Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  WOMAN: Would you ever advocate a boycott as a tactic, though, assuming that it was coordinated and on a large enough scale?

  Well, tactics depend on the specific situations you’re faced with—I don’t think you can say very much worthwhile about them in the abstract. So there might be a particular moment when a boycott of something would be helpful. But as a general matter, I don’t think they really make a lot of sense, frankly.

  I mean, suppose we got millions of people to stop buying: what would happen? The economic system barely functions as it is—I mean, the contemporary economic system is a complete catastrophe, an absolutely catastrophic failure. For instance, the International Labor Organization recently gave its latest estimate of unemployment worldwide—“unemployment” they define as meaning not having enough work to meet a subsistence level, so maybe you can sell some handkerchiefs at a street corner or something, but you don’t have enough work to survive on your own. They estimate that at about 30 percent of the world’s population—which makes it a lot worse than the Great Depression. 23 Alright? Now, there’s a ton of work to be done in the world—everywhere you look there’s work that ought to be done. And the people who don’t have work would be delighted to do it. So what you’ve got is a huge number of idle hands, a vast amount of work that ought to be done, and an economic system that is incapable of putting those two things together. Okay, absolutely catastrophic failure. Boycotts aren’t going to overcome that failure, they’re just going to make it worse.

  So you know, they may be worthwhile as a tactic at some point, but what’s really required is just a complete rethinking of the entire nature of economic interactions and structures—there really is no other way to overcome this whole massive failure of the economy.

  “A Praxis”

  MAN: Dr. Chomsky, as I listen to you talk and give your marvelous analysis of the destructions of capitalism and American foreign policy, and even as I hear you today give us some of your perspectives on more practical issues of activism, I’m often struck by what I hear to be an underlying generality to your advice: it seems there’s almost the absence of a concrete program. Don’t you think that it would be helpful to give people a little bit more guidance about what to do specifically, especially since people are so directionless these days?

  What I’m saying is, I don’t see a revolutionary “praxis” in your politics—and I’m wondering why that is.

  Well, when you say there’s no “praxis,” I don’t exactly know what that means. There are plenty of things that can be done; I don’t think they have to be described with fancy terms. And we just do the things that can be done, the kinds of things that are the next stage. There aren’t any general formulas about that—you just ask where you are, what are the problems that exist, where are people ready to move? And then you try to do something with them. There’s a whole spectrum of actions you can take, and there’s no simple answer as to which ones should have the priority—people judge differently.

  But I’d be very skeptical if somebody comes along with a “praxis”—you know, some formula saying, “Here’s the way we’re supposed to do it.” I’d be really skeptical about that, if I were you.

  The War on Unions

  WOMAN: Noam, I know a lot of people fighting for Workmen’s Compensation [i.e. for on-the-job injuries] and things like that, and sometimes they’ve said to me, “If I try to get together with other workers to press for changes, I’m going to get in trouble, I’ll lose my job—what the hell can I do except look out for Number One?” They’re not happy about that option, nobody’s happy about saying, “All I can do is duck and cover and look out for myself, never be loyal to anybody else or support other workers”—it’s just that there are these consequences that they can’t deal with. I don’t have an answer for them, I really don’t know what to say to that.

  Yeah, there really is no answer, unless there are organizations—in this case, unions—that are strong enough to fight for them. I mean, if you don’t have solidarity and organization and you’re just out there alone fighting a big system of power, there’s not very much that you can do. It’s like if you’re walking down the streets of Haiti [under the military junta] and somebody comes up to you and says, “What should I do?”—the answer “Go attack the police station” is not very helpful.

  The only thing that these people looking for workmen’s comp can do is be involved in strong enough organizations, and in this case that means unions—or maybe they can get somebody from the National Lawyers Guild [progressive law organization] or something to help them work through the legal structures. Short of having an organization that you can be part of that will defend you, though, there’s really not much you can do—and that’s precisely why there’s been such a passionate effort by the business world and the government to try to destroy unions. I mean, ever since the Wagner Act first got passed in 1935, there has been a sustained campaign in the United States to destroy the labor movement and to overcome this tragedy. And there’s a very good reason for that: if people are all alone, they really are defenseless, they just assume “I can only look out for myself,” and then that builds up a real privatization of interests, which in turn contributes to their oppression. But of course, the dynamic also goes the other way too—when you organize with other people, you develop your sense of solidarity and sympathy, and that helps break down the oppression.

  In fact, this all goes back to James Madison’s point again: there are “parchment barriers” which say that you can’t fire workers for trying to organize, there are federal laws that make that completely illegal. But because for whatever reason people have not been able to fight to maintain those laws, the government just doesn’t enforce them anymore. I mean, the reason the people you’re talking about can be fired is that the government is a criminal operation: it doesn’t enforce the laws. Therefore employers have this real weapon over people’s heads, which is a very powerful one, as you say.

  Actually, there was an interesting article about this in Business Week a little while ago. It was about the destruction of unions in the United States, and what they pointed out—kind of casually, not making a big point of it—is that part of the way that unions have been destroyed here is just by a huge increase in illegal firings, particularly during the 1980s, The Wagner Act makes that flatly illegal, but since the federal government is a criminal operation and doesn’t enforce the laws, employers just do whatever they feel like. The same thing was true with industrial accidents: they shot way up in the 1980s, because the Reagan administration just refused to enforce the laws regulating workplace safety. And this is all right out in the open—like, Business Week says it straight out: “illegal firings,” nobody’s trying to cover it up.

  WOMAN: Can’t employers fire employees “at will” in the U.S., though?

  No—if employees are trying to organize and they get fired, that’s against the law, it’s flatly illegal. 25

  WOMAN: It’s tough to prove, though.

  It’s tough to prove if the government won’t prosecute, or if the courts won’t hear it, or if the National Labor Relations Board is set up in such a way that you’ve got to work for five years before your case ever gets heard—by which time everybody’s either gone away or dropped dead or something. I mean, these are all just various techniques of state criminality to evade very clear legislation. In fact, the United States has been censured by the International Labor Organization for violating international labor standards—it’s probably the only industrial society the I.L.O. has ever censured, because this is a U.N. agency, so it’s largely paid for by the U.S., and they never say anything bad about the people who pay their wages. But the I.L.O. in 1991 censured the United States for violating international labor standards at the time of the Caterpillar strike, when the government permitted the corporation to bring in scabs [workers who cross the picket-line] to break the strike. 26

  And the same sorts of things are happening under Bill Clinton too. So one of the campaign issues t
hat got Clinton a lot of labor support in 1992 was that he promised to put some teeth in the law that makes it illegal for employers to hire scabs—which basically destroys any strike. I mean, when you’ve got a huge unemployed labor force, and you don’t have a sense of working-class solidarity in the population, and a ton of people are desperate, if you go on strike and get replaced by scabs, okay, that’s the end of the strike—so that kills strikes. Now, this is unheard of: no modern country permits this. In fact, at the time that the I.L.O. censured the U.S., only the U.S. and South Africa allowed it, though by now I think it’s spreading for all kinds of reasons, especially in England. But one of Clinton’s big campaign promises in ’92 was that he was going to put a stop to this practice—and just now he’s sort of backed off from that, under the threat of a filibuster [the practice of blocking legislation in Congress by indefinitely prolonging debate]. The people in Congress who were pushing it said, rightly or wrongly, that they couldn’t overcome a filibuster—and so he stopped. 27

  Well, that’s again the same interaction: there are already laws on the books that make hiring scabs illegal, but laws only get enforced if people are willing to fight for them, otherwise they don’t get enforced. I mean, it’s nice to have the laws, but it’s nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights—it’s not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing, as in this case.

  There are also a number of other tricks which are being used all around the world to destroy unions. So for example, in England under Margaret Thatcher [Prime Minister from 1979 to ’90], which was very similar to Reaganite America in many ways, there was also a major effort to try to destroy the labor movement—and by now it’s pretty much gone there too. It’s not quite as bad as the United States yet, but it’s going that way. And remember, the labor movement used to be very strong in England, just like in Canada. In fact, the British labor movement led the way in a lot of respects in pushing through the wave of modern social reform after the Second World War. But now employers in England are allowed to pay differential wages to workers depending on whether or not they unionize—in other words they can say, “If you refuse to join the union I’ll increase your wages; if you join the union I’ll lower your wages.” Well, that’s devastating for unions.

  Or take another trick they just instituted there, which is absolutely lethal for organizing. Union dues have traditionally been paid by a check-off: you agree that some part of your salary is going to be deducted for union dues, just like some part of it gets deducted for Social Security. Well, the Conservative John Major government in England just passed an administrative regulation or something that requires all union members to regularly renew their authorization for this check-off—meaning the British labor movement now has to reach six million people somewhere and periodically get them to sign a statement saying, “I agree to continue doing this.” Alright, that is just an incredible burden. Even the mainstream British press pointed out that if you tried to do that to banks, like make banks regularly get written agreements from everybody they’ve ever lent money to or something that they’re still going to pay it back, the financial system would probably collapse. 28 And the labor movement mostly runs by unpaid volunteers—they don’t have the money to pay people, so it’s usually volunteers who keep the unions going. So now those volunteers have to take time off from their other activities to try to round up six million people from all around the country, who’ve moved since you last heard of them and this and that, just to get them to sign some statement they’ve already signed before allowing the unions to make this check-off of dues.

  Well, that’s the kind of thing that’s been happening all over the place in recent years—and it’s all going to keep on going. I mean, there are all kinds of ways in which power can try to destroy popular organizations: it doesn’t have to be death squads like it is in the Third World. And unless there is enough popular pressure and organizing to overcome it—and in fact, progress—they’ll win. So I don’t know how many of you have tried to organize these days, but it’s extremely hard—partly just because there are a lot of barriers that have been set up to make it very difficult to do, many of them instituted in the 1980s. But they’re obstacles we’re just going to have to overcome.

  Inner-City Schools

  WOMAN: Noam, a number of activists I know are on welfare, and their children are going to public schools that increasingly are resembling prisons: there are armed guards in the halls, there’s a high level of violence. And I know some of these kids, they’re really brutalized—if they’re not chronically depressed, then they’re violent: violent in language, violent in fact. One of the mothers recently told me—and she’s a pretty radical person—that the conservative “School Choice Movement” [whereby the state would subsidize tuition at private institutions instead of administering public schools] really is appealing to her. It surprised me, but she said, “The left isn’t addressing the problem of the schools, the left is sentimental about public education.” I’m wondering what you think about that?

  I think there’s a lot of truth to it. I mean, it’s the same with crime—people are really scared, especially people in poor neighborhoods. It’s not so bad where I live, in the fancy suburbs, but if you live in a poor neighborhood, it’s frightening—unpleasant things can happen to you and your children. And when it’s frightening, people want something to protect themselves—and if protecting yourself means having armed guards all around, or calling for more use of the death penalty or something, well, then you’ll go for that. If the choices are narrowed to your child being attacked in the halls and getting a rotten education, or having “private choices”—sure, people will pick the “private choices.” But the task of the left is to extend those options, to let people know that there is another option, the option of a decent life: which is neither schools as prisons, nor pull yourself out and let everybody else stay in the prison—which is what the whole “privatization of education” story is really about.

  But sure: if people can’t see any other alternatives, they’ll say “I’ll pull myself out.” In fact, I did the same thing. Why do I live in the suburbs? Because my wife and I wanted our kids to go to a good school, first person to tell you. Of course I did that, and people who have that option will do it—but the idea is to set up a system in which people don’t ever have to face that narrow set of alternatives, all of them awful.

  I do think it’s true, though, that at this point the left is basically offering nothing in the way of alternatives. What it ought to be getting across is the message, “Look, this is not the full range of alternatives, there are others”—and then it should present the others. And the others are not Utopian. I mean, just look at the history of inner-city schools in the United States: there was a period, not so far back, when many of the inner-city schools here were extremely good—in fact, some of the black inner-city schools in Washington had among the highest college-acceptance rates in the country. 29 Or take my own family, for example: they were immigrants from Eastern Europe—not peasants, but from a very poor Eastern European background—and they went through ordinary city schools in New York, some of them went to the City College, and they got very good educations. In fact, the City College of New York used to be one of the best schools in the country: public city school, no reason why it shouldn’t be.

  So good public education can certainly be achieved—but of course, like everything else, it’s going to depend on the general social and economic structure in which it operates. I mean, it’s true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities—but they’re destroying them because of a social structure that we’ve just got to change, from the bottom up. And yes, until people can see some hope of changing it, they’re going to pick from within the rotten set of options that are being presented to them.

  Defending the Welfare State

  WOMAN: Noam, since you’re an anarchist and often say that you oppose the existence of the
nation-state itself and think it’s incompatible with true socialism, does that make you at all reluctant to defend welfare programs and other social services which are now under attack from the right wing, and which the right wing wants to dismantle?

  Well, it’s true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power—and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don’t think there’s any contradiction there—none at all, really.

  For example, take the so-called “welfare state.” What’s called the “welfare state” is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on—and as I’ve been saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn “personal responsibility” by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don’t agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it’s grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today’s world, that’s going to have to involve working through the state system; it’s not the only case.

  So despite the anarchist “vision,” I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended—in fact, defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that’s being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society.