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Q: And that could have led to some of the misconceptions, for instance, about the Iraq War — people believing that the weapons of mass destruction had already been found.

A: Well, there, it’s pretty dramatic. There are cases, and that’s one of them, where you can see the effects of the propaganda showing almost immediately. So like in September 2002, when the propaganda began — the war drums began to beat — within a month, they had a majority of the population believing that Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States. The commitment — belief — that the weapons of mass destruction and connections to 9/11 and so on were there are so high that Bush can just say it, and there’s no reaction.

Like this morning, I was listening to the radio on the way in. The reaction to the Kay Report, was, “Okay, this proves our point.” And he can say it without real fear of contradiction, even though it’s so outlandish. On a radio address a week or two ago, the president’s Saturday radio address, the theme was that the war was justified because we removed a tyrant who was developing weapons of mass destruction, and plotting with international terrorists. Every one of those claims has been totally exploded. The only known connection to terrorism is that the war increased it, exactly as every intelligence agency predicted it was going to do. But the president can say it without fear of contradiction. That’s real propaganda. And it’s very striking because the U.S. is alone in the world on this. There’s no other country in the world where the majority of the population thought that Iraq was a threat to them.

Q: On February 15, you had millions of people around the world, and hundreds of thousands in the United States, protesting the war in Iraq. And yet some people came out of that saying, “Well, I protested, and nothing changed. The foreign policy didn’t change.”

A: You see, that goes back to the earlier discussion, where we were talking about before about institutional permanence and continuity. I mean, in the United States, where there is very little continuity of social movements, and little permanence, and no institutional base, the attitudes that people have are, “We’ll try, we’ll put out a lot of effort for the next couple months, and if it didn’t work, that shows everything’s impossible.” You know, that’s not the way any social movement’s ever worked. I mean, abolitionism, women’s rights, labor rights, anything you take — you have to expect to keep at it day after day. You have partial successes, failures — you pick up and go on. You figure [out] what did you learn last time, how you’re going to do it better next time.

But the idea that you’re going to have some kind of instant gratification, or else it was worthless, is a very typically American idea. And it’s deep in the history, it’s in the nature of the way the country works. There’s a ton of propaganda about it. You’re supposed to look for instant gratification. And if it didn’t work, well, it’s useless. Quit. I remember, for example, at the time of the Columbia strike in 1968, the students were very excited. I had discussions with them, trying to dampen down the enthusiasm. Same with France in ‘68. I, other people, were trying to dampen the enthusiasm. Because the young people involved were very dedicated, very brave, and they really believed that if they sat in for a couple of weeks, or did their thing on the streets of Paris, the whole system was going to collapse. That’s not going to happen, you know? You may make a dent. But you’re not going to achieve long-term institutional changes by sitting in a Columbia president’s office.

And when people failed to achieve the long-term goals, they regarded it as a failure. And right at that point, the massive popular movements here — the young ones — a lot of them went off into very self-destructive directions. Here, the Maoist groups, PL, the Weathermen. “We’ve shown that reform doesn’t work.” You haven’t shown anything. You’ve shown that one demonstration didn’t work — but when did it ever?

And the same is true in February. These were unprecedented protests. Of course they’re not going to stop power systems, and anyone who participated should have understood that. But they might be a barrier to the next step, if you persist with them. But you have to have a realistic understanding of where power lies, how it can adapt to large-scale protests, and where they must go if they want to really change things. This should have been used for ongoing organizing efforts. To say, yeah sure, we didn’t stop the war, we didn’t really expect to, but we want to make it harder for those guys to run the next war. And we want to make sure that we’re going to work to change the system of power which even allows them to make such decisions.

Q: Do you think that movements today are getting better at building bridges across lines of race, class, gender, religion, other lines of identity?

A: There are some that are pretty successful at it. How much that generalizes is really hard to say. Because it’s also quite easy for systems of power and domination to separate people on these issues. Take the Immigrant [Workers Freedom] Ride. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to get immigrants and workers to be on opposite sides. Same on international trade issues. I mean, there are real issues involved. If jobs are lost here, they’re going somewhere else. Well, how do you deal with that? The people and peasants in China have to eat too, so you can’t just disregard that question.

It was interesting in NAFTA — NAFTA was kind of narrow enough so that you could actually face the questions concretely. And it was quite interesting to see the debate about NAFTA, to go through it. It’s virtually unknown that the labor movement had a position on that. That was suppressed. I don’t know if you know the background of that, but it’s pretty interesting. You know, there is a Labor Advisory Council, which is the labor union groups, basically. And according to the congressional trade laws, they’re supposed to be consulted on any trade-related issue. But they weren’t even advised that NAFTA was being discussed until about a day before the congressional vote. I think they were given like twenty-four-hours notice.

Well, they did meet, nevertheless, and put together a pretty interesting proposal for a North American Free Trade Agreement — but not this one. It had other devices in it. They pointed out that this one was going to be an investor rights agreement, it’s going to harm working people — but it could be done differently, with compensatory funding, a partially European union model where they brought in Spain and Portugal and Greece, in such a way that it wouldn’t undermine Northern workers’ rights. A lot of ideas spelled out. Well, it was distributed. Never reported. The only mention of it I’ve ever seen is in stuff I wrote in Z Magazine at the time.

Their proposal happened to be almost the same as one done by the OTA, the Office of Technology Assessment, which has since been disbanded, but at that time was the congressional research organization. They did a detailed analysis of NAFTA, which reached pretty much the same conclusions: Namely, NAFTA could be good here, but not this one, because this one was aimed at low-wage, low-growth, high-profit outcomes. And it could be different, it could be done in a way that would lead to higher growth, higher wages, maybe lower profits, and that’s the way it ought to be done. Well, these are not radicals; this is OTA. Their report was never — I don’t think it was ever mentioned.

So here you have the congressional research office, the mass labor movement, giving alternative proposals for NAFTA. If you look at popular opinion, it was mostly opposed to the official version of NAFTA, either in majorities or pluralities depending on how you asked the question. Nothing in the press. I mean, the labor movement was bitterly condemned in the press by the so-called left commentators, like Anthony Lewis. But they were condemned for things they didn’t say. They were condemned for crude nationalism, and all kind of denunciations. No mention of what they actually proposed. And it died. To this day, nobody knows that any of this happened. Well, you know, if there were activist popular movements, they could have broken through on that. And you could have had a very different kind of NAFTA, which maybe would have benefited people instead of harming them.

The same thing happened at the Quebec meetings, at the summit in April 2001, where the top issue was the FTAA, which was going be modeled on NAFTA, and the declarations of the trade ministers and the headlines in the press hailed the great successes of NAFTA. The summit, first of all, never came up in the presidential campaign or election — which was interesting enough, because the issues in it are of major importance to people. They are high priority issues in polls. It never came up. Along comes the Quebec summit. You couldn’t suppress it, because there were massive protests, people breaking down the barricades, and you got to have commentary on them, and there was press commentary. But the commentary was almost entirely, “The model for the FTAA is NAFTA, which was a great success, and now we have to bring it to the hemisphere. And these crazy protesters are trying to undermine the poor, and so on and so forth.”

Well, you know, there were two major studies of NAFTA that were timed for release at the summit. They were on every editor’s desk in the country. One was Human Rights Watch, which is hard to ignore. The other is the Economic Policy Institute, which they all know … The Human Rights Watch report was on the effect of NAFTA on labor rights in the three countries. And it found negative in all three countries: It [NAFTA] harmed labor rights. The EPI report was an interesting and detailed study by specialists on the three countries about the effects of NAFTA on working people. And the conclusions were it was harmful in all three countries, and very harmful in Mexico — and not just on working people, but on businessmen and everyone else.

You know, here’s major studies by well-known organizations, timed for release at the summit, where the issue was the great success of NAFTA and can we extend it to the hemisphere. I had a friend do a database search afterwards. There was one mention of it in a column in a small newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. That’s a level of discipline — and nobody is giving them orders, nobody is saying don’t report it. It’s just the level of internalized discipline is so enormous, that you don’t mention what was obviously highly topical, very important, but the wrong conclusion. It was redoing the NAFTA story.

Q: So bringing people on the streets can actually insert those issues onto the radar screen?

A: It didn’t. The only thing it did was allow the picture to be created of crazed protesters and odd Hippies and people with funny hats who were trying to harm the poor, because they’re trying to prevent the benefits of NAFTA. But a different kind of organizing could have forced this onto the agenda. And sometimes it works. Like on the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, it did, in fact, work.

Q: What kind of organizing would say would be more effective?

A: It’s got to be something that’s not just directed to a demonstration in Quebec, and then when you fail, you say, “Okay, we gave up.” It has to be day-to-day, ongoing organization. Delegations going to the Boston Globe editorial office and saying we want you to report the result of these reports, and if you don’t, we’re going to leaflet the whole city and say you’re a bunch of this, that, and the other thing. You know, that kind of pressure could work, and could break through. Alternative journalists could have done it. Very few did. Very few even knew about it. Again, you could read it in Z Magazine or probably IndyMedia and stuff like that. But it doesn’t reach people because we don’t have the regular, continuing organizations.

If you go back to an older period — take, say, the period when the Communist Party was alive. And there’s lots and lots of things wrong with the Communist Party, Stalinism and everything else. But it was a very important organization, because it existed, and it was continuing. And you had the same guys coming around to grind the mimeograph machines week after week, even if you lost the last battle. And I remember from my own childhood — my family was mostly unemployed Jewish working class. And they were mostly in and around the Communist Party. They didn’t give a damn about the Stalinist purge or anything else — if they had to nod at the right point, they’d nod at the right point. But they cared about those issues that were being struggled about here. So my aunts were seamstresses working in what amounted to sweatshops, but they got a couple of weeks in the summer at the union summer camp, and they got some protection at work, and some health care. And they had workers’ education. This was elite culture, incidentally. It would be normal to listen to the Budapest String Quartet, or go to performances of Shakespeare plays. And a lot of this was around the periphery of the Communist Party.

The fact that they had terrible attitudes toward Russia and hopeless misunderstanding of what was going on there — some of them at least, not others — was wrong, but irrelevant to most of the participants. And in the civil rights movement, it was a major phenomenon, in the revival of the labor movements in the thirties and so on. There were continuing resources. It wasn’t the whole story — there were lots of other things going on, too. But it was one part of it. You don’t want to reconstitute the old Stalinist Party, obviously. But you want to know what was right about it, as well as what was wrong about it. And what was right about it was things like this.

Q: So there’s a need for organization that the movements of today are lacking, but there’s also a need for democracy that the movements of old were lacking in some ways.

A: You’re looking at completely top-down hierarchies, arranged orders from the Kremlin, and so on. But at the sort of grassroots level, it might have been fairly democratic and participatory. You have to look closely to know. These are hard things to develop. They do require instilling the understanding that if you go to a demonstration and you didn’t win, it doesn’t mean everything’s hopeless, and now we join the Spartacist League or something.

Q: What role does democracy play in social movements today?

A: Unless they are really participatory, they’re not going to have staying power, and shouldn’t. And these are not easy things to develop. Anybody who’s been in any popular movement, whether it’s a group of twenty people or something larger, knows that there are internal tendencies that lead to hierarchy. People’s boredom level varies. There are some who are going to stick it out for hour after hour in meetings, and others who say, “I can’t take this anymore,” and who will end up with the former types being the decision-makers. And it goes from interpersonal things like that, to just the easy tendency to delegate authority and go do something else and let them run it.

Q: And that doesn’t work either, to let people run things.

A: No, then it’s just going to become hierarchical and bureaucratized and dominated, and you’ll end up being a servant again. And that’s true in any kind of organization. It has to be struggled with all the time. I mean, it has to be internalized, it’s part of the understanding of participation in a movement, that this is what it’s going to take.

Q: It has to be this consciousness among people, to make them creative, active citizens in a way, then?

A: It has to be a consciousness, yes. I mean, just as a massive propaganda system, that everyone’s subjected to from infancy, is trying to drive them to become what are called “rational wealth maximizers” — maximize your own wealth, and don’t give a damn about anybody else — there’s huge pressures to turn people into that, and there have to be equally huge pressures, or bigger ones, to bring out other aspects of human concerns and capacities. But it takes work.

Q: The New York Times is talking about the emergence of the “other superpower” to contest American power.

A: They were worried about it. Just like they were worried about the crisis of democracy. That one sentence in The New York Times represented real fear that the world may be getting out of control. And it shows up in other respects, too. Take this whole Old Europe, New Europe business. What was that all about? And in part, it was just the expression of the absolute, passionate hatred of democracy among American elites, which is really remarkable. I mean, the fact that Old Europe is denounced because the governments took the same position as the majority of the population, and New Europe is praised because the governments overrode an even bigger majority of the population — I mean, what that tells you is amazing, as is the fact that there’s no comment on it, that it’s just taken for granted.

But there’s much deeper issues than that. Old Europe is France and Germany. That’s the industrial and commercial and financial heartland of Europe. And the concern over that, reflects an old concern — going back to the Second World War — that Europe was going to strike an independent course. And if it does it’ll be led by its heartland, France and Germany. So when they get out of line, and if they don’t follow orders from Crawford, Texas, it’s really dangerous. Because they might take Europe along with them into an independent course in world affairs. A lot of the concern about China and Japan is the same. Northeast Asia is the most dynamic economic region in the world. Its GDP is much bigger than that of the United States. It’s potentially integrated. It could go in an independent direction.

So it’s not just the second superpower — you know, popular opinion. It’s also the fact that the world has conflicting centers of power. The U.S. happens to dominate militarily, but not in other dimensions. And this is a longstanding concern. Mostly with Europe, throughout the second half of the last century, but you will remember the concerns about Japan in the 1980s — “Japan is No. 1, what’s going to happen to us?” and so on and so forth. The idea of losing control is very frightening, whether it’s control of domestic population, or control of the world system and so on.

And international policies are very heavily geared toward this. Say, taking control of Iraqi oil, or making sure that Caspian Sea pipelines go to the West. A lot of this is based on the concern that Northeast Asia might seek energy independence. Which would mean the loss of a very powerful lever of control. On the other hand, if the U.S. has control over the levers of energy, and makes sure they basically decide what happens to it — that’s a way of blocking more independent development in economic and political and social centers that are on par with, or even greater than, the United States. So all this is being thought about all the time.

Q: When some Americans see the protests around the world against, for instance, the Iraq War, they see that as anti-Americanism.

A: That’s the way it was described.

Q: Do you think that’s a valid concern?

A: The very notion is interesting. The very fact that that notion exists is interesting. Concepts like anti-Americanism only exist in totalitarian states. Suppose people in Italy protest against Berlusconi. Is that called anti-Italianism? In Russia, it was called anti-Sovietism. In Brazil, under the generals, if you protested you were anti-Brazilian. But the only way that concept can exist is if you identify the leadership with the society, the culture, the people, their aspirations, and so on. If you do that, if you accept that deeply totalitarian doctrine, you can have notions like anti-Sovietism, anti-Brazilianism, anti-Americanism, and so on.

So the very existence of the concept reflects a deeply totalitarian streak in American elite thought. I mean, you’d laugh about it if you had a book in Italy called Anti-Italianism, referring to people who protest Berlusconi’s policies. People would just break up in laughter. When you have a book in the United States called Anti-Americanism, by Paul Hollander, referring to people who criticize U.S. policies or something, people don’t laugh, it gets a favorable review in The New York Times.

So you’re right about the concept, but you should think about what it means. The concept reflects the deep-seated conception that you must subordinate yourself to the leadership: If you’re critical of the leadership, even if you think this is the greatest country in the world, you’re anti-American.

Q: What do you think the future of social movements will be, and are you optimistic or pessimistic?

A: I think the tendencies over the last thirty or forty years are pretty hopeful. But it’s really a question of trajectory. I mean, there are very competing trajectories in the world. There’s one towards centralization and militarization and domination. And disaster, because it is facing disaster. There’s another towards increasing concern over human rights, over issues of peace, over — you know, “Is this going to be an environment for our grandchildren to live in?” — and so on. And the question is which of these trajectories dominates.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen