Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (55 page)

And exactly the same lessons apply today. Today it’s oil that’s at the center of the industrial economies. And why is oil cheap? Well, that’s what you pay your taxes for: a large part of the Pentagon system exists to make sure that oil prices stay within a certain range—not too low, because Western economies and energy corporations depend on the profits from it, but not too high, because that might interfere with what’s called the “efficiency” of international trade [i.e. because transport and other costs of trade rise with the oil price]. Well, trade is only “efficient” because a lot of force and international violence keeps oil prices from going too high, so if you really wanted to measure the “efficiency of trade,” you’d have to figure in all of the other costs which
make
it that way, like the costs of the Pentagon for one. And if anyone ever did that, you couldn’t
possibly
say that trade is “efficient.” If anybody ever bothered to calculate these things, the efficiency of trade would drop very, very low, and it would in fact prove to be extremely
inefficient
.

I mean, these market distortions are not footnotes—they are absolutely huge phenomena. Nobody ever tries to estimate them, because economics is not a serious field—but people in the business world know about them perfectly well, which is why they’ve always called upon a powerful state to protect them from market discipline: they don’t want market discipline any more than they want democratic control, and they’ve always blocked it. And the same is true of just about every aspect of any developed economy there is.

Automation

Well, let’s just take one last case of this, an extremely important and revealing one: let’s look at automation. I mean, it’s standardly claimed these days that the reason why the population is suffering, why people have been losing jobs at a mad rate, real wages have been going down for the last twenty-five years and so on, is due to, as Ricardo said, “laws like the principle of gravitation”—inexorable market forces are making it that way, like automation, or the efficiency of international trade. That’s the standard argument: these things are inevitable because the market is just imposing them on us.
  ⁵⁰
It’s all total bullshit. I mentioned one reason why the “efficiency of trade” argument is mostly a fraud, now let’s look at automation.

Well, it’s true that automation is “efficient”—like, by market principles, automation saves businessmen money and drives workers out of jobs. But it didn’t
get
that way because of the market, not at all: it only got that way through intensive and prolonged funding and development through the state sector—that’s market
distortion
. I mean, for thirty years automation was developed through the military system in the United States, and the reason why it took so long and cost so much is that automation was so
inefficient
to begin with that it couldn’t possibly have survived in the market—so therefore automation was developed the same way we develop most high technology: through the public sector.

See, in the Air Force and the Navy (where most of this took place), nobody
cares
about costs—because the taxpayer’s paying, so the development can be as expensive and inefficient as you like. And in that way, they were able to develop automation to the point where it could then be used to drive people out of work and make profits for corporations. For instance, take the history of automated numerical control of metal-cutting machines [i.e. translation of part specifications into mathematical information that can be fed into machines without the need for skilled machinists]. That was developed through the Air Force, it went on for decades, and finally it got efficient enough so that it could be handed over to the corporations and they could then throw out their workers. But it didn’t happen through market forces, not at all—it was the result of massive state intervention.

Furthermore, if you look at the
kind
of automation that was developed, you see precisely what workers in the early labor movement were complaining about: being turned into mindless tools of production. I mean, automation could have been designed in such a way as to
use
the skills of skilled machinists and to eliminate management—there’s nothing inherent in automation that says it can’t be used that way. But it wasn’t, believe me; it was used in exactly the opposite way. Automation was designed through the state system to demean and degrade people—to de-skill workers and increase managerial control. And again, that had nothing to do with the market, and it had nothing to do with the nature of the technology: it had to do with straight power interests. So the
kind
of automation that was developed in places like the M.I.T. Engineering Department was very carefully designed so that it would create interchangeable workers and enhance managerial control—and that was not for economic reasons.
  ⁵¹
I mean, study after study, including by management firms like Arthur D. Little and so on, show that managers have selected automation even when it
cuts back
on profits—just because it gives them more control over their workforce.
  ⁵²

If you’re interested, there’s been some very interesting work done on this; the guy who’s done the best work is David Noble—for his sins he was denied tenure at M.I.T., and now he’s teaching in Canada. He wrote a book called
Forces of Production
, which is a pretty specialized technical analysis mainly of the development of numerical control of machinery, but he’s also got a good popular book out, called
Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism
. Unfortunately, this is the kind of book that’s published like in Katmandu or something—it’s published by a very small anarchist press in Chicago. But it’s very interesting, didn’t make him too popular in the Faculty Club and so on.
  ⁵³

One of the things he discusses there is Luddism [a movement of English workers who wrecked industrial machines, which began in 1811]. See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to
destroy
machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent
themselves
from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy
them
, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense. And that sentiment runs right throughout the working-class movements of the nineteenth century, actually—and you can even see it today.

Well, if economics were like a real field, these are the kinds of things they would be studying. None of it is very complicated—like, everybody knows why cotton was cheap, for instance: everybody who went to elementary school knows why cotton was cheap, and if it hadn’t been for cheap cotton, there wouldn’t have been an industrial revolution. It’s not hard. But I’d be very surprised if anybody teaches this stuff in economics courses in the United States.

I mean, sure, there are some market forces operating—but the reality is, they’re pretty much off around the edges. And when people talk about the progress of automation and free-market “trade forces” inevitably kicking all these people out of work and driving the whole world towards kind of a Third World-type polarization of wealth—I mean, that’s true if you take a narrow enough perspective on it. But if you look into the factors that
made
things the way they are, it doesn’t even come
close
to being true, it’s not even remotely in touch with reality. But when you’re studying economics in the ideological institutions, that’s all just irrelevant and you’re not supposed to ask questions like these: you have all the information right in front of you, but these are simply not matters that it is proper to spend time talking about.

A Revolutionary Change in Moral Values

M
AN
: Noam, given an intellectual culture like the one you’ve been describing—can you find any “honest” intellectuals in the U.S.?

You can find them, but like I say, usually they’re not inside the institutions—and that’s for a very good reason: there is no reason why institutions of power and domination should tolerate or encourage people who try to undermine them. That would be completely dysfunctional. So typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values—values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed.

M
AN
: Who are those people? I mean, you make the whole situation look very bleak—who would you say are the intellectuals that are going about things in the right way?

Well, very often they’re the people who have done things to make a real change in the world. Take the S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example—they were serious intellectuals, and they made a big change. Or take the people in the 1960s who did the work that’s led to so many of the improvements we’ve seen in the country over the last twenty years—and “work” didn’t just mean running around the streets waving signs, you know, it also meant thinking about things, and figuring out what the problems were, and trying to teach people about them and convince them. Despite what you always hear, that was
not
elite intellectuals: the liberal intellectual community in the United States was always
strongly
opposed to the people who protested the American aggression in Indochina on principled grounds, they were
not
the ones assisting the popular movements. Well, those people were serious intellectuals, in my view.

So you see, there is sort of an “honest” left intelligentsia, if you like—meaning intellectuals who are not serving power as either a Red Bureaucracy, or as state-capitalist commissar-equivalents. It’s just that most of the time they’re outside the institutions—and for almost trivial reasons: you’re not going to find a militant labor activist as Chairman of the Board of General Electric, right? Yeah, how could there be? But there are people all over the place who are honest and committed, and are thinking about the world, and trying to change it—many more today than there were thirty years ago, in fact.

I mean, it’s standardly claimed that there’s less of a left intelligentsia around today in the United States than there was in the Fifties and Sixties—but I don’t believe a word of it. I think the opposite is true, actually. Just take a look at the people who they’re
calling
the big thinkers of the 1950s: who were they? They were intelligent people, like Edmund Wilson’s an intelligent person—but
left intellectual
? Or Mary McCarthy: yeah, smart person, wrote some nice novels—but not a left intellectual. In fact, what you have now is much more serious activists all over the place, people who are thinking carefully about important questions, and who understand a lot.

I travel around all the time giving talks, and throughout the 1980s I was
amazed
to go to places and see it. Take the Central America solidarity movement, which was a pretty dramatic development—I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it in history, in fact. I’d go to a church in Kansas, or some town in Montana or Wyoming or something, Anchorage, Alaska, and find people there who know more about Latin America certainly than the C.I.A., which isn’t very hard actually, but more than people in the academic departments of universities. They’re people who’ve thought about it, and who’ve understood things, and brought a lot of intelligence to the issues—I can’t even tell you their names, there are too many of them.

Also, I’m not even sure the word “left” is the right word for them: a lot of them were probably Christian conservatives, but they were very radical people in my view, and intellectuals who understood, and who did a lot. They created a popular movement which not only protested U.S. atrocities, but actually
engaged
themselves in the lives of the victims—they took a much more courageous stand than was ever done in the 1960s. I mean, the popular resistance that took place in the Sixties was important—but there was nobody back then who even
dreamt
of going to a Vietnamese village and living there, because maybe a white face would limit the capacity of the marauders to kill and destroy. That wasn’t even an idea in your head. In fact, nobody even went to try to
report
the war from the side of the victims—that was unheard of. But in the 1980s it was common: plenty of people did it—in fact, people who were coming out of religious groups like Witness for Peace were doing that by the thousands and tens of thousands. And the people who were doing that are serious left intellectuals, in my view.
  ⁵⁴

Remember, what will be
labeled
“left” in the general culture and given publicity is going to be something that’s ugly enough so that people can be rallied to oppose it. So books are coming out now about “left intellectuals” in France who were Stalinists—and look at the awful things they did. Okay,
that
kind of “left intelligentsia” is allowed to have publicity and prominence, in fact the elite culture will give them as much prominence as it can. Or people will say “the left” is things like the Spartacist League, or the Socialist Workers Party or something—little sectlets, the kinds of groups that anybody who’s been involved in movement activities knows are the people who hang around your offices and your talks trying to see if they can disrupt things. That’s not the left, that’s parasites that undermine the left—but to show how lousy the left is, the elite press will say “Oh, the Spartacist League doesn’t have a lot of members”: yeah, big excitement.
  ⁵⁵
On the other hand, the
real
left they don’t talk about—like they don’t talk about the thousands and thousands of people involved in this, that and the other cause doing serious work.