Excerpt

Power Systems

Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

by Noam Chomsky

Excerpt

Power Systems

Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

by Noam Chomsky

Back to Book Description

1 The New American Imperialism

Cambridge, Massachusetts (April 2, 2010)

One of the themes that Howard Zinn tried to address during his long career was the lack of historical memory. The facts of history are scrupulously ignored and/or distorted. I was wondering if you could comment on imperialism then and now, interventions then and now. Specifically about Saigon in 1963 and 1964 and Kabul today? What happened in Vietnam in the early 1960s is gone from history. It was barely discussed at the time, and it’s essentially disappeared. In 1954, there was a peace settlement between the United States and Vietnam. The United States regarded it as a disaster, refused to permit it to go forward, and established a client state in the South, which was a typical client state, carrying out torture, brutality, murders. By about 1960, the South Vietnamese government had probably killed seventy or eighty thousand people.1 The repression was so harsh that it stimulated an internal rebellion, which was not what the North Vietnamese wanted. They wanted some time to develop their own society. But they were sort of coerced by the southern resistance into at least giving it verbal support. By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called “strategic hamlets,” essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This “pacification” ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1962. In 1963, the Kennedy administration got wind of the fact that the government of Ngo Dinh Diem it had installed in South Vietnam was trying to arrange negotiations with the North. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were trying to negotiate a peace settlement. So the Kennedy liberals determined that they had to be thrown out. The Kennedy administration organized a coup in which the two brothers were killed and they put in their own guy, meanwhile escalating the war. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy. Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. He did agree to proposals for withdrawal from Vietnam, because he knew the war was very unpopular here, but always with the condition of withdrawal after victory. Once we get victory, we can withdraw and let the client regime go. Actually, imperialism is an interesting term. The United States was founded as an empire. George Washington wrote in 1783 that “the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” Thomas Jefferson predicted that the “backward” tribes at the borders “will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains.”2 Once we don’t need slavery anymore, we’ll send the slaves back to Africa. And get rid of the Latins because they are an inferior race. We’re the superior race of Anglo-Saxons. It’s only to the benefit of everyone if we people the entire hemisphere. But none of that is considered imperialism because of what some historians of imperialism call the “saltwater fallacy”: it’s only imperialism if you cross saltwater.3 So, for example, if the Mississippi had been as wide as the Irish Sea, let’s say, then it would have been imperialism. But it was understood to be imperialism at the time—and it is. Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, “exterminates” them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers. When the United States reached the geographic limits of what we call the national territory, U.S. expansionism just continued. Immediately. Eighteen ninety-eight, that’s the year when the United States essentially conquered Cuba. The U.S. takeover was called “liberating” Cuba. In fact, Washington was preventing Cuba from liberating itself from Spain. Then the United States stole Hawaii from its population and invaded the Philippines. In the Philippines, U.S. troops killed a couple hundred thousand people, establishing a colonial system, which still exists.4 That’s one of the reasons why the Philippines has not joined the rest of East and Southeast Asia in the economic development of the past twenty or thirty years. It’s an outlier. Part of the reason is it still retains the structure of the neocolonial system that the United States established. But the new American imperialism seems to be substantially different from the older variety in that the United States is a declining economic power and is therefore seeing its political power and influence wane. I’m thinking, for example, of a Latin American hemisphere-wide organization that was recently formed that excludes the United States. Such a thing would have been unthinkable in the more than century-long U.S. domination of the continent. I think talk about American decline should be taken with a grain of salt. The Second World War is when the United States really became a global power. It had been the biggest economy in the world by far for long before the war, but it was a regional power in a way. It controlled the Western Hemisphere and had made some forays into the Pacific. But the British were the world power. The Second World War changed that. The United States became the dominant world power. The wealth of the United States at that time is hard to believe. The United States had half the world’s wealth. The other industrial societies were weakened or destroyed. The United States was in an incredible position of security. It controlled the hemisphere, both oceans, the opposite sides of both oceans, with a huge military force. Of course, that declined. Europe and Japan recovered, and decolonization took place. By 1970, the United States was down, if you want to call it that, to about 25 percent of the world’s wealth—roughly what it had been, say, in the 1920s. It remained the overwhelming global power, but not like it had been in 1950. Since 1970, it’s been pretty stable, though of course there were changes. I think what has happened in Latin America is not related to changes in the United States. Within the last decade, for the first time in five hundred years, since the Spanish and Portuguese conquest, Latin America has begun to deal with some of its problems. It’s begun to integrate.5 The countries were very separated from one another. Each one was oriented separately toward the West, first Europe and then the United States. That integration is important. It means that it’s not so easy to pick the countries off one by one. We’ve actually seen that in crucial cases recently. Latin American nations can unify in defense against an outside force. The other development, which is more significant and much more difficult, is that the countries of Latin America are beginning individually to face their massive internal problems. Latin America is just a scandal. With its resources, Latin America ought to be a rich continent, South America particularly. Almost a century ago, Brazil was expected to be the “colossus of the south,” comparable to the United States, the so-called colossus of the north. In fact, Latin America has terrible poverty and extreme in- equality, some of the worst in the world. Latin America has a huge amount of wealth, but it is very highly concentrated in a small—usually Europeanized, often white—elite, and exists alongside massive poverty and misery. There are some attempts to begin to deal with that, which is important—another form of integration—and Latin America is somewhat separating itself from U.S. control. But the United States is reacting. In 2008, the United States was kicked out of its last military base in South America, the Manta Air Base in Ecuador.6 But it immediately picked up seven new military bases in Colombia, the one country that’s still within the U.S. orbit—though so far the Constitutional Court has not granted the United States access to them.7 President Barack Obama has added a couple more, as well as two naval bases in Panama.8 In 2008, the Bush II administration reactivated the Fourth Fleet, the naval fleet that covers the Caribbean and Latin American waters, which had been deactivated in 1950, after the Second World War.9 Government spending on training of Latin American officers is way up.10 They’re being trained to deal with what’s sometimes called “radical populism.”11 That has a definite meaning in Latin America, and not a pretty one. We don’t have internal records, but it’s very likely that Obama’s support for the government installed by a military coup in Honduras—support not shared by Europe and Latin America—is related to the U.S. air base in the country.12 Called the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the 1980s, the base was used for attacking Nicaragua and is still a major military base.13 In fact, shortly after the military coup government took over, its leaders made a security deal with Colombia, the other U.S. client in the region.14 There are plenty of other complicated things happening in the world. There’s a lot of talk about a global shift of power: India and China are going to become the new great powers, the wealthiest powers. Again, one should be pretty reserved about that. For example, there is a lot of talk about the U.S. debt and the fact that China holds so much of it. Actually, Japan holds more U.S. debt than China.15 There have been occasions when China passed Japan, but most of the time, including right now, Japan holds most of the debt. When you put them together, the sovereign wealth funds of the United Arab Emirates probably hold more debt than China.16 Furthermore, the whole framework for the discussion of U.S. decline is misleading. We’re taught to talk about the world as a world of states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there’s what’s called “realist” IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their “national interest.” It’s in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don’t want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false. Furthermore, it’s known to be false. At least, it has been for a long time. Take a dangerous radical like, say, Adam Smith, whom people worship but don’t read. He said that in England the people who own the society make policy. The people who own the place are the “merchants and manufacturers.” They’re “the principal architects” of policy, and they carry it out in their own interests, no matter how harmful the effects on the people of England, which is not their business.17 Of course, he was an old-fashioned conservative, so he had moral values. He was concerned with what he called the “savage injustice” of the Europeans, particularly what Britain was doing in India, causing famines and so on.18 That’s old-fashioned conservatism, not what’s called conservatism now. Power is no longer in the hands of the “merchants and manufacturers,” but of financial institutions and multinationals. The result is the same. And these institutions have an interest in Chinese development. So if you’re, say, the CEO of Walmart or Dell or Hewlett-Packard, you’re perfectly happy to have very cheap labor in China working under hideous conditions and with no environmental constraints. As long as China has what’s called economic growth, that’s fine. Actually, China’s economic growth is a bit of a myth. China is largely an assembly plant. China is a major exporter, but while the U.S. trade deficit with China has gone up, the trade deficit with Japan, Singapore, and Korea has gone down. The reason is that a regional production system is developing. The more advanced countries of the region, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, send advanced technology, parts, and components to China, which uses its cheap labor force to assemble goods and send them out of the country. And U.S. corporations do the same thing: they send parts and components to China, where people assemble and export the final products. Within the doctrinal framework, these are called Chinese exports, but they’re regional exports in many instances and in other instances it’s actually a case of the United States exporting to itself. Once we break out of the framework of national states as unified entities with no internal divisions within them, we can see that there is a global shift of power, but it’s from the global workforce to the owners of the world: transnational capital, global financial institutions. So, for example, the earnings of working people as a percentage of national income has by and large declined in the last couple of decades, but apparently it’s declined in China more than in most places.19 There is certainly economic growth in China and India. Hundreds of millions of people live a lot better than they did before, but then there are hundreds of millions more who don’t. In fact, it’s getting worse for them in many ways.20 The UN Human Development Index ranks India as 134th, slightly above Cambodia and Laos. And China ranks 101st.21 India is about where it was twenty years ago, before the famous reforms began. So yes, there has been growth. You go to Delhi, there is plenty of wealth. But it’s an extension of the traditional Third World system. Even in the worst days, if you went to the poorest country in the world, say, Haiti, you would find a sector—white, European, mulatto maybe—that lives in tremendous wealth and luxury. You find the same structure in India, just on a vastly different scale. So in India a couple hundred million people now have cars, television sets, and nice homes. You have multibillionaires in India who are building palaces for themselves.22 Meanwhile, the consumption of food, on average, has actually declined during this period of growth.23 Incidentally, the richest man in the world is now from Mexico, Carlos Slim. He beat Bill Gates this year.24 As one of the consequences of privatization in Mexico, mainly over the last twenty to thirty years, he was given a telecommunications monopoly. I think you have to take the ranking of China with a grain of salt. India is a much more open society, so we know a lot more about what is happening there. China is pretty closed. We don’t know much about what’s going on in China’s rural areas. One person doing important research on this is Ching Kwan Lee, a sociologist at UCLA. She’s done extensive study of Chinese labor conditions, and she distinguishes what she calls the rustbelt from the sunbelt.25 The rustbelt is up in the northeast, the big production center where the state-run industrial sector was based. That’s being wiped out. And she compares it to the rustbelt in the United States. Workers have essentially nothing. They had a compact, they thought. People have done studies of workers in Ohio and Indiana. They feel cheated, rightly. They thought they had a deal with the corporations and the government: they would work hard all their lives and in return they would get pensions, they would get security, their children would get jobs. They served in the army, they did all the right things. Now they’re being thrown into the trash can. No pensions, no security, no jobs. The jobs are being shipped somewhere else. She finds the same in the Chinese rustbelt, except there the compact was the Maoist version: we have solidarity, we build the country, we sacrifice, and then we get security. The sunbelt is southeast China, the big production center now, where the factories are bringing younger workers in from the rural areas. These workers don’t have this Maoist tradition of solidarity and working to build the country. They’re peasants. In fact, their lives are still based in the villages. That’s where their families are, where they raise children, where they can go if they lose their job. They’re a migrant workforce. There is huge labor unrest all over China. In the southeast, the sunbelt, it’s because the government is failing its legal obligations. There are laws that say you should have certain wages and working conditions, but workers don’t have anything. So they’re protesting that. There are a huge number of protests, even by official statistics.26 The labor force is atomized but very militant. But we really don’t know what’s going on in the inner rural areas. On top of which, there are enormous ecological problems developing in China. So if you measured growth rationally—counting not just the number of products you make but the costs and benefits of making them—China’s growth rate would be much lower. And its ranking in the Human Development Index would probably also be lower, though 101st is bad enough. On your office door at MIT you have a bumper sticker featuring a quote from the two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Smedley Butler, who was a veteran of many U.S. interventions, from China to Nicaragua. The sticker says, “War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.” In fact, he very eloquently described the way war is a racket. He says, “I was a racketeer for capitalism,” and he describes his role in many interventions.27 Actually, a very timely example is Haiti. When Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti in 1915, Smedley Butler was one of the commanders, though not the top one. He was the person who President Woodrow Wilson sent to disband the parliament. The parliament of Haiti had refused to accept a U.S.-written constitution, which permitted American corporations to buy up Haitian land. This measure was considered very progressive. If you go back to the time, the big thinkers were saying that Haiti needs foreign investment in order to develop. You can’t expect American investors to put money in Haiti unless they can own the place, so we have to have this progressive legislation. And these backward people don’t understand it, so we have to disband the parliament. Butler says we disbanded them by typical Marine Corps measures, at gunpoint. After that, the marines, under Butler, ran a referendum in which they got 99.9 percent approval of the U.S.-imposed constitution, with 5 percent of the population participating—namely, the rich elite.28 That was considered a great democratic achievement. It was another step in the process of driving the population off the land, turning them into assembly plant workers or something considered to be to their “comparative advantage” by progressive thinkers. And finally you get the hideous catastrophe we’ve just seen with the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In his later years, Butler was pretty bitter. He also stopped a business coup that planned to overthrow the administration of and kill President Franklin D. Roosevelt.29 He intervened and somehow put an end to it. He was vilified for speaking out, but he was a real hero. Let’s talk more about Afghanistan and the U.S. war there. In March 2010, Obama visited Bagram air base.30 It is a site of major war crimes, which went virtually unmentioned in news reports. Obama told the troops that their mission was “absolutely essential,” declaring, “We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else’s business. We were attacked viciously on 9/11.” And finally he told the assembled troops, “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away.”31 What are those vital interests from Obama’s point of view? There are a few strategic interests but, by this point, I suspect it’s mostly domestic politics. Daniel Ellsberg observed this about the war against Vietnam. If you pull out without victory, which is called losing, you’re literally dead. Obama inherited the war. And I suspect the dominant interest is self-preservation. The United States didn’t invade Afghanistan because we were viciously attacked. It’s true that there was an attack on 9/11, but the government didn’t know who did it. In fact, eight months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn’t know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States.32 After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn’t give them any evidence because they didn’t have any. But, secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we’re going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we’re going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government.33 This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it’s much worse. It’s aggression. How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don’t know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They’re undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that’s what will happen.34 Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing.35 That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It’s very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn’t want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule. The same was true in Iraq. If it hadn’t been for the sanctions, it’s very likely that Saddam Hussein would have been overthrown from within in much the same way as a whole rogues’ gallery of other gangsters the United States and Britain have supported, like, say, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the worst of the Eastern European dictators. Nobody wants to talk about him anymore, but the United States supported him until the very end. Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire—they were all overthrown from within. But the United States didn’t want that in Iraq. It wanted to impose its own regime. And the same in Afghanistan. There are geostrategic reasons. They’re not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don’t know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI) from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved. The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That’s the new “great game”: Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It’s a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan.36 The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that. In fact, that’s probably one of the main reasons why the United States entered into a deal with India in 2008 to permit India to openly violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to import nuclear technology—which, of course, can be transferred to weapons production.37 That’s another way to try to draw India more into the U.S. orbit and separate it from Iran. So all of these things are going on. There are a lot of broad considerations involved. But I still suspect that domestic politics is uppermost. We can’t get out of Afghanistan without victory or we’ll be slaughtered. Is that related to the greatly expanding drone attacks on Pakistan? Yes. They’re horrible, but they’re also interesting. They tell us a lot about American ideology. The drone attacks are not a secret. There’s much we don’t know about them, but mostly they’re not a secret. The Pakistani population is overwhelmingly opposed to them, but they’re justified here on the grounds that the Pakistani leadership covertly agrees.38 Fortunately for us, Pakistan is so dictatorial that they don’t have to pay much attention to their population.39 So if the country is a brutal dictatorship, it’s great, because the leaders can secretly agree to what we’re doing and disregard their population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to it. Pakistan’s lack of democracy is considered a good thing. And then in an adjacent newspaper article you read, “We’re promoting democracy.” It’s what George Orwell called “doublethink,” the ability to have two contradictory ideas in mind and believe both of them.40 That’s almost a definition of our intellectual culture. And this is a perfect example of it. Yes, the bombing is fine, because secretly the leadership agrees, even though they have to tell the population they’re against it because the population is overwhelmingly opposed. India, Pakistan’s neighbor, has seen a huge surge in internal resistance to neoliberalism. Manmohan Singh, the current prime minister, was the finance minister in the early 1990s. He let the cat out of the bag when he told the Indian parliament in June 2009, “If left-wing extremism”—the catchall phrase for Naxalites, Maoists, terrorists—“continues to flourish in important parts of our country which have tremendous natural resources of minerals and other precious things, that will certainly affect the climate for investment.”41 It’s certainly true. There are foreign investors and, for that matter, Indian investors who want to get into these resource-rich areas, even if that means, of course, getting rid of the tribal people, destroying their way of life. But India has been at war internally ever since its founding. In fact, this war goes back way before, to the British in earlier periods. Large parts of India are at war at the moment. Whole states are under attack. You have to get the resources for what’s called economic growth. India figures into U.S. geostrategic planning vis-à-vis China. There has been a major expansion of U.S. weapon sales to India, training, intelligence sharing.42 Israel is involved, as well.43 How has India gone from a country that was once nonaligned to one that’s become very aligned with Washington? India was not only nonaligned, it was a leader of the nonaligned movement. It had pretty close military relations with Russia, but in both power and ideology it was at the core of the nonaligned movement. It’s shifted. India is playing a complicated game. It’s keeping its relations with China, although there are also conflicts with China. So economic and other relations with China are proceeding. At the same time, there is a conflict with China in the Ladakh area. The Sino-Indian War was fought there in 1962, and it still remains a conflicted area. I think India is trying to decide how to position itself in the global system. The relations with the United States and with Israel, its U.S. client, are very close. Indian forces attacking the tribal areas are apparently using Israeli technology.44 For years, one of the services Israel has provided to the United States is to carry out state terrorism. It’s very efficient at doing that. Israelis did it in South Africa and Central America.45 Now they’re doing it in India. They’re probably doing it in Kashmir—it’s claimed, but I don’t know if it’s true—and very likely in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq.46 Israel has been a hired gun for thirty years and has helped the United States—by “the United States,” I mean the White House—get around congressional sanctions. For example, there were congressional sanctions against giving aid to Guatemala, the worst of the terrorist states of Central America. So Washington funneled money through Israel and Taiwan.47 The United States is a big power. Small countries hire individual terrorists like Carlos the Jackal. The United States hires terrorist states. It’s much more efficient. You can do a much more murderous and brutal job. Israel is one. Taiwan is another. Britain has also played that role. Indian-Israeli relations have gotten very close as part of the overarching U.S. effort to maintain a global system that will give the United States a geostrategic advantage over China. But it’s complex. China, for example, is now moving into Saudi Arabia, the real heartland of U.S. concerns. I think China may be the leading importer by now of Saudi oil.48 And China has had a historic relationship with Pakistan. It’s now moving to develop a port system in Karachi and Gwadar, which would be a way for China to get access to the South Asian seas and also key for importing oil and even minerals from Africa.49 Actually, the same thing is going on in Latin America. China is now probably the leading trading partner of Brazil. It has surpassed the United States and Europe.50 We were both at a talk that Arundhati Roy gave at Harvard describing the rather extraordinary amount of resistance to neoliberal policies in India.51 There is a tremendous amount of pushback. I wrote to Howard Zinn about her talk. He wrote back to me, in one of the last e-mails I received from him, “Compared to India, the United States seems like a desert.” It wasn’t at one time. If you go back to the nineteenth century, the indigenous population of the United States resisted. In this respect, the United States is a desert because we exterminated the native people. The United States won that war. By the end of the nineteenth century, the indigenous people were essentially gone. India is now in the stage the United States was in during the nineteenth century. I’m thinking more of workers here who have lost their jobs, who have lost their pensions and benefits. At a talk you gave in Portland, Oregon, called “When Elites Fail,” you decried the fact that the Left has not been able to mobilize dissent.52 The Right has certainly been able to. That’s true. But I don’t think India is a good comparison. Earlier periods in U.S. history are a better comparison. Take, say, the 1930s. The Depression hit in 1929. About five years later, you started getting real militant labor organizing, the forming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, sit-down strikes.53 That’s what basically impelled Roosevelt to carry out the New Deal reforms. That hasn’t happened in the current economic crisis. Remember the 1920s were a period when labor was almost completely crushed. One of the leading labor historians in the United States, David Montgomery, has a book called The Fall of the House of Labor.54 The rise of the house of labor was from the nineteenth-century militants on through the early-twentieth-century labor agitation that was crushed by Woodrow Wilson, who was as brutal internally as he was externally. The Red Scare almost decimated the workers’ movement. That was the 1920s. There was a change in the 1930s, in the course of the Depression. But it took quite a few years. And the Depression was much worse than the current recession. This is bad enough, but that was much worse. And then there were other factors. For example, we’re not supposed to say it, but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element. It didn’t show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else then had to start something else. It was always there—and it was in for the long haul. That’s not the type of organization we have now. And the Communist Party was in the forefront of civil rights struggles, which were very significant in the 1930s, as well as labor organizing, union struggles, union militancy. They were a spark, which is lacking now. Why is it lacking? First of all, the Communist Party was totally crushed. In fact, the activist Left was crushed under President Harry S. Truman. What we call McCarthyism was actually started by Truman. The unions did grow in size, but they grew as collaborationist unions. That’s one of the reasons why, say, Canada, a very similar country, has a health care system and we don’t. In Canada, the unions struggled for health care for the country. In the United States, they struggled for health care for themselves. So if you’re an autoworker here in the United States, you had a pretty good health care and pension system. Union workers won health care for themselves in a compact with the corporations. They thought it was a deal. What they couldn’t see was that it’s a suicide pact. If the corporation decides the compact is over, then it’s over. Meanwhile, the rest of the country didn’t get health care. So now the United States has a completely dysfunctional health care system, while Canada has one that more or less works. That’s a reflection of different cultural values and institutional structures in two very similar countries. So yes, the working class did continue to develop and grow here, but with class collaboration, that is, in a compact with the corporations. You may recall in 1979, Doug Fraser, who was the head of the United Auto Workers, gave a speech in which he lamented the fact that business was engaged in what he called “a one-sided class war” against working people.55 We thought we were all cooperating. That was pretty dumb. Business is always engaged in a one-sided class war, especially in the United States, which has a very class-conscious business community. They’re always militantly struggling to get rid of any interference with their domination and control. The labor unions went along with it. They benefited their own workers temporarily. Now they’re paying the penalty. In a lecture at the Left Forum in New York on March 21, 2010, you talked about Joseph Stack and his manifesto.56 He is the man who took a plane and flew it into the IRS building in Austin.57 You went on to talk about the Weimar Republic. You said, “All of this evokes memories of other days when the center did not hold, and they’re worth thinking about.” Talk about Stack. And why did you bring up Weimar? Joe Stack left a manifesto, which liberal columnists just ridiculed. They dismissed him as a crazy person. But if you read his manifesto, it’s an eloquent and insightful commentary on contemporary American society. He starts by describing how he grew up in an old industrial area. It happened to be Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When he was about eighteen or nineteen, he was a college student living on a pittance. In his building there was an eighty-year-old woman who was living on cat food. And he tells her story. Her husband had been a steelworker, someone who belonged to what is called the “privileged working class,” the part that made out pretty well during the period of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. He was guaranteed a pension. He looked forward to his retirement. It was all stolen from him. He died prematurely. That happens pretty commonly among people who are faced with these situations. His future was stolen by the company, by the government, and by the union. And she’s left eating cat food. That was his first recognition that something was wrong with the picture of the world that he had been taught in grade school. Then he goes on to say, “I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.” He talks about his own efforts over the years to start a small business and how at every point he was smashed down by corporate power, by the government. Finally, he got to the point of saying, we’ve got to “revolt,” and the only way to revolt is to awaken people from their torpor and show that we’re willing to die for our freedom. And then he smashed himself into the building in Austin as a wake-up call to the many people like him. So what’s happening to what we call the middle class—because we’re not allowed to use the word working class. That’s what’s happening to working people. In other countries, it’s called the working class. But here everybody has to be middle class or underclass. The Left Forum used the phrase “the center cannot hold” as the title of the conference at which I spoke, and correctly. What’s happening all over the United States is tremendous anger against corporations, against the government, against the political parties, against institutions, against professions. About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out.58 That’s the center not holding. Take a look back at the Weimar Republic. It’s not a perfect analogy by any means, but it’s strikingly similar. First of all, Germany was at the peak of Western civilization in the 1920s—in the arts, sciences, and literature. It was considered a model democracy. The political system was lively. There were large working-class organizations, a huge Social Democratic Party, a big Communist Party, many civic institutions. The country had plenty of problems but it was, by any standards we have, a vibrant democratic society. Germany was beginning to change even before the Depression. In 1925, there was a mass popular vote for Paul von Hindenburg for president. He was a Prussian aristocrat, yet his supporters were petty bourgeois storekeepers, disillusioned workers, and others—in fact, demographically not unlike the Tea Party movement. And they became the mass base for Nazism. In 1928, the Nazis still got under 3 percent of the vote. In 1933—that’s only five years later—they were so powerful that Hindenburg had to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Hindenburg hated Hitler. Again, Hindenburg was an aristocrat, a general. He didn’t pal around with the hoi polloi. And Hitler was this “little corporal,” as he called him. What the heck is he doing in our aristocratic Germany? But he had to appoint him as chancellor because of his mass base. That was within five years. If you look at the forces behind this shift, initially one was disillusionment with the political system. The parties were bickering. They weren’t doing anything for the people. By then, the Depression had hit and the Nazis could appeal to nationalism. Hitler was a charismatic leader. We’re going to create a powerful new Germany, which is going to find its proper place in the sun. We have to fight our enemies: the Bolsheviks and the Jews. They’re the trouble. That’s what’s spoiling Germany. By 1933, Hitler for the first time declared May Day a workers’ holiday. The Social Democrats, who were a powerful group, had been trying to do that ever since the Second Reich was established, but they could never do it. Hitler did it. There were huge demonstrations in Berlin, which was called “Red Berlin,” a working-class, left-wing city. There were about a million people demonstrating, very excited. Our new united Germany is going to forge a new way. End all this political nonsense by the parties, and we’ll become a unified, organized, militarized country that can show the world what real power and authority is. All of that looks very similar to here. It’s ominous. The Nazis destroyed the major working-class organizations. The Social Democrats and the Communists were huge organizations, not just political parties. They had clubs, associations, and civic societies.59 They were all wiped out, partly by force but partly because the people joined the Nazis out of disillusionment and hope for a better future, a bright militaristic, jingoist future. I wouldn’t say it’s identical, but the parallels are strong enough to be frightening. You can see someone like Joe Stack joining that group. Arundhati Roy has decried weekend protesters. You go to a march or a demonstration and then back to the usual routine on Monday. She’s said that it’s necessary that risks be taken, that protests have consequences. I’m not sure that I agree with her that risks are important. Of course, serious demonstrations are going to have risks. You can get arrested. But the real issue, I think, is continuity. Going home is the problem. That’s why the old Communist Party was so significant. There was always somebody around to turn the mimeograph machine. They were in it for the long haul. They didn’t expect quick victories. Maybe you win something, maybe you don’t, but then you lay the basis for something else, you go on to the next thing. That mentality is basically missing here. And it was during the 1960s, too. It was missing in the 1960s? Yes. If you go back to the 1960s, the big demonstrations, like the Columbia student strike and the marches on Washington, an enormous number of the young people involved thought that they were going to win. If we sit in the president’s office for three weeks, we’re going to have love and peace in the world. You recall that, I’m sure. Of course, love and peace didn’t happen, so they were disillusioned and gave up. That lack of continuity has to be overcome. For a while it was overcome in the civil rights movement. Many people in the movement knew it would be a long struggle. We’re not going to win right away. Maybe we will get something, but then we’ll hit a barrier. They managed to keep going until they tried to expand the African American civil rights movement to become a poor people’s movement. This was Martin Luther King’s inspiration, which was to extend the civil rights movement. So, just to take King, because he’s visible. On Martin Luther King Day, he’s greatly celebrated for what he did in the early 1960s when he was saying “I Have a Dream” and “let’s get rid of racist sheriffs in Alabama.” That was okay. But by 1965 he was getting to be a dangerous figure. For one thing, he was turning against the war in Vietnam pretty strongly. For another, he was working to be at the head of a developing poor people’s movement. He was assassinated when he was taking part in a strike of sanitation workers and he was on his way to Washington for a poor people’s convention. He was going beyond racist sheriffs in Alabama to northern racism, which is much more deep-seated and class-based. The civil rights movement was partly destroyed by force and partly frittered away at that stage. It never really made it past the point where you get into class issues. What Arundhati said about not going home is the crucial part. You have to understand that you’re not going to win by sitting in the president’s office. You don’t get a world of love and peace that way. You may get a little victory, but then you’re going to have a bigger struggle ahead. It’s like mountain climbing. You climb a peak, you think you’re at the top—and then you notice there is a bigger peak right beyond it, and you’ve got to climb that one. That’s what popular struggle is like. And that’s lacking. Our quick-gratification culture is not conducive to that kind of commitment. There are people and organizations that really are persistent and struggle—and, of course, those are the ones under attack. Take ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Why was ACORN destroyed? There was a little bit of a scam, but by the standards of corporate corruption what they did was trivial. But instantly the media, Congress, everybody jumped on the news and destroyed them.60 Because it’s a persistent organization working for poor people, and that’s dangerous. Given the dismal economic situation, why isn’t there a left response? Certainly the Right has generated answers and explanations. So did Hitler. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. They’re crazy answers, but they are answers. It’s better than being in a vacuum. The Left seems to have nothing to say. The Democratic Party and even the Democratic Left are not going to tell people, “Look, your problem is that, back in the 1970s, we took part in a major process of financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of the productive system. So your wages and income have stagnated for thirty years, while what wealth is produced is in a very few pockets. Those are our policies.” They’re not going to tell them that. No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things. And there are things that could be done, which I talked about a little in the Left Forum lecture you mentioned. For example, the Obama administration essentially owns the auto industry at this point, except for Ford. Certainly GM. What they’re doing is continuing the policies of closing down GM plants, which means destroying the workforce, destroying communities. The communities were built by the unions. Meanwhile, Obama sends emissaries to tell people in these cities, “We really care about you and want to help you,” and distribute some pennies. At almost the same time, he sends another emissary, the secretary of transportation, to Spain to spend federal stimulus money for contracts with Spanish companies to build high-speed rail facilities.61 Those high-speed rail facilities could be built in the factories that are being closed, but that’s not important from the point of view of the bankers and Smith’s “principal architects” of policy. What’s lacking is the consciousness that began to arise in the 1930s—we’ll take it over and run it ourselves. The things that really put the fear of God into manufacturers and the government in the 1930s were the sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, “Look, instead of sitting down, we’ll run this place. We don’t need owners and managers.” That’s huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down. Copyright © 2013 by Noam Chomsky