by Noam Chomsky
That’s right.
WOMAN: They’re not academics, they haven’t been trained in this way of making arguments. I really wish that there was something out there in the middle ground that would not just try to persuade, but would also teach about argumentation. Somebody told me they used to do things like that in the 1930s, with popular education.
Absolutely—in fact, that was one of the big things in the 1930s for left intellectuals to be involved in. I mean, good scientists, well-known, important scientists like Bernal [British physicist] and others just felt that it was a part of their obligation to the human species to do popular science. So you had very good popular books being written about physics, and about mathematics and so on—for instance, there’s a book called Mathematics for the Million which is an example of it. 14
WOMAN: Yeah, I’ve heard of that.
Well, that guy came out of the left. And the point is, those people just felt that this kind of knowledge should be shared by everyone. In fact, one of the things I find most astonishing about the current left-intellectual scene is that what the counterparts of these people today are telling the general public is, “You don’t have to know about this stuff, it’s all just some white male power-play—and besides, astrology’s the same as physics: it’s all just a discourse, and a text, and this that and the other thing, so forget about it, do what comes natural; if you like astrology, it’s astrology.” I mean, this is so different in character from what was just assumed automatically in the days when there were live popular movements, it’s amazing.
If you’re privileged enough to, say, know mathematics, and you think you’re a part of the general world, obviously you should try to help other people understand it. And the way you do it, for example, is by writing books like Mathematics for the Million, or by giving talks in elementary schools and things like that. In fact, involvement in popular education goes well beyond writing books: it means having groups, giving talks, workers’ education, all sorts of stuff. And the fact that people on the left aren’t doing those things today I think is a real tragedy—and also part of the really self-destructive aspect of a lot of what’s been happening, in my opinion. These are things that have always been a part of live political movements.
In fact, workers’ education used to be a huge thing in the United States. For example, A. J. Muste [American pacifist and activist] worked in workers’ education for a long time, and the working-class schools he helped set up were significant and big—people who hadn’t gone through elementary school came to them, and really learned a lot. Incidentally, Muste was one of the most important people of this century in the United States—of course, nobody knows about him, because he did the wrong things, but he was really a leading figure in the sort of left-libertarian movement. 15
John Dewey [American philosopher and educator] was also very much involved in popular education, and part of it was an attempt to do just this kind of thing. So Dewey worked with Jane Addams [American social worker and suffragist] and others in Chicago during the Progressive Period on community development programs and so on—in fact, the whole progressive school movement came out of that, and it very much had this kind of democratizing commitment and a commitment to industrial democracy, which was considered a central part of it all. 16
In fact, there were schools like this set up all over the place—for example, in England several of the colleges in the big universities, including Oxford, are working-class colleges: they came out of the labor movement, and are directed to educating working people. And even right around here there’s Cape Cod Community College, which like a lot of community colleges has people teaching in it whose interests really are this. Community colleges and urban colleges in general have mostly working-class students, and they can be a very good way to reach people. A lot of activists have in fact chosen to do that—there are people teaching in community colleges all over the place for precisely these reasons.
So you’re right: there really ought to be more efforts put into things like these—they would be a very important step towards reconstituting the kinds of popular movements we need.
Third-Party Politics
WOMAN: What do you think about working through the electoral process as a strategy for activists to pursue at this point? Is that a viable way to spend one’s energy, if ultimately what we’re trying to change is the basic structure of the economy?
Well, I think it’s possible to work through the electoral process. But the point we have to remember is, things will happen through the electoral process only if there are popular forces in motion in the society which are active enough to be threatening to power.
So for example, take the Wagner Act of 1935 [i.e. the National Labor Relations Act], which gave American labor the right to organize for the first time. 17 It was a long time coming—most of Europe had the same rights about fifty years earlier—and it was voted through by Congress. But it wasn’t voted through by Congress because Franklin Roosevelt liked it, or because he was a liberal or anything like that—in fact, Roosevelt was a conservative, he had no particular interest in labor. 18 The Wagner Act was voted through by Congress because the people who do have power in the society recognized that they’d better give workers something, or else there was going to be real trouble. So therefore it was voted through, and workers got the right to organize—and they kept that right as long as they were willing to struggle for it, then they basically lost it, it doesn’t get enforced much anymore.
So you can get things through the electoral process, but the electoral process is really only a surface phenomenon: a lot of other things have to be happening in the society for it to be very meaningful.
MAN: What about trying to get proportional representation in the United States as a way of maybe developing a viable labor party, which could help articulate more popular interests and broaden the range of political debate generally? [Proportional representation refers to an electoral system by which legislative seats are assigned according to the proportion of votes that each party receives rather than by majority vote in each district, which encourages the proliferation of parties and gives minority voters better representation. 19] It seems to me that in Canada, the fact that they have a labor party makes people somewhat more attuned to issues that Americans largely miss, like workers’ issues for example.
That’s right—Canada’s an interesting case: it’s a pretty similar society to us, except different somehow. It’s much more humane. It has the same corporate rule, the same capitalist institutions, all of that’s the same—but it’s just a much more humane place. They have a kind of social contract that we don’t have, like they have this national health-care system which makes us look bad because it’s so efficient. And that is related to their having a labor-based party, I think—the New Democratic Party in Canada [N.D.P.] isn’t really a labor party, but it’s kind of labor-based. However, that party’s ability to enter the political system in Canada wasn’t a result of having proportional representation, it was due to the same thing that would be necessary to get any kind of change like proportional representation in the first place: a lot of serious popular organizing.
Look, if you have a political movement that’s strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it’ll get accommodated in some fashion—as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren’t going to matter very much anymore. So I think that pushing for something like proportional representation could be worth doing if it’s part of a wider organizing campaign. But if it’s just an effort to try to put some people into Congress and that’s it, then it’s pretty much a waste of your time. I mean, there is never any point in getting some person into office unless you can continue forcing them to be your representative, and they will only continue to be your representative as long as you are active and threatening enough to make them do what you want, otherwise they’re going to stop being your representative.
So you can vote for Gerry Studds [liberal Massachusetts Congressman] if you’re from around here, and he’ll do some nice things—but he also voted for N.A.F.T.A. [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. And that was against the will of a lot of his constituents—just because those constituents weren’t making it clear enough to their representative what he had to do. I mean, the anti-N.A.F.T.A. activity that went on in the country was important, and it went way beyond anything I ever thought it would, but it still wasn’t enough to get people like Gerry Studds to come along when it was needed—and he’s a good guy, like I gave money to the Studds campaign. It’s just that when you weighed all of the pressures, there wasn’t enough of a popular movement to get them to come through when it mattered.
This was also part of the problem with the Rainbow Coalition, in my opinion [progressive political organization led by Jesse Jackson]. I mean, Jesse Jackson was in a very strong position a couple years ago with the Rainbow Coalition, and he had a choice. His choice was, “Am I going to use this opportunity to help create a continuing grassroots organization which will keep on working after the election, or am I going to use it as my own personal vehicle of political promotion?” And he more or less chose the latter—so it died. Therefore it was a complete waste of time: anybody who spent time working on that campaign was wasting their time, because it was used as an electoral platform, and that never makes sense. I mean, whenever somebody says “I want to become President,” you can forget it—as President, they won’t be any different from George Bush.
So as far as I can see, getting proportional representation in the United States today would have basically no effect, the effect would be essentially zilch—just because there’s nothing around to take advantage of it. On the other hand, if it was passed at a time when you had popular grassroots organizations of the kind that developed, say, in Haiti in the late 1980s, sure, then it could make a difference. But of course, it’s only under those circumstances that you would ever get proportional representation in the first place.
So in my view, any of these things could be fine if they’re being used as organizing tools to try to get things going: they’re a waste of time if you actually take them seriously in themselves, but if they’re understood simply as a part of larger popular struggles—so this is what you’re focusing on right now, but the purpose isn’t to get some words written down somewhere or some person into office, but rather it’s to get people to understand the importance of the words and the need to keep fighting for them—yeah, then it can mean something.
WOMAN: So you think that trying to develop a third party here might he worth doing?
Sure, absolutely—I think that could be a very important step. Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage—exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton’s proposals for “managed competition” [put forward in 1993]. 21 But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming—but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.
Now, in the United States there are also a lot of popular organizations, but they’re all separate, there’s no framework to start bringing them together. So developing a popularly-based third party here could be a very important step towards that, and I think it should be pursued.
In fact, there have even been some encouraging developments in recent years in getting something like that off the ground—I’m thinking of the emergence of the New Party, specifically, which is sort of trying to follow the Canadian model. So again, I don’t think that we should have any illusions about working through the political system, and I’m not much of a fan of political parties—but the New Party is really the first serious third-party alternative that I’ve seen in the United States: seriously thought-out, trying to create grassroots structures, using politics the way it ought to be used, as an organizing and pressuring technique, and hoping ultimately to get to the point where it could have real influence. Now, they’re not going to make structural reforms—that requires much bigger changes, changes in the institutions. I mean, when the N.D.P. got into power in Ontario in 1990, they couldn’t really do anything, they just carried out the normal right-wing policies, and in the next national election [in 1993] they got like two votes, nobody wanted to bother with them anymore. But even given those limitations, I still think it’s important for a country to have something like that—there’s a lot of potential to help make people’s lives better, and it certainly could be a basis for moving further and pressing for larger changes.
In fact, that same kind of thinking extends to electoral politics in general, in my view. I mean, right now voting decisions in the United States are pretty subtle tactical matters, in which the policy differences between the two major parties are not great. But just because I say they’re “tactical,” I don’t mean to demean it: the decisions that have serious human consequences and matter for people are mostly tactical judgments, after all. Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn’t affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy—and one of those decisions is whether you should vote, and if so, who should you vote for. And that can be an extremely important decision, with significant implications.
So for example, we have a national election coming up in the United States soon [in 1996], and I don’t really know of any very strong arguments one way or another about who to vote for—but that’s not to say that that judgment is an unimportant one: I think it’s very important. I mean, I’ll vote for Clinton, holding my nose—but the reason has nothing at all to do with big policy issues; there I can’t really see too much difference. What it has to do with are things like who’s going to get appointed to the judiciary: there are some differences between the Republicans and Democrats on questions like that, and who’s appointed to the judiciary happens to have a big effect on people’s lives. They may be small policy differences when you look at the big picture—but remember, there’s a huge amount of power out there, and small policy differences implementing a huge amount of power can make big differences to people. Or there might be a slight difference in things like the earned income tax credit [a tax refund program for poor working individuals and families]. Okay, that makes a lot of difference for people whose kids are hungry in downtown Boston, say. So that’ll be my decision in this election—again, holding my nose. And that’s the
way it is at the upper levels of our political system generally, I think.
Actually, one way for third parties to address this situation is to run “fusion” candidates—meaning, you have your own third-party ballot-line which stands for whatever you stand for, say for social-democratic-type programs, but then you have that ballot-line vote go to one of the main-party candidates in the election, based on these sort of tactical decisions. That’s possible in some jurisdictions. And it’s a compromise way for a third party to preserve a genuine policy identity and commitment, while nevertheless letting people make the small tactical voting choices that can make a real difference to people—and I think it’s a very plausible compromise.
Boycotts
MAN: Do you think it would help to undermine corporate power if people were to begin making consumer choices that directly affect companies like United Fruit [renamed Chiquita], which are the most actively involved in exploiting Third World countries—like, stop buying their bananas, say, stop buying their coffee?
Again, if only a few people do it, it isn’t going to have any effect—it just means that some guy picking bananas in East Costa Rica isn’t going to have enough money to feed his children tomorrow. But if it’s done on a large enough scale that it can have an impact on the corporate structure, sure, then it could mean something.
I mean, suppose you stopped consuming altogether—you can live on subsistence farming in the United States in a lot of places, so suppose you did that. The effect on the general society would be exactly as if you decided to commit suicide: it would simply go on as before, but without you. Bear in mind that a lot of these things about “let’s really make a change by withdrawing from the world and living a decent life” have precisely the social effect of suicide—well, that’s a little too extreme, because people might notice and become interested and involved, so maybe it’s a little bit more than suicide. But not a lot. And in fact, the only thing that does differentiate it from suicide is when you use it as an organizing tool. 22 Otherwise not, otherwise in fact it is just like suicide.