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Learning from Chomsky
Cover Story
Compiled by Ambreena Aziz

“In conversation (with David Barsamian), Chomsky is more relaxed, tentative, and discursive than he is in his books or his public speaking engagements.”
Vancouver Sun

In accordance with the spirit of paying tribute to “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, we bring to our readers a fascinating selection of dialogue excerpts between veteran radio interviewer and long time activist David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky. Together they explore and fathom the powerful maze of information, ideas and analysis on subjects that are usually best left out. They urge the listeners to evaluate, discern and condemn the illusions of corporate power and face the truth.

Learning about Chomsky

A lot of people don’t know that your given name is actually Avram. When did that switch take place?

Before I was conscious. My parents told me that when I was a couple of months old they didn’t want everyone calling me Abie, so they figured they’d switch to the second name.

Is Abie the diminutive of Noam?

No, of Avram. Avram is Abraham.

Is it Noam in Hebrew?

Yes don’t tell anybody – it means “pleasantness”.

Surely the irony was noted by your parents. You once told me there was a little bit of gender confusion around your name.

I once had to get my birth certificate for some reason. I wrote a letter to City Hall in Philadelphia. They sent me a copy. The birth certificate had my name crossed off in pencil. Some clerk didn’t believe it and changed Noam to Naomi. That’s understandable. But they also changed Avram to Avrane. I think the idea is that girls could have crazy names, but boys have to have names like John or Tom. They didn’t change M to F, so I was still male.

You talked about the demands on your time, for example, the hours you’re spending on e–mail. How do you organize your time? With the constant and ever–increasing demands on your time, how do you do it?

Badly. There’s no way to do it. There are physical limitations. The day’s twenty–four hours long. If you do one thing, you’re not doing something else.

But if you’re spending a couple of hours responding to e–mail, you’re not writing an article on linguistics or a political article for Z.

That’s a decision I made forty years ago. You cannot overcome the fact that time is finite. So you make your choices. Maybe badly, maybe well, but there’s no algorithm, no procedure to give you the right answer.

I’d like to put readers in this office space for a moment. Your desk is pretty neat right now. There are usually even higher piles of books. There are at least six or seven piles, stacks of books and papers, and on your filing cabinets even more. How do you divide your labor? You’ve just been away for about two weeks. You come back and have this avalanche of mail, phone calls, things to read. How do you get through this? What are you prioritizing here? Is there an order to this madness?

First of all, it looks remarkably neat now because while I was away they did something really nasty. They painted and cleaned the office, which I never would have permitted while I was here. So it looks surprisingly clean. You may have noticed I’m trying to take care of that.

So it does look neater than usual. But if you want to know what it’s like, you’ve been at our house. Around 4:30 this morning there was what we thought was an earthquake, a huge noise. Our bedroom is right next to the study. We went in and discovered that these big piles of books, six feet high, a couple of piles had fallen and were scattered all over the floor. That’s where I put the books that are urgent reading. Sometimes when I’m having an extremely boring phone call, I try to calculate how many centuries I’d have to live in order to read the urgent books if I were to read twenty–four hours a day, seven days a week at some speed reading pace. It’s pretty depressing. So the answer to your question is, I don’t get anywhere near doing what I would like to do.

You make yourself available for various groups all over the country. You made that choice pretty early on. Why don’t other intellectuals, other privileged people in your position, get engaged politically?

Individuals have their own reasons. Presumably the reason most don’t is because they think they’re doing the right thing. That is, I’m sure that overwhelmingly people who are supportive of atrocious acts of power and privilege do believe and convince themselves that it was the right thing to do, which is extremely easy.
In fact, a standard technique of belief formation is to do something in your own interest and then to construct a framework in which that’s the right thing to do. We all know this from our own experience. We always manage to construct our own framework that says, yes, that was the right thing to do and it’s going to be good. Sometimes the conclusions are accurate. It’s not always self–deception. But it’s very easy to fall into self–deception when it’s advantageous. It’s not surprising.

One of the things I’ve observed over the years of working with you and watching you interact with others is a sense of balance and enormous patience. You’re very patient with people, particularly people who ask the most inane kinds of questions. Is this something you’ve cultivated?

First of all, I’m usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside isn’t necessarily what’s inside. But as far as questions are concerned, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating. I shouldn’t. I should expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on the other hand, what you’re describing as inane questions usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People have no reason to believe anything other than what they’re saying. If you think about where the questioner is coming from, what the person has been exposed to, that’s a very rational and intelligent question. It may sound inane from some other point of view, but it’s not at all inane from within the framework in which it’s being raised. It’s usually quite reasonable. So there’s nothing to be irritated about.

You may be sorry about the conditions in which the questions arise. The thing to do is to try to help them get out of their intellectual confinement, which is not just accidental, as I mentioned. There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it’s possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative.
If you’re independent–minded in school, you’re probably going to get in trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view sound inane, but from their point of view are completely reasonable.

In all these talks that you’ve given, you must have reached hundreds of thousands of people, your articles, the interviews, the radio, the TV. It must put a tremendous, not just a physical burden on you, but an emotional one, too. Everything is riding on your shoulders. I’m concerned about that, just as a friend.

I don’t feel that way at all. I feel I’m riding on other people’s shoulders. When I go to give a talk in Chicago, say, I just show up. They did all the work. All I did is take a plane, give a couple of talks, and go home. The people there did all the work. I just came back from Australia. Those guys have been working for months to set everything up, and they’re still working. I went, had a nice time, talked at a bunch of places. I’m exploiting other people. Actually, it’s mutual exploitation. I’m not trying to be modest about it. There are some things that I can do pretty well. Over the years I’ve tried my hand at a lot of things.

Like what?

I did spend a lot of time, believe it or not, organizing and going to meetings, like in the early days of Resist, of which I was one of the founders. I religiously went to all the meetings and sat there and was useless and bored. Finally, out of all this, a kind of division of labor emerged by mutual consent. We would all do the things we can do.
There are some things I just can’t do at all and other things I can do very easily. I do the things I can do easily. But the serious work is always done by organizers. There’s no question about that. They’re down there everyday, doing the hard work, preparing the ground, bringing out the effects. There is absolutely no effect in giving a talk. It’s like water under a bridge, unless people do something with it. If it is a technique, a device for getting people to think and bringing them together and getting them to do something, fine, then it was worth it. Otherwise it was a waste of time, self–indulgence.

I had a glimpse of what you go through. In November I was in Seattle and Olympia. I gave three public talks, three interviews, and a workshop in a day and a half. At the end of that time, my brains were completely fried. I had no idea what I’d said to whom. I was wondering, how do you keep not just your equilibrium and equanimity, but that separation of what you said?

As far as I know, I have only one talent. I’m not trying to be modest. I think I know what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. The one talent that I have which I know many other friends don’t seem to have is I’ve got some quirk in my brain which makes it work like separate buffers in a computer. If you play around with a computer you know you can put things in different places and they just stay there and you can go back to them whenever you feel like it and they’re there. I can somehow do that. I can write a very technical paper in snatches: a piece on an airplane, another piece three weeks later, six months later finally get back to it and pick up where I left off. Somehow I don’t have any problem switching very quickly from one thing to another. I have some other friends like this. I had one, a well–known logician in Israel, who was a very close friend. We would see each other every five or six years. We would always just pick up the conversation where we had left it off, without any break, without even noticing it, particularly. We didn’t even notice it until people seemed to find it strange.

You continue to be in tremendous demand for these speaking engagements. Are you considering stopping?

I would be delighted to stop. For me it’s not a great joy, frankly. I do it because I like to do it. You meet wonderful people and they’re doing terrific things. It’s the most important thing I can imagine doing. But if the world would go away, I’d be happy to stop. What ought to be happening is that a lot of younger people ought to be coming along and doing all these things. If that happens, fine. I’m glad to drift off into the background. That’s fine by me. It’s not happening much. That’s another thing that I worry about. There’s a real invisibility of left intellectuals who might get involved. I’m not talking about people who want to come by and say, okay, I’m your leader. Follow me. I’ll run your affairs. There’s always plenty of those people around.

Learning to Encounter Propaganda

Let’s talk about a theme that we return to periodically, and that is propaganda and indoctrination. As a teacher, how do you get people to think for themselves? Can you in fact impart tools that will enable that?

You learn by doing, and you figure out how to do things by watching other people do them. That’s the way you learn to be a good carpenter, for example, and the way you learn to be a good physicist. Nobody can train you on how to do physics. You don’t teach methodology courses in the natural sciences. You may in the social sciences. In any field that has significant intellectual content, you don’t teach methodology. You just watch people doing it and participate with them in doing it. I don’t try to persuade people, at least not consciously. Maybe I do. If so, it’s a mistake.

The right way to do things is not to try to persuade people you’re right but to challenge them to think it through for themselves. There’s nothing in human affairs of which we can speak with very great confidence, even in the hard natural sciences that’s largely true. In complicated areas, like human affairs, we don’t have an extremely high level of confidence, and often a very low level. In the case of human affairs, international affairs, family relations, whatever it may be, you can compile evidence and you can put things together and look at them from a certain way. The right approach is simply to encourage people to do that. A common response that I get, even on things like chat networks, is, I can’t believe anything you’re saying. It’s totally in conflict with what I’ve learned and always believed, and I don’t have time to look up all those footnotes. How do I know what you’re saying is true? That’s a plausible reaction. I tell people it’s the right reaction. You shouldn’t believe what I say is true. The footnotes are there, so you can find out if you feel like it, but if you don’t want to bother, nothing can be done. Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.

Learning to live ‘together’

Another comment I hear is that people say, I’m no Noam Chomsky. I don’t have his resources. I work at Logan Airport from 9 to 5. I’ve got a mortgage to pay. I don’t have the access and the ability. Does it take special brains?

It doesn’t take special brains, but it takes special privilege. Those people are right. You have to have special privilege, which we have. It’s unfair, but we’ve got it. To have the resources, training, time, the control over your own life. Maybe I work a hundred hours a week, but it’s a hundred I choose. That’s a rare luxury. Only a tiny sector of the population can enjoy that, let alone the resources and the training. It’s extremely hard to do it by yourself. However, we shouldn’t exaggerate. Many of the people who do this best are people who lack privilege, for one thing because they have several advantages. Not having undergone a good education, not being subjected to the huge flow of indoctrination, of which an education largely is, and also not having participated by taking part in the system of indoctrination and control, so that you internalize it. By indoctrination I mean from kindergarten up through professional life. Not being part of that, you’re somewhat more free. So there are advantages also to being outside of the system of privilege and domination.

But it’s true that the person who’s working fifty hours a week to put food on the table does not have the luxury we do. That’s why people get together. That’s what unions were about, for workers’ education, which often came out of the unions in the workers’ movement. Over quite a range, in fact: literature, history, science, mathematics. Some of the great books on science and mathematics for the public (for the millions) were written by left–oriented specialists, and such topics found their way into workers’ education, often union–based, sometimes offshoots. Very little is done individually. It’s usually done in groups by collective action and interchange and critique and challenge, with students typically playing an active and often critical role. Part of the genius of the system of domination and control is to separate people from one another so that doesn’t happen. We can’t “consult our neighbors”, as one of my favorite Wobbly singers once put it back in the 1930s. As long as we can’t consult our neighbors, we’ll believe that there are good times. It’s important to make sure that people don’t consult their neighbors.

Learning about Children

Do people have to “discover their inner child” in order to ask the obvious questions?

Anyone who has had any dealings with children knows that they’re curious and creative. They want to explore things and figure out what’s happening. A good bit of schooling is an effort to drive this out of them and to fit them into a mold, make them behave, stop thinking, not cause any trouble. It goes right from kindergarten up to what Huntington was talking about, namely, keep the rabble out of their hair. People are supposed to be obedient producers, do what they’re told, and the rest of your life is supposed to be passive consuming. Don’t think about things. Don’t know about things. Don’t bother your head with things like the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) or international affairs. Just do what you’re told, pay attention to something else and maximize your consumption. That’s the role of the public.

Learning not to Deify

You don’t think highly of the deification of individuals and the construction of cults around people?

That’s putting it pretty mildly. I don’t think you should deify anybody or anything. In the fields where there really is intellectual substance and progress, everyone knows that this is not how it works. In the hard sciences, for example, the way you make progress is in graduate seminars, where half the ideas are coming from the students. There are people who have interesting ideas, and they’re usually partially right and particularly wrong. You can try to fix them up, improve and change them, but there’s no Einsteinism in physics. You have notions like that only in fields that are, either consciously or unconsciously, covering up a lack of intellectual substance.

Learning about the Internet

Talk about what’s been called the seismic shift from print to cyberspace. What kind of effect is that going to have on the future of research? What will the archives of the future look like?

Nobody really knows. Part of the reason is that nobody knows the longevity of the methods of storage that are now being used There have been some technical conferences of librarians and others to discuss how long electronic storage will last. You can be pretty sure that seventeenth–century books will last, because they were made of good paper. Take a look at them. I do often. They’re in real good shape and are fun to read. Then look at a twentieth–century book. It’s much less likely that it’s going to be around long. The paper’s much cheaper. It’s going to deteriorate and disintegrate. Things are being put over into electronic storage, and here there’s just not a lot of experience. So it’s a good question what the shape of the archives will be.

On the other hand, there’s an overload problem. The real problem in the sciences and elsewhere is not shortage of information. It’s sensible analysis of information. Just the amount of e–mail communication is a terrific burden, and a growing one, for business too.

Another thing which I see myself is that it’s just too damn easy. Anybody who has some harebrained idea for three seconds can punch a key, and all of a sudden there’s something that half the people in the world see. It’s a sense of power. The half of the people of the world who are receiving it have to do something with it. You should see some of the stuff I get.

Also, people get addicted. There are people who are simply addicted to the Web. They spend time surfing the Web. People who wouldn’t care where France is are getting the latest newspapers from Tibet. It’s an addiction which could be harmful.

So, it’s contributing to the atomization that people experience?

The interconnection among people that the Internet establishes is very positive in many ways, for organizing and just for human life. But it has its downside, too. I’ve spoken to friends whose teenage children go up to their rooms after dinner and start their social life with virtual characters, chat friends, and who make up fake personas and may be are living in some other country. This is their social circle. They are with their friends on–line who are pretending to be such–and–such and they are pretending to be so–and–so. The psychic effect of this is something I wouldn’t like to think about.

We are human beings. Face–to–face contact means a lot. Not having an affair with some sixty–year–old guy who’s pretending to be a fourteen–year–old girl in some other country. There’s an awful lot of this stuff going on. It’s extremely hard to say what the net effect of the whole thing is.

However, this is all small potatoes. The real problem is totally different. The corporations have, only in the last few years, discovered that this public creation can be a tremendous tool for profit, for basically a home marketing service. And marketing means not just perfumes, but also attitudes, beliefs, consumerism, and so on. And they want to take control of it. Whether that’s technically possible is not so certain. But that’s being worked on.

Let’s move on to the Internet and issues of privacy. Unbeknownst to many Internet users, businesses are collecting profiles and amassing data on people’s preferences and interests. What are the implications of that?

The implications could be pretty serious, but in my view they are all secondary to another issue, which is Internet access. The huge mergers that are going on in the media megacorporations carry the threat which is not at all remote that they’ll be able to effectively direct access to favored sites, meaning turning the Internet system even more than it is now into a home shopping service rather than information and interaction.

The megamergers like AOL and Time Warner offer technical possibilities to ensure that getting on the Internet will draw you into what they want you to see, not what you want to see. That’s very dangerous. The Internet, is a tremendous tool for information, understanding, organizing, and communication. There is no doubt at all that the business world, which has been given this public gift, intends to turn it into something else. If they’re able to do it, that will be a very serious blow to freedom and democracy.

You described the Internet to me once as a “lethal weapon”. Someone once wrote an article and put your name on it and circulated it on the Net.

That happened. The article was then picked off the Net and published. A lot of ugly things can happen.

Learning about Linguistics

Talk a little bit about linguistics. In layman’s terms, could you explain your theory of language?

First of all, theories aren’t personal. Nobody owns them. So there is an approach to language of which I’m one of the participants in studying it and there are contributors from lots of sources and plenty of interaction. It starts from the fact, and it’s not a very controversial fact, that the capacity for language is a species–specific property. That is, every normal human being has that capacity. As far as we know it is biologically isolated.

A capacity isn’t one thing. It has many strands. So for example, the fact that I’m using my tongue when I speak is not biologically isolated. Other organisms have tongues, like cats. And undoubtedly there are many other aspects of it that are shared by primates or mammals or maybe all of life.

But some particular crucial aspects of language do appear to be biologically quite isolated with properties that we don’t find elsewhere in the biological world. There’s nothing homologous, meaning same origins, or analogous, meaning roughly the same structure, among other species. So it’s some kind of unique aspect of human intelligence that may have developed in many hominid lines, but only one has survived, namely us.

The one that survived apparently came from a pretty small breeding group, maybe tens of thousands of people, may be a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago, something in that range. Since that time, there has been essentially no time for evolutionary effects to have become detectable and, as far as is known, there’s extremely little genetic variation among existing humans as compared with other species. So we’re a very homogenous species, and the language faculty in particular seems to be essentially shared. What that means is that if your kids grow up in East Africa they’ll learn Swahili as perfectly as anyone there. If their kids grow up in Boulder, Colorado, they’ll speak the Boulder dialect of English as well as anyone there.

These characteristics seem to be a shared and specific part of our genetic endowment. We want to find out what they are. What they are, whatever they are, they allow an infant, maybe even pre–birth, there’s evidence for that, but certainly very early on, to do some pretty astonishing things. First the infant has to pick out of the environment, which is a lot of undifferentiated noise and activity, the child has to somehow select out of that massive confusion the parts that are language. Nobody knows how to do that.

There are similar problems faced by other organisms. Insects, which seem to be more similar to humans in this respect than any other known organism – no relevant evolutionary relationship, obviously – a bee, for example, has to be able to pick out of all the activity that it observes just the parts which are what are called the “waggle dance”, the dance of the bees that’s used to communicate distance and the quality of the flower. Exactly how that’s done, nobody knows. When we look at bees dancing around, we don’t see it. You have to be a bee to see it. In fact to discover it is sophisticated enough a trick that you can get a Nobel Prize for it.

A human has a much more complicated task to pick out a language, and no other organism will do that. If you raise an ape in the same environment as a child without special training, and even with special training, the ape won’t pick out the linguistic activities as a category distinct from anything else. It’s just a mass of things happening. But somehow a human infant is designed to do exactly that.

The infant has some sort of mental faculty, some special component of the whole intellectual system, call it the language faculty, and that faculty picks out the stuff that’s linguistic, and that’s language–related, and then passes through various transitions and gets to the point where you and I are, where you use this system of knowledge freely and productively to talk about new circumstances in ways that are not caused by the circumstances in which you are nor caused by your inner state but are somehow appropriate to the circumstances and coherent. Those are the rough facts about language, which have been observed for hundreds of years.

The next question is, How is it done? What’s the nature of the initial state of the language faculty, the shared initial state, the genetically determined initial state? What are its properties? How do these get refined and shaped and modified in one way or another through interaction with the environment to lead to the mature state of what we call having a language? That’s the topic.

In order to investigate it, there are some upper and lower bounds that have to be satisfied by the theory of the initial state. It has to be at least rich enough to account for the fact that a child does – on the basis of the scattered evidence around it – arrive at a state of knowledge which is highly specific, very articulated, extremely detailed, applies to new circumstances, and does so in a very rich and complex way, as you can demonstrate.

So the initial state has to be at least rich enough to account for that transition. But it can’t be so rich as to exclude some of the options. So you can’t for example, say, The initial state is my dialect of English, or somebody speaking Japanese. So the upper bound that you can’t go beyond is as much complexity and richness as would rule out possible languages, not just actual ones, but possible ones that could be attained. The lower bound is that it has to be at least rich enough to account for the fact that in every linguistic community a normal child will acquire a rich, complex understanding and capacity to use the language of that community.
In between those bounds lies the truth about the initial state. You study it by looking at those two problems. What principles must it have in order to be able to be articulated as a particular complex system? The study of languages of widely different typology puts a constraint on whether you are going too far in imposing internal structure. That’s where the subject is.

Learning about Theories

You’re not big on theories. Why not?

I think theories are great. I work on them all the time. But the term “theory” shouldn’t be abused. You have a theory when you have some non–obvious principles from which you can draw conclusions that explain in surprising ways some of the phenomenon that are worth studying. That’s hard to do. It’s done in the hard sciences. There are a few other areas where it’s done. But for the most part it’s impossible. You can understand that. Even in the sciences, when you get to matters of any complexity, theoretical understanding declines quite sharply.

When you get to human affairs, I can’t even think of anything that deserves the name “theory”. Marx is certainly worth studying. He was a theorist of capitalism. He developed a certain abstract model of capitalism. There’s nothing wrong with abstract idealization. That’s the way to study things. He investigated what might happen in that kind of system. How much relationship it had to the real world of that time, one has to ask. He had essentially nothing to say about socialism, a few scattered sentences here and there. He had no theory of revolution or of social change. But you study what he did for it’s important work, and one should know about it. If you want to call it a theory, OK.

Learning not–to–compete

...Football coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” What kind of societal consequences result from that kind of thinking?

If anyone were to take that seriously, if you do it on the sports field, it’s just obscene. If you do it in the general society, it’s outrageous. It happens. I see it with children’s sports. Let me give you a personal experience. One of my grandchildren is a sports fanatic. He was describing to me with disappointment a game that was called off. Seven–year old kids playing baseball, they’re all organized into teams which is OK. You want to play teams that’s fine. They had a game scheduled with another team. The other team didn’t have enough players. Some kids didn’t come that day. My grandson’s team had more than enough players. So they had to call off the game.

The kids were all disappointed. There was an obvious solution. Let some of the kids on his team play on the other team. In fact, you could have one team and still have a game, the kids that are in the field could be the kids at bat, just intermingle. Then they all would have had fun. But then it wouldn’t have been a game in which the team with one color won and the team with another color lost. This way they all had to be disappointed. This isn’t a huge problem, but it’s carrying the cult of competition to childish absurdity.

When it enters into the rest of life, it’s extremely harmful. Any decent human existence is going to be based on sympathy, solidarity, and mutual support. If we push it to the limit, the idea that the only thing to do is win, then in a family the strongest person would take all the food. This is just inhuman. It’s just as inhuman when you generalize.

What do you say to the argument that competition is intrinsic to human nature and not only that, it builds character?

It builds a certain kind of character, namely the kind of character that wants to beat other people down. Is it intrinsic to human nature? First of all, anyone who says anything about what’s intrinsic to human nature is automatically talking nonsense, because we don’t know very much. But it’s a plausible guess that all kind of characteristics are intrinsic to human nature.

Much of the educational system is built around a system of rewards based on grades, beating other students in tests, and then coming to the front of the classroom and being praised by the teacher.

It is, and that’s a particular kind of training. It’s training in extremely antisocial behavior that is also very harmful to the person. It’s certainly not necessary for education.

In what way is it harmful to a person?

It turns them into the kind of people who do not enjoy the achievements of others but want to see others beaten down and suppressed. It’s as if I see a great violinist and instead of enjoying the fact that he’s a great violinist and I’m not, I try to figure out a way to break his violin. It’s turning people into monsters. This is certainly not necessary for education. I think it’s harmful to it. I have my own personal experiences with this, but I think they generalize.

How do you deal with day–to–day situations is a complicated matter. But as far as schooling was concerned, it just happens that I went to a school up to about age twelve where there was no competition. I didn’t know I was a good student until I got to high school. Everyone was encouraged to do their best and to help others do their best. You applauded them if they did. If they fell short of their own standards you tried to help them meet them. I didn’t really know about the idea of competition for grades until I got into an academic city high school. And the educational level declined at that point.

Incidentally, going on to my last forty–five years of educational experience, which happens to be at MIT, it is not a competitive environment. In a graduate scientific department, technically you have to give grades because there’s some formalism that requires it. But people are working together. You don’t try to do better than the next guy. You have a common goal. You want to understand this stuff. Let’s work on it. It’s certainly the most positive way for an educational or a research experience to proceed.

Let’s say in a different kind of environment, like an auto factory, the boss tells you, If you work an extra eight hours this week, I’ll increase your pay by $100 and I’ll give you an extra week’s vacation.

That’s a different question. That has nothing to do with harming other people and being first and making sure they’re second. That’s a question of how you want to react to an inhuman system in which you’re forced to exist. You’re compelled because of lack of other choices to exist in a system in which some human being can control you, which shouldn’t happen in a decent society, and you have to ask, How do I adjust to that? It’s like being in prison. If you’re a human, you don’t do it.

Learning about Inequality

The issue of inequality, not only in the US but around the world, as you just mentioned, is hard to ignore. Even the Financial Times recently commented that “At the beginning of the 19th century, the ratio of real incomes per head between the world’s richest and poorest countries was three to one. By 1900 it was 10 to one. By the year 2000, it had risen to 60 to one.”

And that is extremely misleading. It vastly understates what’s going on. The real and striking difference is not the difference among countries but the difference within the global population, which is a different measure. That’s risen very sharply, which means that within countries the divisions have sharply risen. I think it’s now gone from about something like 80 to 1 to about 120 to 1, just in the last ten years or so. Those are rough figures. I’m not sure of the exact numbers. But it’s risen very sharply. The top 1 percent of the population of the world now probably has about the income of roughly the bottom 60 percent. That’s close to 3 billion people. These outcomes are the results of very specific decisions, institutional arrangements, and plans which can be expected to have these effects. And they have these effects. These are principles of economics that tell you that over time things ought to even out. That’s true of some abstract models. The world is very different.

…A woman in the audience asked you, in a pretty straight–ahead question, How come you don’t factor gender into your analysis? You pretty much agreed with her, but you really didn’t answer her question.

In fact, I’ve been writing about it quite a bit in recent books in connection with structural adjustment, globalization of production, and imposition of industrialized export–oriented agriculture. In all cases, women are the worst victims. What we discussed the other day about the effect on families is essentially gender war. The very fact that women’s work is not considered work is an ideological attack. As I pointed out, it’s somewhere between lunacy and idiocy. The whole welfare “debate,” as it’s called, is based on the assumption that raising children isn’t work. It’s not like speculating on stock markets. That’s real work. So if a woman is taking care of a kid, she’s not doing anything. Domestic work altogether is not considered work because women do it. That gives an extraordinary distortion to the nature of the economy. It amounts to transfer payments from working women, from women altogether and working women in particular, to others. They don’t get social security for raising a child. You do get social security for other things. The same with every other benefit. I maybe haven’t written as much about such matters as I should have, probably not. But it’s a major phenomenon, very dramatic now.

Learning about Economy

You said the economic system is a “grotesque catastrophe.” What kind of system would you propose?

I would propose a system which is democratic. It’s long been understood that you don’t have democracy unless people are in control of the major decisions. And the major decisions, as has also long been understood, are fundamentally investment decisions: What do you do with the money? What happens in the country? What’s produced? How is it produced? What are working conditions like? Where does it go? How is it distributed? Where is it sold? That whole range of decisions, that’s not everything in the world, but unless that range of decisions is under democratic control, you have one or another form of tyranny. That is as old as the hills and as American as apple pie. You don’t have to go to Marxism or anything else. It’s straight out of mainstream American tradition.

The reason is simple common sense. So that’s got to be the core of it. That means total dismantling of all the totalitarian systems. The corporations are just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism. They come out of the same intellectual roots, in the early twentieth century. So just like other forms of totalitarianism have to go, private tyrannies have to go. And they have to be put under public control.

Then you look at the modalities of public control. Should it be workers’ councils or community organizations or some integration of them? What kind of federal structure should there be? At this point you’re beginning to think about how a free and democratic society might look and operate. That’s worth a lot of thought. But we’re a long way from that. The first thing you’ve got to do in any kind of change is to recognize the forms of oppression that exist. If slaves don’t recognize that slavery is oppression, it doesn’t make much sense to ask them why they don’t live in a free society. They think they do. This is not a joke. Take women. Overwhelmingly, and for a long time, they may have sensed oppression, but they didn’t see it as oppression. They saw it as life. The fact that you don’t see it as oppression doesn’t mean that you don’t know it at some level. At some level you know it. The way in which you know it can take very harmful forms for yourself and everyone else. That’s true of every system of oppression. But unless you sense it, identify it, understand it, understand furthermore that it’s not, as in that New Yorker article, the genius of the market and a mystery, but completely understandable and not a genius of anything, and easily put under popular control—unless all those things are understood, you cannot proceed to the next step, which is the one you raised: How can we change the system?

Let’s say you’re a CEO of a major corporation. Isn’t it in your economic interest to keep enough change in my pocket so that I’ll buy your products?

That’s an interesting question, and nobody knows the answer to it. It was a question that had an answer in a national economy. So if you go back to the 1920s, at the time of the big automobile manufacturing burst, that was the question that Henry Ford raised. He drew the conclusion that you just drew. He said, I’d better give these guys a decent wage or nobody’s going to buy my cars. So he raised workers’ salaries beyond what he was forced to by market pressures. And others went along. That was on the reasoning that you just outlined, and it made sort of sense in a national economy.

Does it make sense in an international economy? Does it make sense in an international economy where you can shift production to the poorest and most deprived and most depressed regions where you have security forces keeping people under control and you don’t have to worry about environmental conditions and you have plenty of women pouring off the farms to work under impossible conditions and get burnt to death in factory fires and die from overwork and somebody else replaces them and that production is then integrated through the global system so that value is added where you have skilled workers and maybe pay a little more but you don’t have many of them?

Finally it’s sold to the rich people in all the societies. Even the poorest Third World country has a very rich elite. As you take this kind of structural Third World model and transfer it over to the rich countries —it’s a structural model, it’s not in absolute terms — they have a sector of consumers that’s not trivial. Even if there’s plenty of superfluous people and huge numbers in jail and a lot of people suffering or even starving. So the question is, Can that work? As a technical question, nobody really knows the answer. And it doesn’t make any difference anyway. We shouldn’t even be allowing ourselves to ask it. The point is that whether it could work or not, it’s a total monstrosity. Fascism works, too. In fact, it worked rather well from an economic point of view. It was quite successful. That doesn’t mean it’s not a monstrosity. So there is the technical question, Will it work? To that nobody knows the answer. But there’s also a human question of whether we should even ask, and the answer to that is, Of course not. That’s not the CEO’s question, but it should be everybody else’s.

About David Barsamian

David Barsamian is the founder and director of Alternative Radio - an award winning weekly radio program. Alternative Radio is broadcast to more than 125 public radio stations around the world and presents information and perspectives that are either ignored or distorted in the corporate-controlled American media. Barsamian is regarded as an "ace interviewer" and "an ingenious impresario of radical broadcasting", and was presented the award of "Top Ten Media Heroes of 1994”.