Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, activist and social critic. He's a libertarian socialist and his ideals center around liberty, community, and freedom of association. He's very clear about his dislike of capitalism
These are my favorite sections in the book: Understanding Power.
The Propaganda Model
Around page 33
Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have written a book called Manufacturing Consent. This book argues that the mass media serve the economic and political interests of elite groups. When being asked about this, he responds in an interview:
This is really just a kind of truism: it just says that you'd expect institutions to work in their own interests, because if they didn't they wouldn't be able to function for very long.
This propaganda is a way to control the general public, according to Chomsky. Every time popular movements have succeeded in solving power to a certain extent, there has been a deepening recognition among elites in the west that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. So in the twentieth century, because the state has lost the power to coerce, elites need to have more effective propaganda to control the public mind.
This is the first point to agree with the basic features of the propaganda model: elite advocacy. The other is that there is prior plausibility: if you look at the institutional structure, you would expect that the corporate media would serve a propaganda function in a business-dominated society like ours.
The third reason is the public's perspective: the general public actually tends to agree with the basic features of the propaganda model. Most of the public thinks that the media are too conforming and too subservient to power.
The fourth is empirical validity. Chomsky and Herman have studied a great number of cases and they all support the propaganda model. However, the reason that the propaganda model is in fact valid, and it predicts that it will be irrelevant no matter how well it's proven. This is because what it reveals undermines very effective and userful ideological institutions, so it's dysfunctional to them, and will be excluded.
Social planning
Chomsky argues that we're going to need participatory social planning to do be able to solve big problems we're currently facing: such as population control or saving the environment. It would help to have more decentralization of power in this, because this would lead to decisions that reflect the interests of the entire population instead of some centralized authority. And the interest of the general population is to preserve life (whereas the interest of cooperations is to make profits).
Why would people be against decentralization of power? Some might argue that going against capitalist ideas would undermine the fact that people need to have jobs in order to survive. Chomsky emphasizes that these things can be coexisting. People would want to balance opportunities work with quality of work, with type of energy available, with conditions of personal interaction, with the need to make sure children survive, etcetera. And these considerations don't currently come up when corporate executives make decisions. They only happen when you have some participatory social planning.
Right now, we have to make big decisions about how to produce energy, because if we continue to produce energy by combustion, the human race isn't going to survive very much longer. But you need social planning for this: you can decide to put a solar panel on your house, but that doesn't really help on a large scale. This is the kind of decision where it only works if it's done a mass scale.
A small example even closer to home where you would need social planning is managing traffic. You as an individual can decide to drive safely, but others have to do so too in order for it to work.
The trouble is that capitalism works against this. The nature of the system is that's supposed to be driven by greed: no one's supposed to be concerned for anybody else, nobody's supposed to worry about the common good - those are not things that are supposed to motivate you, that's the principle of the system. The theory is that private vices lead to public benefits - that's what they teach you in economics departments. It's total bullshit, of course, but that's what they teach you. And as long the system works that way, yeah, it's going to self-destruct.
The problems with large-scale change
Chomsky argues there's plenty of room for potential and that is mostly up to whether people get organized good enough in order to create change.
There are all kinds of people why are just cynical: they don't have any faith in institutions, they don't trust anybody, they hate the government, they assume they're being manipulated and controlled and that something's going on which they don't know about. Now, that's not necessarily a move to the left: that could be the basis for fascism too - it's just a question of what people do with it. I mean, this kind of depoliticized, cynical population could easily be mobilized by a televangelist, or it could be organized by environmentalists. Mostly it just depends on who's willing to do the work.
You can never predict a revolution. It depends on whether people are grouping together, getting organized, and taking action, and taking people along with them.
Chomsky also argues that the more famous leaders of change, such as Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Rosa Parks, have been able to do so because they were supported by coming from a well-organized community. There were lots of people doing a lot of work in order to make this change possible. Part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that these real agents of change, these groups of people that are the back-bone of some of these revolutions, fall out of history. There's this common idea that A Great Man did everything, which teaches people that they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them. It takes away the feeling of agency.
The role of spectator sports in de-politicizing people
Around page 127
In the world of sports, the audience devotes an enormous amount of time to it. They have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on extremely complex discussions. And most strikingly, they're not at all in awe of the experts. They would argue with the coach of their favourite team and tell him what he should have done instead.
He associates this culture with kinship systems in more primitive cultures: there are elaborate structures around these relationships of kinship, develop experts, and theories and so on. Similarly to linguistic systems in non-literature cultures, or puberty rites. What all these things look like is that people want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don't have a lot of technology, you do other things.
In our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people can't really get involved in them in very serious way - so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient, you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left?
Well one thing that's left is sports - so you put a lot of intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.
They also have other useful functions, such as developing chauvinism. You're taught from childhood that you have got to worry about your local club. This sense of irrational loyalty some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power. It builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to awful values.
It's hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.
(A similar concept is soap operas / TV series)
How to build a social contract which is corporative in nature and recognizes individual humanity?
You could argue that there's always a tension between a collective value and an individual value. However, Chomsky argues there doesn't need to be. A crucial aspect of humanity is being a part of functioning communities, so it is for everyone important to create social bonds in which we can find satisfaction.
Same goes for living in a family. It's a crucial part of human life, but there are always going to be problems that go along with it. Sometimes a close-knit group can lead to exclusion, and to avoid exclusion people tend to do things they wouldn't want to do if they had their own way. But those are just human problems. Marx has said: socialism is an effort try to solve man's animal problems, and after having solved the animal problems, then we can face the human problems - but it's not a part of socialism to solve the human problems; socialism is an effort to get you to the point where you can face the human problems.
Anarchy
Around page 239
Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant "chaos". Anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below. According to Chomsky, libertarian and anarchist mean the same thing. In the USA, libertarianism has a different meaning: unbridled capitalism. In Europe, every anarchist is a socialist.
If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. This is not a free choice.
If we ever had a society with no wage incentive and no authority, where would the drive come from to advance and grow?
This drive is a drive to produce more. Who wants that? Companies. Whatever "drive" there is ought to be internal. As humans, we are built to want to do new things, even if they're not efficient, even if they're harmful, even if you get hurt. People want to explore, press our capacities to their limits and appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society.
Chomsky argues people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely, instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. Not only options that objectively available, but also subjectively. How people are allowed to think / how people are able to think. There are all kinds of thinking that are cut off from us in our society, not because we are incapable of them, but because we cannot imagine such things. This relates to the concept of our collective imagination.
That's one of the main purposes of socialism: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the choices forced on them by some arbitrary system of power.
We might think that people are always inclined to want and keep things for themselves, but this doesn't happen in all social structures. This doesn't happen in a family; people don't accumulate more and more for themselves regardless of the needs of other people. Chomsky points out there is a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. Extensive efforts were undertaken to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don't really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society.
Education
Around page 281
Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves and that's a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you're looking at has to somehow catch people's interest and make them want to think, and make them want to pursue and explore. The basic institutional role and function of the schools, and why they're supported, is to provide an ideological service: there's a real selection for obedience and conformity. It's more important to be on time than to get the highest grade. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that's a tragedy, that's a crime. Because you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to obey, and just proceed to through the material in whatever way they require.
Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they've been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years. People who don't get along are called people with behavioral problems or unmotivated or something like that.
Self-destruction of the U.S. Left
Around page 380
On one hand, much larger groups of people are becoming engaged in political activism in some fashion, or at least wanting to become involved in some sort of progressive activity. On the other hand, the opportunities for it are declining at the same time. People are becoming more isolated. What you find all around the country is huge mobs of people showing up at talks and wanting to get involved, but nobody around with anything for them to do, or any sense that there could be any follow-up.
In part, the problem is just divisiveness. It's passionate commitment to a very narrow position, and extreme intolerance of anyone who doesn't see it exactly the way you do. So if you have a slightly different view from the person next door on, say, abortion rights, you can't even talk to each other. There's a lot of that on the left, and it's been very self-destructive. It's made the progressive moments, the sort of "left" movements, kind of unwelcome - because people don't like it; they see it, and they don't like it.
There's just a huge amount of frittering away of energy on real absurdities. If you look at the academic left, it's mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed postmodernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people who are involved in it - but it's really good for careers and that sort of thing.
The attitudes of the general population is absolutely astonishing. For example, 83 percent of the American populations think that the economic system is inherently unfair. What is the left doing about that mere 83 percent of the population that thinks everything has to be radically changed? What we're doing is alienating them, or making them feel that we have nothing to say to them, or something like that.
What I see on the left is pretty much the same story everywhere: tremendous divisiveness, narrowness of focus, intolerance, unwillingness to meet people on their own terms, plut inertia, and just madness of various kinds.
The left is not dealing with class issues as much as they could. And these are the most important issues, because they're right at the core of the whole system of oppression. ANd also, they're the hardest ones, because there you're dealing with solid institutional structures where the core of private power is involved. I mean, other issues are hard too - like issues with patriarchy are hard. But they're modifiable without changing the whole system of power. Class issues aren't.
We have to take that 83 percent of the population that thinks that the system is inherently unfair, and increase it to a larger percentage, then we simply help people get organized to change it. There are no special tactics for that, it's just the usual education and organizing. So you get started doing it.
The decision to get involved
One of the reasons people don't get involved in activism is because they believe it is impossible to change the country, that the basic institutional structures we have now are going to remain in place for the next 200 years. People think their impact is so small.
It's hard for people to even just take a leaflet, or to give a donation at a relatively low level which means nothing to them financially. At some level people know that it's right, but they also know that to do it somewhat leads to doing it more - so they just close the door right at the beginning.
The reality is that there's a whole range of choices in the middle, and all of us have made them. People have other interests: they want to listen to music, they want to take a walk by the ocean, they want to watch the sunset. Any human being is too rich and complex just to be satisfied with these things, so you have to hit some kind of balance.
It's physically difficult for people to recognize that. Once you've recognized that the choices are there, you're always going to be faced with the question, why am I not doing more? But that's just the reality of life: if you're honest, you're always going to be faced with that question.
There are plenty of movements where loads of people joined forces. We're faced with a very high degree of disillusionment, and a very low degree of hope and perceptio nof alternatives. And that's exactly where serious ourganizers ought to be able to step in.
Morality
Around page 417
We don't know much about morality systems are set up. But a serious proposal might be something like what we know about language. For example, there is a framework of basic, fundamental principles of language that are invariant in the species, they're just fixed in our biological nature somehow - they hold for all languages, and they allow for only a very limited degree of modification, which comes from early experience. Then as soon as those wired-in options for variation are fixed, children have a whole linguistic system which allows them to say new things, and to understand new things, and to interpret new experiences that nobody's ever heard before. That's what our system of moral judgment looks like, so it's conceivable that is has a similar kind of basis.
How much variation can there be in such moral systems? Well, without understanding, we don't know. How much variation can there be in languages? Without understanding we don't know. I mean, in the case of languages, we know that it's not much variation, and in the case of moral values, I think we can make a fair guess that it also can't be much variation - and the reason is quite elementary. Our moral system appears to be complex and determinate, and there are only two factors that can enter into determining it: one is our fixed biological nature, and the other is individual experience. Well, we know that experience is extremely impoverished, it doesn't give a lot of direction.
An even closer analogy exists between language growth and the growth that appears in human beings after birth — for example, the onset of puberty. If someone came along and said, “Kids are trained to undergo puberty because they see other people,” once again everybody would laugh. Would we laugh because we know in great detail the gene mechanisms that determine puberty? As far as I can tell, no one knows much of anything about that. Yet we all assume that puberty is genetically determined.
Different social policies - what does it take?
Around page 420
What would have to happen for people to be able to do more of the real work of society - like supporting each other and education children - instead of just spending our while lives working at lame jobs for corporations?
Chomsky argues that Western Europe has societies that are not very different from the USA. They have the same corporate-run economy, the same sort of limited political system, but they just happen to pursue somewhat different social policies, for various historical reasons. So even within the range of existing societies, there are plenty of other social policies you could have.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett identifies two basic patterns of treatment: a Continental-European/Japanese model and an Anglo-American model. Her conclusion is that the Continental-European/Japanese pattern has improved the status of children and families; the Ango-American pattern has been what she calls "a war" against children and families.
This has been particularly true in the last twenty years, because the so-called "conservatives" who took over in the 1980s, aside from their love of torture and misery abroad, also happen to be passionately opposed to family values and the rights of children, and have carried out social policies which have destroyed them.
There's no reason why the USA couldn't move towards a Contential-European/Japanse model. Why do absolutist organizations have any right to exist in the first place? I mean, why should a corporation - technically a fascist organization of enormous power - have any right to tell you what kind of work you're going to do? Why is that any better than having a king tell you what kind of work you're going to do? People fought against that and overthrew it, and we can fight against it again and overthrow it.
There's plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive work around for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it - they simply aren't being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system. There's also, of course, plenty of junk work that has to get done too - but in a reasonable society, that work would just be distributed equally among everybody capable of doing it. If you can't get robots to do it, fine, then you just distribute it equally.
America's defense system
The USA has enormous military spending. The United States isn't defending itself from anybody. They have almost half the military spending in teh world, and who's attacking them? The United States hasn't been attacked since the War of 1812, there's no country in the world that has as limited security threats as they do. But they are defending rich people.
That's the main reason of the Pentagon system. It has never been about defense: the Pentagon is about the fact that rich people can have their own computers, after decades of development paid for by the public through the state sector - and it's about the fact that I.B.M. and other private corporations and investors are making huge profits off them. Or it's about the fact that the biggest civilian exporter in the country is the Boeing corporation, and the biggest single industry in the world, tourism, if founded largely on technology that was developed through the American military system - namely, airplanes - and that it's been pouring huge sums of money into sectors of the American economy for decades.
The second kind of welfare payment that's being extended is regressive fiscal measures - which are just another way of disguising welfare to teh rich. So for example, if you increase tax deductions for business expenses, let's say, that is the exact financial equivalent of giving out a welfare check. Same goes for tax deductions for home mortgages. Same goes for tax write-offs for charitable contributions.
The other thing that the republicans in the USA want to build up is crime control. There's this big superfluous population you aren't letting survive in your system, what are you going to do with them? Lock them up. The United States has the highest per capita prison population of the Western countries. Furthermore, the prisons in the United States are so inhuman by this point that they are being condemned by international human rights organizations as literally imposing torture.
If you look at the composition of the prison population, you'll find that the crime-control policy that's been developed is very finely honed to target select populations. The "War on Drugs" has very little to do with stopping the flow of drugs, and has a lot to do with controlling the inner-city populations, and poor people in general.
In fact, by now over half the prisoners in federal prisons are there on drug charges - and it's largely for possession offenses, meaning victimless crimes, about a third just for marijuana. The "War on Drugs" has been specifically targeted on the black and Hispanic populations. The drug of choice in the ghetto happens to be crack cocaine, and you get huge mandatory sentences for it; teh drug of choice in the white suburbs happens to be powder cocaine, and you don't get anywhere near the same penalties for it. In fact, the sentence ratio for those drugs in the federal courts is 100 to 1.
There's nothing new about this kind of technique of population control. If you look at the history of marijuana prohibitions in the United States, you'll find that they began with legislation in the southwestern states which was aimed at Mexican immigration who were coming in, who happened to use marijuana. It doesn't even come close to the negative consequences of alcohol, let alone tobacco. But these laws were set up to try to control a population that they were worried about.
There are no bankers or chemical corporation executives in prison in the United States for drug-related offenses. Even though about a half-trillion dollar of drug money gets laundered internationally every year - more than half of it through American banks. Even though more than 90 percent of chemical exports to Latin America are produced by chemical corporation executies in the United States.
International capital
As a result of speculative economic policies, we have a big drift internationally towards low-growth, low-wage, high-profit economies. Because national governments trying to make economic and social policy decisions just have very little leeway to do so by now, or else their economies will be wrecked by capital flight.
Building international movements
Serious changes in the economy will simple require dismantling private power alotgether - there is just no way around that in the end.
Elite planning
A lot of these topics can be seen as "conspiracy theories". Chomsky would like to drop this term. There are really only two questions. One is, how much of this is conscious planning - as happens everywhere else? And the other, how much is bad planning?
Well, it's all conscious planning. There is a lot of conscious planning among very intelligent people who are trying to maximize their power. They'd be insane if they didn't do that. Not only do they have meetings, they belong to the same golf clubs, they go to the same parties, they went to the same schools, they flow up and back from one position to another in the government and private sector, and so on and so forth. In other words, they represent the same social class: they'd be crazy if they didn't communicate and plan with each other.
Now the only significant question to ask is, is it intelligent planning? That depends on what the goals are. If the goals are to maximize corporate profits for tomorrow, then it's very intelligent planning. If the goals are to have a world where your children can survive, then it's completely idiotic. But the second thing isn't really part of the game. In fact, it's institutionalized: it's not that these people are stupid, it's that to the extent that you have a competitive system based on private control over resources, you are forced to maximize short-term gain. That's just an institutional necessity.
So in a sense the planning is "bad", but it's not stupid if you're thinking of tomorrow's profits. The question we need to ask is which of these things are we concerned about?
Keep in mind that these governmental regulatory agencies were mostly instituted by business itself, particularly capital-intensive, internationally-oriented big business - because they recognized that the predatory nature of capitalism was just going to destroy everything if they didn't bring it under control somehow. So they wanted regulation to keep things kind of organized - just like they wanted labor unions, and they wanted the New Deal programs.
Ending
This period feels like a turning point. I mean, yo ucan see very clearly where policy is driving people, and you know exactly what its goals are. The only question you can't answer is how the population is going to react as they get slammed in the face - and they are getting slammed in the face. One way would be mass unions being formed, or a movement like the civil rights or feminist movement. Other ways it could go would be Nazism, Islamic fundamentalism - those are all ways people could go too.
But the country is very disturbed. You can see it in polls. There's complete disaffection about everything. People don't trust anyone, they think everyone's lying to them, everyone's working for somebody else. The whole civil society is broken down.
There's an experiment going on. The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population, regard them as superfluous because they're not helping you make those dazzling profits - and can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people of the world? Can you have an economy where everything works like that - production by the most impoverished and exploited, for the richest and most privileged, internationally? And with large parts of population just marginalized because they don't contribute to the system? Nobody knows the answer to that question.
The rich and the powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real - and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they place no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility - certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it - that within a couple of hundred years, the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most human life will have been destroyed. Alright, if we don't start to do something about that now, it's not impossible that'll happen. In fact, it's even likely.
Whether people will react or not, who knows? Everyone's got to decide.