9

Movement Organizing

Based primarily on discussions at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, between 1993 and 1996.

The Movie Manufacturing Consent

Editors’ Note: The 1992 movie Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media was the most successful Canadian feature documentary ever made and played in more than 32 countries. Although Chomsky cooperated with the directors and liked them very much, he has not seen the film and does not intend to, for reasons that follow.¹

 

MAN: Noam, watching your reactions to the documentary they made about your critique of the media, you’ve shown a lot of discomfort . . .

 

You should see the letters I write him [indicating Mark Achbar, one of the directors].

 

MARK ACHBAR: He’s a good letter-writer.

 

MAN: Again earlier today you said something critical about it. I’m sure you realize the politically potent effect that the film is having.

 

Oh yes.

 

MAN: And I was just wondering, if this were a film about Bertrand Russell [British philosopher and socialist] and his powerful ideas, and how he helped to change society with his ideas, would you be as critical of it, or would you see it as a powerful political organizing tool?²

 

Both, both.

 

MAN: Then I guess I’d love to hear you say something positive about the film.

 

Well, what I would say is exactly what you said—I mean, the positive impact of it has been astonishing to me. Mark can give you the details, but outside of the United States, the film is shown all over the place, and even inside the United States it was shown to some extent.

 

MAN: It was in a lot of cities.

 

Yeah, but in every other country it’s been on national television.

 

MAN: It came to Seattle four times and sold out every screening.

 

Okay, but everywhere else it was on national television. I didn’t realize this myself until I was traveling around Europe giving talks last year, and I’d be in Finland and “Oh yeah, we all saw it on television”—it was that sort of thing all over the place. As a matter of fact, it’s gotten to the point where I’m invited to film festivals all over the world—literally.

Well, one result of that is there’s been a ton of reviewing, and the reviewing is extremely interesting. The reviews are often written just by guys who write T.V. criticism for the newspapers, you know, completely apolitical people. And their reaction is extremely positive, I’d say about 98 percent of the time it’s very positive. In fact, about the only thing that got a lot of people pissed off, including Phil Donahue, was some remarks I made about sports: people got kind of angry about that.³ But most of the time the reaction is very positive; they say, “Yeah, really interesting.”

In fact, I get a ton of letters about it—like I get a letter from some steel-worker in Canada saying, “I took my friends three times, we all saw it and it’s great,” and so on and so forth. Well, that’s all fine. But the standard letter, the standard letter, is something like this: it says, “I’m really glad they made this film; I thought I was the only person in the world who had these thoughts, I’m delighted to know that somebody else actually has them and is saying them.” Then comes the punch-line: “How can I join your movement?” That’s why I’m ambivalent.

Now, I don’t think it’s anything Mark and Peter [the directors] did wrong; I mean, I haven’t seen the movie, but I know that they were very well aware of this problem, and tried very hard to overcome it. But somehow it’s just inherent in the medium, I don’t think the medium allows an escape from this—or if it does, I don’t think that anybody’s yet found it. I mean, I don’t think the medium can make people understand that if they film me giving a talk somewhere, that’s because somebody else organized the talk, and the real work is being done by the people who organized the talk, and then followed it up and are out there working in their communities. If they can bring in some speaker to help get people together, terrific, but that person is in no sense “the leader.” That somehow doesn’t get across in a movie—what gets across is, “How can I join your movement?” And then I’ve got to write a letter which is a big speech about this. So I am ambivalent about it.

Incidentally, one more comment about the reviews: the reviews in the United States were intriguingly different. First of all, there weren’t many, because it wasn’t shown a lot here. But they were very interesting. Do you remember the New York Times review? That was really fascinating, that was the most intriguing one.

 

MARK ACHBAR: They left your name out of the title of the film.

 

Well, yeah, right. But actually, the New York Times to my surprise wrote a very favorable review, or what I’m sure they took to be a favorable review. They assigned it to Vincent Canby, who’s kind of an old-time New Dealer, he was the big cultural critic at the Times forever, and he wrote a review which I’m sure everybody at the Times took to be very favorable. It said something like, oh yeah, really interesting guy, wonderful film, so on and so forth. Then it said, obviously there’s nothing to what he’s saying, of course it’s all nonsense—but it was very sympathetic.

Then it got really interesting. It said, though what he’s saying is all nonsense, nevertheless the leading idea is worth taking seriously, even though it sounds crazy. And the leading idea, Canby said, is that the government is only responsive to the fifty percent of the population who vote, not to the fifty percent who don’t vote, so therefore we ought to try to register more people. He said, yeah, this sounds pretty far out in left field, but nevertheless we shouldn’t discount it totally, something like that.⁴ It just flew by him completely—he didn’t see what the film was about. I mean, the most illiterate T.V. reviewer in Tasmania didn’t miss the point like that, it’s only in the United States that it has to be completely missed. And that’s what it means to “think properly.”

But I do think the film is double-edged. It’s certainly energized a lot of activism. I think it did a tremendous amount of good just for East Timor alone [the film includes extensive coverage of the unreported East Timor genocide as a case study of Edward Herman’s and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” ⁵]. And it’s had a good impact in other respects. But it also has this negative aspect, which seems to me almost unavoidable. But you wanted to say something more . . .

 

MARK ACHBAR: I’m sure you’re aware that we have you saying in the film, almost verbatim, what you just said: that the reason you can give talks all over the place is because people are organizing.

 

Yeah, I know—but it just doesn’t get across. There’s something about the medium which prevents it from getting across. I mean, I know that it was tried, I know that that was the idea, but . . .

 

MARK ACHBAR: Was it really the majority of letters that said, “I want to join your movement”?

 

Well, they say something like that: the general picture is that it’s about me—and it isn’t. The whole point is, it’s not. And I don’t know how you get that across to people in a film.

 

MAN: But it is about you, just the ideas aren’t about you.

 

Nooo!

 

MAN: The ideas are for the world to think about.

 

But see, it really isn’t—because if I’m somewhere giving a talk, it’s precisely because somebody organized a meeting. Like, I’m here, but I didn’t do anything—Mike and Lydia [Albert and Sargent, co-editors of Z Magazine ] did something. I didn’t do anything. And that’s the way it is everywhere else too.

 

MAN: But you’re also here because of the way you grew up, and that school that you went to.

 

But the same is true of everybody else who’s here too. Yeah, sure. Everybody’s got their own story.

 

WOMAN: But the critique of the media in the film is taken from speeches that you gave.

 

Yeah, but that’s because other people are doing important things and I’m not doing important things—that’s what it literally comes down to. I mean, years ago I used to be involved in organizing too—I’d go to meetings, get involved in resistance, go to jail, all of that stuff—and I was just no good at it at all; some of these people here can tell you. So sort of a division of labor developed: I decided to do what I’m doing now, and other people kept doing the other things. Friends of mine who were basically the same as me—went to the same colleges and graduate schools, won the same prizes, teach at M.I.T. and so on—just went a different way. They spend their time organizing, which is much more important work—so they’re not in a film. That’s what the difference is. I mean, I do something basically less important—it is, in fact. It’s adding something, and I can do it, so I do it—I don’t have any false modesty about it. And it’s helpful. But it’s helpful to people who are doing the real work. And every popular movement I know of in history has been like that.

In fact, it’s extremely important for people with power not to let anybody understand this, to make them think there are big leaders around who somehow get things going, and then what everybody else has to do is follow them. That’s one of the ways of demeaning people, and degrading them, and making them passive. I don’t know how to overcome this exactly, but it’s really something people ought to work on.

 

WOMAN: As an activist for East Timor, though, I have to say that the film put our work on a completely different level. Even if you have some trouble with it personally, it has gotten people doing a lot of real work out there.

 

I think that’s true; I know that’s true.

 

ANOTHER WOMAN: Now I’ve got to admit it—I felt odd having you sign a book for my friend earlier today.

 

Yeah, it’s crazy—it’s just completely wrong. In a place like San Francisco, it gets embarrassing: I can’t walk across the Berkeley campus—literally—without twenty people coming up and asking me to sign something. That doesn’t make any sense.

 

WOMAN: It does feel unnatural.

 

It is, it’s completely missing the point. It’s simply not factually accurate, for one thing—because like I say, the real work is being done by people who are not known, that’s always been true in every popular movement in history. The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave. Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you’re helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it’s the wave that matters—and that’s what people ought to understand. I don’t know how you get that across in a film.

Actually, come to think of it, there are some films that have done it. I mean, I don’t see a lot of visual stuff, so I’m not the best commentator, but I thought Salt of the Earth really did it. It was a long time ago, but at the time I thought that it was one of the really great movies—and of course it was killed, I think it was almost never shown.

 

WOMAN: Which one was that?

 

Salt of the Earth. It came out at the same time as On the Waterfront, which is a rotten movie. And On the Waterfront became a huge hit—because it was anti-union. See, On the Waterfront was part of a big campaign to destroy unions while pretending to be for, you know, Joe Sixpack. So On the Waterfront is about this Marlon Brando or somebody who stands up for the poor working man against the corrupt union boss. Okay, things like that exist, but that’s not unions—I mean, sure, there are plenty of union bosses who are crooked, but nowhere near as many as C.E.O.s who are crooked, or what have you. But since On the Waterfront combined that anti-union message with “standing up for the poor working man,” it became a huge hit. On the other hand, Salt of the Earth, which was an authentic and I thought very well-done story about a strike and the people involved in it, that was just flat killed, I don’t even think it was shown anywhere. I mean, you could see it at an art theater, I guess, but that was about it. I don’t know what those of you who know something about film would think of it, but I thought it was a really outstanding film.

Media Activism

WOMAN: Noam, I agree with you that alternative media activists have to be very careful not to re-create authoritarian structures like the ones that exist now—like, not have a “Z Channel” [i.e. after Z Magazine] that goes about things in the same way as A.B.C. and C.B.S. But I’m not quite sure how we can disseminate information effectively and still be egalitarian as we do it: it seems to me there is this tendency to try to speak from a position of authority, and we really have to fight against that.

 

I think that’s exactly right—that’s a crucial point. I don’t completely know what the answer is to that, actually—I’d be interested in what some of you have to say about it.

 

MAN: Well, let’s just take you personally for a second. When people ask you where to turn for more truth and for accuracy of information, what do you tell them?

 

What I usually say is that they’re not phrasing the question the right way. I mean, people should not be asking me or anyone else where to turn for an accurate picture of things: they should be asking themselves that. So someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at—but then they have to decide whether or not that’s accurate. Ultimately it’s your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you’ve got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can’t rely on anyone else for the truth.

So the answer I give is, I think the smartest thing to do is to read everything you read—and that includes what I write, I would always tell people this—skeptically. And in fact, an honest writer will try to make it clear what his or her biases are and where the work is starting from, so that then readers can compensate—they can say, “This person’s coming from over here, and that’s the way she’s looking at the world, now I can correct for what may well be her bias; I can decide for myself whether what she’s telling me is accurate, because at least she’s making her premises clear.” And people should do that. You should start by being very skeptical about anything that comes to you from any sort of power system—and about everything else too. You should be skeptical about what I tell you—why should you believe a word of it? I got my own ax to grind. So figure it out for yourself. There really is no other answer.

And in fact, if you’re an organizer who’s serious about it, what you’re going to try to do is help people themselves find their own answers. And then if you can be a resource, or point them in some direction that might be useful, or help put them in touch with somebody, or take care of their kids while they’re out looking for a job or something—okay, that’s organizing.

 

MARK ACHBAR: Noam, one of the best things you said that didn’t end up in the film was, “It’s not so much a matter of what you read, it’s a matter of how you read.” When people ask me about sources for information, I recommend the New York Times as quickly as I recommend Z Magazine.

 

Yeah, I do too—I absolutely agree with that. Take, say, Business Week: it’s useful to read it, it’s useful to read what the ruling class tells its people. You can learn an awful lot from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and so on.

In fact, I think in general that people tend not to read the business press as much as they should. Most of it is very boring, but there are things in there that you do not find elsewhere—they tend to be more honest, because they’re talking to people they don’t have to be worried about, and to people who need to know the truth so that they can go out and make decisions about their money. I mean, you can lie as much as you want in the Boston Globe or something, but the people who read the Wall Street Journal have to have a tolerable sense of reality when they go out to make money. So in journals like Business Week and Fortune, you’ll typically find an awful lot of very useful information. These are journals that you shouldn’t buy, incidentally, they’re too expensive; but you should steal them if you can. They’re also in the library.⁶

As a more general matter, though, if you really want to educate yourself politically, what you have to do is become part of a group—because unless you’re a real fanatic about it, you’re just not going to be able to do it all by yourself. I mean, I do it, but I know I’ve got a screw loose, and I don’t expect anybody else to be that crazy. On the other hand, a group working together can do it very well. Take a look at the Central America solidarity movements in the 1980s, for example—they were usually church-based groups around the country, and they just kept working at it together. They had people going down there, they had their own literature, they circulated information around, and the result was, there were people I met in those groups who knew more about Central America than I do—and I work on it hard. They certainly knew more about it than the C.I.A., which is no big thing actually, or than people in a lot of the academic departments. But that’s what can happen when you start working together—and I think that’s just got to be the answer, except for a few crazed individuals here and there.

And in fact, what I just said about my own work isn’t really accurate—because I certainly don’t find all the information I use on my own. The fact is, there are a lot of people around the world who are in a similar position, and we share information together. A good deal of my time is actually spent just clipping newspapers and periodicals and professional journals, and photocopying them to send to people—and they do the same for me. And the result is, I can easily get to know more than people in the C.I.A., or in any academic research center—mainly because I have smart agents, not dumb agents, and they know what’s important and can dig things out. I mean, mainstream scholars and national intelligence agencies don’t have very smart and perceptive people scanning the journals and the press in other countries and around the United States, and finding what’s important, doing an analysis of it and sending it to them. The countries I’m especially interested in, like say Israel, I could never cover the press well enough by myself, it’s just too much of a job. But if I have friends there clipping it and sending me articles, and picking out what’s important, we can share understanding. And it’s the same with other places—for instance, a lot of the work I’ve done on Southeast Asia and East Timor has used mostly material from the Australian press: I just get tons of stuff from there.

And again, it’s reciprocal: you do this for a number of people, they do it for you, and the end result is, informal networks of cooperation develop through which people can pool their efforts and compensate for a lack of resources. That’s exactly what organization is all about, in fact.

 

WOMAN: Noam, I remember in the movie you criticized the U.S. media for insisting on “concision”—restricting news analysis to concise sound-bites, so only conventional wisdom can be presented coherently. But in the organizing I’ve done, I’ve found that it’s important to use both “concision” and a more in-depth type of analysis, to use the two in combination. I’m thinking specifically of trying to get people’s attention through fact-sheets and quick blurbs of information that you can digest easily, and then go on to find out more. I’m wondering what you think about that kind of combined use?

 

Sure, oh yeah—it’s very useful to do it that way. Actually, I should say that this term “concision” is kind of like a joke—it’s a word I learned from the media P.R. guys when I heard one of them use it, I forget who . . .

 

MARK ACHBAR: Jeff Greenfield.

 

Yeah, what is he, manager of Newsweek?

 

MARK ACHBAR: Producer at Nightline.

 

Producer at Nightline or something. He used the word “concision” to describe what they do—you know, find people who can make their points in 600 words, or between two commercials.⁷ It was the first time I’d ever heard the term. But yeah, it’s around, and it’s a technique of thought control. But you can use it quite constructively too.

For example, during the Gulf War, Z Magazine ran a couple pages of just short factual statements of what the basic story was—I think every good organizing group does things like that. I mean, people need to have information in the front of their minds, so that they know what the general structure is—it’s just that then you should fill in the depth. So I think you should use the techniques in combination: there’s nothing wrong with slogans if they lead you to something. But of course, we should also be making people aware that any presentation of facts is a selection and an interpretation—I mean, we’re picking the facts that we think are important, maybe they’ll think something else is important.

 

WOMAN: A common response when you give people a fact-sheet is, “Why should we trust you? Where did you get this information?” Not enough people ask those questions, actually.

 

They should, yeah. But that distrust still is something that’s very hard to overcome as an organizer. I don’t know how many of you have been following the Z online Bulletin Board lately [a computer network discussion forum], but there’s been an ongoing conversation there in which people have pointed out—and they’re right, I don’t know any answer to it—that they’ll come to people with, not necessarily just fact-sheets, but even detailed, elaborate arguments with a lot of evidence and data, but it’s different from what everyone has always heard, and the standard response is, “Well, why should I believe you?”

And that’s not an unreasonable response. I mean, if somebody came to you with a three-volume work with a lot of footnotes and statistics and mathematical calculations which proved that the world is flat, you’d be very wise to be cautious, no matter how impressive it looked. And that’s the way we’re coming to people most of the time—we’re telling them that the world is flat, and they’re not going to believe all your evidence. They should, in fact, ask questions like that. And that’s just a hard situation for organizers to overcome: you only really overcome that by winning confidence, and helping people gain a broader understanding for themselves, bit by bit.

Self-Destruction of the U.S. Left

MAN: You travel around the country doing a lot of speaking engagements, Noam. I’m wondering, just from going to all these different communities, what do you think things look like in general as far as the movement goes, as far as politics go—what’s your assessment?

 

Well, over the years I think there’s sort of like a tendency you can see—a tendency towards, on the one hand, much larger groups of people getting engaged in political activism in some fashion, or at least wanting to become involved in some sort of progressive activity, roughly speaking. On the other hand, the opportunities for it are declining at the same time—and people are becoming extremely isolated. I just got a sense of it yesterday afternoon. I was getting ready to go off for a couple of weeks, so I did my monthly making out of checks to all the, you know, worthwhile organizations around the world. And it’s amazing when you see it. You take any topic you like, no matter how narrow it is—I mean, health rights in the southern part of Guatemala, let’s say—and there are fifteen separate organizations working on it, maybe right next door to one another, so you have to make out fifteen checks.

Well, that’s what I happened to notice yesterday, but it’s characteristic of what’s happening: everybody’s got their own little operation, everything is extremely narrowly focused and very small, and often the groups don’t even know about each other’s existence. And partly that’s the result of, and partly it contributes to, a sense of real isolation, and also a kind of hopelessness—a sense that nothing’s going on, because after all it’s just me and my three friends. And it’s true, it’s you and your three friends, except down the block there’s somebody else and their three friends. The success in atomizing the population has been extraordinary; I think that’s in fact the major propaganda achievement of recent years—just to isolate people in a most astonishing fashion. And the left has done a lot to help that along, in my opinion.

So what you find all around the country is huge mobs of people showing up at talks and wanting to get involved, but nobody around with anything for them to do, or any sense that there could be any follow-up. I mean, the standard question after a talk where thousands of people have shown up is, “What can I do?” That’s a terrible condemnation of the left, that people have to ask that question. There ought to be fifty booths outside with people saying, “Look, join up, here’s what you can do.” And there aren’t—or if there are, the groups are so narrow that people just have a feeling, “Look, I don’t want to do anything this narrow; I mean, I’m all in favor of gay and lesbian rights in Western Massachusetts, say, but I don’t want to devote my whole life to that.”

 

WOMAN: What exactly has the left done that you think is so self-destructive?

 

In part the problem is just divisiveness—it’s passionate commitment to a very narrow position, and extreme intolerance of anyone who doesn’t see it exactly the way you do. So if you have a slightly different view from the person next door on, say, abortion rights, it’s a war—you can’t even talk to each other, it’s not an issue that you can even discuss. There’s a lot of that on the left, and it’s been very self-destructive. It’s made the progressive movements, the sort of “left” movements, kind of unwelcome—because people don’t like it; they see it, and they don’t like it.

Also, there’s just a huge amount of frittering away of energy on real absurdities. There are parts of the country, like California, where incredible amounts of energy go into things like trying to figure out exactly which Mafia figure might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy or something—as if anybody should care. The energy and the passion that goes into things like that is really extraordinary, and it’s very self-destructive.

Or take a look at the intellectual left, the people who ought to be involved in the kinds of things we’re doing here. If you look at the academic left, say, it’s mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed post-modernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people who are involved in it—but it’s really good for careers and that sort of thing. That again pulls a ton of energy into activities which have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they’re very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with.

Another thing is, there are just extreme illusions about what’s going on in the world—and that’s the fault of all of us, in fact: we just can’t seem to get over them. Take the so-called “Gulf War”—it wasn’t really a war, it was a slaughter, but take the Gulf Slaughter. It led to tremendous depression on the left, because people felt like they weren’t able to do anything about it. Well, if you just think about it for a minute, you realize that it was exactly the opposite: it was probably the greatest victory the peace movement has ever had. The Gulf War was the first time in history that there were huge demonstrations and protests before a war started—that’s never happened before. In the case of the Vietnam War, it was five years before anybody got out in the streets; this time, there were massive demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people involved before the bombing even started. And if you just look at the attitudes of the general population, up until the day the bombing started it was about two to one in favor of a negotiated settlement involving Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in the context of an international conference on regional issues, Israel-Palestine issues and so on.⁸

Well, at the time, the left couldn’t do anything about it. First of all, it didn’t know it, and didn’t know that there were alternatives—like it didn’t know that a week earlier high U.S. officials had rejected an Iraqi offer to withdraw from Kuwait on exactly those terms.⁹ But nevertheless, there is a huge reservoir of support in the general population—it’s just the left isn’t dealing with it.

In fact, the attitudes of the general population are absolutely astonishing. For example, 83 percent of the American population thinks that the economic system is inherently unfair, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”—meaning things should just be radically changed.¹⁰ Well, what is the left doing about that mere 83 percent of the population that thinks everything has to be radically changed? What we’re doing is alienating them, or making them feel that we have nothing to say to them, or something like that.

Or I remember in 1987, when there was a big hoopla about the bicentennial of the Constitution, the Boston Globe published one of my favorite polls, in which they gave people little slogans and said, “Guess which ones are in the Constitution.” Of course, nobody knows what’s in the Constitution, because everybody forgot what they learned in third grade, and probably they didn’t pay any attention to it then anyway—so what the question really was asking is, “What is such an obvious truism that it must be in the Constitution?” Well, one of the suggestions was, “What about ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’?” [a slogan from Karl Marx]. Half the American population thinks that’s in the Constitution, because it’s such an obvious truth—it’s so obviously true that it must be in the Constitution, where else could it come from?¹¹ If you think about what this means and what we’re doing about it, it’s mind-boggling, the chasm.

Or take the whole Ross Perot phenomenon during the 1992 election [Perot is an American billionaire who ran for President on an independent ticket]. Ross Perot appeared on the political scene and had no program, nobody knew what he stood for, he could have come from Mars for all anybody knew, and within a couple days he was running even with the two major candidates. I mean, if a puppet was running it probably would have come out even.

Or do you remember the whole business with Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown? That was taken very seriously in the United States, it was treated as if these were two real people—a debate between the Vice President and a television actress; actually, not an actress, a character on a television show, who then responded through the show [Quayle had criticized the character for deciding to have a child out of wedlock]. Well, there was a poll done at that time in which people were asked who they would prefer as President, Dan Quayle or Murphy Brown—and you can guess who won.¹² There wasn’t a poll done as to who they thought was real; I’m not sure what the result of that one would have been.

But what these things demonstrate is something that is shown over and over again in careful public opinion studies: the population is what’s called “alienated.” People think that none of the institutions work for them, everything’s a scam, a crooked operation; they feel they have no way of influencing anything, the political system doesn’t work, the economic system doesn’t work, everything is being done somewhere else and it’s all out of their control. And this feeling goes up across the board pretty regularly.¹³ I mean, they’re not aware how much it’s true—like, they’re not aware that in the current G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] negotiations, major decisions are being made that will have a tremendous impact on the world and on their lives, and neither they, nor the unions, nor Congress knows anything about them. But they get a sense of it, they sort of have a feel for it.

And the point is, the left is doing virtually nothing to try to take advantage of this situation and turn the tremendous discontentedness in some kind of constructive direction. What I see on the left at least is pretty much the same story everywhere: tremendous divisiveness, narrowness of focus, intolerance, unwillingness to meet people on their own terms, plus inertia, and just madness of various kinds.

And the reason for a lot of that is—well, I think you could sort of see some of the reasons. If you just take the Civil Rights Movement and look at its course, I think you get a pretty good idea of some of the reasons. In the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, in the late 1950s and early Sixties, there was tremendous courage and dedication, and huge numbers of people finally got involved, including all the way up to middle-class America. And it was successful: there were big victories in the South. And then somehow it stopped. Well, what happened? What happened was, you got restaurants integrated, and you got things like the Voting Rights Act of 1965—it was a little bit like what’s going on in South Africa now, although there it’s much more dramatic. And you were able to establish the forms that in general are accepted by the mainstream Establishment culture, and even by the business community—like, General Motors doesn’t have any stake in having restaurants segregated, in fact they’d rather have them not segregated, it’s more efficient. So all of that stuff worked, at least to a certain extent. It wasn’t easy—a lot of people got killed, it was very brutal and so on. But it worked. And then it stopped, and it frittered away, and in fact probably it’s regressed since then. And the reason is, it ran into class issues—and they’re hard. They require institutional change. There the Board of Directors of General Motors is not going to be happy, when you start dealing with class issues in the industrial centers.

So at that point it stopped, and it frittered away, and also it went off into pretty self-destructive things—revolutionary slogans, carrying guns around, smashing windows, this and that—just because it ran into harder issues. And when you run into harder issues, it’s easy to look for an escape. And there are a lot of different escapes. You can escape by writing meaningless articles on some unintelligible version of academic radical feminism, or by becoming a conspiracy buff, or by working on some very narrowly focused issue, which may be important, but is so narrow that it’s never going to get anywhere or have any outreach. There are a lot of these temptations. And as the number of people becoming interested and involved has increased, since the issues are indeed hard, they’re not easy, there’s been a kind of chasm developing between the potentialities and the actual achievements.

 

WOMAN: You don’t think the left is dealing with class issues?

 

Not much. I mean, it’s not that nobody is. And they’re not the only issues that have to be dealt with, it’s just that they’re the most important ones—because they’re right at the core of the whole system of oppression. And also, they’re the hardest ones, because there you’re dealing with solid institutional structures where the core of private power is involved. I mean, other issues are hard too—like issues of patriarchy are hard. But they’re modifiable without changing the whole system of power. Class issues aren’t.

 

MAN: Do you have any strategies for the left to be able to get more on common ground with the working class?

 

Well, first of all, “working class” is pretty broad. I mean, anybody who gets a paycheck is in some sense “working class,” so there’s a sense in which a lot of managers are working class too—and in fact, they have pretty much the same interests these days: they’re getting canned as fast as everybody else is, and they’re worried about it. See, in the United States the word “class” is used in an unusual way: it’s supposed to have something to do with wealth. But in its traditional usage, and the way the word is used everywhere else, what it has to do with is your place in the whole system of decision-making and authority—so if you take orders, you’re “working class,” even if you’re wealthy.

And how should the left be dealing with class issues? Well, we have to take that 83 percent of the population that thinks that the system is inherently unfair, and increase it to a larger percentage, then we simply help people get organized to change it. There are no special tactics for that, it’s just the usual education and organizing. Okay, so you get started doing it.

Popular Education

WOMAN: One thing that I’ve noticed in reading a number of your books, and a number of books by people like Holly Sklar and Michael Albert, is that it’s a standard practice on the left in trying to help educate people—because we are in the minority position—to document everything very thoroughly, to lay out very precise scholarly arguments, to marshal a lot of evidence and have a ton of citations. But the thing that bothers me about that is there are a lot of people who are shut out of that world.

 

That’s right.

 

WOMAN: They’re not academics, they haven’t been trained in this way of making arguments. I really wish that there was something out there in the making arguments. I really wish that there was something out there in the middle ground that would not just try to persuade, but would also teach about argumentation. Somebody told me they used to do things like that in the 1930s, with popular education.

 

Absolutely—in fact, that was one of the big things in the 1930s for left intellectuals to be involved in. I mean, good scientists, well-known, important scientists like Bernal [British physicist] and others just felt that it was a part of their obligation to the human species to do popular science. So you had very good popular books being written about physics, and about mathematics and so on—for instance, there’s a book called Mathematics for the Million which is an example of it.¹⁴

 

WOMAN: Yeah, I’ve heard of that.

 

Well, that guy came out of the left. And the point is, those people just felt that this kind of knowledge should be shared by everyone. In fact, one of the things I find most astonishing about the current left-intellectual scene is that what the counterparts of these people today are telling the general public is, “You don’t have to know about this stuff, it’s all just some white male power-play—and besides, astrology’s the same as physics: it’s all just a discourse, and a text, and this that and the other thing, so forget about it, do what comes natural; if you like astrology, it’s astrology.” I mean, this is so different in character from what was just assumed automatically in the days when there were live popular movements, it’s amazing.

If you’re privileged enough to, say, know mathematics, and you think you’re a part of the general world, obviously you should try to help other people understand it. And the way you do it, for example, is by writing books like Mathematics for the Million, or by giving talks in elementary schools and things like that. In fact, involvement in popular education goes well beyond writing books: it means having groups, giving talks, workers’ education, all sorts of stuff. And the fact that people on the left aren’t doing those things today I think is a real tragedy—and also part of the really self-destructive aspect of a lot of what’s been happening, in my opinion. These are things that have always been a part of live political movements.

In fact, workers’ education used to be a huge thing in the United States. For example, A. J. Muste [American pacifist and activist] worked in workers’ education for a long time, and the working-class schools he helped set up were significant and big—people who hadn’t gone through elementary school came to them, and really learned a lot. Incidentally, Muste was one of the most important people of this century in the United States—of course, nobody knows about him, because he did the wrong things, but he was really a leading figure in the sort of left-libertarian movement.¹⁵

John Dewey [American philosopher and educator] was also very much involved in popular education, and part of it was an attempt to do just this kind of thing. So Dewey worked with Jane Addams [American social worker and suffragist] and others in Chicago during the Progressive Period on community development programs and so on—in fact, the whole progressive school movement came out of that, and it very much had this kind of democratizing commitment and a commitment to industrial democracy, which was considered a central part of it all.¹⁶

In fact, there were schools like this set up all over the place—for example, in England several of the colleges in the big universities, including Oxford, are working-class colleges: they came out of the labor movement, and are directed to educating working people. And even right around here there’s Cape Cod Community College, which like a lot of community colleges has people teaching in it whose interests really are this. Community colleges and urban colleges in general have mostly working-class students, and they can be a very good way to reach people. A lot of activists have in fact chosen to do that—there are people teaching in community colleges all over the place for precisely these reasons.

So you’re right: there really ought to be more efforts put into things like these—they would be a very important step towards reconstituting the kinds of popular movements we need.

Third-Party Politics

WOMAN: What do you think about working through the electoral process as a strategy for activists to pursue at this point? Is that a viable way to spend one’s energy, if ultimately what we’re trying to change is the basic structure of the economy?

 

Well, I think it’s possible to work through the electoral process. But the point we have to remember is, things will happen through the electoral process only if there are popular forces in motion in the society which are active enough to be threatening to power.

So for example, take the Wagner Act of 1935 [i.e. the National Labor Relations Act], which gave American labor the right to organize for the first time.¹⁷ It was a long time coming—most of Europe had the same rights about fifty years earlier—and it was voted through by Congress. But it wasn’t voted through by Congress because Franklin Roosevelt liked it, or because he was a liberal or anything like that—in fact, Roosevelt was a conservative, he had no particular interest in labor.¹⁸ The Wagner Act was voted through by Congress because the people who do have power in the society recognized that they’d better give workers something, or else there was going to be real trouble. So therefore it was voted through, and workers got the right to organize—and they kept that right as long as they were willing to struggle for it, then they basically lost it, it doesn’t get enforced much anymore.

So you can get things through the electoral process, but the electoral process is really only a surface phenomenon: a lot of other things have to be happening in the society for it to be very meaningful.

 

MAN: What about trying to get proportional representation in the United States as a way of maybe developing a viable labor party, which could help articulate more popular interests and broaden the range of political debate generally? [Proportional representation refers to an electoral system by which legislative seats are assigned according to the proportion of votes that each party receives rather than by majority vote in each district, which encourages the proliferation of parties and gives minority voters better representation. ¹⁹] It seems to me that in Canada, the fact that they have a labor party makes people somewhat more attuned to issues that Americans largely miss, like workers’ issues for example.

 

That’s right—Canada’s an interesting case: it’s a pretty similar society to us, except different somehow. It’s much more humane. It has the same corporate rule, the same capitalist institutions, all of that’s the same—but it’s just a much more humane place. They have a kind of social contract that we don’t have, like they have this national health-care system which makes us look bad because it’s so efficient. And that is related to their having a labor-based party, I think—the New Democratic Party in Canada [N.D.P.] isn’t really a labor party, but it’s kind of labor-based. However, that party’s ability to enter the political system in Canada wasn’t a result of having proportional representation, it was due to the same thing that would be necessary to get any kind of change like proportional representation in the first place: a lot of serious popular organizing.

Look, if you have a political movement that’s strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it’ll get accommodated in some fashion—as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren’t going to matter very much anymore. So I think that pushing for something like proportional representation could be worth doing if it’s part of a wider organizing campaign. But if it’s just an effort to try to put some people into Congress and that’s it, then it’s pretty much a waste of your time. I mean, there is never any point in getting some person into office unless you can continue forcing them to be your representative, and they will only continue to be your representative as long as you are active and threatening enough to make them do what you want, otherwise they’re going to stop being your representative.

This point has been understood forever, actually. So if you go back to James Madison, who framed a lot of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and so on, he pointed out that, as he put it, a “parchment barrier” will never stand in the way of oppression—meaning, writing something down on paper is totally worthless by itself: if you fight for it, you can make it real, otherwise you’ll just have really nice things on paper.²⁰ I mean, Stalin’s constitution was just about the nicest constitution around—but it was a parchment barrier. And the same is true of every other part of politics too, including having your representative in Congress.

So you can vote for Gerry Studds [liberal Massachusetts Congressman] if you’re from around here, and he’ll do some nice things—but he also voted for N.A.F.T.A. [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. And that was against the will of a lot of his constituents—just because those constituents weren’t making it clear enough to their representative what he had to do. I mean, the anti-N.A.F.T.A. activity that went on in the country was important, and it went way beyond anything I ever thought it would, but it still wasn’t enough to get people like Gerry Studds to come along when it was needed—and he’s a good guy, like I gave money to the Studds campaign. It’s just that when you weighed all of the pressures, there wasn’t enough of a popular movement to get them to come through when it mattered.

This was also part of the problem with the Rainbow Coalition, in my opinion [progressive political organization led by Jesse Jackson]. I mean, Jesse Jackson was in a very strong position a couple years ago with the Rainbow Coalition, and he had a choice. His choice was, “Am I going to use this opportunity to help create a continuing grassroots organization which will keep on working after the election, or am I going to use it as my own personal vehicle of political promotion?” And he more or less chose the latter—so it died. Therefore it was a complete waste of time: anybody who spent time working on that campaign was wasting their time, because it was used as an electoral platform, and that never makes sense. I mean, whenever somebody says “I want to become President,” you can forget it—as President, they won’t be any different from George Bush.

So as far as I can see, getting proportional representation in the United States today would have basically no effect, the effect would be essentially zilch—just because there’s nothing around to take advantage of it. On the other hand, if it was passed at a time when you had popular grassroots organizations of the kind that developed, say, in Haiti in the late 1980s, sure, then it could make a difference. But of course, it’s only under those circumstances that you would ever get proportional representation in the first place.

So in my view, any of these things could be fine if they’re being used as organizing tools to try to get things going: they’re a waste of time if you actually take them seriously in themselves, but if they’re understood simply as a part of larger popular struggles—so this is what you’re focusing on right now, but the purpose isn’t to get some words written down somewhere or some person into office, but rather it’s to get people to understand the importance of the words and the need to keep fighting for them—yeah, then it can mean something.

 

WOMAN: So you think that trying to develop a third party here might be worth doing?

 

Sure, absolutely—I think that could be a very important step. Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage—exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton’s proposals for “managed competition” [put forward in 1993].²¹ But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming—but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.

Now, in the United States there are also a lot of popular organizations, but they’re all separate, there’s no framework to start bringing them together. So developing a popularly-based third party here could be a very important step towards that, and I think it should be pursued.

In fact, there have even been some encouraging developments in recent years in getting something like that off the ground—I’m thinking of the emergence of the New Party, specifically, which is sort of trying to follow the Canadian model. So again, I don’t think that we should have any illusions about working through the political system, and I’m not much of a fan of political parties—but the New Party is really the first serious third-party alternative that I’ve seen in the United States: seriously thought-out, trying to create grassroots structures, using politics the way it ought to be used, as an organizing and pressuring technique, and hoping ultimately to get to the point where it could have real influence. Now, they’re not going to make structural reforms—that requires much bigger changes, changes in the institutions. I mean, when the N.D.P. got into power in Ontario in 1990, they couldn’t really do anything, they just carried out the normal right-wing policies, and in the next national election [in 1993] they got like two votes, nobody wanted to bother with them anymore. But even given those limitations, I still think it’s important for a country to have something like that—there’s a lot of potential to help make people’s lives better, and it certainly could be a basis for moving further and pressing for larger changes.

In fact, that same kind of thinking extends to electoral politics in general, in my view. I mean, right now voting decisions in the United States are pretty subtle tactical matters, in which the policy differences between the two major parties are not great. But just because I say they’re “tactical,” I don’t mean to demean it: the decisions that have serious human consequences and matter for people are mostly tactical judgments, after all. Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn’t affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy—and one of those decisions is whether you should vote, and if so, who should you vote for. And that can be an extremely important decision, with significant implications.

So for example, we have a national election coming up in the United States soon [in 1996], and I don’t really know of any very strong arguments one way or another about who to vote for—but that’s not to say that that judgment is an unimportant one: I think it’s very important. I mean, I’ll vote for Clinton, holding my nose—but the reason has nothing at all to do with big policy issues; there I can’t really see too much difference. What it has to do with are things like who’s going to get appointed to the judiciary: there are some differences between the Republicans and Democrats on questions like that, and who’s appointed to the judiciary happens to have a big effect on people’s lives. They may be small policy differences when you look at the big picture—but remember, there’s a huge amount of power out there, and small policy differences implementing a huge amount of power can make big differences to people. Or there might be a slight difference in things like the earned income tax credit [a tax refund program for poor working individuals and families]. Okay, that makes a lot of difference for people whose kids are hungry in downtown Boston, say. So that’ll be my decision in this election—again, holding my nose. And that’s the way it is at the upper levels of our political system generally, I think.

Actually, one way for third parties to address this situation is to run “fusion” candidates—meaning, you have your own third-party ballot-line which stands for whatever you stand for, say for social-democratic-type programs, but then you have that ballot-line vote go to one of the main-party candidates in the election, based on these sort of tactical decisions. That’s possible in some jurisdictions. And it’s a compromise way for a third party to preserve a genuine policy identity and commitment, while nevertheless letting people make the small tactical voting choices that can make a real difference to people—and I think it’s a very plausible compromise.

Boycotts

MAN: Do you think it would help to undermine corporate power if people were to begin making consumer choices that directly affect companies like United Fruit [renamed Chiquita], which are the most actively involved in exploiting Third World countries—like, stop buying their bananas, say, stop buying their coffee?

 

Again, if only a few people do it, it isn’t going to have any effect—it just means that some guy picking bananas in East Costa Rica isn’t going to have enough money to feed his children tomorrow. But if it’s done on a large enough scale that it can have an impact on the corporate structure, sure, then it could mean something.

I mean, suppose you stopped consuming altogether—you can live on subsistence farming in the United States in a lot of places, so suppose you did that. The effect on the general society would be exactly as if you decided to commit suicide: it would simply go on as before, but without you. Bear in mind that a lot of these things about “let’s really make a change by withdrawing from the world and living a decent life” have precisely the social effect of suicide—well, that’s a little too extreme, because people might notice and become interested and involved, so maybe it’s a little bit more than suicide. But not a lot. And in fact, the only thing that does differentiate it from suicide is when you use it as an organizing tool.²² Otherwise not, otherwise in fact it is just like suicide.

 

WOMAN: Would you ever advocate a boycott as a tactic, though, assuming that it was coordinated and on a large enough scale?

 

Well, tactics depend on the specific situations you’re faced with—I don’t think you can say very much worthwhile about them in the abstract. So there might be a particular moment when a boycott of something would be helpful. But as a general matter, I don’t think they really make a lot of sense, frankly.

I mean, suppose we got millions of people to stop buying: what would happen? The economic system barely functions as it is—I mean, the contemporary economic system is a complete catastrophe, an absolutely catastrophic failure. For instance, the International Labor Organization recently gave its latest estimate of unemployment worldwide—“unemployment” they define as meaning not having enough work to meet a subsistence level, so maybe you can sell some handkerchiefs at a street corner or something, but you don’t have enough work to survive on your own. They estimate that at about 30 percent of the world’s population—which makes it a lot worse than the Great Depression.²³ Alright? Now, there’s a ton of work to be done in the world—everywhere you look there’s work that ought to be done. And the people who don’t have work would be delighted to do it. So what you’ve got is a huge number of idle hands, a vast amount of work that ought to be done, and an economic system that is incapable of putting those two things together. Okay, absolutely catastrophic failure. Boycotts aren’t going to overcome that failure, they’re just going to make it worse.

So you know, they may be worthwhile as a tactic at some point, but what’s really required is just a complete rethinking of the entire nature of economic interactions and structures—there really is no other way to overcome this whole massive failure of the economy.

“A Praxis”

MAN: Dr. Chomsky, as I listen to you talk and give your marvelous analysis of the destructions of capitalism and American foreign policy, and even as I hear you today give us some of your perspectives on more practical issues of activism, I’m often struck by what I hear to be an underlying generality to your advice: it seems there’s almost the absence of a concrete program. Don’t you think that it would be helpful to give people a little bit more guidance about what to do specifically, especially since people are so directionless these days?

What I’m saying is, I don’t see a revolutionary “praxis” in your politics—and I’m wondering why that is.

 

Well, when you say there’s no “praxis,” I don’t exactly know what that means. There are plenty of things that can be done; I don’t think they have to be described with fancy terms. And we just do the things that can be done, the kinds of things that are the next stage. There aren’t any general formulas about that—you just ask where you are, what are the problems that exist, where are people ready to move? And then you try to do something with them. There’s a whole spectrum of actions you can take, and there’s no simple answer as to which ones should have the priority—people judge differently.

But I’d be very skeptical if somebody comes along with a “praxis”—you know, some formula saying, “Here’s the way we’re supposed to do it.” I’d be really skeptical about that, if I were you.

The War on Unions

WOMAN: Noam, I know a lot of people fighting for Workmen’s Compensation [i.e. for on-the-job injuries] and things like that, and sometimes they’ve said to me, “If I try to get together with other workers to press for changes, I’m going to get in trouble, I’ll lose my job—what the hell can I do except look out for Number One?” They’re not happy about that option, nobody’s happy about saying, “All I can do is duck and cover and look out for myself, never be loyal to anybody else or support other workers”—it’s just that there are these consequences that they can’t deal with. I don’t have an answer for them, I really don’t know what to say to that.

 

Yeah, there really is no answer, unless there are organizations—in this case, unions—that are strong enough to fight for them. I mean, if you don’t have solidarity and organization and you’re just out there alone fighting a big system of power, there’s not very much that you can do. It’s like if you’re walking down the streets of Haiti [under the military junta] and somebody comes up to you and says, “What should I do?”—the answer “Go attack the police station” is not very helpful.

The only thing that these people looking for workmen’s comp can do is be involved in strong enough organizations, and in this case that means unions—or maybe they can get somebody from the National Lawyers Guild [progressive law organization] or something to help them work through the legal structures. Short of having an organization that you can be part of that will defend you, though, there’s really not much you can do—and that’s precisely why there’s been such a passionate effort by the business world and the government to try to destroy unions. I mean, ever since the Wagner Act first got passed in 1935, there has been a sustained campaign in the United States to destroy the labor movement and to overcome this tragedy. And there’s a very good reason for that: if people are all alone, they really are defenseless, they just assume “I can only look out for myself,” and then that builds up a real privatization of interests, which in turn contributes to their oppression. But of course, the dynamic also goes the other way too—when you organize with other people, you develop your sense of solidarity and sympathy, and that helps break down the oppression.

In fact, this all goes back to James Madison’s point again: there are “parchment barriers” which say that you can’t fire workers for trying to organize, there are federal laws that make that completely illegal. But because for whatever reason people have not been able to fight to maintain those laws, the government just doesn’t enforce them anymore. I mean, the reason the people you’re talking about can be fired is that the government is a criminal operation: it doesn’t enforce the laws. Therefore employers have this real weapon over people’s heads, which is a very powerful one, as you say.

Actually, there was an interesting article about this in Business Week a little while ago. It was about the destruction of unions in the United States, and what they pointed out—kind of casually, not making a big point of it—is that part of the way that unions have been destroyed here is just by a huge increase in illegal firings, particularly during the 1980s. The Wagner Act makes that flatly illegal, but since the federal government is a criminal operation and doesn’t enforce the laws, employers just do whatever they feel like. The same thing was true with industrial accidents: they shot way up in the 1980s, because the Reagan administration just refused to enforce the laws regulating workplace safety. And this is all right out in the open—like, Business Week says it straight out: “illegal firings,” nobody’s trying to cover it up.²⁴

 

WOMAN: Can’t employers fire employees “at will” in the U.S., though?

 

No—if employees are trying to organize and they get fired, that’s against the law, it’s flatly illegal.²⁵

 

WOMAN: It’s tough to prove, though.

 

It’s tough to prove if the government won’t prosecute, or if the courts won’t hear it, or if the National Labor Relations Board is set up in such a way that you’ve got to work for five years before your case ever gets heard—by which time everybody’s either gone away or dropped dead or something. I mean, these are all just various techniques of state criminality to evade very clear legislation. In fact, the United States has been censured by the International Labor Organization for violating international labor standards—it’s probably the only industrial society the I.L.O. has ever censured, because this is a U.N. agency, so it’s largely paid for by the U.S., and they never say anything bad about the people who pay their wages. But the I.L.O. in 1991 censured the United States for violating international labor standards at the time of the Caterpillar strike, when the government permitted the corporation to bring in scabs [workers who cross the picket-line] to break the strike.²⁶

And the same sorts of things are happening under Bill Clinton too. So one of the campaign issues that got Clinton a lot of labor support in 1992 was that he promised to put some teeth in the law that makes it illegal for employers to hire scabs—which basically destroys any strike. I mean, when you’ve got a huge unemployed labor force, and you don’t have a sense of working-class solidarity in the population, and a ton of people are desperate, if you go on strike and get replaced by scabs, okay, that’s the end of the strike—so that kills strikes. Now, this is unheard of: no modern country permits this. In fact, at the time that the I.L.O. censured the U.S., only the U.S. and South Africa allowed it, though by now I think it’s spreading for all kinds of reasons, especially in England. But one of Clinton’s big campaign promises in ’92 was that he was going to put a stop to this practice—and just now he’s sort of backed off from that, under the threat of a filibuster [the practice of blocking legislation in Congress by indefinitely prolonging debate]. The people in Congress who were pushing it said, rightly or wrongly, that they couldn’t overcome a filibuster—and so he stopped.²⁷

Well, that’s again the same interaction: there are already laws on the books that make hiring scabs illegal, but laws only get enforced if people are willing to fight for them, otherwise they don’t get enforced. I mean, it’s nice to have the laws, but it’s nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights—it’s not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing, as in this case.

There are also a number of other tricks which are being used all around the world to destroy unions. So for example, in England under Margaret Thatcher [Prime Minister from 1979 to ’90], which was very similar to Reaganite America in many ways, there was also a major effort to try to destroy the labor movement—and by now it’s pretty much gone there too. It’s not quite as bad as the United States yet, but it’s going that way. And remember, the labor movement used to be very strong in England, just like in Canada. In fact, the British labor movement led the way in a lot of respects in pushing through the wave of modern social reform after the Second World War. But now employers in England are allowed to pay differential wages to workers depending on whether or not they unionize—in other words they can say, “If you refuse to join the union I’ll increase your wages; if you join the union I’ll lower your wages.” Well, that’s devastating for unions.

Or take another trick they just instituted there, which is absolutely lethal for organizing. Union dues have traditionally been paid by a check-off: you agree that some part of your salary is going to be deducted for union dues, just like some part of it gets deducted for Social Security. Well, the Conservative John Major government in England just passed an administrative regulation or something that requires all union members to regularly renew their authorization for this check-off—meaning the British labor movement now has to reach six million people somewhere and periodically get them to sign a statement saying, “I agree to continue doing this.” Alright, that is just an incredible burden. Even the mainstream British press pointed out that if you tried to do that to banks, like make banks regularly get written agreements from everybody they’ve ever lent money to or something that they’re still going to pay it back, the financial system would probably collapse.²⁸ And the labor movement mostly runs by unpaid volunteers—they don’t have the money to pay people, so it’s usually volunteers who keep the unions going. So now those volunteers have to take time off from their other activities to try to round up six million people from all around the country, who’ve moved since you last heard of them and this and that, just to get them to sign some statement they’ve already signed before allowing the unions to make this check-off of dues.

Well, that’s the kind of thing that’s been happening all over the place in recent years—and it’s all going to keep on going. I mean, there are all kinds of ways in which power can try to destroy popular organizations: it doesn’t have to be death squads like it is in the Third World. And unless there is enough popular pressure and organizing to overcome it—and in fact, progress—they’ll win. So I don’t know how many of you have tried to organize these days, but it’s extremely hard—partly just because there are a lot of barriers that have been set up to make it very difficult to do, many of them instituted in the 1980s. But they’re obstacles we’re just going to have to overcome.

Inner-City Schools

WOMAN: Noam, a number of activists I know are on welfare, and their children are going to public schools that increasingly are resembling prisons: there are armed guards in the halls, there’s a high level of violence. And I know some of these kids, they’re really brutalized—if they’re not chronically depressed, then they’re violent: violent in language, violent in fact. One of the mothers recently told me—and she’s a pretty radical person—that the conservative “School Choice Movement” [whereby the state would subsidize tuition at private institutions instead of administering public schools] really is appealing to her. It surprised me, but she said, “The left isn’t addressing the problem of the schools, the left is sentimental about public education.” I’m wondering what you think about that?

 

I think there’s a lot of truth to it. I mean, it’s the same with crime—people are really scared, especially people in poor neighborhoods. It’s not so bad where I live, in the fancy suburbs, but if you live in a poor neighborhood, it’s frightening—unpleasant things can happen to you and your children. And when it’s frightening, people want something to protect themselves—and if protecting yourself means having armed guards all around, or calling for more use of the death penalty or something, well, then you’ll go for that. If the choices are narrowed to your child being attacked in the halls and getting a rotten education, or having “private choices”—sure, people will pick the “private choices.” But the task of the left is to extend those options, to let people know that there is another option, the option of a decent life: which is neither schools as prisons, nor pull yourself out and let everybody else stay in the prison—which is what the whole “privatization of education” story is really about.

But sure: if people can’t see any other alternatives, they’ll say “I’ll pull myself out.” In fact, I did the same thing. Why do I live in the suburbs? Because my wife and I wanted our kids to go to a good school, first person to tell you. Of course I did that, and people who have that option will do it—but the idea is to set up a system in which people don’t ever have to face that narrow set of alternatives, all of them awful.

I do think it’s true, though, that at this point the left is basically offering nothing in the way of alternatives. What it ought to be getting across is the message, “Look, this is not the full range of alternatives, there are others”—and then it should present the others. And the others are not utopian. I mean, just look at the history of inner-city schools in the United States: there was a period, not so far back, when many of the inner-city schools here were extremely good—in fact, some of the black inner-city schools in Washington had among the highest college-acceptance rates in the country.²⁹ Or take my own family, for example: they were immigrants from Eastern Europe—not peasants, but from a very poor Eastern European background—and they went through ordinary city schools in New York, some of them went to the City College, and they got very good educations. In fact, the City College of New York used to be one of the best schools in the country: public city school, no reason why it shouldn’t be.

So good public education can certainly be achieved—but of course, like everything else, it’s going to depend on the general social and economic structure in which it operates. I mean, it’s true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities—but they’re destroying them because of a social structure that we’ve just got to change, from the bottom up. And yes, until people can see some hope of changing it, they’re going to pick from within the rotten set of options that are being presented to them.

Defending the Welfare State

WOMAN: Noam, since you’re an anarchist and often say that you oppose the existence of the nation-state itself and think it’s incompatible with true socialism, does that make you at all reluctant to defend welfare programs and other social services which are now under attack from the right wing, and which the right wing wants to dismantle?

 

Well, it’s true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power—and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don’t think there’s any contradiction there—none at all, really.

For example, take the so-called “welfare state.” What’s called the “welfare state” is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on—and as I’ve been saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn “personal responsibility” by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don’t agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it’s grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today’s world, that’s going to have to involve working through the state system; it’s not the only case.

So despite the anarchist “vision,” I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended—in fact, defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that’s being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society.

There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people’s lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don’t think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they’re important—but dismantling the state system is a goal that’s a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what’s at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don’t have. In fact, that’s exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures—because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don’t have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.

So take something that’s been happening in recent years: devolution—that is, removing authority from the federal government down to the state governments. Well, in some circumstances, that would be a democratizing move which I would be in favor of—it would be a move away from central authority down to local authority. But that’s in abstract circumstances that don’t exist. Right now it’ll happen because moving decision-making power down to the state level in fact means handing it over to private power. See, huge corporations can influence and dominate the federal government, but even middle-sized corporations can influence state governments and play one state’s workforce off against another’s by threatening to move production elsewhere unless they get better tax breaks and so on. So under the conditions of existing systems of power, devolution is very anti-democratic; under other systems of much greater equality, devolution could be highly democratic—but these are questions which really can’t be discussed in isolation from the society as it actually exists.

So I think that it’s completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed, because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures.

Let me just give you an analogy. I don’t like to have armed police everywhere, I think it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, a number of years ago when I had little kids, there was a rabid raccoon running around our neighborhood biting children. Well, we tried various ways of getting rid of it—you know, “Have-A-Heart” animal traps, all this kind of stuff—but nothing worked. So finally we just called the police and had them do it: it was better than having the kids bitten by a rabid raccoon, right? Is there a contradiction there? No: in particular circumstances, you sometimes have to accept and use illegitimate structures.

Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around—it’s called corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it doesn’t protect them very well, because mostly it’s run by the corporations, but still it does have some limited effect—it can enforce regulatory measures under public pressure, let’s say, it can reduce dangerous toxic waste disposal, it can set minimal standards on health care, and so on. In fact, it has various things that it can do to improve the situation when there’s this huge rabid raccoon dominating the place. So, fine, I think we ought to get it to do the things it can do—if you can get rid of the raccoon, great, then let’s dismantle the federal government. But to say, “Okay, let’s just get rid of the federal government as soon as we possibly can,” and then let the private tyrannies take over everything—I mean, for an anarchist to advocate that is just outlandish, in my opinion. So I really don’t see any contradiction at all here.

Supporting these aspects of the governmental structures just seems to me to be part of a willingness to face some of the complexities of life for what they are—and the complexities of life include the fact that there are a lot of ugly things out there, and if you care about the fact that some kid in downtown Boston is starving, or that some poor person can’t get adequate medical care, or that somebody’s going to pour toxic waste in your backyard, or anything at all like that, well, then you try to stop it. And there’s only one institution around right now that can stop it. If you just want to be pure and say, “I’m against power, period,” well, okay, say, “I’m against the federal government.” But that’s just to divorce yourself from any human concerns, in my view. And I don’t think that’s a reasonable stance for anarchists or anyone else to take.

Pension Funds and the Law

MAN: Mr. Chomsky, if what I’ve been told is correct, almost half of publicly-owned stock in the United States is in privately-held pension trusts, such as union trust funds. I’m wondering, if restrictions like those under E.R.I.S.A. [the Employee Retirement Income Security Act] can be modified so that workers could control their own funds, do you think that it would be possible to support a collaborative or union-based or popularly-based effort to direct that money towards socially responsible investment—like away from companies that are breaking unions and so on?

 

Well, notice that whatever the numbers are, it’s huge—but that money is not in the hands of labor unions, it’s in the hands of Goldman Sachs [investment firm]. And in fact, if the government enforced the laws, the trustees of those pension funds would be in serious trouble right now—because they have violated their legal responsibility to invest those funds in safe investments. For instance, they are investing your pensions in things like junk bonds in Mexico—and the people making those investment decisions would be legally liable for that, if we applied our laws, because they have a trust to invest those funds in secure investments, and they don’t do it. They just do whatever they want with them. Now, they’re not going to be in trouble, because we don’t have a real justice system—we only go after poor people. But they should be, and in fact, I think the labor movement ought to ask for that now: like, Rubin, the guy who’s Secretary of the Treasury, he should probably be in jail just because of the Mexican economic collapse alone [in December 1994], which he allowed to happen.³⁰

But the point is, you could democratize the unions enough so that they could actually take control of their own resources. And that would be a very important step. I mean, there’s a lot of potential for activism and popular-based efforts there, you’re right. And it doesn’t have to stop at their own pensions, you know: what about the factories in which they work? Why should they be in the hands of private investors? That’s not a law of nature. Why should a corporation have the rights of an individual?³¹ A corporation is a public trust: you go back just a century, and governments were taking away corporate charters because corporations weren’t living up to the “public interest.” ³² It’s a very recent idea that these totalitarian institutions should be totally unaccountable.

So, yes, workers ought to have control of their pension funds—but also everything else too: that is, the society ought to be democratized. And this is not a particularly radical idea, actually: you go back to the guys who founded the American Federation of Labor a century ago—the A.F.L. is not a flaming radical organization—they said, look, working people ought to control the places where they work, there’s no reason why they should be controlled by some rich guy out there who put some money into it and has nothing to do with it.³³ That’s true too, just like it’s true of pension funds—and that would be a move towards a democratic society, as was always understood in fact, until the independent working-class culture was eliminated in the United States. So pension funds are only a part of it: a big part, but only part.

 

MAN: What do you think the role of law is generally in the whole scheme of control?

 

Well, law is a bit like a printing press—it’s kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things.

 

MAN: So you don’t think there’s any legal basis for the hegemony of American corporations, especially in the way that the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted to consider them individuals, with individual rights?

 

Well, you know, “legal basis” is a funny notion: what has a legal basis is a matter of power, not law—like, the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say anything about corporations. During the nineteenth century, there was just a change in the legal status of corporations—a change which would have absolutely appalled Adam Smith, or Thomas Jefferson, or any other Enlightenment thinker. In fact, Smith warned against it, and Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings of it—and what he said is, if what he called the “banks and moneyed incorporations” got the rights that they in fact ended up receiving, we would have a form of absolutism worse than the one we thought we were fighting against in the American Revolution.³⁴ And those rights simply were granted—they weren’t granted by Congress, and in other countries they weren’t granted by Parliaments; they were granted by judges, lawyers, corporate representatives, and others, completely outside the democratic system. And they simply created another world—they created a world of absolutist power which was very new.³⁵

There’s a lot of good work on this by what are called Critical Legal historians, Morton Horwitz at Harvard and others. Also, Oxford University Press has a book by a historian at the University of California named Charles Sellers, who discusses some of this: it’s called The Market Revolution .³⁶ That’s the basic story, though: these laws were made by a big power-play, completely outside of popular control. Okay, as usual, the guys with the guns are the ones that decide what the law is.

Conspiracy Theories

MAN: Noam, you mentioned earlier how “conspiracy theories” take up a lot of energy in the left movements these days, particularly on the West Coast and with respect to the Kennedy assassination—and you said that in your view, it’s a totally wasted effort. Do you really feel there’s nothing at all worthwhile in that kind of inquiry?

 

Well, let me put it this way. Every example we find of planning decisions in the society is a case where some people got together and tried to use whatever power they could draw upon to achieve a result—if you like, those are “conspiracies.” That means that almost everything that happens in the world is a “conspiracy.” If the Board of Directors of General Motors gets together and decides what kind of car to produce next year, that’s a conspiracy. Every business decision, every editorial decision is a conspiracy. If the Linguistics Department I work in decides who to appoint next year, that’s a conspiracy.

Okay, obviously that’s not interesting: all decisions involve people. So the real question is, are there groupings well outside the structures of the major institutions of the society which go around them, hijack them, undermine them, pursue other courses without an institutional base, and so on and so forth? And that’s a question of fact: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power?

Well, as I look over history, I don’t find much of that. I mean, there are some cases—for instance, at one point a group of Nazi generals thought of assassinating Hitler. Okay, that’s a conspiracy. But things like that are real blips on the screen, as far as I can see. Now, if people want to spend time studying the group of Nazi generals who decided it was time to get rid of Hitler, that’s a fine topic for a monograph—maybe somebody will write a thesis about it. But we’re not going to learn anything about the world from it, at least nothing that generalizes to the next case—it’s all going to be historically contingent and specific; it’ll show you how one particular group of people acted under particular circumstances. Fine.

And if you look at the place where investigation of “conspiracies” has absolutely flourished, modern American history, I think what’s notable is the absence of such cases—at least as I read the record, they almost never happen. I mean, occasionally you’ll find something like the Reaganites, with their off-the-shelf subversive and terrorist activities, but that was sort of a fringe operation—and in fact, part of the reason why a lot of it got exposed so quickly is because the institutions are simply too powerful to tolerate very much of that stuff. As far as the Pentagon goes, sure, the Services will push their own interests—but typically they do it in pretty transparent ways.

Or take the C.I.A., which is considered the source of a lot of these conspiracies: we have a ton of information about it, and as I read the information, the C.I.A. is basically just an obedient branch of the White House. I mean, sure, the C.I.A. has done things around the world—but as far as we know, it hasn’t done anything on its own. There’s very little evidence—in fact, I don’t know of any—that the C.I.A. is some kind of rogue elephant, you know, off on its own doing things. What the record shows is that the C.I.A. is just an agency of the White House, which sometimes carries out operations for which the Executive branch wants what’s called “plausible deniability”: in other words, if something goes wrong, we don’t want it to look like we did it, those guys in the C.I.A. did it, and we can throw some of them to the wolves if we need to.³⁷ That’s basically the role of the C.I.A., along with mostly just collection of information.

It’s the same with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, all these other things that people are racing around searching for conspiracy theories about—they’re “nothing” organizations. Of course they’re there, obviously rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together—that’s not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with the way the institutions actually function.

The Kennedy-assassination cult is probably the most striking case. I mean, you have all these people doing super-scholarly intensive research, and trying to find out just who talked to whom, and what the exact contours were of this supposed high-level conspiracy—it’s all complete nonsense. As soon as you look into the various theories, they always collapse, there’s just nothing there.³⁸ But in many places, the left has just fallen apart on the basis of these sheer cults.

 

MAN: There’s perhaps one exception, though—what about Martin Luther King’s assassination?

 

That’s interesting—see, that’s the one case where you can imagine pretty plausible reasons why people would have wanted to kill him, and I would not be in the least surprised if there in fact was a real conspiracy behind that one, probably a high-level conspiracy. I mean, the mechanisms were there, maybe they would have hired somebody from the Mafia or something to do it—but that conspiracy theory is perfectly plausible, I think. And interestingly, I’m not aware that there’s been very much inquiry into it—or if there has been, I haven’t heard about it.³⁹ But in the case of the one that everybody’s excited about—Kennedy—I mean, nobody’s even come up with a plausible reason.

In fact, that’s a pretty dramatic contrast, isn’t it: the case of the King assassination is on its face very plausible, and the case of the Kennedy assassination is on its face extremely implausible—yet look at the difference in treatment.

 

WOMAN: Do you have any ideas why that might be?

 

Well, there are a lot of things in a way “conspiring” to make the Kennedy assassination an attractive topic these days. I mean, the Kennedy administration was in many ways very similar to the Reagan administration—in policy and programs—but they did do one smart thing that was different: they sort of buttered up the intellectual class, as compared with the Reaganites, who just treated them with contempt. So they gave sort of an appearance of sharing power (it was never real) to the kinds of people who write books and articles, and make movies, and all of those things—and the result is, Camelot has always had a very beautiful image. And somehow it’s all succeeded in getting most of the population to believe the lies about Kennedy. I mean, even today you can go down to poor rural black areas in the South and find pictures of him on the walls. Kennedy’s role in the Civil Rights Movement was not pretty. But somehow the imagery has succeeded, even if the reality was never there.⁴⁰

And certainly a lot of things have gone wrong in the last thirty years, for all sorts of independent reasons. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement made great achievements, but it never lived up to the hopes that many people invested in it. The anti-war movement made achievements, but it didn’t end war. Real wages have been declining for twenty years.⁴¹ People are working harder, they have to work longer hours, they have less security—things are just looking bad for a lot of people, especially young people. I mean, very few people expect the future for their children to be anything like what they had, and entry-level wages in the United States have just declined radically in the last fifteen years—for instance, wages you get for your first job after high school are now down 30 percent for males and 18 percent for females over 1980, and that just kind of changes your picture of life.⁴² And one could easily go on. But the fact is, a lot of things have happened that aren’t very pretty. And in this kind of situation, it’s very easy to fall into the belief that we had a hero, and we had a wonderful country, and we had this guy who was going to lead us, we had the messiah—then they shot him down and ever since then everything’s been illegitimate. So really there have to be serious efforts to get past this, I think.

The Decision to Get Involved

MAN: Noam, we’ve been discussing a number of activist strategies and problems—I’d like to talk for a moment about some of the reasons why people don’t get involved in activism. Suppose somebody convinced you, at the level of your belief in most things, that it was impossible to change the country, that the basic institutional structures we have now are going to remain in place for the next 200 years—you know, more or less adapted, but the same basic structures. I’m wondering, would you behave any differently?

 

Zero.

 

MAN: You would behave exactly the same way?

 

Same way. In fact, you don’t even have to make it hypothetical—when I first got seriously involved in anti-Vietnam War activity, I was a hundred percent convinced that absolutely nothing could be done. I mean, into 1965 and ’66, if we wanted to have an anti-war meeting in Boston, we’d have to find six topics—you know, “Let’s talk about Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, and the price of bread, and maybe we can get an audience that’ll outnumber the organizers.” And that went on for a long time. It looked impossible.

 

MAN: So if you thought that the current situation was going to continue, just persist forever, you would still do it?

 

Yes.

 

MAN: Why, exactly?

 

Well, for a number of quite simple reasons. For one thing, if somebody convinced me of that, it would be because I’m totally irrational—there’s no way to convince anybody of such things rationally. Look, we cannot predict the weather two weeks ahead, and that’s something relatively simple, it’s not like human society.

 

MAN: It’s a hypothetical question, it gets to motivations—I’m sure none of us believe it, none of us believe you could prove it . . .

 

Not only could you not prove it, you couldn’t even say anything convincing about it.

 

MAN: But, nevertheless, because in fact a great many people not understanding that point do feel this way, or tend to feel this way sometimes, and get depressed at those moments—what I’m wondering is, anyway, in any event, what gets you up each morning to do the things you do? Is it that you think in terms of winning a little way down the road, or is it something else?

 

Well, it’s hard to introspect, but to the extent that I introspect about it, it’s because you basically have two choices. One choice is to assume the worst, and then you can be guaranteed that it’ll happen. The other is to assume that there’s some hope for change, in which case it’s possible that you can help to effect change. So you’ve got two choices, one guarantees the worst will happen, the other leaves open the possibility that things might get better. Given those choices, a decent person doesn’t hesitate.

 

MAN: But is it really true that a decent person will only go that one way? I’m remembering a friend of mine who was an activist in the Sixties and intended to move into a working-class neighborhood to do organizing, and finally he decided not to. Somewhat later he went back to graduate school and became a psychiatrist, and now I’m sure he has progressive values, but he’s certainly not involved in any significant way in political activity. But the choice he made back then was a very conscious one: he looked around and said, “The impact that I personally am going to have is so small, because I’m not So-and-so and So-and-so, that I feel it’s just not worth giving up what I think I’ll be giving up.”

 

I know plenty of people like that too. But see, that person now, let’s say he’s a rich psychiatrist somewhere—okay, he’s got a lot of options, he’s simply deciding at some point not to face them. They’re always there. For example, he’s got money: if he doesn’t want to do things himself, he can give money to people who do. In fact, movement groups have existed because people who were doing other things were willing to fund them—something as trivial as that. And you can go way beyond that, of course, and still live your elegant lifestyle and do the work you want to do. I know plenty of people who have in fact divided their lives that way.

Now, of course, it’s extremely easy to say, “The heck with it—I’m just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority, and do the best I can within them.” Sure, you can do that. But that’s not acting like a decent person. Look, if you’re walking down the street and you see a kid eating an ice-cream cone, and you notice there’s no cop around and you’re hungry, you can take the ice-cream cone because you’re bigger and just walk away. You can do that—probably there are people who do. But we call them pathological. On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures, we call them normal—but it’s just as pathological, it’s just the pathology of the general society.

Again, people always have choices, so you can decide to accept the pathology—but then do it honestly at least. If you have that grain of honesty in you, say: “Okay, I’m going to honestly be pathological.” Or else just try to break out of it somehow.

 

MAN: For a lot of people, though, it appears that there’s an all-or-nothing choice—it appears that there’s the choice between being “normal,” pathological as you describe, but a normal member of society with its normal benefits and costs, having a reasonably average or perhaps elite existence, one that’s accepted. And then there seems to be the “all” choice. I think the reason why it’s so hard for people even just to take a leaflet, or to give a donation at a relatively low level which means nothing to them financially—which is less money than they’re going to spend on dinner Friday night when they go out—seems to me to be because there is this psychologically very powerful effect. At some level people know that it’s right, but they also know that to do it somewhat leads to doing it more—so they just close the door right at the very beginning. I’m not sure how as organizers we can manage to overcome that situation.

 

I think you’re right that just giving your contribution of a hundred dollars to the Central America Support Center or whatever is a statement that you know that that’s the right thing to do—and then once you’ve stated that it’s the right thing to do, the question arises, “How come I’m only doing this when I could be doing a million times more?” And it’s very easy just to say, “Look, I’m not going to face that problem, I’m just going to forget it all.” But that’s like stealing the ice-cream cone from the kid.

The reality is that there’s a whole range of choices in the middle, and all of us have made them—none of us are saints, at least I’m not. I haven’t given up my house, I haven’t given up my car, I don’t live in a hovel, I don’t spend 24 hours a day working for the benefit of the human race, or anything like that. In fact, I don’t even come close: I spend an awful lot of my time and energy just doing scientific work.

 

MAN: And you don’t feel guilty about that.

 

Well, that’s not so clear. But I certainly do devote an awful lot of my energy and activity to things that I just enjoy, like scientific work. I just like it, I do it out of pleasure. And everybody else I know does the same thing.

 

AN: Do you fool yourself into believing that it increases your effectiveness as a political person somehow?

 

No, that’s ridiculous—it has no effect on that. And I certainly don’t do it for that reason. I do it because I like it, and I think it’s getting somewhere.

Look, you’re not going to be effective as a political activist unless you have a satisfying life. I mean, there may be people who are really saints, but I’ve never heard of one. Like, it may be that the political activities themselves are so gratifying that they’re all you want to do, and you just throw yourself into them. Okay, that’s a perfectly fine thing to be—it’s just that most people have other interests: they want to listen to music, they want to take a walk by the ocean, they want to watch the sunset. Any human being is too rich and complex just to be satisfied with these things, so you have to hit some kind of a balance.

Well, the choices are all there, but I think you’ve identified precisely why it’s psychologically difficult for people to recognize that—because once you’ve recognized that the choices are there, you’re always going to be faced with the question, why am I not doing more? But that’s just the reality of life: if you’re honest, you’re always going to be faced with that question. And there are plenty of things to do, and also plenty of successes to point to. In fact, it’s amazing how many successes there have been, if you really think about it.

For example, take the issue of East Timor, a big massacre. At the time that I got involved in that over a decade ago, nobody even wanted to hear about it—but after years of organizing by some pretty tireless activists, things finally got to the point where the U.S. Congress barred military aid to Indonesia. That’s a tremendous change—you could save hundreds of thousands of lives that way. How many people can look back and say, “Look, I helped to save hundreds of thousands of lives”? And that’s one tiny issue. So all of it was going on in secret, nobody was interested, everybody in power wanted to let it go on—but half a dozen or so people finally managed to break through.

 

MAN: I’m inclined to think that most of the people who are involved in that effort, instead of feeling elated, or at least feeling a degree of satisfaction over the accomplishment, rather view it as a horrendously long campaign with very little achieved over the years.

 

Suppose you’re on your deathbed: how many people can look back and say, “I’ve contributed to helping one person not get killed”?

 

MAN: I’m not disagreeing with you—but there’s just something about our culture that causes people on the left not to see the successes.

 

See, I’m not so convinced of this. If you go back to the 1960s movements, when a lot of the current ferment started, the people involved overwhelmingly were young people—and young people have a notoriously short perspective. That’s part of being twenty years old: you’re thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow, not what life is going to be like twenty years from now.

So look at something like the Columbia strike, which was the big thing in 1968 [hundreds of students took over Columbia University buildings for eight days to protest war-related research and the school’s relations with the surrounding community]. If you remember what it was like back then, you’ll recall that the sense on the Columbia campus—quite literally, I’m not exaggerating—was: “If we close down Columbia and have fun smoking pot for three weeks, the revolution will be here, and then it’ll all be over and everybody will be happy and equal and free, and we can go back to our ordinary concerns.” Well, you waited three weeks, the cops came in and smashed you up, and nothing changed. And there were a lot of results from that. One result was just that a lot of people gave up, said, “Well, we couldn’t do it.” In fact, it’s rather striking that ’68 around the world is considered a crucially important date—but it was really the end.

So the fact that it was dominantly a youth movement in the Sixties had good and bad aspects, and one bad aspect was this sense that if you don’t achieve quickly, you’d might as well quit. But of course, that’s not the way changes come. The struggle against slavery went on forever, the struggle for women’s rights has been going on for centuries, the effort to overcome “wage slavery”—that’s been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven’t advanced an inch. In fact, we’re worse off than we were a hundred years ago in terms of understanding the issues. Well, okay, you just keep struggling.

“Human Nature Is Corrupt”

MAN: Noam, another view I frequently encounter lying behind people’s reticence to become involved in political activity stems from the idea that human nature is corrupt: egotistical, self-centered, anti-social, and so on—and that as a result, society will always have oppressors and oppressed, be hierarchical, exploit people, be driven by individual self-interest, etc. I often find that you can get agreement on the inhumanity of the system, or on the injustice of a war, or on some specific set of policies, but that people will refrain from becoming active about it because of a sense of hopelessness having to do with this view of human nature. Again, it may just be an excuse, a last line of defense against getting involved—but in order to deal with it as an organizer, you still have to address the claim. I’m curious what you would say to someone like that.

 

Well, there’s a sense in which the claim is certainly true. First of all, human nature is something we don’t know much about: doubtless there is a rich and complex human nature, and doubtless it’s largely genetically determined, like everything else—but we don’t know what it is. However, there is enough evidence from history and experience to demonstrate that human nature is entirely consistent with everything you mentioned—in fact, by definition it has to be. So we know that human nature, and that includes our nature, yours and mine, can very easily turn people into quite efficient torturers and mass-murderers and slave-drivers. We know that—you don’t have to look very far for evidence. But what does that mean? Should people therefore not try to stop torture? If you see somebody beating a child to death, should you say, “Well, you know, that’s human nature”—which it is in fact: there certainly are conditions under which people will act like that.

To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it’s just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.

I mean, my general feeling is that over time, there’s measurable progress—it’s not huge, but it’s significant. And sometimes it’s been pretty dramatic. Over history, there’s been a real widening of the moral realm, I think—a recognition of broader and broader domains of individuals who are regarded as moral agents, meaning having rights. Look, we are self-conscious beings, we’re not rocks, and we can come to get a better understanding of our own nature, it can become more and more realized over time—not because you read a book about it, the book doesn’t have anything to tell you, because nobody really knows anything about this topic. But just through experience—including historical experience, which is part of our personal experience because it’s embedded in the culture we enter into—we can gain greater understanding of our nature and values.

Discovering Morality

Take the treatment of children, for example. In the medieval period, it was considered quite legitimate to either kill them, or throw them out, or treat them brutally, all sorts of things. It still happens of course, but now it’s regarded as pathological, not proper. Well, it’s not that we have a different moral capacity than people did in the Middle Ages, it’s just that the situation’s changed: there are opportunities to think about things that weren’t available in a society that had a lower material production level and so on. So we’ve just learned more about our own moral sense in that area.

I think it’s part of moral progress to be able to face things that once looked as if they weren’t problems. I have that kind of feeling about our relation to animals, for example—I think the questions there are hard, in fact. A lot of these things are matters of trying to explore your own moral intuitions, and if you’ve never explored them, you don’t know what they are. Abortion’s a similar case—there are complicated moral issues. Feminist issues were a similar case. Slavery was a similar case. I mean, some of these things seem easy now, because we’ve solved them and there’s a kind of shared consensus—but I think it’s a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animal rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like, to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals? I mean, yes, you want to do animal experimentation for the prevention of diseases. But what’s the balance, where’s the trade-off? There’s obviously got to be some. Like, we’d all agree that too much torture of animals for treating a disease would not be permissible. But what are the principles on which we draw such conclusions? That’s not a trivial question.

 

MAN: What about eating?

 

Same question.

 

MAN: Are you a vegetarian?

 

I’m not, but I think it’s a serious question. If you want my guess, my guess is that if society continues to develop without catastrophe on something like the course you can see over time, I wouldn’t in the least be surprised if it moves in the direction of vegetarianism and the protection of animal rights.

Look, doubtless there’s plenty of hypocrisy and confusion and everything else about the question right now, but that doesn’t mean that the issue isn’t valid. And I think one can see the moral force to it—definitely one should keep an open mind on it, it’s certainly a perfectly intelligible idea to us.

I mean, you don’t have to go back very far in history to find gratuitous torture of animals. So in Cartesian philosophy, they thought they’d proven that humans had minds and everything else in the world was a machine—so there’s no difference between a cat and a watch, let’s say, just the cat’s a little more complicated. And if you look back at the French Court in the seventeenth century, courtiers—you know, big smart guys who’d studied all this stuff and thought they understood it—would as a sport take Lady So-And-So’s favorite dog and kick it and beat it to death, and laugh, saying, “Ha, ha, look, this silly lady doesn’t understand the latest philosophy, which shows that it’s just like dropping a rock on the floor.” That was gratuitous torture of animals, and it was regarded as if it were the torturing of a rock: you can’t do it, there’s no way to torture a rock. Well, the moral sphere has certainly changed in that respect—gratuitous torture of animals is no longer considered quite legitimate.

 

MAN: But in that case it could be that what’s changed is our understanding of what an animal is, not the understanding of our underlying values.

 

In that case it probably was—because in fact the Cartesian view was a departure from the traditional view, in which you didn’t torture animals gratuitously. On the other hand, there are cultures, like say, aristocratic cultures, that have fox-hunting as a sport, or bear-baiting, or other things like that, in which gratuitous torture of animals has been seen as perfectly legitimate.

In fact, it’s kind of intriguing to see how we regard this. Take cock-fighting, for example, in which cocks are trained to tear each other to shreds. Our culture happens to regard that as barbaric; on the other hand, we train humans to tear each other to shreds—they’re called boxing matches—and that’s not regarded as barbaric. So there are things that we don’t permit of cocks that we permit of poor people. Well, you know, there are some funny values at work there.

Abortion

MAN: You mentioned abortion—what’s your view about that whole debate?

 

I think it’s a hard one, I don’t think the answers are simple—it’s a case where there really are conflicting values. See, it’s very rare in most human situations that there’s a clear and simple answer about what’s right, and sometimes the answers are very murky, because there are different values, and values do conflict. I mean, our understanding of our own moral value system is that it’s not like an axiom system, where there’s always one answer and not some other answer. Rather we have what appear to be conflicting values, which often lead us to different answers—maybe because we don’t understand all the values well enough yet, or maybe because they really are in conflict. Well, in the case of abortion, there are just straight conflicts. From one point of view, a child up to a certain point is an organ of the mother’s body, and the mother ought to have a decision what to do—and that’s true. From another point of view, the organism is a potential human being, and it has rights. And those two values are simply in conflict.

On the other hand, a biologist I know once suggested that we may one day be able to see the same conflict when a woman washes her hands. I mean, when a woman washes her hands, a lot of cells flake off—and in principle, each of those cells has the genetic instructions for a human being. Well, you could imagine a future technology which would take one of those cells and create a human being from it. Now, obviously he was making the argument as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but there’s an element of truth to it—not that much yet, but it’s not like saying something about astrology. What he’s saying is true.

If you want to know my own personal judgment, I would say a reasonable proposal at this point is that the fetus changes from an organ to a person when it becomes viable—but certainly that’s arguable. And besides, as this biologist was pointing out, it’s not very clear when that is—depending on the state of technology, it could be when the woman’s washing her hands. That’s life, though: in life you’re faced with hard decisions, conflicting values.

Moral Values

MAN: Where do you think “values” come from in the first place?

 

That’s an interesting question. Any answer we give is based on extremely little understanding, so nothing one says is very serious. But just from the conditions of moral judgment, I don’t see how it can fail to be true that moral values are basically rooted in our nature—I think that must be true. And the reason why I say that is pretty elementary.

I mean, undoubtedly the way in which we look at things and make judgments about them and assess them has a significant and notable cultural factor. But that aside, we certainly are capable, and everybody does it, of making moral judgments and evaluations in entirely new situations—we do that all the time; we may not be consciously evaluating all the new circumstances we’re faced with, but we’re certainly at least tacitly doing it, and the results of those evaluations are the basis for our choices of action, our doing one thing and not another. So we’re constantly making all kinds of judgments, including moral judgments, aesthetic judgments, and all sorts of others, about new things and new situations. Well, either it’s being done just randomly, sort of like pulling something out of a hat—which certainly doesn’t seem to be true, either introspectively or by observation—or else we’re doing it on the basis of some moral system that we have built into our minds somehow, which gives answers, or at least partial answers, to a whole range of new situations.

Well, nobody knows what that system actually is of course—we don’t understand it at all—but it does seem to be rich and complex enough so that it can apply to indefinitely many new situations.

 

MAN: Obviously one couldn’t map it out in detail, but how do you think such a system might be set up?

 

Well, again, we really don’t know at all. But a serious proposal for such a system, I think, would be that it might be something like what we know about language—and a lot is known. For example, there is a framework of basic, fundamental principles of language that are invariant in the species, they’re just fixed in our biological nature somehow—they hold for all languages, and they allow for only a very limited degree of modification, which comes from early experience. Then as soon as those wired-in options for variation are fixed, children have a whole linguistic system which allows them to say new things, and to understand new things, and to interpret new expressions that nobody’s ever heard before—all kinds of things like that.

Well, qualitatively speaking, that’s what our system of moral judgment looks like, so it’s conceivable that it has a similar kind of basis—but again, you have to find the answer, you can’t just guess.

 

MAN: Obviously the underlying principles can’t be simple—they can’t just be something like, “Thou shalt not kill.”

 

No—because we decide much more complex things than that. I mean, we really don’t know what the fundamental principles of moral judgment actually are, but we have very good reason to believe that they’re there. And that’s simply because we can, in fact, make relatively consistent moral judgments, judgments which are understood by other people, and appreciated by them (sometimes with disagreement, in which case we can have moral discourse), and we can do all of that under new conditions that we’ve never seen before, and facing new problems and so on. Okay, unless we’re angels, the structures that perform those functions got into the organism the same way other complex things did—namely, they’re largely part of a genetically-determined framework, which gets marginally modified through the course probably of early experience.

Well, that’s what our moral system might look like. How much variation can there be in such moral systems? Well, without understanding, we don’t know. How much variation can there be in languages? Without understanding, we don’t know. I mean, in the case of languages, we know that it’s not much variation, and in the case of moral values I think we can make a fair guess that it also can’t be much variation—and the reason is quite elementary. Our moral system appears to be complex and determinate, and there are only two factors that can enter into determining it: one is our fixed biological nature, and the other is individual experience. Well, we know that experience is extremely impoverished, it doesn’t give a lot of direction—the logic being pretty much the same as when someone asks, “Why do children undergo puberty at a certain age?” Actually, nobody knows the answer to that: it’s a topic that’s unknown. But there are only two possible factors that can enter into it. One is something in children’s pre-puberty experience which sort of sets them off undergoing puberty—say, some effect of the environment such as peer pressure, or somebody told you it would be a good idea or something. And the other is that we’re just genetically designed so that under certain conditions and at a certain level of maturation, hormones take over, and at that point we undergo puberty: it’s wired in.

Well, without knowing anything, everyone just assumes the second possibility. Like, if somebody came along and said they think it’s peer pressure that causes puberty—it’s because you see other people doing it, and you want to be like them—without knowing anything, you’d just laugh. And the reason you’d laugh is very simple: the environment is not specific enough or rich enough to determine these highly specific changes that take place. And that logic also holds for just about everything else in growth and development too—that’s why people assume, without knowledge, that an embryo will become a chicken rather than a human being depending on its biological nature, not depending on the nutrition that’s fed in: because the nutrition doesn’t have enough information to cause those highly specific changes. Well, it looks as if moral values and our moral judgment system are of that character too.

Actually, contributing to this conclusion is just the fact that we can have moral discourse to begin with. So take an issue on which people were really split, take slavery. It wasn’t just an intellectual debate, obviously—there was a huge amount of struggle involved—but insofar as there was an intellectual debate, it had a certain shared moral ground to it. In fact, the slave owners’ arguments are not so simple to answer—some of them are valid, and have a lot of implications. They were taken very seriously by American workers in the late nineteenth century, for example.

For instance, the slave owners argued, “You take better care of a slave if you own it than if you rent it.” Like, you take better care of your car if you own it than if you rent it, so you take better care of your worker if you own it than if you rent it—so slavery’s benevolent and “free market” is morally atrocious. And the slave owners in fact said, “Look, we’re a lot more benevolent than you guys with your capitalist wage-slave system.” And if you look back at the literature by workers who organized into, say, the Knights of Labor and other working-class organizations of the late nineteenth century, you’ll also see a strain running through their position which said: “We fought to end slavery, not to impose it” [i.e. the industrial wage-labor system became dominant after the Civil War].⁴³ So the point is, on all sides of debates like these, people understand that they have to appeal to the same basic moral principles, even if what they’re doing is totally venal.

I mean, it’s extremely rare even for an S.S. guard or a torturer to say, “I’m doing this because I like to be a son of a bitch.” We all do bad things in our lives, and if you think back, it’s very rare that you’ve said, “I’m doing this just because I feel like it”—people reinterpret things in order to fit them into a basic framework of moral values, which in fact we all share.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that moral values are uniform—if you look across cultures, you do find some differences. But when you look at different languages, you also appear to find radical differences. You know they can’t be there—because if the differences really were great, it would be impossible to acquire any of the languages. So therefore the differences have to be superficial, and the scientific question is to prove what must be true by the basic logic of the situation. Well, I think the same must be true in the case of moral judgment as well. So to go back to the original question, I don’t think we can reasonably doubt that moral values are indeed rooted in our nature.

 

MAN: Then if people do have this shared set of moral values, you still have to explain why everything is as corrupt and hierarchical and war-laden as it is.

 

But why not ask another question? Why not ask how come there’s so much sympathy, and care, and love, and solidarity? I mean, that’s also true.

 

MAN: That’s the way I always answer the objection—there should be none of those things, because the institutions don’t breed them.

 

Well, there’s no such thing as, “why is there so much of this and so much of that?”—there is what there is. But what there is doubtless is conditioned by the opportunities and choices that are imposed and available to people under particular social, cultural, economic, and even physical settings. So the point is to try to get to a situation where the society and all its institutions and arrangements are set up so as to maximize the options for people to pursue the healthier alternatives. And I really don’t think there’s been a better period in modern history for organizing towards that than there is right now, actually.

I mean, there’s tremendous disillusionment all across the country—and it’s world-wide incidentally: there have been cross-national studies of this, and the level of pessimism across the entire industrial world is just extraordinary. In the United States, for example, about three-quarters of the population thinks that the future is going to be “objectively worse” than the past—in other words, that their children won’t live like they do.⁴⁴ About half the American population thinks that both political parties just ought to be disbanded, they’re useless.⁴⁵ The disaffection from institutions is always high, and it’s been going up very consistently in past years.⁴⁶ These are conditions under which organizing for social change ought to be very much possible—if we’re not doing it, it’s our own fault: these factors have not been true in the past.

But at the same time, it’s also true that people feel hopeless. I mean, part of the disillusionment is that they just don’t see anything else—they don’t see a solution, or any alternatives. Even at the depths of the 1930s Depression, which was objectively much worse than today, people were never hopeless the way they are today. Most people felt it’s going to get better, we can do something about it, we can organize, we can work. I mean, they had illusions too, like there were a lot of illusions about Roosevelt, for example—but the illusions were combined with something real going on. Today what people mainly feel is, it’s going to get worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

So what we’re faced with is a combination of a very high degree of disillusionment, and a very low degree of hope and perception of alternatives. And that’s exactly where serious organizers ought to be able to step in.