Breakfast with Chomsky

[marmar]

Noam Chomsky on Hopes and Prospects for Activism: "We Can Achieve a Lot"


from ZNet:




Keane Bhatt: Your new book "Hopes and Prospects" begins with the story of Haiti, and that’s what we discussed last, so it’s an appropriate place to start the interview. For hundreds of thousands of people, decent, hurricane-resistant housing is a chimera. Despite the billions given to relief agencies, Carrefour camp-dwellers pay a monthly "tax" just to stay there; 1.3 million people are still internally displaced. An estimated 8,000 displaced persons have been forcibly evicted. If there were a functioning, democratic Haitian state, it could use eminent domain on behalf of the affected population to secure land for permanent housing. But in the upcoming elections that the U.S. is financing, the largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas, has been excluded along with 13 others, and there hasn't been a comprehensive initiative to provide internally displaced persons with the ID cards required to vote.

You've talked about the contempt for democracy shown before - funding (World Bank official and former Duvalier minister) Marc Bazin's candidacy against Aristide in 1990, punishing Gaza for voting the wrong way, funding opposition parties throughout Latin America - but now it seems that pretenses for supporting even procedural democracy can be abandoned. The Honduran elections under the coup regime were accepted too. Are we seeing a new trend of greater brazenness and extremism?

Noam Chomsky: I think it’s always been true. Democracy is a danger to any powerful group. Take, say, the United States - formally maybe one of the most advanced democracies in the world. And one of the earliest, in fact - in the 18th century, it was way in the lead. The founding fathers were very concerned about the danger of democracy and spoke quite openly about the need to construct the democratic institutions so that threat would be contained. That’s why the Senate has so much more power than the House, to mention just one example.

KB: But it seems that in foreign policy, there used to be a greater tolerance of formal, procedural democracy. Now, as shown by Honduras and Haiti, there's not even an effort to maintain the pretense.

NC: The scholarly literature is pretty straight on this. With regards to Latin America, but in general it's true worldwide, the main scholarship on "democracy promotion" is by Thomas Carothers. He's a neo-Reaganite, who believes that Reagan was kind of a Wilsonian trying to bring democracy, and he was in the State Department in the Reagan years working on democracy-enhancement programs. And he’s an honest scholar. And he's done studies right up to practically the present, and I won't go through the details, but his conclusion is correct and predictable. He says that the United States supports democracy if and only if it conforms to social and economic objectives. And since he's a real loyalist, he regards this as kind of a paradox.

....(snip)....

KB: I talked with an older, honest investor recently, a multi-millionaire. He discussed how, as a social norm, his class had relieved itself of any allegiance or loyalty, in contrast to the Eisenhower-era capitalists in the U.S. and East Asian elites today. If this country were to institute higher marginal tax rates - even if well below the 90 percent marginal tax rates under Eisenhower - he said he'd simply shut down what remains of his productive assets in the U.S., put thousands of his workers out of a job, change his citizenship to the UAE, and live there. In fact, after he mentioned Obama's "socialist" tendencies, he was contemplating doing just that. This untethered, transnational mentality that's now predominant is a refutation of Smith and Ricardo's notion that the capitalist class would prefer to support its own country. How does the general population combat this threat, which now extends to physically leaving the U.S. to prevent even income taxes from being levied? You've spoken about worker takeover and management as a solution. What else is in the arsenal of the general population, working through organized labor, the government or other means?

NC: What he’s describing is honest and accurate. In fact, the capitalist class in the '50s was sort of part of a social contract. It was part of the tenor of the times. During the Depression and the War, there was a real radicalization of the population -not just here but all over the world. And the post-War system was designed to reflect that. That's why you get welfare states developing in the '50s - a lot of popular pressure you couldn't escape. Changes have taken place since then and there's actually been a return to an extreme form of predatory capitalism, which means that not only will I close my business or move if I don't like what you do, but something else that's been happening, which is interesting. In the financial institutions, which by now dominate the economic system, the management level repeatedly acts in ways which will destroy their own institutions if it'll increase their benefits, and benefits are not small. You know, you take a look at the revenue of, say, Goldman Sachs - a very high percentage of it just goes to payment of management and bonuses. There was a time traditionally - say, GM in the 1950s - it was trying to develop a consumer base that would be loyal and lasting and they were thinking in terms of an institution that would remain and grow and thrive in the society. By now, a lot of the investment firms - bankers, hedge funds - are perfectly happy to destroy what they're in and come out with huge, tremendous benefits. That's a new stage of capitalism.

Regarding your question on strategies: among less radical options, using the ballot box, as was done in the 1930s and 1960s - to be sure, on a wave of large-scale popular activism. With good effect, leaving a legacy that can be carried forward. And there are many other options, depending on circumstances and level of organization and popular understanding and commitment. To bring that about is always the fundamental step.

KB: In "Hopes and Prospects" you discussed the hypocrisy at the beginning of the financial crisis: IMF proposals for the Third World were to pay back debt to core countries, raise interest rates, privatize and generally engage in pro-cyclical policies. For the U.S., the accepted prescriptions were: stimulate economy, forget about debt, nationalize industry. But since then, a very powerful current emerged and changed the policy debate - now it's about deficit reduction and austerity at home, which the Obama administration is actively fueling with its deficit commission and talk of the federal government's need to tighten its belt. Is this shift another indicator of what Simon Johnson talks about, namely the similarities between the U.S. and emerging-market oligarchies? Is the U.S. "becoming a banana republic," as he puts it? Your book mentions Citigroup's buoyant analysis of plutonomies, in which the economy functions in all respects in the interests of its richest 10 percent, largely oblivious of the needs of everyone else. Is this what’s taking place?

NC: It’s a development that’s been going on, though even more so in Europe. The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on. These are all pretty typical of Third World countries, not countries that are trying to develop a sound future economy. Let's just steal what we can and go away. Regarding Citigroup's analysis, it's certainly more so than before. It's never been untrue, but certainly more so now. Take the period that was moving toward social democracy of some kind - say the '50s and the '60s – that's when the technology that you're using right now was developed. And it was developed at taxpayer expense, but there was no particular thought that the taxpayer would benefit from it. People who would benefit from it were IBM, Microsoft, and so on. The corporate sector wanted the population of the country to pay the costs, take the risks. And it was done totally fraudulently, not so that you could have a computer. People thought they were defending themselves from the Russians or something. But planners understood. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.zcommunications.org/noam-chomsky-on-hopes-and-prospects-for-activism-we-can-achieve-a-lot-by-noam-chomsky