Power Systems (16 page)

 

Apple also, conveniently, has an office in Reno, Nevada, and by doing so, according to a recent report, “it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California” and other states.
²³
Meanwhile, California is cutting programs left and right.

 

It's a standard technique. It's now called globalization. It's been going on for quite a while.

 

Robert Reich was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He's currently a media pundit and professor at Berkeley. He says, in France, “Socialism isn't the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations. The answer,” he says, “is to reform capitalism…. We don't need socialism. We need a capitalism that works for the vast majority.”
²⁴
What do you think about this idea of sustainable capitalism?

 

In a narrow sense, I agree with him. If we're talking about feasible objectives in the short term, it's kind of meaningless to talk about socialism. There isn't a popular base for it. There isn't an understanding of it. That's, of course, not what he means—but if we keep to that narrow frame, yes, there's a point.

In the long term, it's almost a self-contradiction. Capitalism is based on production for profit, not need. It's also based on a requirement of constant growth for profit. That's self-destructive—quite apart from things like the steady process of monopolization, forming more and more oligopolies, as well as overproduction and the decline of the rate of profit. These are long-term tendencies that can be delayed, but they're inherent to capitalism.

And, at least from my point of view, there's something essentially wrong with the current system. Here we get to values. Do we want to have a system in which some people give orders and others take them? That's a deeper question. Do we want it in the political system? Do we want it in the economic system, especially given the inevitable interaction between the two, with concentration of wealth heavily influencing political power? Or should we be moving toward enterprises that are owned and managed by the workforce and communities? Call it whatever name you want. You can call it capitalist if you like. You can call it anything. But that's a direction in which policy could move: toward more democracy, undermining illegitimate authority.

Various moves in this direction are taking place. There's a new organization being formed, an International Organization for a Participatory Society, coming largely out of the ZNet collective.
²⁵
The United Steelworkers has a new initiative with Mondragon, the huge worker- and community-owned conglomerate in the Basque country in Spain.
²⁶
Mondragon runs industrial enterprises, banks, schools, hospitals, housing. It's quite successful economically and quite complex. Mondragon functions in an international capitalist economy—a quasi-market economy—which often has ugly consequences. But things like Mondragon could still become what Mikhail Bakunin once called “the seeds of the future” in the present society.
²⁷
I don't know what Robert Reich thinks about this, but I would think that's a much saner way to move in the long term.

 

In a lecture at Loyola University, you pointed out that Thomas Jefferson had rather serious concerns about the fate of the democratic experiment.
²⁸
He feared the rise of a new form of absolutism that was more ominous than the British rule overthrown in the American Revolution. He distinguished in his later years between what he called “aristocrats and democrats.”
²⁹
And then he went on to say, “I hope we shall…crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
³⁰
He also wrote, “I sincerely believe…that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”
³¹
That's the kind of quote from a Founding Father you don't see too much.

 

Yes, those lines are not usually quoted. But these concerns were felt early on, for a complex variety of reasons. They take newer forms constantly.

 

Didn't Bakunin say, “If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another”?
³²

 

He did, but I would somewhat take issue. The state is not the only center of power in our society. In fact, there's another center of power: concentrated private capital. And as long as that's there, in many ways the state is a protector against its excesses. So I think he's right in criticizing the state as an oppressive institution, but it is also relative to the nature of the rest of the society.

Bakunin was not a systematic thinker, but he did have significant insight into the nature of power and its exercise. His disagreements with Karl Marx were over an element of that conflict. He objected to what he understood to be Marx's conception of a kind of a radical intelligentsia running the workers' movement, for its own benefit, of course. He pointed out, very presciently, that what he called a new class of scientific intelligentsia, who claim to appropriate all knowledge, would move in one of two directions: either it would become a “red bureaucracy,” which would institute the most oppressive rule ever seen in the name of the working classes, or it would recognize that power lies elsewhere, in private capital, and become its servants.
³³
That's essentially what happened. That's a pretty good prediction—one of the few far-reaching predictions in the social sciences that really came true. It should be studied everywhere for that reason alone.

 

There's a movement in the country to reverse the
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
ruling of the Supreme Court in January 2010, which deregulated the campaign finance system, and which, one critic says, “has legalized corporate bribery of our elected officials.”
³⁴
What are your views on
Citizens United
and the efficacy of engaging in such a constitutional amendment ratification, which may take years and years?

 

There are a number of questions, including a tactical question of the kind you raise and a principled question, the heart of the matter. And there's something to say about each of them. On the tactical side, I think a campaign to amend the Constitution could be justified as an educational effort, a way to get people to pay attention to the issue. That's independent of how long it might take to ratify something like that. If enough people get interested in the issue, they may turn to more radical goals and, I think, more principled ones. Which takes us to the principled issue. I think
Citizens United
is a very bad decision. However, it's kind of the icing on the cake. The idea of corporate personhood goes back a century. It wasn't instituted by
Citizens United
. And we should be thinking about that.

Why should corporations be granted personal rights? By now corporations have rights way beyond persons of flesh and blood. They are immortal, they are protected by state power. In fact, the basis of a corporation is limited liability, meaning as a participant in a corporation you're not personally liable if it, say, murders tens of thousands of people at Bhopal.

 

You are referring to the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India, which killed about twenty thousand people in 1984.
³⁵

 

Which is just one example. Why should such an institution have personal rights? Also, these institutions are directed to maximize shareholder rights at the expense of stakeholder rights by law. Why should we accept that? It's not an economic principle, certainly.

Under NAFTA, U.S. corporations have the right of what's called “national treatment” in Mexico.
³⁶
A Mexican person doesn't have the right of “national treatment” in Arizona, obviously. Why should a corporation have such rights?

Another major Supreme Court decision,
Buckley v. Valeo
, back in the 1970s, interpreted money as a form of speech.
³⁷
That has far-reaching implications. If money is a form of speech, then those who have money can shout louder. I should say, the American Civil Liberties Union has supported these judgments on the basis of a form of free-speech absolutism.
³⁸
I don't think they're thinking through the implications.

Citizens United
opens the way for massive contributions that distort the political system.
³⁹
But this is something that's been going on for a long time. So we're talking about an expansion of something that shouldn't have happened in the first place.

 

Marx said that the task is not just to understand the world but to change it.
⁴⁰
You've devoted much of your life to that.

 

For whatever it's worth—that's for others to decide. But sure, I think that's what we should all be trying to do: change the world in the short term, overcoming immediate problems—some of them, like environmental disaster and nuclear war, lethal problems. Not small problems. The fate of the species depends on them. So, in the short term, you can work for what are called reforms. Others try to get at the heart of the forms of illegitimate authority, dismantle them, and move toward greater freedom and independence.

 

But you warn that victories don't come quickly. So we're not in a sprint here. It's a marathon.

 

It's a marathon, and one in which you often go backward. There's regression, too. The last thirty years have been in some respects a period of regression, although in popular activism it's been an expansion. History is never simple.

 

You've got grandchildren. What kind of world do you see them inheriting?

 

A realistic projection would not be very attractive. But a lot depends on human will, as always. You cannot predict the course of social movements, of the efforts to change things. We can never do that. Nobody could have predicted in 1960 that a handful of black students sitting in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, would help set off a massive civil rights movement. And nobody could have predicted in the early stages of the women's movement that it would radically change the culture, as it has in a very effective way. If you had asked me a year ago, “Does it make sense to occupy Zuccotti Park?” I would have said you're out of your mind. That couldn't possibly work. It worked spectacularly well. How it goes on from here, it depends.

 

And what advice would you give to young people starting out?

 

Every night when I come home and start to answer the day's hundreds of e-mails, a fair number are from young people saying, “I don't like the way the world is going. In fact, I can't stand it. What should I do?” By now I receive so many that I'm almost compelled to resort to form responses. And what I point out is that you're well on the way to answering the question yourself, because you recognize there's a problem. There is no general answer for everybody. There is no right answer for every person, in all circumstances. It depends on who you are, what your concerns are, what your options are, how much you want to devote yourself to it, what your talents are. But you're probably pretty privileged. Otherwise you wouldn't be writing me a letter on the Internet. That means you have a lot of opportunities—much more than your counterparts in other countries, or even here a generation ago. So there is a legacy that you can use. It's not going to be easy—it never is. But you can make a difference. You just have to find your own way.

There's no way people can answer for anyone else the questions, “What should I devote my life to? How should I live?” Those are things you just have to work out for yourself. You will go down paths that don't work. There will be failures, which you can learn from and then go back and start over in a different direction. It's in your hands.

 

Forgive me for saying this, but you're in your mid-eighties. Are you going to keep up your punishing travel and speaking schedule? You've essentially retired from teaching, right?

 

Yes, although I do work with students and sometimes teach and lecture, of course. I'll try to keep up both sides of my life as long as I can do it. I have no profound things to say about it. I don't expect a long period ahead, but I'll do what I can.

 

But your health is holding up?

 

Reasonably well. No complaints.

1. The New American Imperialism

1.
For details on Vietnam, see Noam Chomsky,
At War with Asia: Essays on Indochina
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004). See also Noam Chomsky,
For Reasons of State
(New York: New Press, 2003) and
Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999).

2.
Noam Chomsky,
Year 501: The Conquest Continues
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1993), p. 22.

3.
Bernard Porter,
Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 64.

4.
See Philip S. Foner,
The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism
, 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

5.
For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky,
Hopes and Prospects
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).

6.
Simon Romero, “Ecuador's Leader Purges Military and Moves to Expel American Base,”
New York Times,
21 April 2008.

7.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy, “US Builds Up Its Bases in Oil-Rich South America,”
Independent
(London), 22 November 2009.

8.
Staff, “Controversial Agreement,”
Panama Star
, 29 September 2009. I. Roberto Eisenmann Jr., “Be Careful That with the Drug Story, We Return to Having Bases Again!”
La Prensa
, 2 October 2009.

9.
For discussion, see Mark Weisbrot, “More of the Same in Latin America,”
New York Times,
11 August 2009.

10.
Charlie Savage, “DEA Squads Extend Reach of Drug War,”
New York Times
, 7 November 2011. See also John Lindsay-Poland, “Beyond the Drug War: The Pentagon's Other Operations in Latin America,”
NACLA Report on the Americas
, 26 August 2011.

11.
For further discussion, see “Militarizing Latin America,”
Chomsky.info
, 30 August 2009. Available at
http://chomsky.info/articles/20090830.htm
. See also William M. LeoGrande, “From the Red Menace to Radical Populism: U.S. Insecurity in Latin America,”
World Policy Journal
22, no. 4 (Winter 2005–06), pp. 25–35.

12.
James Zacharia, “Obama Backing of Honduras Election Crimps Latin Ties,” Bloomberg News, 27 November 2009.

13.
James Gerstenzang and Juanita Darling, “Clinton Extols Mitch Relief Efforts by GIs,”
Los Angeles Times
, 10 March 1999.

14.
Kirsten Begg, “Colombia and Honduras Sign Anti-Drug Trafficking Pact,”
Colombia Reports
, 15 February 2010. See also “Honduran, Colombian Presidents Sign Agreement,” BBC Latin America, 24 May 2011.

15.
Daniel Kruger, “Japan Overtakes China as Largest Holder of Treasuries,” Bloomberg News, 16 February 2010.

16.
For data, see the regular report of the Federal Reserve Board, Department of the Treasury, “Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities.” Available at
http://www.treasury.gov
.

17.
Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations: Books IV–V
(New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 247.

18.
Ibid., p. 25.

19.
Francisco Rodriguez and Arjun Jayadev,
The Declining Labor Share of Income
, United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Research Paper 2010/36 (November 2010). See also Eva Cheng, “China: Wage Share Plunges,”
Green Left Weekly
, 19 October 2007.

20.
For an analysis, see Paul Mason,
Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global
, updated ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).

21.
United Nations Development Programme,
Human Development Report 2011: Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All
(New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2011), p.126.

22.
See Arundhati Roy, “Beware the ‘Gush-Up Gospel' Behind India's Billionaires,”
Financial Times
(London), 13 January 2012.

23.
Arundhati Roy,
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 55.

24.
BBC, “Carlos Slim Overtakes Bill Gates in World Rich List,” 11 March 2010.

25.
Ching Kwan Lee,
Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

26.
See Tom Mitchell, “China: Strike Force,”
Financial Times
(London), 10 June 2010.

27.
Smedley Butler, “America's Armed Forces: ‘In Time of Peace,'”
Common Sense
4, no. 11 (November 1935), p.8. See also Smedley Butler,
War Is a Racket
(Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003).

28.
For discussion, see Chomsky,
Year 501
, chap. 8.

29.
Butler,
War Is a Racket
, pp. 11–12.

30.
Alissa J. Rubin and Helene Cooper, “In Afghan Trip, Obama Presses Karzai on Graft,”
New York Times,
28 March 2010.

31.
“What Obama Told U.S. Troops in Afghanistan,”
Los Angeles Times
, 28 March 2010.

32.
Walter Pincus, “Mueller Outlines Origin, Funding of Sept. 11 Plot,”
Washington Post
, 6 June 2002.

33.
Michael R. Gordon, “Allies Preparing for Long Fight as Taliban Dig In,”
New York Times
, 28 October 2001. Boyce told the
Times
, “I believe that what we should try to do is not let them think that we are going to give up and go away or lighten up…. The squeeze will carry on until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed.”

34.
Abdul Haq, “US Bombs Are Boosting the Taliban,”
Guardian
(London), 2 November 2001. Excerpted from an 11 October 2001 interview with Anatol Lieven.

35.
Farhan Bokhari and John Thornhill, “Afghan Peace Assembly Call,”
Financial Times
(London), 26 October 2001.

36.
Mehreen Khan, “Iran Builds New Gas Pipeline,”
Financial Times
(London), 6 July 2011.

37.
Peter Baker, “Senate Approves Indian Nuclear Deal,”
New York Times
, 1 October 2008.

38.
For poll data, see “Pakistani Public Turns Against Taliban, But Still Negative on US,” World Public Opinion: Global Public Opinion on International Affairs, 1 July 2009.

39.
Scott Shane, “C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan,”
New York Times
, 3 December 2009.

40.
George Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(New York: Plume, 1983), p. 27.

41.
Jawed Naqvi, “Singh Sees ‘Vital Interest' in Peace with Pakistan,”
Dawn
, 9 June 2009.

42.
Ravi Nessman, “Ambitious India Now World's Largest Arms Importer,” Associated Press, 13 March 2011.

43.
Yossi Melman, “Media Allege Corruption in Massive Israel-India Arms Deal,”
Ha'aretz
(Tel Aviv), 29 March 2009.

44.
Prafulla Marpakwar, “Security Issues: City Team to Take Tips from Israel,”
Times of India
, 11 July 2009. See also “Spy Drones to Be Deployed on Tamil Nadu Coast on Wednesday,”
Times of India
, 10 April 2012.

45.
Jane Hunter,
Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America
(Boston: South End Press, 1987).

46.
Chidanand Rajghatta, “Israeli Teams Training Forces in Kashmir: Jane's,”
Times of India
, 16 August 2001. “Israelis Trained Kurds: BBC,”
Dawn
, 21 September 2006. See also Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi,
The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

47.
For background, see Noam Chomsky,
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians
, updated ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), p.26.

48.
Glen Carey, “Chinese Imports of Saudi Oil Will Rise 19% This Year to 50 Million Tons,” Bloomberg News, 29 September 2010.

49.
Kalbe Ali, “China Agrees to Run Gwadar Port,”
Dawn
, 22 May 2011.

50.
Associated Press, “Brazil Sets Trade Records, Due to Chinese Demand,” 2 January 2012. The report notes, “In 2009 China surpassed the U.S. as Brazil's biggest trading partner.”

51.
Arundhati Roy, “Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain?” Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1 April 2010.

52.
Noam Chomsky, “When Elites Fail, and What We Should Do About It,” First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon, 2 October 2009.

53.
For a useful history, see Irving Bernstein,
The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933
, updated ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), and
The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941
, updated ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).

54.
David Montgomery,
The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

55.
Douglas A. Fraser, Resignation Letter to the Labor–Management Group (19 July 1978), reprinted in
Voices of a People's History of the United States
, ed. Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, 2nd ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), pp. 529–33.

56.
Noam Chomsky, “Closing Plenary: Rekindling the Radical Imagination,” Left Forum, New York, New York, 21 March 2010. See also “Internet Note Posted by Man Linked to Plane Crash,”
Austin Statesman
, 18 February 2010.

57.
Michael Brick, “Man Crashes Plane into Texas I.R.S. Office,”
New York Times
, 18 February 2010.

58.
Chris Cillizza, “Vote Out the Entire Congress? You Bet,”
WashingtonPost.com
, 6 September 2011.

59.
See Daniel Guérin,
The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany
, trans. Robert Schwartzwald (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). See also Peter Fritzsche,
Germans Into Nazis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

60.
Scott Shane, “Conservatives Draw Blood from Acorn,”
New York Times
, 15 September 2009.

61.
“Exchange of Rail Know-How Between the United States and Spain,”
SpanishRailwayNews.com
, 7 December 2011. See also Thomas Catan and David Gauthier-Villars, “Europe Listens for U.S. Train Whistle,”
Wall Street Journal
, 29 May 2009.

2. Chains of Submission and Subservience

1.
Stuart Ewen,
Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 85.

2.
For further discussion, see Noam Chomsky,
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
(Boston: South End Press, 1989).

3.
Ewen,
Captains of Consciousness
, p. 85.

4.
Ben Arnoldy, “For Laid-Off IBM Workers, a Job in India?”
Christian Science Monitor
, 26 March 2009.

5.
See Diane Ravitch,
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
(New York: Basic Books, 2010).

6.
Steven Green house, “Union Membership in U.S. Fell to a 70-Year Low Last Year,”
New York Times
, 21 January 2011.

7.
Ross Eisenbrey, “Workers Want Unions Now More than Ever,” Economic Policy Institute
Snapshot
, 28 February 2007, and Richard B. Freeman,
Do Workers Still Want Unions? More Than Ever
(Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2007).

8.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, “A War Against Workers Who Organize,”
Washington Post
, 3 June 2009.

9.
Green house, “Union Membership in U.S. Fell to a 70-Year Low Last Year.”

10.
See
Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back,
ed. Michael D. Yates (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).

11.
Larry M. Bartels, “Inequalities,”
New York Times Magazine
, 27 April 2008.

12.
CNN, “Not Such a Lame-Duck Session: What Congress Passed, Obama Signed in Week,” 23 December 2010.

13.
Peter Baker, “With New Tax Bill, a Turning Point for the President,”
New York Times
, 17 December 2010. Paul Sullivan, “Estate Tax Will Return Next Year, but Few Will Pay It,”
New York Times
, 17 December 2010.

14.
Peter Baker and Jackie Calmes, “Amid Deficit Fears, Obama Freezes Pay,”
New York Times
, 29 November 2010.

15.
Susanne Craig and Eric Dash, “Study Points to Windfall for Goldman Partners,”
New York Times
, 18 January 2011.

16.
Noam Chomsky, “Human Intelligence and the Environment,”
International Socialist Review
, no. 76 (March–April 2011).

3. Uprisings

1.
Eileen Byrne, “Death of a Street Seller That Set Off an Uprising,”
Financial Times
(London), 16 January 2011.