The interview with Noam Chomsky was conducted in June 2005 by Sniježana Matejčić
SM: "There's Pope and Dalay Lama and there's Chomsky" sad my friend to a person who didn't know who Chomsky was. Some people say you are a guru, a prophet, but you said once that you didn't want to persuade people, weather help them persuade themselves. I won't ask you to tell me that you are a linguist, a professor, a scientist. I would like to know what do you think is your mission in this world?
Chomsky: I do not know of any people grandiose enough to have missions in the world. I certainly don't. I don't know of any mission other than to be a decent person, to the best of one's ability. From that point on, the mission can take many forms. Professionally, if I had the talent, I'd be delighted to be an expert carpenter. Unfortunately, I don't have the talent, so I do what seems to come naturally to me. As a human being, one's "mission," if we can use such an inflated term, is to try to encourage people to gain some understanding of the world in which they live, and to act to make it a better place. Oneself as well.
SM: You identify yourself as an anarchist thinker; you talk about responsible intellectuals and intellectual elites. How do you define an intellectual?
Chomsky: I don't. Intellectuals are what we call those -people who have the privilege (time, resources, training....) and the interest to think, reflect, analyze, interact on matters of human significance. Some of the most intellectual and cultured people I have known never went to college. One was a toolmaker. Another a newsstand operator whose academic life ended at fourth grade, age 10. On the other hand, I have known highly respected intellectuals whose intellectual achievements scarcely rise above clerical work and reflexive subordination to power. It is not a very useful category, and I don't try to define it. As for "responsible intellectuals," those are people who use their good fortune as "intellectuals" in ways that merit some respect. Elites, whether they are called "intellectual" or not, are those with unusual power and privilege. Nothing very profound about it. I don't identify myself as an "anarchist thinker," though I do feel that the leading principles of anarchism, as I understand them (and have tried to explain them), are appropriate general guidelines for decent life and action.
SM: If the main role of an intellectual is to tell the truth, the best he or she can, about important issues, to the targeted audience how is the truth defined, how are important issues and the audiences chosen? Is it not true that women are in general discriminated, or is that not an important topic since we don't hear intellectuals speak about it as often as about some other issues?
Chomsky: When I have written about that, I have put it a little differently. If I may quote myself:
One should seek out an audience that matters -- and furthermore (another important qualification), it should not be seen as an audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively. We should not be speaking to, but with. That is second nature to any good teacher, and should be to any writer and intellectual as well.
On choice of important issues, one has to seek one's own criteria. I've tried to explain mine. Others may disagree, and I would like to hear why, and perhaps change my subjective judgments. No one seriously tries to define "truth." In fact, it is not at all clear that there is anything to be defined. In the philosophical literature, there is a "deflationary theory," which holds that we can say no more than "'...' is true if and only if ..." Thus 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. We then turn to the interesting problem: is snow white?
Is there discrimination against women? Undoubtedly. One of the many great achievements of the activism of the 1960s and what it led to in subsequent years as that this problem has not only received far more attention than before but also has been addressed in much more serious ways. There is a long way to go, but the progress is unmistakable, and very significant. As to how it ranks in priority with other issues -- including issues of survival of the species, which are not insignificant -- one again has to make one's own judgments. I cannot legislate.
SM: How do the responsible intellectuals influence politics if speaking the truth they deprive themselves of power?
Chomsky: I would not put the matter that way. The formulation presupposes that power resides in leadership of authoritarian institutions. But their power relies on submission and obedience. David Hume went so far as to say that their power resides only in control of opinion -- which underestimates the effects of violence and terror. But his point is nevertheless of considerable weight. Those who want to work with others to undermine subordination to the masters are not depriving themselves of power, but rather seeking to shift power to other hands: from the masters to the people.
SM: You said that UN Declaration on human rights is a letter to Santa. Why is that so?
Chomsky: I did not say that. I was quoting Jeane Kirkpatrick, Washington's Ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan years. She was referring to the socioeconomic provisions of the UD, which have the same status as all others, but are unacceptable to the narrow sectors of extreme privilege that the Reagan administration represented, to a more extreme extent than usual. These sectors do not agree that people have a right to life, those rights specified in Article 25 of the UD, for example. That is the fundamental basis of the extremist version of capitalist ideology called "neoliberalism." It is by no means new. The founders of classical economics held the same view -- not Adam Smith, who was pre-capitalist, but Ricardo, Malthus, and others of their era who held that people have no rights other than what they can gain on the labor market. If they cannot survive, they should "go somewhere else" -- which they could in those days: they could go to America, where they could help exterminate the indigenous population in what was already the richest country in the world. Kirkpatrick's views are not idiosyncratic. Still just keeping just to the US, they are the views of the present administration, explicitly. The highest State Department official responsible for human rights has called for the elimination of "myths" concerning human rights, the most pernicious of which is that the socioeconomic provisions of the UD are rights. And their practices conform to those commitments. It is a particularly cruel and savage form of state capitalism, but at the extreme of a rather narrow spectrum.
SM: There are individuals and organizations that are worldwide determined as anti-globalist. How do you contest the term?
Chomsky: I suppose there are a few people who would like to live as hermits on mountain tops. But I know of no others who are "anti-globalist." The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum, called "anti-globalization" in the propaganda system -- which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called "pro-globalization" by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.
SM: What does the actual "world order" tell us of our world? How does the European Union fit into the picture?
Chomsky: This is a question I cannot try to answer briefly. I've written books and many articles about it, and can only refer to those for my own views on the matter.
SM: How does "free", "independent" media relate to democracy?
Chomsky: Democratic forms are close to meaningless without a free flow of information, independent of the will of concentrated centers of power -- hence without free and independent media.
SM: Most of the socialist states are history. What is the message: capitalism is better than socialism, or socialist states had a genuine virus that destroyed them? What is the alternative to neo liberalism? What is our general alternative and hope?
Chomsky: I do not agree that they are history. There have been socialist movements, but no socialist states. Prior to the Bolshevik revolution -- or coup, some might say -- there were quite powerful socialist currents in Russia: factory councils, Soviets, peasant movements and associations, etc. These were quickly demolished by Lenin and Trotsky, fulfilling the warnings of anarchists and left Marxists -- like Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky himself before he chose to become Lenin's associate -- that in Leninist doctrine, the Party would rule in the name of the proletariat, the Central Committee would rule in the name of the Party, and the maximal leader would rule in the name of the Central Committee. That is pretty much what happened, very soon after the Bolsheviks assumed power. From then on "Communist" Russia was at the forefront of destroying socialism -- for principled reasons, if one looks closely at the variety of "Marxism" to which the Bolsheviks were committed. The term "socialism," like other terms of political discourse, is quite imprecise, but it is hard to imagine any form of socialism worthy of the name that is not at the very least committed to the idea that producers should control production, an idea that was anathema to the Bolshevik leadership.
The reasons why their radically anti-socialist movement came to be called "socialist" are reasonably clear. The West preferred that characterization so as to defame socialism. The Bolsheviks preferred it so that they could gain some of the moral prestige of socialism, while crushing it. When the world's two major propaganda systems happen to be in agreement on terminology, it tends to become established. Again, the hypothetical Martian observer could only gaze in wonder at the strange doings of this curious species.
There are very conservative alternatives to neo-liberalism. Simply take the period since World War II. The first 25 years are generally called "the golden age of capitalism" -- more accurately, state capitalism, since the economies of the leading states, dramatically so in the case of the US, relied very heavy on the dynamic state sector of the economy, as they still do, to socialize cost and risk while ultimately privatizing profit. But it was a "golden age" by general measures. Economic growth was the greatest in history, and it was fairly egalitarian growth: in the US, for example, the lowest quintile actually did slightly better than the highest quintile. Growth was also unparalleled in most of the Third World. This was also the period of the growth of the "welfare state," with social democratic measures benefiting the population, in most of the world. The golden age was based on the principles established at Bretton Woods by the US and Britain. These principles were dismantled from the 1970s, primarily by the US and Britain, also others. That led to sharp decline all over the world in standard macroeconomic measures: growth of the economy, of productivity, etc. There were exceptions: the countries that did not observe the rules, like the East Asians. But there is a very close correlation between adherence to the neoliberal principles and harm to the economy. There was of course growth, but it was highly inegalitarian, as contrasted to the golden age. And benefits were attacked everywhere, and declined. The neoliberal rules were designed to create and more savage and brutal form of state capitalism, with worse economic performance, but tremendous gains to the designers. On the general matters, the facts are quite uncontroversial, often obfuscated by statistical trickery, such as purposely confusing export orientation with neoliberalism, though the two plainly are quite distinct; that allows the growth of the countries that violated the neoliberal rules to be counted as proving their validity.
So one conservative alternative is simply to dismantle the harmful neoliberal principles, as is already happening, because they are plainly unviable.
But humans can surely do much better than that. I cannot try to spell out alternatives here, but they are reasonably well-known, and very commonly discussed and often developed in considerable detail. At sessions of the World Social Forum, for example.
(Croatian translation was published by Glas Istre on 1st July 2005; Ljudska rasa može bolje, Glas Istre, Pula, Broj 174, Godina LXII, str. 26 -27, Sniježana Matejčić)