Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  So for example, one of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von Humboldt (who incidentally is very admired by so-called “conservatives” today, because they don’t read him), pointed out that if a worker produces a beautiful object on command, you may “admire what the worker does, but you will despise what he is”—because that’s not really behaving like a human being, it’s just behaving like a machine. 37 And that conception runs right through classical liberalism. In fact, even half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville [French politician and writer] pointed out that you can have systems in which “the art advances and the artisan recedes,” but that’s inhuman—because what you’re really interested in is the artisan, you’re interested in people, and for people to have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives they have to be in control of what they do, even if that happens to be economically less efficient. 38

  Well, okay—obviously there’s just been a dramatic change in intellectual and cultural attitudes over the past couple centuries. But I think those classical liberal conceptions now have to be recovered, and the ideas at the heart of them should take root on a mass scale.

  Now, the sources of power and authority that people could see in front of their eyes in the eighteenth century were quite different from the ones that we have today—back then it was the feudal system, and the Church, and the absolutist state that they were focused on; they couldn’t see the industrial corporation, because it didn’t exist yet. But if you take the basic classical liberal principles and apply them to the modern period, I think you actually come pretty close to the principles that animated revolutionary Barcelona in the late 1930s—to what’s called “anarcho-syndicalism.” [Anarcho-syndicalism is a form of libertarian socialism that was practiced briefly in regions of Spain during its revolution and civil war of 1936, until it was destroyed by the simultaneous efforts of the Soviet Union, the Western powers, and the Fascists.] I think that’s about as high a level as humans have yet achieved in trying to realize these libertarian principles, which in my view are the right ones, I mean, I’m not saying that everything that was done in that revolution was right, but in its general spirit and character, in the idea of developing the kind of society that Orwell saw and described in I think his greatest work, Homage to Catalonia—with popular control over all the institutions of society—okay, that’s the right direction in which to move, I think. 39

  The Computer and the Crowbar

  MAN: Noam, given what you were saying before about our limited understanding of human nature and social change, don’t you think there’s a caution there in general for people intervening in social patterns involving human beings?

  Yes—any kind of drastic intervention in a human being, or a human society, is very dubious. Like, suppose you’ve got a personal computer and it isn’t working—it’s a bad idea to hit it with a crowbar. Maybe hitting it with a crowbar will by accident fix it, but it’s by and large not a good tactic—and human societies are much more complex than computers, as are human beings. So you really never understand what you’re doing. People have to carry out changes for themselves: they can’t be imposed upon them from above.

  Take the Spanish Revolution again. I mean, that was just one year in a rather undeveloped country (though it had industry and so on), so it’s not like a model for the future. But a lot of interesting things happened in the course of it, and they didn’t just happen out of the blue—they happened out of maybe fifty years of serious organizing and experimentation, and attempts to try it, and failures, and being smashed up by the army, and then trying again. So when people say it was spontaneous, that’s just not true: it came from a lot of experience, and thinking, and working, and so on, and then when the revolutionary moment came and the existing system sort of collapsed, people had in their heads a picture of what to do, and had even tried it, and they then tried to implement it on a mass scale. And it was implemented in many different ways—there wasn’t any single pattern that was followed, the various collectives were experimenting on their own under different conditions, and finding out for themselves what worked. 40 And that’s a good example of how I think constructive change has to happen.

  On the other hand, if an economist from, say, Harvard, goes to some Eastern European country today and tells them, “Here’s the way to develop,” that’s worse than hitting a computer with a crowbar: there are a million different social and cultural and economic factors they don’t understand, and any big change that’s pressed on people is very likely to be disastrous, no matter what it is—and of course, it always is disastrous. Incidentally, it’s disastrous for the victims—it’s usually very good for the people who are carrying out the experiments, which is why these experiments have been carried out for the last couple hundred years, since the British started them in India. I mean, every one of them is a disaster for the victims and they’re invariably good for the guys carrying out the experiments. 41 Well, as far as people who are interested in social reform are concerned, what that suggests is, people better do it themselves, and a step at a time, under their own control. That’s in fact what was being attempted on a fairly local scale in Barcelona, and I think it’s the kind of thing we have to work towards now.

  7

  Intellectuals and Social Change

  Based primarily on discussions at Woods Hole and Rowe, Massachusetts, in 1989, 1993 and 1994.

  The Leninist/Capitalist Intelligentsia

  MAN: Your vision of a libertarian socialism is a very appealing one—I’m wondering, what’s gone wrong?

  First of all, maybe nothing’s gone wrong. You could argue that we haven’t been ready for it yet—but there was also a period when we weren’t ready for ending slavery either; when conditions, including subjective conditions, were such that abolition just wasn’t in the cards. So one could argue that conditions today are such that we need the degree of hierarchy and domination that exists in totalitarian institutions like capitalist enterprises, just in order to satisfy our needs—or else a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or some other authoritarian structure like that. I mean, I don’t believe a word of it—but the point is, the justification for any kind of power system has to be argued and proven to people before it has any claim to legitimacy. And those arguments haven’t been made out in this case.

  If you look at what’s actually happened to the various efforts at libertarian socialism that have taken place around the world, the concentration of force and violence present in those situations has just been such that certain outcomes were virtually guaranteed, and consequently all incipient efforts at cooperative workers’ control, say, have simply been crushed. There have in fact been efforts in this direction for hundreds of years—the problem is, they regularly get destroyed. And often they’re destroyed by force.

  The Bolsheviks [political party that seized power during the Russian Revolution and later became the Communist Party] are a perfect example. In the stages leading up to the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, there were incipient socialist institutions developing in Russia—workers’ councils, collectives, things like that [i.e. after a popular revolution first toppled the Tsar in February 1917]. And they survived to an extent once the Bolsheviks took over—but not for very long; Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated their power. I mean, you can argue about the justification for eliminating them, but the fact is that the socialist initiatives were pretty quickly eliminated.

  Now, people who want to justify it say, “The Bolsheviks had to do it”—that’s the standard justification: Lenin and Trotsky had to do it, because of the contingencies of the civil war, for survival, there wouldn’t have been food otherwise, this and that. Well, obviously the question there is, was that true? To answer that, you’ve got to look at the historical facts: I don’t think it was true. In fact, I think the incipient socialist structures in Russia were dismantled before the really dire conditions arose. Alright, here you get into a question where you don’t want to be too cavalier about it
—it’s a question of historical fact, and of what the people were like, what they were thinking and so on, and you’ve got to find out what the answer is, you can’t just guess. But from reading their own writings, my feeling is that Lenin and Trotsky knew what they were doing, it was conscious and understandable, and they even had a theory behind it, both a moral theory and a socioeconomic theory. 1

  First of all, as orthodox Marxists, they didn’t really believe that a socialist revolution was possible in Russia, because Russia was just a peasant backwater: it wasn’t the kind of advanced industrial society where in their view the coming socialist revolution was supposed to happen. So when the Bolsheviks got power, they were hoping to carry out kind of a holding action and wait for “the iron laws of history” to grind out the revolution in Germany, where it was supposed to happen by historical necessity, and then Russia would continue to be a backwater, but it would then develop with German help. 2

  Well, it didn’t end up happening in Germany: there was a revolution, in January 1919, but it was wiped out, and the German working class was suppressed. So at that point, Lenin and Trotsky were stuck holding the bag—and they basically ended up trying to run a peasant society by violence: since Russia was such a deeply impoverished Third World society, they thought it was necessary just to beat the people into development. So they took steps to turn the workers into what they called a “labor army,” under control of a “maximal leader,” who was going to force the country to industrialize under what they themselves referred to as “state-capitalism.” 3 Their hope was that this would carry Russia over the early stages of capitalism and industrialization, until it reached a point of material development where then the iron laws of history would start to work as the Master said they were going to, and socialism would finally be achieved [i.e. Karl Marx theorized that history progresses according to natural “laws,” and that the advanced stages of capitalism will inevitably lead to socialism].

  So there was a theory behind their actions, and in fact a moral principle—namely, it will be better for people in the long run if we do this. But what they did, I think, was to set the framework for a totalitarian system, which of course Stalin then accelerated.

  MAN: Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolsheviks’ actions as an honest mistake, a “historical accident” maybe—or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show?

  Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself—the very idea that a “vanguard party” can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they’re too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it’s going to lead them towards is “I rule you with a whip.” Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves—I think that’s kind of like an obvious sociological truism.

  And actually, if you look back, that was in fact Bakunin’s prediction half a century before—he said this was exactly what was going to happen. [Bakunin was a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, and with Marx a leading figure in the main socialist labor organization of the time, the First International.] I mean, Bakunin was talking about the people around Marx, this was before Lenin was born, but his prediction was that the nature of the intelligentsia as a formation in modern industrial society is that they are going to try to become the social managers. Now, they’re not going to become the social managers because they own capital, and they’re not going to become the social managers because they’ve got a lot of guns. They are going to become the social managers because they can control, organize, and direct what’s called “knowledge”—they have the skills to process information, and to mobilize support for decision-making, and so on and so forth. And Bakunin predicted that these people would fall into two categories. On the one hand, there would be the “left” intellectuals, who would try to rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements, and if they could gain power, they would then beat the people into submission and try to control them. On the other hand, if they found that they couldn’t get power that way themselves, they would become the servants of what we would nowadays call “state-capitalism,” though Bakunin didn’t use the term. And either of these two categories of intellectuals, he said, would be “beating the people with the people’s stick”—that is, they’d be presenting themselves as representatives of the people, so they’d be holding the people’s stick, but they would be beating the people with it. 4

  Well, Bakunin didn’t go on with this, but I think it follows from his analysis that it’s extremely easy to shift from one position to the other—it’s extremely easy to undergo what’s called the “God That Failed” syndrome. You start off as basically a Leninist, someone who’s going to become part of what Bakunin called the “Red Bureaucracy,” you see that power doesn’t lie that way, and then you very easily become an ideologist of the right, and devote your life to exposing the sins of your former comrades, who haven’t yet seen the light and shifted to where power really lies. And you barely have to change at all, really, you’re just operating under a different formal power structure. In fact, we’re seeing it right now in the former Soviet Union: the same guys who were Communist thugs, Stalinist thugs two years back are now running banks, they’re enthusiastic free-marketeers, praising America and so on. And this has been going on for forty years—it’s become kind of a joke.

  Now, Bakunin didn’t say it’s the nature of people that this will happen. I mean, I don’t know how much he thought it through, but what we should say is that a Red Bureaucracy or its state-capitalist commissar-class equivalent is not going to take over because that’s the nature of people—it’s that the ones who don’t do it will be cast by the wayside, the ones who do do it will make out. The ones who are ruthless and brutal and harsh enough to seize power are the ones who are going to survive. The ones who try to associate themselves with popular organizations and help the general population itself become organized, who try to assist popular movements in that kind of way, they’re just not going to survive under these situations of concentrated power.

  Marxist “Theory” and Intellectual Fakery

  WOMAN: Noam, apart from the idea of the “vanguard,” I’m interested why you’re so critical of the whole broader category of Marxist analysis in general—like people in the universities and so on who refer to themselves as “Marxists.” I’ve noticed you’ re never very happy with it.

  Well, I guess one thing that’s unattractive to me about “Marxism” is the very idea that there is such a thing. It’s a rather striking fact that you don’t find things like “Marxism” in the sciences—like, there isn’t any part of physics which is “Einsteinianism,” let’s say, or “Planckianism” or something like that. It doesn’t make any sense—because people aren’t gods: they just discover things, and they make mistakes, and their graduate students tell them why they’re wrong, and then they go on and do things better the next time. But there are no gods around. I mean, scientists do use the terms “Newtonianism” and “Darwinism,” but nobody thinks of those as doctrines that you’ve got to somehow be loyal to, and figure out what the Master thought, and what he would have said in this new circumstance and so on. That sort of thing is just completely alien to rational existence, it only shows up in irrational domains.

  So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They’re theology, so they’re whatever you think of theology; I don’t think much of it. In fact, in my view that’s exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.

  So part of my problem is just its existence: it seems to me that even to discuss something like “Marxism” is already making a mistake. Like, we don’t discuss “Planckism.” Why not? Because it would be crazy. Planck [German physicist] had some things to say, and some of them are right, and those were absorbed into later science, and some of t
hem are wrong, and they were improved on. It’s not that Planck wasn’t a great man—all kinds of great discoveries, very smart, mistakes, this and that. That’s really the way we ought to look at it, I think. As soon as you set up the idea of “Marxism” or “Freudianism” or something, you’ve already abandoned rationality.

  It seems to me the question a rational person ought to ask is, what is there in Marx’s work that’s worth saving and modifying, and what is there that ought to be abandoned? Okay, then you look and you find things. I think Marx did some very interesting descriptive work on nineteenth-century history. He was a very good journalist. When he describes the British in India, or the Paris Commune [70-day French workers’ revolution in 1871], or the parts of Capital that talk about industrial London, a lot of that is kind of interesting—I think later scholarship has improved it and changed it, but it’s quite interesting. 5

  He had an abstract model of capitalism which—I’m not sure how valuable it is, to tell you the truth. It was an abstract model, and like any abstract model, it’s not really intended to be descriptively accurate in detail, it’s intended to sort of pull out some crucial features and study those. And you have to ask in the case of an abstract model, how much of the complex reality does it really capture? That’s questionable in this case—first of all, it’s questionable how much of nineteenth-century capitalism it captured, and I think it’s even more questionable how much of late-twentieth-century capitalism it captures.

  There are supposed to be laws [i.e. of history and economics]. I can’t understand them, that’s all I can say; it doesn’t seem to me that there are any laws that follow from it. Not that I know of any better laws, I just don’t think we know about “laws” in history.

  There’s nothing about socialism in Marx, he wasn’t a socialist philosopher—there are about five sentences in Marx’s whole work that refer to socialism. 6 He was a theorist of capitalism. I think he introduced some interesting concepts at least, which every sensible person ought to have mastered and employ, notions like class, and relations of production …