Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Okay, that’s all out of history. What’s in history is, one person had the courage to do something—which she did. But not on her own. Nobody does anything on their own. Rosa Parks came out of an organized community of committed people, people who’d been working together for change for a very long time. And that’s how it always works.

  The same was true of Martin Luther King: he was able to appear and give public speeches because S.N.C.C. workers and Freedom Riders and others had prepared the ground—and taken a brutal beating for it. And a lot of those people were pretty privileged kids, remember: they chose it, they didn’t have to do it. They’re the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was important because he could stand up there and get the cameras, but these other people were the real Civil Rights Movement. I’m sure he would have said the same thing too, incidentally—or at least, he should have.

  As for Gandhi, again it’s the same story. He had a very mixed record, actually—but the point is, it was the people on the ground who did the work that prepared the basis for Gandhi to become prominent, and sort of articulate things. And when you look at any other popular movement, I think it’s always like that.

  Levels of Change

  MAN: Noam, as we work to build up that kind of movement, what do you think are the best methods we should be using as pressure tactics right now? Should we be doing the traditional reformist kind of steps—lobbying legislators, writing letters, trying to get Democrats into office—or should we go with more of a direct action kind of approach, demonstrations and civil disobedience and so on?

  Well, those are tactical decisions you have to make—the only people qualified to make that kind of decision are the ones who live in a place, and can see what’s going on. So really it would be ridiculous for me to have an opinion on it.

  Demonstrations are often the right thing to do, you just have to make tactical decisions—but keep in mind, they’re just as reformist as lobbying your legislature. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, even if you’re the most extreme revolutionary in the world, you’re going to use whatever methods are available to try to ameliorate things, and then if ultimately you run into limits where powerful institutions will not permit more reform, well, then you go beyond it. But first you have to reach those limits—and there are many ways of reaching them. One way is lobbying your legislator, one may be another political party, others are demonstrations—which simply change the conditions under which powerful people make decisions. But that does have an effect.

  Let me just give you an example. There’s a part of the Pentagon Papers [the leaked official Defense Department planning record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam] which is considered politically incorrect—it doesn’t appear in big histories and nobody discusses it, because it’s just too revealing. It’s the part that deals with the time right after the Tet Offensive, Right after the Tet Offensive in 1968, everyone recognized that the Vietnam War was going to take a long time, it wasn’t going to be possible to win it quickly—so major decisions had to be made about strategy and policy. Well, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were asked by General Westmoreland, the top American commander in Vietnam, to send 200,000 more troops over to the war—and they refused, they didn’t want to do it. And the reason is, they said they were afraid they might have to use the troops here in the United States to put down a civil war: they said they were going to need the troops at home for “civil disorder control,” as they put it, and therefore they didn’t want to send them to Vietnam. 7 These guys thought the society was going to crack up in 1968, because people here were just too opposed to what they were doing.

  In fact, the “civil disorder” was also one of the reasons why a group called the “Wise Men” came to Washington with a lot of money in their pockets, and shortly after, in an unusually blatant power-play, essentially told President Johnson, “You’re through: you’re not running for reelection.” 8 And he didn’t. We started withdrawing from Vietnam, and we entered into peace negotiations, and so on. Well, a lot of public protest here and huge demonstrations and direct actions were a big part of the reason behind that.

  So, yes, demonstrations and resistance can have effects—but they’re no more revolutionary than talking to your legislator. They don’t affect power, they don’t change the institutions of power, they just change the decisions that will be made within those institutions. And that’s a fine thing to do, There’s nothing wrong with that, it helps a lot of people. I mean, I don’t think the institutions of power should exist either, but that’s another question for right now.

  MAN: What would you say are the most important causes for us to be focusing on, then—I mean, what do you think can actually he done by activists working today?

  Well, everything can be done—everything can be done up to the point of eliminating all structures of authority and repression: they’re human institutions, they can be dismantled. If you ask what’s most important at this point—well, you know, that’s not the kind of thing you just decide right on the spot, those are decisions that come by serious thought and discussion in groups like this, among people who are really trying to institute change.

  I mean, you have to start with where the world is. Like, you don’t start by saying, “Okay, let’s overthrow transnational corporations”—because right now it’s just not within range. So you start by saying, “Look, here’s where the world is, what can we begin to do?” Well, you can begin to do things which will get people to understand better what the real source of power is, and just how much they can achieve if they get involved in political activism. And once you’ve broken through the pretense, you just construct organizations—that’s it. You work on the things that are worth working on. If it’s taking control of your community, it’s that. If it’s gaining control of your workplace, it’s that. If it’s working on solidarity, it’s that. If it’s taking care of the homeless, it’s that.

  With regard to the domestic scene, take the fact that the criminal justice system increasingly is becoming a system for targeting the poor and minorities, who are being turned into people under military occupation. Look, that’s an easy one to change—you really just have to change public opinion on that one. You aren’t striking at the core of private power when you begin to have a civilized criminal justice system instead of a brutal, barbaric one. So that’s an example of something I think is changeable. Or you could start by getting us to stop torturing people in the Third World, right? Easy things to do are, stop killing children in Cuba, stop massacring people in East Timor, get people in the United States to realize that Palestinians are human beings—those are easy things. So let’s do those, first do the easy things.

  On things like what’s taking place in the international economy, you’re getting into harder territory—because there, crucial interests of authoritarian institutions are at stake. And at that point, you’re going to have to face the fact, which sooner or later we’re going to have to face after all, that maybe the most totalitarian institution in human history—or certainly close to it—is a corporation: it’s a centrally-managed institution in which authority is structured strictly from top to bottom, control is in the hands of owners and investors, if you’re inside the organization you take orders from above and transmit them down, if you’re outside it there are only extremely weak popular controls, which indeed are fast eroding. And this isn’t some new insight of mine, incidentally—for example, it was pointed out by Thomas Jefferson in his later years, which were only the early days of corporations. Jefferson warned that if power was going to shift into the hands of what he called “banking institutions and moneyed incorporations,” then the democratic experiment would be over: we’d have a form of absolutism worse than what the colonists had struggled against. 9

  Okay, Thomas Jefferson is not exactly a figure who’s off the mainstream spectrum in American history, so this is not some new off-the-wall insight—it’s as American as apple pie, and we should recognize what Thomas Jefferson could see. But when you do rec
ognize it, you realize it’s a hard nut to crack—because these are enormous agglomerations of power, indeed concentrating, and indeed transnational, which are almost totally protected from public scrutiny and popular participation. And that’s just got to change.

  After all, why do corporations have the rights they do? Why are they treated as “immortal persons,” contrary to the warnings of people like Adam Smith and others? 10 It’s not by nature—in fact, these rights weren’t even granted by Congress, this happened because of decisions made in courts by judges and lawyers, which simply changed the world totally. 11

  So, if you ask what should be done: well, I don’t think any sane human being can look around at the world and not figure out things that have to be done—take a walk through the streets, you’ll find plenty of things that have to be done. So you know, you get started doing them. But you’re not going to be able to do them alone. Like, if you take a walk down the streets and say, “That ought to be done,” nothing’s going to happen. On the other hand, if people become organized enough to act together, yeah, then you can achieve things. And there’s no particular limit to what you can achieve. I mean, that’s why we don’t still have slavery.

  MAN: Could you mention some specific organizations that we could try to link up with and network with, which are doing a good job of working on these problems?

  Well, a lot of organizations are involved, from a lot of different points of view. For example, at one level—which is important, though of course superficial—Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen is involved [the group works primarily on consumer issues]. That’s important, like I say, but not really touching the basic structure of power.

  Beyond that, if the American labor movement ever recovers the insights that ordinary working people had a hundred years ago, then it will be working on them too. So if you look back a hundred years—and even much more recently than that, in fact—you’ll find that the major goal of the labor movement in the United States was achieving industrial democracy: placing the workplace under democratic control. 12 And it wasn’t because they’d read Marx—people figured that out for themselves long before Marx: it was just the natural response to industrial capitalism. And in fact, Marx didn’t say much about it anyway. So it could be the labor movement that’s doing it.

  But there’s a ton of activism going on around the country apart from that—and though right now it’s focused on pretty narrow issues, ultimately the people are all talking about the same thing: illegitimate authority of one form or another. I mean, if you want a list of organizations to contact, it’s easy to find—just write to any of the major progressive funding organizations, like Resist in Boston, for example, and they’ll be delighted to give you a list of the couple hundred groups they’ve funded in the last few years: you’ll find among them groups involved in any political cause you can imagine. 13 Also, in any major city there’s typically some church which is a coordinating center for all kinds of peace and justice activities—and you’ll find anything in the world there. That happens everywhere, and they’ll be thrilled if you help direct people to them.

  Non-Violence

  MAN: Mr. Chomsky, I’ve always hoped we could disassemble corporate capitalism through non-violent yet very determined and organized resistance, and the creation of alternative institutions that could someday take over and diffuse power peacefully. I’m wondering, do you think that kind of hope for non-violence is at all realistic—and how do you feel about the use of violence in general?

  Well, like I say, nobody really knows anything much about tactics—at least I don’t. But I think you have to think through the non-violence question in detail. I mean, anybody is going to try to do things non-violently if possible: what’s the point of violence? But when you begin to encroach on power, you may find that it’s necessary to defend your rights—and defense of your rights sometimes does require violence, then either you use it or you don’t, depending on your moral values.

  So take a look at American labor history. Around the first half of this century, hundreds of American workers were simply killed by security forces, just for trying to organize. 14 The United States has an unusually violent labor history, so violent in fact that if you read the right-wing British press in the 1890s—the right-wing British press, like the London Times—they just couldn’t understand the brutality of the treatment of American workers and their lack of rights. 15 And it’s not because the workers were trying to be violent—it’s because people with power were violently protecting their power against people trying to get elementary rights.

  Alright, if you’re a pacifist or something, you have to ask yourself some questions at that point: are people allowed to defend themselves by force when they’re attacked by force? Well, okay, people’s values may differ on that, but those are at least the questions.

  My own opinion is that popular movements should try a lot of tactics, but even things that are non-violent on their face could become violent. For example, one thing that I think is important is the building of a political party which could enter the political arena and represent the population, not just business interests—I mean, it’s certainly conceivable that there could be a party like that in the United States. But if such a party ever got any power, people with power in the society would defend themselves against it. And at that point everyone’s got to decide: do you use violence to protect your rights or don’t you? Look, violence usually comes from the powerful—people may talk about it coming from the revolutionaries, but that’s typically because they’re attacked and they then defend themselves with violence.

  The same question also arises with another thing that I think has to go on now—the building up of alternative media, and of networks of activist organizations which could help bring people together to fight the effects of indoctrination, like we’ve been talking about. Again, that’s non-violent—but only up to the point where it starts to have the effect of undermining corporate power, when then you may discover that it’s not going to be nonviolent anymore, because the rich may find ways of defending themselves with violence. So talking about non-violence is easy, but personally I can’t really see taking it as an absolute principle.

  Now, of course, there are also ways of transcending violence. Like, if enough people got together and took over a factory, let’s say, the police would try to stop them—but ultimately the police and soldiers are just other people, and if understanding and solidarity were to spread enough, they wouldn’t stop them. So in a sense, one answer to your question just has to be more solidarity, broader solidarity—so they can’t bring in soldiers from someplace else to smash people up. But that’s going to be hard, we simply have to face that—it’s not just going to happen on its own. The fact that societies today are so stratified and divided by hatreds means that elites don’t have to go very far away to bring in people who are willing to repress you.

  But that can change—in fact, it has to change, because there’s a real limit to how much popular movements can defend themselves with violence and still maintain a popular-democratic character, in my opinion. To the extent that the defense would require guns and warfare, I think that any revolutionary developments would probably decline, and the chance of real changes would likely be destroyed. So the hope ultimately lies in more international solidarity, I think, and in the political appeal of what you’re doing to other people in this country, and elsewhere around the world as well.

  Transcending Capitalism

  MAN: Referring back to your comments about escaping from or doing away with capitalism, I’m wondering what workable scheme you would put in its place?

  Me?

  MAN: Or what would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going?

  Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, “wage slavery” is intolerable. I mean, I do not think that people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically—by their pa
rticipants, and by the communities in which they live. And I think that through various forms of free association and federalism, it’s possible to imagine a society working like that. I mean, I don’t think you can lay it out in detail—nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you’ve got to experiment. But reasonable principles on which to build such a society are quite clear.

  MAN: Most efforts at planned economies kind of go against the grain of democratic ideals, and founder on those rocks.

  Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies—the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a “free market,” but that’s baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts—like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well. 16

  And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes—you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don’t even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they’re fascist, they’re state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That’s precisely fascism, it’s not the free market.

  Now, that kind of planned economy “works,” in a way—it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don’t work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic—like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.