Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (82 page)

Well, now New England is importing cod from Norway. Anybody from New England knows what that means—it’s unimaginable. And the reason we’re importing cod from Norway is that in Norway, they continued to regulate their fishing grounds; here we deregulated them, so of course they were destroyed. So now a large part of Georges Bank is closed off to fishing, and nobody knows if it can recover.
  ⁸⁶
Well, if they eliminate the rest of the country’s regulatory apparatus, it’s going to be the same kind of thing all over the place. So if this task of organizing a democratic society
does
prove to be impossible, we’re all going to be in very serious trouble: very serious.

Initial Moves and the Coming Crisis

M
AN
: Do you see any steps being taken right now towards building these kinds of international movements?

Well, I think one can see some things happening—and you can imagine them extending to a much larger scale. Most of the things you see today are so small that they’re not really making an impact, but they’re real, and they could potentially become the start of bigger things.

For example, the first shreds of any positive move in the union movement that I’m aware of occurred right after N.A.F.T.A. was passed [in 1993]. Immediately after the N.A.F.T.A. vote, like within weeks, General Electric and Honeywell both fired workers for trying to organize unions in their plants in Northern Mexico. Okay, normally when that happens, that’s the end of it. This time, for the first time ever I think, two American unions, United Electrical Workers and the Teamsters, intervened to defend the organizers and protested to the Clinton administration. And they have some clout: they’re not like corporations, but they’ve got a lot more power than Mexican unions. I mean, there really
are no
Mexican unions, because Mexico’s like a fascist state—there’s just a government union (kind of like in the old Soviet Union) and then essentially one other one, which of course opposed N.A.F.T.A. but is under such terrific controls that it couldn’t do anything. But the big American unions still can’t be completely ignored, and in this case they were able to get the U.S. Labor Department to investigate these firings in Mexico.
  ⁸⁷

Well, the thing went to a U.S. Labor Department panel, which was supposed to determine whether there had in fact been an infringement of labor rights—and of course Robert Reich’s department discovered that there had been no violations. What they said is, the fired workers had Mexican law behind them, they still had legal recourse under Mexican law, so therefore there was no issue for the U.S. Labor Department. I mean, you have to
read
this thing—I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Mexican labor law, but this doesn’t even rise to the level of hilarity. But that was the decision, so the firings went through. The fired workers are allowed to apply for severance pay, very happy; I’m sure G.E. is mourning.
  ⁸⁸
But at least in this case American unions got to the point of defending the rights of Mexican workers for the first time—at this point out of their own interests, because they recognize they’re really getting crushed. But that’s the kind of thing that has to start taking place on a massive scale, if there are going to be significant moves against these problems.

Beyond that, serious changes in the economy will simply require dismantling private power altogether—there just is no way around that in the end. And you can even see some rudimentary steps towards it here and there, I think. Weirton Steel was one recent effort [workers own a portion of the company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan]; and there are others which could be turned into something meaningful. Even things like the negotiations at United Airlines could be meaningful initial steps, though ultimately it depends on whether the settlements are just in terms of stock ownership by workers or actual employee management, which would be something very different [United’s employees traded steep pay cuts for
55
percent ownership of the company’s stock and 3 of its 12 board seats in 1994].

So the
methods
for starting to move towards real change are quite clear, it’s just a question of whether enough people are willing to start pursuing them. There are all sorts of options for how to begin building popular movements, and they could be developed on a very substantial scale. Then if they’re coordinated, with genuine community efforts to take control over whatever resources and industries are within them, and they begin to link up internationally, anything at all is possible, I think. I mean, sure, the scale is enormous—but with any major social change the scale has been enormous. You could raise the same doubts about the women’s movement, or getting rid of slavery in Haiti in 1790—it must have looked impossible. There’s nothing new about that feeling.

M
AN
: I just get the sense that we’re waiting for some ecological disaster before people really start to get active in these movements on a massive scale
.

Well, if we wait for an ecological disaster, it’ll be too late—in fact, we might not even have such a long wait.

Look, it’s certainly true that as the threats mount, it may energize people—but you don’t
wait
for that to happen: first you have to prepare the ground. For example, suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the greenhouse effect has been way underestimated, and that the catastrophic effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100 years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover—with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there just are no other alternatives around right now.

So you don’t
wait
for the disasters to happen, first you have to create the groundwork. You need to plant the seeds of something right now, so that whatever opportunities happen to arise—whether it’s workers being fired in Mexico, or an ecological catastrophe, or anything else—people are in a position that they can do something constructive about it.

M
AN
: Dr. Chomsky, I’m actually wondering whether the corporate elites can’t turn the environmental crisis to their benefit—use it as a new technique of taxpayer subsidy, another form of welfare like the others you were describing? So now the public will pay them to salvage the environment they’ve been primarily responsible for destroying?

Yeah, sure, you don’t even have to predict it—it’s already been happening. Take DuPont: they weren’t all that upset about the fact that they can no longer sell fluorocarbons [which destroy the ozone layer and have been closely regulated since the late 1980s], because now they can just get big public subsidies to produce other things that will replace them.
  ⁸⁹
I mean, at least in this respect these people are rational, so they are going to try to take advantage of whatever techniques happen to be around to ensure that the public is forced to keep subsidizing their profits. And if the environmental crisis reaches the point where some changes have to be introduced—as it already
has
, in fact—they’ll be sure to profit off them.

Actually, people are really worried about the destruction of the ozone layer—even the
Wall Street Journal
editors, who are usually out in space on these issues, have started getting worried about it. I mean, it wasn’t so bad when it was just killing people in Chile and Argentina who are near the South Pole [i.e. where the first hole in the ozone layer was discovered], but when they detected another hole over the Arctic in the north—meaning white people are going to suffer someday—then even those guys finally noticed it.
  ⁹⁰
And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they’re in and whatever floor they’re on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they’ll agree that there’s a greenhouse effect and we’d better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they’re going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It’s just that the next thing they’ll ask is, “So how can we make some money off it?” In fact, anybody in business who
didn’t
ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that’s the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said, “I’m
not
going to look at it that way, I’m going to do things differently,” well, they’d get replaced by someone who
would
try to make more money off it—because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don’t like them, and I don’t, then you’re going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way.

So yes, within the framework of the institutions that currently exist, the environmental crisis will be yet another technique of public subsidy to ensure continued private profits, and they’ll keep capitalizing on it exactly as you describe.

Elite Planning—Slipping Out of Hand

M
AN
: How much of this do you attribute to a conspiracy theory, and how much would you say is just a by-product of capital nearsightedness and a shared interest in holding on to power?

Well, this term “conspiracy theory” is kind of an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, “Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this,” nobody would call that a “conspiracy theory”—everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by power in the
West
, then everybody calls it a “conspiracy theory.” You’re not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it’s not allowed to exist. So if you’re a political scientist, one of the things you learn—you don’t even make it into graduate school unless you’ve already internalized it—is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benevolence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into “conspiracy theory.”

It’s the same with business: business is again just operating out of a generalized benevolence, trying to help everybody get the cheapest goods with the best quality, all this kind of stuff. If you say: “Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share,” that’s “conspiracy theory.” In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power—well, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s a part of domestic power, it’s a “conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it.

So, the first thing I would suggest is, drop the term. There are really only two questions. One is, how much of this is
conscious
planning—as happens everywhere else. And the other is, how much is
bad
planning?

Well, it’s all conscious planning: there is just no doubt that a lot of very conscious planning goes on among intelligent people who are trying to maximize their power. They’d be insane if they didn’t do that. I mean, I’m not telling you anything new when I tell you that top editors, top government officials, and major businessmen have meetings together—of course. And not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they’d be crazy if they didn’t communicate and plan with each other.

So
of course
the Board of Directors of General Motors plans, the same way the National Security Council plans, and the National Association of Manufacturers’ P.R. agencies plan. I mean, this was a truism to Adam Smith: if you read Adam Smith [classical economist], he says that every time two businessmen get together in a room, you can be sure there’s some plan being cooked up which is going to harm the public. Yeah, how could it be otherwise? And there’s nothing particularly new about this—as Smith pointed out over two hundred years ago, the “masters of mankind,” as he called them, will do what they have to in order to follow “the vile maxim”: “all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.”
  ⁹¹
Yeah, and when they’re in the National Security Council, or the Business Roundtable [a national organization composed of the C.E.O.s of 200 major corporations], or the rest of these elite planning forums, they have extreme power behind them. And yes, they’re planning—planning very carefully.

Now, the only significant question to ask is, is it
intelligent
planning? Okay, that depends on what the goals are. If the goals are to maximize corporate profits for tomorrow, then it’s very intelligent planning. If the goals are to have a world where your children can survive, then it’s completely idiotic. But that second thing really isn’t a part of the game. In fact, it’s institutionalized: it’s not that these people are stupid, it’s that to the extent that you have a competitive system based on private control over resources, you are forced to maximize short-term gain. That’s just an institutional necessity.

I mean, suppose there were three car companies: Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford. And suppose that one of them decided to put its resources into producing fuel-efficient, user-friendly cars which could be available ten years from now, and which would have a much less destructive impact on the environment—suppose Ford decided to put a proportion of its resources into that. Well, Chrysler
wouldn’t
be putting its resources into that, which means that they would undersell Ford today, and Ford wouldn’t be in the game ten years from now. Well, that’s just the nature of a competitive system—and that’s exactly why if you’re a manager you’ve got to try to make sure that in the next financial quarter your bottom line shows something good, whatever effects it may have a year from now: that’s just part of the institutional irrationality of the system.