Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (14 page)

Now take Japan: Japanese corporations and investors can collect a lot of capital, but they’re never going to get their own resources—they don’t have their own energy resources, they don’t have their own raw materials, they don’t have agricultural resources. And we do: that makes a big difference. In fact, American planners back in the late 1940s were very well aware of this difference when they sort of organized the post-war world—so while they helped Japan to reindustrialize, they also insisted on controlling its energy resources: the Japanese were not allowed to develop their own petrochemical industry, or to obtain their own independent access to petroleum resources. And the reason for that is explained in now-declassified U.S. internal documents: as George Kennan [State Department official and diplomat], who was one of the major planners of the post-war world, pointed out, if we control Japan’s energy resources, we will have veto power over Japan—if they ever get out of line, we’ll just choke off their energy supply.
  ⁴⁹
Now, whether or not that plan would still work you don’t know, because the world is changing in unpredictable ways. But for the moment, the United States is still overwhelmingly powerful in world affairs—that’s why we can get away with so much.

Democracy Under Capitalism

M
AN
: You mentioned that we’re going to need participatory social planning to save the environment. I’m wondering, doesn’t decentralization of power also somehow
conflict
with trying to save the environment—I mean, that can’t be done without some sort of central agreement, don’t you think?

Well, first of all,
agreements
don’t require centralized authority, certain
kinds
of agreements do. One’s assumption, at least, is that decentralization of power will lead to decisions that reflect the interests of the entire population. The idea is that policies flowing from any kind of decision-making apparatus are going to tend to reflect the interests of the people involved in making the decisions—which certainly seems plausible. So if a decision is made by some centralized authority, it is going to represent the interests of the particular group which is in power. But if power is actually rooted in large parts of the population—if people can actually participate in social planning—then they will presumably do so in terms of their own interests, and you can expect the decisions to reflect those interests. Well, the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits—those are fundamentally different interests.

M
AN
: In an industrial society, though, one might argue that people need to have jobs
.

Sure, but having jobs doesn’t require destroying the environment which makes life possible. I mean, if you have participatory social planning, and people are trying to work things out in terms of their own interests, they are going to want to balance opportunities to work with quality of work, with type of energy available, with conditions of personal interaction, with the need to make sure your children survive, and so on and so forth. But those are all considerations that simply don’t
arise
for corporate executives, they just are not a part of the agenda. In fact, if the C.E.O. of General Electric started making decisions on
that
basis, he’d be thrown out of his job in three seconds, or maybe there’d be a corporate takeover or something—because those things are not a part of his job. His job is to raise profit and market share, not to make sure that the environment survives, or that his workers lead decent lives. And those goals are simply in conflict.

M
AN
: Give us an example of what exactly you mean by social planning
.

Well, right now we have to make big decisions about how to produce energy, for one thing—because if we continue to produce energy by combustion, the human race isn’t going to survive very much longer.
  ⁵⁰
Alright, that decision requires social planning: it’s not something that you can just decide on yourself. Like, you can decide to put a solar-energy something-or-other on your own house, but that doesn’t really help. This is the kind of decision where it only works if it’s done on a mass scale.

M
AN
: I thought you might have been referring to population control
.

Yeah, population control is another issue where it doesn’t matter if
you
do it, everybody has to do it. It’s like traffic: I mean, you can’t make driving a car survivable by driving well yourself; there has to be kind of a social contract involved, otherwise it won’t work. Like, if there was no social contract involved in driving—everybody was just driving like a lethal weapon, going as fast as they can and forgetting all the traffic lights and everything else—you couldn’t make that situation safe just by driving well yourself: it doesn’t make much difference if you set out to drive safely if everybody else is driving lethal-weapon, right? 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.

What’s more, capitalists have long understood this. So most government regulatory systems have in fact been strongly lobbied for by the industries themselves: industries want to be regulated, because they know that if they’re not, they’re going to destroy themselves in the unbridled competition.
  ⁵¹

M
AN
: Then what kind of mechanism for social planning do you think would work? Obviously you’re not too sanguine about our current form of government
.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with the
form
—I mean, there are
some
things wrong with the form—but what’s really wrong is that the
substance
is missing. Look, as long as you have private control over the economy, it doesn’t make any difference what forms you have, because they can’t do anything. You could have political parties where everybody gets together and participates, and
you
make the programs, make things as participatory as you like—and it would still have only the most marginal effect on policy. And the reason is, power lies elsewhere.

So suppose all of us here convinced everybody in the country to vote for us for President, we got 98 percent of the vote and both Houses of Congress, and then we started to institute very badly needed social reforms that most of the population wants. Simply ask yourself, what would happen? Well, if your imagination doesn’t tell you, take a look at real cases. There are places in the world that have a broader range of political parties than we do, like Latin American countries, for example, which in this respect are much more democratic than we are. Well, when popular reform candidates in Latin America get elected and begin to introduce reforms, two things typically happen. One is, there’s a military coup supported by the United States. But suppose that doesn’t happen. What you get is capital strike—investment capital flows out of the country, there’s a lowering of investment, and the economy grinds to a halt.

That’s the problem that Nicaragua has faced in the 1980s—and which it cannot overcome, in my view, it’s just a hopeless problem. See, the Sandinistas have tried to run a mixed economy: they’ve tried to carry out social programs to benefit the population, but they’ve also had to appeal to the business community to prevent capital flight from destroying the place. So most public funds, to the extent there are any, go as a bribe to the wealthy, to try to keep them investing in the country. The only problem is, the wealthy would prefer
not
to invest unless they have political power: they’d rather see the society destroyed. So the wealthy take the bribes, and they send them to Swiss banks and to Miami banks—because from their perspective, the Sandinista government just has the wrong priorities. I mean, these guys hate democracy just as much as Congress hates democracy: they want the political system to be in the hands of wealthy elites, and when it is again, then they’ll call it “democracy” and they’ll resume investing, and the economy will finally start to function again.

Well, the same thing would happen here if we ever had a popular reform candidate who actually achieved some formal level of power: there would be disinvestment, capital strike, a grinding down of the economy. And the reason is quite simple. 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.

In fact, if you think through the logic of this, you’ll see that so long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody,
everybody
, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that’s to make sure that the rich folk are happy—because unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So if you’re a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, let’s say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy—because if they’re happy, then they’ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they’re
not
happy, everything’s going to grind to a halt, and you’re not even going to get anything trickling down. So if you’re a homeless person in the streets, your first concern is the happiness of the wealthy guys in the mansions and the fancy restaurants. Basically that’s a metaphor for the whole society.

Like, suppose Massachusetts were to increase business taxes. Most of the population is in favor of it, but you can predict what would happen. Business would run a public relations campaign—which is true, in fact, it’s not lies—saying, “You raise taxes on business, you soak the rich, and you’ll find that capital is going to flow elsewhere, and you’re not going to have any jobs, you’re not going to have anything.” That’s not the way they’d put it exactly, but that’s what it would amount to: “Unless you make us happy you’re not going to have anything, because we own the place; you live here, but we own the place.” And in fact, that’s basically the message that
is
presented, not in those words of course, whenever a reform measure does come along somewhere—they have a big propaganda campaign saying, it’s going to hurt jobs, it’s going to hurt investment, there’s going to be a loss of business confidence, and so on. That’s just a complicated way of saying, unless you keep business happy, the population isn’t going to have anything.

M
AN
: What do you think about nationalization of industry as a means of allowing for this kind of large-scale social planning?

Well, it would depend on how it’s done. 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.

The Empire

W
OMAN
: Then is the basic goal of the United States when it intervenes in Third World countries to destroy left-wing governments in order to keep them from power?

No, the primary concern is to prevent
independence
, regardless of the ideology. Remember, we’re the global power, so we have to make sure that all the various parts of the world continue serving their assigned functions in our global system. And the assigned functions of Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so on. I mean, there’s no big secret about that—the media won’t tell you and scholarship won’t tell you, but all you have to do is look at declassified government documents and this is all explained very frankly and explicitly.

The internal documentary record in the United States goes way back, and it says the same thing over and over again. Here’s virtually a quote: the main commitment of the United States, internationally in the Third World, must be to prevent the rise of nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from the masses of the population for improvement in low living standards and diversification of production; the reason is, we have to maintain a climate that is conducive to investment, and to ensure conditions which allow for adequate repatriation of profits to the West. Language like that is repeated year after year in top-level U.S. planning documents, like National Security Council reports on Latin America and so on—and that’s exactly what we do around the world.
  ⁵²

So the nationalism we oppose doesn’t need to be
left-wing
—we’re just as much opposed to
right-wing
nationalism. I mean, when there’s a right-wing military coup which seeks to turn some Third World country on a course of independent development, the United States will also try to destroy that government—we opposed Perón in Argentina, for example.
  ⁵³
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.