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<\/a><\/p>\nEveryone knows what one looks like.\u00a0 They\u2019ve got the leather boots.\u00a0 Maybe some chains.\u00a0 Trench-coats.\u00a0 They wait in dark alleys with perfectly-spherical bombs.\u00a0 A lot of \u2018em like to spike up their hair, or shave the side of their head, or do weird things like that to their appearance.\u00a0 You know what I mean.\u00a0 Everyone knows.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what an anarchist looks like.<\/p>\n
But the man I\u2019m talking to today, albeit by voice-over-internet, I\u2019m fairly certain doesn\u2019t have a shaved head.\u00a0 No Mohawk that I\u2019m aware of.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t carry any bombs.\u00a0 Especially not behind any dark alleys wearing a trench-coat.\u00a0 In fact, when he was young he tended to wear a nerdy short-sleeved shirt and necktie and those glasses with the Buddy Holly rims.\u00a0 And the few times I\u2019ve had the opportunity to hear him speak in person, he seemed very \u2026 average.\u00a0 Almost disappointingly so.\u00a0 He was more the mild-mannered Clark Kent than the brazen Superman.\u00a0 His manner of speaking is almost mesmerizingly professorial \u2014 he rarely changes his cadence or pitch, except perhaps to deliver a satirical remark, and then only using pause, not inflection.\u00a0 His thoughts often fly into contingent \u2014 though important or descriptive \u2014 fields, before returning to the point.\u00a0 One must use every brain cell to follow his speaking at times since it is so full of starts, pauses, back-tracks, codas, and re-referencing.\u00a0 This is not due to lack of confidence on his part, but because, I think, of all the ideas coming into his mind at once.<\/p>\n
If you are absolutely not familiar with who Noam Chomsky is, you are not alone.\u00a0 He almost never appears in the mainstream media, due to factors which should become clear as the interview progresses.\u00a0 Yet his intellectual stature is undeniable:<\/p>\n
The New Yorker has \u2026 termed Chomsky \u201cone of the greatest minds of the 20th Century\u201d, while the New York Times has him as \u201carguably the most important intellectual alive.\u201d\u00a0 But judged by the range, influence and novelty of his ideas, many argue that Chomsky is, in fact, the owner of one of the greatest minds in the history of our species.\u00a0 There is barely a domain of human understanding that has not been touched in some way by his thought.\u00a0 In the half-century since the 1960s, reverberations from his work have shaken the foundations of cognitive science, epistemology, media studies, psychobiology, computer science (to name but a few).\u00a0 Alongside Marx and Shakespeare, he ranks among the ten most-quoted writers in history.\u00a0 \u2014 Matt Kenard, Financial Times<\/p>\n
I remember how shocked people were when I told them I was going to interview M. I. T. Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky.\u00a0 I remember how shocked I was when he agreed to a brief interview.\u00a0 But I also know Professor Chomsky to be a very down-to-earth man, very approachable, someone who seems to draw from a vast pool of inner strength to be able to speak not only to large crowds in Universities around the world, but also to respond to endless individual emails and letters, while continuing with all his other work of research.\u00a0 (He is said to read an average of twelve scholarly journals per week, among dozens of other periodicals and newspapers.)\u00a0 With all the work the man generates, one begins to wonder if Noam Chomsky, now at the youthful age of eighty-four, wasn\u2019t cloned at some point.<\/p>\n
Whatever the case, I had the pleasure of interviewing him as I sat in Memorial Union and he in his university office in Boston.\u00a0 So many things have been written about, and discussed by, Professor Chomsky, it was a challenge to think of anything new to ask him:\u00a0 like the grandparent you can\u2019t think of what to get for Christmas because they already have everything.<\/p>\n
So I chose to be a bit selfish and ask him what I\u2019ve always wanted to ask him.\u00a0 As an out-spoken, actual, live-and-breathing anarchist, I wanted to know how he could align himself with such a controversial and marginal position.<\/p>\n
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\nMODERN SUCCESS<\/b>:\u00a0 You are, among many other things, a self-described anarchist \u2014 an anarcho-syndicalist, specifically.\u00a0 Most people think of anarchists as disenfranchised punks throwing rocks at store windows, or masked men tossing ball-shaped bombs at fat industrialists.\u00a0 Is this an accurate view?\u00a0 What is anarchy to you?<\/p>\n
NOAM CHOMSKY<\/b>:\u00a0 Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics.\u00a0 Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy.\u00a0 It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified.\u00a0 It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them.\u00a0 Their authority is not self-justifying.\u00a0 They have to give a reason for it, a justification.\u00a0 And if they can\u2019t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.\u00a0 And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency.\u00a0 It takes different forms at different times.<\/p>\n
Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular variety of anarchism which was concerned primarily, though not solely, but primarily with control over work, over the work place, over production.\u00a0 It took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, [that] they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and \u2026 democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.\u00a0 And then, you know, ideas are worked out about how exactly that should manifest itself, but I think that is the core of anarcho-syndicalist thinking.\u00a0 I mean it\u2019s not at all the general image that you described \u2014 people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows \u2014 but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none.<\/p>\n
MS<\/b>:\u00a0 With the apparent ongoing demise of the capitalist state, many people are looking at other ways to be successful, to run their lives, and I\u2019m wondering what you would say anarchy and syndicalism have to offer, things that others ideas \u2014 say, for example, state-run socialism \u2014 have failed to offer?\u00a0 Why should we choose anarchy, as opposed to, say, libertarianism?<\/p>\n
NC<\/b>:\u00a0 Well what\u2019s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U. S. phenomenon, it doesn\u2019t really exist anywhere else \u2014 a little bit in England \u2014 permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power:\u00a0 so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes.\u00a0 The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society.\u00a0 Actually that has been believed in the past.\u00a0 Adam Smith for example, one of his main arguments for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality.\u00a0 Well, we don\u2019t have to talk about that!\u00a0 That kind of \u2014<\/p>\n
MS<\/b>:\u00a0 It seems to be a continuing contention today \u2026<\/p>\n
NC<\/b>:\u00a0 Yes, and so well that kind of libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a call for some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny.\u00a0 Anarchism is quite different from that.\u00a0 It calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny.\u00a0 Including the kind of tyranny that\u2019s internal to private power concentrations.\u00a0 So why should we prefer it?\u00a0 Well I think because freedom is better than subordination.\u00a0 It\u2019s better to be free than to be a slave.\u00a0 Its\u2019 better to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and force you to observe them.\u00a0 I mean, I don\u2019t think you really need an argument for that.\u00a0 It seems like \u2026 transparent.<\/p>\n
The thing you need an argument for, and should give an argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that direction?\u00a0 And there are lots of ways within the current society.\u00a0 One way, incidentally,\u00a0 is through use of the state, to the extent that it is democratically controlled.\u00a0 I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated.\u00a0 But it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and control \u2014 could be much more so.\u00a0 And it provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power.\u00a0 Rules for safety and health in the workplace for example.\u00a0 Or insuring\u00a0 that people have decent health care, let\u2019s say.\u00a0 Many other things like that.\u00a0 They\u2019re not going to come about through private power.\u00a0 Quite the contrary.\u00a0 But they can come about through the use of the state system under limited democratic control \u2026 to carry forward reformist measures.\u00a0 I think those are fine things to do. they should be looking forward to something much more, much beyond, \u2014 namely actual, much larger-scale democratization.\u00a0 And that\u2019s possible to not only think about, but to work on.\u00a0 So one of the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out that it\u2019s quite possible to build the institutions of a future society within the present one.\u00a0 And he was thinking about far more autocratic societies than ours.\u00a0 And that\u2019s being done.\u00a0 So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one.\u00a0 And those not only can be developed, but are being developed.\u00a0 There\u2019s some important work on this by Gar Alperovitz who\u2019s involved in the enterprise systems around the Cleveland area which are worker and community controlled.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of theoretical discussion of how it might work out, from various sources.\u00a0 Some of the most worked out ideas are in what\u2019s called the \u201cparecon\u201d \u2014 participatory economics \u2014 literature and discussions.\u00a0 And there are others.\u00a0 These are at the planning and thinking level.\u00a0 And at the practical implementation level, there are steps that can be taken, while also pressing to overcome the worst \u2026 the major harms \u2026 caused by \u2026 concentration of private power through the use of state system, as long as the current system exists.\u00a0 So there\u2019s no shortage of means to pursue.<\/p>\n
As for state socialism, depends what one means by the term.\u00a0 If it\u2019s tyranny of the Bolshevik variety (and its descendants), we need not tarry on it.\u00a0 If it\u2019s a more expanded social democratic state, then the comments above apply.\u00a0 If something else, then what?\u00a0 Will it place decision-making in the hands of working people and communities, or in hands of some authority?\u00a0 If the latter, then \u2014 once again \u2014 freedom is better than subjugation, and the latter carries a very heavy burden of justification.<\/p>\n
MS<\/b>:\u00a0 Many people know you because of your and Edward Herman\u2019s development of the Propaganda Model.\u00a0 Could you briefly describe that model and why it might be important to the students at the UW-Madison?<\/p>\n
NC<\/b>:\u00a0 Well first look back a bit \u2014 a little historical framework \u2014 back in the late 19th-, early 20th century, a good deal of freedom had been won in some societies.\u00a0 At the peak of this were in fact the United States and Britain.\u00a0 By no means free societies, but by comparative standards quite advanced in this respect.\u00a0 In fact so advanced, that power systems \u2014 state and private \u2014 began to recognize that things were getting to a point where they can\u2019t control the population by force as easily as before, so they are going to have to turn to other means of control.\u00a0 And the other means of control are control of beliefs and attitudes.\u00a0 And out of that grew the public relations industry, which in those days described itself honestly as an industry of propaganda.<\/p>\n
The guru of the PR industry, Edward Bernays \u2014 incidentally, not a reactionary, but a Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal \u2014 the maiden handbook of the PR industry which he wrote back in the 1920s was called Propaganda<\/i>.\u00a0 And in it he described, correctly, the goal of the industry.\u00a0 He said our goal is to insure that the \u201cintelligent minority\u201d \u2014 and of course anyone who writes about these things is part of that intelligent minority by definition, by stipulation, so we, the intelligent minority, are the only people capable of running things, and there\u2019s that great population out there, the \u201cunwashed masses,\u201d who, if they\u2019re left alone will just get into trouble:\u00a0 so we have to, as he put it, \u201cengineer their consent,\u201d figure out ways to insure they consent to our rule and domination.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the goal of the PR industry.\u00a0 And it works in many ways.\u00a0 It\u2019s primary commitment is commercial advertising.\u00a0 In fact, Bernays made his name right at that time \u2014 late 20s \u2014 by running an advertising campaign to convince women to smoke cigarettes:\u00a0 women weren\u2019t smoking cigarettes, this big group of people who the tobacco industry isn\u2019t able to kill, so we\u2019ve got to do something about that.\u00a0 And he very successfully ran campaigns that induced women to smoke cigarettes:\u00a0 that would be, in modern terms, the cool thing to do, you know, that\u2019s the way you get to be a modern, liberated woman.\u00a0 It was very successful \u2014<\/p>\n
MS<\/b>:\u00a0 Is there a correlation between that campaign and what\u2019s happening with the big oil industry right now and climate change?<\/p>\n
NC<\/b>:\u00a0 These are just a few examples.\u00a0 These are the origins of what became a huge industry of controlling attitudes and opinions.\u00a0 Now the oil industry today, and in fact the business world generally, are engaged in comparable campaigns to try to undermine efforts to deal with a problem that\u2019s even greater than the mass murder that was caused by the tobacco industry; and it was mass murder.\u00a0 We are facing a threat, a serious threat, of catastrophic climate change.\u00a0 And it\u2019s no joke.\u00a0 And [the oil industry is] trying to impede measures to deal with it for their own short-term profit interests.\u00a0 And that includes not only the petroleum industry, but the American Chamber of Commerce \u2014 the leading business lobby \u2014 and others, who\u2019ve stated quite openly that they\u2019re conducting \u2026 they don\u2019t call it propaganda \u2026 but what would amount to propaganda campaigns to convince people that there\u2019s no real danger and we shouldn\u2019t really do much about it, and that we should concentrate on really important things like the deficit and economic growth \u2014 what they call \u2018growth\u2019 \u2014 and not worry about the fact that the human species is marching over a cliff which could be something like [human] species destruction; or at least the destruction of the possibility of a decent life for huge numbers of people.\u00a0 And there are many other correlations.<\/p>\n
In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets.\u00a0 We should recognize that.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices.\u00a0 You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself \u2026 is that it\u2019s purpose?\u00a0 No it\u2019s not.\u00a0 It\u2019s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.\u00a0 And these same institutions run political campaigns.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty much the same:\u00a0 you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.\u00a0 And so this is only one aspect of the PR industry.\u00a0 What Herman and I were discussing was another aspect of the whole propaganda system that developed roughly at that period, and that\u2019s \u201cmanufacture of consent,\u201d as it was called, [consent] to the decisions of our political leaders, or the leaders of the private economy, to try to insure that people have the right beliefs and don\u2019t try to comprehend the way decisions are being made that may not only harm them, but harm many others.\u00a0 That\u2019s propaganda in the normal sense.\u00a0 And so we were talking about mass media, and the intellectual community of the world in general, which is to a large extent dedicated to this.\u00a0 Not that people see themselves as propagandists, but \u2026 that they are themselves deeply indoctrinated into the principles of the system, which prevent them from perceiving many things that are really right on the surface, [things] that would be subversive to power if understood.\u00a0 We give plenty of examples there and there\u2019s plenty more you can mention up to the present moment, crucial ones in fact.\u00a0 That\u2019s a large part of a general system of indoctrination and control that runs parallel to controlling attitudes and \u2026 consumeristic commitments, and other devices to control people.<\/p>\n
You mentioned students before.\u00a0 Well one of the main problems for students today \u2014 a huge problem \u2014 is sky-rocketing tuitions.\u00a0 Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history?\u00a0 In the 1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher education was \u2026 pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge numbers of people.\u00a0 There hasn\u2019t been an economic change that\u2019s made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a poor country.\u00a0 And to drive the point home even more clearly, if we look just across the borders, Mexico is a poor country yet has a good educational system with free tuition.\u00a0 There was an effort by the Mexican state to raise tuition, maybe some 15 years ago or so, and there was a national student strike which had a lot of popular support, and the government backed down.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s just happened recently in Quebec, on our other border.\u00a0 Go across the ocean:\u00a0 Germany is a rich country.\u00a0 Free tuition.\u00a0 Finland has the highest-ranked education system in the world.\u00a0 Free \u2026 virtually free.\u00a0 So I don\u2019t think you can give an argument that there are economic necessities behind the incredibly high increase in tuition.\u00a0 I think these are social and economic decisions made by the people who set policy.\u00a0 And [these hikes] are part of, in my view, part of a backlash that developed in the 1970s against the liberatory tendencies of the 1960s.\u00a0 Students became much freer, more open, they were pressing for opposition to the war, for civil rights, women\u2019s rights \u2026 and the country just got too free. In fact, liberal intellectuals condemned this, called it a \u201ccrisis of democracy:\u201d\u00a0 we\u2019ve got to have more moderation of democracy.\u00a0\u00a0 They called, literally, for more commitment to indoctrination of the young, their phrase \u2026 we have to make sure that the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young do their work, so we don\u2019t have all this freedom and independence.\u00a0 And many developments took place after that.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we have enough direct documentation to prove causal relations, but you can see what happened.\u00a0 One of the things that happened was controlling students \u2014 in fact, controlling students for the rest of their lives, by simply trapping them in debt.\u00a0 That\u2019s a very effective technique of control and indoctrination.\u00a0 And I suspect \u2014 I can\u2019t prove \u2014 but I suspect that that\u2019s a large part of the reason behind [high tuitions].\u00a0 Many other parallel things happened.\u00a0 The whole economy changed in significant ways to concentrate power, to undermine workers\u2019 rights and freedom.\u00a0 In fact the economist who chaired the Federal Reserve around the Clinton years, Alan Greenspan \u2014 St. Alan as he was called then, the great genius of the economics profession who was running the economy, highly honored \u2014 he testified proudly before congress that the basis for the great economy that he was running was what he called \u201cgrowing worker insecurity.\u201d\u00a0 If workers are more insecure, they won\u2019t do things, like asking for better wages and better benefits.\u00a0 And that\u2019s healthy for the economy from a certain point of view, a point of view that says workers ought to be oppressed and controlled, and that wealth ought to be concentrated in a very few pockets.\u00a0 So yeah, that\u2019s a healthy economy, and we need growing worker insecurity, and we need growing student insecurity, for similar reasons.\u00a0 I think all of these things line up together as part of a general reaction \u2014 a bipartisan reaction, incidentally \u2014 against liberatory tendencies which manifested themselves in the 60s and have continued since.<\/p>\n
MS<\/b>:\u00a0 With the few remaining minutes we have left, I\u2019m wondering if you could leave the students with one thing you\u2019d like to say to them about how they can be successful in the future.<\/p>\n
NC<\/b>:\u00a0 There are plenty of problems in the world today, and students face a number of them, including the ones I mentioned \u2014 the joblessness, insecurity and so on.\u00a0 Yet on the other hand, there has been progress.\u00a0 In a lot of respects things are a lot more free and advanced than they were \u2026 not many years ago.\u00a0 So many things that were really matters of struggle, in fact even some barely even mentionable, say, in the 1960s, are now \u2026 partially resolved.\u00a0 Things like women\u2019s rights.\u00a0 Gay rights.\u00a0 Opposition to aggression.\u00a0 Concern for the environment \u2014 which is nowhere near where it ought to be, but far beyond the 1960s.\u00a0 These victories for freedom didn\u2019t come from gifts from above.\u00a0 They came from people struggling under conditions that are harsher than they are now.\u00a0\u00a0 There is state repression now.\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t begin to compare with, say, Cointelpro in the 1960s.\u00a0 People that don\u2019t know about that ought to read and think to find out.\u00a0 And that leaves lots of opportunities.\u00a0 Students, you know, are relatively privileged as compared with the rest of the population.\u00a0 They are also in a period of their lives where they are relatively free.\u00a0 Well that provides for all sorts of opportunities.\u00a0 In the past, such opportunities have been taken by students who have often been in the forefront of progressive change, and they have many more opportunities now.\u00a0 It\u2019s never going to be easy.\u00a0 There\u2019s going to be repression.\u00a0 There\u2019s going to be backlash.\u00a0 But that\u2019s the way society moves forward.<\/p>\n
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To read more about Chomsky\u2019s ideas, there are literally hundreds of places to do so.\u00a0 He has written dozens of books about American military imperialism, the hegemony of the poor, the advertising and PR industry and their connection to news media in particular, and \u2026\u00a0 The list goes on.\u00a0 Most of his books can be found in Madison at Rainbow Bookstore<\/a>.\u00a0 To search through subjects about which he has written, you can visit his website at Chomsky.info<\/a>, where you will find thousands of articles, interviews, and outside news commentary on Chomsky.\u00a0 My personal favorite introduction to Chomsky is the film, Manufacturing Consent:\u00a0 Chomsky and the Media<\/a>, still considered one of the top-ten documentaries of all time.<\/i><\/p>\n