Power Systems (4 page)

All of that looks very similar to here. It's ominous. The Nazis destroyed the major working-class organizations. The Social Democrats and the Communists were huge organizations, not just political parties. They had clubs, associations, and civic societies.
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They were all wiped out, partly by force but partly because the people joined the Nazis out of disillusionment and hope for a  better future, a bright militaristic, jingoist future. I wouldn't say it's identical, but the parallels are strong enough to be frightening. You can see someone like Joe Stack joining that group.

 

Arundhati Roy has decried weekend protesters. You go to a march or a demonstration and then back to the usual routine on Monday. She's said that it's necessary that risks be taken, that protests have consequences.

 

I'm not sure that I agree with her that risks are important. Of course, serious demonstrations are going to have risks. You can get arrested. But the real issue, I think, is continuity. Going home is the problem. That's why the old Communist Party was so significant. There was always somebody around to turn the mimeograph machine. They were in it for the long haul. They didn't expect quick victories. Maybe you win something, maybe you don't, but then you lay the basis for something else, you go on to the next thing. That mentality is basically missing here. And it was during the 1960s, too.

 

It was missing in the 1960s?

 

Yes. If you go back to the 1960s, the big demonstrations, like the Columbia student strike and the marches on Washington, an enormous number of the young people involved thought that they were going to win. If we sit in the president's office for three weeks, we're going to have love and peace in the world. You recall that, I'm sure. Of course, love and peace didn't happen, so they were disillusioned and gave up. That lack of continuity has to be overcome.

For a while it was overcome in the civil rights movement. Many people in the movement knew it would be a long struggle. We're not going to win right away. Maybe we will get something, but then we'll hit a barrier. They managed to keep going until they tried to expand the African American civil rights movement to become a poor people's movement. This was Martin Luther King's inspiration, which was to extend the civil rights movement.

So, just to take King, because he's visible. On Martin Luther King Day, he's greatly celebrated for what he did in the early 1960s when he was saying “I Have a Dream” and “let's get rid of racist sheriffs in Alabama.” That was okay. But by 1965 he was getting to be a dangerous figure. For one thing, he was turning against the war in Vietnam pretty strongly. For another, he was working to be at the head of a developing poor people's movement. He was assassinated when he was taking part in a strike of sanitation workers and he was on his way to Washington for a poor people's convention. He was going beyond racist sheriffs in Alabama to northern racism, which is much more deep-seated and class-based. The civil rights movement was partly destroyed by force and partly frittered away at that stage. It never really made it past the point where you get into class issues.

What Arundhati said about not going home is the crucial part. You have to understand that you're not going to win by sitting in the president's office. You don't get a world of love and peace that way. You may get a little victory, but then you're going to have a bigger struggle ahead. It's like mountain climbing. You climb a peak, you think you're at the top—and then you notice there is a bigger peak right beyond it, and you've got to climb that one. That's what popular struggle is like. And that's lacking. Our quick-gratification culture is not conducive to that kind of commitment.

There are people and organizations that really are persistent and struggle—and, of course, those are the ones under attack. Take ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Why was ACORN destroyed? There was a little bit of a scam, but by the standards of corporate corruption what they did was trivial. But instantly the media, Congress, everybody jumped on the news and destroyed them.
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Because it's a persistent organization working for poor people, and that's dangerous.

 

Given the dismal economic situation, why isn't there a left response? Certainly the Right has generated answers and explanations.

 

So did Hitler. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. They're crazy answers, but they are answers.

 

It's better than being in a vacuum. The Left seems to have nothing to say.

 

The Democratic Party and even the Democratic Left are not going to tell people, “Look, your problem is that, back in the 1970s, we took part in a major process of financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of the productive system. So your wages and income have stagnated for thirty years, while what wealth is produced is in a very few pockets. Those are our policies.” They're not going to tell them that. No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don't coalesce into a movement that can really do things.

And there are things that could be done, which I talked about a little in the Left Forum lecture you mentioned. For example, the Obama administration essentially owns the auto industry at this point, except for Ford. Certainly GM. What they're doing is continuing the policies of closing down GM plants, which means destroying the workforce, destroying communities. The communities were built by the unions. Meanwhile, Obama sends emissaries to tell people in these cities, “We really care about you and want to help you,” and distribute some pennies. At almost the same time, he sends another emissary, the secretary of transportation, to Spain to spend federal stimulus money for contracts with Spanish companies to build high-speed rail facilities.
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Those high-speed rail facilities could be built in the factories that are being closed, but that's not important from the point of view of the bankers and Smith's “principal architects” of policy.

What's lacking is the consciousness that began to arise in the 1930s—we'll take it over and run it ourselves. The things that really put the fear of God into manufacturers and the government in the 1930s were the sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, “Look, instead of sitting down, we'll run this place. We don't need owners and managers.” That's huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.

B
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31, 2011)

Formal slavery has long been abolished, but a de facto mental slavery has replaced it. This is reflected in obedience to power and authority. People are reduced to asking, pleading with the masters for favors, a few crumbs here and there. Don't slash the budget by this amount or don't cut this after-school program by this much. How does a person break the chains of submission and subservience?

 

First of all, mental slavery didn't replace slavery—it has always existed. How do you break mental slavery? There is no magic answer. You start by asking for reforms that make sense. You see if they come. If they do, you try to go farther. Or if you hit a brick wall, if the power systems won't relent, you move on to try to overthrow them. That's the history of activism. That's how slavery ended.

 

Is it more difficult to do here in the United States than, say, Bolivia?

 

I think it's a lot easier here than in Bolivia. Just as it's easier to protest here than it is in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Bolivians have far harsher circumstances. What they've achieved is remarkable. The circumstances are much harder, but it has to be done.

 

To what extent does the propaganda system induce docility and passivity in the citizenry in the United States?

 

That's its point. But that has been its point from time immemorial. It's part of the function of the reverence for kings, priests, submission to religious authorities. These are doctrinal characteristics of power systems that seek to induce passivity. The major propaganda systems that we face now, mostly growing out of the huge public relations industry, were developed quite consciously about a century ago in the freest countries in the world, in Britain and the United States, because of a very clear and articulated recognition that people had gained so many rights that it was hard to suppress them by force. So you had to try to control their attitudes and beliefs or divert them somehow. As the economist Paul Nystrom argued, you have to try to fabricate consumers and create wants so people will be trapped.
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It's a common method.

It was used by the slave owners. For example, when Britain abolished slavery, it had plantations using slaves throughout the West Indies. With official slavery gone, there were big parliamentary debates about how to sustain the same regime. What would stop a former slave from going up into the hills, where there was plenty of land, and just living happily there? They hit on the same method that everyone hits on: try to capture them with consumer goods. So they offered teasers—easy terms, gifts. And then when people got trapped into wanting consumer goods and started getting into debt at company stores, pretty soon you had a restoration of something similar to slavery, from the plantation owners' point of view.
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The United Fruit Company independently did the same thing in Central America, and U.S. and British business communities independently hit on the same technique in the early twentieth century. Out of that developed this enormous propaganda system directed exactly as Nystrom said, toward fabricating consumers and “concentrating human attention on the more superficial things.”
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And, of course, it also goes along with trying to control people's ideas and beliefs. That's another part of the doctrinal system.

These techniques aren't new. They're as old as the hills. But they take new forms as circumstances change. The techniques we now see are a reaction to the achievement of earlier generations in gaining a lot more freedom. And I must say, it's a lot easier to combat the fabrication of consumers than torture chambers.

 

As you travel around the United States, you've often commented that communities with community radio stations are marginally different from those without them. For example, your hometown of Boston does not have a community radio station.

 

It's not a scientific conclusion—it's an impression—but, yes, Boston is a good example. There is no community radio station, and things are very scattered. People don't know that something is happening in another part of town. There is no interaction, no way to get people together. There are other means, such as the Internet, but there is no place you can turn to directly to find out what's happening, even to gain a critical analysis of what's going on in the world that relates to local concerns and interests. And that does hamper the ability to create community.

 

You're an educator. You've taught at MIT for decades. Many people are concerned about what's happening to public education. There are announcements of layoffs of thousands of teachers all over the country, larger class sizes, closing of schools, huge budget cuts. Remedial programs are being reduced or eliminated altogether. Don't the powers that be, the corporate elites, need a trained and competent workforce? Or will they rely simply on South and East Asians for that?

 

I don't think the business world, at least in the short term, is that concerned about lacking a workforce. First of all, there has been a substantial program of offshoring of production for the last thirty years. Not just manual labor, but also data analysis. You have a much cheaper workforce abroad. In fact, a couple of years ago, IBM announced inducements to try to get its U.S. staff to move to India, where they could live on smaller salaries.
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So what you said is partly true. But I think corporate elites assume they can maintain a big enough domestic workforce with a smaller part of the population.

The developments you describe are all part of a major effort to undermine public education altogether, basically to privatize it, which would be a big boon to private power. Private power doesn't like public education, for many reasons. One is the principle on which it's based, which is threatening to power. Public education is based on a principle of solidarity. So, for example, I had my children fifty years ago. Nevertheless, I feel and I'm supposed to feel that I should pay taxes so that the kids across the street can go to school. That's counter to the doctrine that you should just look after yourself and let everyone else fall by the wayside, a basic principle of business rule. Public education is a threat to that belief system because it builds up a sense of solidarity, community, mutual support.

The same is true of Social Security. That's one of the reasons that there is such a passionate attempt to destroy Social Security, even though there are no economic reasons to do so, none of any significance at least. But public education and Social Security are residues of a dangerous conception that we're all in this together and we have to work together to create a better life and a better future. If you're trying to maximize profit or maximize consumption, then working together is the wrong idea. It has to be beaten out of people's heads.

Solidarity makes people hard to control and prevents them from being passive objects of private power. So you have to have a propaganda system that overcomes any deviations from the principle of subjugation to power systems.

There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they're any better.
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For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of schools does undermine solidarity and mutual support—dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.

 

Certainly labor unions in the United States have historically been institutions of solidarity. From a peak of representing 35 percent of all workers, union membership is now down to single digits.
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Workers are being asked to work longer hours, their wages and benefits are being reduced, they're losing jobs. Is capital using the current economic crisis to implement its long-term project to smash unions?

 

Unions are bitterly hated by private power. That's always been true. The United States is a business-run society, much more so than comparable ones. Correspondingly, it has a very brutal labor history, much worse than in other societies. There have been constant efforts to try to destroy unions. By the 1920s, for example, they were almost crushed. Then they came back again in the worker struggles in the 1930s. It took almost no time for the business world to organize to try to destroy them again. Immediately after the war, you had the Taft-Hartley bill, other antilabor measures, and immense propaganda campaigns—in the churches, schools, cinema, press—to turn people against unions.

Over time, this campaign had some success, but a majority of the workforce would still prefer to be unionized if they could be.
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Barriers have been set up by state policy which make it very hard to join a union.
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The consequence of all this is that private-sector unionization is down to about 7 percent.
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Public-sector unions still haven't been destroyed, but that's why there is a bitter attack against them right now. The attack in Wisconsin on the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain is a clear example.
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The issues in Wisconsin have nothing to do with the state budget deficit. That's a fraud that's simply used as a pretext. The issue is the right of collective bargaining, one of the basic principles of union organization. The business world wants to destroy that.

 

Rhetoric aside, has the Democratic Party really been a friend of organized labor and the working class?

 

Compared with the Republicans, yes, but that's not saying much. The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations.
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But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are. They're both nuzzled there quite happily. There are individual members of the Democratic Party who have been friends of labor, but they're a scattered and diminishing minority.

Take, say, Obama. The lame-duck session of Congress after the midterm elections in November 2010 was interesting. He was highly praised, including by his supporters, for his statesmanlike attitude during the lame-duck session, bipartisanship, and getting legislation through.
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What did he get through? The main achievement was a huge tax cut for the extremely wealthy.
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When I say extremely wealthy, I mean extremely. So, for example, I'm pretty well off, but I was below the cutoff point for the tax break. That break was a huge gift to a tiny sector of the wealthy, the deficit even higher—but who cares about that? That was Obama's major achievement. Meanwhile, at the same time, he initiated a tax increase on federal workers. Of course, no one called it a tax increase. That doesn't sound good. They called it a pay freeze.
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But a pay freeze on public-sector workers is exactly the same thing as a tax increase. So we punish public-sector workers and reward the executives of Goldman Sachs, who just announced a $17.5 billion compensation package for themselves.
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In a talk that you gave at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill called “Human Intelligence and the Environment,” you said that the system “is just driving us to disaster.”
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I note that you said this many months before the political upheavals in Madison, Wisconsin. “So is anything going to be done about it?” you asked. And answered, “The prospects are not very auspicious.” Why not?

 

The prospects are not auspicious because of the general feeling you described before that there is nothing we can do. As long as people sit by passively and let things happen to them, the dynamics of the system will drive it in a certain direction—and that direction is toward self-destruction. I don't think that's hard to show.

But the assumption that there is nothing we can do is just wrong. There is a lot that we can do. In fact, what happened in Madison illustrates that very clearly. The protesters didn't win, but it was an important demonstration. It's a basis for going further. There's plenty that we can do, but it's not going to happen by itself. If people are made to feel helpless, isolated, atomized, then power will win. These issues are pretty severe. Right now, for example, we are really facing the prospect of something like species destruction for the first time in human history.