The New York Times Book Review has called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today,” and the “foremost gadfly of our national conscience.” He is one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities — just one notch below Freud on a list that includes Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible. A giant in the field of linguistics, a prolific and uncompromising critic of American foreign policy, a radical activist for social justice — Noam Chomsky has managed to cram several lifetimes of intellectual and political labor in the span of his seventy-four years. He has also stirred several lifetimes’ worth of controversy: His political opponents have denounced him as a ringleader in the “blame America first” crowd, or a “self-hating Jew” who is dangerously critical of the Israeli state. Even one of the Times reviewers who heaped praise on him went on to call his political writings “maddeningly simple-minded” — a quote that Chomsky himself is fond of citing.

InTheFray Editor Victor Tan Chen met up this month with Professor Chomsky at his MIT office for an hour-long conversation on the state of today’s social movements. The focus of the interview was the recent growth in activism around the world, especially coming out of the massive popular protests against the U.S.-led war on Iraq. But in true Chomskian fashion, the discussion ranged widely — from Brazilian landless workers to sixties activism to free-trade economics to, yes, the elitist agenda of The New York Times.

(This is the complete transcript of the interview. For the highlights, including links, click here.)

Q: What do you think the present state of social movements around the globe is right now?

A: Well, it’s hard to think of a time when there has been anything approaching this level of activism, participation, and, in particular, interaction. That’s something quite new. The kinds of interaction that are reflected at the World Social Forum, for example, or at the international demonstrations at Cancún. There had never been anything like that in the past. The popular movements in the West, at least — the labor movement, the left movements from the nineteenth century — were always talking about internationalism. That’s why every union is called an international. And you have that series of [Communist] Internationals. But they were never anything remotely like internationals. Either unions, or the First and Second and Third Internationals were very localized and narrow.

Q: There wasn’t that kind of communication between national lines.

A: There was some but not much interaction. The unions are where they are: The international connections are very limited, even if they call themselves international. In Europe, there’s some integration, so the First International was a mixture of German, French, English. But, well, as you know, it just broke up. I think Marx destroyed it pretty much by moving the center to America and trying to get rid of it because he didn’t like the French influence. The Second International was substantial, but it was destroyed by the First World War. The Third International was just an agency of the Russian government. It meant nothing. The Fourth International were scattered intellectuals, mostly.

Q: So it was very top-bottom, it seems, very much centralized.

A: Well, the First International — which was the more serious one — broke up over the issue of centralization. I mean, Marx just didn’t wanted to relinquish control. And he didn’t like the French anarchists. There was a lot of Franco-German conflict. The Second International was also pretty much centralized. I mean, there were a lot of interesting people, and it was a huge organization, with huge mass parties. But it didn’t last very long; the others, not anything. These were the early attempts, in the early modern period. But then nothing much came of it. And it’s picked up through the growth of — first of all, through decolonization. Which didn’t mean necessarily throwing out foreign troops. Brazil wasn’t technically colonized, but it still had a kind of quasi-colonial relationship to the Western industrial powers. And of course, India was brutally colonized. But as decolonization and independence began to develop, and the Non-Aligned Movement developed, and the South Commission, and others, you started getting — these were reflections of popular activism throughout the South, which reached enormous proportions.

In Brazil, for example, it’s beyond anything in any Western country. In fact, what just happened in Brazil was historically pretty amazing. It’s the first time that popular movements reached this scale. A number of them: the Workers Party, the unions, the Landless Workers Movement — which played the most interesting role in many ways. They reached a sufficient scale so they could naturally take over political power over enormous odds: the centralization of capital and rich-poor gap and so on … What they can do about it is another question. There were efforts in this direction in the past. Forty years ago they did actually elect a mildly populist president — nothing remotely like Lula [Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, president of Brazil], and nothing like the populist Workers Party. But then it was just overthrown quickly by a military coup, organized from Washington and celebrated by American liberals as the greatest thing that ever happened.

Q: So there’s these external dangers that social movements face.

A: Well, that’s changed. There’s not going to be any military coup to overthrow Lula. For one thing, because the population no longer would accept it, either there or here. There’s been enough changes in popular consciousness, both in the South and, by now, in the rich countries, in the North. You couldn’t get away with a military coup now the way you could forty years ago when nobody paid attention. But it’s just almost unimaginable now.

The other, negative side is that they don’t need it now. Because the neoliberal mechanisms of the past thirty years have created conditions which undermine — severely undermine — the threat that democracy could actually function. So international financial markets have a stranglehold over Brazil and other Third World countries thanks to these measures. It’s almost unnecessary to think in terms of military coups. In fact, Lula is being compelled to follow policies more reactionary than the preceding government, the Cardoso government. It’s making it a little bit interesting to watch, and unpleasant to watch. Unless they want to pull out of the international financial system — like they create an independent new bloc of countries that just don’t want to accept these rules — unless they do that, as long as they decide to play by the rules, they have to maintain what’s called their “credibility,” with banks and foreign investors and the IMF and so on. And they have to work harder to do that than a reactionary government does, because the investors are always waiting to pounce on them if there’s any minor move towards social reform in health services or wherever. The result is he’s [Lula] got to go beyond the Cardoso government: raise interest rates higher, so on and so forth. So in a sense, they’re even harsher than the more center-right governments. And that’s coming to a crunch right now for the major players.

The point is, these things have developed in the South, in India and South Africa and other places, and there’s an enormous mobilization in the North that’s never existed before. And furthermore, there is solidarity. So at Cancún, where you were, there’s interaction among people. I mean, in Porto Alegre, when I got off the plane, I didn’t go to the World Social Forum, I went to the Via Campesina meeting — the international peasant movement, workers from all over the place. It’s alongside the World Social Forum, and interacts with it, but not the same. And it’s a powerful movement which could get participation by even Northern farmers who are, at a very different level, facing other, similar problems that are crushing them. The huge mass peasant movements in the world, which is probably more than half of the population of the world, is mirrored in the rich countries. Take a look at the food chain: There’s tremendous profits at both ends. The energy corporations, Cargill and those guys, are doing fine. But if you look at the middle, even rich countries’ farmers, the people who actually produce the food, are being crushed. Not in the sense that peasants get crushed … but the same phenomenon happens, and they have similar interests.

Q: What’s the situation for social movements in the United States right now? Is it favorable right now, the conditions for social movements?

A: The conditions are such that they ought to be able to achieve a lot. The United States is a complicated country. It’s very disorganized. There’s little in the way of political parties, the political system is almost unrelated to popular movements. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous amount of energy and activism, just very disorganized.

I travel a lot, and give talks. And one of the main reasons I go to give talks — and the organizers know it, we agree on this — is that, you know, I’ll go somewhere for a fundraiser or something, and one of the things it does, it just brings together people from that town or city or even region who are working along pretty similar lines, or at least parallel lines, and don’t have much to do with each other. But these events kind of bring them together and contribute to some further integration. This is a very disorganized, scattered country. If you just take Boston. Lots and lots of groups. But they barely know about each other. They’re doing their own thing, here, there, and the other place. I mean, the total level of participation is probably quite substantial. On the other hand, the degree of integration is slight, and the degree of involvement varies. And that means there’s not much in the way of long-term thinking or planning or strategy and so on.

Q: Why do you think there is such fragmentation within social movements within the United States?

A: In other industrial countries, these movements have tended to coalesce around the labor movement or social-democratic political parties or some kinds of ongoing institutions that maintain themselves. The United States does not have those institutions. So if I give a talk in some other industrial country, it’ll often be in a union hall. I almost never give a talk in a union hall [here] — occasionally, but it’s not a phenomenon that exists. Or even if it’s in a town hall, it’s set up by the labor council or labor party activists or something like that.

And that has both a positive side and a negative side. The positive side is that the movements here are not under the control of pretty autocratic, bureaucratized institutions. On the other hand it means there’s no center you can keep coming back to, there are no learning experiences. What was done ten years ago is forgotten because the people who did it are now somewhere else and you have to start over again and learn the same techniques. I mean, there are things you have to know: how do you distribute leaflets, how do you get people organized, how do you talk to people. And there’s just a lot of lore that’s involved in continual activism that gets lost because of the lack of continuing institutions.

In the United States, the one continuing institution is the church. The churches, a lot of the churches. So as a result, just because they exist, and they continue, a lot of the organizing and activism is around churches. I mean, just take Boston. Where do the groups have their offices? Usually in one or another church. But they’re there.

Q: [It’s] an institution to base your movement.

A: Well, there’s something there. There’s a church on Garden Street which will give you an office or something … But that’s unusual in the United States. And it’s also a big country, a very insular country, that doesn’t pay attention to the outside. There’s a tremendous amount of mobility as compared to other industrial countries — people don’t live where they grew up, others come from outside the country, and it means there’s a lack of ties.

And also this is an unusually business-run society. Other industrial countries are also largely business-run, but here it’s extraordinary. It shows up through the whole history. The U.S. has a very violent labor history. The major business-run propaganda institutions, the public relations industry, are in the U.S. or, secondarily, Britain, which is also where they had their major origins as part of the effort to control attitudes and beliefs.

And there’s enormous efforts going into trying to undermine popular organizations. And they are very centralized, and they are continuing, and they have an institutional base, and they have learning experiences — they pick up from last time and so on and so forth. So in terms of institutional structures it’s an extremely unequal battle. On the other hand it’s a pretty dissident population. And there’s plenty to be concerned about. So if you look at people’s attitudes, it looks like it ought to be an organizer’s paradise.

Q: In what sense?

A: For example, I remember on the Bicentennial, in 1976, there were lots of polls about people’s attitudes and all sorts of things. And some of them were pretty striking. One Gallup poll or something asked people, gave people slogans basically. The question was, “Is this in the Constitution?” Of course, nobody had a clue what’s in the Constitution — maybe they looked at it in eighth grade but forgot about it. So when you ask people is this in the Constitution, what you’re really asking them is this such an obvious truth that it must be in the Constitution. One of the questions was, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Fifty percent of the population thought that’s in the Constitution. Because it’s such an obvious truism. And you look at that, and you think, “Well, what are the organizers doing?” [laughs] Nobody, virtually, hears articulate support to this. Well, that’s what people think.

It’s the same on a lot of issues. Take, say, the Vietnam War. I mean, there was a huge amount of activism on the war, and there’s been a lot of studies of people’s attitudes on it. Because of the indoctrination in the academic world, people don’t go there, they don’t pursue the answers to the questions to find out what they mean, so all you know is the answers. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, for example, does regular polls on people’s attitudes towards international affairs every four years. And some of the questions are always about the Vietnam War. And there’s an open question, “What do you think of the Vietnam War?” And there’s maybe ten choices. And the one that’s had an overwhelming majority since 1969 is, “Fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake.”

If you did a poll in the Harvard Faculty Club or editorial offices or something, nobody would say that. Everybody says, “It was a mistake. It was right, but it was a mistake. It was wrong because it cost us too much, but it was a mistake, it was a disaster, it got too costly, we got into a quagmire” — and that sort of thing. Well, apparently, that’s not the popular attitude. Now, what do people mean when they say, “Fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake”? Well, in order to find that out, you have to ask the further questions. But those questions don’t come to the minds of investigators — academic investigators.

And in fact, if you look at their interpretation of it … what they say is, well, this must mean that people didn’t like the casualties. Well, maybe. But that’s not the obvious interpretation. “Fundamentally wrong and immoral” might mean something beyond just too many American casualties. But it’s been built up in the doctrinal system to be something called the “Vietnam Syndrome,” meaning you don’t want to take casualties. Actually, the polls that have been done on that show that that’s not true. Recently, the main polling institution in the country — academic one — the Program on International Policy Attitudes at Maryland — has investigated this, and they consistently show that people don’t think that casualties are a cost they’re unwilling to accept if the cause is just.

And it goes across the board. Seventy-five percent of the population before the last election — there was a Harvard project on this, [Thomas E.] Patterson’s project — they found that before the last [presidential] elections, 75 percent of the population regarded it as a farce. That’s before Florida, before the Supreme Court. In fact, if you look at this whole stolen election business, it’s of great concern among intellectuals, but there’s almost no popular resonance. They don’t care.

And I think the reason is — if you look at the Vanishing Voter Project you can see the reasons: Before the election people weren’t taking it seriously, because it’s just rich people and public relations operations and so on and so forth. If you ask people, “Is the economic system fair?”: overwhelmingly, it’s unfair. Ask people about national health insurance: There’s been very consistent support for it, some of the latest figures are about 75 percent. If it’s being discussed, it’s called “politically impossible” — meaning, the insurance companies won’t accept it. It doesn’t matter if the population would. We could go across the board. These are things that people can organize about.

Q: Why aren’t they organizing? If there’s such a degree of grievances about health care, about the minimum wage, about the lack of a U.N. role in foreign policy, why aren’t the people agitating?

A: Take the U.N. role in foreign policy. In April, before the whole thing started becoming a catastrophe, there was still about two-thirds in favor of the U.N. taking over reconstruction and the U.N. taking the lead — not the United States — in international conflicts. Take, say, Cancún. They ask the questions in skewed ways, but what basically it comes down to is that people are largely opposed — pluralities, or majorities — are opposed to the international economic agreements. But these don’t come up in the political system, and they don’t come up in media debates and so on, because the sectors that have power concentrations, including educated sectors, are almost uniform on the other side. So therefore these things just don’t come up.

At the year 2000 election, for example, the big issue that ought to have been right at the core of it, was the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which was just coming along. Nobody even mentioned it. And the reasons are simple: The population is opposed, the elites favor it. So therefore it isn’t part of the political system. It’s not part of the debate. It’s like national health care. If someone mentions it, it’s “politically impossible.” If it turns out that 75 percent of the population supports it, it doesn’t matter, it’s still politically impossible. Well, that’s the way our system works. But it means that there’s a potential for organizing which is quite substantial.

Q: Can you talk a little about your own background in social movements, the ones you’ve been involved with in the past, and what lessons you can draw from that that could apply today?

A: Well, I was very active and political as a child, as a teenager and so on, but then it was mostly Palestine-related. I was all involved in what was then called Zionist movements — they’d now be called anti-Zionist. And then in the sixties I just kind of joined in with the stuff that was going on. The civil rights movement. I was very active in organizing resistance, to try to organize national tax resistance in the sixties — organizing resistance against the [Vietnam] War. Then just hung out from there.

In the eighties, I was very heavily involved in the solidarity movements in regard to Central America. Which were a real breakthrough. They were what people would call conservative in many respects — the church, the Midwest. But it was the first time in the history of Europe or the United States ever, as far as I know, that large numbers of people from the imperial society went to live with the victims. Very courageously. To help them, to offer some protection because there’s a white face around. And a lot of them stayed. By now they’re all over the world. That’s a real breakthrough, and it’s part of the mood that led to the international solidarity that is now manifesting itself in coordination with these big Southern movements which were around building for some time.

Q: Do you see some continuity to the global justice movement?

A: The global justice movements, yeah. And they sort of grew out of this, in a kind of unplanned fashion, they just developed into these further interactions and developments. People think of the global justice movements as originating in Seattle. But that’s very misleading. They were much more powerful in the South. But they were kind of disregarded. When it hit a Northern city, you can’t disregard it any longer. So then, you know, Seattle, Genoa, Prague, Quebec — that’s visible, you can’t say I don’t see that. But if it’s peasants storming the Indian parliament and getting them to vote down the Uruguay Round — it might make a small note on the back page, even if though it’s a much more powerful movement.

Q: Because of the parochialism of Americans, or Northerners in general?

A: People in the rich countries didn’t care. Take the probably millions of people who have been killed in the Congo in the last two years. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. You can say, well, we’re sending troops to Iraq for humanitarian reasons. Whatever you think of that argument, a fraction of those forces in Eastern Congo would have deterred and maybe stopped huge massacres, way beyond anything there [in Iraq]. Of course, they don’t have oil wealth and are too unimportant to control and so on, so it doesn’t come up.

Probably the biggest international issue in the 1980s, the one that dominated the press more than anything else, was Nicaragua. A large part of the country didn’t know which side we were on. Many people thought the U.S. was supporting the government. Because the U.S. supports governments, and the guerrillas are the bad guys. And a lot of people didn’t know where Nicaragua was. An island somewhere maybe in Africa, or something like that.

There’s a lack of interest and concern about the rest of the world. When people here are asked, for example, about national health insurance. What they’re really asked about is, do you want the Canadian system? Because these people know Canada is there. But if you ask people, do you want the French system, they don’t know what you’re talking about. So these are things that have to be overcome if there’s going to real international solidarity. And the social justice movements have done it for a lot of people. They do reach out to plenty of people now who know a lot about the world. For example, by now there are plenty of people who are getting their information about ongoing events in the world through the Internet. I don’t know what the numbers are, but it’s not insubstantial. Whereas if you went back ten years, the number of people who even knew that the BBC or a foreign newspaper existed was extremely small.

Q: What kind of contribution do you think social movements can give to this distressing picture globally? What can social movements do to change the situation?

A: The bounds are endless. I mean, pick what you like. People are in favor of democratic control, they don’t want to work in corporate tyrannies, they don’t like aggression and massacre, they’d like to have social services.

Just run across the board. Every one of those things is a possibility for organizing. And nothing’s graven in stone. These are very fragile systems of control and domination. And the people in them know that — they’re always deeply concerned about any manifestation of popular activism, and react very powerfully to try to crush it. And there’s now pretty good scholarship on this, for the period after the Second World War … One of the results of the anti-fascist war was a growth of strong, kind of radical, democratic sentiment — including in the United States. You were hearing calls for worker takeover of industry, and things that went pretty far-reaching. And it struck a real panic in elite centers. And they organized huge campaigns to try to crush it. I mean, I thought I knew something about it until some of the scholarly work started to come out, and it’s shocking to see the extent and coordination and the concentration on trying to overcome what they called, “the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses.”

And through the fifties it kind of calmed things down. Then the sixties came along and everything just blew up. And it had the same reaction. We’re right in the middle of that right now. There’s tremendous fear of a “crisis of democracy” — too much democratization. The right-wing think tanks got organized to try to shift the political spectrum. The spectrum of discussion and debate changed. The educational system changed.

In fact, a lot of the neoliberal programs which come from the early seventies — you can debate what their economic impact is. It’s pretty negative, in my opinion. But it’s debatable at least. However, what’s not debatable is their effect in undermining democracy. Almost every element of them is designed to reduce the arena of popular participation and decision-making. And that runs from free financial flows — as [economist John Maynard] Keynes knew all along — to privatization. So, reducing the arena of popular choice. And you can see it dramatically in places like Brazil. You can see it here, too. The fact that people may care about Social Security and the environment and health care and so on, is just gradually squeezed out of the public arena as much as possible.

Q: And social movements can provide some antidote to that?

A: Well, you can see the fear there is among highly concentrated — and very class conscious — business and elite interests, managerial interests. That’s in business, politics, education, and media. There’s a lot of interaction. There’s high class consciousness, high degree of commitment to preventing another “crisis of democracy” from developing. And the social movements, the only answer they have to that is to have the population on their side.

And the same is true of elections. Take, say, Brazil, which is democratic in a sense that we can barely aspire to at this point. I mean, the concentration of capital that dominates the electoral system is enormous. How are they able to counter it? Well, just by having mass popular movements of pretty poor people who combine and balance, counterbalance, capital concentrations.

We don’t have that here. So here the elections are just bought. If a candidate happens to represent the interests and concerns of maybe even a large majority of the population, he can’t even enter the political system. Because they’re not organized enough to counter the concentration of capital, media, propaganda, and other mechanisms. Well, you know, that all has to be developed.

Q: Do you think that people will, if given a chance, actually organize to change some of these things? Or do people really do crave submission, like [Russian novelist Fyodor] Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor says?

A: You know, Grand Inquisitor is kind of a caricature. I think more to the point is to say what Josh Cohen and Joel Rogers wrote about twenty years ago. It’s not so much people crave submission. It’s just that the individual costs of opposition are reasonably high, and there’s a free-rider effect. Others can profit from the gains if somebody sacrifices themselves. And that makes it a hard choice for people to make that decision. Say you want to become a union organizer. You may have a rotten time of it, but the working people who you succeed in organizing may be better off at the end. But that kind of mechanism tends to dampen participation for an individual.

An individual is making a real choice that may be complicated and — by some measures — difficult. But if you measure the nature of your life by the standard criteria that are imposed on you by the doctrinal system — meaning make a lot of money, live in a nice house, don’t have people yell at you, and get a good job — if those are the criteria of what makes a decent life, then you pay a cost if you decide to become involved in a global justice movement or something else. On the other hand, there’s no reason why we should accept those values. The people who do it, they just have a different concept of what’s a decent life. But it’s drilled into you from childhood. It has a certain logic to it. And it’s easy to submit to it. And those mechanisms, much more than Grand Inquisitor-style subordination, I think are very real.

So I think Cohen and Rogers make a very convincing statement of that. They don’t think, and I don’t think, it necessarily immobilizes people. But it does reveal some of the impediments to participation as long as you subordinate yourself to the values that are imposed on you by massive propaganda systems. And they really are massive. I mean, if you look at the impact of television and commercialization and so on and so forth, it’s just enormous. It has an overwhelming effect, particularly on young people.

Go to part two

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

Go to part one

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

The New York Times Book Review has called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today,” and the “foremost gadfly of our national conscience.” He is one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities — just one notch below Freud on a list that includes Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible. A giant in the field of linguistics, a prolific and uncompromising critic of American foreign policy, a radical activist for social justice — Noam Chomsky has managed to cram several lifetimes of intellectual and political labor in the span of his seventy-four years. He has also stirred several lifetimes’ worth of controversy: His political opponents have denounced him as a ringleader in the “blame America first” crowd, or a “self-hating Jew” who is dangerously critical of the Israeli state. Even one of the Times reviewers who heaped praise on him went on to call his political writings “maddeningly simple-minded” — a quote that Chomsky himself is fond of citing.

InTheFray Editor Victor Tan Chen met up this month with Professor Chomsky at his MIT office for an hour-long conversation on the state of today’s social movements. The focus of the interview was the recent growth in activism around the world, especially coming out of the massive popular protests against the U.S.-led war on Iraq. But in true Chomskian fashion, the discussion ranged widely — from Brazilian landless workers to sixties activism to free-trade economics to, yes, the elitist agenda of The New York Times.

(The text below includes highlights from the interview, as well as links and the Story Index. For the complete transcript, click here.)

Lost in ‘paradise’

Q: What do you think the present state of social movements around the globe is right now?

A: Well, it’s hard to think of a time when there has been anything approaching this level of activism, participation, and, in particular, interaction. That’s something quite new. The kinds of interaction that are reflected at the World Social Forum, for example, or at the international demonstrations at Cancún [against the World Trade Organization]. There had never been anything like that in the past. The popular movements in the West, at least, were always talking about internationalism. That’s why every union is called an international. And you have that series of [Communist] Internationals. But they were never anything remotely like internationals. Either unions or the Internationals were very localized and narrow. [Click here for more on the Communist Internationals.]

In Brazil, for example, it’s beyond anything in any Western country. In fact, what just happened in Brazil was historically pretty amazing. It’s the first time that popular movements reached this scale. A number of them: the Workers Party, the unions, the Landless Workers Movement — which played the most interesting role in many ways. They reached a sufficient scale so they could naturally take over political power over enormous odds: the centralization of capital and rich-poor gap and so on.

What they can do about it is another question. There were efforts in this direction in the past. Forty years ago they did actually elect a mildly populist president — nothing remotely like Lula [Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, president of Brazil], and nothing like the populist Workers Party. But then it was just overthrown quickly by a military coup, organized from Washington and celebrated by American liberals as the greatest thing that ever happened.

Q: So there’s these external dangers that social movements face.

A: Well, that’s changed. There’s not going to be any military coup to overthrow Lula. For one thing, because the population no longer would accept it, either there or here. There’s been enough changes in popular consciousness, both in the South and, by now, in the rich countries, in the North.

The other, negative side is that they don’t need it now. Because the neoliberal mechanisms of the past thirty years have created conditions which undermine — severely undermine — the threat that democracy could actually function. So international financial markets have a stranglehold over Brazil and other Third World countries thanks to these measures. It’s almost unnecessary to think in terms of military coups. In fact, Lula is being compelled to follow policies more reactionary than the preceding government, the Cardoso government. [Click here for more on how foreign investors constrain the actions of developing countries like Brazil.]

The point is, these things have developed in the South, in India and South Africa and other places, and there’s an enormous mobilization in the North that’s never existed before. And furthermore, there is solidarity. I went to the Via Campesina meeting [in Porto Alegre this year] — the international peasant movement, workers from all over the place. It’s alongside the World Social Forum, and interacts with it, but not the same. And it’s a powerful movement which could get participation by even Northern farmers who are, at a very different level, facing other, similar problems that are crushing them.

Q: What’s the situation for social movements in the United States right now?

A: The conditions are such that they ought to be able to achieve a lot. The United States is a complicated country. There’s little in the way of political parties, the political system is almost unrelated to popular movements. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous amount of energy and activism, just very disorganized. Just take Boston. Lots and lots of groups. But they barely know about each other. They’re doing their own thing, here, there, and the other place. And that means there’s not much in the way of long-term thinking or planning or strategy and so on.

Q: Why do you think there is such fragmentation within social movements within the United States?

A: In other industrial countries, these movements have tended to coalesce around the labor movement or social-democratic political parties or some kinds of ongoing institutions that maintain themselves. The United States does not have those institutions. And that has both a positive side and a negative side. The positive side is that the movements here are not under the control of pretty autocratic, bureaucratized institutions. On the other hand it means there’s no center you can keep coming back to, there are no learning experiences. What was done ten years ago is forgotten because the people who did it are now somewhere else and you have to start over again and learn the same techniques. [Click here for discussion of the role of U.S. churches in promoting activism.]

It’s also a big country, a very insular country, that doesn’t pay attention to the outside. There’s a tremendous amount of mobility as compared to other industrial countries — people don’t live where they grew up, others come from outside the country, and it means there’s a lack of ties.

And also this is an unusually business-run society. The major business-run propaganda institutions, the public relations industry, are in the U.S. or, secondarily, Britain, which is also where they had their major origins as part of the effort to control attitudes and beliefs. And there’s enormous efforts going into trying to undermine popular organizations. On the other hand it’s a pretty dissident population. And there’s plenty to be concerned about. So if you look at people’s attitudes, it looks like it ought to be an organizer’s paradise.

Q: In what sense?

A: For example, I remember on the Bicentennial, in 1976, there were lots of polls about people’s attitudes. One Gallup poll gave people slogans. The question was, “Is this in the Constitution?” Of course, nobody had a clue what’s in the Constitution — maybe they looked at it in eighth grade but forgot about it. So when you ask people is this in the Constitution, what you’re really asking them is this such an obvious truth that it must be in the Constitution. One of the questions was, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Fifty percent of the population thought that’s in the Constitution. Because it’s such an obvious truism. And you look at that, and you think, “Well, what are the organizers doing?” [laughs]

It’s the same on a lot of issues. Take, say, the Vietnam War. There was a huge amount of activism on the war, and there’s been a lot of studies of people’s attitudes on it. Because of the indoctrination in the academic world, people don’t go there, they don’t pursue the answers to the questions to find out what they mean. [Click here for more on public attitudes toward the Vietnam War.]

And it goes across the board. [Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project] found that before the last [presidential] elections, 75 percent of the population regarded it as a farce. That’s before Florida, before the Supreme Court. In fact, if you look at this whole stolen election business, it’s of great concern among intellectuals, but there’s almost no popular resonance. They don’t care.

And I think the reason is — if you look at the Vanishing Voter Project you can see the reasons: Before the election people weren’t taking it seriously, because it’s just rich people and public relations operations and so on and so forth. If you ask people, “Is the economic system fair?”: overwhelmingly, it’s unfair. Ask people about national health insurance: There’s been very consistent support for it, some of the latest figures are about 75 percent. If it’s being discussed, it’s called “politically impossible” — meaning, the insurance companies won’t accept it. It doesn’t matter if the population would. We could go across the board. These are things that people can organize about. [Click here for more on how important issues are kept out of the public arena.]

Democracy as a weapon

Q: Can you talk a little about your own background in social movements, the ones you’ve been involved with in the past, and what lessons you can draw from that that could apply today?

A: Well, I was very active and political as a child, as a teenager and so on, but then it was mostly Palestine-related. I was all involved in what was then called Zionist movements — they’d now be called anti-Zionist. And then in the sixties I just kind of joined in with the stuff that was going on. The civil rights movement. I was very active in organizing resistance, to try to organize national tax resistance in the sixties — organizing resistance against the [Vietnam] War. Then just hung out from there.

In the eighties, I was very heavily involved in the solidarity movements in regard to Central America. Which were a real breakthrough. They were what people would call conservative in many respects — the church, the Midwest. But it was the first time in the history of Europe or the United States ever, as far as I know, that large numbers of people from the imperial society went to live with the victims.

Q: Do you see some continuity to the global justice movement?

A: The global justice movements, yeah. And they sort of grew out of this, in a kind of unplanned fashion, they just developed into these further interactions and developments. People think of the global justice movements as originating in Seattle. But that’s very misleading. They were much more powerful in the South. But they were kind of disregarded.

People in the rich countries didn’t care. Take the probably millions of people who have been killed in the Congo in the last two years. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. You can say, well, we’re sending troops to Iraq for humanitarian reasons. Whatever you think of that argument, a fraction of those forces in Eastern Congo would have deterred and maybe stopped huge massacres, way beyond anything there [in Iraq]. Of course, they don’t have oil wealth and are too unimportant to control and so on, so it doesn’t come up. [Click here for discussion of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.]

There’s a lack of interest and concern about the rest of the world. These are things that have to be overcome if there’s going to real international solidarity. And the social justice movements have done it for a lot of people. They do reach out to plenty of people now who know a lot about the world. For example, by now there are plenty of people who are getting their information about ongoing events in the world through the Internet.

Q: What can social movements do to change the situation?

A: The bounds are endless. I mean, pick what you like. People are in favor of democratic control, they don’t want to work in corporate tyrannies, they don’t like aggression and massacre, they’d like to have social services.

Just run across the board. Every one of those things is a possibility for organizing. And nothing’s graven in stone. These are very fragile systems of control and domination. And the people in them know that — they’re always deeply concerned about any manifestation of popular activism, and react very powerfully to try to crush it. [Click here for discussion of the backlash against popular uprisings since World War II.]

We’re right in the middle of that right now. There’s tremendous fear of a “crisis of democracy” — too much democratization. The right-wing think tanks got organized to try to shift the political spectrum. The spectrum of discussion and debate changed. The educational system changed.

In fact, a lot of the neoliberal programs which come from the early seventies — you can debate what their economic impact is. What’s not debatable is their effect in undermining democracy. Almost every element of them is designed to reduce the arena of popular participation and decision-making. And that runs from free financial flows to privatization. So, reducing the arena of popular choice. The fact that people may care about Social Security and the environment and health care and so on, is just gradually squeezed out of the public arena as much as possible.

Q: And social movements can provide some antidote to that?

A: Well, you can see the fear there is among highly concentrated business and elite interests. There’s high class consciousness, high degree of commitment to preventing another “crisis of democracy” from developing. And the social movements, the only answer they have to that is to have the population on their side.

And the same is true of elections. The concentration of capital that dominates the electoral system [in Brazil] is enormous. How are they able to counter it? Well, just by having mass popular movements of pretty poor people who combine and balance, counterbalance, capital concentrations. We don’t have that here. So here the elections are just bought. If a candidate happens to represent the interests and concerns of maybe even a large majority of the population, he can’t even enter the political system.

Q: Do you think that people will, if given a chance, actually organize to change some of these things?

A: It’s not so much people crave submission. It’s just that the individual costs of opposition are reasonably high, and there’s a free-rider effect. Others can profit from the gains if somebody sacrifices themselves. And that makes it a hard choice for people to make that decision. If you measure the nature of your life by the standard criteria that are imposed on you by the doctrinal system — meaning make a lot of money, live in a nice house, don’t have people yell at you, and get a good job — if those are the criteria of what makes a decent life, then you pay a cost if you decide to become involved in a global justice movement or something else.

[Joshua] Cohen and [Joel] Rogers make a very convincing statement of that. They don’t think, and I don’t think, it necessarily immobilizes people. But it does reveal some of the impediments to participation as long as you subordinate yourself to the values that are imposed on you by massive propaganda systems. And they really are massive. I mean, if you look at the impact of television and commercialization and so on and so forth, it’s just enormous. It has an overwhelming effect, particularly on young people.

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.

Like this morning, I was listening to the radio on the way in. The [president’s] 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.

A culture of instant gratification

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.

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. There’s a ton of propaganda about it. You’re supposed to look for instant gratification. [Click here for discussion of the 1968 Columbia University strike.] And when people [in the seventies] 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.

These were unprecedented protests [in February]. 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.

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. 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. [Click here for discussion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).]

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 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 [the demonstrations surrounding the 2001 Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec]. Again, you could read [about] 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. [Click here for discussion of Chomsky’s family and their involvement with the Communist Party.] 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.

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. [Click here for more on the importance of democracy in movements.]

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

A: It has to be a consciousness, yes. 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. 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.

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. [Click here for discussion of the growing power of Northeast Asia.]

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. 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.

Q: When some Americans see the protests around the world against, for instance, the Iraq War, they see that as anti-Americanism. 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. [Click here for more on anti-Americanism.]

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