Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  WOMAN: Can I give it a whack? For years I’ve been working with people who are doing twenty-five years in prison and never getting out, that sort of thing. To answer the question, “How do you keep going?”—I figure, the most pessimistic way to look at it is, it’s really bad: fifty thousand nuclear bombs floating around, we don’t need some dumb American President to put his finger on the wrong button. I figure, it’s a miracle that we’re here, realistically, let’s face it.

  It is.

  WOMAN: Okay, so if you accept that, you have two choices: you can cut your throat and forget about it, or you can keep fighting. If you’re going to keep fighting, then you’ve got to fight to win, and to survive. So what you do is, you find yourself a corner that you can fight really well from, and that you like, and that you fit in—and you give it the works, have a good time. That way you can keep your sanity, you don’t get overwhelmed with the whole enormous situation, and you can accomplish something. And as I say, you have a good time while you’re doing it—that’s the way I keep going.

  MAN: But do you ever succeed, or do you just keep fighting?

  Well, see, you have succeeded—things are better than they would have been if you hadn’t done it.

  ANOTHER WOMAN: And we should remember that the mainstream media obviously won’t publicize and draw attention to the successes—so we have to keep reminding ourselves of just how much we have achieved. I think we get burned out when we stop reminding ourselves of that.

  That’s right, we should always bear that in mind—that they’re not going to tell us we’re succeeding, it would be against their interests to tell us that. The media’s part of what popular organizing has to oppose, remember. And they’re not going to function in a way so as to self-destruct.

  For instance, take this supposed big phenomenon that swept the country in the 1970s, the “Culture of Narcissism,” and the “Me Generation” and so on. I’m just convinced that that whole thing was crafted by the public relations industry to tell mainly young people, “Look, this is who you are—you don’t care about all this solidarity and sympathy and helping people” that had started to break out. And of course, that’s what they would do. In fact, they shouldn’t get their salaries if they don’t do things like that. We should expect them to do it, we should expect them to tell us: “You guys can’t do anything, you’re all alone, you’re each separate; you’ve never achieved anything, and you never will achieve anything.” Of course they should tell us that—and they should even tell us, “You don’t want to achieve anything, all you want to do is consume more.”

  As long as power’s concentrated, that’s what it’s going to tell us—“There’s no point in working to help other people, you don’t care about them, you’re just out for yourself.” Sure it’s going to tell us that, because that’s what’s in its interests. There’s no point in telling ourselves, “They’re lying to us” over and over again. Of course they are; it’s like saying the sun’s setting or something like that. Obviously they are.

  So what we want to try to do is develop stable enough structures so that we can learn these kinds of things and not keep getting beaten down by the indoctrination—so we don’t have to keep fighting the same battles over and over again, we can go on to new ones, and bigger ones, better ones. I think that could be done; slowly, over time.

  MAN: Do you see any of those sorts of continuing progressive structures developing these days in the United States?

  There isn’t a lot, it’s mostly local. So I’ll go to some place like Detroit, say, and there’ll be a meeting like this with people from different parts of the city who are working on different things—but many of them don’t even know about the others. Everything is pretty much fractionated. Now, if you go to a small town which has listener-supported radio—like Boulder, Colorado, for instance—it’s different, it’s unified. And part of the reason it’s unified is because of one community radio station and a couple of journals and so on that everybody can be a part of. Or I remember going to some town in New Hampshire which happened to have a movement bookstore, and everybody went to the bookstore to find out what was going on, you’d go there and look at what’s on the wall and stick together that way. You do find things like that around the country.

  But take Boston, where there’s nothing central to bring people together—there’s no community radio, there’s no community newspaper. I mean, there are lots of people doing all sorts of activist work, but they don’t even know about each other: there’s a group in one section working on Bikes for Nicaragua, there’s a group in another section of the city working on a Sister Cities program for Central America, they don’t even know of each other’s existence.

  The Nuclear Freeze Movement

  WOMAN: What else do you feel we can learn from organizations you don’t think are going about it the right way?

  Well, there are plenty of groups around that are doing things I don’t think are very constructive, even though I’m often a member of them and give them support and so on. Take the nuclear freeze campaign, for example: I really thought they were going about it the wrong way. The nuclear freeze campaign was in a way one of the most successful popular organizing movements in history: they managed to get 75 percent of the American population in favor of a nuclear freeze at a time when there was no articulate public support for that position—there wasn’t a newspaper, a political figure, anybody who came out publicly for it. 3 Now, in a way that’s a tremendous achievement. But frankly I didn’t think it was an achievement, I thought the disarmament movement was going to collapse—and in fact, it did collapse. And the reason it collapsed is, it wasn’t based on anything: it was based on nothing except people signing a petition.

  I mean, if you sign a petition it’s kind of nice—but that’s the end of it, you just go back home and do whatever you were doing: there’s no continuity, there’s no real engagement, it’s not sustained activity that builds up a community of activism. Well, an awful lot of the political work I see in the United States is of that type.

  Now, if we had stable popular institutions, we’d be able to remember how we failed the last time, instead of somebody else doing it all over again and making the same mistakes—we’d know that’s not the way to do anything. The nuclear freeze movement amounted to a public opinion poll, basically: they found out that three times as many people want the government to spend the money on Medicare and things like that as want it spent on nuclear weapons. So what? What are they going to do about it? Nothing. So all these nuclear freeze people did was answer a poll question—that’s not organizing.

  I think an awful lot of movement activity goes into things like that, and it doesn’t get anywhere—in fact, that’s what leads to burn-out. I mean, you had all these people collecting all these signatures, and they worked hard, they got so many signatures you could show that almost all of the country wants a nuclear freeze. Then they went to the Democratic Party Convention [in 1984] and presented their results, and everybody there said, “Gee, that’s really nice that you did that, we’re going to support you all the way”—then the Democrats went off to the election and never mentioned it again, unless they were talking in some town where they figured they could score some easy points by referring to it: you know, “We’ve got to remember in this town you want to say so on and so forth.” That’s the kind of thing that gets people frustrated, and makes them give up. But that’s because they started with illusions about how power operates and how you effect change—and we shouldn’t have those illusions, any more than we should have illusions about whether the media’s telling you the truth. If you don’t have the illusions, then you don’t get burnt out by the failure—and the way we overcome the illusions is by developing our own institutions, where we can learn from experiences like this.

  For instance, if we see a big organizing effort where everybody signs the petitions and some people try to introduce the isssue into the ’84 Democratic Party platform, and it has absolutely no effect, and a year later
Mikhail Gorbachev [Soviet leader] declares a unilateral nuclear test freeze and still there’s no effect—well, we should be learning something. 4 Then we should be carrying on to the next step. But that wasn’t the reaction of the nuclear freeze organizers. The reaction among the organizers wasn’t, “Well, we obviously misunderstood the way things work”—it was, “We did the right thing, but we partially failed: we convinced the population, but we didn’t manage to convince the elites, so now let’s convince the elites.” You know, “We’ll go talk to the strategic analysts, who are confused—they don’t understand what we understand—and we’ll explain to them why a nuclear freeze would be a good thing.” And in fact, that’s the direction a lot of the disarmament movement took after that: the people went off and got themselves Mac Arthur Fellowships and so on, and then they went around “convincing” the strategic analysts. 5

  Well, that’s one of the ways in which you can kid yourself into believing that you’re still doing your work, when really you’re being bought off—because there’s nothing that elites like better than saying, “Oh, come convince me.” That stops you from organizing, and getting people involved, and causing disruption, because now you’re talking to some elite smart guy—and you can do that forever: any argument you can give in favor of it, he can give an argument against it, and it just keeps going. And also, you get respectable, and you’re invited to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, and everybody pays attention to you and loves you, and it’s all great. That’s in fact the direction in which the nuclear freeze movement went—and that’s a mistake. And we ought to be aware of those mistakes and learn from them: if you’re getting accepted in elite circles, chances are very strong that you’re doing something wrong—I mean, for very simple reasons. Why should they have any respect for people who are trying to undermine their power? It doesn’t make any sense.

  Awareness and Actions

  MAN: A lot of the activists I work with operate under the assumption that if we can just make people aware, everything’s going to work out and there’ll be a change. Even with c.d. [civil disobedience] actions protesting nuclear weapons, that’s been my assumption too: get people to see us doing it, hold up our signs. But it seems like that’s not all that is needed, really—what more, would you say, besides education?

  Education is just the beginnings—and furthermore, there are situations where you can get everybody aware and on your side, and they still won’t be able to do anything. Like, take a look at Haiti. I don’t think there’s much doubt about what 90 percent of the population there wants, and they’re aware of it—they just can’t do anything about it without getting slaughtered. So there’s a whole series of things which have to happen, and they begin with awareness; you don’t do anything without awareness, obviously—you don’t do anything unless you’re aware that there’s something that ought to be done, so that’s the beginning almost by definition. But real awareness in fact comes about through practice and experience with the world. It’s not, first you become aware and then you start doing things; you become aware through doing things.

  For instance, you become aware of the limits of reformist politics by trying it. In my view, you should always push all of the opportunities to their limits—partly because sometimes you can get some useful results that help people, but primarily because pretty soon you’ll find out what those limits are and you’ll understand why there are limits; you’ll gain awareness you can’t gain from a lecture. I mean, you can hear all the lectures you like about the way that power works, but you learn it very fast when you actually confront it, without the lectures. So there’s an interaction between awareness and action—and sometimes the steps you have to take to make changes require taking things to the level of violent revolutionary struggle. Like, if people in Haiti were in a position to overthrow the military there by force, in my opinion they ought to do it. Sometimes it comes to that.

  As to the c.d. demonstrations about nuclear weapons, just personally speaking, I had a lot of disagreements with some of my friends on that, people I really respect a lot, like the people in Plowshares [a group active on disarmament issues]. I mean, I think these are all tactical questions—like, I don’t think there’s any question of principle involved in whether you should smash a missile nose-cone or not, it’s not like a contract between you and God or something. The question is, what are the effects? And there I thought the effects were negative. It seemed to me that the effects of what they were doing were, first of all, to remove them from political action, because they were going to be in jail for twenty years, and also to tie up tons of money and effort in courts, which is absolutely the worst place to be. I mean, the worst waste of time and effort and money in the world is a court—so any time you can stay out of courts, you’re well off. But the second thing is, I don’t think that they reached people—because they didn’t prepare the ground for it. Like, if you smash up a missile nose-cone in some town where people are working at the missile plant and there’s no other way they can make a living, and they haven’t heard of any reason why we shouldn’t have missiles, that doesn’t educate anybody, it just gets them mad at you.

  So I think these tactical questions have to be very carefully thought through—you can’t really predict with much certainty, but as well as you can, you have to make a guess as to what the effect of the tactic is going to be. If the effect is going to be to build up awareness, that’s good. But of course, awareness is only the beginning, because people can be aware and still not do anything—for instance, maybe they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs. And obviously you can’t criticize people for worrying about that; they’ve got kids, they’ve got to live. That’s fair enough. It’s hard to struggle for your rights—you usually suffer.

  Leaders and Movements

  WOMAN: As an activist, I think we also have an obligation to get across the fact that we have fun doing this—that we get nurtured by working on these issues which are close to our essence. If we’re looking to the long term, and building up the types of institutions you’re talking about, we have to project that a lot more than we do, almost as a way of recruitment. Too often, people’s image of “the activist” is of someone who’s always burned out. We have to create a culture that is engaging to people and exciting, so that it doesn’t just seem like we’re putting in the hours and chanting radical slogans.

  See, I think the people who’ve really made social movements successful have been the ones who did those things. They’re gone from history of course: none of the books mention them, nobody knows the names of the people who really made the social movements in history work—but that’s the way it’s always happened, I think.

  And this is even true of the recent ones, like the anti-war movement in the 1960s. So there are a lot of books coming out these days that tell you what went on in the S.D.S. [Students for a Democratic Society] office, or what one smart guy said to some other smart guy—but none of that had anything to do with why the peace movement in the Sixties became a huge mass movement. From my own personal experience in it, and that’s only a little piece of it obviously, I know who was doing the really important things, and I remember them—like, I remember that this student worked hard to set up that demonstration, and that’s why I had a chance to talk there; and they were bringing other people in to get involved; they were enjoying what they were doing, and communicating that to others somehow. That’s what makes popular movements work—but of course, that’s all going to be gone from history: what will be left in history is just the fluff on the top.

  MAN: I’m curious what you think about some of the more famous leaders of change—like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, for instance. You don’t ever seem to mention them when you speak. Why is that?

  Well, let’s take Martin Luther King. See, I think Martin Luther King was an important person, but I do not think that he was a big agent of change. In fact, I think Martin Luther King was able to play a role in bringing about change only because the real agents of change wer
e doing a lot of work. And the real agents of change were people working at the grassroots level, like S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example.

  Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything—that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

  But just take a look at the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, for example—take, say, Rosa Parks [who triggered the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott protesting racial segregation]. I mean, the story about Rosa Parks is, this courageous black woman suddenly decided, “I’ve had enough, I’m not going to sit in the back of the bus.” Well, that’s sort of half true—but only half. Rosa Parks came out of a community, a well-organized community, which in fact had Communist Party roots if you trace it back, things like Highlander School [a Tennessee school for educating political organizers] and so on. 6 But it was a community of people who were working together and had decided on a plan for breaking through the system of segregation—Rosa Parks was just an agent of that plan.