Noam Chomsky and Fabian Scheidler on the Crisis of Civilization and "The End of the Megamachine“

[Music] welcome to the second in a series of interviews on context tv the series will focus on the new book the end of the mega machine a brief history of a failing civilization by fabian scheidler the book looks at the destructive forces that are threatening human survival fabian is the founder of context tv which has covered global justice issues for more than 10 years and we're joined today by world renowned political dissident linguist and author noam chomsky he's a laureate professor in the department of linguistics at the university of arizona and professor emeritus at the massachusetts institute of technology where he taught for more than 50 years so i'll begin the conversation by asking fabian about his book the book is an attempt to overturn widely held assumptions about the political and economic institutions and ideologies that govern our present moment you do so by situating these paradigms in a historical context indeed over the course of several millennia one of the principal foundational structures of the president is of course the state as against the argument that the state was necessary to so to speak limit or contain eruptions of violence in a hobbesian war of all against all you in fact suggest that violence has increased with the emergence of state power and you speak of what you term the four tyrannies so talk about that yeah first of all i'm so grateful to be here with you and with noah who whose work was so crucial for my my own work so thank you for joining here and um yeah indeed the book is about demystifying our history and i think this is crucial to understand the destructive forces that are by now threatening human survival and the survival of the planet indeed with the destruction of the natural ecosystems with climate havoc and with the threat of nuclear war the mystification of our history of course tries to legitimize the system we are in as the only possible system or the best system we can have without alternatives and for such mythologies there need to be some dark ages of course so uh we we have the stone age which is the dark age in our past and uh supposedly um people were running around with clubs and beating each other to death and so civilization 5000 years ago came by and brought humanity to a path to decent behavior and the state played a crucial role in this narrative of course and the second one and we will talk later about it maybe is the middle ages of course from which modernity and capitalism saved us so concerning the creation of the state and indeed what has been called civilization 5 000 years ago in mesopotamia the first city states were created and they were heavily um militarized and the invention of slavery as an institution took place in this time also and the invention of writing which was a tool of logistics and of um organizing slavery as well and when we look at the standard narrative for example by stephen pinker and others they were saying well human nature is so violent people are beating each other to death this is basically the hopson idea of war against all of uh all against all and so we needed a civilization and the state to come by to save us from this now this is plain wrong in historical terms we know quite a little from the stone age and it's a long period it's 200 000 years of homo sapiens impact we know something we know that there was some kind of violence it was not that widespread stephen pinker has exaggerated this extremely and has been refuted by the most dominant scholars and but what we know is that with the emergence of the first city states and later with the empires until the roman empire violence really searched in an extraordinary manner and that has to do with the fact that the military was created that has to do with the fact that searched the land privatization played a crucial role in antiquity and it concentrated wealth in the hands of an extremely small number of people and the others were forced to serve either as soldiers as mercenaries or as slaves or as indented laborers uh wage laborers and so on so it was an extremely violent system that was created the first systems of domination were created at that time and they called these systems before tyrannies the first tyranny is physical power which of course is most obvious in the militarized state and in mafias as well in warlord systems from which states very often emerge the second kind of tyranny is what i call structural violence a term used by johan galton and structural violence means that you cannot see the physical violence directly one example are property relations for example if you take will in the city where i live there are corporations which earn hundreds of thousands of apartments and the poorer half of the germans don't own anything so you have to get a job to pay your rent and people tend to think that this is normal the people who have all the apartments have are very clever and the others haven't made it and so on but the fact is that this is a relation of violence because if you lose your job you cannot pay your rent then the landlord will come and say get out of here and if you don't the police will show up and take you out and of course in the united states currently the evictions of millions of people are this is very serious uh um example of structural violence which turns into physical violence but structural violence tends to be seen as normal it seems tends to be seen as something that is natural in a way and this has to do with the third pillar ideological power and ideological power in a systematic way also started 5000 years ago the invention of writing was very important and it was not only used used for logistics but also to uh to write down the mythologies and the religion of the upper classes which legitimized and justified the system of exploitation and rule of their time so ideological power can tries to impose a narrative that says well this is given by god this order is given by god or it is natural it cannot be changed and all of this but the interesting thing about all these means of ideological power they can be turned around in the other way writing for example was used later with the first prophets like amos and others to criticize power to criticize power relations to criticize property relations and this is of course the case also with modern media they are gnome has written extensively about this the media has a power system but they can be used as a counter force so the internet is an example it can be used as a counter force so it's a contested terrain ideological power it's never complete it's never certain and the fourth tyranny which i talk about in the book is a little harder to grasp and i call it the tyranny of linear thinking it's the idea that man can control other human beings and nature in general in a linear way by a chain of command i command and another person obeys i command and nature or base this is an idea that can only evolve when there is command and obedience like in the military for example and so rulers thought that way that they can control in a linear way their subjects and the idea that god controls creation is a projection of this earthly rule unto heaven and in modernity this idea turned into the idea that man as an engineer can control nature as in in the regulation of command and obedience and we see that today in the idea for example that we can geo-engineer us out of the climate crisis that we can control nature and i think it's quite an erroneous and dangerous idea because nature all living things are based on cycles um causal cycles every effect is at the same time a cause for many other things so it's not linear it's not deterministic living things work in a completely different way if we try to control human beings in nature we will end up destroying it and this is quite the case today professor chomsky your your response to to what fabian said uh and in particular the the whole question of the the effects of the foundation of of the state well it is contested but i think there's reasonably good evidence of the kind that's been accumulated by anthropologists brian ferguson douglas fry stephen cory others that the several hundred thousands of years of human existence prior to the agricultural revolution and the formation of the first city-states and later was not a particularly violent period in fact we can see this from contemporary evidence about groups that still live under these circumstances there are conflicts but not the kind of organized violence class structure and so on that took place with the coming of the nation state can't run through the long history but through the in the last thousand years or so just take a look at that our immediate past the most violent areas of the world were europe uh european states were being formed in the in that period remember that italy germany these are pretty recent state formations they were being formed in the 18th 19th century as the same with britain and france were struggling over who dominates what areas the state system as it emerged through the last couple hundred years it was extremely violent that finally led to two uh horrendous uh wars the first second world war a largely a large part of them was determining where the state system uh should exist within europe in fact about the only reason why the main reason why we haven't seen any wars since major wars wars among powerful states is that they reached the point where the next time they would have a war they'd all be destroyed uh there's no way to have a war among major states any longer or everything's over so europe moved towards the beginning of the erosion of this nation-state system centuries and centuries of trying to create it since 1945 it's been slowly eroded it's a difficult process a lot of fragmentation and reaction but the european union with all of its major flaws is some kind of a step towards eroding the boundaries of the major state major states so the schengen agreement which is one of the positive sides of the european union uh enables you to travel from uh spain to you know eastern europe without crossing any borders it in that sense it's rather like the ottoman empire the ottoman empire was horrible in many ways but it was a loose structure in which local regions could take care of themselves so if you were in the greek community in beirut you ran your own affairs you could travel from cairo to baghdad to constantinople istanbul without crossing any borders the imperial states mostly britain and france moved in an imposed state state structures with no concern for the interests of the populations they have nothing to do with them same happened all over africa that's why you see straight lanes on the street in the state borders the imperial powers imposed state structures in their own interests with no concern for the fluid overlapping complex relations within those societies so of course it always leads to violence and brutality that's almost natural now but in this current day we have to face the fact that we have to move towards an erosion of this system also as fabian said an erosion of the structures of authority and domination that exist within it towards a more fluid structure of the international social order which will break down structures of authority and domination and also erode borders every crisis we are facing now and there are major crises is international they don't have borders the pandemic doesn't stop at a border global warming doesn't stop at a border the nuclear war will destroy all of us the erosion of democracy over the world is infectious happens in one place it affects others so yes we have to i mean there have been thousands of years in the western world a couple of hundred years of establishing state structures which have they've had their benefits they've had many horrible consequences i should add that the same is true in the united states there's a lot of talk in the united states now about endless wars we have to get out of these endless wars like afghanistan the united states has been an endless war since 1783. it's one of the rare countries in the world that hasn't probably hasn't had a year of peace i mean the one of the major reasons for the what's called the american revolution was the uh royal clock proclamation of king george iii in 1763 which barred the colonists from moving beyond the eastern mountain range appalachian mountains they were not permitted to move into what was called indian territory the territory of the numerous indian nations they were bored by the british for their own not pretty reasons but that's another story it's a question who would monopolize trading rights and things like that but the colonists weren't accepting that they wanted to carry out an aggressive war against the indian nations and expand their own territory and control now that was also true of great land speculators like george washington who wanted to move to the west for speculation and profit soon as the british were gone the war started against the indian nations ugly horrifying history of extermination expulsion the treaty violation the conquest of half of mexico in a war of aggression finally reached what's called the national territory but that was a century ago then come many other wars so this is it's kind of not the same as but somewhat similar to the imposition of the state system in europe during the same period these are not ancient constructions they're being constructed in recent years of the second world war that was to a significant extent about who's going to control al sussell iran and the rural valley russia the french and the growing prussian imperial empire have been fighting about that for years uh there's been a thousand-year war of the northern powers that includes russia against the mostly muslim south which has had horrifying effects all over the world including the imposition of state systems and all of the internal repression uh internal structural violence that fabian was talking about that goes with it so yes i think that picture is basically right it's not ancient history it's not just the city-states of mesopotamia it's going on like in my own lifetime for example still going on uh it's uh so it's right it's right in front of us we have major problems in trying to overcome all of these structures of violence and exclusion we're seeing it right now in a very dramatic way with regard to the preparation of vaccines and the distribution of vaccines it's a major humanitarian crisis right on the agenda right now sooner or later some vaccines will be available we don't know which right now china seems to be in the lead others may be coming along they should be available to everyone like the polio vaccine when salk finally managed to create the first polio vaccine it wasn't patented they said this is part of the world environment like the air we breathe everyone has access to it freely that's the way a covid19 vaccine should be but it's not what's happening the major drug corporations are trying to monopolize it in the neoliberal framework they are given basically monopoly pricing rights radically opposed to free trade and what's called free trade agreements so uh if one corporation managed mederino says manages to get a vaccine they're supposed to own it and make the profit from it huge profits because of the ridiculous patent rights granted monopoly pricing rights granted in the trade agreements that there is an international organization kofax trying to bring together countries of the world to cooperate in developing a vaccine and to work out the crucial distributional properties to make sure that the vaccine goes to those who need it like poor people in africa not to those who can pay for it like the rich countries who can monopolize it for themselves well it's a kind of an uneven effort partially working partially not just got a hammer blow a couple of weeks ago trump announced the u.s is pulling out of it okay breaking down the small steps towards internationalism which are required to deal with the crisis same with pulling out of the paris negotiations same with trying to destroy the world health organization same with what secretary of state pompeo did two days ago the united states wants to ram through the united states of course broke down and destroyed the agreement with iran in opposition to the whole world greatly increasing tensions in that region uh the united states wants there have been u.n sanctions the united states wants them to be reinstituted it did bring it to the security council no support one country colombia said okay the rest said no a couple of days ago mike pompeo got up and said the sanctions are reinstituted because we say so and if the security council's against it too bad for them we're the godfather we run the world and we smash anybody in the faces in our way that's the extreme opposite ludicrous extreme opposite of the internationalism that's necessary it's imposing state violence to an extent that no country in history has ever attempted it the nazis wanted to control eurasia not the whole world okay that's the kind of thing we're actually facing and we've got to deal with it very quickly but we're all going to be finished well professor chomsky i'd just like to ask you uh uh you know you've said and fabian's book of course does the same which is um to uh make the argument that the nation-state system has perpetrated violence on a virtually unprecedented scale you mentioned the european union um as a means of at least in some sense transcending the limits uh imposed by nation states now is it your sense that that model itself is uh rather than being even somewhat universalized is itself crumbling within the eu with brexit but not only with brexit i mean do you see the nation-state in any sense quite apart from the u.s where there's no evidence at all that this might happen but elsewhere that the state could become less powerful well i should say that the united states is facing a possible situation of breakdown that goes beyond the european union the united states is facing possible civil war it's not a fringe idea just a couple of days ago two highly regarded senior military commanders general john nagle lieutenant colonel another lieutenant colonel wrote a remarkable open letter to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff the top military officer in the united states general milley these are incidentally not fringe characters they are right at the center of the military top military establishment highly regarded they reviewed for him his constitutional duties in case president trump refuses to leave office if he loses the election surrounds himself by our military forces little somebody else wants to get into the act surround himself by paramilitary forces of the kind that he sent to terrorize portland recently notice he didn't send the military which probably wouldn't have followed his orders he sent paramilitaries like the border tactical units of the border guards who terrorized people in the desert uh right south of where i live in tucson suppose he surrounds himself with them or militias this letter from nicole said it is your duty general milly to send in military forces maybe the 82nd airborne division to force them out of office it's never happened in the history of parliamentary democracy they are not alone there's a transition integrity project a very high level leading figures in both republican and democratic parties and other respected analysts and so on all right from the mainstream they've been actually running war games workings to see what might happen after the election and they just released their findings they said in any scenario other than a trump victory the scenarios lead the civil war because we have a megalomaniac sociopath sitting in the white house it's not like say richard nixon not the most lovely person in presidential history but a human being in 1960 he probably won the election the election went to kennedy through machinations by the democratic party operatives in chicago and elsewhere nixon didn't challenge it he placed the welfare of the country above his personal ambitions so he let it go by though he probably won same thing happened in 20 years later with al gore when the election was pretty obviously stolen for bush he said well not going to destroy the country today it's different we don't have a human being in power resemblance to a human being but quite different and the country's different so what's happening in europe where there is fragmentation i'll come back to that in a moment is happening in even worse ways here and it's very imminent okay let's go back to europe yes the european union is fraying and there are reasons for it we should look into the reasons so basically two one is there several one is that the way the european union was designed largely under german influence german banks and so on the economic system is dissociated from the political structure the economic system [Music] is basically run by an unelected troika in bureaucrats in brussels european councils on elected european commission unelected sorry imf of course unelected the world the european central bank unbelievable they make the basic decisions the decisions are not in the hands of the people of the countries well that's a recipe for disaster and it was made worse by something that is by the plague that has hit much of the world in the past 40 years the neoliberal plague its major principle is that government decisions have to be taken out of the hands of government government has a flaw it's partially influenced by populations so therefore decisions have to move to totally unaccountable institutions private power completely unaccountable to the public and the principle that it follows is pure self-enrichment the major principle was announced to the world by the leading economic guru of neoliberalism milton friedman at the same time that reagan said government is the problem thatcher said there's no society so we have to transfer decisions into the hands of unaccountable private power which is directed in principle solely to self-enrichment it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going to come from that and it's habit the result all over the world is anger resentment bitterness all justified uh fertile territory for demagogues to come along trump bolsonaro orban others like them say i'm your savior with one hand i stab you in the back with the other hand i say i'm going to save you from what's happening so yes that's a very dangerous situation that's i think these are the main reasons that lied i mean what lies behind brexit the deindustrialization of england by both political parties and labor gave up on the working class just the way the democrats did here anger bitterness let's find some way out of this the way they are finding out of it happens to be suicidal they'll turn themselves into even more of a vassal of the united states than they already are but you can understand the decision why do we want responsible for with this i'm not responsible so let's get out of it and start over we're seeing similar things in europe understandable and we have to recognize the plagues one of it is the neoliberal plague the other in europe is the specific structure of the european union which is deeply anti-democratic and has left people victims to the austerity policies others which haven't had the same harsh effect in continental europe that they've had in the united states because there's more of a social democratic structure remaining which somewhat protects people but it has eroded now there are responses to this just last weekend there was a major response the first meeting the opening meeting of the progressive international in iceland international effort based on the sanders movement in the united states progressive mass movement in the united states that european counterpart the m25 the universe's initiative which is transnational european movement seeking to preserve what makes sense in the european union and to dismantle and overcome its very serious flaws lots of voices from the global south first conference international the possible way to save us from these disasters so it's not that there's a real kind of international class war going on a major class war of there's an effort to construct a reactionary international based in the white house that's what the agreements between israel and the arab dictatorships are about forging a component of the reactionary international in the middle east with the most reactionary states gulf dictatorships family dictatorships the egyptian dictatorship israel which moved very far to the right bringing out tacit relations and turning them into formalized ones under the aegis of the united states the reactionary international will include modi's secular national secular democracy in india turning it into a a hindu right-wing hindu nationalist ethnocracy kashmir orban and hungary this is what's happening okay there is a reactionary international run by the white house where mike pompeo can just tell the world i don't care what you want we're putting through your insecure u.n sanctions you shut up that's one international the other is the progressive international the first is trying to reconstruct the neoliberal system that caused these crises in a harsher and more autocratic form more surveillance more control more centralized power centralized economic power under the control of the white house that's one progressive international is based on popular forces mobilizing all over the world and there is a struggle as to what the post post-pandemic world will look like and those are two of the major forces not the whole world there's also china and its region and others but those are two major forces they all have to do with the kinds of things fabian was talking about the nature of the nation-state the violence it brings with it the chances to overcome it the internal structural violence having to do with safeguarding the property relations of the very rich and imposing stagnation or decline on others we should recognize how deeply rooted this is in what had been in the past the most democratic states take the united states the constitution of the united states in the 18th century was fairly progressive document not today i mean today it's radically regressive but then it was progressive but remember what it was founded on james made it madison the main framer made it very clear to the constitutional convention that a prime responsibility of government i'm quoting him is to pronounce protect the minority of the opulent against the majority protect the property rights of the opulent against the majority the major scholarly work on the constitutional convention formation of the constitution martial climate the main the gold standard and scholarship is called the framers coup the coup that the rich wealthy mostly slave-owning framers carried out against the population who wanted more democracy and the framers wanted less democracy and constructed the constitution to prevent it because you have to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority now that's the most democratic move of the 18th century there's been history since up and back but we should bear in mind where we're coming from well fabian i mean earlier you you mentioned um another theme that that recurs uh through your book which is uh that of modernity and you mentioned that in the context of the formation of uh the nation state but in the book you also question the widely held assumption that modernity brought with it the advent of modernity brought with it an age of enlightenment of of uh you know universal human emancipation so could you explain what the argument is there in addition to what you've said about the state and what professor chomsky has also just said yes sure first of all i would like to uh respond also to to what noam chomsky just said i think uh on on the side of the progressive internationalism one thing is very important and this is the theme of climate refugees i mean we will have climate havoc maybe we can uh limit it to a certain extent maybe we will limit it to three degrees or even four degrees but we can even reach five degrees and so the question is where will the people in bangladesh go to when their country is destroyed i mean you can only solve this internationally with borders like we have them now with the the european union and the us and so on shutting borders down you will have a human catastrophe that is without any parallel in human history so i think this is a very important part of what gnome just said concerning the myth of modernity if you will um the the the standard narrative is that we come from the dark middle ages and modernity saved us and brought us into an era of light and this is historically historically quite wrong because the main things that are usually attributed to the middle ages the dark middle ages like um torture like the inquisition like witch hunts all of them reached their climaxes in the early modern age in the 1670s and partly in the 18th century and the same is true for slavery of course and for all the genocides that we have seen since columbus i mean in in the americas uh uh tens of millions of people have died due to the conquest in in south america and north america and um and in africa and asia as well later on so it's really the essence of what i call the monsters of modernity and we also have to see the surge of militarization that came in in modern times in when william the conqueror conquered britain he had like something like 10 000 soldiers so compared to modern armies it was tiny in the early modern age uh wallenstein uh the great great uh warlord uh in the 30s 30-year war in the 17th century he had a hundred thousand soldiers and later um louis cartage uh of france had four hundred thousand soldiers and later they were hunt were millions of soldiers in the first and second world war and the same is true for arms there has been an arms race that started in the hundred years war between france and england in the thirties and four in the 14th and 15th century with the introduction of firearms and firearms played a crucial role in the emergence of capitalism because you need a lot of money to buy firearms and so states we were talking about the modern state the modern state emerged in a co-evolutionary way with the institutions of capital accumulation in those days and the reason is that states at that time needed lots of money to buy cannons and to buy mercenaries and they didn't have the money so where did they get the money from they got it from the bankers in genoa in florence in venice and so on the city-states of northern italy in fact formed quite a similar system to the city-states of mesopotamia thousands of years earlier and uh so the the bankers and merchants were lending money to the sovereigns the sovereigns went to other they bought cannons and they bought mercenaries they went to other countries looted these countries and from these looting they paid as one would say today the return on investment to the bankers and merchants and so it was a business model for them to to use the states as a means to produce this return on investment and the states which is interesting in the system were indebted from the outset the modern state was dependent on capital and what is interesting about what emmanuel wallerstein has termed the modern world system which was created in these days is that the modern the nation states or the territorial states they were limited to certain regions but capital was international from the very beginning so what we see in neoliberalism in a very strong way today is therefore has been there for the last 500 years in a way so the system that was created out of war out of this machinery of capital accumulation and war at that time was something radically new in the history of the world and it is founded on three pillars the first pillar is uh the endless accumulation of capital in an endless cycle of uh profit and reinvestment there were many societies in which uh um wealth and income was disreputed in a very uneven way like the roman empire chinese empires and so on but there was this was the first system where you have created a sort of machine that has to go on forever this started with the merchants in italy with the banking houses then the first corporations in the early 17th century like the dutch east india company the british east india company they had only one girl these institutions which is to increase the money invested the money of the shareholders and they have no other objectives than uh turning the natural world into commodities and to uh grow in an infinite way and these are these are the structures that force the system to grow eternally and the second pillar is the modern state as we have talked about it earlier the modern state that is very much tied to these institutions of capital accumulation the merchants and bankers from the outset the merchants didn't want only a return on investment for the money that they gave the state to make war they also wanted another thing and this was monopolies it's one of the dirty um secrets of capitalism that it had it had never really much to do with free markets but uh it was based on monopolies like today look at google or amazon and so on uh so the states granted monopolies to the foogers and two to many other merchants and to the big trading companies the joint stock companies like the british east india company and so on this was not based on free markets and the system doesn't work with free markets because in order to accumulate capital in such a way in the hands of very few people you need monopolies if you have really free markets what adam smith thought about as a free market system for example well the profits will go down because you have real competition at the top capitalism is not based on competition at the top is it's based on competition of wage laborers and competition of small business but at the top first of all they are monopolies and secondly they are very much tied to the state remember the british east india company the dutch east india company they were created by states they were granted monopolies by states they were saved by states when they had financial problems like corporations today and today we have a system which has been sometimes termed the corporate nanny state and gnome talked about it many times um which if you take the 500 biggest corporations today which run about 40 of the global economy and two-thirds of global trade most of them could not survive without huge subsidies take for example the fossil fuel industry which is responsible for climate change and climate havoc they they're subsidized according to the international monetary fund by 5 trillion dollars per year and the same is true for wall street of course as we all know all these big banks couldn't survive without being rescued all the time the same is true with the car industry today in germany for example is most of the big car manufacturers would have collapsed already in the 2008 crisis they were saved the same is true for the aviation industry which has been saved in the 2008 crisis which is safe now in the corona crisis again with billions and billions of dollars even trillions if you take all these subsidies together so we have to face the fact that the real capitalism that we have whether it's neo-liberal or non-neo-liberal is something that is based on the states and the corporations tied together in a very close way and the thing is that we use all the subsidies to to save the dirtiest industries on the planet which in fact destroy the planet while we could use this money for an ecological and social transition and gnome is absolutely right that in a democracy even if it's by no means perfect the kind of republic as medicine calls it that we have on democracy but we have the means as population even as voters to change things in a way that governments that's why we elect parliaments to to use the money in a different way so the state should be transformed in a way that we don't use the money to save the corporations which destroy the planet but to put the money into decentral structures into institutions economic institutions which work for the common good there are such institutions like cooperatives communal institutions and so on mostly they are small some are bigger but you can really build a system on uh on these institutions a new system if the public money taxpayers money is put into this kind of transition and there are some proposals uh janis vargotharkis with dm25 had a sort of green new deal proposal there are some elements of such a transition bernie sanders and alexandria ocasio-cortez of course have proposed a greener deal with some elements of that i think this can go much further but i think we i think we have to be clear that we the way forward to save humanity and the planet is to um to separate the state from the corporations and this is really a big issue because all you know that in especially in the u.s a lot of representatives are in the pockets of the big corporations it's a kind of broad democracy and in the european union noam talked about it we have this kind of problem as well with unelected bodies and the lobbies of big industries um running the show but we could we can change that and that's why um media like this like democracy now where in you are working for is so important to really um show the people that the system that we are living in is not a market system it's based on states tied to corporations professor chomsky your thoughts on this i mean you've you've termed the present order uh neoliberal plague uh and this question of the fallacy of free markets uh what fabian has said about the relationship between states and markets the state the government always the states structure the market they structure corporate governance they structure the nature of the market within the system that they structure there's an element of the free market interchange and operation but within the framework that governments establish so for example what i mentioned about intellectual property rights is radically opposed to free markets and grants effectively monopoly pricing rights to major corporations the same is true internal to corporate governance remember corporations are set up by the state to incorporate is to get a gift from the state when you incorporate the state of saying okay we grant you protection of limited liability that goes back to the origin of corporations hundreds of years ago so you're getting a gift from the state and in return the state determines the mode of corporate governance well the neoliberal plague which was quite different from the period that preceded it could go into that one of the changes that instituted was changes in the rules of corporate governance it allowed ceos heads of corporations to pick the board that sets their remuneration okay the remuneration is partly salary partly stock options all sorts of devices but there's a board of directors that picks that determines it the new rules of governments have allowed the ceo to pick it what do you think is going to happen from that we'll see management remuneration has shut through the sky one of the main factors in the huge inequality that's developed during the neoliberal period is simply the dragging of remuneration up for a tiny percentage of the population ceos other managers dragged up with them university presidents whole system that's just to give you a picture of it in the last 40 years 0.1 percent of the population not 1 0.1 its share of income has doubled from 10 of national wealth to 20 of national will the recent study just came out a couple of weeks ago from the rand corporation very authoritative study estimated the robbery of how much the working class and middle class have been robbed by the neo-liberal principles instituted in around 1980 which modified the rules radically allowed tax havens all sorts of things what's the total cost to the working class in the middle class what they call the lower 90 percent of the population they estimated at 47 trillion trillion dollars that's a trillion dollars a year stolen from the working class and the middle class just by the manipulations that created the neoliberal system now they have sharply reversed things the period of regimented capitalism roughly the second world war up to late 70s 1980 was the greatest growth period in capitalist history it's called the golden age of capitalism by economists and it was egalitarian growth the lower quintile did actually a little better than the upper quintile there were no financial crises because the banks and the financial institutions were under control there were no tax havens they were illegal treasure department enforced the law the there's no heaven by any means all of the basic problems of capitalism that fabian mentioned were there but they're in a different form just as they're there in a different form in social democratic norway and radically neo-liberal america there are different varieties of state capitalism tall state capitalism but many different varieties and when we're thinking about the immediate problem the main problem we face as fabian pointed out is the heating of the environment if we do get to three or four degrees centigrade higher than pre-industrial levels we're probably finished it's very hard to imagine that any form of organized human life will survive at that level the main analysts call it cataclysmic now we are moving there so we have to do something to change that but the time scale for modifying that and the time skill for overcoming capitalism are very much out of line overcoming capitalism is a long project the basis has to be established for it in public consciousness in alternative institutions of the kind that fabian mentioned and so on dealing with the coming environmental catastrophe is a matter of the next decade or two it's going to have to be done pretty much within the framework of capital state capitalist institutions fortunately these can be very much modified very much like the green new deal the diversion that was presented to congress is very vague and imprecise but there are much more specific versions one of them is worked out by in detail by robert pollan economist robert paul in my friend and co-author our joint book on this has just come out yesterday in fact a very detailed plan to how to move towards meeting the goals of the top goals of the climate analysts reduction of emissions by about 50 percent within a decade complete net zero emissions by 2050. you can meet that with feasible measurement methods all known to us uh with a fraction literally a fraction of the state expenditures that were used to bail people out after the pandemic way less than was used during the second world war it's all available all possible roughly within the framework of the general state capitalist institutions but they have to be changed so take say the fossil fuel industries right now there is nothing to stop the government from buying them up handing them over to the workforce terminating use of fossil fuels shifting them to sustainable energy it's not even a lot of money there's a low oil prices that's perfectly feasible that can be done tomorrow it maintains state capitalism but in a sharply different form and you can say this across the board the the careful green new deal proposals go into all of this in detail also how to create better jobs more jobs including taking care of the people who will lose their jobs under transition to a sustainable economy a lot of this has worked out in great detail in the major green new deal proposals robert collins is one jeffrey sachs uses somewhat similar models comes out with similar results it's all in our hands the problems the deep problems of capitalism will remain they have to be overcome but in a longer time range and by other methods like the ones that fabian mentioned the self-managed industries for example which are proliferating uh cooperatives uh localism and food production many means can be pursued to try to erode undermine destroy the long-standing system but we have immediate problems to face that those refugees fleeing from bangladesh are not in the far future and just a couple of months ago there was a cyclone of unprecedented proportions uh one of the predicted effects of global warming in east bengal west bengal and bangladesh and the large part of bangladesh was under water okay there was one cycling it's gonna keep coming sea levels rising these are the what's called the refugee problem today which is in fact as pope francis put it a moral crisis of the west not a refugee crisis that's going to expand enormously very soon we have to deal with that within pretty much existing institutions time scales allow us nothing else so we have to bear that in mind uh a lot of things to say about the enlightenment of modern history that is not the time to go into professor chomsky i mean could you um elaborate a little bit because you know as as we wrap up you know what you think you've said a little bit on on the the climate crisis that's that's uh not only imminent but in fact uh present and only likely to accelerate um whether you see any kind of political will and if so where to institute the kinds of changes that that you're talking about and the figures you mentioned have been talking about and what role you think the kind of um more or less global climate activism led by young people what role and what significance and influence that might have it's very significant i mean if you look at this international class conflict that's taking place sort of symbolized by the reactionary international in the white house and the progressive international that just met last weekend it's based on large popular movements and popular forces so let's take the climate activism as you say that's been led by basically two groups one is young people whose spokesperson in many ways greta thundberg captured it in one phrase you are betraying us that's right it's talking to us you are betraying us it's being led by young people there's another group leading it indigenous people they've been in the forefront of trying to deal with the climate catastrophe for years first nations in the western hemisphere indigenous people in south america all over the world and tribal people in india they've been working hard to try to develop to construct what they have lived with with for tens of thousands of years of relation with the environment which is sustaining and they've been bitterly attacked in in the amazon region of brazil they are facing literal destruction uh but these two groups have been struggling to save us from our follies and that take say the the green new deal one or another form of it is essential for survival a couple years ago in the united states it was way out at the margins just ridiculed now it is on the legislative agenda that's the result of work by young people a lot of activists small group the sunrise movement who went young activists who went to the extent of occupying congressional offices they got the support of alexandria ocasio-cortez one of the young people who came into congress on the sanders wave ed markey senior senator from massachusetts has been interested interested in environmental issues for all his life they managed to put it on the legislative agenda now comes a battle can you implement it and that of course the republicans don't even talk about they want to just destroy it totally their wreckers but within the democratic party there's a conflict developing it's very interesting to watch it the activists succeed and the people from the sanders campaign did succeed in getting the biden campaign to put a reasonably decent wonderful but reasonably decent climate proposal in the in their program the democratic national committee the clinton knights the donor-oriented segment that runs the party killed it you can see it very dramatically you go back a month one month late august if you looked on the you you clicked you ran on google democratic party climate program you got the mildly progressive biden program click on it now you get how to donate to the democratic party it's gone okay i'm not part of the inner workings so i don't know in detail how this was managed but you can guess it seems pretty clear that the clintonite managers killed it okay that's going to be a battle that's going on even if biden is elected his program was nowhere near good enough but the dnc program is do nothing and there's where the activists have to make their move they did succeed in pushing something forward but a lot more has to be done and it is simply a tragic betrayal to leave this in the hands of young people and indigenous populations they're not the ones who should be leading it it's the ones with power prestige some degree of stability and in their lives and professions they should be leading and that has to be fast it can't wait 200 years it's going to have to be in the next couple of decades the disaster may come in 100 years or 200 years but the sources of it have to be dealt with now not in fact the disaster doesn't come like that it grows you see bits and pieces of it every year i see it out the window where i'm sitting where there's no i haven't seen a blue sky in arizona for weeks because of the smoke coming from california which is on fire okay that's that's coming now it's not catastrophe not to see a blue sky but a sign of what's coming in a much harsher way and it will hit her most heart harshly the people who are not responsible for young people poor people in africa than elsewhere if you look at co2 emissions which are destroying possibility for organized human life on earth overwhelming they come from the rich countries and within the rich countries they come from the rich not the poor so this is a class problem on a colossal scale and we have to recognize that and deal with it rapidly and decisively fabian the last word to you how to exit the mega machine and in particular what professor chomsky was talking about the climate catastrophe which you also mentioned earlier yes i completely agree with gnome that we need fast solutions even within the scope of the capitalist system and we need a progressive green new deal um with uh very ambitious numbers and a very fast track i mean some climate scientists like kevin anderson even say that we need to go down in the industrialized world by 80 of our emissions until 2030. take the car industry as an example if you have a very mild green new deal then we will have big teslas be replacing the combustive engines and we know that electric cars have need a lot of co2 emissions in their production for the batteries especially so if you replace the car system as it is today only by electrical vehicles you don't really solve the problem you can save some emissions but you don't go down by 50 or 80 percent until 2030. so we need to start also to think in another logic and in terms of car cars and traffic there are a lot of very well detailed proposals to do that to have more public transport instead of cars there are cities in spain for example where cars are banned from from the inner cities and it works very well in grenoble in france something like that is happening as well so you need a very progressive a plan to have a perspective also for the people positive perspective because for example getting out the cars from the cities can improve our living conditions can improve our health children can play in the streets you need a progressive vision for better world where you can have the need transport for example satisfied with less production less production of cars so i think we need both we need a technical revolution replacing fossil energies by renewable energies and we have to at the same time make steps to a logic of better living with less goods because at the end of the day uh we have a huge overproduction and it's not only the climate crisis we have caused the six big species extinction in the history of the planet there were five big extinction events the last one being 65 years 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were almost wiped out and this species extinction would happen even without climate change so it's also the whole system of over production that has to be changed and when we do that and i completely agree with gnome that this is a class question and it's a kind of class struggle here because the over producers and over consumers are the richest 20 percent of the planet and mostly in the industrial worlds those people have to go down with their production and consumption and the poor people cannot consume less they can't consume in a different way but not less and so we have to face the fact that climate justice is also about distribution is about taking away the resources from the rich and distributing it more evenly so eight billion people can live in a decent way on this planet without destroying it and so i think we have also to be clear that uh the path we are facing will not be a linear smooth way and for progressive movements i think it's very important to get prepared for crises like the crisis of 2008 like the corona crisis because in this type of crisis the elites also have problems they have to justify huge amounts of money that they put in one direction and not in another direction and in the corona crisis we would have had the possibility if you will uh to put all the money not into boeing the aviation industry the car industry and wall street which was the bailout plan that was actually imposed uh but if we had the social movements were uh on a higher level in a way we could turn the the situation in a way that the money is put in a different way but learning from one crisis means to be prepared for the next crisis to grow stronger and i think there are signs that this can happen with the convergence of the bernie sanders campaign with black lives matter with the climate movement which has been very strong before the corona crisis and i think it will re-emerge and i think the convergence of these struggles is very important and to see that the social justice issues and the environmental issues can only go together we can solve this crisis only with those two things at the same time well with that um fabian thank you so much professor thank you so much that ends the conversation you

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Published: Fri Sep 25 2020