Jerry Brown Interviews Noam Chomsky
(Excerpts)SPIN Magazine, August 1993
Noam Chomsky is a capitalist's worst nightmare
Jerry Brown kept Bill Clinton sleepless on the campaign trail.
An intellectual colossus talks to a maverick presidential candiate about the evils of the establishement and the enduring power of the people.
| Jerry Brown's Introduction During my campaign for president in 1992, I experienced for the first time the full weight of the money-media system of control. Having been so much a part of that system, I had not fully grasped the radical dominance of politics by the top 1 percent and the complicit role of the media. All this became clear once I swore off donations above $100 and refused to attend the sacred rite of endless political fundraising with the wealthy. This made the media turn aside, for they knew I was not a "serious" candidate committed to the proposition: Money buys media, media buys credibility.
But Professor Noam Chomsky has gone much further in peeling back the myths. A renowned professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is best known for his stark analysis of the American system of power. His books and lecture take you where few dare to tread. He is not afraid of his peers and doesn't let public disapproval intimidate him -- he ruthlessly exposes the deceits that cover up the dark side of power and the media conformity that makes it possible.
I promised to speak truth to power -- and found Chomsky had already been doing it for 30 years. This interview captures the spirit and key elements of his devastating critique. Savor it. Let it engage you as it assaults your complacency. Then act.
Everything politics is, Chomsky isn't. That why this interview is important: it will allow you to perceive contemporary society -- its government, its commodity fetishes, its cruelty -- in a starker light. Chomsky gives you a lens through which you can see.
Excerpts from the Interview Jerry Brown: But the military was a larger percentage of the Gross National Product (GNP) in the 50s and 60s than it became in the 80s.
Noam Chomsky: Well, except for the peak in the early Reagan years. But it doesn't make sense for the military to be measured against the GNP. Suppose you're trying to protect yourself from the guy next door -- if you get richer, you don't need more guns. In fact, you need less 'cause you have other kinds of power. [...]
Brown: It's amazing to me how much the elites in this country are in agreement on the value of NAFTA. It just seems natural to them that the scale of corporate activity should increase across borders.
Chomsky: "Growth" is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense, but it's kind of a dumb measure. Has our life improved if we have more people in prison?
Brown: And a poor person will add more to the GNP with a cancer that is treated under Medicaid than if they work in a minimum wage job.
Chomsky: Exactly, yeah. And things like preventive health don't show up in increasing the GNP. In fact, they might even reduce it, because it means you waste less money in high technology care later. So a lot of this stuff really is theology. I'm not saying that economics is a joke. It's a serious subject. But the way it's applied as policy is just theology. It's as crazy as Khomeni. Crazier in many ways. Kind of like fundamentalism. It emphasizes particular values: growth, profit, macroeconomic statistics -- in ways which have almost no human meaning. [...]
Brown: Yeah, an example of the corruption of our thinking: When the President proposes immunizing children, he doesn't say the purpose is to minimize suffering, but rather to save money in the long run.
Chomsky: That's a perfect example: The idea that you might want to save children, even if you lose money by it, doesn't arise.
The elites, including the educated classes, are going towards reducing moral values and turning people into nothing but agents of production and profit. So the deal is you try to glue everybody to the television set, where they get bombarded from childhood with messages that tell them: You've got to buy more, your human value depends on the number of commodities you've got piled up. There nothing else in life.
On the other hand if you can't use them as tools of production, you stick them in jail or in the slums, or let 'em prey on one another, and have enough cops around to control them. That's a picture of the world, and it might lead to good macroeconomic statistics.
A city like Boston -- rich, cultivated -- at the city hospital, they had to open a malnutrition clinic a couple of years ago. [...]
Brown: But now, the economics profession is arrayed against local power because it puts the greatest value on increasing the size of markets -- the larger the market, the more efficient the enterprise.
Chomsky: Yeah, look: the Economics profession is basically a tool of private power. They have a doctorate, which is kind of a theology, which points out, sometimes correctly, that you can increase output by moving to market arrangement. Market arrangements essentially give more power to the powerful. That's what it amounts to. It's like a parliamentary system where the number of votes you have depends on the number of dollars you have. Well, we know what kind of democracy that would be, and we know where it would end up.
For one thing, future generations can't vote with their dollars in the market. My grandchildren can't decide how they want things spent, but there' going to have to live with it -- which means the environment.
Take other issues: Suppose the people around here decide that instead of having more consumer good they'd like to have more leisure. The market system doesn't allow you that choice. It drives you to having more consumer goods because it's all driven to maximizing production. But is the only human value to have more and more good you don't need? In fact the business world knows that it's not. That's why they spend billions of dollars in advertising, to try to create artificial wants.
Brown: The economists have a word, "autarchy," which they use to denigrate the notion of local self-reliance.
Chomsky: Yeah, they say it's bad. What "autarchy" means is people in some area saying, "Look, we'd like our lifes to be like this, not like you guys tell us." Take Japan. Part of the Japan-bashing now is because Japan protects, say, mom-and-pop-style stores, and that blocks big supermarket chains from the West from coming in and taking overt.
Well, suppose Japan would *like* to have a community where you have mom-and-pop stores. I can remember that from childhood. You go 'round the corner and you pick up a loaf of bread, and you talk to the grocer. It's a lot nicer than going into the supermarket.
Now it's economically inefficient by the economist's measures. It means that things cost a little bit more. But suppose people say, okay, I'm willing to spend a little more because I want a nicer life. The economists say you're not allowed to make that decision, because the only human value in the world is maximizing profit and efficiency. Who says that's the only human value?
Adam Smith didn't think so. You go back and read their hero. What he said, in fact, is that in any civilized country, the government is going to have to intervene to prevent market forces from destroying people and reducing them to creatures as ignorant and stupid as is possible for a human being to be. The natural effect of the division of labor, maximizing efficiency, is going to turn people into tools. [...]
Selected and transcribed by Harel Barzilai, Co-founder, Co-moderator, misc.activism.progressive (MAP) & ACTIV-L
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