Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (40 page)

Well, that’s one of the ways in which you can kid yourself into believing that you’re still doing your work, when really you’re being bought off—because there’s nothing that elites like better than saying, “Oh, come convince me.” That stops you from organizing, and getting people involved, and causing disruption, because now you’re talking to some elite smart guy—and you can do that forever: any argument you can give in favor of it, he can give an argument against it, and it just keeps going. And also, you get respectable, and you’re invited to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, and everybody pays attention to you and loves you, and it’s all great. That’s in fact the direction in which the nuclear freeze movement went—and that’s a mistake. And we ought to be aware of those mistakes and learn from them: if you’re getting accepted in elite circles, chances are very strong that you’re doing something wrong—I mean, for very simple reasons. Why should they have any respect for people who are trying to undermine their power? It doesn’t make any sense.

Awareness and Actions

M
AN
: A lot of the activists I work with operate under the assumption that if we can just make people aware, everything’s going to work out and there’ll be a change. Even with c.d. [civil disobedience] actions protesting nuclear weapons, that’s been my assumption too: get people to see us doing it, hold up our signs. But it seems like that’s not all that is needed, really—what more, would you say, besides education?

Education is just the beginnings—and furthermore, there are situations where you can get everybody aware and on your side, and they still won’t be able to do anything. Like, take a look at Haiti. I don’t think there’s much doubt about what 90 percent of the population there wants, and they’re aware of it—they just can’t do anything about it without getting slaughtered. So there’s a whole series of things which have to happen, and they
begin
with awareness; you don’t do anything without awareness, obviously—you don’t do anything unless you’re aware that there’s something that ought to be done, so that’s the beginning almost by definition. But real awareness in fact comes about through practice and experience with the world. It’s not, first you become aware and
then
you start doing things; you become aware
through
doing things.

For instance, you become aware of the limits of reformist politics by trying it. In my view, you should always push all of the opportunities to their limits—partly because sometimes you can get some useful results that help people, but primarily because pretty soon you’ll find out what those limits
are
and you’ll understand
why
there are limits; you’ll gain awareness you can’t gain from a lecture. I mean, you can hear all the lectures you like about the way that power works, but you learn it very fast when you actually confront it, without the lectures. So there’s an interaction between awareness and action—and sometimes the steps you have to take to make changes require taking things to the level of violent revolutionary struggle. Like, if people in Haiti were in a position to overthrow the military there by force, in my opinion they ought to do it. Sometimes it comes to that.

As to the c.d. demonstrations about nuclear weapons, just personally speaking, I had a lot of disagreements with some of my friends on that, people I really respect a lot, like the people in Plowshares [a group active on disarmament issues]. I mean, I think these are all tactical questions—like, I don’t think there’s any question of principle involved in whether you should smash a missile nose-cone or not, it’s not like a contract between you and God or something. The question is, what are the effects? And there I thought the effects were negative. It seemed to me that the effects of what they were doing were, first of all, to remove
them
from political action, because they were going to be in jail for twenty years, and also to tie up tons of money and effort in courts, which is absolutely the worst place to be. I mean, the worst waste of time and effort and money in the world is a court—so any time you can stay out of courts, you’re well off. But the second thing is, I don’t think that they reached people—because they didn’t prepare the ground for it. Like, if you smash up a missile nose-cone in some town where people are working at the missile plant and there’s no other way they can make a living, and they haven’t heard of any reason why we shouldn’t have missiles, that doesn’t educate anybody, it just gets them mad at you.

So I think these tactical questions have to be very carefully thought through—you can’t really predict with much certainty, but as well as you can, you have to make a guess as to what the effect of the tactic is going to be. If the effect is going to be to build up awareness, that’s good. But of course, awareness is only the beginning, because people can be aware and still not do anything—for instance, maybe they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs. And obviously you can’t criticize people for worrying about that; they’ve got kids, they’ve got to live. That’s fair enough. It’s hard to struggle for your rights—you usually suffer.

Leaders and Movements

W
OMAN
: As an activist, I think we also have an obligation to get across the fact that we have fun doing this—that we get nurtured by working on these issues which are close to our essence. If we’re looking to the long term, and building up the types of institutions you’re talking about, we have to project that a lot more than we do, almost as a way of recruitment. Too often, people’s image of “the activist” is of someone who’s always burned out. We have to create a culture that is engaging to people and exciting, so that it doesn’t just seem like we’re putting in the hours and chanting radical slogans
.

See, I think the people who’ve really made social movements successful have been the ones who
did
those things. They’re gone from history of course: none of the books mention them, nobody knows the names of the people who really made the social movements in history work—but that’s the way it’s always happened, I think.

And this is even true of the recent ones, like the anti-war movement in the 1960s. So there are a lot of books coming out these days that tell you what went on in the S.D.S. [Students for a Democratic Society] office, or what one smart guy said to some other smart guy—but none of that had anything to do with why the peace movement in the Sixties became a huge mass movement. From my own personal experience in it, and that’s only a little piece of it obviously, I know who was doing the
really
important things, and I remember them—like, I remember that this student worked hard to set up that demonstration, and that’s why I had a chance to talk there; and they were bringing other people in to get involved; they were enjoying what they were doing, and communicating that to others somehow. That’s what makes popular movements work—but of course, that’s all going to be gone from history: what will be left in history is just the fluff on the top.

M
AN
: I’m curious what you think about some of the more famous leaders of change—like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, for instance. You don’t ever seem to mention them when you speak. Why is that?

Well, let’s take Martin Luther King. See, I think Martin Luther King was an important person, but I do not think that he was a big agent of change. In fact, I think Martin Luther King was able to play a role in bringing about change only because the
real
agents of change were doing a lot of work. And the real agents of change were people working at the grassroots level, like S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything—that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

But just take a look at the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, for example—take, say, Rosa Parks [who triggered the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott protesting racial segregation]. I mean, the
story
about Rosa Parks is, this courageous black woman suddenly decided, “I’ve had enough, I’m not going to sit in the back of the bus.” Well, that’s sort of half true—but only half. Rosa Parks came out of a community, a well-organized community, which in fact had Communist Party roots if you trace it back, things like Highlander School [a Tennessee school for educating political organizers] and so on.
  ⁶
But it was a community of people who were working together and had decided on a plan for breaking through the system of segregation—Rosa Parks was just an agent of that plan.

Okay, that’s all out of history. What’s in history is, one person had the courage to do something—which she did. But not on her own. Nobody does anything on their own. Rosa Parks came out of an organized community of committed people, people who’d been working together for change for a very long time. And that’s how it always works.

The same was true of Martin Luther King: he was able to appear and give public speeches because S.N.C.C. workers and Freedom Riders and others had prepared the ground—and taken a brutal beating for it. And a lot of those people were pretty privileged kids, remember: they
chose
it, they didn’t have to do it.
They’re
the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was important because he could stand up there and get the cameras, but these other people were the real Civil Rights Movement. I’m sure he would have said the same thing too, incidentally—or at least, he should have.

As for Gandhi, again it’s the same story. He had a very mixed record, actually—but the point is, it was the people on the ground who did the work that prepared the basis for Gandhi to become prominent, and sort of articulate things. And when you look at any other popular movement, I think it’s always like that.

Levels of Change

M
AN
: Noam, as we work to build up that kind of movement, what do you think are the best methods we should be using as pressure tactics right now? Should we be doing the traditional reformist kind of steps—lobbying legislators, writing letters, trying to get Democrats into office—or should we go with more of a direct action kind of approach, demonstrations and civil disobedience and so on?

Well, those are tactical decisions
you
have to make—the only people qualified to make that kind of decision are the ones who live in a place, and can see what’s going on. So really it would be ridiculous for me to have an opinion on it.

Demonstrations are often the right thing to do, you just have to make tactical decisions—but keep in mind, they’re just as reformist as lobbying your legislature. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, even if you’re the most extreme revolutionary in the world, you’re going to use whatever methods are available to try to ameliorate things, and then if ultimately you run into limits where powerful institutions will not permit more reform, well, then you go beyond it. But first you have to reach those limits—and there are many ways of reaching them. One way is lobbying your legislator, one may be another political party, others are demonstrations—which simply change the conditions under which powerful people make decisions. But that does have an effect.

Let me just give you an example. There’s a part of the
Pentagon Papers
[the leaked official Defense Department planning record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam] which is considered politically incorrect—it doesn’t appear in big histories and nobody discusses it, because it’s just too revealing. It’s the part that deals with the time right after the Tet Offensive, Right after the Tet Offensive in 1968, everyone recognized that the Vietnam War was going to take a long time, it wasn’t going to be possible to win it quickly—so major decisions had to be made about strategy and policy. Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked by General Westmoreland, the top American commander in Vietnam, to send 200,000 more troops over to the war—and they refused, they didn’t want to do it. And the reason is, they said they were afraid they might have to use the troops here in the United States to put down a civil war: they said they were going to need the troops at home for “civil disorder control,” as they put it, and therefore they didn’t want to send them to Vietnam.
  ⁷
These guys thought the society was going to crack up in 1968, because people here were just too opposed to what they were doing.

In fact, the “civil disorder” was also one of the reasons why a group called the “Wise Men” came to Washington with a lot of money in their pockets, and shortly after, in an unusually blatant power-play, essentially told President Johnson, “You’re through: you’re not running for reelection.”
  ⁸
And he didn’t. We started withdrawing from Vietnam, and we entered into peace negotiations, and so on. Well, a lot of public protest here and huge demonstrations and direct actions were a big part of the reason behind that.

So, yes, demonstrations and resistance can have effects—but they’re no more revolutionary than talking to your legislator. They don’t affect power, they don’t change the institutions of power, they just change the decisions that will be made
within
those institutions. And that’s a fine thing to do, There’s nothing wrong with that, it helps a lot of people. I mean, I don’t think the institutions of power should exist either, but that’s another question for right now.

M
AN
: What would you say are the most important causes for us to be focusing on, then—I mean, what do you think can actually he done by activists working today?