Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (60 page)

Well, what are those people so upset about? Here’s one thing. One of the protections codified in the current G.A.T.T. agreements, as in N.A.F.T.A., is what’s called “intellectual property rights” [i.e. rights to registered trademarks, patented technologies, and copyrights of valuable “information” products ranging from music to genes]. Intellectual property rights are a protectionist measure, they have nothing to do with free trade—in fact, they’re the exact
opposite
of free trade. And they’ll do a lot of things, but two really crucial ones.

First of all, they’re going to increase the duration of patents: meaning, if Merck Pharmaceutical patents some drug, thanks to publicly-subsidized work in American universities, for example, now they can get a much longer patent for it under G.A.T.T.—much longer than any of the rich countries ever accepted during the periods when
they
were developing, incidentally. In fact, it’s only in very recent years that the rich countries have even honored patent rights at all—the United States never did when it was a developing country, for instance. So, point one: patents are being much extended.

Secondly, the
nature
of patents is being shifted in character. See, up until now, patents have been what are called “process patents”—in other words, if Merck figures out a way to create a drug, the
process
of making the drug is patented, but not the drug itself. The G.A.T.T. treaty, like N.A.F.T.A., shifts that: now it’s the
product
that’s patented—meaning the Indian or Argentine pharmaceutical industries no longer can try to figure out a smarter way to produce the same drug at half the cost, in order to get it to their own populations more affordably. Notice that these are not only highly protectionist measures, but they’re a blow
against
economic efficiency and technological progress—that just shows you how much “free trade” really is involved in all of this.

Actually, there are significant historical precedents on product patents, and I’m sure that they are perfectly well known to the G.A.T.T. designers. France, for example, once had a chemical industry, but it lost it—most of the French chemical industry moved to Switzerland, which is why Switzerland now has such a large chemical industry. The reason? France happened to have product patents, which were such a barrier to innovation and technical progress that the French chemical companies just decided to go elsewhere.
  ²⁶
Well, now G.A.T.T. is trying to impose that inefficiency on the entire world. In fact, India already has been forced to accept it: a little while ago they did what’s called “liberalizing” their pharmaceuticals industry, meaning they opened it up to foreign penetration. So now drug prices will shoot sky-high, more children will die, people won’t be able to afford medications they need, and so on.
  ²⁷

Well, these changes in patents are just one part of G.A.T.T.: they’re one piece of a whole attempt that is now being made to ensure that unaccountable transnational corporations will monopolize the technologies of the future. In my opinion, that’s grotesque—I don’t see any reason to push
that
through. Certainly anyone who believes in free trade would be opposed to these policies: they’re a high level of protectionism, which in fact is specifically designed to be contrary to even the narrow definitions of economic efficiency they teach you in the University of Chicago Economics Department [home of well-known exponents of free-market theory]. G.A.T.T. is going to cut down on technological innovation, it’s going to cut down on economic efficiency—but by some strange accident, it’ll also happen to increase profits, so of course nobody will pick up on any of the contradictions.

As a matter of fact, it’s not even clear that these so-called “free trade” agreements are going to increase
trade
at all, in any authentic sense. So there’s a lot of talk in the papers these days about the growth of international trade, which is supposed to show everyone how wonderful the market is. But if you take a look at that international trade, you’ll find that it’s a very curious kind of growth: about 50 percent of U.S. trade now is
internal
to corporations, which means it’s about as much “trade” as if you move something from one shelf of a grocery store to another, it just happens to cross an international border, so therefore it gets recorded as “trade.” And the figures are comparable for other major countries.
  ²⁸

That means, for example, that if the Ford Motor Company sends some parts to Mexico to be assembled by super-cheap labor under essentially no environmental regulations and then they ship it back up to the United States to add more value to it, that’s “trade.” But that’s not trade at all: those aren’t exports, they didn’t even enter the Mexican market—they’re centrally-managed interactions by huge institutions, with a very “visible hand” pushing them around, and with all kinds of other market distortions involved that nobody here bothers to study very much but which undoubtedly are severe. And 50 percent is not a small amount—that’s a lot. I mean, at the time that N.A.F.T.A. was passed, there was a lot of talk in the press about U.S. trade with Mexico soaring—but there wasn’t talk about the fact that more than half of U.S. exports to Mexico were
internal
to corporations. So in fact, N.A.F.T.A. and G.A.T.T. might really end up
reducing
trade—they’ll probably increase things moving across borders, but that’s not the same as trade: those transfers are not market interactions.

Well, okay, these are complicated matters, and you don’t just want to sloganize about them—but in my opinion, all of these international agreements are part of a general attack on democracy and free markets that we’re seeing in the contemporary period, as banks, investment firms, and transnational corporations develop new methods to extend their power free from public scrutiny. And in that context, it’s not very surprising that they’re all being rammed through as quickly and secretly as they are. And whatever you happen to think about the specific treaties that have now been put into place, there is just no doubt that their consequences for most of the people in the world are going to be vast.

In fact, these treaties are just one more step in the process that’s been accelerating in recent years of differentiating the two main class interests of the world still further—far more so than before—so that the Third World wealth-distribution model is being extended everywhere. And while the proportions of wealth in a rich country like the United States will always differ significantly from the proportions in a deeply impoverished country like Brazil, for example (deeply impoverished thanks to the fact that it’s been under the Western heel for centuries), you can certainly see the effects under way in recent years. I mean, in the United States things probably aren’t going to get to the point where 80 percent of the population is living like Central Africa and 10 percent is fabulously wealthy. Maybe it’ll be 50 percent and 30 percent or something like that, with the rest somewhere in between—because more people are always going to be needed in the Western societies for things like scientific research and skilled labor, providing propaganda services, being managers, things like that. But the changes no doubt are happening, and they will be rapidly accelerated as these accords are implemented.

Defense Department Funding and “Clean Money”

W
OMAN
: Noam, just to go back to freedom of thought for a second—I’m curious what your feeling is about the Defense Department funding so many of our scientists today. Do you see that as a problem in terms of freedom of research and freedom of inquiry? And does it make you feel at all uncomfortable personally to be working at M.I.T.?

To tell you the honest truth, I’ve always thought that’s kind of a secondary issue. For instance, in the late 1960s, M.I.T. was about 80 percent funded by the Defense Department—it’s less than that today, because of things like cancer research money. But what did that mean? Was M.I.T. different from, say, Harvard, which wasn’t so much funded by the Defense Department? Well, about the only major differences between them were that M.I.T. was a little bit more open to radical ideas, and there was more political activism and fewer ideological controls. That’s about it, as far as I could see.

Now, there was once a time when I was being funded by the Air Force myself—to do exactly the same sort of thing that I’m doing now in my scientific work. Right now I’m not, so if you asked me whether I’m funded by the Defense Department, I could in some narrow sense say no. But the fact of the matter is, I
am
funded by the Defense Department, whether I have a contract with them or not—because if the Defense Department weren’t funding the Electrical Engineering Department, which M.I.T. needs, the Institute would not be able to fund my department. I mean, if you’re teaching
music
at M.I.T. you’re being funded by the Defense Department, because if somebody they really cared about
weren’t
being funded by the Defense Department, they wouldn’t have anything left to pay you to teach music. So in part the thing is kind of like a bookkeeping device.

As for its influence on what’s done, that’s very small: the Defense Department doesn’t give a damn what you do most of the time—they just want to fund it, because they want to have a bigger bureaucracy or something like that. So there’s very little reporting back by the scientists, they don’t pay much attention to you, they don’t care whether you did what you said you’d do or something else, and so on. In fact, back in the Sixties, there was a guy in my lab who was working on translating Humboldt [a Prussian philosopher]—he was being funded by the Office of Naval Research, they didn’t care.

As far as the moral issue goes—I mean, it’s not as if there’s some clean money somewhere. If you’re in a university, you’re on dirty money—you’re on money which is coming from people who are working somewhere, and whose money is being taken away, and is going to support things like universities. Now, there are a lot of ways in which that money can be taken away from those working people and get fed into the universities. One way is by diverting it through taxes and government bureaucracies. Another way is by channeling it through profits—like, some rich benefactor gives it as a gift to the university, meaning he stole it from his workers. And there are all sorts of other ways in which it happens too. But it all comes down to the same point: if you’re at a university, you’re there because there is a social structure which commits a certain amount of “surplus product,” if you want to use a Marxist term, to funding people sitting around in universities.

Now, I don’t see a whole lot of difference myself as to whether that money works its way through the Department of Defense or through some other mechanism—that’s why I’ve never made a big fuss about this. I mean, to the extent that the Defense Department influenced what scientists do, it would matter. But good universities don’t permit that, by and large—they don’t permit it just for their own internal reasons: if you started permitting that, you’d lose the ability to
do
science altogether. Science simply can’t be done under those kinds of ideological constraints.

It’s sort of like what happens in cancer research: Congress is funding a lot of cellular biology because they want somebody to discover a cure for cancer by the time they get it, but what the scientists are doing is just what they know how to do—and what they know how to do has nothing to do with cancer, what they know how to do is work with big molecules. Maybe a cure for cancer will come out of it someday, but that’s sort of by the side. And that’s pretty much the way it goes in the sciences: you can work on what you understand, you can’t work on what people tell you to solve. It’s like the joke about the drunk and the streetlight: you see some drunk guy looking for something under the streetlight and you go over to him and ask, “What’s the matter?” He says, “I lost my key.” You say, “Where did you lose it?” He says, “On the other side of the street.” You say, “So why are you looking over here?” “Well, this is where the light is.” That’s the way the sciences work: you look where the light is—because that’s all you can do.

You understand only a certain small number of things, and you just have to work around the periphery of them. If somebody says, “I’d like to have you solve this problem out here,” you say, “I’ll gladly take your money”—and then you go on looking where you are. And there basically is nothing much else that can be done. If you started trying to direct the money to solving those problems, you’d just do nothing, because we don’t know how to solve them. There’s kind of a tacit compact between funders and recipients to overlook this …

The Favored State and Enemy States

W
OMAN
: Noam, people often attack you as a political commentator for focusing your criticism against the activities of the United States, and not so much against the old Soviet Union, or Vietnam, or Cuba and so on—the official enemies. I’d like to know what you think about that kind of criticism?

Well, it’s true that’s one of the standard things I get—but see, if that criticism is meant honestly (and most of the time it’s not), then it’s really missing the crucial point, I think. See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it’s because American actions are the things that I can
do
something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world—which obviously is very far from the truth—that tiny fraction would still be what I’m responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. And that’s based on a very simple ethical principle—namely, that the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated consequences for human beings: I think that’s kind of like a fundamental moral truism.