What Is Anarchism? Noam Chomsky on Capitalism, Socialism, Free Markets (2013)

it's hardly a secret that the terms of political discourse are not exactly models of precision and considering the way terms are used it's next to impossible to try to give a meaningful answer to such questions as what is socialism or what is capitalism or what our markets free markets and many others in common usage and that's even more true of the term anarchism for reasons that Nathan pointed out it's been not only subject to very varied use but also a quite extreme abuse sometimes by bitter enemies sometimes unfortunately by people who hold its manner high so much so so much is the variation and abuse that it resists any simple characterization in fact the only way I can see to address the question that's posed this evening what is anarchism is to try to identify some leading ideas that animate at least major currents of the rich and complex and often contradictory traditions of an anarchist thought and crucially anarchist action well I think a sensible approach can start with remarks by the perceptive important anarchist intellectual and also activist Rudolf rocker I'll quote him he saw anarchism not as a fixed self-enclosed social system with a fixed answer to all the multifarious questions and problems of human life but rather as a definite trend in the historic development of man kind which strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life from the 1930s these concepts are not really original they derive from the Enlightenment and the early Romantic period in rather similar words Vilhelm von Humboldt one of the founders of classical liberalism among many other achievements described the leading principle of his thought as the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity that's a phrase that John Stuart Mill took as the epigraph to his on Liberty it follows from that that institutions that constrain such human development are illegitimate unless of course they couldn't somehow justify themselves you find a similar conception widely and enlightenment thought so for example in Adam Smith everyone has read the opening paragraphs of Wealth of Nations where he extolled the wonders of the vision of labor but not many people have gotten farther inside to read his bitter condemnation of division of labor and his insistence that in any civilized society the government will have to intervene to prevent it because it will destroy personal integrity and essential human rights will turn people he said into creatures is stupid and ignorant as a human can be it's not too easy to find that passage whatever the reason may be if you look in the scholar standard scholarly edition the University of Chicago by a Bicentennial Edition it's not even listed in the index well but it's one of the most important passages in the book looked at in these terms anarchism is a tendency in human development that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy the domination authority and others that constrain human development and then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge justify yourself demonstrate that you're legitimate and maybe in some special circumstances are conceivably in principle and if you can't meet that that challenge which is the usual case the structure should be dismantled then it's Nathan rightly adds not just dismantled but reconstructed from below the ideals that found expression during the Enlightenment and the Romantic era they founded on the shoals of rising industrial capitalism which is completely antithetical to them but rocker argues I think quite plausibly that they remain alive in the libertarian socialist traditions these range pretty widely they range from left anti-bolshevik Marxism that people like Anton Pannekoek call course Paul mattock and others including the anarcho-syndicalism that reached its peak of achievement in the Revolutionary period in Spain in 1936 and it's well to remember that despite its substantial achievements and successes it was crushed by the combined force of fascism communism and Western democracy they had differences but they agreed that this had to be crushed with the effort of free people to control their own lives that had to be crushed before they turned to their petty differences which are we call the Spanish Civil War the same the same tendencies reached further to worker controlled enterprises they're springing up in large parts the old Rust Belt in the United States in northern Mexico they've reached their greatest development in the Basque Country and in Spain Mondragon partly a reflection of the achievements of the long complex rich Spanish tradition of anarchism it partly it comes out of Christian anarchist sources there's also included in this general tendency are the quite substantial and cooperative movements that occur that exist in many parts of the world and I think it also encompasses at least a good part of feminist and human rights activism well in part all of this sounds like truism so why should anyone defend illegitimate structures no reason of course and I think that perception is correct it really is truism I think honor killings is basically ought to be called truism but truisms have some merit that one of them is the merit of being true unlike most political discourse and this particular truism belongs to an interesting category of principles the principles that are not only Universal but doubly Universal they're universal in that they're almost universally accepted and Universal in that they're almost universally rejected in practice and this is one of there are many of these for example the general principle that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others if not harsher ones a few would object a few would practice it or more specific policy proposals like democracy promotion or the humanitarian intervention professed generally rejected in practice almost universally or doubly universal and this wisdom is the same the truism that we should the challenge and coercive institutions of all kinds demand that they justify themselves dismantle and reconstruction them if they do not easy to say but not so easy to act on in practice well proceeding with similar thoughts on quote rock rocker again anarchism seeks to free labor from economic exploitation and to free society from ecclesiastical or political guardianship and by doing that opening the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative later labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community now rocker was an anarchist activist as well as political thinker and he goes on to call on the workers organizations other popular organizations to create them quoting not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself within the current society that's an injunction that goes back to bakunin one traditional anarchist slogan is need une meta no God no master to phrase that Daniel Galen cook gets the title of his very valuable collection of anarchist classics I think it's fair to understand the phrase no God in the terms that I just quoted from rocker opposition to ecclesiastical guardianship individual beliefs are a different matter that's no matter of concern to a person concerned with free development of thought and action that leaves the door open to the lively and impressive tradition of religious anarchism for example Dorothy days very impressive Catholic Workers movement but the phrase no master is different that refers not to individual belief but to a social relation a relation of subordination and dominance relation that anarchism if taken seriously seeks to dismantle and rebuild from below unless it can somehow meet the harsh burden of establishing its legitimacy well by now we've departed from truism in fact to ample controversy in particular right at this point the rather peculiar American brand of what's called libertarianism that the parts very sharply from the libertarian tradition it accepts an indeed strongly advocates the subordination of working people to the masters of the economy and furthermore the subjection of everyone to the restrictive discipline and the destructive features of markets these are topics worth pursuing take them up later if you'd like but I'll put them aside here although also recommending to you Nathan's comment his suggestion about bringing together in some way the energies of the young libertarian left and right as indeed sometimes done for example it's done in the quite important work of valuable theoretical and practical work of economists and David Ellerman and some others well Anakin anarchism of course is famously opposed to the state while at the same time advocating planned administration of things in the interests of the community rockers phrase again and beyond that broader Federation's of self-governing communities at workplaces well in the real world of today the same dedicated anarchists who are opposed to the state often support state power to protect people and society and the earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital so takes a venerable 'anarchist journal like freedom goes back to 1886 formed as a journal socialist anarchism by by supporters of both Kropotkin if you open it spate pages you'll find that much of it is devoted to defending rights of people the environment society often by invoking state power like regulation of the environment or safety and health regulations and the workplace there's no contradiction here as sometimes thought people live and suffer and endure in this world and not some world that we imagine and all the means available should be used to safeguard and benefit them even if the long term goal is to displace these devices and construct preferable alternatives in discussing this sometimes used an image that comes from the Brazilian workers movement just discussed an interesting work by Buuren Maybury Louis they speak of with today's the image of widening the floors of the cage the cage is existing coercive institutions that can be widened by committed the popular struggle happened effectively over many years and you can extend the image beyond think of the cage of coercive state institutions as a kind of protection from savage beasts that are roaming outside namely the predatory state-supported capitalist institutions that are dedicated to the principle of private gain power the a nation with the interest of the community at most the footnote may be revered in rhetoric but dismissed in practice and in fact even in the anglo-american law well it's worth also worth remembering that anarchists condemned really existing States not visions of unrealized democratic dreams such as government of By and For the People they bitterly opposed the rule of what bakunin had called the red bureaucracy which he predicted 50 years in advance would be among the most savage of human creations and they also opposed parliamentary systems that are instruments of class rule the contemporary United States for example which is not a democracy it's a chakra see very easy to demonstrate majority of the population has no influence over policy and as you move up the income wealth scale you get more and more influence very top people get what they want will establish by academic political science but too familiar to everyone who looks at the way the world works a truly democratic system would be quite different it would have the character of quote again an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interests of the community in fact that's not too remote from one version of the mainstream Democratic ideal actually one version and stress that I'll return to others so take for example the leading American social philosopher of 20th century John Dewey his major concerns were democracy and education no one took Dewey to be an anarchist but pay attention to his ideas in his conception of democracy illegitimate structures of coercion must be dismantled and that includes I'll quote him domination by business for private profit through private control of banking land industry reinforced by command of the press press agents other means of publicity and propaganda he recognized still quoting that power today resides in control of the means of production exchange publicity transportation and communication whoever owns them rules the life of the country even if democratic forms remain and until these institutions are in the hands of the public politics will remain the shadow cast on the cast by big business on society very much what we see around us in fact but it's important that do we went beyond calling for some form of public control that could take many forms he went beyond in a free and democratic society he wrote the workers should be the masters of their own industrial fate not tools rented by employers not directed by state authorities now that position goes right back to the leading ideas of classical liberalism articulated by fun humble Smith others and extended in the anarchist tradition turning to education Dewey held that it is a liberal and immoral to train children to work not freely and intelligently but for the sake of the work earned the to achieve test scores for example in which case their activity is not free because it's not freely participated in and it's quickly forgotten too as all of us know from our experience so he proceeded to conclude that industry be changed from a futile istic to a democratic social order and educational practice should be designed to encourage creativity exploration independence cooperative work exactly the opposite of what's happening today well these ideas lead to a vision of society based on workers control of productive institutions linked to community control within the framework of free association and federal organization in the general style of thought that includes of course along with many anarchists others to say gdh Cole's guild socialism England left the anti-bolshevik Marxism at current developments such as for example the participatory economics and politics of Michael Albert Robin Hahnel Steven Shalem and others along with important work and theory and practice by the late Seymour Melman his associates and many others and notably gar alperovitz is very valuable recent contributions on worker owned enterprise and cooperatives not just talk but actual taking place well going back to Dewey he was as American as apple pie the bar of the old cliche right in the mainstream of American history and culture and in fact all of these ideas and developments are very deeply rooted in the American tradition and in American history fact which is kind of suppressed but is very very obvious when you look into it and when you pursue these questions you enter into an important terrain of inspiring often bitter struggle that's ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution which was right around here Lowell Lawrence eastern Massachusetts mid nineteenth century the first serious scholarly worked a study of the industrial worker in those years there was 90 years ago that's by Norman we're still very much worth reading he reviews the hideous working conditions that were imposed on formerly independent craftsmen and immigrants and farmers as well as the so called factory girls young women brought from the farms to work in the textile mills around Boston he mentions that he reviews it but he focuses attention on something else what he calls the degradation suffered by the industrial worker the loss of status and independence which could not be canceled even where there casually was some material improvement and he focuses on the radical capitalist social revolution in which sovereignty and economic affairs passed from the community as a whole into the keeping of a special class of masters often remote from production a group added into the producers and where shows I think pretty convincingly that for every protest against machine industry and privation there can be found a hundred protests against the new power of capitalist production and it's discipline in other words workers were struggling and striking not just for bread but for roses in the traditional slogan of the workers communities and organizations they were struggling for dignity and independence for their rights as free men and women and their journals are very interesting there's a rich and lively labor press written by working people artisans from Boston factory girls from the farms and these journals they condemned what they called the blasting influence of Mannar kacal principles on democratic soil which will not be overcome until they who work in the mills will on them the slogan of the massive Knights of Labor and sovereignty will return to free and independent producers then they will no longer be menials or the humble subjects of a foreign despot the absentee owner slaves in the strictest sense of the word who toil for their masters rather they will regain their status as free American citizens the capitalist Revolution instituted a crucial change from price to wage it's very important when a producer sold his product for a price he retained his person but when he came to sell his labour he sold himself I'm quoting from the press that's a big difference he lost his dignity as a person as he became a slave a wage slave to use the common term of the period 160 years ago a group of skilled workers repeated the common view that a daily wage was equivalent to slavery and they weren't warned perceptively that a day might come when wage slaves will so far forget what is due to manhood as the glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of Independence and self-respect a day that they hoped would be far distant these were very popular notions in the mid 19th century in fact so popular that they were a slogan of the Republican Party you could read them in editorials of the New York Times that's then not now but that they may come back let's hope labor activists at the time warned bitterly often of what they call the new spirit of the age gained wealth for getting old itself that was a new spirit of the age 150 years ago and in sharp reaction to this demeaning spirit there were quite enormous an act of rising movements of working people in radical farmers radical farmers actually began in Texas spread through the Midwest that much of the country was of course an agricultural country then these are the most significant Democratic popular movements in American history they were dedicated to solidarity mutual aid to battle they were crushed by force we have a very violent labor histories compared to other countries but it's a battle that's not over far from over despite setbacks often violent repression well there are apologists familiar apologists for the radical revolution of wage slavery and they have an argument they argue that the worker should indeed glory in a system of free crop free contracts voluntarily undertaken there was an answer to that 200 years ago by shelley in his great poem masque of anarchy this was written right after the Peterloo massacre in england manchester went in British cavalry birdly attacked a peaceful gathering of tens of thousands of people the first major example of huge nonviolent protest of the reaction of the state authorities to it they were calling for parliamentary reform so Shelley wrote that we know what slavery is tis to work and have such pay as just keeps life from day to day in your limbs as in a cell for the tyrants used to dwell tis to be slave and soul and to hold no strong control over your own wills but be all that others make of ye that's slavery that's what working people and independent farmers were struggling against and the artisans and factory girls who struggle for dignity and independence and freedom might very well have known Shelley's words observers at the time noted that they were highly literate they had good libraries they were acquainted with the standard works of English literature before this is before mechanism and wage slavery the wage system ended the days of at least curtailed the days of independence high culture or insecurity before that we're points out a workshop might be what he called a Lyceum a journeyman would the higher boys to read to them while they worked these were social businesses with many opportunities for reading discussion mutual improvement along with the factory girls the journeyman the artisans have bitterly condemned the attack on their culture the same was true in England incidentally where conditions were much harsher there's actually a great book about this by Jonathan Rose called the intellectual life of the British working class it's a monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of what we think of as Dickensian England and he contrasts what he calls the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidact with the pervasive Philistine ISM of the British aristocracy actually I'm old enough to remember residues that remained among working people right here in New York in the 1930s who were deeply immersed in the high culture of the day it's another battle that may have receded but I don't think it's lost well I mentioned that Dewey and American workers and farmers held one version of democracy with very strong libertarian elements but the dominant version has been radically different it's most instructive expression is that the progressive end of the spectrum mainstream spectrum so that is people among people who are good Woodrow Wilson FDR Kennedy liberals here's a few representative quotes from icons of the liberal intellectual establishment on democratic theory the public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders they have to be put in their place decisions must be in the hands of an intelligent minority of responsible men namely us and we have to be protected from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd out there the herd does have a function in a Democratic Society they're supposed to lend their weight every few years to a choice among the responsible men but apart from that their function is to be spectators not participants in action and all of this is for their own good that we should not succumb to democratic dogmatism 'he's about men being the best judges of their own interests they're not they're like young children you have take care of them we are the best judges of their own interests so their attitudes and opinions have to be controlled for their own benefit we have to regiment their minds the way in army regiments bodies we have to discipline the institutions responsible for what they call the indoctrination of the young schools universities churches if we can do this we can get back to the good old days this is complaints about the 60s we give back to the good old days when Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers then we'll have true democracy now these are quotes from icons of the liberal establishment walter Lippmann Edward Bernays Harold Lasswell and founder modern political science Samuel Huntington trilateral commission which largely staffed the Carter Administration well the conflict between these conceptions of democracy goes far back goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolution in 17th century England that time as you know a war that was a war raging between supporters of the king and supporters of Parliament that's the civil war that we read about but there was more the gentry the men who called themselves the men of best quality they were appalled by the rabble who didn't want to be ruled by either king or Parliament like the Spanish workers in 1936 neither side that they wanted to be ruled as they put they had their own pamphlets pamphlet literature and they said they wanted to be ruled by countrymen like ourselves that no heir wants that will never be a good world while Knights and gentlemen make us laws that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us and do not know the people sores that's 17th century England the essential nature of this conflict which is far from ended was captured then nicely by Thomas Jefferson in his later years when he had serious concerns about both the quality and the fate of the democratic experiment he made a distinction between what he called aristocrats and Democrats the aristocrats on quoting him are those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes the Democrats in contrast identify with the people have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the honest and safe although not the most wise depository of the public interest the modern progressive intellectuals the Wilson Roosevelt Kennedy intellectual those who seek to put the public in their place and are free from democratic dogmatism zaboo capacity of the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders to enter the political arena there are Jefferson's aristocrats these basic views are very widely held though there are some disputes namely who should play the guiding role should it be what the liberal intellectuals called the technocratic and policy oriented intellectuals the ones we celebrate as the Camelot intellectuals who run the progressive knowledge society should it be bankers or corporate executives in other versions should it be the Central Committee or the Guardian Council of clerks all pretty similar ideas and they're all examples of the ecclesiastical and political guardianship that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below while also changing industry from feudalistic to a democratic social order the one that's based on workers control community control respects the dignity of the producer as a genuine person not a tool in the hands of others in accordance with a libertarian tradition that has deep roots and like Marx's old mole as always burrowing quite close to the surface and ready to spring forth thanks so for the discussion I'd like to invite anybody who has a question to to line up behind the microphones on either side and please try to try to keep it concise and as you do that I'd like to start if you don't mind I just wonder if you could say something about the images that represent some of your first encounters with anarchism I mean I think for people who have gotten excited about these ideas through the Occupy movement it was important to see it and practice somehow I wonder what those images have been for you well I grew up in the 1930s that's when I was kids deep depression and plenty of suffering and there were images that kind of stick in my mind people coming to my parents were teachers so we had some money you know not rich but got long and in fact the whole family of unemployed working-class kind of converged around the around our house we had at least something but there were images of people coming to the door trying to sell rags to try to get a piece of bread to survive I remembered writing with my mother on trolley cars watching going past textile plants this is Philadelphia and watching women on strike being brutally beaten by security forces my own family was extended family was mostly unemployed working-class and as I mentioned very high culture as the New Deal sort of began to having an impact they were able to enjoy Shakespeare plays in the park to go to the Buddha with string quartet to my unemployed seamstress aunts were members of the ilgwon you know ladies garment workers union could get a couple of weeks in the countryside at a solidarity camp that that was life a lot of it was Communist Party allowed to say anything nice about the Communist Party that's a rule and there were a lot of things wrong with it I've mentioned some of them but there were things that were right about it like I said one was that it overcame the amnesia that nathan talked about it was always there you know people remembered somebody remembered how to turn the minigraf machine or organized demonstration and you went from a civil rights demonstration to a labor organizing to something else that crazy international ideas but that was kind of in the back of their minds it wasn't road was really going on the destruction of the Communist Party was quite important killed off the radical continuing element that kept a lot of the Left traditions going you know the reasons it was in the Cold War framework that was all there as far as the anarchists were concerned the place I learned about that was by reading I went when I was kid I'd go to visit my relatives and since I got old enough to get on that train about 11 or 12 years old I'd take the train to New York and stay with my relatives but spend most of my time down on those of you know New York Union Square used to be the place where the anarchist offices were a friar vite there's Timah others and lots of pamphlets lots of interesting people but quite eager to talk to a young kid you know so not hard to have discussions then and down below Union Square on 4th Avenue not today but then there were rows of small bookstores a lot of them run by European emigrates many of them Spanish refugees Spanish anarchist refugees who are also quite eager to talk and had lots of pamphlets and direct you know a real original documentary material actually when I wrote about this 20 years later I'd much mostly documentary material I had picked up as a young teenager wasn't available a lot of it's available now was then and that was a pretty inspiring picture I felt the Spanish revolution at least I felt and feel was a really inspiring moment which i think is why it elicited such a vicious response from every corner of power that's quite important to remember communists fascists liberal democracies all combined on crushing this this was something they couldn't tolerate then they could have a fight later about who puts up the spoils actually there were anarchist proposals that I felt were not unreasonable there disparaged of course in the West but for how to win the civil war was an anarchist thinkers like Camila binary who was murdered by the communists in May 1937 one of the leading anarchist thinkers he he proposed that he had pointed out I think has turned out quite correctly that they'd never win a conventional war for one reason because the commitment to the war on the part of the population had seriously declined after the Revolution was crushed they had lost what they had fought for and then care very much who was going to pick up the spoils he pointed out and and of course the fascists were being directly supported by by Hitler Mussolini and the West was not opposed to that yet Hartley may forget now but the fascism had a pretty good image in the West in the late 30s Mussolini was that admirable Italian gentleman as Roosevelt called him Hitler was regarded by the State Department as in the late 30s as a moderate who was holding off the forces of left right so we shouldn't be too critical of him the United States had a consul in Berlin up until Pearl Harbor who was sending back dispatches saying shouldn't be too hard on the Nazis and doing some things we don't like but they're still kind of moderates his name is George Kennan you don't read that in the biographies but that's not untypical of the period Roosevelt for example bitter there was a Neutrality Act theoretically that the United States was not supposed to allow the support for either side in the Civil War and Rosa was very bitter about any attempt to by somebody to say send a pistol to the Republic I couldn't stop it by force but he bitterly condemned it on the other hand the State Department couldn't notice what I was reading in the left-wing press at the time and was later conceded twenty years later that the United States had authorized the Texaco oil company which was run by an outright Nazi open Nazi had authorized them to they were so they had a contract to ship oil to the Republic they switched it to shipping oil to the fascist forces which is the one thing that Hitler Mussolini couldn't provide they couldn't find that the left press could find it but the State Department couldn't well going back to binary what he proposed was that in Spain itself the popular forces should fight a guerrilla war that's an old Spanish tradition in fact that's where guerrilla wars and it were initiated under Napoleon fight a guerrilla war in Spain itself and in Morocco call for support the Moroccan liberation forces that were trying to free themselves from French and British Imperial and Spanish Imperial control that was the base of Franco's army they were Moorish troops coming from northern so his idea was fight a Revolutionary War I support them in their efforts to overthrow imperialist control that he thought would erode the Spanish the fascist armies just as in Spain itself the popular forces were fighting but until they were crushed well that's if you read the scholarship on on the matter up till today that's kind of dismissed as a sort of a romantic joke as the whole liner his movement is but I don't think it was that's worth that was my initial exposure hi professor Chomsky this is an unimaginable honor thank you so much for doing us I just wanted to touch briefly you have this wonderful Shelly quote and you touch briefly on your family's engagement with high culture and I was wondering where I was I was just gonna ask you to reflect briefly on the contemporary state of high culture and serious art and how important you think engagement with that you know serious contemporary literature music cinema whatever it is how important it is in exploring the sort of the vanguard of political thought and you know whether or not contemporary artists and contemporary audiences are rising to that challenge I think it's very important and I'm not the only one to think so I think people with power think so that's why famous rivera mural wasn't allowed to be put in Rockefeller Center that's why if you go back to cinema you say go back 60 years early 50s some of you remember so in 1953 interesting year for cinema there were two major films that came out one major well two films that came out on the labor movement one which was a huge box-office success ton of PR or advertising and so on a featured Marlon Brando was about a corrupt union leader and how the heroic you know Joe with his lunch box finally overcame the corrupt union leader at the end of the film throws him into the water and everybody cheers that was one there was another film a low a marvelous film called salt of the earth a low-budget film which was about a victorious strike led by Hispanic woman it was a really great film as you can find it somewhere he should look at it but no one ever heard of it you know I mean he could find it maybe in a small art theater in downtown New York somewhere but that wasn't the kind of film that was going to get publicity and that runs through consistently and I think when people in power believe something firmly it's worth paying attention to him and I think they believe firmly that you should not have a revolutionary popular art and which people participate access one of the reasons I think for destroying the graffiti in the New York subways that's considered a great achievement of Bloomberg you know Murphy T popular art all over the subways you know because that's just too dangerous as part of the drug war grotesque drug war race were murders a large part of it came from the fact that the Harlem Renaissance black artists in Harlem were playing jazz and smoking marijuana so that had to be destroyed that became the great criminal of the age Mexicans were doing it too this is a pretty constant so yeah I think it's that's really important know what is what is preventing people if anything from organizing themselves into worker controlled cooperatives you alluded to coops and if not much is preventing them from doing so - what do you attribute their relative lack of popularity and the related question would be why what could union control pension for example be doing if the problem is capital for example why aren't more entities like worker control putative Li worker control pensions investing the capital they have some control over in supporting these kinds of worker controlled alternatives well first of all pensions are not in the hands of working people the unions are not popular democracies pensions are in the hands of bureaucrats and money managers and they're not about to hand over power to popular organizations actually tunics that's not entirely true there are some interesting initiatives if they're going to get anywhere but they're interesting the United Steelworkers which is one of the more progressive unions has recently made some tentative arrangements with Mondragon in the Basque Country this huge in worker owned industrial banking housing school educational cooperative that could get somewhere and I mentioned gar alperovitz is work he's discussed very well the and participates in the spread of worker owned enterprises in mostly northern Ohio the old Rust Belt they have a kind of an interesting history and which relates very much to this back in 1977 at the beginning of the concerted effort to destroy industrial production in the United States and sort of beginning of the kind of neoliberal assault on the population we've been through in the past generation a US Steel decided to close its main steel plants in Youngstown Ohio it was a steel town like other working-class towns like Detroit it had actually been built by the working classes was their town they didn't get the profit because there are tools but they built it they wanted to keep it US Steel wanted to sell it to close it down and the Union offered to buy it they had community support they even had some supportive I think it was a Republican governor just by let the workers by the plan and keep running it well us still didn't want that in fact this is pretty consistent I mentioned Dave Armen before he's one is written about it and worked on it very commonly around here to eastern us chooses when workers decide to try to take over an enterprise maybe an enterprise which may be perfectly profitable but not profitable enough for the multinational who you know who runs it maybe they don't want to keep in their books when they try to buy it which would be a good deal for the multinational they refuse to sell it for class reasons they have class interests they do not want to see the spread of popular democratic organizations for perfectly obvious reasons this just happened and going to I'll come back to Youngstown in a minute but it just happened a couple of years ago right here and Taunton there was a small but quite successful manufacturing plan made specialized parts for aircraft doing pretty well but the multinational didn't want to bother with it so they were going to close it down the Union you know UE in this case I tried to buy it multinationals usually refused to sell it and there wasn't enough support popular support to push it through if there had been an Occupy movement at that time real I think that's something they might have pushed through actually on a much larger scale a couple of years ago Obama virtually nationalized the auto industry not entirely but virtually there were a couple of options that one option was to restructure it use taxpayer funding hand it back to the original owners or other people just like them maybe a different face but you know bankers CEOs and so on and then have it continue to do what it had been doing before building cars that's what they chose there was another option I hand it over to the workforce have them build what's needed in the country which is not more cars for traffic jams but high-speed mass transportation the United States is very backward in the world in this respect I mean you can take a high-speed train from Beijing to Kazakhstan but try to take a train from Boston to New York it's about as slow as it was 60 years ago this is really backward the country needs it and the the former auto industry could have been handed over to the workforce and given may be given some support the probably less than the auto industry got to do this but that wasn't an option suppose there had been a large-scale Occupy movement you know significant it was significant but broader expanded well I think that could have been pushed through takes popular consciousness but going back to Youngstown the case went to court in 1977 the Union lost workers lost and it was the steel mills were destroyed but they didn't give up they didn't just say okay we'll starve to death or go somewhere else they began to organize small worker owned enterprises and they've been spreading around the Cleveland area and good Youngstown good bit of northern Ohio into other areas so it is taking place but you know it's happening elsewhere too in northern Mexico there are quite successful worker owned plants it's not easy because you know the the banks don't like to give them capital and the government doesn't like them and won't support them again for class reasons but if the sufficient popular support these things can develop and it's not easy you know it's hard work and the people who organize usually suffer for it but that's typical of almost everything and civil rights movement the correctly any movement that has ever gotten anywhere the people up front usually take it in it chin you know it's hard and that people have to be willing to endure and for a longer-term gain and that's not easy but it can happen and it does hi I'm just curious if you could address the role of surveillance technologies and increasingly the militarization of police as far as moving forward in radical thought today and in the future kind of what you see that where that is that well I think there are two things to bear in mind about that the first thing is that the phenomenon itself shouldn't be at all surprising the second is that the scale at least to me is kind of surprising and really expected that scale but the phenomenon is normal and it's again as American as apple pie you can go back to a century take say the Philippine war early in the 19th century 20th century there was a vicious war the u.s. conquered the Phyllis fill the Philippines killed a couple hundred thousand people was a major popular nationalist movement after the military victory it had to be suppressed and controlled and a huge pacification campaign was initiated using the highest technology of the day for surveillance subversion at breaking up groups you know building up hostilities all kinds of things a very sophisticated it was very quickly transferred home it was used by Woodrow Wilson and Red Scare the worst repression in American history and developed further since it's had a lethal effect on the Philippines people mourn the typhoon that killed tens of thousands of people that doesn't happen in functioning societies very striking in the Caribbean when a tropical storm goes through the Caribbean and Haiti when the major victims of Imperial violence its vicious they right next door in Cuba three people died you know some buildings are knocked over same storm depends on the Society well the Philippines is a society that we created have maintained it's the one part of Southeast Asia that hasn't taken part in the so-called Asian miracle you know the not one of the Asian Tigers there's a reason for that good good reason but these techniques you can be confident that any state or a commercial enterprise any system of power is going to use whatever technology is available to try to control and dominate its what amounts to its major enemy namely the population that's what power systems are going to do the scale of what was revealed I think was a little surprising but it actually shouldn't be and there's more to come those of you who read technical journals like say the MIT Technology Review they should know what's coming so for example just in the tech review recently there's been articles on things like there and elsewhere on the hardware and computers which is now being designed they blame China but of course that means it's being done 10 times as much here to put in the components in the hardware that will enable the manufacturer the to record every keystroke everything that's happening on your computer American businesses are worried because if they have Chinese computers they'll be picking it up at the People's Liberation Army but they don't point out that the American systems are doubtless much more advanced and doing the same thing robotics is a field that's been worked on pretty hard for many years here too and one of the goals quite a listen nothing secret is to develop fly sized drones tiny robots which can you know get on your on the ceiling of your living room and carry out constant surveillance and drones tend to go from surveillance to lethal capacities very quickly so we can expect that pretty soon and these are things that are in development any system of power is going to use them and pretty strikingly G hotties are going to use them but one of the things we're doing right now is creating perfect technology for terrorist attacks it's not a secret you take a look at drone technology but right by today already claimed that for three hundred dollars you can purchase a small drone online that's improving very fast and for terrorist activities just perfect if you want to get a picture of it there's an article in this month's leading journal of Foreign Affairs and Britain the Royal Institute Journal of International Affairs describing how we are rapidly creating the technology to permit the massive terrorist attacks on ourselves that's also typical power systems seek short term power and domination they are not concerned with security it's contrary to academic dogma can easily show that they're interested in power domination the the wealthy the welfare of their primary domestic constituencies which are wealth concentrated wealth and if there's a disaster in the long term it's not their business you can show that it's obvious with environmental issues it's the same with nuclear weapons same right now with drone technology so sure this stuff is going to go on unless we stop it you can stop it too doesn't have to go on can you offer a critique of startup culture and entrepreneurship which which offers many of the characteristic Eric turistic sivanna me but isn't so seeming characteristics I'm in start-up culture is you know it's okay people like their apps and so on but it's based very heavily on state subsidy it's not it's kind of a narrow form of entrepreneurship let so take for example the Silicon Valley culture where what are they using well they're using computers the internet to mic electronics and so on and so forth almost all developed in the state sector for decades before it's handed over to private power to for commercialization and application so yeah there is initiative there and people are having fun doing maybe interesting things but relying very heavily on the background state subsidy which takes many forms after everyone at MIT or to know it it's paid our salaries for years you know that's you know for decades computers in the internet the whole basis the IT culture were being developed right here similar places and orally and so on and finally after decades it was handed over to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to mark it and commercialize and make profits and make little things that you carry around with you but so it's a it's a kind of a it has entrepreneurial aspects but it's a parasitic but it's parasitic going much more fundamental development the really hard work the hard research and development the creative work is quite substantially in the state sector and so it's not just subsidy there are many other devices of taxpayer support for private enterprise one of the main ones is procurement so for example in the early 60s IBM through the 50s had learned mostly in government laboratories and places like this had learned to switch from punch cards to digital computers and they built the world's biggest computer in the early sixties stretch computer fastest computer but it was much too expensive for business so the government bought it that's the purchaser of last resort and I think it went to Los Alamos and that goes on all the time procurements a major form of public subsidy to private enterprise and there are many other ways that's one of the reasons why private capital does not want markets they want markets for other people but not for themselves for themselves they want a a nanny state powerful nanny state that will support them of what the significance of the entrepreneurial culture is you can judge not overwhelmed by the fact that there's thousands of new apps coming every day I think they're more important oh so I had a question about how you reconcile the the emancipatory tradition of anarchism to the kind of abstractness of the ideology itself around authority and empower and coercion because it could be argued for example that the federal government intervened in the South during the Civil War was coercive to the Confederate States we know that like it was the Civil War was a revolution of slaves against slavery and the federal government ended up intervening much later but that could be argued that was a form of authority because I yeah so how do you how do you actually navigate that would say for example the Marxist kind of definition which would be between labor and capital for example do you see that as as something that is maybe different from or offers a sort of a different perspective from anarchism because I think that that could account for the reason why for example there are such things as anarcho-capitalism it can be argued that you know several different ways that the state is intervening on my ability to pay my workers a low wage or whatnot I'm not sure I didn't understand exactly the question of so my question is Authority itself is a really abstract term authority of whom I feel like is it anything abstract about Authority we all live with it all the time that's true if you're if you're a worker named Lea a wage slave as workers understood it's true if you're for that until very recently for most women that's been obvious nothing abstract about it that the women didn't that women didn't even have legal rights in the United States until pretty recently oh my question is like if there's do workers have the authority for example to take over do they have the authority yeah why not that's again they built the plant they made the product so they do the work why should they be tools rented by some banker somewhere else I mean that's the way our institutional structure happens to be if formulated but doesn't mean it's legitimate I mean when you talk about authority or ask some questions about legitimacy the people have the right to run their own lives or do they have to be the sort of tools in the hands of far of foreign masters well you know that's a question of legitimacy not not Authority well you mentioned the civil war and there's ample evidence by now that there was a very significant slave initiative in the Civil War this is more to say about that a lot more so take the American Revolution to a large extent that was a revolution carried out in order to maintain slavery you look back at the history in seventeen rounds 1770 the in Britain the legal system was beginning to undertake strong condemnation of slavery there was one famous case Somerset case 1772 were slave owners from the United States brought their slaves with them to England the one of them escaped thee it was an effort to his owner wanted him back it's my property and it went to court then went to Lord Mansfield famous jurist who ruled that slavery is so odious that was the term that he used that it cannot be tolerated on English soil crucially it could be tolerated in the colonies but that's another story but not on English soil and the the United States was the the founders of the country are almost all slave owners and they could see the handwriting on the wall if the colonies remained under British rule probably these would apply here and they'd lose their property that was surely a significant element of the revolution and it runs right to the present I mean right to this moment the civil war still being fought simply take a look at the electoral maps say the map of the election in 2012 red states and blue states it's almost identical identical to the Civil War it's the Confederacy which I'll call themselves Republicans shifted names and the rest which was the north a large part of the motivation behind the effort to shut down the government is just revenge we want to shut down Washington and win this war finally the United States never developed class parties like labor parties they didn't amount to much but at least they were something but the u.s. never had them it's always had sectional parties and it's a reflection of the civil war which has never ended it also hasn't ended in the prisons and elsewhere it's a very deeply rooted thing in the society and hard to extirpate well I hope you all join me in thanking Noam Chomsky once more you thank you all so much for coming door looks available in the back thank you also for the question you

Channel: Remember This

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Keywords: Anarchism (Political Ideology), Free Market (Literature Subject), Noam Chomsky (Author), Capitalism (Political Ideology), Socialism (Political Ideology), Bush, Economy, Politics (TV Genre), Economics (Field Of Study), George, Crisis, Beck, Glenn, Freedom, Freedom (Musical Album), Reserve, Collapse, Dollar, America, Gold, Bank, Government, Schiff, Financial, Fed

Id: yccBBzSHFAM

Length: 71min 51sec (4311 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2015