Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (70 page)

But what these things demonstrate is something that is shown over and over again in careful public opinion studies: the population is what’s called “alienated.” People think that none of the institutions work for them, everything’s a scam, a crooked operation; they feel they have no way of influencing anything, the political system doesn’t work, the economic system doesn’t work, everything is being done somewhere else and it’s all out of their control. And this feeling goes up across the board pretty regularly.
  ¹³
I mean, they’re not aware how much it’s true—like, they’re not aware that in the current G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] negotiations, major decisions are being made that will have a tremendous impact on the world and on their lives, and neither they, nor the unions, nor Congress knows anything about them. But they get a sense of it, they sort of have a feel for it.

And the point is, the left is doing virtually nothing to try to take advantage of this situation and turn the tremendous discontentedness in some kind of constructive direction. What I see on the left at least is pretty much the same story everywhere: tremendous divisiveness, narrowness of focus, intolerance, unwillingness to meet people on their own terms, plus inertia, and just madness of various kinds.

And the reason for a lot of that is—well, I think you could sort of see some of the reasons. If you just take the Civil Rights Movement and look at its course, I think you get a pretty good idea of some of the reasons. In the early part of the Civil Rights Movement, in the late 1950s and early Sixties, there was tremendous courage and dedication, and huge numbers of people finally got involved, including all the way up to middle-class America. And it was successful: there were big victories in the South. And then somehow it stopped. Well, what happened? What happened was, you got restaurants integrated, and you got things like the Voting Rights Act of 1965—it was a little bit like what’s going on in South Africa now, although there it’s much more dramatic. And you were able to establish the forms that in general are accepted by the mainstream Establishment culture, and even by the business community—like, General Motors doesn’t have any stake in having restaurants segregated, in fact they’d rather have them not segregated, it’s more efficient. So all of that stuff worked, at least to a certain extent. It wasn’t easy—a lot of people got killed, it was very brutal and so on. But it worked. And then it stopped, and it frittered away, and in fact probably it’s regressed since then. And the reason is, it ran into class issues—and they’re hard. They require institutional change. There the Board of Directors of General Motors is
not
going to be happy, when you start dealing with class issues in the industrial centers.

So at that point it stopped, and it frittered away, and also it went off into pretty self-destructive things—revolutionary slogans, carrying guns around, smashing windows, this and that—just because it ran into harder issues. And when you run into harder issues, it’s easy to look for an escape. And there are a lot of different escapes. You can escape by writing meaningless articles on some unintelligible version of academic radical feminism, or by becoming a conspiracy buff, or by working on some very narrowly focused issue, which may be important, but is so narrow that it’s never going to get anywhere or have any outreach. There are a lot of these temptations. And as the number of people becoming interested and involved has increased, since the issues are indeed hard, they’re not easy, there’s been a kind of chasm developing between the potentialities and the actual achievements.

W
OMAN
: You don’t think the left is dealing with class issues?

Not much. I mean, it’s not that nobody is. And they’re not the only issues that have to be dealt with, it’s just that they’re the most important ones—because they’re right at the core of the whole system of oppression. And also, they’re the hardest ones, because there you’re dealing with solid institutional structures where the core of private power is involved. I mean, other issues are hard too—like issues of patriarchy are hard. But they’re modifiable without changing the whole system of power. Class issues aren’t.

M
AN
: Do you have any strategies for the left to be able to get more on common ground with the working class?

Well, first of all, “working class” is pretty broad. I mean, anybody who gets a paycheck is in some sense “working class,” so there’s a sense in which a lot of managers are working class too—and in fact, they have pretty much the same interests these days: they’re getting canned as fast as everybody else is, and they’re worried about it. See, in the United States the word “class” is used in an unusual way: it’s supposed to have something to do with wealth. But in its traditional usage, and the way the word is used everywhere else, what it has to do with is your place in the whole system of decision-making and authority—so if you take orders, you’re “working class,” even if you’re wealthy.

And how should the left be dealing with class issues? Well, we have to take that 83 percent of the population that thinks that the system is inherently unfair, and increase it to a larger percentage, then we simply help people get organized to change it. There are no special tactics for that, it’s just the usual education and organizing. Okay, so you get started doing it.

Popular Education

W
OMAN
: One thing that I’ve noticed in reading a number of your books, and a number of books by people like Holly Sklar and Michael Albert, is that it’s a standard practice on the left in trying to help educate people—because we are in the minority position—to document everything very thoroughly, to lay out very precise scholarly arguments, to marshal a lot of evidence and have a ton of citations. But the thing that bothers me about that is there are a lot of people who are shut out of that world
.

That’s right.

W
OMAN
: They’re not academics, they haven’t been trained in this way of making arguments. I really wish that there was something out there in the middle ground that would not just try to persuade, but would also teach about argumentation. Somebody told me they used to do things like that in the 1930s, with popular education
.

Absolutely—in fact, that was one of the big things in the 1930s for left intellectuals to be involved in. I mean, good scientists, well-known, important scientists like Bernal [British physicist] and others just felt that it was a part of their obligation to the human species to do popular science. So you had very good popular books being written about physics, and about mathematics and so on—for instance, there’s a book called
Mathematics for the Million
which is an example of it.
  ¹⁴

W
OMAN
: Yeah, I’ve heard of that
.

Well, that guy came out of the left. And the point is, those people just felt that this kind of knowledge should be shared by everyone. In fact, one of the things I find most astonishing about the current left-intellectual scene is that what the counterparts of these people today are telling the general public is, “You don’t have to know about this stuff, it’s all just some white male power-play—and besides, astrology’s the same as physics: it’s all just a discourse, and a text, and this that and the other thing, so forget about it, do what comes natural; if you like astrology, it’s astrology.” I mean, this is so different in character from what was just assumed automatically in the days when there were live popular movements, it’s amazing.

If you’re privileged enough to, say, know mathematics, and you think you’re a part of the general world, obviously you should try to help other people understand it. And the way you do it, for example, is by writing books like
Mathematics for the Million
, or by giving talks in elementary schools and things like that. In fact, involvement in popular education goes well beyond writing books: it means having groups, giving talks, workers’ education, all sorts of stuff. And the fact that people on the left
aren’t
doing those things today I think is a real tragedy—and also part of the really self-destructive aspect of a lot of what’s been happening, in my opinion. These are things that have always been a part of live political movements.

In fact, workers’ education used to be a huge thing in the United States. For example, A. J. Muste [American pacifist and activist] worked in workers’ education for a long time, and the working-class schools he helped set up were significant and big—people who hadn’t gone through elementary school came to them, and really learned a lot. Incidentally, Muste was one of the most important people of this century in the United States—of course, nobody knows about him, because he did the wrong things, but he was really a leading figure in the sort of left-libertarian movement.
  ¹⁵

John Dewey [American philosopher and educator] was also very much involved in popular education, and part of it was an attempt to do just this kind of thing. So Dewey worked with Jane Addams [American social worker and suffragist] and others in Chicago during the Progressive Period on community development programs and so on—in fact, the whole progressive school movement came out of that, and it very much had this kind of democratizing commitment and a commitment to industrial democracy, which was considered a central part of it all.
  ¹⁶

In fact, there were schools like this set up all over the place—for example, in England several of the colleges in the big universities, including Oxford, are working-class colleges: they came out of the labor movement, and are directed to educating working people. And even right around here there’s Cape Cod Community College, which like a lot of community colleges has people teaching in it whose interests really are this. Community colleges and urban colleges in general have mostly working-class students, and they can be a very good way to reach people. A lot of activists have in fact chosen to do that—there are people teaching in community colleges all over the place for precisely these reasons.

So you’re right: there really ought to be more efforts put into things like these—they would be a very important step towards reconstituting the kinds of popular movements we need.

Third-Party Politics

W
OMAN
: What do you think about working through the electoral process as a strategy for activists to pursue at this point? Is that a viable way to spend one’s energy, if ultimately what we’re trying to change is the basic structure of the economy?

Well, I think it’s possible to work through the electoral process. But the point we have to remember is, things will happen through the electoral process only if there are popular forces in motion in the society which are active enough to be threatening to power.

So for example, take the Wagner Act of 1935 [i.e. the National Labor Relations Act], which gave American labor the right to organize for the first time.
  ¹⁷
It was a long time coming—most of Europe had the same rights about fifty years earlier—and it was voted through by Congress. But it wasn’t voted through by Congress because Franklin Roosevelt liked it, or because he was a liberal or anything like that—in fact, Roosevelt was a conservative, he had no particular interest in labor.
  ¹⁸
The Wagner Act was voted through by Congress because the people who do have power in the society recognized that they’d better give workers something, or else there was going to be real trouble. So therefore it was voted through, and workers got the right to organize—and they kept that right as long as they were willing to struggle for it, then they basically lost it, it doesn’t get enforced much anymore.

So you can get things through the electoral process, but the electoral process is really only a surface phenomenon: a lot of other things have to be happening in the society for it to be very meaningful.

M
AN
: What about trying to get proportional representation in the United States as a way of maybe developing a viable labor party, which could help articulate more popular interests and broaden the range of political debate generally? [Proportional representation refers to an electoral system by which legislative seats are assigned according to the proportion of votes that each party receives rather than by majority vote in each district, which encourages the proliferation of parties and gives minority voters better representation
.
  ¹⁹
] It seems to me that in Canada, the fact that they have a labor party makes people somewhat more attuned to issues that Americans largely miss, like workers’ issues for example
.

That’s right—Canada’s an interesting case: it’s a pretty similar society to us, except different somehow. It’s much more humane. It has the same corporate rule, the same capitalist institutions, all of that’s the same—but it’s just a much more humane place. They have a kind of social contract that we don’t have, like they have this national health-care system which makes us look bad because it’s so efficient. And that
is
related to their having a labor-based party, I think—the New Democratic Party in Canada [N.D.P.] isn’t really a
labor
party, but it’s kind of labor-based. However, that party’s ability to enter the political system in Canada wasn’t a result of having proportional representation, it was due to the same thing that would be necessary to
get
any kind of change like proportional representation in the first place: a lot of serious popular organizing.

Look, if you have a political movement that’s strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it’ll get accommodated in some fashion—as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren’t going to matter very much anymore. So I think that pushing for something like proportional representation could be worth doing if it’s part of a wider organizing campaign. But if it’s just an effort to try to put some people into Congress and that’s it, then it’s pretty much a waste of your time. I mean, there is never any point in getting some person into office unless you can continue forcing them to be
your
representative, and they will only continue to be
your
representative as long as you are active and threatening enough to make them do what you want, otherwise they’re going to stop being your representative.