Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read online

  MAN: What do you think about nationalization of industry as a means of allowing for this kind of large-scale social planning?

  Well, it would depend on how it’s done. If nationalization of industry puts production into the hands of a state bureaucracy or some sort of Leninist-style vanguard party, then you’d just have another system of exploitation, in my view. On the other hand, if nationalization of industry was based on actual popular control over industry—workers’ control over factories, community control, with the groups maybe federated together and so on—then that would be a different story. That would be a very different story, in fact. That would be extending the democratic system to economic power, and unless that happens, political power is always going to remain a very limited phenomenon.

  The Empire

  WOMAN: Then is the basic goal of the United States when it intervenes in Third World countries to destroy left-wing governments in order to keep them from power?

  No, the primary concern is to prevent independence, regardless of the ideology. Remember, we’re the global power, so we have to make sure that all the various parts of the world continue serving their assigned functions in our global system. And the assigned functions of Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so on. I mean, there’s no big secret about that—the media won’t tell you and scholarship won’t tell you, but all you have to do is look at declassified government documents and this is all explained very frankly and explicitly.

  The internal documentary record in the United States goes way back, and it says the same thing over and over again. Here’s virtually a quote: the main commitment of the United States, internationally in the Third World, must be to prevent the rise of nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from the masses of the population for improvement in low living standards and diversification of production; the reason is, we have to maintain a climate that is conducive to investment, and to ensure conditions which allow for adequate repatriation of profits to the West. Language like that is repeated year after year in top-level U.S. planning documents, like National Security Council reports on Latin America and so on—and that’s exactly what we do around the world. 52

  So the nationalism we oppose doesn’t need to be left-wing—we’re just as much opposed to right-wing nationalism. I mean, when there’s a right-wing military coup which seeks to turn some Third World country on a course of independent development, the United States will also try to destroy that government—we opposed Perón in Argentina, for example. 53 So despite what you always hear, U.S. interventionism has nothing to do with resisting the spread of “Communism,” it’s independence we’ve always been opposed to everywhere—and for quite a good reason. If a country begins to pay attention to its own population, it’s not going to be paying adequate attention to the overriding needs of U.S. investors. Well, those are unacceptable priorities, so that government’s just going to have to go.

  And the effects of this commitment throughout the Third World are dramatically clear: it takes only a moment’s thought to realize that the areas that have been the most under U.S. control are some of the most horrible regions in the world. For instance, why is Central America such a horror-chamber? I mean, if a peasant in Guatemala woke up in Poland [i.e. under Soviet occupation], he’d think he was in heaven by comparison—and Guatemala’s an area where we’ve had a hundred years of influence. Well, that tells you something. Or look at Brazil: potentially an extremely rich country with tremendous resources, except it had the curse of being part of the Western system of subordination. So in northeast Brazil, for example, which is a rather fertile area with plenty of rich land, just it’s all owned by plantations, Brazilian medical researchers now identify the population as a new species with about 40 percent the brain size of human beings, a result of generations of profound malnutrition and neglect—and this may be un-remediable except after generations, because of the lingering effects of mal-nutrition on one’s offspring. 54 Alright, that’s a good example of the legacy of our commitments, and the same kind of pattern runs throughout the former Western colonies.

  In fact, if you look at the countries that have developed in the world, there’s a little simple fact which should be obvious to anyone on five minutes’ observation, but which you never find anyone saying in the United States: the countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck. I mean, Japan was the one country that managed to resist European colonization, and it’s the one part of the traditional Third World that developed. Okay, Europe conquered everything except Japan, and Japan developed. What does that tell you? Historians of Africa have actually pointed out that if you look at Japan when it began its industrialization process [in the 1870s], it was at about the same developmental level as the Asante kingdom in West Africa in terms of resources available, level of state formation, degree of technological development, and so on. 55 Well, just compare those two areas today. It’s true there were a number of differences between them historically, but the crucial one is that Japan wasn’t conquered by the West and the Asante kingdom was, by the British—so now West Africa is West Africa economically, and Japan is Japan.

  Japan had its own colonial system too, incidentally—but its colonies developed, and they developed because Japan didn’t treat them the way the Western powers treated their colonies. The Japanese were very brutal colonizers, they weren’t nice guys, but they nonetheless developed their colonies economically; the West just robbed theirs. So if you look at the growth rate of Taiwan and Korea during the period of Japanese colonization, it was approximately the same as Japan’s own growth rate through the early part of this century—they were getting industrialized, developing infrastructure, educational levels were going up, agricultural production was increasing. In fact, by the 1930s, Formosa (now Taiwan) was one of the commercial centers of Asia. 56 Well, just compare Taiwan with the Philippines, an American colony right next door: the Philippines is a total basket-case, a Latin American-style basket-case. Again, that tells you something.

  With World War II, the Japanese colonial system got smashed up. But by the 1960s, Korea and Taiwan were again developing at their former growth rate—and that’s because in the post-war period, they’ve been able to follow the Japanese model of development: they’re pretty closed off to foreign exploitation, quite egalitarian by international standards, they devote pretty extensive resources to things like education and health care. Okay, that’s a successful model for development. I mean, these Asian countries aren’t pretty; I can’t stand them myself—they’re extremely authoritarian, the role of women you can’t even talk about, and so on, so there are plenty of unpleasant things about them. But they have been able to pursue economic development measures that are successful: the state coordinates industrial policy, capital export is strictly constrained, import levels are kept low. Well, those are exactly the kinds of policies that are impossible in Latin America, because the U.S. insists that those governments keep their economies open to international markets—so capital from Latin America is constantly flowing to the West. Alright, that’s not a problem in South Korea: they have the death penalty for capital export. Solves that difficulty pretty fast. 57

  But the point is, the Japanese-style development model works—in fact, it’s how every country in the world that’s developed has done it: by imposing high levels of protectionism, and by extricating its economy from free-market discipline. And that’s precisely what the Western powers have been preventing the rest of the Third World from doing, right up to this moment.

  WOMAN: Is there any hope for disbanding America’s empire, do you think?

  Well, it seems to me the situation is kind of like what one concludes from looking at the very likely potential of ecological catastrophe: either control over these matters is left in the hands of existing power interes
ts and the rest of the population just abdicates, goes to the beach and hopes that somehow their children will survive—or else people will become sufficiently organized to break down the entire system of exploitation, and finally start putting it under participatory control. One possibility will mean complete disaster; the other, you can imagine all kinds of things. For example, even profitability would no longer be all that important—what would be important is living in a decent way.

  Look, the general population here does not gain very much from holding on to our imperial system—in fact, it may gain nothing from it. If you take a look at imperial systems over history, it’s not at all clear that they are profitable enterprises in the final analysis. This has been studied in the case of the British Empire, and while you only get kind of qualitative answers, it looks as if the British Empire may have cost as much to maintain as the profits that came from it. And probably something like that is true for the U.S.-dominated system too. So take Central America: there are profits from our controlling Central America, but it’s very doubtful that they come anywhere near the probably ten billion dollars a year in tax money that’s required to maintain U.S. domination there. 58

  WOMAN: Those costs are paid by the people, though, while the profits are made by the rich.

  That’s it exactly—if you ask, “Why have an empire?” you’ve just given the answer. The empire is like every other part of social policy: it’s a way for the poor to pay off the rich in their own society. So if the empire is just another form of social policy by which the poor are subsidizing the rich, that means that under democratic social planning, there would be very little incentive for it—let alone the obvious moral considerations that would become a factor at that point. In fact, all kinds of questions would just change, radically.

  Change and the Future

  MAN: Mr. Chomsky, you present a very powerful view of the problems of capitalism, which I totally accept. When you start talking about the dissidence of the American population and the possibilities for large-scale change, though, I’ve got to admit that I have a little bit of trouble. I don’t see the same general disillusionment with the system that you describe. I think people maybe see things that are wrong in certain areas, maybe see that they’re powerless, but on the whole still really seem to buy into it—they think Reagan was a hands-off guy, not a figurehead created by the public relations industry.

  Well, people aren’t out in the streets revolting, that’s true—you can just look outside the door and see that. But by any index I know, the fact of the matter is that the public has become dramatically more dissident and skeptical. So for example, about half the population thinks that the government is just run by “a few big interests looking out for themselves.” 59 As to whether Reagan was a hands-off guy or a figurehead, frankly that doesn’t matter very much. The reality is that people either know or can quickly be convinced that they are not involved in policy-making, that policy is being made by powerful interests which don’t have much to do with them. Now, I think they sometimes misidentify the powerful interests—for instance, they include labor unions as among them; well, that’s propaganda. But when they mention corporations, big media, banks, investment firms, law firms that cater to their interests, things like that, okay, then I think they’re on target.

  So, yeah, people aren’t out revolting in the streets, that’s for sure. But I think there’s plenty of potential, I mean, the environmental movement is big, and remember, it’s a movement of the Seventies, not the Sixties. The Third World solidarity movements are movements of the Eighties. The anti-nuclear movement is a movement of the Eighties. The feminist movement is Seventies and Eighties. And it’s way beyond movements—there are all kinds of people who are just cynical: they don’t have any faith in institutions, they don’t trust anybody, they hate the government, they assume they’re being manipulated and controlled and that something’s going on which they don’t know about. Now, that’s not necessarily a move to the left: that could be the basis for fascism too—It’s just a question of what people do with it. I mean, this kind of depoliticized, cynical population could easily be mobilized by Jimmy Swaggart [a televangelist], or it could be organized by environmentalists. Mostly it just depends on who’s willing to do the work.

  WOMAN: But do you actually believe that these positive changes will come?

  I don’t know, I really haven’t the slightest idea. But nobody could ever have predicted any revolutionary struggle—they’re just not predictable. I mean, you couldn’t have predicted in 1775 that there was going to be an American Revolution, it would have been impossible to have predicted it. But there was. You couldn’t have predicted in 1954 that there was going to be a Civil Rights Movement. You couldn’t have predicted in 1987 that there was going to be an uprising on the West Bank. I don’t think at any stage in history it has ever been possible to decide whether to be optimistic or pessimistic, you just don’t know—nobody understands how change happens, so how can you guess?

  Let me just take a concrete case. In 1968, M.I.T. [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] was the deadest place in the world—there was no anti-war activity, nothing was going on. And this was after the Tet Offensive: Wall Street had turned against the war, M.I.T. still hadn’t heard about it. Well, a small group of students who were in a little collective on campus decided they would set up a sanctuary for a soldier who deserted; that was the kind of thing activists were doing back then. There was this working-class Marine kid who wanted to desert as an anti-war gesture, so the idea was, people would stay with him until the cops came, then they’d try to make a public issue out of it. There was a discussion about this among ten or fifteen students and two or three faculty members—and I came out against it, because I was totally pessimistic; I thought it couldn’t possibly work, I thought that it would be a complete fiasco. But they went ahead with it.

  Well, it turned out to be an incredible success. I mean, within about two days, the whole of M.I.T. was totally shut down—there weren’t any classes, nothing was going on, the whole student body was over in the Student Center. It turned into a 24-hour mixture of seminars, and you know, this horrible music that people listen to, all that kind of stuff—it was very exciting. And it just changed the whole character of the place; ever since then, M.I.T. has not been the same. I mean, it’s not that it turned into Utopia or anything, but a lot of concern developed and a lot of activity started up, which still continues, on issues which people didn’t even consider before. Well, could you have guessed? I mean, I guessed wrong, they guessed right. But as far as I can see, it was basically like flipping a coin.

  3

  Teach-In: Evening

  Based primarily on discussions at Rowe, Massachusetts, April 15–16, 1989.

  The Military-Industrial Complex

  WOMAN: What’s been the point of the arms race, Dr. Chomsky?

  Well, there are a lot of things, it’s served a number of crucial functions. Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population. If politics begins to break out inside your own country and the population starts getting active, all kinds of horrible things can happen—so you have to keep the population quiescent and obedient and passive. And international conflict is one of the best ways of doing it: if there’s a big enemy around, people will abandon their rights, because you’ve got to survive. So the arms race is functional in that respect—it creates global tension and a mood of fear.

  It’s also functional for controlling the empire: if we want to invade South Vietnam, let’s say, we have to be able to make it look as if we’re defending ourselves from the Russians. If we’re not able to do that, it’s going to be a lot harder to invade South Vietnam. The domestic population just won’t accept it—it’s costly, it’s morally costly if nothing else, to do these things.

  The arms race also plays a crucial role in keeping the economy going—and that’s a big problem. Suppose that the arms race really did decline: how would you force the taxpayers to keep subsidiz
ing high-technology industry like they’ve been doing for the past fifty years? Is some politician going to get up and say, “Alright, next year you’re going to lower your standard of living, because you have to subsidize I.B.M. so that it can produce fifth-generation computers”? Nobody’s going to be able to sell that line. If any politician ever started talking that way, people would say: “Okay, we want to start getting involved in social and economic policy-making too.”

  In fact, that danger has been very openly discussed in the business literature in the United States for forty or fifty years. 1 Business leaders know perfectly well what every economist knows: that spending for civilian purposes is maybe even more efficient, more profitable than spending for military purposes. And they also know that there are any number of ways to have the population subsidize high-technology industry besides through the Pentagon system—business knows that perfectly well, and it also knows the reasons against it. They remain what they always were.

  If you take an economics course, they’ll teach you, correctly, that if the government spends n dollars to stimulate the economy, it doesn’t really matter what it’s spent on: they can build jet planes, they can bury it in the sand and get people to dig for it, they can build roads and houses, they can do all sorts of things—in terms of stimulating the economy, the economic effects are not all that different. 2 In fact, it’s perfectly likely that military spending is actually a less efficient stimulus than social spending, for all kinds of reasons. But the problem is, spending for civilian purposes has negative side effects. For one thing, it interferes with managerial prerogatives. The money that’s funneled through the Pentagon system is just a straight gift to the corporate manager, it’s like saying, “I’ll buy anything you produce, and I’ll pay for the research and development, and if you can make any profits, fine.” From the point of view of the corporate manager, that’s optimal. But if the government started producing anything that business might be able to sell directly to the commercial market, then it would be interfering with corporate profit-making. Production of waste—of expensive, useless machinery—is not an interference: nobody else is going to produce B-2 bombers, right? So that’s one point.