Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

Or take a look at the Nixon administration’s famous “Enemies List,” which came out in the course of Watergate [exposed in 1973, the document named 208 Americans from various professions under the title “Opponents list and political enemies project”]. You’ve heard of that, but did you hear about the assassination of Fred Hampton? No. Nothing ever happened to any of the people who were on the Enemies List, which I know perfectly well, because I was on it—and it wasn’t because I was on it that it made the front pages. But the F.B.I. and the Chicago police assassinated a Black Panther leader as he lay in his bed one night during the Nixon administration [on December 4, 1969]. Well, if the press had any integrity at all, if the Washington Post had any integrity, what they would have said is, “Watergate is totally insignificant and innocuous, who cares about any of that in comparison with these other things.” But that’s not what happened, obviously. And that just shows again, very dramatically, how the press is lined up with power. The real lesson of Nixon’s fall is that the President shouldn’t call Thomas Watson [Chairman of I.B.M.] and McGeorge Bundy [former Democratic official] bad names—that means the Republic’s collapsing. And the press prides itself on having exposed this fact. On the other hand, if you want to send the F.B.I. to organize the assassination of a Black Panther leader, that’s fine by us; it’s fine by the Washington Post too.

Take the bombing of Cambodia, for instance: the bombing of Cambodia was infinitely worse than anything that came up in the Watergate hearings—this thing they call the “secret bombing” of Cambodia, which was “secret” because the press didn’t talk about what they knew.34 The U.S. killed maybe a couple hundred thousand people in Cambodia, they devastated a peasant society.35 The bombing of Cambodia did not even appear in Nixon’s Articles of Impeachment. It was raised in the Senate hearings, but only in one interesting respect—the question that was raised was, why hadn’t Nixon informed Congress? It wasn’t, why did you carry out one of the most intense bombings in history in densely populated areas of a peasant country, killing maybe 150,000 people? That never came up. The only question was, why didn’t you tell Congress?

But for another thing, there’s no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands—that’s like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn’t a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn’t a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically.

The policy that won out was what he called “stalemate”: keep things the way they are, maintain the system of Israeli oppression. And there was a good reason for that, it wasn’t just out of the blue: having an embattled, militaristic Israel is an important part of how we rule the world. Basically the United States doesn’t give a damn about Israel: if it goes down the drain, U.S. planners don’t care one way or another, there’s no moral obligation or anything else. But what they do care about is control of the enormous oil resources of the Middle East. I mean, a big part of the way you run the planet is by controlling Middle East oil, and in the late 1950s, the United States began to recognize that Israel would be a very useful ally in this respect. So for example, there’s a National Security Council Memorandum in 1958 which points out that the main enemy of the United States in the Middle East (as everywhere) is nationalism, what they call “radical Arab nationalism”—which means independence, countries pursuing a course other than submission to the needs of American power.

And in the 1970s and Eighties, the United States increasingly turned to Israel as kind of a weapon against other parts of the Third World—Israel would provide armaments and training and computers and all sorts of other things to Third World dictatorships at times when it was hard for the U.S. government to give that support directly. For instance, Israel acted as the main U.S. contact with the South African military for years, right through the embargo [the U.N. Security Council imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa in 1977 after the U.S. and Britain had vetoed even stronger resolutions].44 Well, that’s a very useful alliance, and that’s another reason why Israel gets such extraordinary amounts of U.S. aid.45

If you eliminate the major Arab deterrent force and increase U.S. aid to Israel to the level of 50 percent of total U.S. aid worldwide, and Israel is committed to integrating the Occupied Territories and attacking and disrupting Lebanon, if you get that configuration of events, what do you think is going to happen? It’s transparent, a child could figure it out. But you can’t say it, because to say it would imply that the United States is not the leader of the world peace forces, and is not interested in justice and freedom and human rights around the world.

And the book is almost a daily record of cabinet meetings in Israel between 1967 and ’77—right in the period when they were trying to figure out just what to do with the Occupied Territories.57 Well, there’s virtually no mention of security, barely a mention of it. One thing that does get mentioned a lot is what they call the “demographic problem”—the problem of what do you do about too many Arabs in a Jewish state. Okay, that’s called the “demographic problem” in Israel, and in fact, people here refer to it that way too.58 The purpose of that term, which sounds like kind of a neutral sociological term, is to disguise the fact that it’s a deeply racist notion—we would see that right off if we applied it here.

MAN: Well, I don’t know about these cabinet records—but the fact is that when Israel was originally conceived in 1948, it was immediately lunged upon by virtually everybody on its borders: all of the Arab countries immediately tried to destroy it, and prevent its very existence. Wouldn’t you say the Israeli people are justified in remembering that history still, as they set national policies today? Well, you’re right that that’s the standard line about what happened. But it’s not true. Keep in mind the background facts. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly made a recommendation for a three-way partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small internationally-administered zone that would have included Jerusalem [the area was under British imperial control].60 Now, I should stress that this was a General Assembly recommendation, and General Assembly recommendations have no force: they are only recommendations. Israel insists that they have no force, I should say—Israel is by far the greatest violator of General Assembly recommendations, beginning in December 1948, when Israel rejected the General Assembly call for allowing Palestinian refugees the right of return [they had fled violence that broke out in Palestine beginning in November 1947]. In fact, Israel was accepted into the United Nations on condition that it accept that requirement, and it claimed that it would accept it—but then it immediately refused to carry through on that promise.61 An...

But achieving some kind of meaningful federation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with really divided sovereignty—that’s going to be extremely hard, we just have to face that. And that’s about the only kind of solution that makes any sense, I think—it’s the only limited form of justice I can see. MAN: There’s also the different mentality between the Arabs and Jews that figures into it too, don’t you think—isn’t that always going to get in the way of peace? They’re the same kind of people, they have the same kind of mentality. They bleed when they’re cut, they mourn when their children are killed. I’m not aware of any difference between them.

That’s the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work. MAN: Did you go through a phase of hopelessness, or . . . Yeah, every evening. MAN: I feel like I’m kind of stuck in one. Every evening. I mean, look: if you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point? MAN: You’ve just got to work at it. Yeah, what’s the point? First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything—they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget the pessimism.

First of all, the Soviet Union was basically a capitalist system. The first thing that Lenin and Trotsky did when they took power in October 1917, remember, was to destroy all of the forms of socialist initiative that had developed in Russia since the start of the Russian Revolution in February 1917 [the Russian Tsar was overthrown by popular revolution in February 1917; Lenin’s Bolshevik Party took over eight months later in a military coup]. Just now I was talking about workers and communities participating in decision-making—the first thing the Bolsheviks did was to destroy that, totally. They destroyed the factory councils, they undermined the soviets [elected local governing bodies], they eliminated the Constituent Assembly [democratically elected parliament initially dominated by a rival socialist group, which was to govern Russia but was dispersed by Bolshevik troops in January 1918]. In fact, they dismantled every form of popular organization in Russia and set up a command economy with wages and profits, on sort of a centralized state-capitalist model.

In the Czech Republic, the percentage of the population living in poverty has gone from 5.7 percent in 1989 to 18.2 percent in 1992; in Poland, the figures are something like from 20 percent to 40 percent. So if you walk down the streets of Warsaw now, sure, you’ll find a lot of nice stuff in the shop windows—but that’s the same as in any Third World country: plenty of wealth, very narrowly concentrated; and poverty, starvation, death, and huge inequality for the vast majority.10 And actually, that’s the reason the so-called “Communist” Parties in Eastern Europe and Russia are getting votes these days. I mean, when they describe that here, they say, “it’s nostalgia, they forget how bad it was in the old days”—but there’s no nostalgia.11 I don’t think anybody there actually wants to go back to the Stalinist dungeon again—it’s not that they’re nostalgic about the past, it’s that they’re apprehensive about the future. They can see what’s coming very well, namely Brazil and Guatemala, and as bad as their system was, that’s worse. Much worse.

Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it’s true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves “socialist”—but they also called themselves “democratic.” Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers’ control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren’t even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives—but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup—and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin’s takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism.21 But that truism has been driven out of people’s heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism.

In January 1959, Cuba had a popular nationalist revolution. We now know from declassified U.S. government documents that the formal decision to overthrow Castro was made by the American government in March 1960—that’s very important, because at that point there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.]29 So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can’t have had anything to do with Cuba being a Russian outpost in the Cold War—Cuba was just taking an independent path, which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United States. Strafing and sabotage operations began as early as October 1959. Then, soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy launched a terrorist campaign against them which is without even remote comparison in the history of international terrorism [Operation MONGOOSE].30 And in February 1962, we instituted the embargo—which has had absolutely devastating effects on the Cuban population.

For the last thirty years the story had always been, “We have to defend ourselves against Cuba because it’s an outpost of the Russians.” Okay, all of a sudden the Russians weren’t there anymore—so what happens? All of a sudden it turned out that we really had Cuba under an embargo because of our love for democracy and human rights, not because they’re an outpost of Communism about to destroy us—now it turns out that’s why we have to keep torturing them—and nobody in the American press even questions this development. The propaganda system didn’t skip a beat: check back and try to find anybody who even noticed this little curiosity. Then in 1992, a liberal Democrat, Robert Torricelli, pushed a bill through Congress called the Cuban Democracy Act, which made the embargo still tighter—it forbids foreign-based U.S. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, it allows seizure of cargo from foreign ships that trade with Cuba if they enter U.S. waters, and so on. In fact, this proposal by the liberal Democrat Torricelli was so obviously in conflict with international law that George Bush himself even vetoed it—until he was out-flanked from the right during the Presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, and finally agreed to accept it. Well, the so-called “Cuban Democracy Act” was immediately denounced by I think every major U.S. ally. At the U.N., the entire world condemned it, with the exception of two countries—the United States and Israel; the New York Times apparently never discovered ...

For instance, there’s a lot of talk in the U.S. about “Islamic fundamentalism,” as if that’s some bad thing we’re trying to fight. But the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world is Saudi Arabia: are we going after the leaders of Saudi Arabia? No, they’re great guys—they torture and murder and kill and all that stuff, but they also send the oil profits from their country to the West and not to the people of the region, so they’re just fine.49 Or take non-state agents: I suppose the most extreme fanatic Islamic fundamentalist in the world is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, who got over a billion dollars of aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia and is now tearing what’s left of Afghanistan to pieces. Yeah, he’s a good guy, he’s been fighting on our side—narco-trafficker, terrorist, all those things, but doing what we wanted.50 On the other hand, if Islamic fundamentalists are organizing clinics in the slums of Cairo, they’re going to have to go, just as the liberation theologians in Latin America who happened to be Basques—you know, blue eyes, blond hair and so on—had to go. I mean, there is a racist element to U.S. policy, of course, but the basic motivation is not that, I think. The real goal is just maintaining obedience—as in Cuba, as in Panama, and so on.

Aristide was allowed in for a few months with his hands tied, and with a national economic plan being rammed down his throat by the World Bank, a standard structural adjustment package.59 I mean, it was referred to in the press as “the program that Aristide is offering the donor nations”—offering it with a gun to his head—and it has lots of nice rhetoric around in it for the benefit of Western journalists. But when you get right down to the core part of it, what it says is the following. It says: “The renovated government,” meaning Aristide, “must focus its energies and efforts on civil society,” particularly export industries and foreign investors.60 Okay, that’s Haitian civil society—foreign investors in New York City are Haitian civil society, not grassroots organizations in Haiti, they’re not Haitian civil society. And what that means is, under these World Bank economic conditions, whatever foreign resources do come into Haiti will have to be used to turn the country back into what we’ve always wanted it to be in the first place: an export platform with super-cheap manufacturing labor and agricultural exports to the United States that keep the peasants there from subsistence farming as the population starves.

It was the same story in France—and the same throughout Europe. In fact, if you look back, the main reason for the partition of Germany into Eastern and Western countries—which was Western-initiated, remember—was put rather nicely by George Kennan [of the U.S. State Department], who was one of the main architects of the post-war world. Back in 1946, he said: we have to “wall off” Western Germany (nice phrase) from the Eastern Zone, because of the danger that a German Communist movement might develop—which would just be too powerful; Germany’s an important, powerful country, you know, and since the world was kind of social-democratic at that time, a unified socialist movement in a place like Germany or Japan would have been totally intolerable. So therefore we had to wall off Western Germany from the Eastern Zone in order to prevent that possibility from taking place.

France as a whole was mostly collaborationist during the Nazi occupation.70 But Italy was quite different: the Italian resistance was so significant that it basically liberated Northern Italy, and it was holding down maybe six or seven German divisions, and the Italian working-class part of it was very organized, and had widespread support in the population. In fact, when the American and British armies made it up to Northern Italy, they had to throw out a government that had already been established by the Italian resistance in the region, and they had to dismantle various steps towards workers’ control over industry that were being set up. And what they did was to restore the old industrial owners, on the grounds that removal of these Fascist collaborators had been “arbitrary dismissal” of legitimate owners—that’s the term that was used.71 And then we also undermined the democratic processes, because it was obvious that the resistance and not the discredited conservative order was going to win the upcoming elections. So there was a threat of real democracy breaking out in Italy—what’s technically referred to by the U.S. government as “Communism”—and as usual, that had to be stopped.

MAN: Professor Chomsky, in light of all this I’m wondering, do you think there has ever been such a thing as a humanitarian intervention by the U.S.? Take what we were supposed to have been doing in Somalia, for example: that was framed as a humanitarian action here—do you think that was all image, or was there also some reality to it too? Well, states are not moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their societies. So anybody who intervenes in another country, except maybe Luxembourg or something, is going to be intervening for their own purposes—that’s always been true in history. And the Somalia operation, to take the case you mention, certainly was not humanitarian. I mean, the U.S. waited very carefully until the famine there was pretty much over and the major international aid organizations, like the Red Cross and Save the Children and so on, were getting about eighty percent of their aid into the country (using Somalis to do most of the work, it turns out) before it decided to move in.81 So if the U.S. government had had any humanitarian feelings with regard to Somalia, it had plenty of time to show it—in fact, it could have shown it from 1978 through 1990, when the U.S. was the chief supporter of Siad Barre, the Somali warlord who destroyed the country and killed maybe fifty or sixty thousand people with U.S. assistance, long before the famine.82

But the point is, by refusing to allow the discussion and debate—and even the information—that would be the basis for sane decision-making about the need for war in a democratic society, the media set the stage for what turned out to be, predictably, a very destructive and murderous conflict. People don’t want a war unless you absolutely have to have one, but the media would not present the possibility that there were alternatives—so therefore we went to war very much in the manner of a totalitarian society.

For instance, the U.S. gave very little aid to India. In fact, sometimes it was absolutely scandalous—like, right after Indian independence, in around 1950, India had its last massive famine (under the British there were famines all the time), and while there aren’t very good statistics, probably something on the order of maybe 13 to 15 million people died from starvation. Well, we have the U.S. internal records from that period, and at first there wasn’t even any question of giving them aid—I mean, we had food coming out our ears, just huge food surpluses, but there was no aid going to India because we did not like Nehru’s independence and his moves towards non-alignment and neutrality. But then there was a discussion about whether the U.S. should give India food aid as a weapon—that is, we give them some food aid as a way of forcing them to accept U.S. policies on various issues. And after that, a little bit of aid was trickled out—but it was delayed and conditioned on India’s accepting American positions on things like the Korean War and so on. Nobody knows exactly how many millions of people died because of that.109

A couple nights ago I was reading an article in the Israeli press by a friend of mine at Tel Aviv University, who summarized what’s been going on very nicely. She said: people in Israel are comparing this agreement with the end of apartheid in South Africa, but the true comparison is with the onset of apartheid—with the enactment of the 1950s laws in South Africa which set up the Bantustans [partially self-governing black districts].111 And that’s right, that’s more or less what the Oslo Agreement is: it’s enslavement, it’s a plan for enslavement, with about as much independence for the Territories—less maybe—as the Bantustans had. So that means that the whole struggle against apartheid is just beginning right now, not ending.

Right now there are huge construction projects going up all over the Occupied Territories (with, as always, U.S. funding), and Israel will just continue with its settlement program [the idea is to “settle” Jewish citizens in the Palestinian territories, which are not officially part of the state of Israel, to solidify Israel’s claim to them]. And what they’ve pretty much been doing is creating a large bulge of Jewish settlers around this big area they call “Greater Jerusalem,” in order to break the West Bank into two separate parts and enclose Jerusalem—they’re basically breaking the West Bank into two cantons, where they’ll then gladly cede authority to the local cops to do the dirty business of keeping order. It would be like asking the New York City police force whether they would like to turn Harlem over to local mercenaries to patrol, while they hold on to Wall Street, the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, and so on—if you asked the New York City police force that, I’m sure they’d be delighted. Who wants to patrol Harlem?

So the answer is, we’ve got to create alternatives, and the alternatives have got to integrate these lots and lots of different interests and concerns into a movement—or maybe not one necessarily, which somebody could then cut the head off of, but a series of interconnected ones: lots of associations of people with similar concerns, who’ve got in mind the other people next door who have related concerns, and who can get together with them to work for changes. Maybe then we can ultimately construct serious alternative media—I mean, not “serious” in the sense that the concerns of existing alternative media aren’t serious, but serious in scale, at the point where they can consistently present people with a different picture of the world, a picture different than the one you get from an indoctrination system based on private control over resources. And as to how you can do that, well, I don’t think there’s any big secret about it—if there’s any big secret about getting social change, I’ve never heard of it.

I mean, when I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that it would ever have any effect. In fact, the few of us who got involved in the early Sixties confidently expected that the only consequence of what we were doing would be that we’d spend years and years in jail and destroy our lives; I came very close to that, incidentally. I mean, just to tell you personally, when I got started actively in the peace movement my wife went back to college, because we figured that somebody was going to have to support the kids, I wasn’t going to be able to. And in fact, there were only two reasons why that didn’t happen. One was, the F.B.I. was too incompetent and ideologically fanatic to figure out what I was doing—that’s not a joke actually, and it’s something to bear in mind. And the other was, the Tet Offensive happened in 1968, and it changed U.S. government policy towards the war, so they began to cancel the prosecutions of activists that were under way. In fact, the Tet Offensive even changed people’s heads—you know who was prosecuting those trials? Ramsey Clark, just to illustrate how things have changed. [Clark was President Johnson’s Attorney General and is now a radical political activist.]

I don’t think what happened with the movements in the 1960s led to very much sophistication and insight, frankly—but I think what happened in the later years did. And exactly how that worked I don’t really understand at all. But something happened in the 1970s that just changed things—people were looking at things differently. It wasn’t just, “I hate that they’re dropping napalm on babies,” it was, “I really want to change the world, and I don’t like coercion and control,” and that kind of thing. That happened in the Seventies, and you can certainly see the consequences. I mean, in the 1960s, I never even talked about the nature of the institutions or capitalism—it was just too exotic. Now I don’t cut corners:

I figure, it’s a miracle that we’re here, realistically, let’s face it. It is. WOMAN: Okay, so if you accept that, you have two choices: you can cut your throat and forget about it, or you can keep fighting. If you’re going to keep fighting, then you’ve got to fight to win, and to survive. So what you do is, you find yourself a corner that you can fight really well from, and that you like, and that you fit in—and you give it the works, have a good time. That way you can keep your sanity, you don’t get overwhelmed with the whole enormous situation, and you can accomplish something. And as I say, you have a good time while you’re doing it—that’s the way I keep going. MAN: But do you ever succeed, or do you just keep fighting? Well, see, you have succeeded—things are better than they would have been if you hadn’t done it. ANOTHER WOMAN: And we should remember that the mainstream media obviously won’t publicize and draw attention to the successes—so we have to keep reminding ourselves of just how much we have achieved. I think we get burned out when we stop reminding ourselves of that. That’s right, we should always bear that in mind—that they’re not going to tell us we’re succeeding, it would be against their interests to tell us that. The media’s part of what popular organizing has to oppose, remember. And they’re not going to function in a way so as to self-destruct. For instance, take this supposed big phenomenon that swept the country in the 1970s, the “Culture of Narciss...

So all these nuclear freeze people did was answer a poll question—that’s not organizing. I think an awful lot of movement activity goes into things like that, and it doesn’t get anywhere—in fact, that’s what leads to burn-out. I mean, you had all these people collecting all these signatures, and they worked hard, they got so many signatures you could show that almost all of the country wants a nuclear freeze. Then they went to the Democratic Party Convention [in 1984] and presented their results, and everybody there said, “Gee, that’s really nice that you did that, we’re going to support you all the way”—then the Democrats went off to the election and never mentioned it again, unless they were talking in some town where they figured they could score some easy points by referring to it: you know, “We’ve got to remember in this town you want to say so on and so forth.” That’s the kind of thing that gets people frustrated, and makes them give up. But that’s because they started with illusions about how power operates and how you effect change—and we shouldn’t have those illusions, any more than we should have illusions about whether the media’s telling you the truth. If you don’t have the illusions, then you don’t get burnt out by the failure—and the way we overcome the illusions is by developing our own institutions, where we can learn from experiences like this.

And in fact, that’s the direction a lot of the disarmament movement took after that: the people went off and got themselves MacArthur Fellowships and so on, and then they went around “convincing” the strategic analysts.5 Well, that’s one of the ways in which you can kid yourself into believing that you’re still doing your work, when really you’re being bought off—because there’s nothing that elites like better than saying, “Oh, come convince me.” That stops you from organizing, and getting people involved, and causing disruption, because now you’re talking to some elite smart guy—and you can do that forever: any argument you can give in favor of it, he can give an argument against it, and it just keeps going. And also, you get respectable, and you’re invited to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, and everybody pays attention to you and loves you, and it’s all great. That’s in fact the direction in which the nuclear freeze movement went—and that’s a mistake. And we ought to be aware of those mistakes and learn from them: if you’re getting accepted in elite circles, chances are very strong that you’re doing something wrong—I mean, for very simple reasons. Why should they have any respect for people who are trying to undermine their power?

But real awareness in fact comes about through practice and experience with the world. It’s not, first you become aware and then you start doing things; you become aware through doing things. For instance, you become aware of the limits of reformist politics by trying it. In my view, you should always push all of the opportunities to their limits—partly because sometimes you can get some useful results that help people, but primarily because pretty soon you’ll find out what those limits are, and you’ll understand why there are limits; you’ll gain awareness you can’t gain from a lecture. I mean, you can hear all the lectures you like about the way that power works, but you learn it very fast when you actually confront it, without the lectures. So there’s an interaction between awareness and action—and sometimes the steps you have to take to make changes require taking things to the level of violent revolutionary struggle.

you’re going to have to face the fact, which sooner or later we’re going to have to face after all, that maybe the most totalitarian institution in human history—or certainly close to it—is a corporation: it’s a centrally-managed institution in which authority is structured strictly from top to bottom, control is in the hands of owners and investors, if you’re inside the organization you take orders from above and transmit them down, if you’re outside it there are only extremely weak popular controls, which indeed are fast eroding. And this isn’t some new insight of mine, incidentally—for example, it was pointed out by Thomas Jefferson in his later years, which were only the early days of corporations. Jefferson warned that if power was going to shift into the hands of what he called “banking institutions and moneyed incorporations,” then the democratic experiment would be over: we’d have a form of absolutism worse than what the colonists had struggled against.9

My own opinion is that popular movements should try a lot of tactics, but even things that are non-violent on their face could become violent. For example, one thing that I think is important is the building of a political party which could enter the political arena and represent the population, not just business interests—I mean, it’s certainly conceivable that there could be a party like that in the United States. But if such a party ever got any power, people with power in the society would defend themselves against it. And at that point everyone’s got to decide: do you use violence to protect your rights or don’t you? Look, violence usually comes from the powerful—people may talk about it coming from the revolutionaries, but that’s typically because they’re attacked and they then defend themselves with violence.

So the hope ultimately lies in more international solidarity, I think, and in the political appeal of what you’re doing to other people in this country, and elsewhere around the world as well.

I do not think that people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically—by their participants, and by the communities in which they live. And I think that through various forms of free association and federalism, it’s possible to imagine a society working like that. I mean, I don’t think you can lay it out in detail—nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you’ve got to experiment. But reasonable principles on which to build such a society are quite clear.

WOMAN: Professor Chomsky, on a slightly different topic, there’s a separate meaning of the word “anarchy” different from the one you often talk about—namely, “chaos.” Yeah, it’s a bum rap, basically—it’s like referring to Soviet-style bureaucracy as “socialism,” or any other term of discourse that’s been given a second meaning for the purpose of ideological warfare. I mean, “chaos” is a meaning of the word, but it’s not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant “chaos”—in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that’s organized democratically from below. WOMAN: It seems to me that as a social system, anarchism makes such bottom-line sense that it was necessary to discredit the word, and take it out of people’s whole vocabulary and thinking—so you just have a reflex of fear when you hear it. Yeah, anarchism has always been regarded as the ultimate evil by people with power. So in Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare [a 1919 campaign against “subversives” in the U.S.], they were harsh on socialists, but they murdered anarchists—they were really bad news. See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power. That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation.

MAN: What’s the difference between “libertarian” and “anarchist,” exactly? There’s no difference, really. I think they’re the same thing. But you see, “libertarian” has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what’s called “libertarianism” here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that’s always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract”—but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve,” that’s not a choice—it’s in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

I don’t feel that in order to work hard for social change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in any kind of detail. What I feel should drive a person to work for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved. Now, you may not know in detail—and I don’t think that any of us do know in detail—how those principles can best be realized at this point in complex systems like human societies. But I don’t really see why that should make any difference: what you try to do is advance the principles.

the basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it’s justified—it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five-year-old kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation: it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case, I think you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it—invariably. And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else—they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top. So I think that whenever you find situations of power, these questions should be asked—and the person who claims the legitimacy of the authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that.

MAN: But you could say that “to truck and barter” is human nature—that people are fundamentally materialist, and will always want to accumulate more and more under any social structure. You could say it, but there’s no reason to believe it. You look at peasant societies, they go on for thousands of years without it—do those people have a different human nature? Or just look inside a family: do people “truck and barter” over how much you’re going to eat for dinner? Well, certainly a family is a normal social structure, and you don’t see people accumulating more and more for themselves regardless of the needs of the other people. In fact, just take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself: look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken—conscious efforts—to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population.

So within a couple years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called “free” economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same—and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slaves have to become the happy workers—somehow we’ve got to work it all out. Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn’t want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, “How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they’re no longer enslaved into it?”

In fact, it’s only in the United States and the old Soviet Empire that I haven’t had any real access to the major media over the years. And it’s not just me, of course: the major media in the U.S., as was the case in the former Soviet Empire, pretty much exclude anybody with a dissident voice. So I can have interviews and articles in major journals and newspapers in Western Europe, and in Australia, and all up and down the Western Hemisphere. And often I get invitations from leading journals in other countries to write for them—like, recently I had an article in Israel’s most important newspaper, Ha’aretz, which is kind of the equivalent of the New York Times: it was an invited critique of their foreign policy, and of the so-called “peace process.”29 Or in Australia, I gave a talk at the National Press Club in the Parliament Building, which was nationally televised twice on Australian World Services, their version of the B.B.C.—they wanted me to speak about Australia’s foreign policy, so I gave a very critical talk to a national audience, and I spoke to Parliamentarians and journalists and so on, and was all over the press and papers there. And the same thing is true in Europe; I’m often on the C.B.C. nationally in Canada; and so on. Well, as you say, that’s all unheard of in the United States—and the main reason, I think, is just that what people think, and are allowed to think, is much more important here, so the controls are much greater.30

MAN: Noam, aren’t you at all afraid of being silenced by the establishment for being so prominent and vocal in speaking out against U.S. power and its abuses? No, not really—and for a very simple reason, actually: if you look at me, you’ll see what it is. I’m white, I’m privileged, and that means I’m basically immune from punishment by power. I mean, I don’t want to say that it’s a hundred percent immunity—but the fact of the matter is that these two things mean that you can buy a lot of freedom.

So the best answer, I suspect, is just the same as for everything else—we have to develop stable popular organizations, and a culture of concern, and commitment, and activism, and solidarity, which can help to sustain us in these struggles, and which can help break down some of the barriers that have been set up to divide and distract us.

it’s very unlikely that we really do know the laws, even at the core of science. A physicist will tell you much more about this than I can, but take, say, the matter in the universe: more than 90 percent of the matter in the universe is what’s called “dark matter”—and it’s called “dark” because nobody knows what it is. It’s just sort of postulated that it exists, because if you don’t postulate it, everything blows up—so you have to assume that it’s there. And that’s over 90 percent of the matter in the universe: you don’t even know what it is.

So look at Smith: why was he in favor of markets? He gave kind of a complicated argument for them, but at the core of it was the idea that if you had perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality—that’s why Adam Smith was in favor of markets.34 Adam Smith was in favor of markets because he thought that people ought to be completely equal—completely equal—and that was because, as a classical liberal, he believed that people’s fundamental character involves notions like sympathy, and solidarity, the right to control their own work, and so on and so forth: all the exact opposite of capitalism. In fact, there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism—and that’s why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now spout in his name.

Now, the sources of power and authority that people could see in front of their eyes in the eighteenth century were quite different from the ones that we have today—back then it was the feudal system, and the Church, and the absolutist state that they were focused on; they couldn’t see the industrial corporation, because it didn’t exist yet. But if you take the basic classical liberal principles and apply them to the modern period, I think you actually come pretty close to the principles that animated revolutionary Barcelona in the late 1930s—to what’s called “anarcho-syndicalism.” [Anarcho-syndicalism is a form of libertarian socialism that was practiced briefly in regions of Spain during its revolution and civil war of 1936, until it was destroyed by the simultaneous efforts of the Soviet Union, the Western powers, and the Fascists.] I think that’s about as high a level as humans have yet achieved in trying to realize these libertarian principles, which in my view are the right ones.

If you look at what’s actually happened to the various efforts at libertarian socialism that have taken place around the world, the concentration of force and violence present in those situations has just been such that certain outcomes were virtually guaranteed, and consequently all incipient efforts at cooperative workers’ control, say, have simply been crushed. There have in fact been efforts in this direction for hundreds of years—the problem is, they regularly get destroyed. And often they’re destroyed by force. The Bolsheviks [political party that seized power during the Russian Revolution and later became the Communist Party] are a perfect example. In the stages leading up to the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, there were incipient socialist institutions developing in Russia—workers’ councils, collectives, things like that [i.e. after a popular revolution first toppled the Tsar in February 1917]. And they survived to an extent once the Bolsheviks took over—but not for very long; Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated their power.

MAN: Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolsheviks’ actions as an honest mistake, a “historical accident” maybe—or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show? Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself—the very idea that a “vanguard party” can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they’re too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it’s going to lead them towards is “I rule you with a whip.” Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves—I think that’s kind of like an obvious sociological truism. And actually, if you look back, that was in fact Bakunin’s prediction half a century before—he said this was exactly what was going to happen. [Bakunin was a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, and with Marx a leading figure in the main socialist labor organization of the time, the First International.]

Bakunin didn’t go on with this, but I think it follows from his analysis that it’s extremely easy to shift from one position to the other—it’s extremely easy to undergo what’s called the “God That Failed” syndrome. You start off as basically a Leninist, someone who’s going to become part of what Bakunin called the “Red Bureaucracy,” you see that power doesn’t lie that way, and then you very easily become an ideologist of the right, and devote your life to exposing the sins of your former comrades, who haven’t yet seen the light and shifted to where power really lies. And you barely have to change at all, really, you’re just operating under a different formal power structure. In fact, we’re seeing it right now in the former Soviet Union: the same guys who were Communist thugs, Stalinist thugs two years back are now running banks, they’re enthusiastic free-marketeers, praising America and so on. And this has been going on for forty years—it’s become kind of a joke.