Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky

  Just keeping to the present, the role of the state is not just to create and protect high-tech industry, it also has to intervene to overcome management failures—that was quite dramatic in the 1970s. At the time there was a lot of concern about the low level of productivity and investment growth, and the failure of incompetent US management to keep up with more advanced Japanese methods. There were public calls for what was called there—industrialization of the US. Well, the Pentagon responded with a program called Mantech (“Manufacturing Technology”). The goals, as described by the Pentagon, were to design the “factory of the future,” to integrate computer technology and automation in production and design, and to develop flexible manufacturing technology and management efficiency.21 The goal was to boost the market share and industrial leadership of US industry in the traditional way, through state initiative and taxpayer funding. There was also a side benefit: the factory of the future can reduce and control the workforce. It’s an old story—take automation. Automation was so inefficient that it had to be developed in the public sector for a long period, then finally handed over to private industry. When it was designed in the state sector it was designed in a very specific way, which is not inherent in the technology, and this topic has been rather well studied.22 The system of computer-controlled machine tools could have been developed so as to empower mechanics and get rid of useless layers of management. But it was done the other way around: it was done to increase the layers of management and to de-skill workers. Again, that’s not a technological or an economic decision, but it’s a power decision—basically, part of class war. The same can be done with the factory of the future, when it is designed in the state sector—without anyone observing it, of course, except the business world, who are quite happy about it.

  The Mantech program expanded rapidly under the Reagan administration, which actually went far beyond the norm in violating market principles for the rich, while being full of elevated rhetoric for the poor. Under Reagan the main research branch of the Pentagon, DARPA, actively promoted new technologies in a variety of fields, such as massively parallel computing—the source of the main technology in supercomputers and information technology, finishing up the work on the Internet, which they initiated in fact, and so on. And also in establishing start-up companies. Science magazine, the journal of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, had an article in which they pointed out that “DARPA became a pivotal market force” under Reagan and Bush, transferring new technologies to “nascent industries”—it’s a major source of Silicon Valley.23 The Reagan administration also doubled protective barriers; it broke all post-war records in protectionism. The purpose was to keep out superior Japanese products—that was true of steel, automotive industries, semiconductors, computers—not only to save the industries but to place them in a dominant position for the triumph of the market, as it’s called, in the 1990s, thanks in large measure to huge public subsidies, public sector innovation and development, protection, straight bailouts like Continental Illinois, and so on. It’s amazing to watch the story transmuted into the politically correct terms that you read and hear.

  14

  Socioeconomic Sovereignty

  In the past year, many global issues have been framed in terms of the notion of sovereignty, that is, the right of political entities to follow their own course—which may be benign or may be ugly—and to do so free from external interference. In the real world, that means interference by highly concentrated power, with its major center in the United States. This concentrated global power is called by various terms, depending on which aspect of sovereignty and freedom one has in mind. So sometimes it’s called the Washington consensus, or the Wall Street/Treasury complex, or NATO, or the international economic bureaucracy (the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and IMF), or G-7 (the rich, Western, industrial countries) or G-3 or, more accurately, usually, G-1. From a more fundamental perspective, we could describe it as an array of mega-corporations, often linked to one another by strategic alliances, administering a global economy which is in fact a kind of corporate mercantilism tending toward oligopoly in most sectors, heavily reliant on state power to socialize risk and cost, and to subdue recalcitrant elements.

  In the past year, the issues of sovereignty have risen in two domains. One has to do with the sovereign right to be secure from military intervention. Here, the questions arise in a world order based on sovereign states. The second is the matter of sovereign rights in the face of socioeconomic intervention. Here, the questions arise in a world that’s dominated by multinational corporations, especially financial institutions, and the whole framework that’s been constructed to serve their interests—for example, the issues that arose dramatically in the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999.

  Let me turn to the second topic, and that’s the one I’ll keep to for this discussion: the questions of sovereignty, freedom, and human rights that arise in the socioeconomic arena. First, a general comment: sovereignty is no value in itself. It’s only a value insofar as it relates to freedom and rights, either enhancing them or diminishing them. I also want to take for granted something that may seem obvious, but is actually controversial: namely that, in speaking of freedom and rights, we have in mind human beings—that is, persons of flesh and blood, not abstract political and legal constructions like corporations, or states, or capital. If these entities have any rights at all, which is questionable, they should be derivative from the rights of people. That’s the core classical liberal doctrine. It’s also been the guiding principle for popular struggles for centuries, but it’s very strongly opposed. It’s opposed by official doctrine. It’s opposed by sectors of wealth and privilege, and that’s true both in the political and the socioeconomic realms.

  The Political Realm

  In the political realm, the familiar slogan is “popular sovereignty in a government of, by, and for the people,” but the operative framework is quite different. The operative framework is that the people are considered a dangerous enemy. They have to be controlled for their own good. These issues go back centuries, to the earliest modem democratic revolutions in 17th-century England and in the North American colonies a century later. In both cases, the democrats were defeated—not completely, and certainly not permanently, by any means. In 17th-century England, much of the population did not want to be ruled by either king or parliament. Recall that those were the two contestants in the standard version of the civil war, but, as in most civil wars, a good part of the population wanted neither of them. As their pamphlets put it, they wanted to be governed “by countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants,” not by “knights and gentlemen [that] make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people’s sores.”1

  These same ideas animated the rebellious farmers of the colonies a century later, but the constitutional system was designed quite differently. It was designed to block that heresy. The goal was “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority” and to ensure that “the country [is] governed by those who own it.” Those are the words of the leading framer, James Madison, and the president of the Continental Congress and first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay. Their conception prevailed, but the conflicts continued. They continually take new forms; they’re alive right now. However, elite doctrine remains essentially unchanged.2

  Fast forwarding to the 20th century (I’ll keep here to the liberal, progressive side of the spectrum—it’s harsher on the other side), the population are regarded as “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose role is to be “spectators,” not “participants,” apart from periodic opportunities to choose among the representatives of private power.3 These are what are called elections. In elections, public opinion is considered essentially irrelevant if it conflicts with the demands of the minority of the opulent who own the country. We’re seeing that right now, in fact.

  One striking example (there are many) has to do with the international
economic order—what are called trade agreements. The general population, as polls make very clear, is strongly opposed to most of what’s going on, but the issues don’t arise in elections. They’re not an issue in elections because the centers of power—the minority of the opulent—are unified in support of instituting a particular kind of socioeconomic order. What is discussed are things that they don’t much care about, like questions of character or questions about reforms, which they know aren’t going to be implemented. That’s pretty typical, and it makes sense on the assumption that the role of the public—as the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders—is just to be spectators. If the general public, as it often does, seeks to organize and enter the political arena, to participate, to press its own concerns, that’s a problem. It’s not democracy; it’s “a crisis of democracy” that has to be overcome.

  These are all quotes from the liberal, progressive side of the modern spectrum, but the principles are quite widely held, and the past 25 years have been one of those regular periods when a major campaign has been conducted to try to overcome the perceived crisis of democracy and to reduce the public to their proper role of apathetic and passive and obedient spectators. That’s the political realm.

  The Socioeconomic Realm

  In the socioeconomic realm there’s something similar. There have been parallel, closely related conflicts for a long, long time. In the early days of the industrial revolution in the United States, in New England 150 years ago, there was a very lively, independent labor press run by young women from the farms and laborers from the towns. They condemned the “degradation and subordination” of the newly emerging industrial system, which compelled people to rent themselves to survive. It’s worth remembering, and hard to remember, perhaps, that wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery at that time, not only by the workers in the mills, but right through much of the mainstream: for example, Abraham Lincoln, or the Republican Party, or even editorials in the New York Times (which they might like to forget). Working people opposed the return to what they called “monarchical principles” in the industrial system, and they demanded that those who work in the mills should own them—the spirit of republicanism. They denounced what they called the “new spirit of the age—gain wealth forgetting all but self,” a demeaning and degrading vision of human life that has to be driven into people’s minds by immense effort—which, in fact, has been going on over centuries.4

  In the 20th century, the literature of the public relations industry provides a very rich and instructive store of information on how to instill the “new spirit of the age” by creating artificial wants or by “regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers” (Edward Bernays), and inducing a “philosophy of futility” and lack of purpose in life, by concentrating human attention on “the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.”5 If that can be done, then people will accept the meaningless and subordinate lives that are appropriate for them, and they’ll forget subversive ideas about taking control of their own lives.

  This is a major social engineering project. It’s been going on for centuries, but it became intense and enormous in the last century. There are a lot of ways of doing it. Some are the kind I just indicated, which are too familiar to illustrate. Others are to undermine security, and here, too, there are a number of ways. One way of undermining security is the threat of job transfer. One of the major consequences and, assuming rationality, one has to assume one of the major purposes of the mislabeled “trade agreements” (stress “mislabeled,” because they’re not about free trade: they have strong anti-market elements of a variety of kinds, and they’re certainly not agreements, at least if people matter, since people are mostly opposed to them), is to facilitate the threat—it doesn’t have to be reality, but just the threat—of job transfer, which is a good way of inducing discipline by undermining security.

  Another device is to promote what’s called “labor market flexibility.” Let me quote the World Bank, who put the matter pretty plainly. They said, “Increasing labor market flexibility—despite the bad name it has acquired as a euphemism for pushing wages down and workers out [which is just what it is]—is essential in all the regions of the world. . . . The most important reforms involve lifting constraints on labor mobility and wage flexibility, as well as breaking the ties between social service and labor contracts.”6 That means cutting the benefits and the rights that have been won in generations of bitter struggle.

  When they talk about lifting constraints on wage flexibility, they mean flexibility down, not flexibility up. The talk about labor mobility doesn’t mean the right of people to move anywhere they want, as has been required by free market theory ever since Adam Smith, but rather the right to fire employees at will. And, under the current investor-based version of globalization, capital and corporations must be free to move, but not people, because their rights are secondary, incidental.

  These “essential reforms,” as the World Bank calls them, are imposed on much of the world as conditionalities for ratification by the World Bank and the IMF. They’re introduced into the rich, industrial countries by other means, and they’ve been effective. Alan Greenspan testified before Congress that “greater worker insecurity” was an important factor in what’s called the “fairy-tale economy.” It keeps inflation down because workers are afraid to ask for wages and benefits. They’re insecure. And that shows up pretty clearly in the statistical record. In the past 25 years, this period of rollback, of the crisis of democracy, wages have stagnated or declined for the majority of the workforce, for nonsupervisory workers, and working hours have increased very sharply—they’ve become the highest in the industrial world. This is noticed, of course, by the business press, which describes it as “a welcome development of transcendent importance,” with working people compelled to abandon their “luxurious lifestyles,” while corporate profits are “dazzling” and “stupendous.”

  There Is No Alternative

  In the dependencies, less delicate measures are available. One of them is the so-called “debt crisis,” which is largely traceable to World Bank/ IMF policy programs of the 1970s, and to the fact that the Third World rich are, for the most part, exempt from social obligations. That’s dramatically true in Latin America, and one of its major problems. The “debt crisis” is not a simple economic fact, by any means. It is, to a large extent, an ideological construct. What’s called the “debt” could be largely overcome in a number of elementary ways.7

  But that’s not to be. The debt is a very powerful weapon of control, and it can’t be abandoned. For about half of the world’s population right now, national economic policy is effectively run by bureaucrats in Washington. Also, half of the population of the world (not the same half, but overlapping) is subject to unilateral sanctions by the United States, which is a form of economic coercion that, again, undermines sovereignty severely and has been condemned repeatedly, most recently by the United Nations, as unacceptable, but it makes no difference.

  Within the rich countries, there are other means of achieving similar results. Before getting to that, just a word about what we should never allow ourselves to forget, and that is that the devices that are used in the dependencies can be very brutal. There was a Jesuit-organized conference in San Salvador a couple of years ago, which considered the state terrorist project of the 1980s and its continuation since, by the socioeconomic policies imposed by the victors. The conference took special note of what it called the residual “culture of terror,” which lasts after the actual terror declines and has the effect of “domesticating the expectations of the majority,” who abandon any thought of “alternatives different to the demands of the powerful.” They’ve learned the lesson that There Is No Alternative—TINA, as it’s called—Maggie Thatcher’s cruel phrase. The idea is that there is no alternative—that’s now the familiar slogan of the corporate version of globalization. In the dependencies, the great a
chievement of the terrorist operations has been to destroy the hopes that had been raised in Latin America and Central America in the 1970s, inspired by popular organizing throughout the region and the “preferential option for the poor” of the Church, which was severely punished for that deviation from good behavior.

  Sometimes the lessons about what happened are drawn rather accurately in measured tones. Right now there is a torrent of self-adulation about our success in inspiring a wave of democracy in our Latin American dependencies. The matter is put a little differently, and more accurately, in an important scholarly review by a leading specialist on the topic, Thomas Carothers, who, as he says, writes with an “insider’s perspective,” since he served in the State Department “democracy enhancement programs” of the Reagan administration, as they were called. He believes that Washington had good intentions, but he recognizes that in practice, the Reagan administration sought to maintain “the basic order of . . . quite undemocratic societies” and to avoid “populist-based change,” and, like its predecessors, adopted “pro-democracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.” It would be more accurate to say “the traditional structures of power with which the traditional structures of power within the United States had long been allied.”