Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Okay, if anything has no legitimacy, it’s this. But that’s our nation-state system, and we just have to begin with it. I mean, it’s there, and it has whatever legitimacy—I wouldn’t say that it’s “legitimate,” I’d just say that it exists, we have to recognize that it exists, and states have to be given whatever rights they are accorded in the international system. But the indigenous populations have to be given comparable rights too, I think—at least. So when I denounce apologetics for Israel’s oppression, remember, it’s not in any particular criticism of Israel. In fact, I think Israel is just as ugly a state as every other state. The only difference is that Israel has a fabricated image in the United States—it’s regarded as having some unique moral quality, and there’s all sorts of imagery about purity of arms, and high noble intent and so on. 78 It’s complete mythology, just pure fabrication: Israel’s a country like every other country, and we should recognize that and stop the nonsense. To talk about legitimacy is ridiculous—the word doesn’t apply, to their history or anyone else’s.

  Qualifications to Speak on World Affairs; A Presidential Campaign

  MAN: Mr. Chomsky, I’m wondering what specific qualifications you have to he able to speak all around the country about world affairs?

  None whatsoever. I mean, the qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians—none, none that you don’t have. The only difference is, I don’t pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I’d refuse—because I don’t understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there’s nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think, but there’s nothing deep—if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they’ve been kept a carefully guarded secret.

  In fact, I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam—it’s kind of like Leninism [position that socialist revolution should be led by a “vanguard” party]: it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke.

  MAN: But don’t you also use that system too, because of your name-recognition and the fact that you’re a famous linguist? I mean, would I be invited to go somewhere and give talks?

  You think I was invited here because people know me as a linguist? Okay, if that was the reason, then it was a bad mistake. But there are plenty of other linguists around, and they aren’t getting invited to places like this—so I don’t really think that can be the reason. I assumed that the reason is that these are topics that I’ve written a lot about, and I’ve spoken a lot about, and I’ve demonstrated a lot about, and I’ve gone to jail about, and so on and so forth—I assumed that’s the reason. If it’s not, well, then it’s a bad mistake. If anybody thinks that you should listen to me because I’m a professor at M.I.T., that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it. And the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about things that are common sense, that’s just another scam—it’s another way to try to marginalize people, and you shouldn’t fall for it.

  WOMAN: Seeing as you’re such a big draw with audiences, though, and since you do have some name-recognition—I’m wondering, what would you think about running a Presidential campaign? I mean, huge crowds come out to listen to your talks all around the country, those people might support something like that and want to begin getting involved with it.

  Well, it’s true about the audiences—but I don’t think that has to do with name-recognition or anything like that. See, there are only about ten people in the country, literally, who do this kind of thing—John Stockwell, Alex Cockburn, Dan Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, Holly Sklar, only a couple others—and we all get the same reaction. I think it’s just a matter of people all over the country being hungry to hear a different viewpoint. And what’s more, we all get the same reaction wherever we go—it’s the same in towns where nobody’s ever heard of me. Like, I was in central Michigan last week, they didn’t know who I was from Adam, but it was the same kind of crowd.

  WOMAN: But seeing as you do get all this draw, why not run a Presidential campaign?

  First of all, there’s nobody around to run for President, and if there were …

  WOMAN: You, Stockwell…

  Anybody who wants to be President, you should right away say, “I don’t want to hear that guy anymore.”

  WOMAN: I’m sorry?

  You should say, “I don’t want to listen to that person anymore.” Anybody who wants to become your leader, you should say, “I don’t want to follow.” That’s like a rule of thumb which almost never fails.

  WOMAN: But what about just to create a forum where more of the population would hear this different point of view?

  Well, if you want to use it kind of instrumentally, like jujitsu or something—use the properties of the system against it—okay. But I don’t really think that makes any sense, frankly.

  WOMAN: The form of government we have just has to be overthrown, in your view? There’s no way of doing it through reform?

  It’s not a relevant distinction: if you could ever get to the point where a reformist candidate had a chance, you’d already have won, you’d already have done the main thing. The main thing is to develop the kind of mass support which would make a revolution meaningful. At that point, some crook will come along and say, “I’m your leader, I’ll do it for you.”

  MAN: What do you think could have that effect, though? Just like Noam Chomsky, say, going and talking to five hundred people here and there? Just keep plugging away?

  Yeah, you keep plugging away—that’s the way social change takes place. That’s the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.

  MAN: Did you go through a phase of hopelessness, or …

  Yeah, every evening.

  MAN: I feel like I’m kind of stuck in one.

  Every evening. I mean, look: if you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point?

  MAN: You’ve just got to work at it.

  Yeah, what’s the point? First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything—they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget the pessimism.

  5

  Ruling the World

  Based on discussions in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland,

  Colorado, Illinois, and Ontario in 1990 and between 1993 and 1996.

  Soviet Versus Western Economic Development

  WOMAN: In a best-case scenario for the future, how do you envision an economic system that works?

  Well, our economic system “works,” it just works in the interests of the masters, and I’d like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the “principal architects” of policy, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase. 1 I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated, whether in the economic or the politic
al system, you know who’s going to benefit from the policies—you don’t have to be a genius to figure that out. That’s why democracy would be a good thing for the general public. But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled—because it’s radically anti-democratic. And that can’t be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society’s investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities. That’s a long job, it requires building up an entire cultural and institutional basis for the changes, it’s not something that’s just going to happen on its own. There are people who have written about what such a system might look like—kind of a “participatory economy,” it’s sometimes called. 2 But sure, that’s the way to go, I think.

  MAN: But Mr. Chomsky, we just went through a long experience with anti-capitalism like the kind you’re advocating—and it didn’t work out very well. It was tried, and the experiment failed. Why are you now advocating the same old thing again?

  I’m not. On the contrary—I presume you’re talking about the Soviet Union?

  MAN: Exactly.

  Well, there are really two points that ought to be made. First of all, the Soviet Union was basically a capitalist system. The first thing that Lenin and Trotsky did when they took power in October 1917, remember, was to destroy all of the forms of socialist initiative that had developed in Russia since the start of the Russian Revolution in February 1917 [the Russian Tsar was overthrown by popular revolution in February 1917; Lenin’s Bolshevik Party took over eight months later in a military coup]. Just now I was talking about workers and communities participating in decision-making—the first thing the Bolsheviks did was to destroy that, totally. They destroyed the factory councils, they undermined the Soviets [elected local governing bodies], they eliminated the Constituent Assembly [democratically elected parliament initially dominated by a rival socialist group, which was to govern Russia but was dispersed by Bolshevik troops in January 1918]. In fact, they dismantled every form of popular organization in Russia and set up a command economy with wages and profits, on sort of a centralized state-capitalist model. 3 So on the one hand, the example you’re referring to is just the extreme opposite of what I was talking about, not the same.

  Secondly comes another question. Whatever you think of the Soviet economic system, did it work or did it fail? Well, in a culture with deeply totalitarian strains, like ours, we always ask an idiotic question about that: we ask, how does Russia compare economically with Western Europe, or with the United States? And the answer is, it looks pretty bad. But an eight-year-old would know the problem with that question: these economies haven’t been alike for six hundred years—you’d have to go back to the pre-Columbian period before East and West Europe were anything more or less alike economically. Eastern Europe had started becoming sort of a Third World service-area for Western Europe even before the time of Columbus, providing resources and raw materials for the emerging textile and metal industries of the West. And for centuries, Russia remained a deeply impoverished Third World country. 4 I mean, there were a few small pockets of development there and also a rich sector of elites, writers and so on—but that’s like every Third World country: Latin American literature is some of the richest in the world, for example, even though its people are some of the most miserable in the world. And if you just look at the Soviet Union’s economic development in the twentieth century, it’s extremely revealing. For instance, the proportion of Eastern European to Western European income was declining until around 1913, then it started rising very fast until around 1950, when it kind of leveled off. Then in the mid-1960s, as the Soviet economy began to stagnate, the proportion started to decline a bit, then it declined a bit more into the late 1980s. After 1989, when the Soviet Empire finally broke up, it went into free-fall—and it is now again approximately what it was in 1913. 5 Okay, that tells you something about whether the Soviet economic model was successful or not.

  Now, suppose we asked a rational question, instead of asking an insane question like “how did the Soviet Union compare with Western Europe?” If you want to evaluate alternative modes of economic development—whether you like them or not—what you ought to ask is, how did societies that were like the Soviet Union in 1910 compare with it in 1990? Well, history doesn’t offer precise analogs, but there are good choices. So we could compare Russia and Brazil, say, or Bulgaria and Guatemala—those are reasonable comparisons. Brazil, for example, ought to be a super-rich country: it has unbelievable natural resources, it has no enemies, it hasn’t been practically destroyed three times by invasions in this century [i.e. the Soviet Union suffered massive losses in both World Wars and the 1918 Western intervention in its Civil War]. In fact, it’s a lot better equipped to develop than the Soviet Union ever was. Okay, just compare Brazil and Russia—that’s a sane comparison.

  Well, there’s a good reason why nobody undertakes it, and we only make idiotic comparisons—because if you compare Brazil and Russia, or Guatemala and Hungary, you get the wrong answer. Brazil, for maybe 5 or 10 percent of its population, is indeed like Western Europe—and for around 80 percent of its population, it’s kind of like Central Africa. In fact, for probably 80 percent of the Brazilian population, Soviet Russia would have looked like heaven. If a Guatemalan peasant suddenly landed in Bulgaria, he’d probably think he’d gone to paradise or something. So therefore we don’t make those comparisons, we only make crazy comparisons, which anybody who thinks for a second would see are preposterous. And everybody here does make them: all the academics make them, all the development economists make them, the newspaper commentators make them. But just think for a second: if you want to know how successful the Soviet economic system was, compare Russia in 1990 with someplace that was like it in 1910. Is that such a brilliant insight?

  In fact, the World Bank gave its own analysis of the success of the Soviet development model. The World Bank is not a radical outfit, as I’m sure you realize, but in 1990 it described Russia and China as “relatively successful societies that developed by extricating themselves from the international market,” although finally they ran into trouble and had to return to the fold. 6 But “relatively successful”—and as compared with countries they were like before their revolutions, very successful.

  In fact, that’s exactly what the U.S. was worried about in the Cold War in the first place, if you want to know the truth—that Soviet economic development just looked too good to poor Third World countries, it was a model they wanted to follow. I mean, in part the Cold War went on because it turned out to be a very good way for the two superpowers to keep control over their respective empires—each using fear of the other to mobilize its own population, and at the same time kind of tacitly agreeing not to interfere with the other’s domains. But for the U.S., the origin of the Cold War—and in fact the stated concern of American planners throughout—was that a huge area of the traditional Third World had extricated itself from exploitation by the West, and was now starting to pursue an independent course. 7 So if you read the declassified internal government record—of which we have plenty by now—you’ll see that the main concern of top Western planners right into the 1960s was that the example of Soviet development was threatening to break apart the whole American world system, because Russia was in fact doing so well. For example, guys like John Foster Dulles [American Secretary of State] and Harold Macmillan [British Prime Minister] were frightened out of their wits by Russia’s developmental success—and it was successful. 8 I mean, notice that Russia is not referred to as a “Third World” country today, it’s called a “failed developed country” or something like that—in other words, it did develop, although ultimately it failed, and now we can go ahead and start reintegrating it back into the traditional Third World again.

  And in fact, you can see that process taking place ever since the Soviet Empire dissolved—and with the s
tandard effects. The so-called “economic reforms” we’ve been instituting in the former Soviet-bloc countries have been an absolute catastrophe for most of their populations—but Western investors and a standard Third World elite of super-rich are making huge fortunes, in part by skimming off most of the “aid” that gets sent there, in various ways. 9 In fact, U.N.I.C.E.F. [United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund] put out a study a little while ago estimating just the simple human cost, like deaths, of what they call the “capitalist reforms” in Russia and Poland and the others (and incidentally, they approved of the reforms)—and for Russia, they calculated that there have been about a half-million extra deaths a year just as a result of them. Poland’s a smaller country, so it was a smaller number, but the results were proportional throughout the region. In the Czech Republic, the percentage of the population living in poverty has gone from 5.7 percent in 1989 to 18.2 percent in 1992; in Poland, the figures are something like from 20 percent to 40 percent. So if you walk down the streets of Warsaw now, sure, you’ll find a lot of nice stuff in the shop windows—but that’s the same as in any Third World country: plenty of wealth, very narrowly concentrated; and poverty, starvation, death, and huge inequality for the vast majority. 10

  And actually, that’s the reason the so-called “Communist” Parties in Eastern Europe and Russia are getting votes these days. I mean, when they describe that here, they say, “it’s nostalgia, they forget how bad it was in the old days”—but there’s no nostalgia. 11 I don’t think anybody there actually wants to go back to the Stalinist dungeon again—it’s not that they’re nostalgic about the past, it’s that they’re apprehensive about the future. They can see what’s coming very well, namely Brazil and Guatemala, and as bad as their system was, that’s worse. Much worse.