by Noam Chomsky
In fact, it’s gotten to the point where some major corporations don’t even worry about strikes anymore, they see them as an opportunity to destroy unions. For instance, the Caterpillar corporation recently broke an eighteen-month strike in Decatur, Illinois [from June 1994 to December 1995], and part of the way they did it was by developing excess production capacity in foreign countries. See, major corporations have a ton of capital now, and one of the things they’ve been able to do with it is to build up extra overseas production capacity. So Caterpillar has been building plants in Brazil—where they get far cheaper labor than in the United States—and then they can use that production capability to fill their international orders in the event of a strike in the U.S. So they didn’t really mind the strike in Decatur, because it gave them an opportunity to finally break the union through this international strategy. 72 That’s something that’s relatively new, and given this increasing centralization of power in the international economy, and the ability of big transnational corporations to play one national workforce against another to drive down work standards everywhere, there just has to be international solidarity today if there’s going to be any hope—and that means real international solidarity.
Another thing that has to happen for an international trade union movement to really be successful, in my opinion, is that it is simply going to have to be started from the ground up and be run by its participants. And that kind of serious organizing is something that is very difficult to do. It’s going to be particularly tricky in the United States—because the labor leadership here has traditionally been almost completely divorced from the workforce. So take a look at the world-wide destruction of unions after the Second World War: that’s had a really major impact on working conditions throughout the world, and some of the people who were doing it were in fact the American labor leadership at the time—they were a big part of the whole effort to break up the Italian unions, and the Japanese unions, and the French unions, and so on. 73
If you look back to the history of the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe, American planners were very intent on preventing the rise of popular-democratic movements there which would have been based in the former anti-fascist resistance, which had a lot of prestige right then. And the reason was, the world in general was very social-democratic after the war, especially as a result of the anti-fascist struggles that had taken place. And with the traditional order discredited and a whole lot of radical-democratic ideas around, powerful interests in the United States were extremely concerned that a unified labor movement could develop in a place like Germany or Japan.
Actually, the same kind of problem also existed at home right then as well: the U.S. population was very social-democratic after the war—it was extremely pro-union, it wanted more government involvement in regulating industry, probably a majority thought there should even be public industry—and business was terrified by it, they were very scared. They in fact said in their publications things like, “We have about five or six years to save the private enterprise system.” 74 Well, one thing they did was to launch a huge propaganda program in the United States, aimed at reversing these attitudes. 75 It was actually called at the time part of “the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” who have to be “indoctrinated in the capitalist story”; that’s a standard straight quote from the P.R. literature. 76 So in the early 1950s, the Advertising Council [an organization begun during World War II and funded by the business community to assist the government with propaganda services at home] was spending huge amounts of money to propagandize for what they called “the American way.” 77 The public relations budget for the National Association of Manufacturers I think went up by about a factor of twenty. 78 About a third of the textbooks in schools were simply provided by business. 79 They had 20 million people a week watching propaganda films about worker-management unity, after the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed propaganda to be shown to basically captive audiences in companies. 80 They continued on with the “scientific methods of strikebreaking” that had been developed in the late 1930s: devoting huge resources into propaganda instead of goon-squads and breaking knees. 81 And it was all tied up with the “anti-Communist” crusade at the time—that’s the true meaning of what’s referred to as “McCarthyism,” which started well before Joseph McCarthy got involved and was really launched by business and liberal members of the Democratic Party and so on. 82 It was a way of using fear and jingoism to try to undermine labor rights and functioning democracy.
And the point is, the leadership of the U.S. labor movement was right in the center of the whole post-war destruction of unions, internationally. In fact, if you look back at their records, which are very fascinating, one of the things that they were most afraid of when they helped to smash the Italian unions, for example, was that they were just too democratic—they wanted them to be more like American unions, and they said so. “American unions” means the A.F.L. leadership sits in a room somewhere and none of the workforce knows what’s going on, the leaders make the decisions, then they go out and have lunch with some guy in the government or a corporation—that’s the way a union’s supposed to work here. The trouble is, the Italian unions weren’t like that. I might be exaggerating it a little—but if you look back at these guys’ records, they say it in roughly those words, actually. 83
Well, when you have a history of labor leadership like that, it’s another reason why reconstituting a union movement here is simply going to have to start from the bottom up—and I don’t think that’s an impossible job. It’s certainly been done under much harsher conditions than we face. I mean, if it’s possible in El Salvador to organize a union when you’ve got death squads running after you and murdering you, and then we ask, “Is this too hard for us?”—it’s kind of like a joke. If it’s not happening, it’s because people aren’t doing it: it’s not because it’s too hard, it’s because people aren’t doing it.
So take Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Hemisphere. I don’t know if any of you have ever traveled to Haiti, but if you go there, you can barely believe it—I’ve gone to a lot of parts of the Third World, and Haiti is just something else. But in Haiti in the late 1980s, under extremely repressive and impoverished conditions, Haitian peasants and slum-dwellers were able to create an organized civil society: they succeeded in creating unions, and grassroots organizations, and a whole network of popular groupings which achieved such strength that, with no resources at all, they were able to take over the government. Now, it turns out they immediately got smashed by a military coup which we were assisting—but that shows you what people can do in the world. 84 If you read the American press when the coup collapsed [in 1994], they were all saying, “Now we have to go down and teach lessons in democracy to the Haitians”—but anybody except a complete commissar ought to have burst out in ridicule at that. We have to learn about democracy from the Haitians, Haitian peasants have a lot to teach us about democracy, they show how it really works.
But the point is, if you can do it in Haiti, and if you can do it in El Salvador, you can certainly do it right now in the United States—we are much better off than those people.
So you’re right, it’s certainly not going to be a walk-over—but I don’t really see any reason why these things are beyond our reach. And I should say that if they are beyond our reach, we’re all in trouble—bad trouble. Because if it turns out that building genuine mass popular movements on an international scale can’t be done, it’s not so obvious that there will continue to be human civilization for very long—because part of the whole capitalist ethic is that the only thing that matters is how much money you make tomorrow: that’s the crucial value of the system, profit for tomorrow. Not just profit, but the bottom line has to look good tomorrow. And the result is that planning for the future, and any kind of regulatory apparatus that would sustain the environment for the long-term, become impossible—and that means the planet is going to go down the tubes very fast.
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sp; In fact, this was just demonstrated kind of dramatically in the United States a little while ago. Right as the “Gingrich army” was coming into office in 1994 and describing how they’re going to destroy the country’s environmental regulatory system, right at that very same time a number of scientific reports of considerable significance were released. 85 One had to do with New England—or really, the world: it had to do with the Georges Bank fishing ground, an offshore shelf off the coast of New England. Georges Bank has always been the richest fishing area in the world, and it remained so through the 1970s. But in the 1980s, the Reaganites deregulated the fishing industry and at the same time subsidized it—because that’s how the “free market” works: you deregulate so the industries can do anything they want, and then the public pays them off to make sure they stay in business. Well, when you deregulate and you subsidize the fishing industry, it doesn’t take a great genius to figure out what’s going to happen—what happened is, they wiped out the ground-fish.
Well, now New England is importing cod from Norway. Anybody from New England knows what that means—it’s unimaginable. And the reason we’re importing cod from Norway is that in Norway, they continued to regulate their fishing grounds; here we deregulated them, so of course they were destroyed. So now a large part of Georges Bank is closed off to fishing, and nobody knows if it can recover. 86 Well, if they eliminate the rest of the country’s regulatory apparatus, it’s going to be the same kind of thing all over the place. So if this task of organizing a democratic society does prove to be impossible, we’re all going to be in very serious trouble: very serious.
Initial Moves and the Coming Crisis
MAN: Do you see any steps being taken right now towards building these kinds of international movements?
Well, I think one can see some things happening—and you can imagine them extending to a much larger scale. Most of the things you see today are so small that they’re not really making an impact, but they’re real, and they could potentially become the start of bigger things.
For example, the first shreds of any positive move in the union movement that I’m aware of occurred right after N.A.F.T.A. was passed [in 1993]. Immediately after the N.A.F.T.A. vote, like within weeks, General Electric and Honeywell both fired workers for trying to organize unions in their plants in Northern Mexico. Okay, normally when that happens, that’s the end of it. This time, for the first time ever I think, two American unions, United Electrical Workers and the Teamsters, intervened to defend the organizers and protested to the Clinton administration. And they have some clout: they’re not like corporations, but they’ve got a lot more power than Mexican unions. I mean, there really are no Mexican unions, because Mexico’s like a fascist state—there’s just a government union (kind of like in the old Soviet Union) and then essentially one other one, which of course opposed N.A.F.T.A. but is under such terrific controls that it couldn’t do anything. But the big American unions still can’t be completely ignored, and in this case they were able to get the U.S. Labor Department to investigate these firings in Mexico. 87
Well, the thing went to a U.S. Labor Department panel, which was supposed to determine whether there had in fact been an infringement of labor rights—and of course Robert Reich’s department discovered that there had been no violations. What they said is, the fired workers had Mexican law behind them, they still had legal recourse under Mexican law, so therefore there was no issue for the U.S. Labor Department. I mean, you have to read this thing—I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Mexican labor law, but this doesn’t even rise to the level of hilarity. But that was the decision, so the firings went through. The fired workers are allowed to apply for severance pay, very happy; I’m sure G.E. is mourning. 88 But at least in this case American unions got to the point of defending the rights of Mexican workers for the first time—at this point out of their own interests, because they recognize they’re really getting crushed. But that’s the kind of thing that has to start taking place on a massive scale, if there are going to be significant moves against these problems.
Beyond that, serious changes in the economy will simply require dismantling private power altogether—there just is no way around that in the end. And you can even see some rudimentary steps towards it here and there, I think. Weirton Steel was one recent effort [workers own a portion of the company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan]; and there are others which could be turned into something meaningful. Even things like the negotiations at United Airlines could be meaningful initial steps, though ultimately it depends on whether the settlements are just in terms of stock ownership by workers or actual employee management, which would be something very different [United’s employees traded steep pay cuts for 55 percent ownership of the company’s stock and 3 of its 12 board seats in 1994].
So the methods for starting to move towards real change are quite clear, it’s just a question of whether enough people are willing to start pursuing them. There are all sorts of options for how to begin building popular movements, and they could be developed on a very substantial scale. Then if they’re coordinated, with genuine community efforts to take control over whatever resources and industries are within them, and they begin to link up internationally, anything at all is possible, I think. I mean, sure, the scale is enormous—but with any major social change the scale has been enormous. You could raise the same doubts about the women’s movement, or getting rid of slavery in Haiti in 1790—it must have looked impossible. There’s nothing new about that feeling.
MAN: I just get the sense that we’re waiting for some ecological disaster before people really start to get active in these movements on a massive scale.
Well, if we wait for an ecological disaster, it’ll be too late—in fact, we might not even have such a long wait.
Look, it’s certainly true that as the threats mount, it may energize people—but you don’t wait for that to happen: first you have to prepare the ground. For example, suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the greenhouse effect has been way underestimated, and that the catastrophic effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100 years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover—with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there just are no other alternatives around right now.
So you don’t wait for the disasters to happen, first you have to create the groundwork. You need to plant the seeds of something right now, so that whatever opportunities happen to arise—whether it’s workers being fired in Mexico, or an ecological catastrophe, or anything else—people are in a position that they can do something constructive about it.
MAN: Dr. Chomsky, I’m actually wondering whether the corporate elites can’t turn the environmental crisis to their benefit—use it as a new technique of taxpayer subsidy, another form of welfare like the others you were describing? So now the public will pay them to salvage the environment they’ve been primarily responsible for destroying?
Yeah, sure, you don’t even have to predict it—it’s already been happening. Take DuPont: they weren’t all that upset about the fact that they can no longer sell fluorocarbons [which destroy the ozone layer and have been closely regulated since the late 1980s], because now they can just get big public subsidies to produce other things that will replace them. 89 I mean, at least in this respect these people are rational, so they are going to try to take advantage of whatever techniques happen to be around to ensure that the public is forced to keep subsidizing their profits. And if the environmental crisis reaches the point where some changes have to be introduced—as it already has, in fact—they’ll be sure to profit off them.
Actually, people are really worried about the destruction of the ozone layer—even the Wall Street Journal editors, who are usually out in space on these issues, have started getting worried about it. I mean, it wasn’t so bad when it
was just killing people in Chile and Argentina who are near the South Pole [i.e. where the first hole in the ozone layer was discovered], but when they detected another hole over the Arctic in the north—meaning white people are going to suffer someday—then even those guys finally noticed it. 90 And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they’re in and whatever floor they’re on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they’ll agree that there’s a greenhouse effect and we’d better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they’re going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It’s just that the next thing they’ll ask is, “So how can we make some money off it?” In fact, anybody in business who didn’t ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that’s the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said, “I’m not going to look at it that way, I’m going to do things differently,” well, they’d get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it—because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don’t like them, and I don’t, then you’re going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way.
So yes, within the framework of the institutions that currently exist, the environmental crisis will be yet another technique of public subsidy to ensure continued private profits, and they’ll keep capitalizing on it exactly as you describe.