The following is the adapted text of an interview that first appeared in Modern Success [4] magazine.
So
many things have been written about, and discussed by, Professor
Chomsky, it was a challenge to think of anything new to ask him: like
the grandparent you can’t think of what to get for Christmas because
they already have everything.
So I chose to be a bit selfish and ask
him what I’ve always wanted to ask him. As an out-spoken, actual,
live-and-breathing anarchist, I wanted to know how he could align
himself with such a controversial and marginal position.Michael S. Wilson:You
are, among many other things, a self-described anarchist — an
anarcho-syndicalist, specifically. Most people think of anarchists as
disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men
tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists. Is this an accurate
view? What is anarchy to you?
Noam Chomsky:Well,
anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought
which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has
some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is
suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It
seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the
whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial
systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes
that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority
lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to
give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that
authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the
authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and
just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It
takes different forms at different times. Anarcho-syndicalism is a
particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though
not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place,
over production. It took for granted that working people ought to
control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the
enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should
be associated with one another in free associations, and … democracy of
that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free
society. And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly
that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of
anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I mean it’s not at all the general image
that you described — people running around the streets, you know,
breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a
very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation
at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible,
maybe none. Wilson: With the apparent ongoing demise of
the capitalist state, many people are looking at other ways to be
successful, to run their lives, and I’m wondering what you would say
anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others ideas — say,
for example, state-run socialism — have failed to offer? Why should we
choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism? Chomsky:Well
what’s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U.
S. phenomenon, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else — a little bit in
England — permits a very high level of authority and domination but in
the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do
whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic,
concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society.
Actually that has been believed in the past. Adam Smith for example,
one of his main arguments for markets was the claim that under
conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality.
Well, we don’t have to talk about that! That kind of — Wilson:
It seems to be a continuing contention today … Chomsky: Yes, and so
well that kind of libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is
just a call for some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable
private tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for
an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of
tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should
we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than
subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave. Its’ better
to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make
decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don’t think you
really need an argument for that. It seems like … transparent. The
thing you need an argument for, and should give an argument for, is, How
can we best proceed in that direction? And there are lots of ways
within the current society. One way, incidentally, is through use of
the state, to the extent that it is democratically controlled. I mean
in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated. But
it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a
certain extent, under public influence and control — could be much more
so. And it provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces
of private power. Rules for safety and health in the workplace for
example. Or insuring that people have decent health care, let’s say.
Many other things like that. They’re not going to come about through
private power. Quite the contrary. But they can come about through the
use of the state system under limited democratic control … to carry
forward reformist measures. I think those are fine things to do. they
should be looking forward to something much more, much beyond, — namely
actual, much larger-scale democratization. And that’s possible to not
only think about, but to work on. So one of the leading anarchist
thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out that it’s quite possible
to build the institutions of a future society within the present one.
And he was thinking about far more autocratic societies than ours. And
that’s being done. So for example, worker- and community- controlled
enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And
those not only can be developed, but are being developed. There’s some
important work on this by Gar Alperovitz who’s involved in the
enterprise systems around the Cleveland area which are worker and
community controlled. There’s a lot of theoretical discussion of how it
might work out, from various sources. Some of the most worked out
ideas are in what’s called the “parecon” — participatory economics —
literature and discussions. And there are others. These are at the
planning and thinking level. And at the practical implementation level,
there are steps that can be taken, while also pressing to overcome the
worst … the major harms … caused by … concentration of private power
through the use of state system, as long as the current system exists.
So there’s no shortage of means to pursue. As for state socialism,
depends what one means by the term. If it’s tyranny of the Bolshevik
variety (and its descendants), we need not tarry on it. If it’s a more
expanded social democratic state, then the comments above apply. If
something else, then what? Will it place decision-making in the hands
of working people and communities, or in hands of some authority? If
the latter, then — once again — freedom is better than subjugation, and
the latter carries a very heavy burden of justification. Wilson::
Many people know you because of your and Edward Herman’s development of
the Propaganda Model. Could you briefly describe that model and why it
might be important to [college] students? Chomsky: Well first look back
a bit — a little historical framework — back in the late 19th-, early
20th century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies. At
the peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain. By no
means free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in
this respect. In fact so advanced, that power systems — state and
private — began to recognize that things were getting to a point where
they can’t control the population by force as easily as before, so they
are going to have to turn to other means of control. And the other
means of control are control of beliefs and attitudes. And out of that
grew the public relations industry, which in those days described itself
honestly as an industry of propaganda. The guru of the PR industry,
Edward Bernays — incidentally, not a reactionary, but a
Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal — the maiden handbook of the PR
industry which he wrote back in the 1920s was calledPropaganda. And in
it he described, correctly, the goal of the industry. He said our goal
is to insure that the “intelligent minority” — and of course anyone who
writes about these things is part of that intelligent minority by
definition, by stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the
only people capable of running things, and there’s that great population
out there, the “unwashed masses,” who, if they’re left alone will just
get into trouble: so we have to, as he put it, “engineer their
consent,” figure out ways to insure they consent to our rule and
domination. And that’s the goal of the PR industry. And it works in
many ways. It’s primary commitment is commercial advertising. In fact,
Bernays made his name right at that time — late 20s — by running an
advertising campaign to convince women to smoke cigarettes: women
weren’t smoking cigarettes, this big group of people who the tobacco
industry isn’t able to kill, so we’ve got to do something about that.
And he very successfully ran campaigns that induced women to smoke
cigarettes: that would be, in modern terms, the cool thing to do, you
know, that’s the way you get to be a modern, liberated woman. It was
very successful — Wilson: Is there a correlation
between that campaign and what’s happening with the big oil industry
right now and climate change? Chomsky: These are just a few examples.
These are the origins of what became a huge industry of controlling
attitudes and opinions. Now the oil industry today, and in fact the
business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns to try to
undermine efforts to deal with a problem that’s even greater than the
mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was mass
murder. We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic
climate change. And it’s no joke. And [the oil industry is] trying to
impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit
interests. And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the
American Chamber of Commerce — the leading business lobby — and others,
who’ve stated quite openly that they’re conducting … they don’t call it
propaganda … but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince
people that there’s no real danger and we shouldn’t really do much about
it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the
deficit and economic growth — what they call ‘growth’ — and not worry
about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which
could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the
destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of
people. And there are many other correlations. In fact quite generally,
commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine
markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics
course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed
consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you
see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s
not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.
And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much
the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed
people to make irrational choices. And so this is only one aspect of
the PR industry. What Herman and I were discussing was another aspect
of the whole propaganda system that developed roughly at that period,
and that’s “manufacture of consent,” as it was called, [consent] to the
decisions of our political leaders, or the leaders of the private
economy, to try to insure that people have the right beliefs and don’t
try to comprehend the way decisions are being made that may not only
harm them, but harm many others. That’s propaganda in the normal
sense. And so we were talking about mass media, and the intellectual
community of the world in general, which is to a large extent dedicated
to this. Not that people see themselves as propagandists, but … that
they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into the principles of the
system, which prevent them from perceiving many things that are really
right on the surface, [things] that would be subversive to power if
understood. We give plenty of examples there and there’s plenty more
you can mention up to the present moment, crucial ones in fact. That’s a
large part of a general system of indoctrination and control that runs
parallel to controlling attitudes and … consumeristic commitments, and
other devices to control people. You mentioned students before. Well
one of the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is
sky-rocketing tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely
out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history? In the
1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and
yet higher education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for
huge numbers of people. There hasn’t been an economic change that’s
made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when
we were a poor country. And to drive the point home even more clearly,
if we look just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a
good educational system with free tuition. There was an effort by the
Mexican state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there
was a national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and
the government backed down. Now that’s just happened recently in
Quebec, on our other border. Go across the ocean: Germany is a rich
country. Free tuition. Finland has the highest-ranked education system
in the world. Free … virtually free. So I don’t think you can give an
argument that there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high
increase in tuition. I think these are social and economic decisions
made by the people who set policy. And [these hikes] are part of, in my
view, part of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the
liberatory tendencies of the 1960s. Students became much freer, more
open, they were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights,
women’s rights … and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal
intellectuals condemned this, called it a “crisis of democracy:” we’ve
got to have more moderation of democracy. They called, literally, for
more commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase … we have
to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of
the young do their work, so we don’t have all this freedom and
independence. And many developments took place after that. I don’t
think we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but
you can see what happened. One of the things that happened was
controlling students — in fact, controlling students for the rest of
their lives, by simply trapping them in debt. That’s a very effective
technique of control and indoctrination. And I suspect — I can’t prove —
but I suspect that that’s a large part of the reason behind [high
tuitions]. Many other parallel things happened. The whole economy
changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers’
rights and freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal
Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan — St. Alan as he was
called then, the great genius of the economics profession who was
running the economy, highly honored — he testified proudly before
congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was
what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If workers are more
insecure, they won’t do things, like asking for better wages and better
benefits. And that’s healthy for the economy from a certain point of
view, a point of view that says workers ought to be oppressed and
controlled, and that wealth ought to be concentrated in a very few
pockets. So yeah, that’s a healthy economy, and we need growing worker
insecurity, and we need growing student insecurity, for similar
reasons. I think all of these things line up together as part of a
general reaction — a bipartisan reaction, incidentally — against
liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves in the 60s and have
continued since. Wilson: [Finally, ]I’m wondering if
you could [end with some advice for today's college
students]. Chomsky: There are plenty of problems in the world today, and
students face a number of them, including the ones I mentioned — the
joblessness, insecurity and so on. Yet on the other hand, there has
been progress. In a lot of respects things are a lot more free and
advanced than they were … not many years ago. So many things that were
really matters of struggle, in fact even some barely even mentionable,
say, in the 1960s, are now … partially resolved. Things like women’s
rights. Gay rights. Opposition to aggression. Concern for the
environment — which is nowhere near where it ought to be, but far beyond
the 1960s. These victories for freedom didn’t come from gifts from
above. They came from people struggling under conditions that are
harsher than they are now. There is state repression now. But it
doesn’t begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro in the 1960s. People
that don’t know about that ought to read and think to find out. And
that leaves lots of opportunities. Students, you know, are relatively
privileged as compared with the rest of the population. They are also
in a period of their lives where they are relatively free. Well that
provides for all sorts of opportunities. In the past, such
opportunities have been taken by students who have often been in the
forefront of progressive change, and they have many more opportunities
now. It’s never going to be easy. There’s going to be repression.
There’s going to be backlash. But that’s the way society moves forward.
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