable currencies, and balanced budgets]. And it doesn’t have any more validity than it had in the early nineteenth century—in fact, it has even less. At least in the early nineteenth century, Ricardo’s and Malthus’s assumptions had some relation to reality. Today those assumptions have no relation to reality.

Look: the basic assumption of the classical economists was that labor is highly mobile and capital is relatively immobile—that’s required, that’s crucial to proving all their nice theorems. That was the reason they could say, “If you can’t get enough to survive on the labor market, go someplace else”—because you could go someplace else: after the native populations of places like the United States and Australia and Tasmania were exterminated or driven away, then yeah, poor Europeans could go someplace else. So in the early nineteenth century, labor was indeed mobile. And back then, capital was indeed immobile—first because “capital” primarily meant land, and you can’t move land, and also because to the extent that there was investment, it was very local: like, you didn’t have communications systems that allowed for easy transfers of money all around the world, like we do today.

So in the early nineteenth century, the assumption that labor is mobile and capital is immobile was more or less realistic—and on the basis of that assumption, you could try to prove things about comparative advantage and all this stuff you learn in school about Portugal and wine and so on [Ricardo’s most famous hypothetical for demonstrating how free trade could be mutually advantageous to participating countries involved England concentrating on selling cloth and Portugal wine].

Incidentally, if you want to know how well those theorems actually work, just compare Portugal and England after a hundred years of trying them out—growing wine versus industrializing as possible modes of development. But let’s put that aside . . .

Well, by now the assumptions underpinning these theories are not only false—they’re the opposite of the truth. By now labor is immobile, through immigration restrictions and so on, and capital is highly mobile, primarily because of technological changes. So none of the results work anymore. But you’re still taught them, you’re still taught the theories exactly as before—even though the reality today is the exact opposite of what was assumed in the early nineteenth century. I mean, if you look at some of the fancier economists, Paul Krugman and so on, they’ve got all kinds of little tricks here and there to make the results not quite so grotesquely ridiculous as they’d otherwise be. But fundamentally, it all just is pretty ridiculous.

I mean, if capital is mobile and labor is immobile, there’s no reason why mobile capital shouldn’t seek absolute advantage and play one national workforce against another, go wherever the labor is cheapest and thereby drive everybody’s standard of living down. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re seeing in N.A.F.T.A. [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and all these other international trade agreements which are being instituted right now. Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn’t matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality anymore—and furthermore, it never did.

The Real Market

So take a look at one of the things you don’t say if you’re an economist within one of the ideological institutions, although surely every economist has to know it. Take the fact that there is not a single case on record in history of any country that has developed successfully through adherence to “free market” principles: none. Certainly not the United States. I mean, the United States has always had extensive state intervention in the economy, right from the earliest days—we would be exporting fur right now if we were following the principles of comparative advantage.

Look, the reason why the industrial revolution took off in places like Lowell and Lawrence is because of high protectionist tariffs the U.S. government set up to keep out British goods. And the same thing runs right up to today: like, we would not have successful high-tech industry in the United States today if it wasn’t for a huge public subsidy to advanced industry, mostly through the Pentagon system and N.A.S.A. and so on—that doesn’t have the vaguest relation to a “free market.”

In fact, if you want a good illustration, just read today’s New York Times. There’s a story on the business page about how we’ve got a funny kind of economic recovery going on in the country right now: there’s a lot of economic growth, but not many good new jobs—you know, big surprise. And they use one factory as an example, a stove factory that’s being set up in Tulsa by the Whirlpool corporation. Well, the last paragraph of the article points out how the “free market” really works: the reason why Whirlpool decided to put the factory in Tulsa instead of, say, in Mexico, is that the taxpayers in Tulsa County are going to pay 25 percent of the corporation’s capital costs.³⁷ Okay, that’s how the free market really works—in fact, that’s how it’s always worked, from the early days of the industrial revolution right up until this morning, without any known exception. ³⁸

As a matter of fact, the United States has been the most economically protectionist country in history. We’ve traditionally had the highest protectionist tariffs in the world, so much so that one leading economic historian in a recent book (published by the University of Chicago Press, no less) describes us as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism.” ³⁹ So for example, in the late nineteenth century, when Europe was actually toying around with laissez faire for a brief period, American tariffs were five to ten times as high as theirs—and that was the fastest economic growth period in American history. ⁴⁰

And it goes on right until the present. The United States developed a steel industry a century ago because it radically violated the rules of the “free market,” and it was able to recover its steel industry in the last decade or so by doing things like restricting imports from abroad, destroying labor unions to drive down wages, and slamming huge tariffs on foreign steel.⁴¹ I mean, the Reaganites always talked enthusiastically about “market forces,” but they refused to allow them to function—and for a very simple reason: if market forces had been allowed to function, the United States would no longer have an automobile industry, or a microchip industry, or computers, or electronics, because they would have just been wiped out by the Japanese. So therefore the Reaganites closed off American markets and poured in huge amounts of public funds. And actually, they were perfectly frank about it to the business community—though of course, not to the public. So when he was Secretary of the Treasury, James Baker proudly proclaimed to a business audience in 1987 that Ronald Reagan “has granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century”—which was far too modest, actually; Reagan probably provided more import relief to industry than all his predecessors combined in that period.⁴²

Of course, the “free market” ideology is very useful—it’s a weapon against the general population here, because it’s an argument against social spending, and it’s a weapon against poor people abroad, because we can hold it up to them and say “You guys have to follow these rules,” then just go ahead and rob them. But nobody really pays any attention to this stuff when it comes to actual planning—and no one ever has.

So there was just a British study of the hundred leading transnational corporations in the “Fortune 500,” and it found that of the hundred, every single one of them had benefited from what’s called “state industrial policy”—that is, from some form of government intervention in the country in which they’re based. And of the hundred, they said at least twenty had been saved from total collapse by state intervention at one point or another. For instance, the Lockheed corporation was going under in the early 1970s, and the Nixon administration just bailed them out with public funds.⁴³ Okay, so they’re back in business. And now they stay in business because the public pays for C-130s [military aircraft], and upgrading F-16s, and the F-22 project, and so on—none of which has anything to do with a “free market” either.

Or take the fact that so many people live in the suburbs and everybody has to drive their own car everywhere. Was that a result of the “free market”? No, it was because the U.S. government carried out a massive social-engineering project in the 1950s to destroy the public transportation system in favor of expanding a highly inefficient system based on cars and airplanes—because that’s what benefits big industry. It started with corporate conspiracies to buy up and eliminate streetcar systems, and then continued with huge public subsidies to build the highway system and encourage an extremely inefficient and environmentally destructive alternative. That’s what led to the suburbanization of the country—so you get huge shopping malls in the suburbs, and devastation in the inner cities.⁴⁴ But these policies were a result of planning—they had nothing to do with the “free market.”

Actually, the most dramatic example of these “market distortions” that I can think of—which I suspect is never even taught in economics courses—concerns the reason why the United States had an industrial revolution in the first place. Remember, the industrial revolution was fueled by textiles, meaning one commodity: cotton. And cotton was cheap, that was crucially important. Well, why was cotton cheap? Was it because of market forces? No. Cotton was cheap because they exterminated the native population here and brought in slaves—that’s why cotton was cheap. Genocide and slavery: try to imagine a more severe market distortion than that.

Other countries who had their own cotton resources also tried to start on industrial revolutions—but they didn’t get very far, because England had more guns, and stopped them by force. Egypt, for example, had its own cotton resources, and started on an industrial revolution at about the same time as the United States did, around 1820—but the British weren’t going to tolerate an economic competitor in the Eastern Mediterranean, so they just stopped it by force. Okay, no industrial revolution in Egypt.⁴⁵

The same thing also happened in Britain’s earliest “experiment” with these ideas, in what was called Bengal, in India. In fact, Bengal was one of the first places colonized in the eighteenth century, and when Robert Clive [British conqueror] first landed there, he described it as a paradise: Dacca, he said, is just like London, and they in fact referred to it as “the Manchester of India.” It was rich and populous, there was high-quality cotton, agriculture, advanced industry, a lot of resources, jute, all sorts of things—it was in fact comparable to England in its manufacturing level, and really looked like it was going to take off. Well, look at it today: Dacca, “the Manchester of India,” is the capital of Bangladesh—the absolute symbol of disaster.⁴⁶ And that’s because the British just despoiled the country and destroyed it, by the equivalent of what we would today call “structural adjustment” [i.e. economic policies from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund which expose Third World economies to foreign penetration and control].

In fact, India generally was a real competitor with England: as late as the 1820s, the British were learning advanced techniques of steel-making there, India was building ships for the British navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815], they had a developed textiles industry, they were producing more iron than all of Europe combined—so the British just proceeded to de-industrialize the country by force and turn it into an impoverished rural society.⁴⁷ Was that competition in the “free market”?

And it goes on and on: the United States annexed Texas [in 1845], and one of the main reasons for that was to ensure that the U.S. achieved a monopoly on cotton—which was the oil of the nineteenth century, it was what really fueled the industrial economies. So the American leadership figured that if they could take Texas, which was a major cotton-producing area, then they would be able to strangle England economically. See, England was the main enemy at that time, they hated England: it was much more powerful militarily than the United States, it kept us from conquering Canada and seizing Cuba the way elites here wanted to—and in fact, the only reason the American colonists had been able to defeat England in the American Revolution in the first place was that the French military had massively intervened in the colonial uprising here to help overthrow British power.⁴⁸ So England was the real enemy. And if you read the Jacksonian Democrats, Presidents Polk and Tyler and so on, they were saying: if we can get Texas, we can bring England to our feet and gain mastery of the trade of the world. In fact, the worst charges, paranoid charges, that were leveled against Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War apply precisely to the Jacksonian Democrats: they wanted to monopolize the main resource of the world so they could bring everybody else to their feet.⁴⁹

And exactly the same lessons apply today. Today it’s oil that’s at the center of the industrial economies. And why is oil cheap? Well, that’s what you pay your taxes for: a large part of the Pentagon system exists to make sure that oil prices stay within a certain range—not too low, because Western economies and energy corporations depend on the profits from it, but not too high, because that might interfere with what’s called the “efficiency” of international trade [i.e. because transport and other costs of trade rise with the oil price]. Well, trade is only “efficient” because a lot of force and international violence keeps oil prices from going too high, so if you really wanted to measure the “efficiency of trade,” you’d have to figure in all of the other costs which make it that way, like the costs of the Pentagon for one. And if anyone ever did that, you couldn’t possibly say that trade is “efficient.” If anybody ever bothered to calculate these things, the efficiency of trade would drop very, very low, and it would in fact prove to be extremely inefficient.

I mean, these market distortions are not footnotes—they are absolutely huge phenomena. Nobody ever tries to estimate them, because economics is not a serious field—but people in the business world know about them perfectly well, which is why they’ve always called upon a powerful state to protect them from market discipline: they don’t want market discipline any more than they want democratic control, and they’ve always blocked it. And the same is true of just about every aspect of any developed economy there is.

Automation

Well, let’s just take one last case of this, an extremely important and revealing one: let’s look at automation. I mean, it’s standardly claimed these days that the reason why the population is suffering, why people have been losing jobs at a mad rate, real wages have been going down for the last twenty-five years and so on, is due to, as Ricardo said, “laws like the principle of gravitation”—inexorable market forces are making it that way, like automation, or the efficiency of international trade. That’s the standard argument: these things are inevitable because the market is just imposing them on us.⁵⁰ It’s all total bullshit. I mentioned one reason why the “efficiency of trade” argument is mostly a fraud, now let’s look at automation.

Well, it’s true that automation is “efficient”—like, by market principles, automation saves businessmen money and drives workers out of jobs. But it didn’t get that way because of the market, not at all: it only got that way through intensive and prolonged funding and development through the state sector—that’s market distortion. I mean, for thirty years automation was developed through the military system in the United States, and the reason why it took so long and cost so much is that automation was so inefficient to begin with that it couldn’t possibly have survived in the market—so therefore automation was developed the same way we develop most high technology: through the public sector.

See, in the Air Force and the Navy (where most of this took place), nobody cares about costs—because the taxpayer’s paying, so the development can be as expensive and inefficient as you like. And in that way, they were able to develop automation to the point where it could then be used to drive people out of work and make profits for corporations. For instance, take the history of automated numerical control of metal-cutting machines [i.e. translation of part specifications into mathematical information that can be fed into machines without the need for skilled machinists]. That was developed through the Air Force, it went on for decades, and finally it got efficient enough so that it could be handed over to the corporations and they could then throw out their workers. But it didn’t happen through market forces, not at all—it was the result of massive state intervention.

Furthermore, if you look at the kind of automation that was developed, you see precisely what workers in the early labor movement were complaining about: being turned into mindless tools of production. I mean, automation could have been designed in such a way as to use the skills of skilled machinists and to eliminate management—there’s nothing inherent in automation that says it can’t be used that way. But it wasn’t, believe me; it was used in exactly the opposite way. Automation was designed through the state system to demean and degrade people—to de-skill workers and increase managerial control. And again, that had nothing to do with the market, and it had nothing to do with the nature of the technology: it had to do with straight power interests. So the kind of automation that was developed in places like the M.I.T. Engineering Department was very carefully designed so that it would create interchangeable workers and enhance managerial control—and that was not for economic reasons.⁵¹ I mean, study after study, including by management firms like Arthur D. Little and so on, show that managers have selected automation even when it cuts back on profits—just because it gives them more control over their workforce.⁵²

If you’re interested, there’s been some very interesting work done on this; the guy who’s done the best work is David Noble—for his sins he was denied tenure at M.I.T., and now he’s teaching in Canada. He wrote a book called Forces of Production, which is a pretty specialized technical analysis mainly of the development of numerical control of machinery, but he’s also got a good popular book out, called Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism. Unfortunately, this is the kind of book that’s published like in Katmandu or something—it’s published by a very small anarchist press in Chicago. But it’s very interesting, didn’t make him too popular in the Faculty Club and so on.⁵³

One of the things he discusses there is Luddism [a movement of English workers who wrecked industrial machines, which began in 1811]. See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to destroy machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent themselves from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy them, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense. And that sentiment runs right throughout the working-class movements of the nineteenth century, actually—and you can even see it today.

Well, if economics were like a real field, these are the kinds of things they would be studying. None of it is very complicated—like, everybody knows why cotton was cheap, for instance: everybody who went to elementary school knows why cotton was cheap, and if it hadn’t been for cheap cotton, there wouldn’t have been an industrial revolution. It’s not hard. But I’d be very surprised if anybody teaches this stuff in economics courses in the United States.

I mean, sure, there are some market forces operating—but the reality is, they’re pretty much off around the edges. And when people talk about the progress of automation and free-market “trade forces” inevitably kicking all these people out of work and driving the whole world towards kind of a Third World-type polarization of wealth—I mean, that’s true if you take a narrow enough perspective on it. But if you look into the factors that made things the way they are, it doesn’t even come close to being true, it’s not even remotely in touch with reality. But when you’re studying economics in the ideological institutions, that’s all just irrelevant and you’re not supposed to ask questions like these: you have all the information right in front of you, but these are simply not matters that it is proper to spend time talking about.

A Revolutionary Change in Moral Values

MAN: Noam, given an intellectual culture like the one you’ve been describing—can you find any “honest” intellectuals in the U.S.?

You can find them, but like I say, usually they’re not inside the institutions—and that’s for a very good reason: there is no reason why institutions of power and domination should tolerate or encourage people who try to undermine them. That would be completely dysfunctional. So typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values—values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed.

 

MAN: Who are those people? I mean, you make the whole situation look very bleak—who would you say are the intellectuals that are going about things in the right way?

 

Well, very often they’re the people who have done things to make a real change in the world. Take the S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example—they were serious intellectuals, and they made a big change. Or take the people in the 1960s who did the work that’s led to so many of the improvements we’ve seen in the country over the last twenty years—and “work” didn’t just mean running around the streets waving signs, you know, it also meant thinking about things, and figuring out what the problems were, and trying to teach people about them and convince them. Despite what you always hear, that was not elite intellectuals: the liberal intellectual community in the United States was always strongly opposed to the people who protested the American aggression in Indochina on principled grounds, they were not the ones assisting the popular movements. Well, those people were serious intellectuals, in my view.

So you see, there is sort of an “honest” left intelligentsia, if you like—meaning intellectuals who are not serving power as either a Red Bureaucracy, or as state-capitalist commissar-equivalents. It’s just that most of the time they’re outside the institutions—and for almost trivial reasons: you’re not going to find a militant labor activist as Chairman of the Board of General Electric, right? Yeah, how could there be? But there are people all over the place who are honest and committed, and are thinking about the world, and trying to change it—many more today than there were thirty years ago, in fact.

I mean, it’s standardly claimed that there’s less of a left intelligentsia around today in the United States than there was in the Fifties and Sixties—but I don’t believe a word of it. I think the opposite is true, actually. Just take a look at the people who they’re calling the big thinkers of the 1950s: who were they? They were intelligent people, like Edmund Wilson’s an intelligent person—but left intellectual? Or Mary McCarthy: yeah, smart person, wrote some nice novels—but not a left intellectual. In fact, what you have now is much more serious activists all over the place, people who are thinking carefully about important questions, and who understand a lot.

I travel around all the time giving talks, and throughout the 1980s I was amazed to go to places and see it. Take the Central America solidarity movement, which was a pretty dramatic development—I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it in history, in fact. I’d go to a church in Kansas, or some town in Montana or Wyoming or something, Anchorage, Alaska, and find people there who know more about Latin America certainly than the C.I.A., which isn’t very hard actually, but more than people in the academic departments of universities. They’re people who’ve thought about it, and who’ve understood things, and brought a lot of intelligence to the issues—I can’t even tell you their names, there are too many of them.

Also, I’m not even sure the word “left” is the right word for them: a lot of them were probably Christian conservatives, but they were very radical people in my view, and intellectuals who understood, and who did a lot. They created a popular movement which not only protested U.S. atrocities, but actually engaged themselves in the lives of the victims—they took a much more courageous stand than was ever done in the 1960s. I mean, the popular resistance that took place in the Sixties was important—but there was nobody back then who even dreamt of going to a Vietnamese village and living there, because maybe a white face would limit the capacity of the marauders to kill and destroy. That wasn’t even an idea in your head. In fact, nobody even went to try to report the war from the side of the victims—that was unheard of. But in the 1980s it was common: plenty of people did it—in fact, people who were coming out of religious groups like Witness for Peace were doing that by the thousands and tens of thousands. And the people who were doing that are serious left intellectuals, in my view.⁵⁴

Remember, what will be labeled “left” in the general culture and given publicity is going to be something that’s ugly enough so that people can be rallied to oppose it. So books are coming out now about “left intellectuals” in France who were Stalinists—and look at the awful things they did. Okay, that kind of “left intelligentsia” is allowed to have publicity and prominence, in fact the elite culture will give them as much prominence as it can. Or people will say “the left” is things like the Spartacist League, or the Socialist Workers Party or something—little sectlets, the kinds of groups that anybody who’s been involved in movement activities knows are the people who hang around your offices and your talks trying to see if they can disrupt things. That’s not the left, that’s parasites that undermine the left—but to show how lousy the left is, the elite press will say “Oh, the Spartacist League doesn’t have a lot of members”: yeah, big excitement.⁵⁵ On the other hand, the real left they don’t talk about—like they don’t talk about the thousands and thousands of people involved in this, that and the other cause doing serious work.

So if by “left” you mean people who are struggling for peace, and justice, and freedom, and human rights, and for social change, and elimination of authority structures, whether in personal life or in the institutions—if that’s what the left is, there are more of them around than I can remember in my lifetime, at least. A lot more.

 

MAN: There really has been a big change in the culture.

 

Yes. If you take almost any area you can think of in life, whether it’s race, or sex, or military intervention, the environment—these are all things that didn’t even exist in the 1950s, people didn’t even think they were issues, you just submitted. And people don’t anymore. I mean, if I just look at pictures from the early Sixties, I can hardly believe how disciplined everything was, how deep the authority structures were—even just in personal relations, and in the way you looked and talked when you went out with your friends. Younger people may not always realize it, but life’s a lot easier than it was forty years ago: there’s been a big change, there are a lot of successes to point to.

Look, a lot of this stuff got started over the Vietnam War. Well, in terms of official ideology, all of us who were opposed to the war just lost, flat out: within the mainstream institutions, the only question today is, have the Vietnamese done enough to compensate us for the crimes that they committed against us? That’s the only question you’re allowed to discuss if you want to be a part of the educated culture in the United States. So George Bush can get up and say, “The Vietnamese should understand that we bear them no permanent grudge, we’re not going to make them pay for everything they did to us; if they finally come clean, you know, devote their entire lives and every last resource they have to searching for the remains of one of those people they viciously blew out of the sky, then maybe we’ll allow them entry into the civilized world”—and there won’t be a single editorial writer or columnist who either falls on the floor laughing, or else says, “This guy is worse than the Nazis.” Because that’s the way they all are: the only issue is, will we forgive them for the crimes that they committed against us?⁵⁶ I mean, among the educated sector of the population in the U.S., there is overwhelming opposition to the war—but it’s only on what are called “pragmatic” grounds: namely, we couldn’t get away with it. So: “We tried, we made blundering efforts to do good, but it was a mistake.” Well, at that level, we’ve just lost the entire discussion.

On the other hand, let’s go to the general population: to this day, after twenty-five years of this endless, unremitting propaganda to which no response is ever tolerated, 66 percent of the American population still disagrees with the elite culture—that tells you there’s been a victory at another level. I mean, if two-thirds of the population still says in polls, after all of this brainwashing, that the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” well, something got through. And remember, everybody who’s choosing that answer is choosing it all by themselves—because that is not what they hear in the mainstream culture, certainly not from educated people.⁵⁷

And the thing we have to keep in mind is, the people in power know it: they might not want us to know it, but they know it. In fact, it’s even clear from their own documents that they know it. For example, a very important early Bush administration planning document on Third World intervention was leaked to the press and published on the day of the ground attack in the Gulf War—by Maureen Dowd, incidentally, who’s basically a gossip columnist for the New York Times. It was an inter-agency study on the general world situation, prepared by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon and others during an early stage of the Bush administration, well before the Gulf War. And it had a section on U.S. military intervention, and what they said was: in the case of confrontations with “much weaker enemies”—meaning anybody we’re willing to fight—we must not only defeat them, but we must defeat them “decisively and rapidly,” because anything else will “undercut political support,” which is understood to be extremely thin.⁵⁸⁸

See, their belief is, maybe we can frighten the domestic population and get them to huddle under the flag for a couple days, but unless we get the intervention over with quickly, it’s hopeless—people are going to start to rise up and pressure us to stop it. These people recognize that there can’t be classical interventions anymore—you know, U.S. soldiers slogging it out in Vietnam for years and years—it has to be either clandestine warfare, as in Peru now, where not one American in ten thousand knows there are U.S. troops, or the Panama/Iraq game, with enormous propaganda about the enemy ready to destroy us, and then a quick victory without any fighting.⁵⁹

Well, that’s just a radical difference from the Kennedy period—and that difference reflects major changes in the culture. Powerful people here understand that they do not have the option of carrying out foreign interventions anymore, unless they carry out decisive, rapid victories over totally defenseless enemies, after having first gone to great lengths to demonize them. They certainly recognize that—and that’s a tremendous victory for the left.

And anybody who’s my age or even a little bit younger must also realize that it’s a very different country today—and a much more civilized one. Just look at the issue of the rights of indigenous peoples. When I was a kid, I considered myself a radical-anarchist-this that and the other thing—but I was playing “Cowboys and Indians” with my friends: you know, shoot the Indians. That’s like playing “Aryans and Jews” in Germany—you go out and try to kill the Jews. Well, that lasted for a very long time in the United States, and nobody even noticed anything curious about it.

I mean, just to tell you another story: I live in Lexington, a mainly upper-middle-class professional town near Boston, which is very liberal, everybody votes for the Democrats, they all give to the right causes, and so on. Well, in 1969—the year’s interesting—one of my kids was in fourth grade, and she had a Social Studies textbook about the early history of New England, called Exploring New England; the book was centered on a boy named Robert, who was being shown the glories of colonial New England by some older man or something. Well, one day I decided to poke through it, because I was curious about how the authors were going to deal with the colonists’ extermination of the native peoples here. So I turned to the point in the book where they got to the first really major act of genocide in New England, the Pequot Massacre of 1637—when the colonists murdered the Pequot tribe. And to my surprise, it was described quite accurately: the colonists went into the village and slaughtered all the men, women and children, burned everything down, burned out all the Pequots’ crops. Then I got to the bottom line. The bottom line had this boy, Robert, who’s being told all of these things, say: “I wish I were a man and had been there.” In other words, it was a positive presentation. That was in 1969, right after the My Lai massacre was exposed.⁶⁰

That would be inconceivable today—because there have been very important changes in the culture, and a real increase in civilization. And those changes are largely the result of a lot of very significant activism and organizing over the last couple decades, by people that I would refer to as “honest intellectuals.”

In fact, I think all of this screaming about “Political Correctness” that we hear these days in the elite culture is basically just a tantrum over the fact that it has been impossible to crush all of the dissidence and the activism and the concern that’s developed in the general population in the last thirty years. I mean, it’s not that some of these “P.C.” things they point out aren’t true—yeah, sure, some of them are true. But the real problem is that the huge right-wing effort to retake control of the ideological system didn’t work—and since their mentality is basically totalitarian, any break in their control is considered a huge tragedy: 98 percent control isn’t enough, you have to have 100 percent control; these are totalitarian strains. But they couldn’t get it, especially among the general population. They have not been able to beat back all of the gains of the popular movements since the 1960s, which simply led to a lot of concern about sexism, and racism, and environmental issues, respect for other cultures, and all this other bad stuff. And it’s led to real hysteria among elites, so you get this whole P.C. comedy.

I mean, right now the universities are all flooded with Olin Professorships of Free Enterprise [endowed by the conservative Olin Foundation], there are glossy right-wing magazines handed out free to every student—and these are not just right-wing, but crazy right-wing. Meanwhile, everybody’s screaming about how the left has taken over. And that’s all just out of hysteria that they haven’t gotten back total control—in fact, they’ve probably lost most of the population by now. And there’s no reason to think that those changes have ended—I think there’s every reason to think that they could go a lot further, and ultimately lead to changes in the institutions.

Again, people just have to remember: there is nothing in the mainstream culture that is ever going to tell you you’ve succeeded—they’re always going to tell you you’ve failed. I mean, the official view of the Sixties is that it was a bunch of crazies running around burning down the universities and making noise, because they were hysterics, or because they were afraid to go to Vietnam or something—that’s the official story, and that’s what people always hear from the intellectual culture. They may know from their own lives and experience that that’s not what really happened, but they never hear anybody saying it: that’s not the message the system is always pouring into you through television, and radio, and newspapers, and books, and histories, and so on and so forth. It’s beating into your head another story—that you failed, and that you should have failed, because you were just a bunch of crazies.

And of course, it’s natural that the official culture would take that view: it does not want people to understand that you can make changes, that’s the last thing it wants people to understand. So if there have been changes, it’s because “We the elites are so great that we carried through the changes.” When they bow to pressures, they’re going to present that as their benevolence. Like, “We ended slavery because we were such great moral figures that we decided we didn’t like slavery”—but the cause is gone, the slave revolts and the Abolitionist movement are gone.

And we’ve seen that on a not-so-trivial scale in the last thirty years with regard to the Sixties movements. There’s been something close to a revolutionary change in moral values and cultural level in the general population, but since that change has taken place without any lasting institutional effects, the intellectual culture can just keep pounding home its moral: “You guys are worthless, you can’t do anything—why don’t you just shut up and go home.” That’s what they’re always going to tell us, and we should try to remember that.