by Noam Chomsky
There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people’s lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don’t think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they’re important—but dismantling the state system is a goal that’s a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what’s at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don’t have. In fact, that’s exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures—because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don’t have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.
So take something that’s been happening in recent years: devolution—that is, removing authority from the federal government down to the state governments. Well, in some circumstances, that would be a democratizing move which I would be in favor of—it would be a move away from central authority down to local authority. But that’s in abstract circumstances that don’t exist. Right now it’ll happen because moving decision-making power down to the state level in fact means handing it over to private power. See, huge corporations can influence and dominate the federal government, but even middle-sized corporations can influence state governments and play one state’s workforce off against another’s by threatening to move production elsewhere unless they get better tax breaks and so on. So under the conditions of existing systems of power, devolution is very anti-democratic; under other systems of much greater equality, devolution could be highly democratic—but these are questions which really can’t be discussed in isolation from the society as it actually exists.
So I think that it’s completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed, because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures.
Let me just give you an analogy. I don’t like to have armed police everywhere, I think it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, a number of years ago when I had little kids, there was a rabid raccoon running around our neighborhood biting children. Well, we tried various ways of getting rid of it—you know, “Have-A-Heart” animal traps, all this kind of stuff—but nothing worked. So finally we just called the police and had them do it: it was better than having the kids bitten by a rabid raccoon, right? Is there a contradiction there? No: in particular circumstances, you sometimes have to accept and use illegitimate structures.
Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around—it’s called corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it doesn’t protect them very well, because mostly it’s run by the corporations, but still it does have some limited effect—it can enforce regulatory measures under public pressure, let’s say, it can reduce dangerous toxic waste disposal, it can set minimal standards on health care, and so on. In fact, it has various things that it can do to improve the situation when there’s this huge rabid raccoon dominating the place. So, fine, I think we ought to get it to do the things it can do—if you can get rid of the raccoon, great, then let’s dismantle the federal government. But to say, “Okay, let’s just get rid of the federal government as soon as we possibly can,” and then let the private tyrannies take over everything—I mean, for an anarchist to advocate that is just outlandish, in my opinion. So I really don’t see any contradiction at all here.
Supporting these aspects of the governmental structures just seems to me to be part of a willingness to face some of the complexities of life for what they are—and the complexities of life include the fact that there are a lot of ugly things out there, and if you care about the fact that some kid in downtown Boston is starving, or that some poor person can’t get adequate medical care, or that somebody’s going to pour toxic waste in your backyard, or anything at all like that, well, then you try to stop it. And there’s only one institution around right now that can stop it. If you just want to be pure and say, “I’m against power, period,” well, okay, say, “I’m against the federal government.” But that’s just to divorce yourself from any human concerns, in my view. And I don’t think that’s a reasonable stance for anarchists or anyone else to take.
Pension Funds and the Law
MAN: Mr. Chomsky, if what I’ve been told is correct, almost half of publicly-owned stock in the United States is in privately-held pension trusts, such as union trust funds. I’m wondering, if restrictions like those under E.R.I.S.A. [the Employee Retirement Income Security Act] can be modified so that workers could control their own funds, do you think that it would be possible to support a collaborative or union-based or popularly-based effort to direct that money towards socially responsible investment—like away from companies that are breaking unions and so on?
Well, notice that whatever the numbers are, it’s huge—but that money is not in the hands of labor unions, it’s in the hands of Goldman Sachs [investment firm]. And in fact, if the government enforced the laws, the trustees of those pension funds would be in serious trouble right now—because they have violated their legal responsibility to invest those funds in safe investments. For instance, they are investing your pensions in things like junk bonds in Mexico—and the people making those investment decisions would be legally liable for that, if we applied our laws, because they have a trust to invest those funds in secure investments, and they don’t do it. They just do whatever they want with them. Now, they’re not going to be in trouble, because we don’t have a real justice system—we only go after poor people. But they should be, and in fact, I think the labor movement ought to ask for that now: like, Rubin, the guy who’s Secretary of the Treasury, he should probably be in jail just because of the Mexican economic collapse alone [in December 1994], which he allowed to happen. 30
But the point is, you could democratize the unions enough so that they could actually take control of their own resources. And that would be a very important step. I mean, there’s a lot of potential for activism and popular-based efforts there, you’re right. And it doesn’t have to stop at their own pensions, you know: what about the factories in which they work? Why should they be in the hands of private investors? That’s not a law of nature. Why should a corporation have the rights of an individual? 31 A corporation is a public trust: you go back just a century, and governments were taking away corporate charters because corporations weren’t living up to the “public interest.” 32 It’s a very recent idea that these totalitarian institutions should be totally unaccountable.
So, yes, workers ought to have control of their pension funds—but also everything else too: that is, the society ought to be democratized. And this is not a particularly radical idea, actually: you go back to the guys who founded the American Federation of Labor a century ago—the A.F.L. is not a flaming radical organization—they said, look, working people ought to control the places where they work, there’s no reason why they should be controlled by some rich guy out there who put some money into it and has nothing to do with it. 33 That’s true too, just like it’s true of pension funds—and that would be a move towards a democratic society, as was always understood in fact, until the independent working-class culture was eliminated in the United States. So pension funds are only a part of it: a big part, but only part.
MAN: What do you think the role of law is generally in the whole scheme of control?
Well, law is a bit like a printing press—it’s kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instrumen
ts of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things.
MAN: So you don’t think there’s any legal basis for the hegemony of American corporations, especially in the way that the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted to consider them individuals, with individual rights?
Well, you know, “legal basis” is a funny notion: what has a legal basis is a matter of power, not law—like, the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say anything about corporations. During the nineteenth century, there was just a change in the legal status of corporations—a change which would have absolutely appalled Adam Smith, or Thomas Jefferson, or any other Enlightenment thinker. In fact, Smith warned against it, and Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings of it—and what he said is, if what he called the “banks and moneyed incorporations” got the rights that they in fact ended up receiving, we would have a form of absolutism worse than the one we thought we were fighting against in the American Revolution. 34 And those rights simply were granted—they weren’t granted by Congress, and in other countries they weren’t granted by Parliaments; they were granted by judges, lawyers, corporate representatives, and others, completely outside the democratic system. And they simply created another world—they created a world of absolutist power which was very new. 35
There’s a lot of good work on this by what are called Critical Legal historians, Morton Horwitz at Harvard and others. Also, Oxford University Press has a book by a historian at the University of California named Charles Sellers, who discusses some of this: it’s called The Market Revolution. 36 That’s the basic story, though: these laws were made by a big power-play, completely outside of popular control. Okay, as usual, the guys with the guns are the ones that decide what the law is.
Conspiracy Theories
MAN: Noam, you mentioned earlier how “conspiracy theories” take up a lot of energy in the left movements these days, particularly on the West Coast and with respect to the Kennedy assassination—and you said that in your view, it’s a totally wasted effort. Do you really feel there’s nothing at all worthwhile in that kind of inquiry?
Well, let me put it this way. Every example we find of planning decisions in the society is a case where some people got together and tried to use whatever power they could draw upon to achieve a result—if you like, those are “conspiracies.” That means that almost everything that happens in the world is a “conspiracy.” If the Board of Directors of General Motors gets together and decides what kind of car to produce next year, that’s a conspiracy. Every business decision, every editorial decision is a conspiracy. If the Linguistics Department I work in decides who to appoint next year, that’s a conspiracy.
Okay, obviously that’s not interesting: all decisions involve people. So the real question is, are there groupings well outside the structures of the major institutions of the society which go around them, hijack them, undermine them, pursue other courses without an institutional base, and so on and so forth? And that’s a question of fact: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power?
Well, as I look over history, I don’t find much of that. I mean, there are some cases—for instance, at one point a group of Nazi generals thought of assassinating Hitler. Okay, that’s a conspiracy. But things like that are real blips on the screen, as far as I can see. Now, if people want to spend time studying the group of Nazi generals who decided it was time to get rid of Hitler, that’s a fine topic for a monograph—maybe somebody will write a thesis about it. But we’re not going to learn anything about the world from it, at least nothing that generalizes to the next case—it’s all going to be historically contingent and specific; it’ll show you how one particular group of people acted under particular circumstances. Fine.
And if you look at the place where investigation of “conspiracies” has absolutely flourished, modern American history, I think what’s notable is the absence of such cases—at least as I read the record, they almost never happen. I mean, occasionally you’ll find something like the Reaganites, with their off-the-shelf subversive and terrorist activities, but that was sort of a fringe operation—and in fact, part of the reason why a lot of it got exposed so quickly is because the institutions are simply too powerful to tolerate very much of that stuff. As far as the Pentagon goes, sure, the Services will push their own interests—but typically they do it in pretty transparent ways.
Or take the C.I.A., which is considered the source of a lot of these conspiracies: we have a ton of information about it, and as I read the information, the C.I.A. is basically just an obedient branch of the White House. I mean, sure, the C.I.A. has done things around the world—but as far as we know, it hasn’t done anything on its own. There’s very little evidence—in fact, I don’t know of any—that the C.I.A. is some kind of rogue elephant, you know, off on its own doing things. What the record shows is that the C.I.A. is just an agency of the White House, which sometimes carries out operations for which the Executive branch wants what’s called “plausible deniability”: in other words, if something goes wrong, we don’t want it to look like we did it, those guys in the C.I.A. did it, and we can throw some of them to the wolves if we need to. 37 That’s basically the role of the C.I.A., along with mostly just collection of information.
It’s the same with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, all these other things that people are racing around searching for conspiracy theories about—they’re “nothing” organizations. Of course they’re there, obviously rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together—that’s not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with the way the institutions actually function.
The Kennedy-assassination cult is probably the most striking case. I mean, you have all these people doing super-scholarly intensive research, and trying to find out just who talked to whom, and what the exact contours were of this supposed high-level conspiracy—it’s all complete nonsense. As soon as you look into the various theories, they always collapse, there’s just nothing there. 38 But in many places, the left has just fallen apart on the basis of these sheer cults.
MAN: There’s perhaps one exception, though—what about Martin Luther King’s assassination?
That’s interesting—see, that’s the one case where you can imagine pretty plausible reasons why people would have wanted to kill him, and I would not be in the least surprised if there in fact was a real conspiracy behind that one, probably a high-level conspiracy. I mean, the mechanisms were there, maybe they would have hired somebody from the Mafia or something to do it—but that conspiracy theory is perfectly plausible, I think. And interestingly, I’m not aware that there’s been very much inquiry into it—or if there has been, I haven’t heard about it. 39 But in the case of the one that everybody’s excited about—Kennedy—I mean, nobody’s even come up with a plausible reason.
In fact, that’s a pretty dramatic contrast, isn’t it: the case of the King assassination is on its face very plausible, and the case of the Kennedy assassination is on its face extremely implausible—yet look at the difference in treatment.
WOMAN: Do you have any ideas why that might be?
Well, there are a lot of things in a way “conspiring” to make the Kennedy assassination an attractive topic these days. I mean, the Kennedy administration was in many ways very similar to the Reagan administration—in policy and programs—but they did do one smart thing that was different: they sort of buttered up the intellectual class, as compared with the Reaganites, who just treated them with contempt. So they gave sort of an appearance of sharing power (it was never real) to the kinds of people who write books and articles, and make movies, and all of those things—and the result is, Camelot has always had a very beautiful image. And somehow it’s all succeeded in getting most of the population to believe the lies about Kennedy. I mean, even today you can go do
wn to poor rural black areas in the South and find pictures of him on the walls. Kennedy’s role in the Civil Rights Movement was not pretty. But somehow the imagery has succeeded, even if the reality was never there. 40
And certainly a lot of things have gone wrong in the last thirty years, for all sorts of independent reasons. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement made great achievements, but it never lived up to the hopes that many people invested in it. The anti-war movement made achievements, but it didn’t end war. Real wages have been declining for twenty years. 41 People are working harder, they have to work longer hours, they have less security—things are just looking bad for a lot of people, especially young people. I mean, very few people expect the future for their children to be anything like what they had, and entry-level wages in the United States have just declined radically in the last fifteen years—for instance, wages you get for your first job after high school are now down 30 percent for males and 18 percent for females over 1980, and that just kind of changes your picture of life. 42 And one could easily go on. But the fact is, a lot of things have happened that aren’t very pretty. And in this kind of situation, it’s very easy to fall into the belief that we had a hero, and we had a wonderful country, and we had this guy who was going to lead us, we had the messiah—then they shot him down and ever since then everything’s been illegitimate. So really there have to be serious efforts to get past this, I think.
The Decision to Get Involved