"What the public wants is called 'politically unrealistic'.
Translated into English, that means power and privilege are opposed to it."
from a
blurb
for
Secrets, Lies, and Democracy
-- Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian
-- I don't know as of 16 Apr 1999
whether this is a
direct quote from Chomsky or not
- he's certainly expressed this sentiment frequently.
-- apparently Chomsky himself isn't too keen on this appelation either.
"According to Chomsky, America is a business-run huckster society whose primary value is deceit.
A major purpose of military procurement and production is to subsidize private corporations."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
Chomsky, quoted here
"It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order."
from
American Power and the New Mandarins
quoted here
"I can't figure out from Chomsky's writings about what he thinks the United States and its allied states should, realistically, have done. It's absolutely untrue that he preferred the Soviet Union to the US; he's an anarchist, not a communist , and as such people like him were being liquidated by 1922 at the latest....
But what was to be done? "
"Though Chomsky has written a considerable amount about anarchism in the past three decades, people often ask him for a more tangible, detailed vision of social change. His political analysis never fails to instill outrage and anger with the way the world works, but many readers are left uncertain about what exactly Chomsky would do to change it. Perhaps because they regard his analytical work with such respect, they anticipate he will lay out his goals and strategy with similar precision and clarity, only to be disappointed with his generalized statements of libertarian socialist values. Or perhaps many look to a great intellectual to provide a "master plan" for them to follow step-by-step into a bright shining future.
Yet Chomsky shys away from such pronouncements. He cautions that it is difficult to predict what particular forms a more just social organization will take, or even to know for sure what alternatives to the current system are ideal. Only experience can show us the best answers to these questions, he says. What should guide us along the way are a general set of principles which will underly whatever specific forms our future society will take. For Chomsky, those principles arise from the historical trend of thought and action known as anarchism.
Chomsky warns that little can be said about anarchism on a very general level. "I haven't tried to write anything systematic about these topics, nor do I know of anything by others that I could recommend," he wrote to me in reply to a set of questions on the subject. He's written here and there about it, notably in the recent Powers and Prospects, but there just isn't a lot to say in general terms. "The interest lies in the applications," he thinks, "but these are specific to time and place."
"PeaceWORKS: Dr. Chomsky, why do you call yourself a "libertarian anarchist" rather than a plain "anarchist"?
Noam Chomsky: The term I usually use is "libertarian socialist," which is fairly standard usage in the anarchist tradition. Anarchism covers a pretty broad range. One major sector in Europe regarded itself as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement. Unfortunately, the term "libertarian" has a different usage in the United States, which departs from the tradition. Here the term "libertarian" means anarcho-capitalist."
"According to Chomsky, classical liberal ideals have been 'perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order' ( For Reasons of State, p.156). Since the 1930's, Chomsky notes, the term "liberalism" has come to mean 'a committment to the use of state power for welfare purposes' (Language and Politics, p.656), rather than the restriction of state power. Chomsky also notes that the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative' have switched meanings. Perhaps surprisingly, Chomsky regards himself as a conservative. 'Mark Hatfield might qualify in the Senate. I'm another one, incidentally, in essential respects' (transcript, 'United States International and Security Policy: The "Right Turn" in Historical Perspective', University of Colorado, Boulder, 22 October 1986, p.1). He comments, 'A modern conservative, like Taft, wants to cut back state power, cut back state intervention in the economy -- the same as someone like Mark Hatfield -- to preserve the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of expression, freedom from state violence, of law-abiding states, etc. (Language and Politics, p. 656). "
Chomsky's Politics
by Milan Rai
page 188, note Ch.6 #24
"I was attracted to anarchism as a young teenager, as soon as I began to think about the world beyond a pretty narrow range, and haven't seen much reason to revise those early attitudes since. I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes political power, ownership and management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else. Naturally this means a challenge to the huge institutions of coercion and control: the state, the unaccountable private tyrannies that control most of the domestic and international economy, and so on. But not only these. That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met."
(my emphasis -- ed.)
"These and a thousand other examples testify to moral degeneration on such a scale that talk about the `normal channels' of political action and protest becomes meaningless or hypocritical. We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent --- or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification. What is more, there is no powerful outside force that can call us to account -- the change will have to come from within. .... It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order."
American Power and the New Mandarins, page 17
"... I do not have the usual professional credentials in any field, and my own work has ranged fairly widely. Some years ago, for example, I did some work in mathematical linguistics and automata theory, and occasionally gave invited lectures at mathematics or engineering colloquia. No one would have dreamed of challenging my credentials to speak on these topics -- which were zero, as everyone knew; that would have been laughable. The participants were concerned with what I had to say, not my right to say it. But when I speak, say, about international affairs, I’m constantly challenged to present the credentials that authorize me to enter this august arena, in the United States, at least -- elsewhere not."
"What the World is Really Like": Who Knows It -- and Why
From a 1987 interview of Chomsky by James Peck
in
The Chomsky Reader
According to his home page
, Chomsky is
"Institute Professor; Professor of Linguistics
(Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of Language)"
at MIT
(my, but that's quite
an avant-garde design for a university's Web page)
(oh, looks like they change it every week or so)
"...the business...about level playing field is all a bit of a joke, I mean type writers and paper are also a level playing field but that doesn't mean that the mass media system is equally distributed among the population."
"Mr. CHOMSKY:. You're supposed to love the flag, but you're supposed to hate the government.
You're supposed to love the symbols, you're supposed -- You have to be a jingoist, otherwise you're not going to accept things like Pentagon spending. So, it's a complicated operation, but, you know, not that complicated. You're sitting in a PR office, you can figure it out. Get people to be patriotic, subordinate, silent, hate government, blame government for everything that goes wrong, think governments can do nothing right, not notice that more and more power is being turned over to private hands , which are completely unaccountable and are totally --
Mr. SHORR: And those private hands are?
Mr. CHOMSKY: Corporations , which is a totalitarian institution.
People are unhappy. A lot of things are going wrong with their lives. Real income is going down, working hours are going up, families are falling apart, a lot of bad things. And you've been taught for 50 years that it's the government's fault, so you bomb a -- you don't bomb the GE headquarters, you don't read the Fortune 500 and find out who's got all the money, you don't notice that they've just celebrated their fourth straight year of double digit profit growth. That stuff is for special people. What you're supposed to know is, 'yeah, those bad government guys, they're doing it.' And government is bad because it's potentially influenceable. You could take part in it an change it. So, hate them. And that creates the mood of anti-politics, and that's part of the -- you know, that's part of the propaganda.
Well, where does the military fit into all this? Well, if you can keep the population frightened -- This is a very frightened country. People are more frightened in the United States than I think anywhere in the world. ... If you can keep people cowering in terror, then they will support this huge military system which is defending them from somebody -- Martians, aliens, who knows who. And that means you got plenty of money pouring into the pockets of Newt Gingrich's rich constituents through this industrial policy system. And indeed, if you have to control somebody out there, you got the force to do it.
Mr. SHORR: Now that's why they're saying that the threat is from the unknown. They'll actually use the unknown or instability, much more general --
Mr. CHOMSKY: Yes, just to keep people frightened. I mean, people have to be kept frightened, atomized. They have to have their attention diverted away from true power. Of course, any good propaganda system understands that. You don't want to see real power and the government's a good target, especially the federal government.... "
-- "The whole aim of practical
politics is to keep the populace
alarmed
(and hence clamorous
to be led to safety) by an
endless series of hobgoblins."
-- H.L. Mencken, 1923, quoted here
I generally count myself as a Chomsky sympathizer,
but I think his critics could easily
direct the same charge of scare tactics against him
"The inquiry expresses interest "about what I believe is an alternative" to the current social order, and "in hearing Chomsky's describe a social order that he would approve of"; and ask if anyone knows of references to a discussion of any discussion of mine about how "the radical democratic ideals of the Enlightenment , for example, [can be translated] into a form in which they would apply to a modern industrial society." One is the collection " For Reasons of State" (1973), which includes several essays on the topic; specifically, "Notes on Anarchism," introduction to Daniel Guerin's " Anarchism," where there are a number of references to works that go as far as I would personally be willing to go in answering these questions: Pannekoek, Rocker , de Santillan, and a few others. There are no references at all (in this connection) to the "classics": Marx, Luxemburg, Bakunin, etc., because they didn't discuss the topic, for reasons that I think have no slight merit. Notice that for essentially the same reasons (discussed there), I don't try to carry the description of a future society beyond the sources cited (which sometimes go too far in detail, in my opinion; de Santillan, for example). There's more of a similar sort in various other places, including several collections of interviews (Carlos Otero, ed., "Radical Priorities," "Language and Politics," Black Rose (Books))."
"People who voted for Bush tended to assume that he was in favor of their views, even if the Republican Party platform was diametrically opposed to them. The same was largely true of Kerry voters.-- Links are mine -- ed.
The reason for this is that the parties try to exclude the population from participation. So they don’t present issues, policies, agendas, and so on. They project imagery, and people either don’t bother or they vote for the image. ...
In the year 2000, there was a huge fuss afterwards about the stolen election, with the Florida chads and the Supreme Court. But ask yourself who was exorcised about it? It was all among a small group of intellectuals. They were the ones who were upset about it. There was never any public resonance for this. In the current election it’s being reiterated. There’s a big fuss among intellectuals about the vote in Ohio, how the voting machines didn’t work, and other things. But the interesting thing is that nobody cares.
Why don’t people care if the election is stolen? The reason is that they don’t take the election seriously in the first place. They reacted about the way that people react to television ads. It’s a mode of delusion. ...
There is an alternative, and that is to try to run a program that’s committed to developing a democratic society in which people’s opinions matter."
The Story of Mouseland was a story told first by Clarence Gillis, and later and most famously by Tommy Douglas, leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and, later, the New Democratic Party of Canada, both social democratic parties. It was a political fable expressing the CCF's view that the Canadian political system was flawed in offering voters a false dilemma: the choice of two parties, neither of which represented their interests.
The mice voted in black cats, which represented the Progressive Conservative Party, and then they found out how hard life was. Then they voted in the white cats, which symbolized the Liberal Party. The story goes on, and a mouse gets an idea that mice should run their government, not the cats. This mouse was accused of being a Bolshevik, and imprisoned."
I'm tempted to call this incisive and witty little book (95 pages including end matter) -- which is quite independent of Chomsky -- the best introduction to Chomskyian thought (though I suppose one could also call Chomsky's entire political oeuvre a pedantic ramble through Vidalian thought!)