Optimism over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change

by Noam Chomsky

obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity. If commissars in Soviet Russia agreed to subordinate themselves to state power, they could at least plead fear in extenuation. Their counterparts in more free and open societies can plead only cowardice.

One of the most respected mainstream US Middle East analysts, former CIA operative Graham Fuller, recently wrote: “I think the United States is one of the key creators of [ISIS].

And as the Republican Party has become so extreme in serving wealth and corporate power that it cannot appeal to the public on its actual policies, it has been compelled to rely on these sectors as a voting base, giving them substantial influence on policy.

There is a huge voting bloc of evangelical Christians that is fanatically pro-Israel. There is also an effective Israel lobby, which is often pushing an open door—and which quickly backs down when it confronts US power, not surprisingly.

Not long ago I literally had to have police protection when I spoke on these topics on college

campuses, even my own university. That has greatly changed. By now Palestine solidarity is a major commitment on many campuses. Over time, these changes could combine with some other factors to lead to a change of US policy. It’s happened before. But it will take hard, serious, dedicated work.

What are the aims and the objectives of US policy in Ukraine, other than stirring up trouble and then letting other forces do the dirty work? Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, the United States began seeking to extend its dominance, including NATO membership, over the regions released from Russian control—in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev, whose protes...

Doesn’t Russia have a legitimate concern over Ukraine’s potential alliance with NATO? A very legitimate concern, over the expansion of NATO generally. This is so obvious that it is even the topic of the lead article in the current issue of the major establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, by international relations scholar John Mears...

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute: the party became an “insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Its guiding principle was, whatever Obama tries to do, we have to block it, but without providing some sensible alternative. The goal was to make the country ungovernable, so that the insurgency could take power. Its infantile antics on the Affordable Care Act are a good illustration: endless votes to repeal it in favor of—nothing.

DeVos’s appointment is no doubt attractive to the evangelicals who flocked to Trump’s standard and constitute a large part of the base of today’s Republican Party. She should also be able to work amicably with vice president Mike Pence, one of the “prized warriors [of] a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy,” as Jeremy Scahill details in the Intercept, reviewing his shocking record on other matters as well.

All of this aside, the United States is not immune to the general decline of the mainstream political parties of the West, and the growth of political insurgencies on the right and left (though “left” means moderate social democracy, in practice)—one of the predictable consequences of the neoliberal policies that have undermined democracy and caused substantial harm to most of the population, the less privileged sectors. All familiar.

Nothing that is completely new. The standard scholarly work on this topic—Thomas Ferguson’s outstanding studies in his book Golden Rule and more recent publications—traces the practices and the consequences back to the late nineteenth century, with particularly interesting results on the New Deal years, continuing to the present.

The essence of traditional socialism was workers’ control over production, along with popular democratic control of other components of social, economic, and political life. There was hardly a society in the world more remote from socialism than Soviet Russia, which is presented as the leading “socialist” society. If that’s what “socialism” is, then we ought to oppose it.

The term “socialist” became taboo for reasons of Cold War ideology, which divorced the term from any useful meaning.

In some ways the system is a legacy of the Civil War, which has never really been overcome. Today’s “red states” are solidly

based in the Confederacy, which was solidly Democratic before the civil rights movement and Nixon’s “Southern strategy” shifted party labels.

Although an extremely rich society, with incomparable advantages, the United States ranks very low in measures of social justice among the richer Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) societies, alongside of Turkey, Mexico, and Greece.

Traditional Marxists speak of human society as consisting of two parts: base and superstructure. Would you say that the base dictates the superstructure in US society? Don’t have much to say. I don’t find the framework particularly useful. Who holds dominant decision-making power in US society is not very obscure at a general level: concentrated economic power, mostly in the corporate system. When we look more closely, it is of course more complex, and the population is by no means powerless when it is organized and dedicated and liberated from illusions.

The capacity extends to self-destruction, as we are now witnessing. It is presumed that the fifth extinction was caused by a huge asteroid that hit the earth. Now we are

the asteroid. The impact on humans is already significant and will soon become incomparably worse unless decisive action is taken right now. Furthermore, the risk of nuclear war, always a grim shadow, is increasing.

The two Democratic candidates range from the New Deal style of Sanders’s programs to the “New Democrat/moderate Republican” Clinton version, driven a bit to the left under the impact of the Sanders challenge.

The United States has never really transcended the Civil War and the horrendous legacy of oppression of African Americans for five hundred years. There is also a long history of illusions about Anglo-Saxon purity, threatened by waves of immigrants (and freedom for Blacks, and indeed for women, no small matter among patriarchal sectors).

As Greenspan explained during his glory days, his successes in economic management were based substantially on “growing worker insecurity.”

Intimidated working people would not ask for higher wages, benefits, and security but would be satisfied with the stagnating wages and reduced benefits that signal a healthy economy by neoliberal standards.

not “follow the rules” are being moved in front of them by federal government programs they erroneously see as designed to benefit African Americans, immigrants, and others they often regard with contempt. All of this is exacerbated by Ronald Reagan’s racist fabrications about “welfare queens” (by implication Black) stealing white people’s hard-earned money and other fantasies.

The Democratic Party abandoned any real concern for working people by the 1970s, and they have therefore been drawn to the ranks of their bitter class enemies, who at least pretend to speak their language—Reagan’s folksy style of making little jokes while eating jelly beans, George W. Bush’s carefully cultivated image of a regular guy you could meet in a bar who loved to cut brush on the ranch in 100-degree heat and his probably faked mispronunciations (it’s unlikely that he talked like that at Yale), and now Trump, who gives voice to people with legitimate grievances—people who have lost not just jobs but also a sense of personal self-worth—and who rails against the government that they perceive as having undermined their lives (not without reason).

With all its flaws, the government is, to some extent, under popular influence and control, unlike the corporate sector. It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people’s minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by, and for the people.

That could indeed lead to what sociologist Bertram Gross called “friendly fascism” in a perceptive study thirty-five years ago. But that requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me. The dangers, however, have been real for many years, perhaps even more so in the light of the forces that Trump has unleashed.

There is, however, an escape, provided by Dick Cheney when he explained to Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”—meaning deficits that we Republicans

create in order to gain popular support, leaving it to someone else, preferably Democrats, to somehow clean up the mess. The technique might work, for a while at least.

The United States is to an unusual extent a business-run society, where short-term concerns of profit and market share displace rational planning. The United States is also unusual in the enormous scale of religious fundamentalism.

In defense of that democracy against real but probably

overestimated foreign and domestic threats, the United States used undemocratic tactics that tended to undermine the legitimacy of the Italian state.

The democratic ideal, at home and abroad, is simple and straightforward: you are free to do what you want, as long as it is what we want you to do.

And politicians to be elected to a national office have to be pretty good actors, right? Electoral campaigns, especially in the United States, are being run by the advertising industry. The 2008 political campaign of Barack Obama was voted by the advertising industry as the best marketing campaign of the year.

Consider this: Every time there is a crisis, the taxpayer is called on to bail out the banks and the major financial institutions. If you had a real

capitalist economy in place, that would not be happening. Capitalists who made risky investments and failed would be wiped out. But the rich and powerful do not want a capitalist system. They want to be able to run the nanny state so when they are in trouble the taxpayer will bail them out. The conventional phrase is “too big to fail.”

It is also important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors in society have never liked democracy, for good reasons. Democracy places power in the hands of the population and takes it away from them. In fact, the privileged and powerful classes of this country have always sought to find ways to limit power from being placed in the hands of the general population—and they are breaking no new ground in this regard.

The state is there to provide security and support to the interests of the privileged and powerful sectors in society, while the rest of the population is left to experience the brutal reality of capitalism. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

The “founding fathers,” even James Madison, the main framer, who was as much a believer in democracy as any other leading political figure in those days, felt that the United States’ political system

should be in the hands of the wealthy because the wealthy are the “more responsible set of men.” And, thus, the structure of the formal constitutional system placed more power in the hands of the Senate, which was not elected in those days. It was selected from the wealthy men who, as Madison put it, had sympathy for the owners of wealth and private property.

The solution that he proposed, however, was something like a welfare state with the aim of reducing economic inequality. The other alternative, pursued by the “founding fathers,” is to reduce democracy.

Now, the so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and partly in reality. From the early nineteenth century onward and up until fairly recently, working-class people, including immigrants, had expectations that their lives would improve in American society through hard work.

Sanders is an honest and committed New Dealer. The fact that he’s considered “radical” tells us how far the elite political spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period.

One part of the health system that is likely to suffer is Medicaid, probably through block grants to states, which gives the Republican-run states opportunities to gut it. Medicaid only helps poor people who “don’t matter” and don’t vote Republican anyway. So, according to Republican logic, why should the rich pay taxes to maintain it?

Article 25 of the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) states that the right to health care is indeed a human right. Yet, it is estimated that close to 30 million Americans remain uninsured even with the ACA in place. What are some of the key cultural, economic, and political factors that make the United States an outlier in the provision of free health care? First, it is important to remember that the United States does not accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—though in fact the UDHR was largely the initiative of Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the commission that drafted its articles, with quite broad international participation.

Furthermore, US labor history is unusually violent. Hundreds of US workers were being killed by private and state security forces in strike actions, practices unknown in similar countries. In her history of American labor, Patricia Sexton—noting that there are no serious studies—reports an estimate of seven hundred strikers killed and thousands injured from 1877 to 1968, a figure which, she concludes, may “grossly understate the total casualties.” In comparison, one British striker was killed since 1911.

Trump supporters include much of the white working class. One can understand their anger and frustration, and why Trump’s rhetoric might appeal to them. But they are betting on the wrong horse. His policy proposals—to the limited extent that they are coherent—not only do not seriously address their legitimate concerns but would be quite harmful to them. And not just to them.

How should we define socialism in the twenty-first century? Like other terms of political discourse, “socialism” is quite vague and broad in application. How we should define it depends on our values and goals. A good start, fitting well into the American context, would be the recommendations of America’s leading twentieth-century social philosopher, John Dewey, who called for democratization of all aspects of political, economic, and social life. He held that workers should be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” and that “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication” should be under public control. Otherwise, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business” and social policy will be geared to the interests of the masters. That’s a good start. And is deeply rooted in significant strands of the society and its complex history.

A problem facing today’s left is that, whenever it came to power, it capitulated in no time to capitalist forces and became immersed itself in the practices of corruption and the pursuit of power for the sake of power and material gains. We have seen it in Brazil, in Greece, in Venezuela, and elsewhere. How do you explain this? That’s been a very sad development. The causes vary, but the results are highly destructive. In Brazil, for example, the PT (Workers’ Party) had enormous opportunities and could have been a force for transforming Brazil and leading the way for the whole continent, given Brazil’s unique position. Though there were some achievements, the opportunities were squandered as the party leadership joined the rest of the elite in sinking into the abyss of corruption.