Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (71 page)

This point has been understood forever, actually. So if you go back to James Madison, who framed a lot of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and so on, he pointed out that, as he put it, a “parchment barrier” will never stand in the way of oppression—meaning, writing something down on paper is totally worthless by itself: if you fight for it, you can make it real, otherwise you’ll just have really nice things on paper.
  ²⁰
I mean, Stalin’s constitution was just about the nicest constitution around—but it was a parchment barrier. And the same is true of every other part of politics too, including having your representative in Congress.

So you can vote for Gerry Studds [liberal Massachusetts Congressman] if you’re from around here, and he’ll do some nice things—but he also voted for N.A.F.T.A. [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. And that was against the will of a lot of his constituents—just because those constituents weren’t making it clear enough to their representative what he had to do. I mean, the anti-N.A.F.T.A. activity that went on in the country was important, and it went way beyond anything I ever thought it would, but it still wasn’t enough to get people like Gerry Studds to come along when it was needed—and he’s a good guy, like I gave money to the Studds campaign. It’s just that when you weighed all of the pressures, there wasn’t enough of a popular movement to get them to come through when it mattered.

This was also part of the problem with the Rainbow Coalition, in my opinion [progressive political organization led by Jesse Jackson]. I mean, Jesse Jackson was in a very strong position a couple years ago with the Rainbow Coalition, and he had a choice. His choice was, “Am I going to use this opportunity to help create a continuing grassroots organization which will keep on working after the election, or am I going to use it as my own personal vehicle of political promotion?” And he more or less chose the latter—so it died. Therefore it was a complete waste of time: anybody who spent time working on that campaign was wasting their time, because it was used as an electoral platform, and that never makes sense. I mean, whenever somebody says “I want to become President,” you can forget it—as President, they won’t be any different from George Bush.

So as far as I can see, getting proportional representation in the United States today would have basically no effect, the effect would be essentially zilch—just because there’s nothing around to take advantage of it. On the other hand, if it was passed at a time when you had popular grassroots organizations of the kind that developed, say, in Haiti in the late 1980s, sure, then it could make a difference. But of course, it’s only under those circumstances that you would ever
get
proportional representation in the first place.

So in my view, any of these things could be fine if they’re being used as organizing tools to try to get things going: they’re a waste of time if you actually take them seriously in themselves, but if they’re understood simply as a part of larger popular struggles—so this is what you’re focusing on right now, but the purpose isn’t to get some words written down somewhere or some person into office, but rather it’s to get people to understand the
importance
of the words and the need to keep fighting for them—yeah, then it can mean something.

W
OMAN
: So you think that trying to develop a third party here might he worth doing?

Sure, absolutely—I think that could be a very important step. Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage—exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton’s proposals for “managed competition” [put forward in 1993].
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But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming—but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.

Now, in the United States there are also a lot of popular organizations, but they’re all separate, there’s no framework to start bringing them together. So developing a popularly-based third party here could be a very important step towards that, and I think it should be pursued.

In fact, there have even been some encouraging developments in recent years in getting something like that off the ground—I’m thinking of the emergence of the New Party, specifically, which is sort of trying to follow the Canadian model. So again, I don’t think that we should have any illusions about working through the political system, and I’m not much of a fan of political parties—but the New Party is really the first serious third-party alternative that I’ve seen in the United States: seriously thought-out, trying to create grassroots structures, using politics the way it ought to be used, as an organizing and pressuring technique, and hoping ultimately to get to the point where it could have real influence. Now, they’re not going to make structural reforms—that requires much bigger changes, changes in the institutions. I mean, when the N.D.P. got into power in Ontario in 1990, they couldn’t really do anything, they just carried out the normal right-wing policies, and in the next national election [in 1993] they got like two votes, nobody wanted to bother with them anymore. But even given those limitations, I still think it’s important for a country to have something like that—there’s a lot of potential to help make people’s lives better, and it certainly could be a basis for moving further and pressing for larger changes.

In fact, that same kind of thinking extends to electoral politics in general, in my view. I mean, right now voting decisions in the United States are pretty subtle tactical matters, in which the policy differences between the two major parties are not great. But just because I say they’re “tactical,” I don’t mean to demean it: the decisions that have serious human consequences and matter for people are
mostly
tactical judgments, after all. Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn’t affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy—and one of those decisions is whether you should vote, and if so, who should you vote for. And that can be an extremely important decision, with significant implications.

So for example, we have a national election coming up in the United States soon [in 1996], and I don’t really know of any very strong arguments one way or another about who to vote for—but that’s not to say that that judgment is an unimportant one: I think it’s very important. I mean, I’ll vote for Clinton, holding my nose—but the reason has nothing at all to do with big policy issues; there I can’t really see too much difference. What it has to do with are things like who’s going to get appointed to the judiciary: there are some differences between the Republicans and Democrats on questions like that, and who’s appointed to the judiciary happens to have a big effect on people’s lives. They may be small policy differences when you look at the big picture—but remember, there’s a huge amount of power out there, and small policy differences implementing a huge amount of power can make big differences to people. Or there might be a slight difference in things like the earned income tax credit [a tax refund program for poor working individuals and families]. Okay, that makes a lot of difference for people whose kids are hungry in downtown Boston, say. So that’ll be my decision in this election—again, holding my nose. And that’s the way it is at the upper levels of our political system generally, I think.

Actually, one way for third parties to address this situation is to run “fusion” candidates—meaning, you have your own third-party ballot-line which stands for whatever you stand for, say for social-democratic-type programs, but then you have that ballot-line vote go to one of the main-party candidates in the election, based on these sort of tactical decisions. That’s possible in some jurisdictions. And it’s a compromise way for a third party to preserve a genuine policy identity and commitment, while nevertheless letting people make the small tactical voting choices that can make a real difference to people—and I think it’s a very plausible compromise.

Boycotts

M
AN
: Do you think it would help to undermine corporate power if people were to begin making consumer choices that directly affect companies like United Fruit [renamed Chiquita], which are the most actively involved in exploiting Third World countries—like, stop buying their bananas, say, stop buying their coffee?

Again, if only a few people do it, it isn’t going to have any effect—it just means that some guy picking bananas in East Costa Rica isn’t going to have enough money to feed his children tomorrow. But if it’s done on a large enough scale that it can have an impact on the corporate structure, sure, then it could mean something.

I mean, suppose you stopped consuming altogether—you can live on subsistence farming in the United States in a lot of places, so suppose you did that. The effect on the general society would be exactly as if you decided to commit suicide: it would simply go on as before, but without you. Bear in mind that a lot of these things about “let’s really make a change by withdrawing from the world and living a decent life” have precisely the social effect of suicide—well, that’s a little too extreme, because people might notice and become interested and involved, so maybe it’s a little bit more than suicide. But not a lot. And in fact, the only thing that does differentiate it from suicide is when you use it as an organizing tool.
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Otherwise not, otherwise in fact it is just like suicide.

W
OMAN
: Would you ever advocate a boycott as a tactic, though, assuming that it was coordinated and on a large enough scale?

Well, tactics depend on the specific situations you’re faced with—I don’t think you can say very much worthwhile about them in the abstract. So there might be a particular moment when a boycott of something would be helpful. But as a general matter, I don’t think they really make a lot of sense, frankly.

I mean, suppose we got millions of people to stop buying: what would happen? The economic system barely functions as it is—I mean, the contemporary economic system is a complete catastrophe, an absolutely catastrophic failure. For instance, the International Labor Organization recently gave its latest estimate of unemployment worldwide—“unemployment” they define as meaning not having enough work to meet a subsistence level, so maybe you can sell some handkerchiefs at a street corner or something, but you don’t have enough work to survive on your own. They estimate that at about 30 percent of the world’s population—which makes it a lot worse than the Great Depression.
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Alright? Now, there’s a ton of work to be done in the world—everywhere you look there’s work that ought to be done. And the people who don’t have work would be delighted to do it. So what you’ve got is a huge number of idle hands, a vast amount of work that ought to be done, and an economic system that is incapable of putting those two things together. Okay, absolutely catastrophic failure. Boycotts aren’t going to overcome that failure, they’re just going to make it worse.

So you know, they may be worthwhile as a tactic at some point, but what’s really required is just a complete rethinking of the entire nature of economic interactions and structures—there really is no other way to overcome this whole massive failure of the economy.

“A Praxis”

M
AN
: Dr. Chomsky, as I listen to you talk and give your marvelous analysis of the destructions of capitalism and American foreign policy, and even as I hear you today give us some of your perspectives on more practical issues of activism, I’m often struck by what I hear to be an underlying generality to your advice: it seems there’s almost the absence of a concrete program. Don’t you think that it would be helpful to give people a little bit more guidance about what to do specifically, especially since people are so directionless these days?

What I’m saying is, I don’t see a revolutionary “praxis” in your politics—and I’m wondering why that is
.

Well, when you say there’s no “praxis,” I don’t exactly know what that means. There are plenty of things that can be done; I don’t think they have to be described with fancy terms. And we just do the things that can be done, the kinds of things that are the next stage. There aren’t any general formulas about that—you just ask where you are, what are the problems that exist, where are people ready to move? And then you try to do something with them. There’s a whole spectrum of actions you can take, and there’s no simple answer as to which ones should have the priority—people judge differently.

But I’d be very skeptical if somebody comes along with a “praxis”—you know, some formula saying, “Here’s the way we’re supposed to do it.” I’d be
really
skeptical about that, if I were you.