Noam Chomsky interview on his Philosophy (2010)

you've identified from a young age as an anarchist and during that time the popularity of anarchism has fallen and risen and I wonder if your core philosophy your anarchism has evolved or changed during the course of your life well it's not what it was when I was 10 years old fundamentally not but that's because the core philosophy just seems to be like common sense I don't see how anybody can not accept so no the core flow the core principles as far as I understand it that I'm the anarchism covers a extremely wide range and all sorts of you can you can't encapsulate it and formulas but it seems to me there is a sort of a thread that runs through it and it is basically skepticism about any form of authority or domination or submission or whatever the idea basic idea is that domination and hierarchy are not self justifying they have to justify themselves this is burden of proof to be R and if they can't justify themselves they should be dismantled and that covers everything from personal relations to international affairs and then out of that comes a Newark ISM depending on what exactly you're looking for in the future what do you what are the alternatives to Authority and so on but almost everything in decent and human life is used in you fall under there so no that hasn't changed well the part the tendency of anarchism which I guess you subscribe to of anarcho-syndicalism overlaps fairly closely with council communism around this notion of worker councils and for the the public at large the assumption is that an anarchist society would be one where people ran amok where there is chaos what would that's the propaganda nij anarchist view were mostly highly organized societies so what would that society look like a society of worker councils a worker councils I think it should be one component of it so it means in any institution it's a university or factory or whatever it is the participants would run it they run it through councils in which people participate and make decisions and she's not it's not unlike a faculty which is about as close to this model as you get in the narrow world where it's you know there are outside controls but pretty much the faculty makes decisions about what happens internally I see one of the things about that makes university life appealing much more so than higher paid professions is that you're running your own life to a large extent I mean there are duties but they're technically supposed to be shared you know and shared by a common agreement and you may decide to work 80 hours a week but it's the 80 hours you pick and it's the topics that you choose to work on the it comes out with coming an inner need rather than external compulsion and I think that's the kind of model everything should turn towards so worker councils would be one component of a freely organized society but they'd have to interact with others so in institutions a factory whatever it is is in a community and the community should have a comparable form of self organization and self management and then they have to interact and it's complex interactions because many people are parts of a lot of them and as an anarchist society the kind of I think is desirable would develop it would have to deal with quite concrete problems about the nature of self-government the nature of the administration do you want to distribute jobs so that they're fixed 13 what circulation of responsibilities and actions and there's no simple answer to that like you know you want people to be trained as surgeons let's say on the other hand you don't want all the dirty work done by a special category of people so that has to be worked distribution of the job functions and interactions between different forms of which should be voluntary association and there are many other problems like what happens if somebody doesn't want to be part of it take on the responsibilities of a community those are problems they exist in any society and they would exist in a different form in a more free society and at this point you have lots of different ideas so there are people who basically anarchists to think that pay payment you know what you earn from your work should be proportional to effort there are others who think that's not an appropriate model that it should be independent of effort toward the latter but most of my friends did enjoyed the farmer so but these are real questions in there in the movement well thinking about the road to a stateless society in attica society you've written that you believe that radicals should defend those gains which have been fought for by people that are embodied in the state such as social security such as progressive taxation other amicus might argue that this holds people within the material paternalistic grip of the state why do you come down where you do on this if that's what the alternatives are I mean many anarchist just considered the state of the fundamental form of oppression I think that's a mistake I meant of the various kinds of oppressive institutions that exist the state is among the least of them the state at least you know to the extent of the society is democratic you know various degrees and types but to the extent that it's democratic you have some influence on what happens in the state you have no influence on what happens in the corporation they're real tyrannies and as long as society is largely dominated by private tyrannies which is the worst form of oppression people just need some form of self-defense and the state provides some form of self-defense so to say well let's dismantle social security means concretely let's decide that that disabled Widow across town starve to death in recent years there's been a fair amount of debate about what process of fundamental transformation of society might take what would it look like there are those who argue that radicals need to change the world without taking power and another position is that a revolution of some kind would be necessary what do you think with regard to this and you see the role of pre-existing state formations say nationalized industries is playing some part in such a transformation I don't think there's a general answer it depends a lot on circumstances so say right now I think it would make say with the bailout of the banks a short term you know dedicated anarchist might say look I'm going to talk about this there shouldn't be any base that's like saying I'm not going to talk about getting rid of nuclear weapons because everyone should live in peace I mean you know life these things are kind of like a chess game there's no point coming in and saying well I just want to make the King no you got to say well what do you do about that one over there you have to get places and stages it doesn't it's just a gift to the forces of oppression to save all I'm going to talk about anything except the final state okay then fine we'll keep things as they are so sometimes nationalization might be a positive step say for the government to have saved bought Citigroup I think would have made more sense for them to them to bail it out at a far greater expense at once it's what then the question becomes okay has overrun missive rung by the community by its participants is it sold off to some other corporation and so on but I just don't see how they could be a general answer you have to ask about the particular circumstances like I say if you're playing chess you have to ask about the plan that happens to be in front one of the currents within anarchism in the u.s. is a current which does not see class as a central axis for understanding society and and thinking about a future society why do you think that this tendency is has gotten some traction and and why do you not agree with it it's gotten some traction because of the because of the decline because the class struggle which exists has just become one-sided I mean there's one group of people who are basically vulgar Marxists and who are dedicated to class struggle constantly that's the business place it's a highly class conscious business class they're fighting a bitter class conscious struggle all the time well you know nobody if everyone else has said you know I'm going to worry about something else they win and that's it's become a an attractive position for one thing because it it allows you to focus your attention on things that are quite important but aren't going to change the class struggle like say take say gay rights it's a good cause can be working on gay rights but if gays had 100% rights the institutional structure of oppression the core of it would remain unchanged as you can see that didn't say take South Africa overthrowing apartheid was a major achievement but for the majority of the population mean a lot okay now they're black faces in the limousines but the townships are is awful or worse they are where the class structure remained which is kind of one aspect of it softens so now it's not straight white black the same with and it's you know there's less resistance from power centers to try to write cultural and social wrongs than there is to trying to modify the fundamental core properties of oppression and domination so it's easy to drift into those and it's something wrong it's right yes you shouldn't deal with these things but the class struggle is not going to go away unless you abandon it and say okay they win well switching gears slightly I wanted to ask you about your Butte science of course as interviews being conducted in your office at MIT how do you understand science do you think that it's socially or politically neutral sooner to a degree I mean of course it's influenced by outside forces I mean like where the science goes where the money is has to I mean it doesn't if saying my field didn't work with pencil and paper but if you're in the chemistry lab you just have to get money otherwise you can't do anything and the money comes from one of several sources could come from the government it could come from a private corporation it's about it you know those are the basic sources of money and which you pick and what you do does affect the work you do it's also what you do is affected by general cultural attitudes so it's been argued with some plausibility think that they say in in the way evolution is interpreted has been influenced by the kind of society in which evolutionary theories developed it's been argued with some some degree of plausibility on how much that the competitive you know nature's written tooth and claw social Darwinian approach that evolution is affected by the fact that it developed within a competitive state capitalist society one very well-known the biologist who's argued this is lynn margulis who whose work was on symbiogenesis you know arguing that the species change takes place not by competition and you know defeat of some genes by others but by incorporating genetic genomes essentially into organ into other organisms bacteria so it's kind of a cooperative mode of evolution if you like it's possible that those things are influenced by general social cultural values but and the fact that say in nuclear physics developed is not unrelated to the fact that the military wanted you know nuclear weapons but by and large I think science develops from its own internal needs I mean you can only work on the problems that are at the borders of understanding it's one of the reasons why Pentagon supported science like MIT like me that tended to be the most free the the MIT say in the 60s was about a hundred percent Pentagon funded I was working in a lab that was 100% funded by the three armed services it was also one of the country's centers as resistant and there was no real conflict pentagons was funding the I mean in their view they were I presume funding the development of the next stage of the economy and from our view we were working things that looked interesting so more or less mesh there's some influence from one on the other since the 1970s post-modernism has had a great deal of influence on at least part of the left in this country and it has been characterized by among other things as being quite critical of science and of the Enlightenment tradition I wonder if you could talk about your view of post-modernism and whether you think that its influence is waning I've saved a lot of postmodern work I just don't understand so I can't comment on that seems to me some exercise by intellectuals who were talking to each other and very obscure ways and I can't follow it to know of anybody else can postpone our views of science by enlarge have been pre embarrassing I think there's some interesting work on this this a book by two physicists genre come on Ellen so Cal both of whom have to be political radicals just running through it's mostly Paris post-modernism what the post-motor commentators have said about science and it is really embarrassing I mean to the extent you can understand it I mean on the other hand there is a point I mean insofar as they say that everything that people do is some kind of social construction depends on the historical context the cultural context you know that part's true I don't know if you need the whole postmodern baggage to say those things my feeling is not at least personally I haven't seen anything that it doesn't seem to me has to be said in anything with mono Souls it looks as far as I understand that it's pretty straightforward and I get the feeling that it's kind of um if there isn't a drive among intellectuals to make things look difficult that's a kind of self-protection I mean if what I'm doing can be done by you know the guy who is repairing my furnace ok then Who am I and then there's those physicists over there who talk complicated things and have to I don't understand them so I'd like to be like them you know that drive is clearly the air and I think it should be resistant I'm sure we say things simply so that people can understand I we should post-modernism has also been characterized by a fairly fierce attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment I had no idea what that means I mean happy to be part of the legacy of the Enlightenment well that's what I want to ask you about in some circles quite an unpopular stance to take but what does that mean to you to continue in some way the legacy of the Enlightenment like meant like any major movement and human life was pretty complicated but its major features were commitment to ideas that I think are basically anarchist so takes a ideas about say takes a division of labor and let's take a typical enlightenment figure Adam Smith what did he have to say about division of labor here it's worth reading I mean everyone's read the first paragraph of wealth of nations which butcher does his thing everybody does their own thing everything comes out fine so division of labor was marvelous I know if you read in a few hundred pages he comes out as a figure of the Enlightenment he says division of labor will turn human beings into creatures stupid and ignorant as a person can possibly be because it will drive them into a repeating work on command and therefore any civilized societies as the government will have to move in to stop it that's a version of a standard enlightenment idea that you're on intelligence and creative abilities derive from what you do if one of the founders of what we call classical liberalism you know figure the enlightenment he encapsulated it by saying that if a craftsperson does eats a craftsman of course if a craftsman produces a beautiful object on command we may admire what he does but we'll despise what he is is a creature is a tool and under somebody else's control like a machine that's producing a beautiful object if we want that person to be a real human being they should be doing things under their own internal impulses and then if it creates even maybe it's not a beautiful object we'll still admire what the person is well it's an Enlightenment idea grows at a conception of human intelligence human creativity it's a very good ideal the same with some values like say freedom of speech I think we should preserve that and even the questioning of authority and dominance that's a core enlightenment values so I don't see what's wrong with it well I want to ask you about another set of ideas perhaps as labyrinth Athena's postmodern ones which are conspiracy theories which have become quite popular amongst those people who identify as progressive I know you've been fairly critical of those ideas why do you think that they're popular now first of all there are conspiracies yeah no question about it in fact sometimes it takes a something that big effects like take the suburbanization of america the huge government state that corporate social engineering projects which were largely dedicated to maximizing the inefficient use of fossil fuels with everything that goes on goes along with it well you know I may destroy the species so it's not insignificant but it did start as a literal conspiracy of General Motors Standard Oil of California and Firestone rubber to buy up and destroy the fairly efficient electric transport system in Los Angeles and other cities destroy it and turn it into the monstrosity we have okay that was a conspiracy they were taking a court you know find a couple thousand dollars but look looking for something hidden that sort of beneath the surface that's really running things I think that's a sometimes it's true but usually it's my view turns out to be a pathology I think it comes from a sense that I don't like the way things are and so there must be some hidden hands somewhere that's manipulating and controlling it whereas when you look closely I think you just see the normal workings of institutional structures that makes you of course raise questions about the nature of the society who we are we tolerate it and so on so for example it's appealing to believe that say John F Kennedy one of the main figures in conspiracy theory what are called conspiracy theories it would be nice to believe he's just a fantastically wonderful guy was gonna do all kind of great things and they shot him down just because he was a wonderful in the world is going off handbasket it was an incident it's a comforting feeling it's less comforting to recognize what I think the document or director demonstrates in the historical record and he was a kind of a hawk who was politician you know trying to gained power by the usual techniques is kind of affable and friendly and smile you've got a better people up but if you take a look what he's doing is pretty horrible it's one of the worst most dangerous creatures of the 20th century and unfortunately didn't have the blow of the world they came pretty close to that's a less comforting position I happen to think it's largely true same with Barack Obama but you can see the appeal of trying to find so takes a Obama there's a widespread feeling on the left you know middle eastern commentators and so on that he's really dedicated doing wonderful things it's just the dark forces are preventing so we just have to hope that he's gonna overcome the dark forces you know like a hero in a fairy tale and somehow get rid of the witches and dragons and everything will be nice I don't think that there's any truth to that I did exactly what he seems to be and there nobody's gonna ride in on a white horse back that'll get rid of the dragons and the witches got to do it ourselves that's order right so would you say that conspiracy conspiracy theories in general are not particularly helpful for radical politics and radical action if they're inaccurate I mean if they're accurate as they sometimes are sure that helps explain the world but most of what happens is it's kind of icky I mean you know in a sense it's a conspiracy if the board of directors of General Motors get together and decide okay here's our plans for next year it's kind of a conspiracy but we don't call that a conspiracy theory because it's the normal working of institutions and similarly when the you know fixate during the Second World War the high State Department planners and comparable features figures from the private sector like the Council on Foreign Relations did meet and extensively discuss the nature of the post-war world and laid plans which were proven well executed well has happened to be public but is it a conspiracy you know they got together they worked out plans that they later implemented them swell group of people they have special interests not the interests of the population but exposing that makes perfect sense that's not what's called a conspiracy theory because that's the way institutions operate and that makes sense you know on the other hand this I don't like to use the term because there are conspiracies it's called a conspiracy theory if we don't like it or something it's not the way to look at it but you have to ask is whether the theories of a conspiracy are accurate so like take say the idea that the Bush administration plotted to blow up the World Trade Center that attracts a huge support maybe a third of the population believes it and very dedicated groups of people many of them on the left are just committed to that is it plausible I mean suppose that the let's say somebody can sports conspired to blow up the World Trade Center we know what they did they claimed a ton Saudis I mean with the Bush administration blame it on Saudis thereby shooting themselves in the feet I mean if they wanted to bomb Iraq so if they'd work in heist it they would have blamed it on Iraqis then they'd have no problem at all getting congressional authorization the UN resolution you know NATO and join and everybody fine let's invade Iraq instead whoever did it blamed it on sebou T's well that absolves the Bush administration short of outright insanity why harm your relations with a valued ally instead of blaming it on the people you want to invade so that's already a barrier to even entertaining the possibility and the elaborate work that goes into you know is there nano-thermite and building sickness seven or whatever it is it's kind of a sad two point yeah maybe it was maybe there wasn't unless you have a pretty sophisticated knowledge of civil engineering and structural architecture you can t make a judgment as to whether it means anything but there are obvious clear phenomena that the the theory has to deal with somehow and it doesn't and if it doesn't I don't see I don't see where you take it seriously so yes then it becomes one of these kinds of conspiracy theory that just mislead misdirect and energy and so on it wouldn't surprise me if say forty years from now we get declassified documents would show that the Bush administration was very sympathetic to these theories it was it was diverting energy from real crimes into things that are basically a wild goose chase actually we have documents like that from about the Kennedy assassination so there are Pentagon advisory documents which advise the Pentagon the government to periodically leak information about the Kennedy assassination basically so as to keep people out of our hair you know let them follow those not non-existent leads instead of asking us questions that we really don't want to answer so it really conspiracy theory there and there we have the actual documents and I wouldn't would shock me if there are similar things about 9/11 conspiracies now they do have an immediate effect they draw a lot of energy and effort away from major crimes the crimes which are a lot worse than blowing up the World Trade Center so that's convenient for the powerful that's it's the you know the theories seem to have just major logical problem so that I don't see how they confront like what I mentioned it it does seem to me the the kind of theory that misleads and mr. eggs and ice it's not hard to see why it's popular I mean some terrible things are going on this should be some dark hand behind it we hate Bush and Rumsfeld for good reasons so maybe they're behind do you have time for me to ask you one short question okay that's just one question I really want to ask you and it's a message structure before thank you yeah it runs it so I don't really have any really quickly um it seems indisputable that we're facing an ecological crisis and there are obviously different currents within the radical left in terms of addressing it one current within anarchism known as Anna Kournikova primitivism associated with John's Arizona and derekjjensen argues that the only way for the planet to survive is if we go back to the pre-industrial societies or even pre agrarian societies what do you think of that kind of view that's a factual claim I mean if they have to be right then we have to be in favor of mass genocide on a scale has never even been compliment you know contemplated okay what happens to the six billion people around they can't live in a Stone Age society or an agricultural society so if that factual claim happens to be correct we're lost it's not a prescription for action I mean nobody nobody's proposing a course of action seriously that'll lead us to a pre-industrial Society I mean you couldn't get ten people to even listen to you suggested that for a good reason that means mass genocide so it's not a prescription it's a factual claim which I doubt is correct but if it happens to be correct fine that we lost okay well on that uplifting note thank you so much for talking with me

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 12,357

Rating: 4.8769231 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: U19PCxfi-FM

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017