Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

MAN: The editor doesn’t pay attention to the advertising—he doesn’t care about the advertising. Are you kidding? If he doesn’t care about the advertising, he will not be editor any longer.

in 1976 or ’77, New York Times advertising and stock values began to drop very slightly. There were immediately articles about this in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, pointing out what was going on—Business Week in fact said, if the New York Times doesn’t realize that it’s a business, it’s not going to be in business any longer.54 Well, what was happening was that the Times had taken a mildly supportive editorial position on a New York tax bill that business was opposed to, and advertising started slipping off a little, stocks started dropping very slightly. And the Times then shifted its entire editorial staff: John Oakes went out, all the liberal editors went out, and a whole bunch of new people came in. All it took was a slight change on the stock market. Now, in that case it was a matter of such a slight deviation that you’d need a microscope to see it—suppose they took a major deviation, what would happen to their stock?

Well, to draw a broad brush-stroke through it, by and large the media love to be attacked from the right—they love it when they’re attacked as being subversive, adversarial, going so far in their passion to undermine power that they’re destroying democracy, and so on. They even love being told that they’re lying in their commitment to undermine power—there are dramatic examples of this. And it’s obvious why they like it so much: then they can come back and say, as Katharine Graham [owner of the Washington Post] did in a commencement address, well yes, it’s true that in our antiestablishment zeal we sometimes go too far, but that’s the price you have to pay in a free society. It makes great copy. On the other hand, if they’re criticized from the opposite side, saying: “Look, you may do your work with a good deal of integrity, but you’re very subordinated to power—indeed servile, often—in the way that you select topics, and shape them, and adopt perspectives,” that they hate. So they don’t like to be told that they’re doing their work honestly but subordinated to power—they much prefer to be told, “You’re dishonest in your efforts to undermine power.”

The trouble is, that’s the way that capitalism works. The nature of the system is that it’s supposed to be driven by greed; no one’s supposed to be concerned for anybody else, nobody’s supposed to worry about the common good—those are not things that are supposed to motivate you, that’s the principle of the system. The theory is that private vices lead to public benefits—that’s what they teach you in economics departments. It’s all total bullshit, of course, but that’s what they teach you. And as long as the system works that way, yeah, it’s going to self-destruct.

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

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.

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

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

There was this huge Depression in the 1930s, worldwide, and at that point everyone understood that capitalism was dead. I mean, whatever lingering beliefs people had had about it, and they weren’t very much before, they were gone at that point—because the whole capitalist system had just gone into a tailspin: there was no way to save it the way it was going. Well, every one of the rich countries hit upon more or less the same method of getting out. They did it independently, but they more or less hit on the same method—namely, state spending, public spending of some kind, what’s called “Keynesian stimulation.” And that did finally get countries out of the Depression.