Noam Chomsky - The Future of Capitalism

[Music] question about the future of capitalism general future yeah first of all that we should bear in mind that capitalism is a bit of a myth and we don't really have capitalist societies now we have state capitalist societies and the state has always played an essential central role in in development and extension of the capitalist system so that goes back to England in the 17th century and all the way through the history of development but let's just take the recent period so take today's high-tech economy it takes a your iPhone if you take your iPhone and you take the technology and it and take it apart turns out that almost everything comes from the state sector the GPS was developed by the Navy of the electronics was developed in military labs you know everything the computer that's in front of you the computers began to be developed in the 1950s actually a large part in the lab where I happened to be working it wasn't until 1977 but Apple was able to produce a computer that could be marketed and for profit that's after about 30 years of research and development in the state sector now suppose we had capitalist societies but one of the principles of capitalism supposed to be that if you invest in something especially if you invest to make a risky costly investment over say 30 years and there's some profit that comes out it's supposed to go back to you but our system doesn't work like that it goes to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos now the public pays the costs through various devices now the university labs and so on and then after many years something has handed over the private corporations and they make the profit same with the internet the beginnings of the internet were in the late 1950s actually in same lab where I was working at MIT that began thinking about the internet and it developed over decades under the within the government system meaning taxpayer support finally around 1995 the public made a gift simply a gift to private corporations to say ok you guys can have the internet that we developed now we have the half a dozen huge mega corporations which run the Internet it's a public public gift you know and in fact across the board that's the way it is the same if you go back to the 19th century when the what was called the American system of production developed kind of amazed the world you know mass production quality control interchangeable parts and most of who's developing government armors that's where you can do experimentation you can you can make investments for the long term for private corporations don't do that they want to make profit tomorrow you know not invest for what might happen in 30 years you know and that's in fact the entire history of development of what we call capitalism and its current function if you look at the present that takes the people who are saying we have to have a small government and devote ourselves to the market and just look at how they live there are huge public subsidies government subsidies to every major sector of the economy the agribusiness energy finance they're all heavily publicly subsidized but that's ok that's a proper function of the government just not pensions and security and health and irrelevant things like that so that's what's called capitalism but it's a very specific specifically shaped and designed form of capitalism so can that survive well it should certainly shouldn't survive and I think that can be changed in fact the public wants it to be changed so again if you take a look at the United States is a very heavily polled society mainly because business wants to know what people think but it's important so we know it long about people's attitudes the one thing we know is that across the spectrum people want much higher taxes on the rich the taxes keep going down in fact those results usually aren't even reported that of the even people who you know are considered very right-wing tea party let's say if you take a look at their actual attitudes they're more or less social democratic people say yeah we want a very small government but we want more expenditures in health and education and support for people who can't feed their children and so on but just a small government but all the things that a big government does in fact even attitudes on things like foreign foreign aid or very interesting that can they polls about foreign aid everyone says it's way too high and we're giving everything away to the undeserving foreigners when you ask them what foreign aid should be this is about ten times as high as it actually is you know because it's these are the results of extensive propaganda systems which indoctrinate people into having certain conceptions you know everybody's stealing from us the poor are taken away you know the government's of putting the poor in front of us immigrants are flooding the country that takes a immigration huge concern about immigration in the United States you know Mexican rapists and criminals almost half the immigration is from Asia educated trained to people who are being brought in to help develop the high-tech economy it's about 40% of the immigrants it's not what people start here you know what they hear is something that doesn't exist you know Mexican criminals but it's it's pretty much the same in Europe so for example in fact is very striking I mentioned the other day the latest elections in Europe were in Sweden a couple of weeks ago which which again the right-wing did get a much higher percentage in everyone wanted which is a frightening development but there was a careful study of the rise of the right in Sweden and what it showed was very interesting and generalizes turns out that the rise of the right in Sweden was before the wave of immigrants it was a reaction of people who were basically cast aside by the abandonment of the social democratic policies as the government including the Social Democratic so-called left began to move towards the so-called austerity programs you know people know the mass of the population has left out some people do fine you know they get rich the elites as they're called so what most of the people see is well those guys up there are doing fine and on left out Oslo I object and I'm gonna respond by voting for the Nationalists xenophobic party that was before the wave of immigrants once the immigrants come in they serve as a convenient scapegoat and so it's their fault it's not the fault of the corporation's up there we don't see them in Finland with the same study showed does the same rise in the right-wing parties have put almost no immigration if you take a look at the United States it's quite interesting the 2016 election have been extensive studies of why people voted for Trump and almost all the studies say it's racism and sexism which is not false but the question is why did these attitudes emerge and if you look back they emerge from people who were left out who have been stagnating for forty years even worse wages declining benefits declining organization decline those are communities that are ripe for the demagogue who can blame everything on a scapegoat the racism is there undoubtedly misogyny is there xenophobia is there and it comes out of the bottle when people are angry and resentful and don't know where to turn to for explanation for their plight I think the source of a lot of this is simply the neoliberal policies of the last generation which were designed they're not a law of nature you know they're designed to have certain consequences which they have and one of them is leaving the mass of the population as what's sometimes called a precariat people living precarious existences no security pensions aren't coming no organization we have nowhere Osaka potatoes we're going to look for somebody responsible and the easiest place to look as people are even more vulnerable than you are and so it shows up in these dangerous antisocial attitudes the decline of democracy is a consequence and in fact a desired consequence of the policies that were instituted they overcome what was called the crisis of democracy too much democracy so now yes we've succeeded in reducing the crisis of democracy with the consequences that follow from the resistance you said this system will not survive like this can't yes impossible for a reason we haven't discussed there are two huge crises growing one of them we know about the nuclear threat if you look at the history of the nuclear age it's an absolute miracle that we have survived there was time we could go through it but case after case dozens of times sometimes by accident mostly by accident sometimes by reckless acts of leaders became literally within minutes of terminal destruction literally some of the cases are shocking when you look at them and miracles don't continue so sooner or later we'll manage and destroy ourselves the other is global warming which is very serious I mean if the foot use of fossil fuels continues that anything remotely like the present level by the end of this century let's say we might see sea level rising 6 to 10 meters you can just imagine what that would mean plus what we already see severe weather droughts hurricanes typhoons all escalating and it already has big effects like the the Syrian war for example at one of its roots is a unprecedented drought nothing and hundreds of thousands of years of history huge drought surely the result of global warming which drove peasants off the land into the cities no way for them to survive it creates a kind of kindling which any Sparkle said all it's part of the background for the conflicts that arose the same happened in Darfur the huge drought of nomads into the agricultural areas and there's also ethnic conflict there immediately led to conflict and confrontation ended up with big massacres these things are not are not just future we're living with the beginnings of them you take a look at Bangladesh which is mostly a coastal plain the sea level starts rising that what's going to happen to hundreds of millions of people if the glaciers keep melting and the Himalayas the already meagre water supply in South Asia is going to be severely threatened and there right now there are several hundred million people in India who do not have potable water we're taught in Pakistan it's going to be even worse I mean we're talking about the fate of hundreds of millions of people in the near future the rich may think they can escape by going to a mountain somewhere but that's not going to happen so and the policies that are being pursued are to escalate the problem that's not just nothing and it's not just Trump I'm take the big banks you take a look at the JPMorgan Chase huge banks they know exactly what the consequences are and they're increasing their investments in fossil fuels that's the nature of capitalism capital and the as I said its we have a mixed form of capitalism but there is a market system underlying it somewhere and an imperative of the market system is that you try to make maximal profit tomorrow and you disregard what are called externalities the things that are not charted and if you don't do that you're out of the game it's part of the structure of the system so Jamie Dimon who's smart guy head of JP Morgan Chase understands perfectly well the consequences but nevertheless is compelled by the logic of the institutions to maximize the threat his own grandchildren he may not like it maybe on the side he gives money to the Sierra Club environmental groups but as functioning within the system they're destroying the possibility for organized life that is nothing that you can put band-aids on this is much deeper then of course the Trump administration that's that's just though by far we ought to have big headlines and the newspapers every day saying these guys are trying to destroy the possibility of organized human life and if you think about it honestly there's been nothing in all of human history to compare with this not a Atilla the Hun not Angus Kahn not Hitler horrible as they were they never tried to destroy organized human life this is something new if that there's a word to describe it an evil doesn't capture it it's insanity doesn't capture it because it's not insane its plan unconscious and part of the very logic of the system in which they work now of course with Trump and his associates they're trying to extend it make it worse that's not part of the logic of the system you could the system could function with you know palliative efforts to Obama in fact was doing and most of the world is doing not enough but at least something but it's a very deep problem it's like class hatred in Brazil this is deep you can't put a bandaid on it it's fundamental things that have to be dealt with how about resistance resistance the the movement against capitalism against this dole things believe that's it's going to be encouraging for the store all over the world there is a resistance and it's you having so the most popular political figure in the United States by a considerable margin is Bernie Sanders which is kind of unthinkable in the framework of American political history it's never happened in American political history that somebody like Sanders could become even notice let alone become the most popular political figure in the country now just think of what happened here's a guy you have to recognize that American elections are literally bought you can you can predict the outcome of elections with remarkable precision simply by looking at campaign funding executive and Congress goes back well over a hundred years now here's somebody who entered the campaign virtually unknown no media support barely mentioned if the media mentions of they just made fun of him you know no support zero from any of the funders no corporate support no support from private wealth he even used what's in the United States the kind of four-letter word that the United States that I suppose the only country in the world outside of maybe some dictatorship where you can't say the word socialism no let alone communism but it's just unspeakable you know it's the it's it's literally a four-letter word yeah then he called him he said he was a socialist socialist really means New Deal Democrats mean anything very profound but but with all of that he came very close to win the nomination for the Democrats are for Hillary at that time no no not not after the nomination yes but that's not for Hillary that's against Trump that's something quite different she was awful but if Sanders had been able to win the nomination frankly I don't know what would have happened because the Republican propaganda machine which had not been directed against Sanders and which is huge corporate back fantastic it would be directed against Sanders and what you'd start hearing is things about this atheist Jew communist wants to destroy everything a ton of stuff like that he probably probably couldn't have withstood it but so it's kind of unpredictable but that's what certainly would have happened that and how people would react to that you really don't know it's hard that you can see it in England right now the attack on Corbin I mean there's an enormous fear including the Labour point you know the old Labour Party the Guardian you know the idea that you might have a political party that actually represents the general public and its interests and suffering people abroad and is led by a decent human being that's totally intolerable so you have this enormous attack of the kind you can't defend yourself against like anti-semitism since you say and somebody's a Holocaust denier and anti-semite you know there's no defense basically and it's just across the board a huge attack on Corbin and the Labour Party and that's the kind of thing you would have seen if Sanders and commenter you know they pick a little differently but anti-israel you know all this huge propaganda which he is so familiar you can just make it a - since there's a lot to overcome but what the Sanders campaign showed and what the Corbin success shows is that you do quite a lot of these Sanders and Yanis varoufakis just came out with a joint declaration Baro focus that's very important I think of our focus is very smart interesting guy they have he is the center of this new political organization diem25 which is in fact running candidates transnational candidates for the European Parliament and ultimately for in the Greek elections and later other ones which is a kind of a counterpart to Corbin and Sanders and they've are FACA Sanders declaration a couple of days ago is you know it's not radical it's calling for sensible multipolar and then Liberal Democratic instant stew in the Europe to preserve what's good about the European Union and to overcome the serious flaws same in the Western Hemisphere and things like the Obrador election in Mexico or another example so I think if you look around the world there's a little just plain level of activism mainly among young people it's quite surprising striking I think it's much higher than almost it's ever been except for a few few brief moments but 1968 there's a brief spike but this is lasting so I think the basis is sort of there or if it can be brought together and organized

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 251,288

Rating: 4.8258467 out of 5

Keywords: Capitalism, Chomsky, Climate Change, Subsidy, Neoliberalism, Noam Chomsky, Socialism, Social democracy, Trump, Externalities, Immigration

Id: ZkcDT4l7e4o

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/a-drug-against-wars]

Spot-on as always with Chomsky. 🍻