Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read online

  The other point, which is probably even more serious from the perspective of private power, is that social spending increases the danger of democracy—it threatens to increase popular involvement in decision-making. For example, if the government gets involved, say around here, in building hospitals and schools and roads and things like that, people are going to get interested in it, and they’ll want to have a say in it—because it affects them, and is related to their lives. On the other hand, if the government says, “We’re going to build a Stealth Bomber,” nobody has any opinions. People care about where there’s going to be a school or a hospital, but they don’t care about what kind of jet plane you build—because they don’t have the foggiest idea about that. And since one of the main purposes of social policy is to keep the population passive, people with power are going to want to eliminate anything that tends to encourage the population to get involved in planning—because popular involvement threatens the monopoly of power by business, and it also stimulates popular organizations, and mobilizes people, and probably would lead to redistribution of profits, and so on.

  MAN: How about just reducing taxes, instead of sending all this money into the military-industrial complex?

  You can’t reduce taxes much—because what else is going to keep the economy going? Remember, it’s been known since the Great Depression that anything like free-market capitalism is a total disaster: it can’t work. Therefore every country in the world that has a successful economy is somewhere close to fascism—that is, with massive government intervention in the economy to coordinate it and protect it from hostile forces such as too much competition. I mean, there just is no other way to do it really: if you pulled that rug out from under private enterprise, we’d go right back into the Depression again. That’s why every industrial economy has a massive state sector—and the way our massive state sector works in the United States is mainly through the military system.

  I mean, I.B.M. isn’t going to pay the costs of research and development—why should they? They want the taxpayer to pay them, say by funding a N.A.S.A. program, or the next model of fighter jet. And if they can’t sell everything they produce in the commercial market, they want the taxpayer to buy it, in the form of a missile launching system or something. If there are some profits to be made, fine, they’ll be happy to make the profits—but they always want the public subsidies to keep flowing. And that’s exactly how it’s worked in general in the United States for the past fifty years.

  So for example, in the 1950s computers were not marketable, they just weren’t good enough to sell in the market—so taxpayers paid 100 percent of the costs of developing them, through the military system (along with 85 percent of research and development for electronics generally, in fact). By the 1960s, computers began to be marketable—and they were handed over to the private corporations so they could make the profits from them; still, about 50 percent of the costs of computer development were paid by the American taxpayer in the 1960s. 3 In the 1980s, there was a big new “fifth-generation” computer project—they were developing new fancy software, new types of computers, and so on—and the development of all of that was extremely expensive. So therefore it went straight back to the taxpayer to foot the bills again—that’s what S.D.I, [the Strategic Defense Initiative] was about, “Star Wars.” Star Wars is basically a technique for subsidizing high-technology industry. Nobody believes that it’s a defense system—I mean, maybe Reagan believes it, but nobody whose head is screwed on believes that Star Wars is a military system. It’s simply a way to subsidize the development of the next generation of high technology—fancy software, complicated computer systems, fifth-generation computers, lasers, and so on. 4 And if anything marketable comes out of all that, okay, then the taxpayer will be put aside as usual, and it’ll go to the corporations to make the profits off it.

  In fact, just take a look at the parts of the American economy that are competitive internationally: it’s agriculture, which gets massive state subsidies; the cutting edge of high-tech industry, which is paid for by the Pentagon; and the pharmaceutical industry, which is heavily subsidized through public science funding—those are the parts of the economy that function competitively. And the same thing is true of every other country in the world: the successful economies are the ones that have a big government sector. I mean, capitalism is fine for the Third World—we love them to be inefficient. But we’re not going to accept it. And what’s more, this has been true since the beginnings of the industrial revolution: there is not a single economy in history that developed without extensive state intervention, like high protectionist tariffs and subsidies and so on. In fact, all the things we prevent the Third World from doing have been the prerequisites for development everywhere else—I think that’s without exception. So to return to your question, there just is no way to cut taxes very much without the entire economy collapsing.

  The Permanent War Economy

  MAN: I’m a little surprised to hear you say that the Pentagon is so important to our economy.

  There’s hardly an element of advanced-technology industry in the United States that’s not tied into the Pentagon system—which includes N.A.S.A., the Department of Energy [which produces nuclear weapons], that whole apparatus. In fact, that’s basically what the Pentagon’s for, and that’s also why its budget always stays pretty much the same. I mean, the Pentagon budget is higher in real terms than it was under Nixon—and to the extent that it’s declined in recent years, it’s in fact had the effect of what they call “harming the economy.” For instance, the Pentagon budget started to decline in 1986, and in 1987 real wages started to fall off for skilled workers, in other words for the college-educated. Before that they’d been declining for unskilled workers, and they started to go down for the college-educated a year after the Pentagon budget began to drop off a bit. And the reason is, college-educated people are engineers, and skilled workers, and managers and so on, and they’re very dependent on the whole Pentagon system for jobs—so even a slight decline in military spending immediately showed up in real wage levels for that sector of the population. 5

  Actually, if you look back at the debates which went on in the late 1940s when the Pentagon system was first being set up, they’re very revealing. You have to examine the whole development against the background of what had just happened. There was this huge Depression in the 1930s, worldwide, and at that point everyone understood that capitalism was dead. I mean, whatever lingering beliefs people had had about it, and they weren’t very much before, they were gone at that point—because the whole capitalist system had just gone into a tailspin: there was no way to save it the way it was going. Well, every one of the rich countries hit upon more or less the same method of getting out. They did it independently, but they more or less hit on the same method—namely, state spending, public spending of some kind, what’s called “Keynesian stimulation.” And that did finally get countries out of the Depression. In the Fascist countries, it worked very well—they got out pretty fast. And in fact, every country became sort of fascist; again, “fascism” doesn’t mean gas chambers, it means a special form of economic arrangement with state coordination of unions and corporations and a big role for big business. And this point about everyone being fascist was made by mainstream Veblenite-type economists [i.e. after the American economist Veblen] right at the time, actually—they said, everybody’s fascist, the only question is what form the fascism takes: it takes different forms depending on the country’s cultural patterns. 6

  Well, in the United States, the form that fascism took at first was the New Deal [legislative programs enacted in the 1930s to combat the Depression]. But the New Deal was too small, it didn’t really have much effect—in 1939, the Depression was still approximately what it had been in 1932. Then came the Second World War, and at that point we became really fascist: we had a totalitarian society basically, with a command economy, wage and price controls, allocations of materials, all done straight from Washington
. And the people who were running it were mostly corporate executives, who were called to the capital to direct the economy during the war effort. And they got the point: this worked. So the U.S. economy prospered during the war, industrial production almost quadrupled, and we were finally out of the Depression. 7

  Alright, then the war ended: now what happens? Well, everybody expected that we were going to go right back into the Depression—because nothing fundamental had changed, the only thing that had changed was that we’d had this big period of government stimulation of the economy during the war. So the question was, what happens now? Well, there was pent-up consumer demand—a lot of people had made money and wanted to buy refrigerators and stuff. But by about 1947 and ’48, that was beginning to tail off, and it looked like we were going to go back into another recession. And if you go back and read the economists, people like Paul Samuelson and others in the business press, at that point they were saying that advanced industry, high-technology industry, “cannot survive in a competitive, unsubsidized free-enterprise economy”—that’s just hopeless. 8 They figured we were heading right back to the Depression, but now they knew the answer: government stimulation. And by then they even had a theory for it, Keynes; before that they’d just done it by instinct.

  So at that point, there was general agreement among business and elite planners in the United States that there would have to be massive government funneling of public funds into the economy, the only question was how to do it. Then came kind of an interesting … it wasn’t really a debate, because it was settled before it was started, but the issue was at least raised: should the government pursue military spending or social spending? Well, it was quickly made very clear in those discussions that the route that government spending was going to have to take was military. And that was not for reasons of economic efficiency, nothing of the sort—it was just for straight power reasons, like the ones I mentioned: military spending doesn’t redistribute wealth, it’s not democratizing, it doesn’t create popular constituencies or encourage people to get involved in decision-making. 9 It’s just a straight gift to the corporate manager, period. It’s a cushion for managerial decisions that says, “No matter what you do, you’ve got a cushion down there”—and it doesn’t have to be a big portion of total revenues, like maybe it’s a few percent, but it’s a very important cushion. 10

  And the public is not supposed to know about it. So as the first Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, put the matter very plainly back in 1948, he said: “The word to use is not ‘subsidy,’ the word to use is ‘security.’ ” 11 In other words, if you want to make sure that the government can finance the electronics industry, and the aircraft industry, and computers, and metallurgy, machine tools, chemicals, and so on and so forth, and you don’t want the general public trying to have a say in any of it, you have to maintain a pretense of constant security threats—and they can be Russia, they can be Libya, they can be Grenada, Cuba, whatever’s around.

  Well, that’s what the Pentagon system is about: it’s a system for ensuring a particular form of domination and control. And that system has worked for the purposes for which it was designed—not to give people better lives, but to “make the economy healthy,” in the standard sense of the phrase: namely, ensuring corporate profits. And that it does, very effectively. So you see, the United States has a major stake in the arms race: it’s needed for domestic control, for controlling the empire, for keeping the economy running. And it’s going to be very hard to get around that; I actually think that’s one of the toughest things for a popular movement to change, because changing the commitment to the Pentagon system will affect the whole economy and the way it’s run. It’s a lot harder than, say, getting out of Vietnam. That was a peripheral issue for the system of power. This is a central issue.

  In fact, I’ve been arguing for years with friends of mine who are campaigning for “conversion” of the economy from military production to social spending that they’re basically talking nonsense. I mean, it’s not that business has to be told “for this many jet planes we could have this many schools, isn’t it awful to build jet planes?” You don’t have to convince the head of General Motors of that: he knew that forty years before anyone started talking about “conversion,” that’s why he wanted jet planes. There is no point in explaining to people in power that “conversion” would be better for the world. Sure it would. What do they care? They knew that long ago, that’s why they went in the opposite direction. Look: this system was designed, with a lot of conscious and intelligent thought, for the particular purpose that it serves. So any kind of “conversion” will just have to be part of a total restructuring of the society, designed to undermine centralized control.

  And I mean, you’re going to need an alternative—it’s not enough just to cut off the Pentagon budget, that’s just going to make the economy collapse, because the economy is dependent on it. Something else has to happen unless you just want to go back to the Stone Age. So the first thing simply has to be creating both a culture and an institutional structure in which public funds can be used for social needs, for human needs. That’s the mistake that a lot of the “conversion” people make, in my opinion: they’re just identifying what’s obvious, they’re not focusing enough on creating the basis for an alternative.

  WOMAN: What is the hope, then, for dismantling the whole military system?

  There have to be large-scale institutional changes, we need a real democratization of the society. I mean, if we continue to have domination of the economic and political system by corporations, why should they behave any differently? It’s not that the people in the corporations are bad people, it’s that the institutional necessity of the system is to maintain corporate domination and profit-making. I mean, if the Chairman of General Motors suddenly decided to start producing the best quality cars at the cheapest prices, he wouldn’t be Chairman any longer—there’d be a shift on the stock market and they’d throw him out in five minutes. And that generalizes to the system as a whole. There is absolutely no reason why the people who own the economy would want it to be set up in a way that undermines or weakens their control, any more than there’s a reason why they would want there to be a political system in which the population genuinely participates—why would they? They’d be crazy. Just like they’d be crazy if they opened up the media to dissident opinion—what possible purpose would there be in that? Or if they let the universities teach honest history, let’s say. It would be absurd.

  Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do. Even within the current structure of power, there’s plenty of latitude for pressure and changes and reforms. I mean, any institution is going to have to respond to public pressure—because their interest is to keep the population more or less passive and quiescent, and if the population is not passive and quiescent, then they have to respond to that. But really dealing with the problems at their core ultimately will require getting to the source of power and dissolving it—otherwise you may be able to fix things up around the edges, but you won’t really change anything fundamentally. So the alternative just has to be putting control over these decisions into popular hands—there simply is no other way besides dissolving and diffusing power democratically, I think.

  Libyan and American Terrorism

  WOMAN: Switching to current events a bit, Mr. Chomsky—“terrorism” is a phenomenon that really took off in the media in the 1980s. Why do you think all of a sudden Libya became such a great threat to us?

  Well, because from the very first minute that the Reagan administration came into office, it immediately selected Libya as a punching bag. 12 And there were very good reasons for that: Libya’s defenseless, Qaddafi is sort of hateful and kind of a thug—a very small-time thug, I might say, but nevertheless a thug—and he’s also an Arab, and there’s a lot of anti-Arab racism around. 13 And the Reagan administration needed to create fear: it had to mobilize the population to do things they didn’t want to do, like support
a massive increase in military spending.

  I mean, Reagan could talk about the “Evil Empire,” but he couldn’t get into any confrontations with the Evil Empire—because that’s dangerous; the Soviets can fight back, and they’ve got missiles and things like that. So the trick was to find somebody who’s frightening enough to scare Americans into accepting a huge military build-up, but nevertheless weak enough so you could beat him up without anyone fighting back. And the answer was Qaddafi, and international terrorism generally.

  International terrorism by Arabs is certainly real. I mean, overwhelmingly international terrorism comes out of Washington and Miami, but there is a relatively small amount of it that comes from the Arab world. 14 And people don’t like it—they blow up planes, and it’s scary, and it’s Arabs, it’s weird-looking guys who have dark faces and mustaches. How does it become a big enough threat that we have to build more missiles and so on? Well, it’s Kremlin-directed international terrorism. 15 This stuff was crafted from the first moment—and furthermore, it was all utterly transparent right from the very beginning, like I was writing about it as early as 1981. 16 The media pretend they don’t understand it, scholarship pretends it doesn’t understand it, but it’s been as predictable as a broken record: they put it on in 1981, and it’s still playing.