by Noam Chomsky
But a tactic has a half-life. It works for a while, and then you see diminishing returns. It’s inevitable. So it’s important at some stage, maybe now, to ask whether the Occupy tactic has essentially lived its life and it’s time to turn to something else, like the Occupy the Dream movement. Around New York, Boston, other places, there have been Occupy the Hood movements in poor and minority neighborhoods, where people get together to deal with their own problems, drawing inspiration from the downtown Occupy movements but saying, “We’ll do it here.” That’s really important.
Also, I think there should be a lesson from Tunisia and Egypt, and from the 1930s here. Unless the labor movement is revitalized and becomes a core part of the movement, I don’t think it’s going to get very far. Revitalizing the labor movement may seem like a real long shot, if you take a look at the country today, but conditions now are actually no worse than they were in the 1930s. Remember that by the 1920s the American labor movement, which had been militant and successful, had been virtually crushed.
The Red Scare and the Palmer raids had crushed labor and independent thought and created an end-of-history mentality, a utopia of the masters, rather like the early 1990s. But the labor movement was resurrected. In fact, if you go back to the 1920s, visitors from abroad, including conservatives, were just appalled at the treatment and the status of American workers. There was nothing like it in other major industrial countries. But in the 1930s labor revived and you had the formation of the CIO, sit-down strikes. It could happen again. The seeds of it are there.
In 1968, a slogan was raised in France to “demand the impossible.” What do you remember about that particular period that might have some relevance to what’s going on today?
What happened in France was significant. The most significant part, at least for me, was the fact that there was an incipient student-worker alliance, which could have meant something. Actually, it turned out it didn’t, but it really could have meant something. That’s an example of a spark that didn’t lead to a conflagration.
In order to mount resistance and challenge power, it’s necessary to overcome the barrier of fear. It seems that the Occupy movement has done that.
It has. It’s costly to oppose power. No matter if you’re a graduate student, a child in school questioning something that’s happening, a union organizer, or a political dissident, whatever you may be, it’s going to carry a personal cost. Power systems, whatever they are, very rarely abdicate their power cheerfully. They usually resist. In a society like ours, they have many means at their disposal. We have a very class-conscious business class in the United States. They’re always fighting a bitter one-sided class war and if they meet any opposition they will react. So yes, there’s a cost. And fear is understandable. If you attempt to organize a union at some workplace, you can be easily subjected to punishment. The punishments are illegal, but when you have a criminal state, that doesn’t matter. The state doesn’t enforce the laws. In fact, just the very act of breaking out of discipline to begin to organize people carries a cost.
So fear is understandable. Nowadays it’s being enhanced by pretty severe attacks on basic civil liberties. A system of control and repression is in place—it’s not being excessively used, but it’s in place and it can be quite punitive.
Indefinite military detention, for example.
The new National Defense Authorization Act2 isn’t as bad as it’s been described on the Internet by some, but it’s bad. Essentially, it codifies practices that have been carried out regularly by the Bush II and Obama administrations without particular objection. In fact, they’re bipartisan. But now these practices have been codified, and that’s worse. Also, the act allows for the military to be involved in domestic policing, which violates principles that go back to the late nineteenth century. And it makes military detention mandatory for people who are called terrorists or enemy combatants. For U.S. citizens, military detention is left in the law as an option but is not mandatory.3 All of those are dangerous steps.
Still, I don’t think the act is the worst attack on civil liberties under the Obama administration. There are worse ones. Maybe the worst is the Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.4 The case, which didn’t get too much attention, was brought to the court by the Obama administration and argued by former solicitor general Elena Kagan, his latest Supreme Court appointment. The Humanitarian Law Project was giving advice to a lot of groups, including some that are on the official U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.5 They were talking to them about strategies of nonviolence.6 The Obama administration argued in the Supreme Court that advice is “material support,” and won. There already were laws against material assistance to groups on the terrorist list. You can’t give them arms. But Obama expanded it to talking. So, for example, the wording of the judgment suggests that if you talk to somebody they call a terrorist and urge them to turn to nonviolence, you’re guilty of giving material assistance to terrorist groups. The potential scope of that is incredible. These are executive decisions—without review, without recourse.
If you look at the record of who is designated a terrorist, it’s shocking. Maybe the most extreme case is Nelson Mandela, who just got off the terrorist list about four years ago.7 The Reagan administration, which supported the apartheid regime in South Africa right to the end, condemned the African National Congress as one of “the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world.8 So Mandela is a terrorist because they say so. He’s only now for the first time free to come to the United States without special authorization.9 Saddam Hussein was taken off the terrorist list in 1982 so the United States could provide him with agricultural and other support that he needed.10 The whole record is grotesque.
But extending the concept of material support to conversation—most of us could be tried under that. And the ruling was applied right away. As soon as the Supreme Court case was decided, the FBI was sent to raid apartments in Chicago and Minneapolis to collect information about people who were suspected of giving material support for the Palestinian groups and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), like maybe urging them to negotiate and turn to nonviolence.11 That’s a pretty severe attack on civil liberties.
So there are reasons for fear. The government has instruments at hand, which it shouldn’t have.
We’re soon going to be commemorating the eighth century of Magna Carta. Magna Carta was a huge step forward. It established the right of any freeman—later extended to every person—to be free from arbitrary persecution. It established the presumption of innocence, the right to be free from state persecution, and the right to a free and fair speedy trial. That later was expanded into the doctrine of habeas corpus and became part of the U.S. Constitution. This is the foundation of Anglo-American law and one of its highest achievements, but it’s now being cast to the winds.
One of the most remarkable examples is of Omar Khadr, the first Guantánamo case to come to a military commission—not a court—under Obama. The charge was that he had tried to resist an attack on his village by American soldiers when he was a fifteen-year-old boy.12 That’s the crime. A fifteen-year-old tries to defend his village from an invading army. So he’s a terrorist. Khadr had been kept in Guantánamo and, before that, Bagram in Afghanistan for eight years. I don’t have to tell you what Guantánamo is like. He finally came to a military commission, where he was given a choice: either plead not guilty and stay here forever or plead guilty and just spend another eight years in detention.13 This violates every international convention that you can think of, including laws on treatment of juveniles. Of course, it grossly violates any principle. He was fifteen. But there was no public outcry.
In fact, particularly striking in some ways is that Khadr is a Canadian citizen. Canada could extradite him and free him if it wanted to, but they didn’t want to step on the master’s toes.14
Talk about the dangers of sectarianism, which historically drove a number of wedges into social m
ovements in the 1960s. Some of this sectarianism was engineered by the state through COINTELPRO, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program, and other efforts.
Sectarianism is very serious. The core of U.S. popular activism in the 1960s was the civil rights movement. But by the mid-1960s it had basically shattered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society were the center of a lot of the student activism and other activism of young people. Around 1968, the student Left split into two major groups. One of them was Progressive Labor (PL), which was Maoist. So PL says, “Let’s stand outside the G.E. factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and hand out leaflets to recruit them for a Maoist revolution.” I’m being a little unfair, but that’s basically what it was. The other split was the Weathermen, which said, “Things are so awful and horrible that we have to start a revolution. And the way we do it is by breaking windows of banks and attacking people”—robbing Brinks trucks, things like that. It’s hard to know which was more destructive. They were both destructive.
It was a real struggle to help young people escape these tendencies. Some did on their own, but a lot were caught up in them. There were a number of personal tragedies. Friends of mine spent years in jail as a result. And it effectively destroyed the movement.
COINTELPRO was part of the story, but we shouldn’t exaggerate. A lot of the sectarianism was coming from inside.
One of the criticisms leveled against the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it is leaderless, anarchic, nonideological. What do you think about its decision-making process, which is non-hierarchical. These general assemblies, for example, operate on consensus.
Consensus certainly has its value, but it’s also dangerous. All of us who have been around for years know that consensus decisions can turn out to be highly authoritarian. Some small group will be really dedicated to taking the movement over, and they’ll hang around after everybody is bored silly and end up running it. That happens over and over. So consensus can be a good thing, but you’ve got to understand its limits.
Without any leadership, more or less spontaneously the movement has developed a “let a hundred flowers bloom” mentality, which I think is a good thing. They didn’t develop a party line, like, say, the old Communist Party. Or to take a contemporary analogue, the Republican Party. The Republican Party today has a catechism. If you want to be a candidate, with very rare exceptions, you have to repeat the catechism in lockstep uniformity: global warming isn’t happening, no taxes on the rich.
There are about ten things that you have to repeat, whether you believe them or not. Anybody who departs from them is in trouble. Part of the catechism is, if somebody is out there that we don’t like or we think might harm us, “we kill them,” as Romney’s put it.15 One person in the Republican debate, Ron Paul, said, “Maybe we ought to consider a golden rule…in foreign policy,” treat others the way we want them to treat us.16 He was practically booed off the stage. That’s reminiscent of the old Communist Party.
The Occupy movements are quite right to try to avoid this quasi-totalitarian structure. On the other hand, consensus can go too far, like any other tactic. I think the criticism that Occupy hasn’t come up with actual proposals or demands is just not true. There are lots of proposals that have come out of Occupy. Many of them are quite feasible, within reach. In fact, some even have mainstream support from places like the Financial Times, things like a financial transaction tax, which makes good sense.
That’s the former Tobin tax, put forward by the economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin, sometimes called the Robin Hood tax.
Yes. A financial transaction tax would make a big difference in some countries, if it were done properly. The absolute refusal to tax the superrich is another part of the Republican catechism. Going after that—and dealing with radical inequality—makes perfectly good sense.
So does creating jobs. The basic problem we face is not a deficit but rather joblessness. A majority of the population agrees with that.17 But the banks don’t agree, so therefore it’s not discussed in Washington.
We could have a reasonable health care system, like other industrial countries. Not exactly utopian. Again, fighting for that makes perfectly good sense. A single-payer health care system has a lot of popular support, but the financial institutions are against it, so it’s not even discussed. A national health care system would, incidentally, eliminate the deficit, among other things—not that the deficit is all that important.
There are further goals I don’t think are unfeasible but could be revolutionary in import. So, for example, if a multinational corporation is shutting down an efficient manufacturing installation because it doesn’t make enough profit for them and they would rather shift it to China, the workforce and community could decide that they want to take it over, purchase it, direct it, and keep it running. In fact, that’s something proposed in standard works of business economics, which point out that there is no law of economics or capitalism that says firms have to act in the interest of shareholders, not stakeholders. The stakeholder is anybody their actions have an impact on: the workforce, the community, others.
The Occupy movement could at least be as imaginative as a standard business economics text. If they pursue that, it could lead to quite far-reaching changes.
The sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein says, “Capitalism is at the end of its rope.”18 Is it too soon to be talking about the end of capitalism?
I don’t even know what it means. First of all, we’ve never had capitalism, so it can’t end. We have some variety of state capitalism. If you fly on an airplane, you’re basically flying in a modified bomber. If you buy drugs, the basic research was done under public funding and support. The high-tech system is permeated with internal controls, government subsidies. And if you look at what are supposed to be the growing alternatives, China is another form of state capitalism. So I don’t know what’s supposed to be ending.
The question is whether these systems, whatever they are, can be adapted to current problems and circumstances. For example, there’s no justification, economic or other, for the enormous and growing role of financial institutions since the 1970s. Even some of the most respected economists point out that they’re just a drag on the economy. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says straight out that the financial institutions shouldn’t be allowed to have anything like the power they do.19 There’s plenty of leeway for modification and change. Worker-owned industries can take over. There’s interesting work on this topic by Gar Alperovitz, who has been right at the center of a lot of the organizing around worker control.20 It’s not a revolution, but it’s the germ of another type of capitalism, capitalism in the sense that markets and profit are involved.
Howard Zinn once commented, “There is a basic weakness in governments—however massive their armies, however wealthy their treasuries, however they control the information given to the public—because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists. When these people begin to suspect they have been deceived, and when they withdraw their support, the government loses its legitimacy, and its power.”21 He also wrote that people “know with supreme clarity—when their attention is not concentrated by the government and the media on waging war—that the world is run by the rich.”22
That’s basically correct. And incidentally, without taking anything away from Howard, it’s an old principle. I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in “Of the First Principles of Government,” where he pointed out that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”23 Whether it’s a military society, a partially free society, or what we—not he—would call a totalitarian state, it’s the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren’t able to do that, the whole thi
ng is going to collapse.
When coercion doesn’t work anymore, you have to turn to persuasion. In the rich, developed societies this has become an art form. In Britain and the United States, the freest societies about century ago, it was very clearly recognized by the leadership, the Tory Party in Britain, intellectuals in the United States, that the limits of coercion had been reached. People had won too much freedom—parliamentary labor parties, labor unions, women’s rights groups. So you had to turn to control of attitudes and opinion. That’s the origins of the public relations industry. Edward Bernays, the guru of the U.S. public relations industry, a liberal progressive, expressed the standard view, which wasn’t novel to him: “Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.”24 We somehow have to persuade or change the attitudes of the population so they will be willing to hand power over to us. Whoever presents these views is always part of the “intelligent minority.” And the way we do it is through propaganda. The term was used openly then. In fact, Bernays titled his book Propaganda. The word took on bad connotations in the 1930s, but before that it was used freely. Now it’s called advertising or public relations.
Those are the foundations of the industries of control of opinions and attitudes, driving people to consumerism and marginalizing them in various ways. Huge resources are devoted to this. Marketing is mostly a form of propaganda. If anybody believed in markets, which only ideologues do, but if, say, business believed in markets, they wouldn’t do anything like the marketing they do today. If you take an economics course, they teach you that markets are based on informed consumers making rational choices. But business devotes huge resources to trying to create uninformed consumers who make irrational choices. It’s obvious as soon as you look at an advertisement. If you had a market system, General Motors, let’s say, would put up a thirty-second ad on television saying, “Here are the characteristics of the cars we’re selling next year.” They obviously don’t do that, because they want to undermine markets.