Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (67 page)

So the process of colonization was extraordinarily destructive, and it in turn imposed the European nation-state system on the world, kind of a reflection of internal European society, which of course was always extremely hierarchical and unequal and brutal. And if that system continues, I suppose it will continue to be hierarchical and unequal and brutal.

So I think
other
forms of social organization have to be developed—and those forms are not too difficult to imagine. I mean, the United Nations was an attempt to do something about it, but it didn’t work, because the superpowers won’t let it work. International law is the same story. International law is a method by which you might regulate the aggressive and destructive tendencies of the nation-state—the trouble is, international law doesn’t have a police force: there are no Martians around to enforce it. So international law will only work if the powers subjected to it are willing to accept it, and the United States is not willing to accept it. If the World Court condemns us, we simply disregard it, it’s not our problem—we’re above the law, we’re a lawless state.
  ⁹⁴
And as long as the major powers in the world are lawless and violent, and are unwilling to enter into international arrangements or other kinds of mechanisms which would constrain force and violence, there’s very little hope for human survival, I would think.

Now, my own feeling—I mean, big story—is that the reasons for all of this have to do with the way that power is concentrated
inside
the particular societies; that’s the source of this extreme violence in the world. Remember that every existing social system has a vast disparity of power internally. Take the United States: the United States was not founded on the principle that “the people” ought to rule—that’s freshman Civics, it’s not what happened in history. If you look back at the actual record, you’ll find that the principles of the American Founding Fathers were quite different.

Keep in mind, all of the Founding Fathers hated democracy—Thomas Jefferson was a partial exception, but only partial. For the most part, they hated democracy. The principles of the Founding Fathers were rather nicely expressed by John Jay, the head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His favorite maxim was, “The people who own the country ought to govern it”—that’s the principle on which the United States was founded.
  ⁹⁵
The major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, emphasized very clearly in the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the whole system must be designed, as he put it, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”—that’s the primary purpose of the government, he said.
  ⁹⁶

Now, Madison had kind of a theory behind that, which was that the “minority of the opulent” would be elevated Enlightenment gentlemen, who would act like some kind of ancient Roman republicans of his imagination—benevolent philosophers who would use their opulence to benefit everybody in the country. But he himself quickly recognized that that was a serious delusion, and within about ten years he was bitterly denouncing what he called the “daring depravity of the times” as “the minority of the opulent” were using their power to smash everyone else in the face.

In fact, still in the eighteenth century, Madison made some insightful comments about the interactions between state power and private power. He said, we’ve designed a system in which the “stock-jobbers” (what we would today call investors) are simply using state power for their own ends—we thought we were going to create a system which would put enlightened gentlemen in control so that they would protect everyone from the tyranny of the majority, but instead what we’ve got is gangsters in control using state power for their own benefit.
  ⁹⁷

Well, that’s the way the system was originally designed in the United States—and over the next two centuries, that basic design hasn’t changed a lot. The “minority of the opulent,” who share a very definite class interest, still have control of the government institutions, both the parliament and the Executive, while the general population remains highly dispersed, separated, and as Madison also recommended, fragmented so that people will not be able to unite together to identify and press their interests.
  ⁹⁸
And the principle that “The people who own the country ought to govern it” continues to be the dominant feature of American politics.

Alright, it’s not a very big secret who owns the country: you look at the “
Fortune
500” every year and you figure out pretty well who owns the country. The country is basically owned by a network of conglomerates that control production and investment and banking and so on, and are tightly inter-linked and very highly concentrated—
they
own the country. And the principle of American democracy is that they also ought to govern it. And to a very large extent, they do. Now, whenever you have a concentration of power like that, you can be certain that the people who
have
the power are going to try to maximize it—and they’re going to maximize it at the expense of others, both in their own country and abroad. And that’s just an unviable system, I think.

Let’s put international violence aside for a minute and take environmental issues, which people are finally beginning to look at. Well, it’s been obvious for centuries that capitalism is going to self-destruct: that’s just inherent in the logic of system—because to the extent that a system is capitalist, that means maximizing short-term profit and not being concerned with long-term effects. In fact, the motto of capitalism was, “private vices, public benefits”—somehow it’s gonna work out. Well, it
doesn’t
work out, and it’s
never
going to work out: if you’re maximizing short-term profits without concern for the long-term effects, you are going to destroy the environment, for one thing. I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it’s an infinite wastebasket—but at some point you’re going to run into the reality, which is that that isn’t true.

Well, we’re running into that reality now—and it’s very profound. Take something like combustion: anything you burn, no matter what it is, is increasing the greenhouse effect—and this was known to scientists decades ago, they knew exactly what was happening.
  ⁹⁹
But in a capitalist system, you don’t care about long-term effects like that, what you have to care about is tomorrow’s profits. So the greenhouse effect has been building for years, and there’s no known technological fix on the horizon—there may not be any answer to this, it could be so serious that there’s no remedy. That’s possible, and then human beings will turn out to have been a lethal mutation, which maybe destroys a lot of life with us. Or it could be that there’s some way of fixing it, or some ameliorating way—nobody knows.

But just keep in mind what we’re dealing with: the predictable effect of an increase in the world’s temperature through the greenhouse effect will be to raise the sea level, and if the sea level begins to rise a few feet, it’s not clear that human civilization can continue. A lot of the agricultural lands, for example, are alluvial—they’re near the seas. Industrial centers, like New York City, could be inundated. The climate is going to change, so the agricultural-producing areas of the United States could become dust-bowls. And when these changes start to be recognized, they’re going to set into motion social conflict of a sort that we can’t even imagine—I mean, if it turns out that agricultural areas in the United States are becoming unviable and that Siberia is becoming the next great agricultural producer, do you think that American planners are going to allow the Russians to use it? We’ll conquer it, even if we have to destroy the world in a nuclear war to do it. That’s the way they think, and have always thought. And those conflicts are going to be growing up all over the world—you can’t even predict what they’ll be like.

Alright, right now we do not have the forms of internal democracy or international organization which will allow us even to begin to cope with these sorts of problems. The very concept of social planning, of rational planning for human concerns—that’s regarded as virtually subversive. And that’s the only thing that could possibly save people: rational social planning, carried out by accountable people representing the whole population rather than business elites. Democracy, in other words—that’s a concept we don’t have.

9

Movement Organizing

Based primarily on discussions at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, between 1993 and 1996
.

The Movie Manufacturing Consent

Editors’ Note: The 1992 movie
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
was the most successful Canadian feature documentary ever made and played in more than 32 countries. Although Chomsky cooperated with the directors and liked them very much, he has not seen the film and does not intend to, for reasons that follow
.
  ¹

M
AN
: Noam, watching your reactions to the documentary they made about your critique of the media, you’ve shown a lot of discomfort
…

You should see the letters I write him [indicating Mark Achbar, one of the directors].

M
ARK
A
CHBAR
: He’s a good letter-writer
.

M
AN
: Again earlier today you said something critical about it. I’m sure you realize the politically potent effect that the film is having
.

Oh yes.

M
AN
: And I was just wondering, if this were a film about Bertrand Russell [British philosopher and socialist] and his powerful ideas, and how he helped to change society with his ideas, would you be as critical of it, or would you see it as a powerful political organizing tool?
  ²

Both, both.

M
AN
: Then I guess I’d love to hear you say something positive about the film
.

Well, what I would say is exactly what you said—I mean, the positive impact of it has been astonishing to me. Mark can give you the details, but outside of the United States, the film is shown all over the place, and even inside the United States it was shown to some extent.

M
AN
: It was in a lot of cities
.

Yeah, but in every other country it’s been on national television.

M
AN
: It came to Seattle four times and sold out every screening
.

Okay, but everywhere else it was on national television. I didn’t realize this myself until I was traveling around Europe giving talks last year, and I’d be in Finland and “Oh yeah, we all saw it on television”—it was that sort of thing all over the place. As a matter of fact, it’s gotten to the point where I’m invited to film festivals all over the world—literally.

Well, one result of that is there’s been a ton of reviewing, and the reviewing is extremely interesting. The reviews are often written just by guys who write T.V. criticism for the newspapers, you know, completely apolitical people. And their reaction is extremely positive, I’d say about 98 percent of the time it’s
very
positive. In fact, about the only thing that got a lot of people pissed off, including Phil Donahue, was some remarks I made about sports: people got kind of angry about that.
  ³
But most of the time the reaction is very positive; they say, “Yeah, really interesting.”

In fact, I get a ton of letters about it—like I get a letter from some steel-worker in Canada saying, “I took my friends three times, we all saw it and it’s great,” and so on and so forth. Well, that’s all fine. But the standard letter, the
standard
letter, is something like this: it says, “I’m really glad they made this film; I thought I was the only person in the world who had these thoughts, I’m delighted to know that somebody else actually has them and is saying them.” Then comes the punch-line: “How can I join your movement?” That’s why I’m ambivalent.

Now, I don’t think it’s anything Mark and Peter [the directors] did wrong; I mean, I haven’t seen the movie, but I know that they were very well aware of this problem, and tried very hard to overcome it. But somehow it’s just inherent in the medium, I don’t think the medium allows an escape from this—or if it does, I don’t think that anybody’s yet found it. I mean, I don’t think the medium can make people understand that if they film me giving a talk somewhere, that’s because somebody else
organized
the talk, and the real work is being done by the people who organized the talk, and then followed it up and are out there working in their communities. If they can bring in some speaker to help get people together, terrific, but that person is in no sense “the leader.” That somehow doesn’t get across in a movie—what gets across is, “How can I join your movement?” And then I’ve got to write a letter which is a big speech about this. So I am ambivalent about it.

Incidentally, one more comment about the reviews: the reviews in the United States were intriguingly different. First of all, there weren’t many, because it wasn’t shown a lot here. But they were very interesting. Do you remember the
New York Times
review? That was really fascinating, that was the most intriguing one.

M
ARK
A
CHBAR
: They left your name out of the title of the film
.