NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human
thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances,
and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is
suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It
seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the
whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial
systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes
that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority
lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give
a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that
authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the
authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and
just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes
different forms at different times.
Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety
of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but
primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production.
It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work,
its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which
they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one
another in free associations, and … democracy of that kind should be
the foundational elements of a more general free society. And then, you
know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest
itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking. I
mean it’s not at all the general image that you described — people
running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but
[anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but
organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as
little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.
MS: With the apparent
ongoing demise of the capitalist state, many people are looking at other
ways to be successful, to run their lives, and I’m wondering what you
would say anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others
ideas — say, for example, state-run socialism — have failed to offer?
Why should we choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism?
NC: Well what’s called
libertarian in the United States, which is a special U. S. phenomenon,
it doesn’t really exist anywhere else — a little bit in England —
permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands
of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it
likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated
private power will lead to a more free and just society. Actually that
has been believed in the past. Adam Smith for example, one of his main
arguments for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect
liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality. Well, we don’t have to
talk about that! That kind of —
MS: It seems to be a continuing contention today …
NC: Yes, and so well
that kind of libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a
call for some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable
private tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an
elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of
tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should
we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination.
It’s better to be free than to be a slave. Its’ better to be able to
make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and
force you to observe them. I mean, I don’t think you really need an
argument for that. It seems like … transparent.
The thing you need an argument for, and
should give an argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that
direction? And there are lots of ways within the current society. One
way, incidentally, is through use of the state, to the extent that it is
democratically controlled. I mean in the long run, anarchists would
like to see the state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private
power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public
influence and control — could be much more so. And it provides devices
to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power. Rules for
safety and health in the workplace for example. Or insuring that people
have decent health care, let’s say. Many other things like that. They’re
not going to come about through private power. Quite the contrary. But
they can come about through the use of the state system under limited
democratic control … to carry forward reformist measures. I think those
are fine things to do. they should be looking forward to something much
more, much beyond, — namely actual, much larger-scale democratization.
And that’s possible to not only think about, but to work on. So one of
the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out
that it’s quite possible to build the institutions of a future society
within the present one. And he was thinking about far more autocratic
societies than ours. And that’s being done. So for example, worker- and
community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within
the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being
developed. There’s some important work on this by Gar Alperovitz who’s
involved in the enterprise systems around the Cleveland area which are
worker and community controlled. There’s a lot of theoretical discussion
of how it might work out, from various sources. Some of the most worked
out ideas are in what’s called the “parecon” — participatory economics —
literature and discussions. And there are others. These are at the
planning and thinking level. And at the practical implementation level,
there are steps that can be taken, while also pressing to overcome the
worst … the major harms … caused by … concentration of private power
through the use of state system, as long as the current system exists.
So there’s no shortage of means to pursue.
As for state socialism, depends what one
means by the term. If it’s tyranny of the Bolshevik variety (and its
descendants), we need not tarry on it. If it’s a more expanded social
democratic state, then the comments above apply. If something else, then
what? Will it place decision-making in the hands of working people and
communities, or in hands of some authority? If the latter, then — once
again — freedom is better than subjugation, and the latter carries a
very heavy burden of justification.
MS: Many people know you
because of your and Edward Herman’s development of the Propaganda
Model. Could you briefly describe that model and why it might be
important to the students at the UW-Madison?
NC: Well first look back
a bit — a little historical framework — back in the late 19th-, early
20th century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies. At
the peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain. By no means
free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in this
respect. In fact so advanced, that power systems — state and private —
began to recognize that things were getting to a point where they can’t
control the population by force as easily as before, so they are going
to have to turn to other means of control. And the other means of
control are control of beliefs and attitudes. And out of that grew the
public relations industry, which in those days described itself honestly
as an industry of propaganda.
The guru of the PR industry, Edward Bernays
— incidentally, not a reactionary, but a Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy
liberal — the maiden handbook of the PR industry which he wrote back in
the 1920s was called Propaganda. And in it he described,
correctly, the goal of the industry. He said our goal is to insure that
the “intelligent minority” — and of course anyone who writes about these
things is part of that intelligent minority by definition, by
stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the only people
capable of running things, and there’s that great population out there,
the “unwashed masses,” who, if they’re left alone will just get into
trouble: so we have to, as he put it, “engineer their consent,” figure
out ways to insure they consent to our rule and domination. And that’s
the goal of the PR industry. And it works in many ways. It’s primary
commitment is commercial advertising. In fact, Bernays made his name
right at that time — late 20s — by running an advertising campaign to
convince women to smoke cigarettes: women weren’t smoking cigarettes,
this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn’t able to kill, so
we’ve got to do something about that. And he very successfully ran
campaigns that induced women to smoke cigarettes: that would be, in
modern terms, the cool thing to do, you know, that’s the way you get to
be a modern, liberated woman. It was very successful —
MS: Is there a correlation between that campaign and what’s happening with the big oil industry right now and climate change?
NC: These are just a few
examples. These are the origins of what became a huge industry of
controlling attitudes and opinions. Now the oil industry today, and in
fact the business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns
to try to undermine efforts to deal with a problem that’s even greater
than the mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was
mass murder. We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic
climate change. And it’s no joke. And [the oil industry is] trying to
impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit
interests. And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the
American Chamber of Commerce — the leading business lobby — and others,
who’ve stated quite openly that they’re conducting … they don’t call it
propaganda … but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince
people that there’s no real danger and we shouldn’t really do much about
it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the
deficit and economic growth — what they call ‘growth’ — and not worry
about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which
could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the
destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of
people. And there are many other correlations.
In fact quite generally, commercial
advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should
recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that
markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational
choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask
yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed
consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run
political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine
democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.
And so this is only one aspect of the PR industry. What Herman and I
were discussing was another aspect of the whole propaganda system that
developed roughly at that period, and that’s “manufacture of consent,”
as it was called, [consent] to the decisions of our political leaders,
or the leaders of the private economy, to try to insure that people have
the right beliefs and don’t try to comprehend the way decisions are
being made that may not only harm them, but harm many others. That’s
propaganda in the normal sense. And so we were talking about mass media,
and the intellectual community of the world in general, which is to a
large extent dedicated to this. Not that people see themselves as
propagandists, but … that they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into
the principles of the system, which prevent them from perceiving many
things that are really right on the surface, [things] that would be
subversive to power if understood. We give plenty of examples there and
there’s plenty more you can mention up to the present moment, crucial
ones in fact. That’s a large part of a general system of indoctrination
and control that runs parallel to controlling attitudes and …
consumeristic commitments, and other devices to control people.
You mentioned students before. Well one of
the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is sky-rocketing
tuitions. Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with
other countries, even with our own history? In the 1950s the United
States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher
education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge
numbers of people. There hasn’t been an economic change that’s made it
necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a
poor country. And to drive the point home even more clearly, if we look
just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a good
educational system with free tuition. There was an effort by the Mexican
state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there was a
national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and the
government backed down. Now that’s just happened recently in Quebec, on
our other border. Go across the ocean: Germany is a rich country. Free
tuition. Finland has the highest-ranked education system in the world.
Free … virtually free. So I don’t think you can give an argument that
there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high increase in
tuition. I think these are social and economic decisions made by the
people who set policy. And [these hikes] are part of, in my view, part
of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the liberatory
tendencies of the 1960s. Students became much freer, more open, they
were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights, women’s
rights … and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal
intellectuals condemned this, called it a “crisis of democracy:” we’ve
got to have more moderation of democracy. They called, literally, for
more commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase … we have
to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of
the young do their work, so we don’t have all this freedom and
independence. And many developments took place after that. I don’t think
we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but you
can see what happened. One of the things that happened was controlling
students — in fact, controlling students for the rest of their lives, by
simply trapping them in debt. That’s a very effective technique of
control and indoctrination. And I suspect — I can’t prove — but I
suspect that that’s a large part of the reason behind [high tuitions].
Many other parallel things happened. The whole economy changed in
significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers’ rights and
freedom. In fact the economist who chaired the Federal Reserve around
the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan — St. Alan as he was called then, the
great genius of the economics profession who was running the economy,
highly honored — he testified proudly before congress that the basis for
the great economy that he was running was what he called “growing
worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, they won’t do things,
like asking for better wages and better benefits. And that’s healthy for
the economy from a certain point of view, a point of view that says
workers ought to be oppressed and controlled, and that wealth ought to
be concentrated in a very few pockets. So yeah, that’s a healthy
economy, and we need growing worker insecurity, and we need growing
student insecurity, for similar reasons. I think all of these things
line up together as part of a general reaction — a bipartisan reaction,
incidentally — against liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves
in the 60s and have continued since.
MS: With the few
remaining minutes we have left, I’m wondering if you could leave the
students with one thing you’d like to say to them about how they can be
successful in the future.
NC: There are plenty of
problems in the world today, and students face a number of them,
including the ones I mentioned — the joblessness, insecurity and so on.
Yet on the other hand, there has been progress. In a lot of respects
things are a lot more free and advanced than they were … not many years
ago. So many things that were really matters of struggle, in fact even
some barely even mentionable, say, in the 1960s, are now … partially
resolved. Things like women’s rights. Gay rights. Opposition to
aggression. Concern for the environment — which is nowhere near where it
ought to be, but far beyond the 1960s. These victories for freedom
didn’t come from gifts from above. They came from people struggling
under conditions that are harsher than they are now. There is state
repression now. But it doesn’t begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro in
the 1960s. People that don’t know about that ought to read and think to
find out. And that leaves lots of opportunities. Students, you know,
are relatively privileged as compared with the rest of the population.
They are also in a period of their lives where they are relatively free.
Well that provides for all sorts of opportunities. In the past, such
opportunities have been taken by students who have often been in the
forefront of progressive change, and they have many more opportunities
now. It’s never going to be easy. There’s going to be repression.
There’s going to be backlash. But that’s the way society moves forward.
