Power Systems

by Noam Chomsky

  Rand Paul is the Republican senator from Kentucky and son of Ron Paul.

  And apparently is being groomed as the future of libertarianism or something.

  What about Canada’s role in all of this? Why is Ottawa so yoked to Washington’s policy?

  It’s an interesting development in recent years. It’s related to NAFTA, but it reflects more general trends. Canadian and U.S. capital are increasingly integrated, which is bringing elites closer together. You can ask about cause and effect but Canadian policies, particularly under Stephen Harper, the prime minister, are not just drawing closer to U.S. policies but in some cases even going beyond them in extremism. Canada is becoming less and less of an independent country in many respects, culturally, economically, politically. It’s increasingly embedded within the U.S.-run system as a kind of client state.

  The energy system is a key part of this integration. The tar sands in Canada are a huge source of potential energy—and of environmental destruction. There’s a controversy going on about who is going to exploit the tar sands. The United States wants to, but Canada occasionally warns that it will partner with China, which is eager to develop these fields if the United States won’t.9 This is a major issue now. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama was very enthusiastic about the idea that we could have a century of energy independence by making use of fossil fuels in North America—natural gas in the United States and fuel from tar sands.10 He didn’t talk about what kind of a world it would be in one hundred years if we use these fossil fuels. There’s some discussion of the local environmental effects of developing the Canadian tar sands, but there’s a much broader question about the general effect on the global environment. These are very serious issues.

  Canada is also one of the major centers of mining operations around the world. Conflicts over mining of natural resources are leading to wars and violence globally, from Latin America to India. Internally, India is practically at war over natural resources.11 The same is true of Colombia and other countries.

  What can you say about the process of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas, known as fracking?

  Fracking has local environmental ramifications that are pretty severe. It uses huge amounts of water. The process itself is destructive of the local environment in many respects, and there is considerable public opposition to it on that basis.12 But I think that we shouldn’t overlook the deeper problem. Suppose it were environmentally pure. You’re still using fossil fuels. And we are coming to a tipping point on fossil fuels. We can’t continue in this direction for long without getting to a point of irreversible devastation. You can’t be sure of the date, but it’s pretty clear that it’s coming.

  The Vikings football team was threatening to move to Los Angeles, so the good taxpayers of the state of Minnesota will provide almost half a billion dollars in public money for the construction of a new stadium to keep the team there.13

  Florida also announced recently that it’s cutting back funding for the state university. The University of Florida is getting rid of some major academic programs, including computer science, but increasing funding for sports.14

  Athletic departments on U.S. campuses operate in a separate world. The salaries of the coaches are in the millions of dollars.15

  I remember going to some college for a talk—I forget where it was—but the first thing we drove to was some huge stadium. Right next to the sports stadium was a big building. I asked the students what it was, and they said, “That’s where the football players live.” They get special training to enable them to pass the courses so they can keep playing football.

  Years ago, you talked about listening to talk radio sports shows. I don’t know if you’re still doing that.

  I still do.

  I remember at the time you commented that these talk shows give the lie to the idea that the average Joe is unable to grasp complex and arcane data. And also, callers demonstrate fearlessness. You hear them saying, “Fire the bum,” “Get rid of that coach,” “Trade that player.”

  It’s very striking. First of all, there’s an enormous amount of knowledge, and a lot of self-confidence and challenging of authority, which is normal. If you don’t like what the coach did, you say he made a stupid decision, get rid of him. We’re smarter than he is. If you could carry that over to other domains of life, it would have some significance.

  I don’t know if you’ve read that your hometown, Philadelphia, is closing forty of its public schools.16

  I didn’t see that, but it’s happening elsewhere, too. I was invited a couple of months ago by a black community in Harlem to give a talk at one of the churches there, a famous church with a long civil rights history. They wanted me to talk about education. And a lot of the concerns people articulated there were that the public education system is under serious attack, both by defunding and by charter schools, which are breaking up the community and undermining the basic contributions of the public education system, which are quite real in the black community.

  In California, which is one of the richest places in the world, but is now under severe budgetary constraints, the major public universities, Berkeley and UCLA, the jewels in the crown, are effectively being privatized. They’re not very different from Ivy League universities now. Tuitions are sky high. They have endowments. At the same time, the state college system is being downgraded, so much so that students and teachers are planning a rolling strike against the budgetary cuts.17 California State University announced that it’s just going to have to refuse to accept any students for the spring 2013 term.18 The educational system is being degraded for the general population. But you have a private education for the rich and the privileged, and some small group that will be selected out to receive scholarships. It’s a sharply two-tiered system.

  One of the amazing things that’s happened in recent years is the corporatization of the universities, which shows up in many ways. There’s been a rapid increase in the number of administrators and layers of administration. They bring in a corporate mentality. Each new administrator has to have a sub-administrator, and that one has to have a sub–something else. Meanwhile, the role of the faculty in running the university is sharply declining. There’s a useful book on this topic by Benjamin Ginsberg called The Fall of the Faculty.19

  All of these developments are part of the general assault on education, which we should remember is part of a much more general assault on the whole society. That’s the neoliberal program, which is being protested all over the world, by the Occupy movement here, by the activists in Tahrir Square in Egypt, in different forms in different countries, but all over. It’s a very harmful system, except for the very rich. Actually, there’s a nice little monograph that just came out from the Economic Policy Institute—which is the main source of reliable, regular data on working America and the economy—called Failure by Design.20 The author, Josh Bivens, reviews the economic policies of the past forty years roughly and points out that they’re a class-based failure. Of course, they’re a great success for the top tenth of a percent of the population—the traders, CEOs—but they’re a failure for the large majority. By design. There are plenty of alternative policies, but these others are the ones that are chosen.

  We’re seeing similar dynamics right now in dramatic form in Europe, where the banks and the bureaucrats have been imposing a policy of austerity under stagnation, which is almost bound to make things worse and will make it harder to pay debts. They’ve been pretty sharply criticized by economists, even by the business press, but they’re pursuing austerity. It’s difficult to give a rationale on economic grounds. In fact, I think impossible. But you can find a rationale. In fact, it was more or less stated by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, in an interview in the Wall Street Journal in which he said that the social contract in Europe is over.21 In other words, we’re killing the social contract.

  You always talk about the institutional imperatives and the structural underpinning of
these policies. But don’t you have to keep the patient in reasonably good health and functioning? Aren’t they killing the goose?

  It depends on what time scale you have in mind. There’s plenty of cheap labor around the world. You can outsource production. If you’re Apple, one of the world’s richest corporations, you can have workers employed by Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, in southwestern China, living and working in hideous conditions, committing suicide, and you can make a lot of profit out of that.22 If China turns out to be too expensive, you can go to Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. You can keep that going for a long time. Yes, there’s a long-term problem, but there are long-term problems in capitalist economies anyway. There’s a problem with overproduction. There’s a crisis of accumulation. These are long-term problems that you try to keep at bay in various ways, all while planning for short-term wealth and privilege. That’s the way business works.

  Apple also, conveniently, has an office in Reno, Nevada, and by doing so, according to a recent report, “it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California” and other states.23 Meanwhile, California is cutting programs left and right.

  It’s a standard technique. It’s now called globalization. It’s been going on for quite a while.

  Robert Reich was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He’s currently a media pundit and professor at Berkeley. He says, in France, “Socialism isn’t the answer to the basic problem haunting all rich nations. The answer,” he says, “is to reform capitalism…. We don’t need socialism. We need a capitalism that works for the vast majority.”24 What do you think about this idea of sustainable capitalism?

  In a narrow sense, I agree with him. If we’re talking about feasible objectives in the short term, it’s kind of meaningless to talk about socialism. There isn’t a popular base for it. There isn’t an understanding of it. That’s, of course, not what he means—but if we keep to that narrow frame, yes, there’s a point.

  In the long term, it’s almost a self-contradiction. Capitalism is based on production for profit, not need. It’s also based on a requirement of constant growth for profit. That’s self-destructive—quite apart from things like the steady process of monopolization, forming more and more oligopolies, as well as overproduction and the decline of the rate of profit. These are long-term tendencies that can be delayed, but they’re inherent to capitalism.

  And, at least from my point of view, there’s something essentially wrong with the current system. Here we get to values. Do we want to have a system in which some people give orders and others take them? That’s a deeper question. Do we want it in the political system? Do we want it in the economic system, especially given the inevitable interaction between the two, with concentration of wealth heavily influencing political power? Or should we be moving toward enterprises that are owned and managed by the workforce and communities? Call it whatever name you want. You can call it capitalist if you like. You can call it anything. But that’s a direction in which policy could move: toward more democracy, undermining illegitimate authority.

  Various moves in this direction are taking place. There’s a new organization being formed, an International Organization for a Participatory Society, coming largely out of the ZNet collective.25 The United Steelworkers has a new initiative with Mondragon, the huge worker- and community-owned conglomerate in the Basque country in Spain.26 Mondragon runs industrial enterprises, banks, schools, hospitals, housing. It’s quite successful economically and quite complex. Mondragon functions in an international capitalist economy—a quasi-market economy—which often has ugly consequences. But things like Mondragon could still become what Mikhail Bakunin once called “the seeds of the future” in the present society.27 I don’t know what Robert Reich thinks about this, but I would think that’s a much saner way to move in the long term.

  In a lecture at Loyola University, you pointed out that Thomas Jefferson had rather serious concerns about the fate of the democratic experiment.28 He feared the rise of a new form of absolutism that was more ominous than the British rule overthrown in the American Revolution. He distinguished in his later years between what he called “aristocrats and democrats.”29 And then he went on to say, “I hope we shall…crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”30 He also wrote, “I sincerely believe…that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”31 That’s the kind of quote from a Founding Father you don’t see too much.

  Yes, those lines are not usually quoted. But these concerns were felt early on, for a complex variety of reasons. They take newer forms constantly.

  Didn’t Bakunin say, “If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another”?32

  He did, but I would somewhat take issue. The state is not the only center of power in our society. In fact, there’s another center of power: concentrated private capital. And as long as that’s there, in many ways the state is a protector against its excesses. So I think he’s right in criticizing the state as an oppressive institution, but it is also relative to the nature of the rest of the society.

  Bakunin was not a systematic thinker, but he did have significant insight into the nature of power and its exercise. His disagreements with Karl Marx were over an element of that conflict. He objected to what he understood to be Marx’s conception of a kind of a radical intelligentsia running the workers’ movement, for its own benefit, of course. He pointed out, very presciently, that what he called a new class of scientific intelligentsia, who claim to appropriate all knowledge, would move in one of two directions: either it would become a “red bureaucracy,” which would institute the most oppressive rule ever seen in the name of the working classes, or it would recognize that power lies elsewhere, in private capital, and become its servants.33 That’s essentially what happened. That’s a pretty good prediction—one of the few far-reaching predictions in the social sciences that really came true. It should be studied everywhere for that reason alone.

  There’s a movement in the country to reverse the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling of the Supreme Court in January 2010, which deregulated the campaign finance system, and which, one critic says, “has legalized corporate bribery of our elected officials.”34 What are your views on Citizens United and the efficacy of engaging in such a constitutional amendment ratification, which may take years and years?

  There are a number of questions, including a tactical question of the kind you raise and a principled question, the heart of the matter. And there’s something to say about each of them. On the tactical side, I think a campaign to amend the Constitution could be justified as an educational effort, a way to get people to pay attention to the issue. That’s independent of how long it might take to ratify something like that. If enough people get interested in the issue, they may turn to more radical goals and, I think, more principled ones. Which takes us to the principled issue. I think Citizens United is a very bad decision. However, it’s kind of the icing on the cake. The idea of corporate personhood goes back a century. It wasn’t instituted by Citizens United. And we should be thinking about that.

  Why should corporations be granted personal rights? By now corporations have rights way beyond persons of flesh and blood. They are immortal, they are protected by state power. In fact, the basis of a corporation is limited liability, meaning as a participant in a corporation you’re not personally liable if it, say, murders tens of thousands of people at Bhopal.

  You are referring to the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India, which killed about twenty thousand people in 1984.35

  Which is just one example. Why should such an institution have personal rights? Also, these institutions are directed to maximize shareholder rights at the expense of stakeholder rights by law. Why should we accept that? It’s not an economic principle, certainly.

  Under NAFTA, U.S. corporations have the right of what’s
called “national treatment” in Mexico.36 A Mexican person doesn’t have the right of “national treatment” in Arizona, obviously. Why should a corporation have such rights?

  Another major Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, back in the 1970s, interpreted money as a form of speech.37 That has far-reaching implications. If money is a form of speech, then those who have money can shout louder. I should say, the American Civil Liberties Union has supported these judgments on the basis of a form of free-speech absolutism.38 I don’t think they’re thinking through the implications.

  Citizens United opens the way for massive contributions that distort the political system.39 But this is something that’s been going on for a long time. So we’re talking about an expansion of something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

  Marx said that the task is not just to understand the world but to change it.40 You’ve devoted much of your life to that.

  For whatever it’s worth—that’s for others to decide. But sure, I think that’s what we should all be trying to do: change the world in the short term, overcoming immediate problems—some of them, like environmental disaster and nuclear war, lethal problems. Not small problems. The fate of the species depends on them. So, in the short term, you can work for what are called reforms. Others try to get at the heart of the forms of illegitimate authority, dismantle them, and move toward greater freedom and independence.