Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (47 page)

And this is again why the study of language is so particularly interesting, because for some reason it seems like things in the inorganic world: there are aspects of it you can study by the methods of the sciences, which is curious—but still it’s like a little laser beam of light that goes through human behavior, leaving most things about language out. Like, science has nothing to say about what you and I are doing now—only about the mechanisms that are
involved
in it, not about how we do it. About that, there’s nothing to say, except again you can write poems. So the reach of scientific understanding is highly specific: very deep in the few areas where it goes, but they’re limited areas.

Now, when you say that human behavior might be beyond our inquiry, that’s possible—but I wouldn’t say that’s because of a “spiritual” property we have: the same thing might be true of large parts of nature. So there’s some capacity of the brain, some faculty of the mind that nobody understands, which allows us to do scientific inquiry—and like any other part of biology, it’s highly structured: it’s very good at certain things, and consequently very bad at other things. I mean, you can’t be good at something if you’re not bad at something else, those two things necessarily go together—like, if you’re a great weight-lifter, you’re going to be a rotten butterfly. You can’t be both, right? So if a human embryo can become a human being, it can’t become a fly—it’s too “weak” to become a fly, if you like, because it’s “strong” enough to become a human being: by a matter of logic, those things go together. So if you have a great capacity in one area, you’re going to have lousy capacities in another area. And if the human science-forming capacity is good enough to figure out quantum theory for some completely unexplained reason, it’s also going to be so bad that it’s not going to figure out lots of other things. And we don’t know what those other things are—but they might very well be most everything that we’re really interested in.

So when someone comes along claiming a scientific basis for some social policy or anything else having to do with human beings, I’d be very skeptical if I were you—because the knowledge just isn’t there right now, and may never be, either.

Adam Smith: Real and Fake

M
AN
: You said that classical liberalism was “anti-capitalist.” What did you mean by that?

Well, the underlying, fundamental principles of Adam Smith and other classical liberals were that people should be free: they shouldn’t be under the control of authoritarian institutions, they shouldn’t be subjected to things like division of labor, which destroys them. So look at Smith: why was he in favor of markets? He gave kind of a complicated argument for them, but at the core of it was the idea that if you had perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality—that’s why Adam Smith was in favor of markets.
  ³⁴
Adam Smith was in favor of markets because he thought that people ought to be completely equal—
completely equal
—and that was because, as a classical liberal, he believed that people’s fundamental character involves notions like sympathy, and solidarity, the right to control their own work, and so on and so forth: all the exact opposite of capitalism.

In fact, there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism—and that’s why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now spout in his name.

So if you read George Stigler’s introduction to the bicentennial edition of
The Wealth of Nations
—it’s a big scholarly edition, University of Chicago Press, so it’s kind of interesting to look at—it is diametrically opposed to Smith’s text on point after point.
  ³⁵
Smith is famous for what he wrote about division of labor: he’s supposed to have thought that division of labor was a great thing. Well, he didn’t: he thought division of labor was a
terrible
thing—in fact, he said that in any civilized society, the government is going to have to intervene to prevent division of labor from simply destroying people. Okay, now take a look at the University of Chicago’s index (you know, a detailed scholarly index) under “division of labor”: you won’t find an entry for that passage—it’s simply not there.
  ³⁶

Well, that’s
real
scholarship: suppress the facts totally, present them as the opposite of what they are, and figure, “probably nobody’s going to read to page 473 anyhow, because I didn’t.” I mean, ask the guys who edited it if
they
ever read to page 473—answer: well, they probably read the first paragraph, then sort of remembered what they’d been taught in some college course.

But the point is, for classical liberals in the eighteenth century, there was a certain conception of just what human beings are like—namely, that what kind of creatures they are depends on the kind of work they do, and the kind of control they have over it, and their ability to act creatively and according to their own decisions and choices. And there was in fact a lot of very insightful comment about this at the time.

So for example, one of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von Humboldt (who incidentally is very admired by so-called “conservatives” today, because they don’t read him), pointed out that if a worker produces a beautiful object on command, you may “admire what the worker does, but you will despise what he is”—because that’s not really behaving like a human being, it’s just behaving like a machine.
  ³⁷
And that conception runs right through classical liberalism. In fact, even half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville [French politician and writer] pointed out that you can have systems in which “the art advances and the artisan recedes,” but that’s inhuman—because what you’re really interested in is the artisan, you’re interested in
people
, and for people to have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives they have to be in control of what they do, even if that happens to be economically less efficient.
  ³⁸

Well, okay—obviously there’s just been a dramatic change in intellectual and cultural attitudes over the past couple centuries. But I think those classical liberal conceptions now have to be recovered, and the ideas at the heart of them should take root on a mass scale.

Now, the sources of power and authority that people could see in front of their eyes in the eighteenth century were quite different from the ones that we have today—back then it was the feudal system, and the Church, and the absolutist state that they were focused on; they couldn’t see the industrial corporation, because it didn’t exist yet. But if you take the basic classical liberal principles and apply them to the modern period, I think you actually come pretty close to the principles that animated revolutionary Barcelona in the late 1930s—to what’s called “anarcho-syndicalism.” [Anarcho-syndicalism is a form of libertarian socialism that was practiced briefly in regions of Spain during its revolution and civil war of 1936, until it was destroyed by the simultaneous efforts of the Soviet Union, the Western powers, and the Fascists.] I think that’s about as high a level as humans have yet achieved in trying to realize these libertarian principles, which in my view are the right ones, I mean, I’m not saying that everything that was done in that revolution was right, but in its general spirit and character, in the idea of developing the kind of society that Orwell saw and described in I think his greatest work,
Homage to Catalonia
—with popular control over all the institutions of society—okay, that’s the right direction in which to move, I think.
  ³⁹

The Computer and the Crowbar

M
AN
: Noam, given what you were saying before about our limited understanding of human nature and social change, don’t you think there’s a caution there in general for people intervening in social patterns involving human beings?

Yes—any kind of drastic intervention in a human being, or a human society, is very dubious. Like, suppose you’ve got a personal computer and it isn’t working—it’s a bad idea to hit it with a crowbar. Maybe hitting it with a crowbar will by accident fix it, but it’s by and large not a good tactic—and human societies are much more complex than computers, as are human beings. So you really never understand what you’re doing. People have to carry out changes for themselves: they can’t be imposed upon them from above.

Take the Spanish Revolution again. I mean, that was just one year in a rather undeveloped country (though it had industry and so on), so it’s not like a model for the future. But a lot of interesting things happened in the course of it, and they didn’t just happen out of the blue—they happened out of maybe fifty years of serious organizing and experimentation, and attempts to try it, and failures, and being smashed up by the army, and then trying again. So when people say it was spontaneous, that’s just not true: it came from a lot of experience, and thinking, and working, and so on, and then when the revolutionary moment came and the existing system sort of collapsed, people had in their heads a picture of what to do, and had even tried it, and they then tried to implement it on a mass scale. And it was implemented in many different ways—there wasn’t any single pattern that was followed, the various collectives were experimenting on their own under different conditions, and finding out for themselves what worked.
  ⁴⁰
And that’s a good example of how I think constructive change has to happen.

On the other hand, if an economist from, say, Harvard, goes to some Eastern European country today and tells them, “Here’s the way to develop,” that’s worse than hitting a computer with a crowbar: there are a million different social and cultural and economic factors they don’t understand, and any big change that’s pressed on people is very likely to be disastrous, no matter what it is—and of course, it always
is
disastrous. Incidentally, it’s disastrous for the
victims
—it’s usually very good for the people who are carrying out the experiments, which is why these experiments have been carried out for the last couple hundred years, since the British started them in India. I mean, every one of them is a disaster for the victims and they’re invariably good for the guys carrying out the experiments.
  ⁴¹
Well, as far as people who are interested in social reform are concerned, what that suggests is, people better do it themselves, and a step at a time, under their own control. That’s in fact what was being attempted on a fairly local scale in Barcelona, and I think it’s the kind of thing we have to work towards now.

7

Intellectuals and Social Change

Based primarily on discussions at Woods Hole and Rowe, Massachusetts, in 1989, 1993 and 1994
.

The Leninist/Capitalist Intelligentsia

M
AN
: Your vision of a libertarian socialism is a very appealing one—I’m wondering, what’s gone wrong?

First of all, maybe nothing’s gone wrong. You could argue that we haven’t been ready for it yet—but there was also a period when we weren’t ready for ending slavery either; when conditions, including subjective conditions, were such that abolition just wasn’t in the cards. So one could argue that conditions today are such that we need the degree of hierarchy and domination that exists in totalitarian institutions like capitalist enterprises, just in order to satisfy our needs—or else a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or some other authoritarian structure like that. I mean, I don’t believe a word of it—but the point is, the justification for any kind of power system has to be
argued
and proven to people before it has any claim to legitimacy. And those arguments haven’t been made out in this case.

If you look at what’s actually
happened
to the various efforts at libertarian socialism that have taken place around the world, the concentration of force and violence present in those situations has just been such that certain outcomes were virtually guaranteed, and consequently all incipient efforts at cooperative workers’ control, say, have simply been crushed. There have in fact been efforts in this direction for hundreds of years—the problem is, they regularly get destroyed. And often they’re destroyed by force.

The Bolsheviks [political party that seized power during the Russian Revolution and later became the Communist Party] are a perfect example. In the stages leading up to the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, there
were
incipient socialist institutions developing in Russia—workers’ councils, collectives, things like that [i.e. after a popular revolution first toppled the Tsar in February 1917]. And they survived to an extent once the Bolsheviks took over—but not for very long; Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated their power. I mean, you can argue about the
justification
for eliminating them, but the fact is that the socialist initiatives were pretty quickly eliminated.

Now, people who want to justify it say, “The Bolsheviks had to do it”—that’s the standard justification: Lenin and Trotsky had to do it, because of the contingencies of the civil war, for survival, there wouldn’t have been food otherwise, this and that. Well, obviously the question there is, was that true? To answer that, you’ve got to look at the historical facts: I don’t think it was true. In fact, I think the incipient socialist structures in Russia were dismantled
before
the really dire conditions arose. Alright, here you get into a question where you don’t want to be too cavalier about it—it’s a question of historical fact, and of what the people were like, what they were thinking and so on, and you’ve got to find out what the answer is, you can’t just guess. But from reading their own writings, my feeling is that Lenin and Trotsky knew what they were doing, it was conscious and understandable, and they even had a theory behind it, both a moral theory and a socioeconomic theory.
  ¹