Noam Chomsky in Greece: Philosophies of Democracy (1994)

if a person works on order let's say a craftsman produces something on orders or under coercion we may admire what he does but we despise what he is because he's a machine and we want people to be human you find exactly the same thing in Adam Smith incidentally one of the reasons Adam Smith was very critical of division of labor I mean he has an O division of labor at the beginning of wealth and they of Nations would have he go on it criticizes at the end and he criticizes because he says if we let division of labor continue we will reduce people to creatures as stupid and as ignorant as it's possible for a creature to be because they'll simply be carrying out mechanical operations under command and a very limited domain and what you are you know your intelligence your understanding your your human characteristics come from your capacity or from the options available to you to carry out independent productive creative activities work included maybe in free association with others because we're social beings but not under external coercion and then he said any civilized societies gonna have to prevent this from happening [Music] in the 18th century and the sort of in the Enlightenment and the period of early modern libertarian revolutions people like for example Vilhelm Flynn Humboldt and Rousseau thought about the exactly these questions they were both they both understood in some sense it was hard to formulate it clearly and coherently at the time but they both grasped the idea that languages are basically infinite that their expressions of human creativity in fact that's a leading Cartesian idea which came to them right through the rationalist and romantic traditions and they were also both interested deeply interested in human liberation and they did in fact try to connect these things pretty much the way suggests by suggesting that it at some core level the part of human nature is a which is reflected on the cognitive side in things like language is the capacity to produce and understand and articulate and express new thoughts without limit and without control so the crucial fact about language use is that it's not determined by our situation it's coming out of us as freely willed action in some sense and continually novel and so on and to express thoughts and ideas that are new to oneself and other people but that are intelligible and appropriate and so on this is a core aspect of human nature in fact for the Cartesians it was the the mark of mind it was the point at which the specific point at which mine draper at the core of human nature again was a kind word later called it by the coda an instinct for freedom that is a need to become involved in free creative activity free creative work so for say Humboldt that one's work is sort of the core of one's existence you want to be involved in creative honest work in association with others but voluntary Association and not under external control these things have mostly been forgotten so the as the market systems of the 19th century developed they eliminated all of this they would have appalled Adam Smith no doubt you know the the market systems that developed because they when you get the people I say Malthus and Ricardo and so on the conception of human beings as freely creative active people with intrinsic rights due to their nature disappears and people become nothing more they have no values other than a value of and what they can sell on the market their labor power if you can't sell your labor power in the market you have no right to live this way it was discussed because there's nothing to a human being other than what can be attained by sale of labor power within a market system under what become basically totalitarian structures corporate structures and so on so the modern extensions of classical liberalism are very anti libertarian and these I'd even the ideologies change and you know the intellectuals change and so on so this tradition has pretty much been well if not wiped out at least marginalized but it's there and it certainly can be revived it stayed alive and for example in the anarchist tradition and in parts of the libertarian left in the United States you find traces of it as late as real traces as late as people like John Dewey who probably didn't know any of these things but just came out of it from another source and you know reached the same point in his conception of democracy is a value because it opens the opportunities for people to freely liberate themselves as they must do and it's their sort of core innocence in the contemporary world you'd be hard put to find much discussion if it's unfortunately but I think it should be revived I think is very significant mmm that's an interesting question actually I mean Marx himself was complex figure the early Marx so you read the philosophical and manuscripts and so on do you know this is coming straight out of the French French and German Romanticism so the kinds of ideas you find expressed in Humboldt and in the more libertarian side of Rousseau Rousseau himself was very split but if you take the libertarian as part of Rousseau the second discourse on inequality and home bold and so on all of this was that's the background that which Marx grew up and if you read the philosophical and kind of manuscripts of the early period they're immersed in this so his theory of alienation comes out of this work the coerced labor is alienating and counter to human nature precisely for these reasons for the Humboldt E and reasons when you get to the later Marx you know it's not it's I mean it's sort of like a scholarly debate about whether he changed his mind or just started talking about other things but anyway you don't find it any longer and by that time Marx Marxism does become exactly as you say very detrimental to this so you get this idea what you you do find in Marx but he couldn't have believed that human nature is just a historical product and people are just malleable they're made what their culture turns them into you get this even people like Gramsci who was one of the more libertarian Marxist but this idea that humans are simply formed by the environment and they are nothing but clay you know passive clay in the hands of their molders that's an idea which is very attractive to radical intellectuals because they think they're going to be the molders of course and that leads right to the Leninist version of Marxism and it does become a kind of orthodoxy and the earlier views of are either forgotten or marginalized although they're certainly there in Marx and they certainly are in the tradition that he came from exactly you know I'm in the in the Marxists and the behaviorists are right in the same ballpark these kinds of Marx's the in fact it's I think it's a tragedy and a catastrophe that the left has been has accepted the idea of humans as historical products simply reflections of their environment because what follows from that of course is that there's no moral barrier to molding them any way you like I mean if humans have no inner nature they don't have an inner instinct for freedom you know if it's not fundamental to their nature to have free creative productive work under their own control if that's not part of their nature then why there's no Advent there's no moral reason for allowing them that space you could just mold them into being what you think they ought to be and you can be the Central Committee or you could be the you know the the managers of the corporation or directors of the fascist state or whatever and it's quite interesting that the intellectual the modern intellectuals have mostly moved in one or the other of those directions overwhelmingly either there and in fact this was foretold in one of the maybe that only prediction of the Social Sciences that ever came so dramatically true was bakunin discussion of this in the late in the late 19th century he was arguing with Marx and it's well before Leninism but he predicted very perceptively that the rising class of intellectuals are just kind of becoming identified as a class and modern modern industrial societies he predicted that they were essentially going to go in one of two directions there would be some who would believe that the struggles of the working class would offer them an opportunity to rise and take state power in their own hands and at that point he said they would become the red bureaucracy who would create the worst tyranny that humanity has ever known of course all in the interests of the workers that's one direction and he said the others would recognize that you're never going to get power that way and the way to get power is to associate yourself with what we would nowadays call state capitalism and just become the servants of its ruling class and then you become the managers and the ideologues and so on for the state capitalist system and as he put it those people will beat the people with the people's stick in other words they'll talk about democracy but they'll really be beating people with the stick of democracy which they'll turn into a mechanism of coercion there's some who think you can get power by by exploiting popular struggles and there are others who've seen that you gonna get power by just associating yourself with the people already have economic power and that's largely dominate and I think that was a very accurate description of the century that followed him on the one his fifty years before the Bolshevik Revolution but he predicted its form very precisely and also its ideological background and he also predicted quite accurately what happens in the modern state capitalist industrial societies and looking at it now from the retrospective a hundred years we can see I think we can see this development very clearly and it also explains an odd fact about 20th century intellectual life namely how easy it's been for people to shift from one position to another so the same person who's a Stalinist apologist one year is a super American patriot you know the next year is supporting every atrocity and working and working in the Hoover Institute and you know associated with most reactionary institutions that transition which sometimes is called the God that failed change which was sort of authentic in the early years like people like Salone and others you know there was something ascent authentic about it became a joke I mean it's because when people within the in fact we're seeing in Russia right now the the worst connoisseurs are now the ones who are most passionate about the you know the free market and investing and enriching yourself and so on that they've made the transition very easily and that goes way back and I think the reason is there's no transition it's just a different estimate as to where power lies but the same ideology the ideology is you beat the people with the people stick and we're going to do it and in fact if you look at modern acket democratic theory in the West it's remarkably similar to this it's remarkably Leninist in its character if you think of modern democrat the leading tendencies in the modern democratic theory in the west so in in academic world it would be the strands of political science that developed from the thinking of people like Harold Lasswell and others one of the founders of modern contemporary political science and in the general sphere the Wilsonian intellectuals the so-called progressive intellectuals of whom maybe walter Lippmann was the most striking example in the United States progressive intellectual in the 1920s if who do all of these people develop theories of democracy and they're quite interesting the very Leninist and their character the conception is that in a democracy there's two classes of citizens there's the general public who Lippmann calls ignorant and meddlesome outsiders and Lasswell says they're too stupid too we should not be overcome by dogmatism about the common man who's too stupid to be able to do anything that's the standard view so there's these people the ignorant and meddlesome Outsiders which is maybe 90% of the population and then there are the responsible men the wise men you know the smart people the people with integrity and honor the intellectual aristocracy whatever you call them and they have to rule they're the ones who make the decisions who do the thinking and so on and the role of the masses the ignorant and meddlesome Outsiders is just to show up every couple of years decide which of the smart guys is going to be their leader and then go home they have nothing more to do that's a democracy and then you have variation there's the way Lippmann put it the general public are to be spectators not participants their only participation is lending their weight to one or another representative of the dominant class and then going home that's an election and the spectrum extends from about there that's the liberal side over to the more reactionary side where you get people like say Reaganites people call themselves conservatives though any authentic conserve it it would be appalled by their positions they're really status to reactionaries and their view rate the Reaganites were very striking in this respect their view is that the people shouldn't even be spectators because it's none of their business what the state is doing [Music] so in the period when the right-wing takes over the Reagan years what they tried it was closed off state power so you can't even see it that's why they instituted unprecedented censorship and it's why they carry out clandestine operations clandestine operations which they love are not a secret from anybody except the population at home so for example say during the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s it was no secret to the Greeks they could see what was happening but it was a secret here because it was clandestine that the US was involved in major atrocities in fact and it's the same right through the eighties so the idea is we have to the state has to be so powerful and so private that the ignorant Outsiders can't even see what's going on now if you look at the modern world this is happening a very dramatic way so one of the major things that's happening now is the transfer of real power away from parliamentary institutions and towards a transnational system of private power transnational corporations and their own institutions like the IMF and GATT and the World Trade Organization and the World Bank and the executive meetings of the g7 you know the seven rich countries that's a system of decision-making which is completely separate from public from the public public has no idea what's going on there's almost no way of figuring out what's happening in the GATT council I mean I doubt if there's one American Indian who knows what was decided in the last and the in what's in the GATT treaty you have to be a specialist you know who goes and knows how to go to specialized documents even he had a picture of in a lot of it you can't even find because it really is secret well that's the in effect transnational corporations themselves or you know almost the you know the unimaginable attack on democracy would have actually appalled someone like Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson because they are totalitarian institutions completely absolutist absolutely unaccountable public has nothing's about them internally they're completely hierarchic they're kind of like the economic equivalent of super fascism and they kept they're also undermining free trade it's called trade but it's a joke so it's it's much of the world is moving in this direction that's a major attack on democracy the use of terror is the same takes a el salvador just had elections no it's quite interesting to see the background for those elections in the 1970s there was there were the beginnings of the possibilities of democracy in Central America there were organizations developing a lot of them coming out of the church you know peasant organizations of Bible study groups that became self-help groups unions and so on alright that's the basis for popular participation in controlling your own life what did it lead to well it led to a decade of incredible terror torture massacres mutilation starvation economic strangulation just a violent reaction in which people were traumatized and now they're allowed to have elections as they just did because it is because it's been driven into their heads that if they get out of line they're gonna get in real trouble now here people pretend at least not to see it but El Salvador they see it like the Jesuits in El Salvador just at a conference before the election in which they pointed out quite in reviewing the situation of Central America which is just devastated they said that there's two aspects of terror that you have to think about one is the narrow aspect that's the low level of terror that always continues like an occasional political assassination and so on which is just there to make people understand don't forget we're here you know we may not be doing a lot but we're here that's the narrow kind of terror then they say this the deeper kind of terror the kind that's taken place for a long period and that the mist kate's people it gets them to internalize the understanding that they that there are very narrow limits to what they can do and if they try to go beyond those limits they're going to be in very serious trouble their children will be murdered and their wives will be raped then they'll be killed and so on once that becomes part of people's psyches and they're domesticated as they put it then you can have the powerful can run free elections with no concern at all because people have understood that there are no options and that's what's happening as much of the much of the world not been up in the third world in the richer countries other things are happening which have parallel aspects and it's all a major attack on the libertarian tradition which we can trace to the 18th century the range of even articulate discussion is narrowing as control becomes more and more centralized a privatization increases this because it puts power in the hands of absolutely unaccountable corporate structures pure eminent you know Public Television let's say can be as Democratic as the society is most societies means not very democratic but at least there's a some of the some relation to the public and public radio and television private radio on television is Europe you have as much relation to it as you have the General Motors it does what it wants and it's an its granted the right to do that and the more business runs societies have moved in this direction faster like take the United States it's a very free country in the sense that the government can't coerce people to the extent that they can elsewhere on the other hand it's a business run society kind of a one class Society you know this violent class war going on but completely one-sided very self-conscious business community and nothing much else when television came along there wasn't even a discussion just became totally privatized this so-called public television which came much later but it's very marginal and even that's largely private and with this new the new what they call information you know this new technology of interactive computers and video and so on there is an argument going on now but we all know how it's going to turn out private power is so overwhelming as compared with public organization that it will be privatized and it will be nothing more than another technique of coercion of selling people things a lot of controlling them and so on it's kind of interesting to look at the debate that's going on right now over this this is a major issue right now there's all this new technology and it's the next step after a radio and television now we're in this and if you look at the debate it's very enlightening they're talking about how democratizing it is and how wonderful it's going to be and then when you look at the examples turns out the examples are given our primarily home marketing meaning you can sit in front of your television set and you'll see things for sale and you know a nice young women advertising and then you can just push a couple of buttons and somebody will mail it to your house that's called interactive that's real participation in control of your life and the other thing the only other thing I've seen mentioned is that in football games you know like Super Bowl and so on where everybody's supposed to be glued than them and watching them because you're not supposed to think about any important thing that might matter you have to be a passive spectator so everybody in the country or at least all the men are watching the Super Bowl and since this is now an interactive system they're going to they're going to try to set up something in which they're going to be able to punch in the play that they think the quarterback oughta call next you know so here you are and they're all standing there and the quarterback is gonna make a decision and you're allowed to punch you and what you think you ought to do quit he doesn't hear you you don't have any influence even on that you don't have any influence it's just that you're allowed to express your opinion and then you know after the quarterback does something the commentator will say what here's what 90% of the people thought or something well that's the kind of interaction that they want they wanted they want they make people feel that that's interaction that's participation and this is very revealing I'm the idea or maybe you can express your that's somebody'll ask a question you know do you want healthcare and you'll be able to push buttons I want it but nothing that involves actual participation in making decisions or forming plans or organizing with people these are very atomizing technologies you're alone you don't talk to anybody and that most you can individually express your view to unaccountable power corporate and state power and that's what's considered democracy so the the monopolization of the the print media is simply another aspect of it same with publishing publishing is becoming very much narrowed in all sorts of ways and purchased through market pressures so for example if you travel around the United States now then take a look at a city you barely find a bookstore and it used to be they were bookstores well it takes a Cambridge where we are no University towns there were bookstores all over the place not much anymore there's still a few around the colleges actually around MIT there's nothing but around Harvard the other big University there's a few but not much nothing like what it was 20 or 30 years and see when I came here in the 1940s it's totally different this bookstore in every corner now you have a few big chains who can sell they'll sell mostly bestsellers because they they want mass production so they'll sell things cheap you know and virtually nothing else it's not worth it to them economically to have books around the only a few people will be interested in it doesn't pay like having a brand of shoes that only a few people want to buy so what you do is you the change which are all over the country they of course can undercut the the book stores that have some you know that do that that have intellectual interests or something focused or whatever because they can sell the know they can sell the bestsellers much cheaper so they'll undercut everyone else just like you know just like supermarkets and they're they themselves are only interested in mass-produced items and that's having a big effect on literary production for example the right of first novel now is extremely hard you don't have any more book stores which are willing to sell a small number of copies of a first novel and get people known and so on what the bookstores want is something that will sell a million copies and if a book if it's clear within a couple of weeks that a book isn't going to sell a million copies might just well be pulped you know cut it up and make scrap paper out of it at you look at it take a look at next time you're in Airport at the newsstand all there is is very cheap bestsellers and this is true in much of Europe too I've noticed the magazines the newspapers the books and so on are the level is declining in part simply through market pressures and that has a very narrowing effect on thought in general it it gets people to it's like this domestication through terror it narrows horizons and it's functional in that respect it drives the population to being at most spectators and probably not even spectators just out of the system altogether as power gets removed even more remotely from accountable institutions like Parliament's and that's very much the tendency in the modern world in fact probably accelerated the same as always I mean it begins with I'm trying to understand what's happening and helping others to understand understanding is a collective activity people don't do it alone you do it in groups whether it's the sciences or political life you work together with people that's how you clarify your ideas and you learn things and so on so the beginning is understanding the next things organization the next is all kinds of action I mean the power isn't a tent has always been recognized even by the most reactionary people but the general population have the power fact you go back to say David Hume very conservative this his principles of government begin by but he kind of like a paradox how come that the many are willing to be governed by the few they don't have to be they could take power themselves he says even in the most autocratic system the general population always has the power to take over if they want so how come they submit themselves his answer is well propagate what we would call propaganda control of opinion says the rulers have to control opinion and unless they control opinion people will rise up and take things over for themselves and there's a lot of truth to that I think he sort of underestimated the use of violence but there's a lot of truth to that and in our society it's the more free societies it really is opinion more than force that's controlling people and we have to break out of that we have to break out of the ideological strictures that prevent people from seeing things and then there are many opportunities for organizing in action and they've been pretty successful so I've been talking about the ugly side of things but there's another side which is quite contrary here I can talk best about the United States but I think it's worldwide if the United States in the last 30 years there has been a tremendous cultural change the culture is much more free and open and libertarian than it was 30 years ago in many respects so major issues that didn't even exist 30 years ago are now common coin issues of say women's rights or civil rights for my respect for other cultures let's say environmental issues solidarity with the poor with third world countries all of these are at levels way beyond what they ever work and that's another aspect of the civilizing effect of the popular movements and this has had a major impact on policy on everything else it hasn't yet reached to the central institutions of power but there are more and more people concerned about it and even in the last months this has changed so for example for the first time in its modern history the American labor movement is now recognizing that it must be committed to international solidarity first time American labor unions are now supporting Mexican workers never happened before in fact American librarians were helping create the conditions of oppression for workers in the third world it's finally gotten home to them that they can't do this if they do this they're gonna simply destroy themselves and besides it's inhuman beginning to understand what they're in fact doing and you know people are not gangsters if they see what's going on and I'm going to like it and you have the first signs of things like say protecting American Mexican workers or Haitian workers and others who are trying to organize and survive under repressive and brutal societies and perfect societies in which American corporations are dominant well that's something really quite new no you know it's too small a scale to affect the centralization of power in Brussels and Geneva and the zurich in new york you know but it's the beginning and it's a major change over past years and it just has to expand if it doesn't we're in bad trouble as the economy is becoming more globalized the third-world model is becoming globalized there's a third world model you go to any third world country there's a small sector you know 10% maybe of great wealth and privilege often super wealth and privilege then there's huge massive population or basically superfluous and they live in misery and starvation and they're controlled by terror one or another way and that's spreading to the first world if you walk around New York or Boston you see it England and the United States are in the lead in this that's Thatcher and Reagan basically but continental Europe is not that far behind and as the economy becomes globalized it's forced so if it's getting to the point now where German corporations are shifting production to the United States because they get cheaper and more oppressed labor in the United States the richest country in the world u.s. wages are now 60% lower than Germany and even 20 percent lower than Italy that's the effect of this well that's what happens in these business run in societies England's kind of like it but all of these are weapons against West European workers the same is true the end of the cold war the end of the cold war basically drives Eastern Europe back to what it traditionally was third-world in fact in my opinion that's what the Cold War was about it was to try to stop this attempt at independence in one part of the third world which never is acceptable the Greek Civil War so the back was very similar back in the 40s when you look back at it the same with the fascist period you want to make sure that third-world people in fact Greece was regarded as third-world at the time do not move towards independence they become assimilated and subordinated to the mm-hmm you know at the centric to the power of the wealthy Eastern Europe went that way its Eastern Europe has not grenaded you get rid of it in a weekend so took 70 years but they're now back in the third world for the most part not entirely but you know much of it is back in the third world they're providing destruct structurally their third world they're providing resources and cheap labor and investment opportunities and markets like everywhere in the third world there's a wealthy sector to a large extent the old Communist Party who have just recognized the better off of the shift in the other direction but they're still in power and this is a weapon against Western European workers daimler-benz and Volkswagen and General Motors say can shift production to wet to Eastern Europe where they can get workers a fraction of the cost of Westerner workers with no benefits and protect they insist on protectionism because these people don't believe in the free market so when they move to Eastern Europe they insist on tariff protection high tariff protection and other sorts of state intervention for their benefit but they can use this as a weapon against their own working class it's very self conscious if you read the business press it's open Financial Times of London Businessweek and so on they talk about how wonderful this is because now you can undercut the luxurious lifestyle of the pampered Western European workers you know here there were all these people who thought they had a right to a job let's say where they had a right to a week's vacation or something well that's Pam this is people have to understand that they don't have this right and we have to eliminate those rights and turn them into tools of production back to the 1820s you know who sell their power on the market and there's no further right to life so this is having a polarizing effect throughout the world the try every trade agreement is like that NAFTA GATT it's at its intention and its result will be to polarize leading to exactly what you described and a basically third-world model so that's happening that's happening in the centralization of power and the attack on democracy is happening but the ferment among the general populations is also happening they're all happening at the same time and the question is which of these forces will be more significantly the drug war is being used primarily for that purpose the primary reason for criminalizing drugs is so that you can have a weapon over poor people because you can move in you know any like a fascist state will always set up a system of laws so oppressive that you're always violating the law and then if they want you they can get you that's an efficient totalitarian state and we you know this isn't fascist it's not the tellurian but they're moving in the same direction so I think about a quarter of the prison population as people who are picked up with a you know and in Chile to marijuana in their pocket they're not doing anything you know and that's that's a way of controlling people plus the fact that the criminalization of drugs stimulates criminal gangs which themselves control people it's a good technique of control is to have criminal gangs running through the ghettos that scares everybody and controls them all of these are techniques have controlled reminiscent of what goes on in the third world like in El Salvador these in that death squads here you do it a little differently but the structural consequences are quite similar and it's very reminiscent of early Industrial Revolution and I think it's going to lead in the same directions towards popular organization and either some accommodation or maybe a real change in structure of power but I think these are unpredictable you can see the tendencies but you don't know how they're going to balance [Music]

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 27,113

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Id: -kL0UNWcWFc

Length: 36min 58sec (2218 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TibiaKing]

"I think it's a tragedy and a catastrophe that the left has accepted the idea of humans as historical products, simply reflections of their environment, because what follows from that is that there is no moral barrier to molding them any way you like."

[u/RanDomino5]

22:00-24:10 my man perfectly predicts the internet

[u/SecretHeat]

Definitely a question that has been on my mind for a while; it's interesting, though, that the main objection to this view of the human being (at least that he voices here) is basically a tactical one, rather than an epistemological one. Like, to me, the biggest problem with saying that human nature is a purely historical product is the fact that it seems like it just isn't true.