Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

Today the methods are different—now it’s not the threat of force that ensures the media will present things within a framework that serves the interests of the dominant institutions, the mechanisms today are much more subtle. But nevertheless, there is a complex system of filters in the media and educational institutions which ends up ensuring that dissident perspectives are weeded out, or marginalized in one way or another. And the end result is in fact quite similar: what are called opinions “on the left” and “on the right” in the media represent only a limited spectrum of debate, which reflects the range of needs of private power—but there’s essentially nothing beyond those “acceptable” positions.

Well, if you look at these larger media outlets, they have some crucial features in common. First of all, the agenda-setting institutions are big corporations; in fact, they’re mega-corporations, which are highly profitable—and for the most part they’re also linked into even bigger conglomerates.33 And they, like other corporations, have a product to sell and a market they want to sell it to: the product is audiences, and the market is advertisers. So the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses. See, they’re not really trying to sell newspapers to people—in fact, very often a journal that’s in financial trouble will try to cut down its circulation, and what they’ll try to do is up-scale their readership, because that increases advertising rates.34 So what they’re doing is selling audiences to other businesses, and for the agenda-setting media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, they’re in fact selling very privileged, elite audiences to other businesses—overwhelmingly their readers are members of the so-called “political class,” which is the class that makes decisions in our society.

So in the twentieth century, there’s a major current of American thought—in fact, it’s probably the dominant current among people who think about these things (political scientists, journalists, public relations experts and so on)—which says that precisely because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind. That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists—he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do it by force, you have to do it by the calculated “manufacture of consent.”

But is there anybody pushing for developing meaningful social services? See, suppose there was somebody with a platform saying, “We want everybody in Massachusetts to have access to adequate medical care”—I’ll bet you if somebody was pushing that, they’d get overwhelming support. But if you just come to people and say, “Do you want to have new taxes?” of course they’ll say no. If you have something on the ballot saying, “Should we put a limit on property taxes?” the answer will be, “Sure, why should I pay more?” But you’re not asking the right question. If you ask people, “Do you want your roads clean? Do you want good schools? Do you want medical services?” then they’ll say yes. So part of the reason there isn’t much response is that there’s no one offering real alternatives.

Well, I once asked another editor I know at the Boston Globe why their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is so awful—and it is. He just laughed and said, “How many Arab advertisers do you think we have?” That was the end of that conversation.

You don’t need verification when you go to vested interests, they’re self-verifying. Like, if you report an atrocity carried out by guerrillas, all you need is one hearsay witness. You talk about torture carried out by an American military officer, you’re going to need videotapes. And the same is true on every issue.

Well, you know, people who care about their money and their property and so on realized that this war was just money going down the drain—it was going to take a huge effort to crush this revolution. And by that point, the U.S. economy was actually beginning to suffer. That’s the great achievement of the peace movement, in fact: it harmed the American economy. And that’s not a joke. The peace movement made it impossible to declare a national mobilization around the war—there was just too much dissidence and disruption, they couldn’t do what was done during the Second World War, for example, when the whole population was mobilized around the war. See, if they could have gotten the population mobilized like that, then the Vietnam War would have been very good for the economy, like the Second World War was during the Forties, a real shot in the arm. But they couldn’t, they had to fight a deficit-spending war, what’s called a “guns-and-butter” war. And the result was that we got the beginnings of stagflation [inflation without a concurrent expansion of the economy], and weakening of the U.S. dollar, and our main economic competitors, Europe and Japan, began raking off huge profits as offshore producers for the war—in short, the war changed the economic balance of power between the U.S. and its major industrial rivals. Well, American business could understand that, they saw what was happening, and when the Tet Offensive came along and it was clear that there was going to be a bi...

So, “terrorism” is only what other people do. What’s called “Communism” is supposed to be “the far left”: in my view, it’s the far right, basically indistinguishable from fascism. These guys that everybody calls “conservative,” any conservative would turn over in their grave at the sight of them—they’re extreme statists, they’re not “conservative” in any traditional meaning of the word. “Special interests” means labor, women, blacks, the poor, the elderly, the young—in other words, the general population. There’s only one sector of the population that doesn’t ever get mentioned as a “special interest,” and that’s corporations, and business in general—because they’re the “national interest.” Or take “defense”: I have never heard of a state that admits it’s carrying out an aggressive act, they’re always engaged in “defense,” no matter what they’re doing—maybe “preemptive defense” or something.

Or just take this phrase “peace process,” which we hear all the time. The phrase “peace process” has a dictionary meaning, it means “process leading to peace.” But that’s not the way it’s used in the media. The term “peace process” is used in the media to refer to whatever the United States happens to be doing at the moment—and again, that is without exception. So it turns out that the United States is always supporting the peace process, by definition. Just try to find a phrase in the U.S. media somewhere, anywhere, saying that the United States is opposing the peace process: you can’t do it.

Yeah, “moderate” is a word that means “follows U.S. orders”—as opposed to what’s called “radical,” which means “doesn’t follow U.S. orders.” “Radical” has nothing to do with left or right; you can be an ultra-right-winger, but you’re a “radical” if you don’t follow U.S. orders.

So just take a look at the different prosecution rates and sentencing rules for ghetto drugs like crack and suburban drugs like cocaine, or for drunk drivers and drug users, or just between blacks and whites in general—the statistics are clear: this is a war on the poor and minorities.

My strong suspicion, though I don’t know how to prove it, is that the reason is that marijuana’s a weed, you can grow it in your backyard, so there’s nobody who would make any money off it if it were legal. Tobacco requires extensive capital inputs and technology, and it can be monopolized, so there are people who can make a ton of money off it. I don’t really see any other difference between the two of them, frankly—except that tobacco’s far more lethal and far more addictive.

But the point is, if things ever really come to a crunch in the United States, this massive part of the population—I think it’s something like a third of the adult population by now—could be the basis for some kind of a fascist movement, readily. For example, if the country sinks deeply into a recession, a depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking it’s somebody else’s fault: “Why are our lives collapsing? There have to be bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly”—and the bad guys can be Jews, or homosexuals, or blacks, or Communists, whatever you pick. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that’s what 1930s Fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here.

I think it has a big future, myself—in fact, I think the Reagan administration was sort of a peek into the future. It’s a very natural move. Imagine yourself working in some public relations office where your job is to help corporations make sure that the annoying public does not get in the way of policy-making. Here’s a brilliant thought that nobody ever had before, so far as I know: let’s make elections completely symbolic activities. The population can keep voting, we’ll give them all the business, they’ll have electoral campaigns, all the hoopla, two candidates, eight candidates—but the people they’re voting for will then just be expected to read off a teleprompter and they won’t be expected to know anything except what somebody tells them, and maybe not even that.

Reagan’s whole career was reading lines written for him by rich folk. First it was as a spokesman for General Electric, then it was for somebody else, and he just continued to the White House: he read the lines written for him by the rich folk, he did it for eight years, they paid him nicely, he apparently enjoyed it, he seems to have been quite cheerful there, had a good time. He could sleep late. And they liked it, the paymasters thought it was fine, they bought a nice home for him, put him out to pasture.

I’ll start with the environment. The reality is that under capitalist conditions—meaning maximization of short-term gain—you’re ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when. Now, for a long time, it’s been possible to pretend that the environment is an infinite source and an infinite sink. Neither is true obviously, and we’re now sort of approaching the point where you can’t keep playing the game too much longer. It may not be very far off. Well, dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. For one thing, it’s going to certainly require large-scale social planning, and that means participatory social planning if it’s going to be at all meaningful. It’s also going to require a general recognition among human beings that an economic system driven by greed is going to self-destruct—it’s only a question of time before you make the planet unlivable, by destroying the ozone layer or some other way.46 And that means huge socio-psychological changes have to take place if the human species is going to survive very much longer. So that’s a big factor.

I mean, Britain throughout its whole modern history has tried to prevent Europe from becoming unified—that was the main theme of British history, prevent Europe from being unified, because we’re just this island power off of Europe, and if they ever get unified we’re in trouble. And the United States has the same attitude towards Eurasia: we’ve got to prevent them from becoming unified, because if they are, we become a real second-class power—we’ll still have our little system around here, but it’ll become kind of second-class.47 By “the United States,” I mean powerful interests in the United States, U.S.-based capital.

In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference—I don’t want to say it’s zero—but the differences are going to be very slight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist—just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic—there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers,

We only talk about “genocide” when other people do the killing.

Or you know, after you get shot, after you’re killed, like Martin Luther King, then you can become a hero—but not while you’re alive. Remember, despite all of the mythology today, Martin Luther King was strongly opposed while he was alive: the Kennedy administration really disliked him, they tried to block him in every possible way. I mean, eventually the Civil Rights Movement became powerful enough that they had to pretend that they liked him, so there was sort of a period of popularity for King when he was seen to be focusing on extremely narrow issues, like racist sheriffs in the South and so on. But as soon as he turned to broader issues, whether it was the Vietnam War, or planning the Poor People’s Campaign [a 1968 encampment and protest march on Washington], or other things like that, he became a total pariah, and was actively opposed.

Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at C.B.S. or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.

Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society;

In fact, in this respect I think Nixon was treated extremely unfairly. I mean, there were real crimes of the Nixon administration, and he should have been tried—but not for any of the Watergate business. 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?

Watergate is a very clear example of what happens to servants when they forget their role and go after the people who own the place: they are very quickly put back into their box, and somebody else takes over.

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.

So when I denounce apologetics for Israel’s oppression, remember, it’s not in any particular criticism of Israel. In fact, I think Israel is just as ugly a state as every other state. The only difference is that Israel has a fabricated image in the United States—it’s regarded as having some unique moral quality, and there’s all sorts of imagery about purity of arms, and high noble intent and so on.78 It’s complete mythology, just pure fabrication: Israel’s a country like every other country, and we should recognize that and stop the nonsense. To talk about legitimacy is ridiculous—the word doesn’t apply, to their history or anyone else’s.

In fact, I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam—it’s kind of like Leninism [position that socialist revolution should be led by a “vanguard” party]: it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke.

Anybody who wants to become your leader, you should say, “I don’t want to follow.” That’s like a rule of thumb which almost never fails.

if you could ever get to the point where a reformist candidate had a chance, you’d already have won,

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.

So the fact that Russia had pulled itself out of the West’s traditional Third World service-area and was developing on an independent course was really one of the major motivations behind the Cold War. I mean, the standard line you always hear about it is that we were opposing Stalin’s terror—but that’s total bullshit. First of all, we shouldn’t even be able to repeat that line without a sense of self-mockery, given our record. Do we oppose anybody else’s terror? Do we oppose Indonesia’s terror in East Timor? Do we oppose terror in Guatemala and El Salvador? Do we oppose what we did to South Vietnam? No, we support terror all the time—in fact, we put it in power.

The leading human rights violator in the Western Hemisphere by a good margin is Colombia, which has just an atrocious record—they have “social cleansing” programs, before every election members of the opposition parties get murdered, labor union leaders are murdered, students, dissidents are murdered, there are death squads all around. Okay, more than half of U.S. aid to the entire Hemisphere goes to Colombia, and the figure’s increasing under Clinton.13 Well, that’s just normal, and like I say, similar results have been shown world-wide.14 So claims about our concern for human rights are extremely difficult to support: in precisely the regions of the world where we’ve had the most control, the most hideous things you can imagine happen systematically

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.

But the U.S. makes its own rules—we don’t care what happens at the U.N., or what international law requires. As our U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, put it in a debate: “if possible we will act multilaterally, if necessary we will act unilaterally”

So you’re right, it is true that the U.S. is attacking a substantial part of the world that happens to be Muslim, but we’re not attacking it because they’re Muslim—we don’t care if they’re Martians. The question is, are they obedient? This is very easy to prove, actually. 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.

states are not moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their societies.

Well, India is basically just saying what everybody else in the Third World thinks but is afraid to say publicly: that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a ridiculous joke. I mean, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is just a way of ensuring that the rich powerful countries have a monopoly of nuclear weapons—not much else. Now, obviously nuclear proliferation is a bad thing—but you know, is it better for the United States to have them? Do we have a better record in international affairs than India? Well, everybody in the Third World can appreciate that hypocrisy, but not a lot of them are willing to get up and say it. In India they do say it—and actually that’s not so surprising.

I mean, if you sign a petition it’s kind of nice—but that’s the end of it, you just go back home and do whatever you were doing: there’s no continuity, there’s no real engagement, it’s not sustained activity that builds up a community of activism. Well, an awful lot of the political work I see in the United States is of that type.

So, yes, demonstrations and resistance can have effects—but they’re no more revolutionary than talking to your legislator. They don’t affect power, they don’t change the institutions of power, they just change the decisions that will be made within those institutions. And that’s a fine thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with that, it helps a lot of people.

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.

“wage slavery” is intolerable. I mean, 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.

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.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [American academic]—and if you just read the world that they describe, it’s a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don’t have roads because you don’t see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you’re not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don’t like the pollution from somebody’s automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It’s a world built on hatred.

and since nobody knows enough about what all the effects are going to be of large-scale social changes, I think what we should do is try them piecemeal. In fact, I have a rather conservative attitude towards social change: since we’re dealing with complex systems which nobody understands very much, the sensible move I think is to make changes and then see what happens—and if they work, make further changes. That’s true across the board, actually.