Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (43 page)

The whole thing’s not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn’t function for a second—and if it could, all you’d want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it’s not really serious.

Articulating Visions

M
AN
: You often seem reluctant to get very specific in spelling out your vision of an anarchist society and how we could get there. Don’t you think it’s important for activists to do that, though—to try to communicate to people a workable plan for the future, which then can help give them the hope and energy to continue struggling? I’m curious why you don’t do that more often
.

Well, I suppose I
don’t
feel that in order to work hard for social change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in any kind of detail. What I feel should drive a person to work for change are certain
principles
you’d like to see achieved. Now, you may not know in detail—and I don’t think that any of us
do
know in detail—how those principles can best be realized at this point in complex systems like human societies. But I don’t really see why that should make any difference: what you try to do is advance the principles. Now, that may be what some people call “reformism”—but that’s kind of like a put-down: reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction. And to push in that direction, I don’t think you have to know precisely how a future society would work: I think what you have to be able to do is spell out the principles you want to see such a society realize—and I think we can imagine
many
different ways in which a future society could realize them. Well, work to help people start trying them.

So for example, in the case of workers taking control of the workplace, there are a lot of different ways in which you can think of workplaces being controlled—and since nobody knows enough about what all the effects are going to be of large-scale social changes, I think what we should do is try them piecemeal. In fact, I have a rather conservative attitude towards social change: since we’re dealing with complex systems which nobody understands very much, the sensible move I think is to make changes and then see what happens—and if they work, make further changes. That’s true across the board, actually.

So, I don’t feel in a position—and even if I felt I was, I wouldn’t say it—to know what the long-term results are going to look like in any kind of detail: those are things that will have to be discovered, in my view. Instead, the basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it’s justified—it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five-year-old kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation: it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case, I think you
can
give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it—invariably. And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else—they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.

So I think that whenever you find situations of power, these questions should be asked—and the person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that. As far as I can see, it’s just the point of view that says that people have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom then you’ve got to justify them. Sometimes you can—but of course, anarchism or anything else doesn’t give you the answers about when that is. You just have to look at the specific cases.

M
AN
: But if we ever had a society with no wage incentive and no authority, where would the drive come from to advance and grow?

Well, the drive to “advance”—I think you have to ask exactly what that means. If you mean a drive to
produce more
, well, who wants it? Is that necessarily the right thing to do? It’s not obvious. In fact, in many areas it’s probably the wrong thing to do—maybe it’s a good thing that there wouldn’t be the same drive to produce. People have to be
driven
to have certain wants in our system—why? Why not leave them alone so they can just be happy, do other things?

Whatever “drive” there is ought to be internal. So take a look at kids: they’re creative, they explore, they want to try new things. I mean, why does a kid start to walk? You take a one-year-old kid, he’s crawling fine, he can get anywhere across the room he likes really fast, so fast his parents have to run after him to keep him from knocking everything down—all of a sudden he gets up and starts walking. He’s terrible at walking: he walks one step and he falls on his face, and if he wants to really get somewhere he’s going to crawl. So why do kids start walking? Well, they just want to do new things, that’s the way people are built. We’re built to want to do new things, even if they’re not efficient, even if they’re harmful, even if you get hurt—and I don’t think that ever stops.

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists. And if you’ve been lucky enough to have had that opportunity, you know it’s quite an experience—and it doesn’t have to be discovering Einstein’s theory of relativity: anybody can have that pleasure, even by seeing what
other
people have done. For instance, if you read even a simple mathematical proof like the Pythagorean Theorem, what you study in tenth grade, and you finally figure out what it’s all about, that’s exciting—“My God, I never understood that before.” Okay, that’s creativity, even though somebody else proved it two thousand years ago.

You just keep being struck by the marvels of what you’re discovering, and you’re “discovering” it, even though somebody else did it already. Then if you can ever add a little bit to what’s already known—alright, that’s very exciting. And I think the same thing is true of a person who builds a boat: I don’t see why it’s fundamentally any different—I mean, I wish
I
could do that; I can’t, I can’t imagine doing it.

Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely—instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are
objectively
available, but also options that are
subjectively
available—like, how are people allowed to think, how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society—not because we’re incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That’s what indoctrination is
about
in the first place, in fact—and I don’t mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a “proper” life and a “proper” set of values are, and that’s all indoctrination.

So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to people—both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that’s one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for
themselves
what their needs are, and not just have the “choices” forced on them by some arbitrary system of power.

“Want” Creation

M
AN
: But you could say that “to truck and barter” is human nature—that people are fundamentally materialist, and will always want to accumulate more and more under any social structure
.

You could
say
it, but there’s no reason to
believe
it. You look at peasant societies, they go on for thousands of years without it—do those people have a different human nature? Or just look inside a family: do people “truck and barter” over how much you’re going to eat for dinner? Well, certainly a family is a normal social structure, and you don’t see people accumulating more and more for themselves regardless of the needs of the other people.

In fact, just take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself: look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken —conscious efforts—to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. It’s happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It’s very dramatic to look at cases like these.

For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica—which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, “It’s not paying anymore.” So within a couple years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called “free” economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same—and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slaves have to become the happy workers—somehow we’ve got to work it all out.

Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn’t want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, “How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they’re no longer enslaved into it?” Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn’t really
want
a lot of things—they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate—the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn’t then desire, so then the only way they’d be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations.
  ²⁰

There was very conscious discussion of the need to create wants—and in fact, extensive efforts were then undertaken to do exactly what they do on T.V. today: to create wants, to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don’t really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society. And that pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism.
  ²¹
In fact, what the whole history of capitalism shows is that people have had to be
driven
into situations which are then claimed to be their nature. But if the history of capitalism shows anything, it shows it’s
not
their nature, that they’ve had to be forced into it, and that that effort has had to be maintained right until this day.

Dissidents: Ignored or Vilified

M
AN
: Noam, if I can just change the topic a bit. You’ve been called a neo-Nazi, your books have been burned, you’ve been called anti-Israeli—don’t you get a bit upset by the way that your views are always distorted by the media and by intellectuals?

No, why should I? I get called anything, I’m accused of everything you can dream of: being a Communist propagandist, a Nazi propagandist, a pawn of freedom of speech, an anti-Semite, liar, whatever you want.
  ²²
Actually, I think that’s all a good sign. I mean, if you’re a dissident, typically you’re ignored. If you can’t be ignored, and you can’t be answered, you’re vilified—that’s obvious: no institution is going to help people undermine it. So I would only regard the kinds of things you’re talking about as signs of progress.

And in fact, it’s gotten a lot better since the 1960s. Again, we don’t remember—younger people, in particular, don’t appreciate—just how much it’s changed. Let me just give you an illustration. Boston’s a pretty liberal city, and the first major and-Vietnam War action there was in October 1965, the “International Days of Protest,” it was called. There was a public demonstration on the Boston Common—which is like Hyde Park, Union Square, it’s where you give talks—and I was supposed to be one of the speakers. Well, the meeting was completely broken up: we never said one word. There were thousands of counter-demonstrators, mostly students marching over from the universities—and I was very pleased that there were hundreds of cops there, otherwise we would have been lynched.

The media were just irate about the demonstration. The front page of the
Boston Globe
had a big picture of a wounded war veteran on it, and the rest of the page was all condemnations of these people who dared to get up and say that we shouldn’t bomb North Vietnam. All of the radio programs were deluged with denunciations of these Communists and traitors. The liberals in Congress denounced the “utter irresponsibility” of the demonstrators, who were questioning the right of the United States to bomb North Vietnam—this was in 1965.
  ²³
Incidentally, I should say that those demonstrations were so tepid it’s embarrassing even to think about them—we weren’t even criticizing the attack on
South
Vietnam, which was much worse, we were only talking about the extension of the bombing to the North.