Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  WOMAN: Just going back to elections for a second—would you say the ’84 elections were the same as ’88: no substance?

  Well, in the 1984 elections there was still an issue. In the 1984 elections, the Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth [the economist Keynes advocated government stimulation of the economy]—they said, “Let’s just keep spending and spending and spending, bigger and bigger deficits, and somehow that will lead to growth”—whereas the Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: they had this sad-looking son of a minister [Mondale] saying, “No, no good; we can’t keep spending, we’re going to get in trouble, we’ve got to watch the money supply.”

  Okay, for anybody who gets amused at these things, the Republicans and the Democrats had shifted their traditional positions 180 degrees; historically, the Democrats have been the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans have been the party of fiscal conservatism. But they shifted totally—and what’s interesting is, nobody even noticed this, I never even saw a single comment on it in the press. Well, that tells you something: what it tells you is, there are different sectors of the business community in the country, and they sometimes have slightly different tactical judgments about the way to deal with current problems. And when they differ on something, it’ll come up in the election; when they don’t differ on anything, there won’t be any issues.

  Two New Factors in World Affairs

  MAN: To move to a more general level, Professor—I’m interested whether you think that there are any developments over the past few decades that are new on the international scene, which people should he aware of as we analyze things that are taking place in the world?

  Well, in my view, there are at least two really major things that are coming along that are new: one is a shift in the international economy. 45 And the other is the threat to the environment—which just can’t be ignored much longer, because if facing it is delayed too much longer there isn’t going to be a lot more to human history.

  I’ll start with the environment. The reality is that under capitalist conditions—meaning maximization of short-term gain—you’re ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when. Now, for a long time, it’s been possible to pretend that the environment is an infinite source and an infinite sink. Neither is true obviously, and we’re now sort of approaching the point where you can’t keep playing the game too much longer. It may not be very far off. Well, dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. For one thing, it’s going to certainly require large-scale social planning, and that means participatory social planning if it’s going to be at all meaningful. It’s also going to require a general recognition among human beings that an economic system driven by greed is going to self-destruct—it’s only a question of time before you make the planet unlivable, by destroying the ozone layer or some other way. 46 And that means huge socio-psychological changes have to take place if the human species is going to survive very much longer. So that’s a big factor.

  Quite apart from that, there have been major changes in the international economy. The world has basically been moving into three major economic blocks; the United States is no longer the sole economic power like it was after World War II. There’s a Japan-based system, which involves Japan and the countries around its periphery, like Singapore and Taiwan, the old Japanese empire. There’s Europe, which has been consolidating into the European Common Market—and that could be a powerful economic unit; if Europe gets its act together, it’ll outweigh the United States: it’s got a larger economy, a bigger population, a more educated population, and they’ve got their traditional colonial interests, which are in fact being reconstructed. Meanwhile the United States has been building up its own counter-block in North America through so-called “free trade” agreements, which are turning Canada into kind of an economic colony and basically absorbing Northern Mexico into the United States as a cheap-labor area. The three regions are roughly comparable by most measures, with the Asian region still far ahead in capital reserves.

  No one understands quite how this situation will be affected by the financial liberalization that has been so harmful to the global economy since the mid-1970s. And there are also other intriguing issues. For example, the European powers, especially Germany, are attempting to reconstruct the traditional colonial relations between Central Europe and Eastern Europe that existed before the Cold War—Central Europe has the industry and technology and investment capital, and Eastern Europe and Russia provide them with cheap manpower and resources. Meanwhile Japan is doing precisely the same thing with Russia on the Asian side, trying to construct colonial relations with Siberia: Japan has plenty of extra capital, and Siberia has plenty of resources that the Russians can’t exploit properly because they don’t have the capital or the technology, so it’s like a natural combination. And if these efforts work, then we’re going to have the two major enemies of the United States, Japan and Europe, integrating with the Soviet Union, it becoming kind of a semi-colonial area related to them. And that realizes the worst nightmares of American planners.

  See, there is an American geopolitical tradition which treats the United States as an island power off the mainland of Europe; it’s a bigger version of British geopolitics, which treats England as an island power off the mainland of Europe. I mean, Britain throughout its whole modern history has tried to prevent Europe from becoming unified—that was the main theme of British history, prevent Europe from being unified, because we’re just this island power off of Europe, and if they ever get unified we’re in trouble. And the United States has the same attitude towards Eurasia: we’ve got to prevent them from becoming unified, because if they are, we become a real second-class power—we’ll still have our little system around here, but it’ll become kind of second-class. 47 By “the United States,” I mean powerful interests in the United States, U.S.-based capital.

  WOMAN: Then do you think it’s possible that the U.S. may not be considered a superpower someday?

  Well, you know, despite the relative decline in U.S.-based power, it’s still powerful without historical precedent.

  WOMAN: I know it is militarily.

  No, even economically. Look, it’s a real scandal of the American economic system that the general economic level here is so low. I mean, by world standards, in terms of, say, infant mortality or lifespan, or most other measures like that, people are not terribly well-off here—the United States is well down the list. I think we’re twentieth of twenty industrial powers in infant mortality, for example. We’re at about the level of Cuba, which is a poor Third World country, in terms of health standards. 48 Those are absolute scandals—the general population of the United States ought to be better off than that of any other country in the world by just a huge margin. No other industrial power has anything like our resources. We’ve got an educated population, like basic literacy is relatively high. We have a comparatively uniform population: people speak English all over the place—you can’t find that in too many areas of the world. We’ve got enormous military power. We have no enemies anywhere nearby. Very few powers in history have ever had that situation. So these are just incomparable advantages, and our economic system has not turned them to the benefit of the population here, particularly—but they’re there, and they’re going to stay there.

  Now take Japan: Japanese corporations and investors can collect a lot of capital, but they’re never going to get their own resources—they don’t have their own energy resources, they don’t have their own raw materials, they don’t have agricultural resources. And we do: that makes a big difference. In fact, American planners back in the late 1940s were very well aware of this difference when they sort of organized the post-war world—so while they helped Japan to reindustrialize, they also insisted on controlling its energy resources: the Japanese were not allowed to develop their own petrochemical industry, or to obtain their own independent access to petroleum resources.
And the reason for that is explained in now-declassified U.S. internal documents: as George Kennan [State Department official and diplomat], who was one of the major planners of the post-war world, pointed out, if we control Japan’s energy resources, we will have veto power over Japan—if they ever get out of line, we’ll just choke off their energy supply. 49 Now, whether or not that plan would still work you don’t know, because the world is changing in unpredictable ways. But for the moment, the United States is still overwhelmingly powerful in world affairs—that’s why we can get away with so much.

  Democracy Under Capitalism

  MAN: You mentioned that we’re going to need participatory social planning to save the environment. I’m wondering, doesn’t decentralization of power also somehow conflict with trying to save the environment—I mean, that can’t be done without some sort of central agreement, don’t you think?

  Well, first of all, agreements don’t require centralized authority, certain kinds of agreements do. One’s assumption, at least, is that decentralization of power will lead to decisions that reflect the interests of the entire population. The idea is that policies flowing from any kind of decision-making apparatus are going to tend to reflect the interests of the people involved in making the decisions—which certainly seems plausible. So if a decision is made by some centralized authority, it is going to represent the interests of the particular group which is in power. But if power is actually rooted in large parts of the population—if people can actually participate in social planning—then they will presumably do so in terms of their own interests, and you can expect the decisions to reflect those interests. Well, the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits—those are fundamentally different interests.

  MAN: In an industrial society, though, one might argue that people need to have jobs.

  Sure, but having jobs doesn’t require destroying the environment which makes life possible. I mean, if you have participatory social planning, and people are trying to work things out in terms of their own interests, they are going to want to balance opportunities to work with quality of work, with type of energy available, with conditions of personal interaction, with the need to make sure your children survive, and so on and so forth. But those are all considerations that simply don’t arise for corporate executives, they just are not a part of the agenda. In fact, if the C.E.O. of General Electric started making decisions on that basis, he’d be thrown out of his job in three seconds, or maybe there’d be a corporate takeover or something—because those things are not a part of his job. His job is to raise profit and market share, not to make sure that the environment survives, or that his workers lead decent lives. And those goals are simply in conflict.

  MAN: Give us an example of what exactly you mean by social planning.

  Well, right now we have to make big decisions about how to produce energy, for one thing—because if we continue to produce energy by combustion, the human race isn’t going to survive very much longer. 50 Alright, that decision requires social planning: it’s not something that you can just decide on yourself. Like, you can decide to put a solar-energy something-or-other on your own house, but that doesn’t really help. This is the kind of decision where it only works if it’s done on a mass scale.

  MAN: I thought you might have been referring to population control.

  Yeah, population control is another issue where it doesn’t matter if you do it, everybody has to do it. It’s like traffic: I mean, you can’t make driving a car survivable by driving well yourself; there has to be kind of a social contract involved, otherwise it won’t work. Like, if there was no social contract involved in driving—everybody was just driving like a lethal weapon, going as fast as they can and forgetting all the traffic lights and everything else—you couldn’t make that situation safe just by driving well yourself: it doesn’t make much difference if you set out to drive safely if everybody else is driving lethal-weapon, right? The trouble is, that’s the way that capitalism works. The nature of the system is that it’s supposed to be driven by greed; no one’s supposed to be concerned for anybody else, nobody’s supposed to worry about the common good—those are not things that are supposed to motivate you, that’s the principle of the system. The theory is that private vices lead to public benefits—that’s what they teach you in economics departments. It’s all total bullshit, of course, but that’s what they teach you. And as long as the system works that way, yeah, it’s going to self-destruct.

  What’s more, capitalists have long understood this. So most government regulatory systems have in fact been strongly lobbied for by the industries themselves: industries want to be regulated, because they know that if they’re not, they’re going to destroy themselves in the unbridled competition. 51

  MAN: Then what kind of mechanism for social planning do you think would work? Obviously you’re not too sanguine about our current form of government.

  Well, there’s nothing wrong with the form—I mean, there are some things wrong with the form—but what’s really wrong is that the substance is missing. Look, as long as you have private control over the economy, it doesn’t make any difference what forms you have, because they can’t do anything. You could have political parties where everybody gets together and participates, and you make the programs, make things as participatory as you like—and it would still have only the most marginal effect on policy. And the reason is, power lies elsewhere.

  So suppose all of us here convinced everybody in the country to vote for us for President, we got 98 percent of the vote and both Houses of Congress, and then we started to institute very badly needed social reforms that most of the population wants. Simply ask yourself, what would happen? Well, if your imagination doesn’t tell you, take a look at real cases. There are places in the world that have a broader range of political parties than we do, like Latin American countries, for example, which in this respect are much more democratic than we are. Well, when popular reform candidates in Latin America get elected and begin to introduce reforms, two things typically happen. One is, there’s a military coup supported by the United States. But suppose that doesn’t happen. What you get is capital strike—investment capital flows out of the country, there’s a lowering of investment, and the economy grinds to a halt.

  That’s the problem that Nicaragua has faced in the 1980s—and which it cannot overcome, in my view, it’s just a hopeless problem. See, the Sandinistas have tried to run a mixed economy: they’ve tried to carry out social programs to benefit the population, but they’ve also had to appeal to the business community to prevent capital flight from destroying the place. So most public funds, to the extent there are any, go as a bribe to the wealthy, to try to keep them investing in the country. The only problem is, the wealthy would prefer not to invest unless they have political power: they’d rather see the society destroyed. So the wealthy take the bribes, and they send them to Swiss banks and to Miami banks—because from their perspective, the Sandinista government just has the wrong priorities. I mean, these guys hate democracy just as much as Congress hates democracy: they want the political system to be in the hands of wealthy elites, and when it is again, then they’ll call it “democracy” and they’ll resume investing, and the economy will finally start to function again.

  Well, the same thing would happen here if we ever had a popular reform candidate who actually achieved some formal level of power: there would be disinvestment, capital strike, a grinding down of the economy. And the reason is quite simple. In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference—I don’t want to say it’s zero—but the differences are going to be very slight.
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  In fact, if you think through the logic of this, you’ll see that so long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that’s to make sure that the rich folk are happy—because unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So if you’re a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, let’s say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy—because if they’re happy, then they’ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they’re not happy, everything’s going to grind to a halt, and you’re not even going to get anything trickling down. So if you’re a homeless person in the streets, your first concern is the happiness of the wealthy guys in the mansions and the fancy restaurants. Basically that’s a metaphor for the whole society.

  Like, suppose Massachusetts were to increase business taxes. Most of the population is in favor of it, but you can predict what would happen. Business would run a public relations campaign—which is true, in fact, it’s not lies—saying, “You raise taxes on business, you soak the rich, and you’ll find that capital is going to flow elsewhere, and you’re not going to have any jobs, you’re not going to have anything.” That’s not the way they’d put it exactly, but that’s what it would amount to: “Unless you make us happy you’re not going to have anything, because we own the place; you live here, but we own the place.” And in fact, that’s basically the message that is presented, not in those words of course, whenever a reform measure does come along somewhere—they have a big propaganda campaign saying, it’s going to hurt jobs, it’s going to hurt investment, there’s going to be a loss of business confidence, and so on. That’s just a complicated way of saying, unless you keep business happy, the population isn’t going to have anything.