66
" MAN: What do you think about nationalization of industry as a means of allowing for this kind of large-scale social planning?
Well, it would depend on how it’s done. If nationalization of industry puts production into the hands of a state bureaucracy or some sort of Leninist-style vanguard party, then you’d just have another system of exploitation, in my view. On the other hand, if nationalization of industry was based on actual popular control over industry—workers’ control over factories, community control, with the groups maybe federated together and so on—then that would be a different story. That would be a very different story, in fact. That would be extending the democratic system to economic power, and unless that happens, political power is always going to remain a very limited phenomenon. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
68
" the effects of this commitment throughout the Third World are dramatically clear: it takes only a moment’s thought to realize that the areas that have been the most under U.S. control are some of the most horrible regions in the world. For instance, why is Central America such a horror-chamber? I mean, if a peasant in Guatemala woke up in Poland [i.e. under Soviet occupation], he’d think he was in heaven by comparison—and Guatemala’s an area where we’ve had a hundred years of influence. Well, that tells you something. Or look at Brazil: potentially an extremely rich country with tremendous resources, except it had the curse of being part of the Western system of subordination. So in northeast Brazil, for example, which is a rather fertile area with plenty of rich land, just it’s all owned by plantations, Brazilian medical researchers now identify the population as a new species with about 40 percent the brain size of human beings, a result of generations of profound malnutrition and neglect—and this may be un-remediable except after generations, because of the lingering effects of malnutrition on one’s offspring. 54 Alright, that’s a good example of the legacy of our commitments, and the same kind of pattern runs throughout the former Western colonies. In fact, if you look at the countries that have developed in the world, there’s a little simple fact which should be obvious to anyone on five minutes’ observation, but which you never find anyone saying in the United States: the countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
73
" Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities freely instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only options that are objectively available, but also options that are subjectively available―like, how are people allowed to think, how are they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society―not because we're incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways. That's what indoctrination is about in the first place, in fact―and I don't mean somebody giving you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a "proper" life and a "proper" set of values are, and that's all indoctrination.
So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to people―both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do something about them without great suffering. And that's one of the main purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and not just have the "choices" forced on them by some arbitrary system of power. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
74
" Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost―and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about "The End of Socialism," and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, "Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed." I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that "socialism" failed, why don't they say that "democracy" failed?―and the proof that "democracy" failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves "democratic"―in fact, they called themselves "People's Democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that "democracy" failed, not just that "socialism" failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, "Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy." And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?
Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves "socialist" ―but they also called themselves "democratic." Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives―but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup―and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism.
But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful―that's why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that's been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West―because it's made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, "Well, that's socialism―and look what it leads to."
Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
77
" But the point is, if things ever really come to a crunch in the United States, this massive part of the population—I think it’s something like a third of the adult population by now—could be the basis for some kind of a fascist movement, readily. For example, if the country sinks deeply into a recession, a depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking it’s somebody else’s fault: “Why are our lives collapsing? There have to be bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly”—and the bad guys can be Jews, or homosexuals, or blacks, or Communists, whatever you pick. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that’s what 1930s Fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
78
" Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way―so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports―so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
79
" Well, every one of the rich countries hit upon more or less the same method of getting out. They did it independently, but they more or less hit on the same method—namely, state spending, public spending of some kind, what’s called “Keynesian stimulation.” And that did finally get countries out of the Depression. In the Fascist countries, it worked very well—they got out pretty fast. And in fact, every country became sort of fascist; again, “fascism” doesn’t mean gas chambers, it means a special form of economic arrangement with state coordination of unions and corporations and a big role for big business. And this point about everyone being fascist was made by mainstream Veblenite-type economists [i.e. after the American economist Veblen] right at the time, actually—they said, everybody’s fascist, the only question is what form the fascism takes: it takes different forms depending on the country’s cultural patterns.6 "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
80
" Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well.
And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market.
Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process. "
― Noam Chomsky , Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
