by Noam Chomsky
Elite Planning—Slipping Out of Hand
MAN: How much of this do you attribute to a conspiracy theory, and how much would you say is just a by-product of capital nearsightedness and a shared interest in holding on to power?
Well, this term “conspiracy theory” is kind of an interesting one. For example, if I was talking about Soviet planning and I said, “Look, here’s what the Politburo decided, and then the Kremlin did this,” nobody would call that a “conspiracy theory”—everyone would just assume that I was talking about planning. But as soon as you start talking about anything that’s done by power in the West, then everybody calls it a “conspiracy theory.” You’re not allowed to talk about planning in the West, it’s not allowed to exist. So if you’re a political scientist, one of the things you learn—you don’t even make it into graduate school unless you’ve already internalized it—is that nobody here ever plans anything: we just act out of a kind of general benevolence, stumbling from here to here, sometimes making mistakes and so on. The guys in power aren’t idiots, after all. They do planning. In fact, they do very careful and sophisticated planning. But anybody who talks about it, and uses government records or anything else to back it up, is into “conspiracy theory.”
It’s the same with business: business is again just operating out of a generalized benevolence, trying to help everybody get the cheapest goods with the best quality, all this kind of stuff. If you say: “Look, Chrysler is trying to maximize profits and market share,” that’s “conspiracy theory.” In other words, as soon as you describe elementary reality and attribute minimal rationality to people with power—well, that’s fine as long as it’s an enemy, but if it’s a part of domestic power, it’s a “conspiracy theory” and you’re not supposed to talk about it.
So, the first thing I would suggest is, drop the term. There are really only two questions. One is, how much of this is conscious planning—as happens everywhere else. And the other is, how much is bad planning?
Well, it’s all conscious planning: there is just no doubt that a lot of very conscious planning goes on among intelligent people who are trying to maximize their power. They’d be insane if they didn’t do that. I mean, I’m not telling you anything new when I tell you that top editors, top government officials, and major businessmen have meetings together—of course. And not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they’d be crazy if they didn’t communicate and plan with each other.
So of course the Board of Directors of General Motors plans, the same way the National Security Council plans, and the National Association of Manufacturers’ P.R. agencies plan. I mean, this was a truism to Adam Smith: if you read Adam Smith [classical economist], he says that every time two businessmen get together in a room, you can be sure there’s some plan being cooked up which is going to harm the public. Yeah, how could it be otherwise? And there’s nothing particularly new about this—as Smith pointed out over two hundred years ago, the “masters of mankind,” as he called them, will do what they have to in order to follow “the vile maxim”: “all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” 91 Yeah, and when they’re in the National Security Council, or the Business Roundtable [a national organization composed of the C.E.O.s of 200 major corporations], or the rest of these elite planning forums, they have extreme power behind them. And yes, they’re planning—planning very carefully.
Now, the only significant question to ask is, is it intelligent planning? Okay, that depends on what the goals are. If the goals are to maximize corporate profits for tomorrow, then it’s very intelligent planning. If the goals are to have a world where your children can survive, then it’s completely idiotic. But that second thing really isn’t a part of the game. In fact, it’s institutionalized: it’s not that these people are stupid, it’s that to the extent that you have a competitive system based on private control over resources, you are forced to maximize short-term gain. That’s just an institutional necessity.
I mean, suppose there were three car companies: Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford. And suppose that one of them decided to put its resources into producing fuel-efficient, user-friendly cars which could be available ten years from now, and which would have a much less destructive impact on the environment—suppose Ford decided to put a proportion of its resources into that. Well, Chrysler wouldn’t be putting its resources into that, which means that they would undersell Ford today, and Ford wouldn’t be in the game ten years from now. Well, that’s just the nature of a competitive system—and that’s exactly why if you’re a manager you’ve got to try to make sure that in the next financial quarter your bottom line shows something good, whatever effects it may have a year from now: that’s just part of the institutional irrationality of the system.
In fact, here I must say I would like to complain about a recent cover of Z Magazine. I had an article in there, and on the cover there was the title: “Corporate Greed.” But that’s just an absurd phrase. 92 I mean, to talk about “corporate greed” is like talking about “military weapons” or something like that—there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that’s what it is. There is no “phenomenon” of corporate greed, and we shouldn’t mislead people into thinking there is. It’s like talking about “robber’s greed” or something like that—it’s not a meaningful thing, it’s misleading. A corporation’s purpose is to maximize profit and market share and return to investors, and all that kind of stuff, and if its officers don’t pursue that goal, for one thing they are legally liable for not pursuing it. There I agree with Milton Friedman [right-wing economist] and those guys: if you’re a C.E.O., you must do that—otherwise you’re in dereliction of duty, in fact dereliction of official legal duty. 93 And besides that, if you don’t do it, you’ll get kicked out by the shareholders or the Board of Directors, and you won’t be there very long anyway.
So in a sense the planning is “bad,” if you like—like it’s stupid to destroy Georges Bank if you’re thinking about five years from now. But it’s not stupid if you’re thinking of tomorrow’s profits. And I think the question we need to ask is, which of those things are we concerned about?
In fact, it’s interesting to look at the history of the government regulatory system in the United States in this context—things like the I.C.C. [Interstate Commerce Commission] and so on. Keep in mind that these governmental regulatory agencies were mostly instituted by business itself, particularly capital-intensive, internationally-oriented big business—because they recognized that the predatory nature of capitalism was just going to destroy everything if they didn’t bring it under control somehow. So they wanted regulation to keep things kind of organized—just like they wanted labor unions, and they wanted the New Deal programs. In fact, if you look at many of the things that have really improved the country, like the New Deal programs in the 1930s, for example (which at least partially brought the United States into the main framework of industrial societies with respect to social programs), a lot of the drive behind them was coming from big business, as opposed to small business.
See, big corporations like General Electric and so on—which are capital-intensive, and have relatively small labor forces and an international orientation—they supported the New Deal measures. It was more mainstream businesses who opposed the New Deal, like medium-level industry, members of the National Association of Manufacturers and so on—because they weren’t capital-intensive, and they had large labor forces, and didn’t sell to international markets, therefore they didn’t benefit particularly from New Deal programs. But for a big corporation like G.E., it was better to have an organized workforce that wouldn’t carry out wildcat strikes, and that you could be sure was going to work pretty regularly even if you had to pay them a l
ittle bit more, and so on and so forth. 94 That’s also why big business has tended to support the existence of unions—American-style unions—to a certain extent: because they know the system’s going to self-destruct if there aren’t devices around to bring things under control.
As a matter of fact, one aspect of the recent shift we’ve seen in American politics is that big business is not in such good shape in this respect. The guys who took over Congress in 1994 are not pro-big business in this way—they are not the sort of people who want an organized, planned society. See, big business is kind of Communist: they want a powerful state organizing things in their long-term interests. And the guys who came into power with Newt Gingrich in 1994 are a somewhat different breed. They’re more like the old National Association of Manufacturers-types who opposed the New Deal, and there’s also this freakish fundamentalist element among them, which is extremely powerful in the United States. I mean, this is not so much true of Gingrich himself—Gingrich is sort of more reasonable, he’s just a flak for big business. But the people he organized are fanatics, especially what they call the “Christian Right”—they’re people who want money tomorrow, they don’t care what happens to the world two inches down the road, they don’t care what happens to anybody else, they’re deeply irrational. And they’re totalitarian: despite what they say, they in fact want a very powerful state, but only to order people around and tell them how to live, and to throw them in jail if they step the wrong way, and so on, a National Security State basically. Well, that’s a real basis for fascism—and big business and a lot of other powerful people are very worried about it.
In fact, if you looked at the funding for the whole Gingrich movement, it was quite interesting. The Wall Street Journal had an article on it after the Congressional elections in 1994, and it turned out that the main people who were funding them were at the fringes of the economy: I think the biggest funder was Amway [a direct-sales company somewhat like a pyramid scheme], which is basically a scam operation, and the other big ones were things like “hedge funds”—not the real brokerage houses, but the ones around the fringe of Wall Street who lend you huge amounts of money for very risky loans. And then there was lots of money coming from gun interests, and alcohol interests, and gambling interests, and so on. I mean, these are sectors of business where there’s a ton of money, but they are not really a part of the mainstream economy. The Gingrich group wasn’t getting its funding from General Electric, let’s say. In fact, the only big corporation that was funding them was Philip Morris [a cigarette manufacturer], and the guys at Philip Morris are mass murderers, so they need government protection and yeah, they’ll fund Newt Gingriches. 95 But if you look at who was really backing them, it’s mostly what are called “small businessmen”—they’re people in the top two percent of income levels, let’s say, instead of the top one-half percent; they’re what’s referred to as “Main Street,” like their businesses have about fifty employees or something like that. Well, those people really do want the government out of their hair, they don’t want a lot of regulations holding them back from making as much money as they can.
Just to give you an example, there’s a contractor painting my house right now, and I’ve been talking to him—he’s the kind of guy they represent. He hates the government, because the government doesn’t let him use lead in the paint, and it makes him pay workers’ compensation to his workers when they get hurt, things like that. He just wants to get all this stuff out of his hair so he can go out there and make money, do whatever he feels like. You tell him, “Well, kids will die of lead poisoning if you use leaded paint.” He says, “Ahh, a lot of government bureaucrats made that up, what do they know? I’ve been breathing lead all my life and look at me, I’m healthy as a horse.” That’s the sort of attitude that’s been supporting this movement—and I think big business is very worried about it.
If you want to get a sense of what it’s like. Fortune magazine in its February ’95 issue had a cover-story on the attitudes of C.E.O.s towards what’s been going on in Washington. These guys are worried—and the reason why they’re worried is quite simple: these C.E.O.s are what’s called “liberal.” I mean, they love the fact that wages are going down, and that profits are shooting through the roof, and that environmental laws are being loosened, and that welfare is being cut—all that stuff is just great to them. But if you look at some of their personal attitudes, they’re about as far away from the Christian Right as the Harvard faculty is. 96 They are militantly pro-abortion on demand. They believe in women’s rights—like, they want their daughters to have career opportunities. They don’t want their kids to have to study Lucifer and Beast 666 in school. They don’t want maniacs running around with assault rifles because the black helicopters are bringing aliens in, or whatever the latest frenzy is. But the troops that they’ve mobilized are in that domain. The so-called Christian Right, for one, just have a different agenda. And I think big business is worried about them: the C.E.O.s don’t want that kind of fascism. And that’s why by now, if you take a look, you’ll see that big corporations have tended to line up with the Clinton administration.
Take something like science policy. These “Gingrich army”-types don’t see any point in science—it’s just a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals, who needs that? On the other hand, big corporations understand that if they want to keep making profits five years from now, there’d better be some science being funded today—and of course, they don’t want to pay for it themselves, they want the public to pay for it, through university science departments and so on. They want the government to keep funding science, so when some discovery comes along they can then rip it off and make the money off it. Well, just a little while ago, a bunch of the big corporate heads wrote a joint letter to the House science committee asking them to continue high levels of funding for university-based science and research programs—just the thing the Republican Congress wants to cut—because their job isn’t just to pour lead paint on somebody’s house: these guys know that they are not going to be in the game a couple years from now unless U.S. science continues to produce things for them to exploit. So by this point, they are getting very worried that these Newt Gingrich-types might go too far and start cutting down the parts of the state system that are welfare for them—which of course is unacceptable.
What’s happened is actually pretty intriguing, if you think about it. I mean, for the past fifty years American business has been organizing a major class war, and they needed troops—there are votes after all, and you can’t just come before the electorate and say, “Vote for me, I’m trying to screw you.” So what they’ve had to do is appeal to the population on some other grounds. Well, there aren’t a lot of other grounds, and everybody always picks the same ones, whether his name is Hitler or anything else—jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them. And they’ve done it, business had to do it—and now after fifty years they’ve got a tiger by the tail.
Actually, the German businessmen who supported Hitler were probably thinking about the same thing in 1937 and ’38. They’d been perfectly happy to pay off the Nazis to organize the population on the basis of fear, hatred, racism, and jingoism, in order to beat down the German labor movement and kill off the Communists there—but of course, once the Nazis got into power, they had their own agenda. The big industrialists in Germany did not want a war with the West—but by then it was too late.
Now, I don’t want to say that this is Nazi Germany, but there is a similarity—just as there’s a similarity to post-Khomeini Iran. I mean, Iranian business strongly opposed the Shah [the Iranian monarch who ruled the country until 1979], because they didn’t like the fact that he controlled the state monopolies, especially the National Iranian Oil Company—and as a result they wanted to see him overthrown, and they needed somebody to do it. Well, the only forces they could appea
l to were the movements in the streets, and those guys were being organized by fundamentalist clerics. So as a result they overthrew the Shah alright, but they also got Khomeini and all these fundamentalist maniacs running around, which they didn’t like.
Well, something similar has been happening in the United States and people are worried about it. Incidentally, I think this is also why we’re now starting to get editorials in the New York Times defending the counterculture. 97 And just to tell you a personal thing, recently there was a favorable review of a book of mine in the Boston Globe. That is unbelievable. 98 I mean, it couldn’t possibly have happened a couple years ago. There have even been some discussions in the press of “class war”—that’s a concept that is usually unmentionable in the U.S. 99 And I think it’s because a lot of elites are really running scared these days. They think: “Look, we’ve unleashed the demon—now it’s going to go after the interests of really rich people.” The only way they’ve been able to keep their power is by waging a huge propaganda war, and that has now brought up guys who are like suicide bombers, and who think that women ought to be driven back to the home and shut up, and who want to have twelve assault rifles in their closets, and so on. Well, they don’t like that, and now they’re starting to get scared.
Disturbed Populations Stirring
WOMAN: How do you think it’s all going to play out, then—do you see the American political system heading for a civil war?
Well, in general I don’t think you can make predictions like that—when we talk about predictions, we’re just talking about intuitions, and mine are no better than anybody else’s. But I do feel this period is kind of a turning point. I mean, you can see very clearly where policy is driving people, and you know exactly what its goals are. The only question you can’t answer is how the population is going to react as they get slammed in the face—and they are getting slammed in the face. One way it could go would be like the building of the C.I.O. [an integrated mass union formed in 1935], or the Civil Rights and feminist movements, or the Freedom Rides [whites and blacks rode buses together into the American South in 1961 to challenge segregation laws]. Other ways it could go would be Nazism, Khomeini’s Iran, Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria—those are all ways people could go too.