Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  MAN: It would be hard to find a working model of an ideal.

  Yes, but in the eighteenth century it would have been hard to find a working model of a political democracy—that didn’t prove it couldn’t exist. By the nineteenth century, it did exist. Unless you think that human history is over, it’s not an argument to say “it’s not around.” You go back two hundred years, it was hard to imagine slavery being abolished.

  The Kibbutz Experiment

  ANOTHER MAN: How could you make decisions democratically without a bureaucracy? I don’t see how a large mass of people could actively participate in all of the decisions that need to be made in a complex modern society.

  No, I don’t think they can—I think you’ve got to delegate some of those responsibilities. But the question is, where does authority ultimately lie? I mean, since the very beginnings of the modern democratic revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it’s always been recognized that people have to be represented—the question is, are we represented by, as they put it, “countrymen like ourselves,” or are we represented by “our betters”? 17

  For example, suppose this was our community, and we wanted to enter into some kind of arrangement with the community down the road—if we were fairly big in scale, we couldn’t all do it and get them all to do it, we’d have to delegate the right to negotiate things to representatives. But then the question is, who has the power to ultimately authorize those decisions? Well, if it’s a democracy, that power ought to lie not just formally in the population, but actually in the population—meaning the representatives can be recalled, they’re answerable back to their community, they can be replaced. In fact, there should be as much as possible in the way of constant replacement, so that political participation just becomes a part of everybody’s life.

  But I agree, I don’t think it’s possible to have large masses of people get together to decide every topic—it would be unfeasible and pointless. You’re going to want to pick committees to look into things and report back, and so on and so forth. 18 But the real question is, where does authority lie?

  MAN: It sounds like the model you’re looking to is similar to that of the kibbutzim [collective farming communities in Israel].

  Yeah, the kibbutz is actually as close to a full democracy as there is, I think. In fact, I lived on one for a while, and had planned to stay there, for precisely these reasons. On the other hand, life is full of all kinds of ironies, and the fact is—as I have come to understand over the years even more than I did at one time—although the kibbutzim are very authentic democracies internally, there are a lot of very ugly features about them.

  For one thing, they’re extremely racist: I don’t think there’s a single Arab on any kibbutz in Israel, and it turns out that a fair number of them have been turned down. Like, if a couple forms between a Jewish member of a kibbutz and an Arab, they generally end up living in an Arab village. The other thing about them is, they have an extremely unpleasant relationship with the state—which I didn’t really know about until fairly recently, even though it’s been that way for a long time.

  See, part of the reason why the kibbutzim are economically successful is that they get a substantial state subsidy, and in return for that state subsidy they essentially provide the officers’ corps for the elite military units in Israel. So if you look at who goes into the pilot training schools and the rangers and all that kind of stuff, it’s kibbutz kids—that’s the trade-off: the government subsidizes them as long as they provide the Praetorian Guard. Furthermore, I think they end up providing the Praetorian Guard in part as a result of kibbutz education. And here there are things that people who believe in libertarian ideas, as I do, really have to worry about.

  You see, there’s something very authoritarian about the libertarian structure of the kibbutz—I could see it when I lived in it, in fact. There’s tremendous group pressure to conform. I mean, there’s no force that makes you conform, but the group pressures are very powerful. The dynamics of how this worked were never very clear to me, but you could just see it in operation: the fear of exclusion is very great—not exclusion in the sense of not being allowed into the dining room or something, but just that you won’t be a part of things somehow. It’s like being excluded from a family: if you’re a kid and your family excludes you—like maybe they let you sit at the table, but they don’t talk to you—that’s devastating, you just can’t survive it. And something like that carries over into these communities.

  I’ve never heard of anybody studying it, but if you watch the kids growing up, you can understand why they’re going to go into the rangers and the pilot programs and the commandos. There’s a tremendous macho pressure, right from the very beginning—you’re just no good unless you can go through Marine Corps training and become a really tough bastard. And that starts pretty early, and I think the kids go through real traumas if they can’t do it: it’s psychologically very difficult.

  And the results are striking. For example, there’s a movement of resisters in Israel [Yesh G’vul], people who won’t serve in the Occupied Territories—but it doesn’t have any kibbutz kids in it: the movement just doesn’t exist there. Kibbutz kids also have a reputation for being what are called “good soldiers”—which means, you know, not nice people: do what you gotta do. All of these things are other aspects of it, and the whole phenomenon comes pretty much without force or authority, but because of a dynamics of conformism that’s extremely powerful.

  Like, the kibbutz I lived in was made up of pretty educated people—they were German refugees, and a lot of them had university degrees and so on—but every single person in the whole kibbutz read the same newspaper. And the idea that you might read a different newspaper—well, it’s not that there was a law against it, it was just that it couldn’t be done: you’re a member of this branch of the kibbutz movement, that’s the newspaper you read.

  MAN: Then how can we build a social contract which is cooperative in nature, but at the same time recognizes individual humanity? It seems to me that there’s always going to be a very tense polar pull there.

  Where’s the polar pull—between what and what?

  MAN: Between a collective value and an individual value.

  I guess I don’t see why there has to be any contradiction there at all. It seems to me that a crucial aspect of humanity is being a part of functioning communities—so if we can create social bonds in which people find satisfaction, we’ve done it: there’s no contradiction.

  Look, you can’t really figure out what problems are going to arise in group situations unless you experiment with them—it’s like physics: you can’t just sit around and think what the world would be like under such and such conditions, you’ve got to experiment and learn how things actually work out. And one of the things I think you learn from the kibbutz experiment is that you can in fact construct quite viable and successful democratic structures—but there are still going to be problems that come along. And one of the problems that people just have to face is the effect of group pressures to conform.

  I think everybody knows about this from families. Living in a family is a crucial part of human life, you don’t want to give it up. On the other hand, there plainly are problems that go along with it—nobody has to be told that. And a serious problem, which becomes almost pathological when it arises in a close-knit group, is exclusion—and to avoid exclusion often means doing things you wouldn’t want to do if you had your own way. But that’s just a part of living, to be faced with human problems like that.

  Actually, I’m not a great enthusiast of Marx, but one comment he made seems appropriate here. I’m quoting, so pardon the sexist language, but somewhere or other he said: socialism is an effort to try to solve man’s animal problems, and after having solved the animal problems, then we can face the human problems—but it’s not a part of socialism to solve the human problems; socialism is an effort to get you to the point where you can face the human problems. And I think the kin
d of thing you’re concerned about is a human problem—and those are going to be there. Humans are very complicated creatures, and have lots of ways of torturing themselves in their inter-personal relations. Everybody knows that, without soap operas.

  “Anarchism” and “Libertarianism”

  WOMAN: Professor Chomsky, on a slightly different topic, there’s a separate meaning of the word “anarchy” different from the one you often talk about—namely, “chaos.”

  Yeah, it’s a bum rap, basically—it’s like referring to Soviet-style bureaucracy as “socialism,” or any other term of discourse that’s been given a second meaning for the purpose of ideological warfare. I mean, “chaos” is a meaning of the word, but it’s not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant “chaos”—in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that’s organized democratically from below.

  WOMAN: It seems to me that as a social system, anarchism makes such bottom-line sense that it was necessary to discredit the word, and take it out of people’s whole vocabulary and thinking—so you just have a reflex of fear when you hear it.

  Yeah, anarchism has always been regarded as the ultimate evil by people with power. So in Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare [a 1919 campaign against “subversives” in the U.S.], they were harsh on socialists, but they murdered anarchists—they were really bad news.

  See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power. That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I mean, there’s a big literature about the Sixties, and it’s mostly written by intellectuals, because they’re the people who write books, so naturally it has a very bad name—because they hated it. You could see it in the faculty clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the idea that students were suddenly asking questions and not just copying things down. In fact, when people like Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind] write as if the foundations of civilization were collapsing in the Sixties, from their point of view that’s exactly right: they were. Because the foundations of civilization are, “I’m a big professor, and I tell you what to say, and what to think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you repeat it.” If you get up and say, “I don’t understand why I should read Plato, I think it’s nonsense,” that’s destroying the foundations of civilization. But maybe it’s a perfectly sensible question—plenty of philosophers have said it, so why isn’t it a sensible question?

  As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Sixties—but that’s the only thing that makes it into history: the crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on are out of history—and that’s because they had a kind of libertarian character, and there is nothing more frightening to people with power.

  MAN: What’s the difference between “libertarian” and “anarchist” exactly?

  There’s no difference, really. I think they’re the same thing. But you see, “libertarian” has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what’s called “libertarianism” here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that’s always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

  If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract”—but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve,” that’s not a choice—it’s in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

  The American version of “libertarianism” is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: “No, I’m a libertarian, I’m against that tax”—but of course, I’m still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

  Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [American academic]—and if you just read the world that they describe, it’s a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don’t have roads because you don’t see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you’re not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don’t like the pollution from somebody’s automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It’s a world built on hatred. 19

  The whole thing’s not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn’t function for a second—and if it could, all you’d want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it’s not really serious.

  Articulating Visions

  MAN: You often seem reluctant to get very specific in spelling out your vision of an anarchist society and how we could get there. Don’t you think it’s important for activists to do that, though—to try to communicate to people a workable plan for the future, which then can help give them the hope and energy to continue struggling? I’m curious why you don’t do that more often.

  Well, I suppose I don’t feel that in order to work hard for social change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in any kind of detail. What I feel should drive a person to work for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved. Now, you may not know in detail—and I don’t think that any of us do know in detail—how those principles can best be realized at this point in complex systems like human societies. But I don’t really see why that should make any difference: what you try to do is advance the principles. Now, that may be what some people call “reformism”—but that’s kind of like a put-down: reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction. And to push in that direction, I don’t think you have to know precisely how a future society would work: I think what you have to be able to do is spell out the principles you want to see such a society realize—and I think we can imagine many different ways in which a future society could realize them. Well, work to help people start trying them.

  So for example, in the case of workers taking control of the workplace, there are a lot of different ways in which you can think of workplaces being controlled—and since nobody knows enough about what all the effects are going to be of large-scale social changes, I think what we should do is try them piecemeal. In fact, I have a rather conservative attitude towards social change: since we’re dealing with complex systems which nobody understands very much, the sensible move I think is to make changes and then see what happens—and if they work, make further changes. That’s true across the board, actually.

  So, I don’t feel in a position—and even if I felt I was, I wouldn’t say it—to know what the long-term results are going to look like in any kind of detail: those are things that will have to be discovered, in my view. Instead, the basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it’s justified—it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five-year-old kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation: it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case, I think you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it—invariably. And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification
, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else—they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.

  So I think that whenever you find situations of power, these questions should be asked—and the person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that. As far as I can see, it’s just the point of view that says that people have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom then you’ve got to justify them. Sometimes you can—but of course, anarchism or anything else doesn’t give you the answers about when that is. You just have to look at the specific cases.

  MAN: But if we ever had a society with no wage incentive and no authority, where would the drive come from to advance and grow?

  Well, the drive to “advance”—I think you have to ask exactly what that means. If you mean a drive to produce more, well, who wants it? Is that necessarily the right thing to do? It’s not obvious. In fact, in many areas it’s probably the wrong thing to do—maybe it’s a good thing that there wouldn’t be the same drive to produce. People have to be driven to have certain wants in our system—why? Why not leave them alone so they can just be happy, do other things?

  Whatever “drive” there is ought to be internal. So take a look at kids: they’re creative, they explore, they want to try new things. I mean, why does a kid start to walk? You take a one-year-old kid, he’s crawling fine, he can get anywhere across the room he likes really fast, so fast his parents have to run after him to keep him from knocking everything down—all of a sudden he gets up and starts walking. He’s terrible at walking: he walks one step and he falls on his face, and if he wants to really get somewhere he’s going to crawl. So why do kids start walking? Well, they just want to do new things, that’s the way people are built. We’re built to want to do new things, even if they’re not efficient, even if they’re harmful, even if you get hurt—and I don’t think that ever stops.