Transcript of Interview with Noam Chomsky — After Thirty Years of Class War

Excerpt from Occupy by Noam Chomsky

ZUCCOTTI PARK PRESS | OCCUPIED MEDIA PAMPHLET SERIES

Interview with Edward Radzivilovkiy, Jan. 6, 2012

I want to start off with something you said at Occupy Boston: “The most exciting aspect of the Occupy movement is the construction of the linkages that are taking place all over. If they can be sustained and expanded, Occupy can lead to dedicated efforts to set society on a more humane course.”[1]

Some have said that the Occupy movement does not have a cohesive message of its demands. If you do believe that the Occupy movement does have specific demands, how many of these demands do you actually think can be realized?

There is quite a range of people from many walks of life and many concerns involved in the Occupy movement. There are some general things that bring them together, but of course they all have specific concerns as well.

Primarily, I think this should be regarded as a response, the first major public response, in fact, to about thirty years of a really quite bitter class war that has led to social, economic and political arrangements in which the system of democracy has been shredded.

Congress, for example, has its lowest approval level in history—practically invisible—and other institution’s ratings are not much higher.

The population is angry, frustrated, bitter and for good reasons. For the past generation, policies have been initiated that have lead to extremely sharp concentration of wealth in a tiny sector of the population. In fact, the wealth distribution is very heavily weighted by literally the top tenth of one percent of the population, a fraction so small that they’re not even picked up on the census. You have to do statistical analysis just to detect them. And they have benefited enormously. This is mostly from the financial sector—hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial corporations, and so on.

At the same time, for the majority of the population, incomes have pretty much stagnated. Real wages have also stagnated, sometimes declined. The benefits system that was very strong has been weakened.

People have been getting by in the United States by much higher work loads, by debt which sooner or later becomes unsustainable and by the illusions created by bubbles, most recently the housing bubble which collapsed, like bubbles do, leaving about $8 trillion in paper wealth disappearing for some sectors of the population. So, by now, U.S. workers put in far more hours than their counterparts in other industrial countries, and for African Americans almost all wealth has disappeared. It’s been a pretty harsh and bitter period, not by the standards of developing nations, but this is a rich society and people judge their situation and their prospects by what ought to be the case.

At the same time, concentration of wealth leads almost reflexively to concentration of political power, which in turn translates into legislation, naturally in the interests of those implementing it, and that accelerates what has been a vicious cycle leading to, as I said, bitterness, anger, frustration and a very atomized society. That’s why the linkages in the Occupy movement are so important.

Occupy is really the first sustained response to this. People have referred to the Tea Party as a response, but that is highly misleading. The Tea Party is relatively affluent, white. Its influence and power come from the fact that it has enormous corporate support and heavy finance. Parts of the corporate world simply see them as their shock troops, but it’s not a movement in the serious sense that Occupy is.

Going back to your question about the movement’s demands, there are general ones that are very widely shared in the population: Concern about the inequality. Concern about the chicanery of the financial institutions and the way their influence on the government has lead to a situation in which those responsible for the crisis are helped out, bailed out, richer and more powerful than ever and the victims are ignored. There are very specific proposals concerning the regulation of financial transaction taxes, reversal of the rules of corporate governance that have lead to this kind of situation, for example, a shifting of the tax code back to something more like what it used to be when the very rich were not essentially exempted from taxes, and many other quite specific demands of that kind. It goes on to include the interests of groups and their particular concerns, some of which are quite far reaching.

But I think if you investigate the Occupy movements and you ask them what are their demands, they are reticent to answer and rightly so, because they are essentially crafting a point of view from many disparate sources. And one of the striking features of the movement has simply been the creation of cooperative communities—something very much lacking in an atomized, disintegrated society—that includes general assemblies that carry out extensive discussion, kitchens, libraries, support systems, and so on. All of that is a work in progress leading to community structures that, if they can spread out into the broader community and remain their vitality, could be very important.

Colin Asher, a journalist, wrote a piece for The Progressive, in which he says, “Most scribes have settled on the idea that Occupy Wall Street is like Tahrir Square in Egypt, but I disagree. Occupy Wall Street is more like a Hooverville. The space itself engages people’s imaginations, but nothing will be settled here, not even the meaning of what is happening, and the participants won’t be able to define it. It matters that something is happening in lower Manhattan, and that people are paying attention, but it doesn’t much matter what is happening.”[2]

And you have said, “The 2012 election is now expected to cost two billion dollars. It’s going to have to be mostly corporate funding. So it’s not at all surprising that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is quite angry and frustrated, but unless Western populations can rise to the level of Egyptians they’re going to remain victims.”[3]

So what I am wondering is, do you see the Occupy movement as an anarchist movement—the kind of uprising you have been advocating for most of your career? Is it a precursor to a revolution, or can these goals be achieved without a revolution?

First of all, let’s talk about Egypt. What happened in Tahrir Square was extremely important, of historic importance in fact, and it did achieve a goal, namely, eliminating the dictatorship, but it left the regime in power. So yes, that’s an important goal and there have been achievements: the press is much freer and the labor activism is much less constrained.

In fact, one striking difference between the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings and the Occupy movements is that in the North African case the labor movement was right at the center of it. And in fact there is a very close correlation between such successes as there have been in the Middle East and North Africa and the level of labor militancy there over many years. That’s been true in Egypt for years. They’re usually crushed, but some successes. As soon as the labor movement became integrated into the April 6 movement—the Tahrir Square movement—it became a really significant and powerful force.

That’s quite different here. The labor movement has been decimated. Part of the task to be carried out is to revitalize it.

In Tunisia they did succeed in getting rid of a dictator and in running a parliamentary election, now with a moderate Islamist party in control.

In Egypt, as I said, there were gains, but the military-run regime is very much in power. There will be a parliamentary election, there has been already. The groups that are succeeding in the elections are those that have been working for years organizing among the general population—the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.

It’s quite a different situation here. There hasn’t been that kind of large-scale organizing. The labor movement has been struggling to retain victories that it won a long time ago and that it has been losing.

To have a revolution—a meaningful one—you need a substantial majority of the population who recognize or believe that further reform is not possible within the institutional framework that exists. And there is nothing like that here, not even remotely.

Should we be trying to achieve that? Should we working up to a revolution or should we be trying to achieve it some other way?

First of all, we are nowhere near the limits of what reform can carry out. People can have the idea of a revolution in the back of their minds if they want. But there are very substantive actions that should be taking place.

I don’t exactly know what it means to say, “Is this just anarchist?” Anarchist movements are very concerned with achieving specific goals. That’s what they have traditionally been and that’s what they should be. In this case, as I said, there are very specific short-term goals that have large support: fiscal policy, controlling financial institutions, dealing with environmental problems which are extraordinarily significant, shifting the political systems so that elections are not simply blocked, and so on. All of these are very direct and immediate concerns.

For example, just a couple of days ago, New York City’s City Council, probably under the influence of the Occupy movement, passed a resolution, unanimously I think, against corporate personhood. The resolution establishes that “corporations are not entitled to the entirety of protections or ‘rights’ of natural persons, specifically so that the expenditure of corporate money to influence the electoral process is no longer a form of constitutionally protected speech” and calls on Congress “to begin the process of amending the Constitution.”[4]

Well, that’s pretty far reaching. It’s a very popular idea in this country and if it’s pursued it will dismantle a century of judicial decisions that have given corporations and state-created fictitious legal entities extraordinary rights and power. The population doesn’t like it and has a right not to like it. Such steps are already being taken in words and could lead to action.

In the longer term there are many things that can be done. For example, in many parts of the country, particularly Ohio, there’s quite a significant spread of worker-owned enterprises. As I mentioned to Occupy Boston, a lot of this derived from a major effort, over thirty years ago, when U.S. Steel wanted to sell off and close one of its major installations. The work force and the community offered to buy it and run it themselves, industrial democracy, essentially. That went to the courts and they lost, although with sufficient support they could have won. But even the failure, like many failures, has spawned other efforts. Now there’s a network of worker/community-owned enterprises spreading over the region.

Is this reform or revolution? If it extends, it’s revolution. It changes the institutional structure of the society. Actually, a lot of it is supported by conservatives. It doesn’t break up very simply or sharply on what’s called, mostly meaninglessly, a right-left spectrum. But these are things that respond to people’s needs and concerns. There are cases right near here where similar options were possible. And I think those are directions that should definitely be pursued. A lot of these struggles are invigorated by things like the Occupy movement.

Similarly, going back to Egypt where the situation is quite different, they have very immediate concerns, like the question of what will the power of the military regime be. Will it be replaced by Islamist forces based in the slums and rural areas? What place will secular liberal elements—the ones who actually initiated the Tahrir Square demonstrations—find in this system? These are all very concrete problems that they have to deal with. Here there are different concrete problems to deal with. There are many similarities.

In both cases, in Egypt and the United States and in fact much the world, what’s happening is a reaction—in my opinion a much too delayed reaction—to the neoliberal policies of the roughly last thirty years. They have been implemented in different ways in different countries. But it’s generally the case that to the extent that they have been implemented everywhere, they have been harmful to the general population and beneficial to a very small sector. And that’s not accidental.

There is a new small book by the Economic Policy Institute called Failure by Design: The Story behind America’s Broken Economy. And the phrase “by design” is accurate. These things don’t happen by the laws of nature or by principles of economics to the extent they exist. They’re choices. And they are choices made by the wealthy and powerful elements to create a society that answers to their needs. It’s happened and it’s happening in Europe right now.

Take the European Central Bank (ECB). There are many economists, Nobel Laureates and others, and I agree with them, who think that the policies that the ECB is following and pursuing, basically austerity in a period of recession, is guaranteed to make the situation worse. So far, I think that’s been the case.

Growth is what is needed in a period of recession, not austerity. Europe has the resources to stimulate growth, but their resources are not being used because of the policies of the Central Bank and others. And one can ask what the purpose of this is. And a rational way to judge purposes is to look at predictable consequences. And one consequence is that these policies undermine the social democratic structures and the welfare-state structure that have been developed; they undermine the power of labor and create a more inegalitarian society with greater power in the hands of the corporate sector and the wealthy. So it’s class war basically, and that’s a kind of “failure by design” as well.

I think a lot of people today, when you mention to them an anarchist society, they get the wrong impression… Would you describe anarchist society as an ultra-radical version of democracy?

First of all, nobody owns the concept “anarchism.” Anarchism has a very broad back. You can find all kinds of things in the anarchist movements. So the question of what an anarchist society can be is almost meaningless. Different people who associate themselves with rough anarchist tendencies have very different conceptions.

But the most developed notions that anarchist activists and thinkers have had in mind are those for a highly organized society—highly structured, highly organized—but organized on the basis of free and voluntary participation. So, for example, what I mentioned about the Ohio network of worker/community-owned enterprises, that’s a traditional anarchist vision. Enterprises, not only owned but managed by participants in a free association with one another is a big step beyond. It could be at the federal level, it could be at the international level. So yes, it’s a highly democratic conception of a structured, organized society with power at the base. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have representatives, it can have, but they should be recallable and under the influence and control of participants.

Who’s in favor of a society like that? You can say Adam Smith, for example, who believed—you can question whether his beliefs were accurate—but he believed that market systems and the “invisible hand” of individual choices would lead to egalitarian societies of common participation. You can question the logic of the argument, but the goals are understandable and they go far back. You can find them in the first serious book of politics that was ever written, Aristotle’s Politics.

When Aristotle evaluated various kinds of systems, he felt that democracy was the least bad of them. But he said democracy wouldn’t work unless you could set things up so that they would be relatively egalitarian. He proposed specific measures for Athens that in our terms would be welfare-state measures.

There are plenty of roots for these concepts, a lot of them come right out of the Enlightenment. But I don’t think anyone has the authority to say this is what an anarchist society is going to look like. There are people who think you can sketch it out in great detail, but my own feeling here—I essentially agree with Marx—is that these things have to be worked out by people who are living and functioning in freedom and work out for themselves what kinds of societies and communities are appropriate for them.

The late British philosopher, Martin Hollis, worked extensively on questions of human action, the philosophy of social science and rationality. One of the claims he made was that any anarchist vision of a society rests upon an idea of human nature that is too optimistic. In short, he argued that anarchism is only viable if humans by nature are good. He says that history shows us that humans cannot be trusted to this degree, thus anarchism is too idealistic. Would you mind responding to this objection very quickly, given your commitment to some of the ideals of anarchism?

It’s possible to respond to arguments. It is not possible to respond to opinions. If some one makes an assertion saying, “Here’s what I believe,” fine, he can say what he believes, but you can’t respond to it. You can ask, what is the basis for your belief? Or, can you provide me with some evidence? What do you know about human nature? Actually, we don’t know very much about human nature. So yes, that’s an expression of his belief, he’s entitled to make it. We have no idea, nor does he have any idea, if it’s true of false. But it really doesn’t matter; whatever the truth turns out to be, we will follow the same policies, namely, try to optimize and maximize freedom, justice, participation, democracy. Those are goals that we’ll attempt to realize. Maybe human beings are such that there’s a limit to how far they can be realized, okay, we’ll still follow the same policies. So, whatever one’s un-argued assertions may be, it has very little affect on the policy and choices.

Professor Chomsky, thank you very much.

Interview extracted from Occupy by Noam Chomsky, published by Zuccotti Park Press

http://www.zuccottiparkpress.com/chomsky.html

[1] Noam Chomsky, “Occupy The Future,” inthesetimes.com, November 1, 2011, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12206/occupy_the_future/.

[2] Colin Asher, “Occupy Wall St. in NYC—The Week That Was,” The Progressive, October 16, 2011. http://www.progressive.org/occupy_wall_street_week.html

[3] Noam Chomsky, “The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival,”lecture given at the University of Toronto, April 7, 2011. http://chomsky.info/talks/20110407.htm

[4] New York City Council, Resolution 1172, January 4, 2012.