Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Chris Steele
Excerpt from Occupy (Second edition), Zucotti Park Press
Q: An article that recently came out in Rolling Stone, titled
"Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail," by Matt Taibbi, asserts that the
government is afraid to prosecute powerful bankers, such as those
running HSBC. Taibbi says that there's "an arrestable class and an
unarrestable class." What is your view on the current state of class
war in the U.S.?
A: Well, there's always a class war going on. The United States, to
an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The
business classes are very class-conscious -- they're constantly fighting
a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.
Occasionally this is recognized.
We don't use the term "working class" here because it's a taboo term.
You're supposed to say "middle class," because it helps diminish the
understanding that there's a class war going on.
It's true that there was a one-sided class war, and that's because
the other side hadn't chosen to participate, so the union leadership had
for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations,
in which their workers, say the autoworkers -- would get certain
benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it
wouldn't engage the general class structure. In fact, that's one of the
reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States
doesn't. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling
for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care
for themselves and they got it. Of course, it's a compact with
corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by
the 1970s they were planning to break it and we've seen what has
happened since.
This is just one part of a long and continuing class war against
working people and the poor. It's a war that is conducted by a highly
class-conscious business leadership, and it's one of the reasons for the
unusual history of the U.S. labor movement. In the U.S., organized
labor has been repeatedly and extensively crushed, and has endured a
very violent history as compared with other countries.
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization,
Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers.
It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite
radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own
control over sales and commerce. It became a huge movement that spread
over major farming areas.
The Farmers' Alliance did try to link up with the Knights of Labor,
which would have been a major class-based organization if it had
succeeded. But the Knights of Labor were crushed by violence, and the
Farmers' Alliance was dismantled in other ways. As a result, one of the
major popular democratic forces in American history was essentially
dismantled. There are a lot of reasons for it, one of which was that the
Civil War has never really ended. One effect of the Civil War was that
the political parties that came out of it were sectarian parties, so the
slogan was, "You vote where you shoot," and that remains the case.
Take a look at the red states and the blue states in the last
election: It's the Civil War. They've changed party labels, but other
than that, it's the same: sectarian parties that are not class-based
because divisions are along different lines. There are a lot of reasons
for it.
The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for
the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable
societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look at CEO
salaries. CEOs are no more productive or brilliant here than they are in
Europe, but the pay, bonuses, and enormous power they get here are out
of sight. They're probably a drain on the economy, and they become even
more powerful when they are able to gain control of policy decisions.
That's why we have a sequester over the deficit and not over jobs,
which is what really matters to the population. But it doesn't matter to
the banks, so the heck with it. It also illustrates the consider- able
shredding of the whole system of democracy. So, by now, they rank people
by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom 70 percent or so
are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy,
and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top,
you basically run the show.
A good topic to research, if possible, would be "why people don't
vote." Nonvoting is very high, roughly 50 percent, even in presidential
elections -- much higher in others. The attitudes of people who don't
vote are studied. First of all, they mostly identify themselves as
Democrats. And if you look at their attitudes, they are mostly Social
Democratic. They want jobs, they want benefits, they want the government
to be involved in social services and so on, but they don't vote,
partly, I suppose, because of the impediments to voting. It's not a big
secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting,
because the more that people vote, the more trouble they are in. There
are other reasons why people don't vote. I suspect, but don't know how
to prove, that part of the reason people don't vote is they just know
their votes don't make any difference, so why make the effort? So you
end up with a kind of plutocracy in which the public opinion doesn't
matter much. It is not unlike other countries in this respect, but more
extreme. All along, it's more extreme. So yes, there is a constant class
war going on.
The case of labor is crucial, because it is the base of organization
of any popular opposition to the rule of capital, and so it has to be
dismantled. There's a tax on labor all the time. During the 1920s, the
labor movement was virtually smashed by Wilson's Red Scare and other
things. In the 1930s, it reconstituted and was the driving force of the
New Deal, with the CIO organizing and so on. By the late 1930s, the
business classes were organizing to try to react to this. They began,
but couldn't do much during the war, because things were on hold, but
immediately after the war it picked up with the Taft-Hartley Act and
huge propaganda campaigns, which had massive effect. Over the years, the
effort to undermine the unions and labor generally succeeded. By now,
private-sector unionization is very low, partly because, since Reagan,
government has pretty much told employers, "You know you can violate the
laws, and we're not going to do anything about it." Under Clinton,
NAFTA offered a method for employers to illegally undermine labor
organizing by threatening to move enterprises to Mexico. A number of
illegal operations by employers shot up at that time. What's left are
private-sector unions, and they're under bipartisan attack.
They've been protected somewhat because the federal laws did function
for the public-sector unions, but now they're under bipartisan attack.
When Obama declares a pay freeze for federal workers, that's actually a
tax on federal workers. It comes to the same thing, and, of course, this
is right at the time we say that we can't raise taxes on the very rich.
Take the last tax agreement where the Republicans claimed, "We already
gave up tax increases." Take a look at what happened. Raising the
payroll tax, which is a tax on working people, is much more of a tax
increase than raising taxes on the super-rich, but that passed quietly
because we don't look at those things.
The same is happening across the board. There are major efforts being
made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office
-- anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts
against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal. I'm old enough
to remember the Great Depression, a time when the country was quite
poor but there were still postal deliveries. Today, post offices, Social
Security, and public schools all have to be dismantled because they are
seen as being based on a principle that is regarded as extremely
dangerous.
If you care about other people, that's now a very dangerous idea. If
you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine
power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about
yourself. Maybe you can become rich, but you don't care whether other
people's kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things
like that. In the United States, that's called "libertarian" for some
wild reason. I mean, it's actually highly authoritarian, but that
doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing
and undermining the public.
That's why unions had the slogan, "solidarity," even though they may
not have lived up to it. And that's what really counts: solidarity,
mutual aid, care for one another and so on. And it's really important
for power systems to undermine that ideologically, so huge efforts go
into it. Even trying to stimulate consumerism is an effort to undermine
it. Having a market society automatically carries with it an undermining
of solidarity. For example, in the market system you have a choice: You
can buy a Toyota or you can buy a Ford, but you can't buy a subway
because that's not offered. Market systems don't offer common goods;
they offer private consumption. If you want a subway, you're going to
have to get together with other people and make a collective decision.
Otherwise, it's simply not an option within the market system, and as
democracy is increasingly undermined, it's less and less of an option
within the public system. All of these things converge, and they're all
part of general class war.
Q: Can you give some insight on how the labor movement could rebuild in the United States?
A: Well, it's been done before. Each time labor has been attacked --
and as I said, in the 1920s the labor movement was practically
destroyed -- popular efforts were able to reconstitute it. That can
happen again. It's not going to be easy. There are institutional
barriers, ideological barriers, cultural barriers. One big problem is
that the white working class has been pretty much abandoned by the
political system. The Democrats don't even try to organize them anymore.
The Republicans claim to do it; they get most of the vote, but they do
it on non-economic issues, on non-labor issues. They often try to
mobilize them on the grounds of issues steeped in racism and sexism and
so on, and here the liberal policies of the 1960s had a harmful effect
because of some of the ways in which they were carried out. There are
some pretty good studies of this. Take busing to integrate schools. In
principle, it made some sense, if you wanted to try to overcome
segregated schools. Obviously, it didn't work. Schools are probably more
segregated now for all kinds of reasons, but the way it was originally
done undermined class solidarity.
For example, in Boston there was a program for integrating the
schools through busing, but the way it worked was restricted to urban
Boston, downtown Boston. So black kids were sent to the Irish
neighborhoods and conversely, but the suburbs were left out. The suburbs
are more affluent, professional and so on, so they were kind of out of
it. Well, what happens when you send black kids into an Irish
neighborhood? What happens when some Irish telephone linemen who have
worked all their lives finally got enough money to buy small houses in a
neighborhood where they want to send their kids to the local school and
cheer for the local football team and have a community, and so on? All
of a sudden, some of their kids are being sent out, and black kids are
coming in. How do you think at least some of these guys will feel? At
least some end up being racists. The suburbs are out of it, so they can
cluck their tongues about how racist everyone is elsewhere, and that
kind of pattern was carried out all over the country.
The same has been true of women's rights. But when you have a working
class that's under real pressure, you know, people are going to say
that rights are being undermined, that jobs are being under- mined.
Maybe the one thing that the white working man can hang onto is that he
runs his home? Now that that's being taken away and nothing is being
offered, he's not part of the program of advancing women's rights.
That's fine for college professors, but it has a different effect in
working-class areas. It doesn't have to be that way. It depends on how
it's done, and it was done in a way that simply undermined natural
solidarity. There are a lot of factors that play into it, but by this
point it's going to be pretty hard to organize the working class on the
grounds that should really concern them: common solidarity, common
welfare.
In some ways, it shouldn't be too hard, because these attitudes are
really prized by most of the population. If you look at Tea Party
members, the kind that say, "Get the government off my back, I want a
small government" and so on, when their attitudes are studied, it turns
out that they're mostly social democratic. You know, people are human
after all. So yes, you want more money for health, for help, for people
who need it and so on and so forth, but "I don't want the government,
get that off my back" and related attitudes are tricky to overcome.
Some polls are pretty amazing. There was one conducted in the South
right before the presidential elections. Just Southern whites, I think,
were asked about the economic plans of the two candidates, Barack Obama
and Mitt Romney. Southern whites said they preferred Romney's plan, but
when asked about its particular components, they opposed every one.
Well, that's the effect of good propaganda: getting people not to think
in terms of their own interests, let alone the interest of communities
and the class they're part of. Overcoming that takes a lot of work. I
don't think it's impossible, but it's not going to happen easily.
Q: In a recent article about the Magna Carta and the Charter of the
Forest, you discuss Henry Vane, who was beheaded for drafting a
petition that called the people's power "the original from whence all
just power arises." Would you agree the coordinated repression of Occupy
was like the beheading of Vane?
A: Occupy hasn't been treated nicely, but we shouldn't exaggerate.
Compared with the kind of repression that usually goes on, it wasn't
that severe. Just ask people who were part of the civil rights movement
in the early 1960s, in the South, let's say. It was incomparably worse,
as was just showing up at anti-war demonstrations where people were
getting maced and beaten and so on. Activist groups get repressed. Power
systems don't pat them on the head. Occupy was treated badly, but not
off the spectrum -- in fact, in some ways not as bad as others. I
wouldn't draw exaggerated comparisons. It's not like beheading somebody
who says, "Let's have popular power."
Q: How does the Charter of the Forest relate to environmental and indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline?
A: A lot. The Charter of the Forest, which was half the Magna Carta,
has more or less been forgotten. The forest didn't just mean the woods.
It meant common property, the source of food, fuel. It was a common
possession, so it was cared for. The forests were cultivated in common
and kept functioning, because they were part of people's common
possessions, their source of livelihood, and even a source of dignity.
That slowly collapsed in England under the enclosure movements, the
state efforts to shift to private ownership and control. In the United
States it happened differently, but the privatization is similar. What
you end up with is the widely held belief, now standard doctrine, that's
called "the tragedy of the commons" in Garrett Hardin's phrase.
According to this view, if things are held in common and aren't
privately owned, they're going to be destroyed. History shows the exact
opposite: When things were held in common, they were preserved and
maintained. But, according to the capitalist ethic, if things aren't
privately owned, they're going to be ruined, and that's "the tragedy of
the commons." So, therefore, you have to put everything under private
control and take it away from the public, because the public is just
going to destroy it.
Now, how does that relate to the environmental problem? Very
significantly: the commons are the environment. When they're a common
possession -- not owned, but everybody holds them together in a
community -- they're preserved, sustained and cultivated for the next
generation. If they're privately owned, they're going to be destroyed
for profit; that's what private owner- ship is, and that's exactly
what's happening today.
What you say about the indigenous population is very striking.
There's a major problem that the whole species is facing. A likelihood
of serious disaster may be not far off. We are approaching a kind of
tipping point, where climate change becomes irreversible. It could be a
couple of decades, maybe less, but the predictions are constantly being
shown to be too conservative. It is a very serious danger; no sane
person can doubt it. The whole species is facing a real threat for the
first time in its history of serious disaster, and there are some people
trying to do some- thing about it and there are others trying to make
it worse. Who are they? Well, the ones who are trying to make it better
are the pre-industrial societies, the pre-technological societies, the
indigenous societies, the First Nations. All around the world, these are
the communities that are trying to preserve the rights of nature.
The rich societies, like the United States and Canada, are acting in
ways to bring about disaster as quickly as possible. That's what it
means, for example, when both political parties and the press talk
enthusiastically about "a century of energy independence." "Energy
independence" doesn't mean a damn thing, but put that aside. A century
of "energy independence" means that we make sure that every bit of
Earth's fossil fuels comes out of the ground and we burn it. In
societies that have large indigenous populations, like, for example,
Ecuador, an oil producer, people are trying to get support for keeping
the oil in the ground. They want funding so as to keep the oil where it
ought to be. We, however, have to get everything out of the ground,
including tar sands, then burn it, which makes things as bad as possible
as quickly as possible. So you have this odd situation where the
educated, "advanced" civilized people are trying to cut everyone's
throats as quickly as possible and the indigenous, less educated, poorer
populations are trying to prevent the disaster. If somebody was
watching this from Mars, they'd think this species was insane.
Q: As far as a free, democracy-centered society, self-organization
seems possible on small scales. Do you think it is possible on a larger
scale and with human rights and quality of life as a standard, and if
so, what community have you visited that seems closest to an example to
what is possible?
A: Well, there are a lot of things that are possible. I have visited
some examples that are pretty large scale, in fact, very large scale.
Take Spain, which is in a huge economic crisis. But one part of Spain is
doing okay -- that's the Mondragón collective. It's a big conglomerate
involving banks, industry, housing, all sorts of things. It's worker
owned, not worker managed, so partial industrial democracy, but it
exists in a capitalist economy, so it's doing all kinds of ugly things
like exploiting foreign labor and so on. But economically and socially,
it's flourishing as compared with the rest of the society and other
societies. It is very large, and that can be done anywhere. It certainly
can be done here. In fact, there are tentative explorations of contacts
between the Mondragón and the United Steelworkers, one of the more
progressive unions, to think about developing comparable structures
here, and it's being done to an extent.
The one person who has written very well about this is Gar
Alperovitz, who is involved in organizing work around enterprises in
parts of the old Rust Belt, which are pretty successful and could be
spread just as a cooperative could be spread. There are really no limits
to it other than willingness to participate, and that is, as always,
the problem. If you're willing to adhere to the task and gauge yourself,
there's no limit.
Actually, there's a famous sort of paradox posed by David Hume
centuries ago. Hume is one of the founders of classical liberalism. He's
an important philosopher and a political philosopher. He said that if
you take a look at societies around the world -- any of them -- power is
in the hands of the governed, those who are being ruled. Hume asked,
why don't they use that power and overthrow the masters and take
control? He says, the answer has to be that, in all societies, the most
brutal, the most free, the governed can be controlled by control of
opinion. If you can control their attitudes and beliefs and separate
them from one another and so on, then they won't rise up and overthrow
you.
That does require a qualification. In the more brutal and repressive
societies, controlling opinion is less important, because you can beat
people with a stick. But as societies become more free, it becomes more
of a problem, and we see that historically. The societies that develop
the most expansive propaganda systems are also the most free societies.
The most extensive propaganda system in the world is the public
relations industry, which developed in Britain and the United States. A
century ago, dominant sectors recognized that enough freedom had been
won by the population. They reasoned that it's hard to control people by
force, so they had to do it by turning the attitudes and opinions of
the population with propaganda and other devices of separation and
marginalization, and so on. Western powers have become highly skilled in
this.
In the United States, the advertising and public relations industry
is huge. Back in the more honest days, they called it propaganda. Now
the term doesn't sound nice, so it's not used anymore, but it's
basically a huge propaganda system which is designed very extensively
for quite specific purposes.
First of all, it has to undermine markets by trying to create
irrational, uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices.
That's what advertising is about, the opposite of what a market is
supposed to be, and anybody who turns on a television set can see that
for themselves. It has to do with monopolization and product
differentiation, all sorts of things, but the point is that you have to
drive the population to irrational consumption, which does separate them
from one another.
As I said, consumption is individual, so it's not done as an act of
solidarity -- so you don't have ads on television saying, "Let's get
together and build a mass transportation system." Who's going to fund
that? The other thing they need to do is undermine democracy the same
way, so they run campaigns, political campaigns mostly run by PR agents.
It's very clear what they have to do. They have to create uninformed
voters who will make irrational decisions, and that's what the campaigns
are about. Billions of dollars go into it, and the idea is to shred
democracy, restrict markets to service the rich, and make sure the power
gets concentrated, that capital gets concentrated and the people are
driven to irrational and self-destructive behavior. And it is
self-destructive, often dramatically so. For example, one of the first
achievements of the U.S. public relations system back in the 1920s was
led, incidentally, by a figure honored by Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy
-- liberal progressive Edward Bernays.
His first great success was to induce women to smoke. In the 1920s,
women didn't smoke. So here's this big population which was not buying
cigarettes, so he paid young models to march down New York City's Fifth
Avenue holding cigarettes. His message to women was, "You want to be
cool like a model? You should smoke a cigarette." How many millions of
corpses did that create? I'd hate to calculate it. But it was considered
an enormous success. The same is true of the murderous character of
corporate propaganda with tobacco, asbestos, lead, chemicals, vinyl
chloride, across the board. It is just shocking, but PR is a very
honored profession, and it does control people and undermine their
options of working together. And so that's Hume's paradox, but people
don't have to submit to it. You can see through it and struggle against
it.
