Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (39 page)

I mean, just to tell you personally, when I got started actively in the peace movement my wife went back to college, because we figured that somebody was going to have to support the kids, I wasn’t going to be able to. And in fact, there were only two reasons why that didn’t happen. One was, the F.B.I was too incompetent and ideologically fanatic to figure out what I was doing—that’s not a joke actually, and it’s something to bear in mind. And the other was, the Tet Offensive happened in 1968, and it changed U.S. government policy towards the war, so they began to cancel the prosecutions of activists that were under way. In fact, the Tet Offensive even changed people’s heads—you know who was prosecuting those trials? Ramsey Clark, just to illustrate how things have changed. [Clark was President Johnson’s Attorney General and is now a radical political activist.]

But those were pretty difficult days: it was real confrontation with state power, and it was getting ugly, especially if you were involved in resistance, helping deserters, that sort of thing. And it was just
impossible
at that time to imagine that anything would come out of it. And that was wrong, a lot came out of it—not out of what I did, but out of what lots and lots of people were doing all over the country. A lot came out of it. So looking back, I think my evaluation of the “hope” was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read. And the immediate experience supported it—like, right off, you found that when you tried to give a talk you needed two hundred cops to save you from being lynched. But it didn’t take too long for that to change, and in a couple years it had changed very significantly.

Now, I don’t think what happened with the movements in the 1960s led to very much sophistication and insight, frankly—but I think what happened in the later years did. And exactly how that worked I don’t really understand at all. But something happened in the 1970s that just changed things—people were looking at things differently. It wasn’t just, “I hate that they’re dropping napalm on babies,” it was, “I really want to change the world, and I don’t like coercion and control,” and that kind of thing. That happened in the Seventies, and you can certainly see the consequences. I mean, in the 1960s, I never even talked about the nature of the institutions or capitalism—it was just too exotic. Now I don’t cut corners: I can be giving a talk in eastern Kentucky or in central Iowa or something, and I say exactly what I think. And people understand it—they may not agree, they may be surprised, but they want to listen and think about it, and they take it seriously. So I think there’s reason to be hopeful.

But on the other hand, don’t forget, the people with power in the society are watching all these things too, and
they
have institutions. They can learn, they can see what didn’t work the last time and do it better the next time—and they have plenty of resources to try out different strategies. On our side what happens is, people forget. I mean, it
does
take skills to organize, it’s not that simple. You want to organize a demonstration or a letter-writing campaign or do fundraising, it does take skills—and those skills tend to get lost. You can see it happening over and over. The people who do it the first time around work hard and learn how to do things, then get burnt out and drift off to something else. Then another issue comes up, and others with a roughly similar understanding, but maybe a little younger or less experienced, have to start over again and learn all the skills from the beginning. How do you organize a meeting? How do you get leaflets out? Is it worth approaching the press? In what way do you approach them? Well, since we don’t have stable popular institutions, all these things that you kind of get in your bones after a while if you do a lot of organizing do not become part of the common lore that the movements could call on and improve upon, if we only had more integration and more continuity. But for people with power, there
is
a common lore, and they
do
improve upon it.

In fact, this is part of an ongoing battle that stretches back to the seventeenth century. If you go back to the beginnings of the modern version of democracy, it’s the same conflict: people are trying to figure out ways to control their own lives, and people with power are trying to stop them. Now, until we dissolve the centers of private power and really get popular control over how the most crucial decisions in the society get made—like the decisions about what’s produced and what’s invested and so on—this battle is always going to go on. But yes, there have been both victories and defeats: you can look at the course of events and see many significant victories by gangsters and murderers and thugs, and you can also see many respects in which people have been able to stop them, and limit their victories, and offer people an opportunity to keep living and to improve their lives. So it doesn’t make sense to be either optimistic or pessimistic, I think. You just look at what’s happening and try to do the best you can under those circumstances.

W
OMAN
: Can I give it a whack? For years I’ve been working with people who are doing twenty-five years in prison and never getting out, that sort of thing. To answer the question, “How do you keep going?”—I figure, the most pessimistic way to look at it is, it’s really bad: fifty thousand nuclear bombs floating around, we don’t need some dumb American President to put his finger on the wrong button. I figure, it’s a miracle that we’re here, realistically, let’s face it
.

It is.

W
OMAN
: Okay, so if you accept that, you have two choices: you can cut your throat and forget about it, or you can keep fighting. If you’re going to keep fighting, then you’ve got to fight to win, and to survive. So what you do is, you find yourself a corner that you can fight really well from, and that you like, and that you fit in—and you give it the works, have a good time. That way you can keep your sanity, you don’t get overwhelmed with the whole enormous situation, and you can accomplish something. And as I say, you have a good time while you’re doing it—that’s the way I keep going
.

M
AN
: But do you ever succeed, or do you just keep fighting?

Well, see, you
have
succeeded—things are better than they would have been if you hadn’t done it.

A
NOTHER
W
OMAN
: And we should remember that the mainstream media obviously won’t publicize and draw attention to the successes—so we have to keep reminding ourselves of just how much we have achieved. I think we get burned out when we stop reminding ourselves of that
.

That’s right, we should always bear that in mind—that they’re
not
going to tell us we’re succeeding, it would be against their interests to tell us that. The media’s part of what popular organizing has to oppose, remember. And they’re not going to function in a way so as to self-destruct.

For instance, take this supposed big phenomenon that swept the country in the 1970s, the “Culture of Narcissism,” and the “Me Generation” and so on. I’m just convinced that that whole thing was crafted by the public relations industry to tell mainly young people, “Look, this is who you are—you don’t care about all this solidarity and sympathy and helping people” that had started to break out. And of course, that’s what they
would
do. In fact, they shouldn’t get their salaries if they don’t do things like that. We should
expect
them to do it, we should expect them to tell us: “You guys can’t do anything, you’re all alone, you’re each separate; you’ve never achieved anything, and you never
will
achieve anything.”
Of course
they should tell us that—and they should even tell us, “You don’t
want
to achieve anything, all you want to do is consume more.”

As long as power’s concentrated, that’s what it’s going to tell us—“There’s no point in working to help other people, you don’t care about them, you’re just out for yourself.” Sure it’s going to tell us that, because that’s what’s in its interests. There’s no point in telling ourselves, “They’re lying to us” over and over again. Of course they are; it’s like saying the sun’s setting or something like that. Obviously they are.

So what we want to try to do is develop stable enough structures so that we can learn these kinds of things and not keep getting beaten down by the indoctrination—so we don’t have to keep fighting the same battles over and over again, we can go on to new ones, and bigger ones, better ones. I think that could be done; slowly, over time.

M
AN
: Do you see any of those sorts of continuing progressive structures developing these days in the United States?

There isn’t a lot, it’s mostly local. So I’ll go to some place like Detroit, say, and there’ll be a meeting like this with people from different parts of the city who are working on different things—but many of them don’t even know about the others. Everything is pretty much fractionated. Now, if you go to a small town which has listener-supported radio—like Boulder, Colorado, for instance—it’s different, it’s unified. And part of the reason it’s unified is because of one community radio station and a couple of journals and so on that everybody can be a part of. Or I remember going to some town in New Hampshire which happened to have a movement bookstore, and everybody went to the bookstore to find out what was going on, you’d go there and look at what’s on the wall and stick together that way. You do find things like that around the country.

But take Boston, where there’s nothing central to bring people together—there’s no community radio, there’s no community newspaper. I mean, there are lots of people doing all sorts of activist work, but they don’t even know about each other: there’s a group in one section working on Bikes for Nicaragua, there’s a group in another section of the city working on a Sister Cities program for Central America, they don’t even know of each other’s existence.

The Nuclear Freeze Movement

W
OMAN
: What else do you feel we can learn from organizations you don’t think are going about it the right way?

Well, there are plenty of groups around that are doing things I don’t think are very constructive, even though I’m often a member of them and give them support and so on. Take the nuclear freeze campaign, for example: I really thought they were going about it the wrong way. The nuclear freeze campaign was in a way one of the most successful popular organizing movements in history: they managed to get 75 percent of the American population in favor of a nuclear freeze at a time when there was no articulate public support for that position—there wasn’t a newspaper, a political figure, anybody who came out publicly for it.
  ³
Now, in a way that’s a tremendous achievement. But frankly I didn’t think it was an achievement, I thought the disarmament movement was going to collapse—and in fact, it did collapse. And the reason it collapsed is, it wasn’t based on anything: it was based on nothing except people signing a petition.

I mean, if you sign a petition it’s kind of nice—but that’s the end of it, you just go back home and do whatever you were doing: there’s no continuity, there’s no real engagement, it’s not sustained activity that builds up a community of activism. Well, an awful lot of the political work I see in the United States is of that type.

Now, if we had stable popular institutions, we’d be able to remember how we failed the last time, instead of somebody else doing it all over again and making the same mistakes—we’d know that’s not the way to do anything. The nuclear freeze movement amounted to a public opinion poll, basically: they found out that three times as many people want the government to spend the money on Medicare and things like that as want it spent on nuclear weapons. So what? What are they going to do about it? Nothing. So all these nuclear freeze people did was answer a poll question—that’s not organizing.

I think an awful lot of movement activity goes into things like that, and it doesn’t get anywhere—in fact, that’s what leads to burn-out. I mean, you had all these people collecting all these signatures, and they worked hard, they got so many signatures you could show that almost all of the country wants a nuclear freeze. Then they went to the Democratic Party Convention [in 1984] and presented their results, and everybody there said, “Gee, that’s really nice that you did that, we’re going to support you all the way”—then the Democrats went off to the election and never mentioned it again, unless they were talking in some town where they figured they could score some easy points by referring to it: you know, “We’ve got to remember in this town you want to say so on and so forth.” That’s the kind of thing that gets people frustrated, and makes them give up. But that’s because they started with illusions about how power operates and how you effect change—and we shouldn’t have those illusions, any more than we should have illusions about whether the media’s telling you the truth. If you don’t have the illusions, then you don’t get burnt out by the failure—and the way we overcome the illusions is by developing our own institutions, where we can learn from experiences like this.

For instance, if we see a big organizing effort where everybody signs the petitions and some people try to introduce the isssue into the ’84 Democratic Party platform, and it has absolutely no effect, and a year later Mikhail Gorbachev [Soviet leader] declares a unilateral nuclear test freeze and
still
there’s no effect—well, we should be learning something.
  ⁴
Then we should be carrying on to the next step. But that wasn’t the reaction of the nuclear freeze organizers. The reaction among the organizers wasn’t, “Well, we obviously misunderstood the way things work”—it was, “We did the right thing, but we partially failed: we convinced the population, but we didn’t manage to convince the elites, so now let’s convince the elites.” You know, “We’ll go talk to the strategic analysts, who are confused—they don’t understand what we understand—and we’ll explain to them why a nuclear freeze would be a good thing.” And in fact, that’s the direction a lot of the disarmament movement took after that: the people went off and got themselves Mac Arthur Fellowships and so on, and then they went around “convincing” the strategic analysts.
  ⁵