Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Actually, the Israeli reviews in general were extremely critical: the reaction of the Israeli press was that they hoped the book would not be widely read, because ultimately it would be harmful to the Jews—sooner or later it would get exposed, and then it would just look like a fraud and a hoax, and it would reflect badly on Israel. 27 They underestimated the American intellectual community, I should say.

  Anyhow, by that point the American intellectual community realized that the Peters book was an embarrassment, and it sort of disappeared—nobody talks about it anymore. I mean, you still find it at newsstands in the airport and so on, but the best and the brightest know that they are not supposed to talk about it anymore: because it was exposed and they were exposed.

  Well, the point is, what happened to Finkelstein is the kind of thing that can happen when you’re an honest critic—and we could go on and on with other cases like that. [Editors’ Note: Finkelstein has since published several books with independent presses.]

  Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they’re likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won’t make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they’ll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it’s not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that’s how they got there. And that’s pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that’s the basic story of how it operates, I think.

  Forging Working-Class Culture

  MAN: Noam, I want to turn for a moment to people who weren’t sent through the ideological control system of the schools, to see what kind of independent minds people today should be struggling to foster. I’ve often heard you talk about the insights that guided the early labor movement in the United States at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1820s. You say that social movements today are going to have to start by regaining some of that understanding. My question is, who were those people exactly—was it mostly European immigrants to the United States?

  No, it’s what were called at the time the “Lowell mill-girls”—meaning young women who came off the farms to work in factories. In fact, a good deal of the labor organizing in the nineteenth century in the United States was done by women, because just like today in the Third World, it was assumed that the most docile and controllable segment of the workforce was women—so therefore they were the most exploited.

  Remember, the early industrial revolution was built on textiles. It took off around here—it was in Lowell and Lawrence [Massachusetts], places like that. And very extensively the labor force was made up of women. In fact, some of the main labor journals at the time were edited by women, and they were young women mostly. And they were people who wanted to read, they wanted to learn, they wanted to study—that was just considered normal by working people back then. And they wanted to have free lives. In fact, many of them didn’t work in the mills for very long—they’d work there for a couple years, then go back to some other life. But in the early stages of the American labor movement, it was the Lowell mill-girls, or farmers who were being driven off their farms by industry, who were the ones who built up the early working-class culture.

  When the big waves of European immigrants began to arrive in the United States, the story started to change a bit, actually. See, the major wave of immigration to the United States happened around the middle of the nineteenth century, and the immigrants who were arriving were fleeing from extremely impoverished parts of Europe—like Ireland, for example. That was at the time of the Irish famine [of 1846–51], and Ireland was being absolutely devastated by it, so a lot of people just escaped to North America if they could.

  People often forget, Ireland’s the oldest colony in the world: it could have been a rich place, just like England, but it’s been a colony for 800 years, and it’s one of the few parts of the world that was not only underdeveloped, like most colonies, but also depopulated—Ireland now has about half the population it had in the early nineteenth century, in fact. And the Irish famine was an economists’ famine—Ireland was actually exporting food to England during the famine, because the sacred principles of Political Economy said that that’s the way it has to be: if there’s a better market for it in England, that’s where the food has to go, and you certainly couldn’t send food to Ireland, because that would have interfered with the market. 28

  So there was mass starvation taking place in Ireland, and the Irish immigrants who were coming to the United States were desperate for work, so they could be forced to work for essentially nothing—the same was also true of a lot of the people who were coming here from Southern and Eastern Europe. And that undercut the early labor movement to a significant extent—I mean, the Lowell mill-girls could not, or would not, work at the level of the millions of immigrants who were coming in. So it took a long time before you started to get the growth of labor organizing here again, because the domestic workforce could just be displaced whenever it started to protest.

  And the poor immigrants who came here were treated like dogs—I mean, miserably treated. So for example, Irish women were used for experimentation in Mengele-style experiments in the United States in the nineteenth century [Mengele was a Nazi doctor who “experimented” on live human beings]. That’s not a joke—gynecological surgery was literally developed by Mengeles, who used subjects like indigent Irish women or slaves, and just subjected them to experiment after experiment, like thirty experiments, to try to figure out how to make the procedures work. In fact, doctors exactly like Joseph Mengele were honored for that in the United States—you still see their pictures up on the walls in medical schools. 29

  So it wasn’t a European input that brought about the American labor movement, quite the opposite. But I mean, these were just natural reactions: you didn’t have to have any training to understand these things, you didn’t have to read Marx or anything like that. It’s just degrading to have to follow orders, and to be stuck in a place where you slave for twelve hours a day, then go to a dormitory where they watch your morals and so on—which is what it was like. People simply regarded that as degrading.

  It was the same with craftsmen, people who had been self-employed and were now being forced into the factories—they wanted to be able to run their own lives. I mean, shoemakers would hire people to read to them while they were working—and that didn’t mean read Stephen King or something, it meant read real stuff. These were people who had libraries, and they wanted to live lives, they wanted to control their own work—but they were being forced into shoe-manufacturing plants in places like Lowell where they were treated, not even like animals, like machines. And that was degrading, and demeaning—and they fought against it. And incidentally, they weren’t fighting against it so much because it was reducing their economic level, which it wasn’t (in fact it was probably raising it)—it was because it was taking power out of their hands, and subordinating them to others, and turning them into mindless tools of production. And they didn’t want that.

  In fact, if you want to do some really interesting reading, one book I would suggest is the first book of labor history that was written—ever, I think. It came out in 1924, and it was just republished in Chicago: it’s called The Industrial Worker, by Norman Ware, and it’s mostly excerpts from the independent labor press in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. 30 See, there was a big independent workers’ press in the United States at the time—it was about at the scale of the capitalist press, actually—and it was run by what were called “factory girls,” or by craftsmen. And it’s extremely interesting to l
ook at.

  Right through the nineteenth century, working people in the United States were struggling against the imposition of what they described as “degradation,” “oppression,” “wage slavery,” “taking away our elementary rights,” “turning us into tools of production,” everything that we now call modern capitalism (which is in fact state-capitalism) they fought against for a full century—and very bitterly, it was an extremely hard struggle. And they were calling for “labor republicanism”—you know, “Let’s go back to the days when we were free people.” “Labor” just means “people,” after all.

  And in fact, they also were fighting against the imposition of the mass public education system—and rightly, because they understood exactly what it was: a technique to beat independence out of the heads of farmers and to turn them into docile and obedient factory workers. 31 That’s ultimately why public education was instituted in the United States in the first place: to meet the needs of newly-emerging industry. See, part of the process of trying to develop a degraded and obedient labor force was to make the workers stupid and passive—and mass education was one of the ways that was achieved. And of course, there was also a much broader effort to destroy the independent working-class intellectual culture that had developed, which ranged from a huge amount of just outright force, to more subtle techniques like propaganda and public relations campaigns.

  And those efforts have been sustained right to this day, in fact. So labor unions have by now been virtually wiped out in the United States, in part by a huge amount of business propaganda, running from cinema to almost everything, and through a lot of other techniques as well. But the whole process took a long time—I’m old enough to remember what the working-class culture was like in the United States: there was still a high level of it when I was growing up in the late 1930s. It took a long time to beat it out of workers’ heads and turn them into passive tools; it took a long time to make people accept that this type of exploitation is the only alternative, so they’d better just forget about their rights and say, “Okay, I’m degraded.”

  So the first thing that has to happen, I think, is we have to recover some of that old understanding. I mean, it all starts with cultural changes. We have to dismantle all of this stuff culturally: we’ve got to change people’s minds, their spirits, and help them recover what was common understanding in a more civilized period, like a century ago on the shop floors of Lowell If that kind of understanding could be natural among a huge part of the general population in the nineteenth century, it can be natural again today. And it’s something we’ve really got to work on now.

  The Fraud of Modern Economics

  MAN: Noam, you mentioned Ireland being forced to export food to England during the Irish famine because of the supposed demands of the free market. How exactly did that kind of “free market” economic thinking get instituted as legitimate in the universities and in the popular ideology as a whole over the years—for instance, the work of the Social Darwinists [who claimed that natural selection and “survival of the fittest” determine individual and societal wealth], and of Malthus [early-nineteenth-century economist who argued that poverty was inevitable and population growth should be checked by famine, war, and disease], and others who in various ways blamed the poor for being poor?

  Malthus gets kind of a bad press, actually: he’s singled out as the guy who said that people should just be left to starve if they can’t support themselves—but really that was pretty much the line of classical economics in general. In fact, Malthus was one of the founders of classical economics, right alongside of guys like David Ricardo.

  Malthus’s point was basically this: if you don’t have independent wealth, and you can’t sell your labor on the market at a level at which you can survive, then you have no right being here—go to the workhouse prison or go somewhere else. And in those days, “go somewhere else” meant go to North America, or to Australia, and so on. Now, he wasn’t saying it was anyone’s fault if they were poor and had to remove themselves; he was saying, it’s a law of nature that this is the way it has to be. 32 Ricardo in fact said that it was true at the level of “the principle of gravitation”—and of course, to try to interfere with a law of nature like that only makes things worse. 33

  So what both Malthus and Ricardo were arguing, sort of in parallel, was that you only harm the poor by making them believe that they have rights other than what they can win on the market, like a basic right to live, because that kind of right interferes with the market, and with efficiency, and with growth and so on—so ultimately people will just be worse off if you try to recognize them. And as you suggest, those ideas are basically still taught today—I don’t think the free-market ideology that’s taught in university economics departments right now is very much different. Sure, you have more mathematical formulas and so on today, but really it’s pretty much the same story.

  MAN: But how did that thinking get instituted?

  How did it get instituted? As a weapon of class warfare. Actually, the history of this is kind of intriguing—and as far as I know, there’s only one book about it: it’s by a good economic historian named Rajani Kanth, who was just rewarded for his efforts by being thrown out of the University of Utah. But he goes through it all, and it’s very revealing. 34

  You see, during the early stages of the industrial revolution, as England was coming out of a feudal-type society and into what’s basically a state-capitalist system, the rising bourgeoisie there had a problem. In a traditional society like the feudal system, people had a certain place, and they had certain rights—in fact, they had what was called at the time a “right to live.” I mean, under feudalism it may have been a lousy right, but nevertheless people were assumed to have some natural entitlement for survival. But with the rise of what we call capitalism, that right had to be destroyed: people had to have it knocked out of their heads that they had any automatic “right to live” beyond what they could win for themselves on the labor market. And that was the main point of classical economics. 35

  Remember the context in which all of this was taking place: classical economics developed after a period in which a large part of the English population had been forcibly driven off the land they had been farming for centuries—that was by force, it wasn’t a pretty picture [i.e. intensive enclosure of communal lands by acts of Parliament occurred between 1750 and I860]. In fact, very likely one of the main reasons why England led the industrial revolution was just that they had been much more violent in driving people off the land than in other places. For instance, in France a lot of people were able to remain on the land, and therefore they resisted industrialization more. 36

  But even after the rising bourgeoisie in England had driven millions of peasants off the land, there was a period when the population’s “right to live” still was preserved by what we would today call “welfare.” There was a set of laws in England which gave people rights, called the “Poor Laws” [initially and most comprehensively codified in 1601]—which essentially kept you alive if you couldn’t survive otherwise; they provided sort of a minimum level of subsistence, like subsidies on food and so on. And there was also something called the “Corn Laws” [dating in varying forms from the twelfth century], which gave landlords certain rights beyond those they could get on the market—they raised the price of corn, that sort of thing. And together, these laws were considered among the main impediments to the new rising British industrial class—so therefore they just had to go.

  Well, those people needed an ideology to support their effort to knock out of people’s heads the idea that they had this basic right to live, and that’s what classical economics was about—classical economics said: no one has any right to live, you only have a right to what you can gain for yourself on the labor market. And the founders of classical economics in fact said they’d developed a “scientific theory” of it, with—as they put it—“the certainty of the principle of gravitation.”

  Alright, by the 1830s, p
olitical conditions in England had changed enough so that the rising bourgeoisie were able to kill the Poor Laws [they were significantly limited in 1832], and then later they managed to do away with the Corn Laws [in 1846]. And by around 1840 or 1845, they won the elections and took over the government. Then at that point, a very interesting thing happened. They gave up the theory, and Political Economy changed.

  It changed for a number of reasons. For one thing, these guys had won, so they didn’t need it so much as an ideological weapon anymore. For another, they recognized that they themselves needed a powerful interventionist state to defend industry from the hardships of competition in the open market—as they always had in fact. And beyond that, eliminating people’s “right to live” was starting to have some negative side-effects. First of all, it was causing riots all over the place: for a long period, the British army was mostly preoccupied with putting down riots across England. Then something even worse happened—the population started to organize: you got the beginnings of an organized labor movement, and later the Chartist movement [an 1838–48 popular campaign for Parliamentary reform], and then a socialist movement developed. And at that point, the elites in England recognized that the game just had to be called off, or else they really would be in trouble—so by the time you get to the second half of the nineteenth century, things like John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which gives kind of a social-democratic line, were becoming the reigning ideology.

  See, the “science” happens to be a very flexible one: you can change it to do whatever you feel like, it’s that kind of “science.” So by the middle of the nineteenth century, the “science” had changed, and now it turned out that laissez faire [the idea that the economy functions best without government interference] was a bad thing after all—and what you got instead were the intellectual foundations for what’s called the “welfare state.” And in fact, for a century afterwards, “laissez faire” was basically a dirty word—nobody talked about it anymore. And what the “science” now said was that you had better give the population some way of surviving, or else they’re going to challenge your right to rule. You can take away their right to live, but then they’re going to take away your right to rule—and that’s no good, so ways have to be found to accommodate them.