Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  And again, it’s reciprocal: you do this for a number of people, they do it for you, and the end result is, informal networks of cooperation develop through which people can pool their efforts and compensate for a lack of resources. That’s exactly what organization is all about, in fact.

  WOMAN: Noam, I remember in the movie you criticized the U.S. media for insisting on “concision”—restricting news analysis to concise sound-bites, so only conventional wisdom can be presented coherently. But in the organizing I’ve done, I’ve found that it’s important to use both “concision” and a more in-depth type of analysis, to use the two in combination. I’m thinking specifically of trying to get people’s attention through fact-sheets and quick blurbs of information that you can digest easily, and then go on to find out more. I’m wondering what you think about that kind of combined use?

  Sure, oh yeah—it’s very useful to do it that way. Actually, I should say that this term “concision” is kind of like a joke—it’s a word I learned from the media P.R. guys when I heard one of them use it, I forget who …

  MARK ACHBAR: Jeff Greenfield.

  Yeah, what is he, manager of Newsweek?

  MARK ACHBAR: Producer at Nightline.

  Producer at Nightline or something. He used the word “concision” to describe what they do—you know, find people who can make their points in 600 words, or between two commercials. 7 It was the first time I’d ever heard the term. But yeah, it’s around, and it’s a technique of thought control. But you can use it quite constructively too.

  For example, during the Gulf War, Z Magazine ran a couple pages of just short factual statements of what the basic story was—I think every good organizing group does things like that. I mean, people need to have information in the front of their minds, so that they know what the general structure is—it’s just that then you should fill in the depth. So I think you should use the techniques in combination: there’s nothing wrong with slogans if they lead you to something. But of course, we should also be making people aware that any presentation of facts is a selection and an interpretation—I mean, we’re picking the facts that we think are important, maybe they’ll think something else is important.

  WOMAN: A common response when you give people a fact-sheet is, “Why should we trust you? Where did you get this information?” Not enough people ask those questions, actually.

  They should, yeah. But that distrust still is something that’s very hard to overcome as an organizer. I don’t know how many of you have been following the Z online Bulletin Board lately [a computer network discussion forum], but there’s been an ongoing conversation there in which people have pointed out—and they’re right, I don’t know any answer to it—that they’ll come to people with, not necessarily just fact-sheets, but even detailed, elaborate arguments with a lot of evidence and data, but it’s different from what everyone has always heard, and the standard response is, “Well, why should I believe you?”

  And that’s not an unreasonable response. I mean, if somebody came to you with a three-volume work with a lot of footnotes and statistics and mathematical calculations which proved that the world is flat, you’d be very wise to be cautious, no matter how impressive it looked. And that’s the way we’re coming to people most of the time—we’re telling them that the world is flat, and they’re not going to believe all your evidence. They should, in fact, ask questions like that. And that’s just a hard situation for organizers to overcome: you only really overcome that by winning confidence, and helping people gain a broader understanding for themselves, bit by bit.

  Self-Destruction of the U.S. Left

  MAN: You travel around the country doing a lot of speaking engagements, Noam. I’m wondering, just from going to all these different communities, what do you think things look like in general as far as the movement goes, as far as politics go—what’s your assessment?

  Well, over the years I think there’s sort of like a tendency you can see—a tendency towards, on the one hand, much larger groups of people getting engaged in political activism in some fashion, or at least wanting to become involved in some sort of progressive activity, roughly speaking. On the other hand, the opportunities for it are declining at the same time—and people are becoming extremely isolated. I just got a sense of it yesterday afternoon. I was getting ready to go off for a couple of weeks, so I did my monthly making out of checks to all the, you know, worthwhile organizations around the world. And it’s amazing when you see it. You take any topic you like, no matter how narrow it is—I mean, health rights in the southern part of Guatemala, let’s say—and there are fifteen separate organizations working on it, maybe right next door to one another, so you have to make out fifteen checks.

  Well, that’s what I happened to notice yesterday, but it’s characteristic of what’s happening: everybody’s got their own little operation, everything is extremely narrowly focused and very small, and often the groups don’t even know about each other’s existence. And partly that’s the result of, and partly it contributes to, a sense of real isolation, and also a kind of hopelessness—a sense that nothing’s going on, because after all it’s just me and my three friends. And it’s true, it’s you and your three friends, except down the block there’s somebody else and their three friends. The success in atomizing the population has been extraordinary; I think that’s in fact the major propaganda achievement of recent years—just to isolate people in a most astonishing fashion. And the left has done a lot to help that along, in my opinion.

  So what you find all around the country is huge mobs of people showing up at talks and wanting to get involved, but nobody around with anything for them to do, or any sense that there could be any follow-up. I mean, the standard question after a talk where thousands of people have shown up is, “What can I do?” That’s a terrible condemnation of the left, that people have to ask that question. There ought to be fifty booths outside with people saying, “Look, join up, here’s what you can do.” And there aren’t—or if there are, the groups are so narrow that people just have a feeling, “Look, I don’t want to do anything this narrow; I mean, I’m all in favor of gay and lesbian rights in Western Massachusetts, say, but I don’t want to devote my whole life to that.”

  WOMAN: What exactly has the left done that you think is so self-destructive?

  In part the problem is just divisiveness—it’s passionate commitment to a very narrow position, and extreme intolerance of anyone who doesn’t see it exactly the way you do. So if you have a slightly different view from the person next door on, say, abortion rights, it’s a war—you can’t even talk to each other, it’s not an issue that you can even discuss. There’s a lot of that on the left, and it’s been very self-destructive. It’s made the progressive movements, the sort of “left” movements, kind of unwelcome—because people don’t like it; they see it, and they don’t like it.

  Also, there’s just a huge amount of frittering away of energy on real absurdities. There are parts of the country, like California, where incredible amounts of energy go into things like trying to figure out exactly which Mafia figure might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy or something—as if anybody should care. The energy and the passion that goes into things like that is really extraordinary, and it’s very self-destructive.

  Or take a look at the intellectual left, the people who ought to be involved in the kinds of things we’re doing here. If you look at the academic left, say, it’s mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed postmodernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people who are involved in it—but it’s really good for careers and that sort of thing. That again pulls a ton of energy into activities which have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they’re very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with.

  Another thing is, there are just extreme illusions about what’s going on in the world—and that’s the
fault of all of us, in fact: we just can’t seem to get over them. Take the so-called “Gulf War”—it wasn’t really a war, it was a slaughter, but take the Gulf Slaughter. It led to tremendous depression on the left, because people felt like they weren’t able to do anything about it. Well, if you just think about it for a minute, you realize that it was exactly the opposite: it was probably the greatest victory the peace movement has ever had. The Gulf War was the first time in history that there were huge demonstrations and protests before a war started—that’s never happened before. In the case of the Vietnam War, it was five years before anybody got out in the streets; this time, there were massive demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people involved before the bombing even started. And if you just look at the attitudes of the general population, up until the day the bombing started it was about two to one in favor of a negotiated settlement involving Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in the context of an international conference on regional issues, Israel-Palestine issues and so on. 8

  Well, at the time, the left couldn’t do anything about it. First of all, it didn’t know it, and didn’t know that there were alternatives—like it didn’t know that a week earlier high U.S. officials had rejected an Iraqi offer to withdraw from Kuwait on exactly those terms. 9 But nevertheless, there is a huge reservoir of support in the general population—it’s just the left isn’t dealing with it.

  In fact, the attitudes of the general population are absolutely astonishing. For example, 83 percent of the American population thinks that the economic system is inherently unfair, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”—meaning things should just be radically changed. 10 Well, what is the left doing about that mere 83 percent of the population that thinks everything has to be radically changed? What we’re doing is alienating them, or making them feel that we have nothing to say to them, or something like that.

  Or I remember in 1987, when there was a big hoopla about the bicentennial of the Constitution, the Boston Globe published one of my favorite polls, in which they gave people little slogans and said, “Guess which ones are in the Constitution.” Of course, nobody knows what’s in the Constitution, because everybody forgot what they learned in third grade, and probably they didn’t pay any attention to it then anyway—so what the question really was asking is, “What is such an obvious truism that it must be in the Constitution?” Well, one of the suggestions was, “What about ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’?” [a slogan from Karl Marx]. Half the American population thinks that’s in the Constitution, because it’s such an obvious truth—it’s so obviously true that it must be in the Constitution, where else could it come from? 11 If you think about what this means and what we’re doing about it, it’s mind-boggling, the chasm.

  Or take the whole Ross Perot phenomenon during the 1992 election [Perot is an American billionaire who ran for President on an independent ticket]. Ross Perot appeared on the political scene and had no program, nobody knew what he stood for, he could have come from Mars for all anybody knew, and within a couple days he was running even with the two major candidates. I mean, if a puppet was running it probably would have come out even.

  Or do you remember the whole business with Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown? That was taken very seriously in the United States, it was treated as if these were two real people—a debate between the Vice President and a television actress; actually, not an actress, a character on a television show, who then responded through the show [Quayle had criticized the character for deciding to have a child out of wedlock]. Well, there was a poll done at that time in which people were asked who they would prefer as President, Dan Quayle or Murphy Brown—and you can guess who won. 12 There wasn’t a poll done as to who they thought was real; I’m not sure what the result of that one would have been.

  But what these things demonstrate is something that is shown over and over again in careful public opinion studies: the population is what’s called “alienated.” People think that none of the institutions work for them, everything’s a scam, a crooked operation; they feel they have no way of influencing anything, the political system doesn’t work, the economic system doesn’t work, everything is being done somewhere else and it’s all out of their control. And this feeling goes up across the board pretty regularly. 13 I mean, they’re not aware how much it’s true—like, they’re not aware that in the current G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] negotiations, major decisions are being made that will have a tremendous impact on the world and on their lives, and neither they, nor the unions, nor Congress knows anything about them. But they get a sense of it, they sort of have a feel for it.

  And the point is, the left is doing virtually nothing to try to take advantage of this situation and turn the tremendous discontentedness in some kind of constructive direction. What I see on the left at least is pretty much the same story everywhere: tremendous divisiveness, narrowness of focus, intolerance, unwillingness to meet people on their own terms, plus inertia, and just madness of various kinds.

  And the reason for a lot of that is—well, I think you could sort of see some of the reasons. If you just take the Civil Rights Movement and look at its course, I think you get a pretty good idea of some of the reasons. In the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, in the late 1950s and early Sixties, there was tremendous courage and dedication, and huge numbers of people finally got involved, including all the way up to middle-class America. And it was successful: there were big victories in the South. And then somehow it stopped. Well, what happened? What happened was, you got restaurants integrated, and you got things like the Voting Rights Act of 1965—it was a little bit like what’s going on in South Africa now, although there it’s much more dramatic. And you were able to establish the forms that in general are accepted by the mainstream Establishment culture, and even by the business community—like, General Motors doesn’t have any stake in having restaurants segregated, in fact they’d rather have them not segregated, it’s more efficient. So all of that stuff worked, at least to a certain extent. It wasn’t easy—a lot of people got killed, it was very brutal and so on. But it worked. And then it stopped, and it frittered away, and in fact probably it’s regressed since then. And the reason is, it ran into class issues—and they’re hard. They require institutional change. There the Board of Directors of General Motors is not going to be happy, when you start dealing with class issues in the industrial centers.

  So at that point it stopped, and it frittered away, and also it went off into pretty self-destructive things—revolutionary slogans, carrying guns around, smashing windows, this and that—just because it ran into harder issues. And when you run into harder issues, it’s easy to look for an escape. And there are a lot of different escapes. You can escape by writing meaningless articles on some unintelligible version of academic radical feminism, or by becoming a conspiracy buff, or by working on some very narrowly focused issue, which may be important, but is so narrow that it’s never going to get anywhere or have any outreach. There are a lot of these temptations. And as the number of people becoming interested and involved has increased, since the issues are indeed hard, they’re not easy, there’s been a kind of chasm developing between the potentialities and the actual achievements.

  WOMAN: You don’t think the left is dealing with class issues?

  Not much. I mean, it’s not that nobody is. And they’re not the only issues that have to be dealt with, it’s just that they’re the most important ones—because they’re right at the core of the whole system of oppression. And also, they’re the hardest ones, because there you’re dealing with solid institutional structures where the core of private power is involved. I mean, other issues are hard too—like issues of patriarchy are hard. But they’re modifiable without changing the whole system of power. Class issues aren’t.

  MAN: Do you have any strategies for the left to be able to get more on common ground with the working class?

  Well, first of all, “worki
ng class” is pretty broad. I mean, anybody who gets a paycheck is in some sense “working class,” so there’s a sense in which a lot of managers are working class too—and in fact, they have pretty much the same interests these days: they’re getting canned as fast as everybody else is, and they’re worried about it. See, in the United States the word “class” is used in an unusual way: it’s supposed to have something to do with wealth. But in its traditional usage, and the way the word is used everywhere else, what it has to do with is your place in the whole system of decision-making and authority—so if you take orders, you’re “working class,” even if you’re wealthy.

  And how should the left be dealing with class issues? Well, we have to take that 83 percent of the population that thinks that the system is inherently unfair, and increase it to a larger percentage, then we simply help people get organized to change it. There are no special tactics for that, it’s just the usual education and organizing. Okay, so you get started doing it.

  Popular Education

  WOMAN: One thing that I’ve noticed in reading a number of your books, and a number of books by people like Holly Sklar and Michael Albert, is that it’s a standard practice on the left in trying to help educate people—because we are in the minority position—to document everything very thoroughly, to lay out very precise scholarly arguments, to marshal a lot of evidence and have a ton of citations. But the thing that bothers me about that is there are a lot of people who are shut out of that world.