訪談中的人物 (58)：92歲的"大師"Noam Chomsky接受《從合著新書 “What Is Politics?”出版說起，洛杉磯書評 LBRB》訪問，"If telling the truth about important matters is significant, that’s what you do."他認為，政治是發生在街頭上及企業董事會的萬事。
董事會對政治系統的形塑和其言論框架的影響力出奇大，而前者是在街道上發生的事情-我的意思是，不僅是實際的街道，也是比遇上的，是普通民眾中的政治教育，組織，政治行動– 這些都在改變所謂"Overton窗口"，即，討論和考量的事物之範圍。 基本上，這兩者一場階級戰爭：董事會對街頭。 顯然，這過於簡單化了，但是這種觀點自有些道理。 我們嘗試將它們擴充，避免讓其過分簡化，並說明其工作原理。
NOAM CHOMSKY IS INDISPENSABLE. Just as it is impossible to imagine appreciating the dramatic arts without learning Shakespeare, or loving jazz trumpet without an appreciation of Louis Armstrong, it is inconceivable that one might study contemporary political thought without reading Chomsky.
Beginning in the 1960s, with his manifesto against the Vietnam War, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Chomsky has steadily built a prolific body of work that interrogates the deceit of the powerful and illuminates the promise of democratic revolt. His classics include Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), an analysis of the corporate bias of the commercial press co-authored with Edward S. Herman; Profit Over People (1999), one of the earliest and most cogent exercises in demolishing the logic of neoliberalism; and 9-11 (2001), a pamphlet that amplified a rare voice of reason during the jingoistic fervor for war that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
His latest book, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (2020) (co-authored with Marv Waterstone, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Arizona), consists mainly of lectures they gave to their students in a course called “What Is Politics?” At a moment of converging crises and political upheaval, Consequences of Capitalism provides essential support for activists and intellectuals as they try to envision a freer and fairer world.
Until 2017, Chomsky was a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is often credited as one of the founders of modern linguistics. Of all the assessments of Chomsky’s unique career in scholarship and activism, Irish singer/songwriter Foy Vance might have summarized it best: “If you’re quiet and you’re sick of institution baby / Noam Chomsky is a soft revolution.”
I recently interviewed Chomsky over Zoom about his latest book and a wide variety of related sociopolitical issues.
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DAVID MASCIOTRA: Did your and Marv Waterstone’s decision to publish the lectures from your course “What Is Politics?” derive from a sense of needing to return to fundamentals, perhaps due to the convergence of crises we are currently experiencing?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Marv and I felt that the content of the book, which does begin with essentials, like the nature of presupposed “common sense” — where people get their ideas and beliefs from — goes on to reach things that are very urgent and critical today. We based this on our own sense of things, and the reactions from the two class cohorts. One is undergraduate students at the University of Arizona, and the other is community people, older people. The two groups interact, and judging from their reactions, both seemed to find it valuable and instructive. That was encouragement enough for us to put it together, and there is material that goes beyond the lectures, of course. It seemed worth doing, and the reactions we’ve had so far reinforce that conclusion.
What do you believe is a prevalent misconception among Americans in answer to the simple question “What is politics?” And how would you correct that misconception?
Well, if this course was taught by a mainstream instructor, politics would be what is taught in a civics course: how the rules are in the Senate and House, who introduces legislation, who votes on it, the nuts and bolts of the workings of the formal political system. From our point of view, politics is what happens in the streets and what happens in corporate boardrooms. The latter overwhelmingly dominates the shaping and framing of what happens in the political system. The former, what goes on in the streets — and I mean that metaphorically, not just the actual streets, but political education, organization, political action among the general population — is what shifts the Overton Window, the range of things that are discussed and considered. Basically, it is a class war: the boardrooms versus the streets. That’s obviously oversimplifying, but there is truth to that perspective. We try to fill that out, make it less oversimplified, and show how it works.
One of the simple but profound statements in the book is that the “problem isn’t individual, but institutional.” Mainstream political discussion tends to obsess over individuals rather than institutions. There are many Americans who are angry about politics but aren’t exactly sure why or how to direct their rage. Is part of that because — as much as, say, Biden is preferable to Trump — the overall problem isn’t individual, it’s institutional?
這本書中簡單而深刻的說法之一是，“問題不是個人的，而是製度的”。主流政治討論傾向於關注個人而不是機構。許多美國人對政治感到憤怒，但不確定為什麼或如何控制他們的憤怒。這是否是因為-拜登比特朗普更可取-整體問題不是個人的，而是製度性的？
There are differences, which are significant, but basically institutions place tight constraints on what can happen. Let’s take the most urgent issue that has arisen in human history: the destruction of the environment. If we don’t take care of that in the next couple of decades, nothing else matters. We’ll be off on an irreversible course of self-destruction. Well, there are institutions and individuals. There’s the CEO of ExxonMobil. There’s Jamie Dimon, who runs JPMorgan Chase. They make decisions, and the decisions to some extent reflect their own goals, priorities, sentiments, and so on. But they are narrowly constrained. So, for example, the CEO of ExxonMobil surely knows as much about global warming as you or I do, probably a lot more, at least if he reads the materials that come to him from his own scientists and engineers, and they’ve known it for 50 years. ExxonMobil scientists were in the lead, back before many people were warning about the extraordinary dangers of heating in the environment. In fact, when James Hansen, a famous geoscientist, made a speech in 1988 warning of the threat of global warming, putting it into the public realm, ExxonMobil responded with significant efforts to undermine the idea that there is a threat. They didn’t do it stupidly. They didn’t deny it, because that would have been easily refuted. What they did is try to develop doubt — “Maybe we don’t know,” “We haven’t looked into clouds,” “Let’s put off any big decisions so we can have a richer society,” “We might have to do something about it a long time from now,” etc. They all knew that was nonsense. They all knew that if we don’t do something about it quickly, we are in severe danger.
兩者之間存在著很大的差異，但基本上，制度對可能發生的事情施加了嚴格的約束。讓我們來看看人類歷史上出現的最緊迫的問題：環境的破壞。如果在接下來的幾十年中我們不解決這個問題，那麼其他任何事情都不會發生。我們將走向不可逆轉的自我毀滅過程。好吧，這裡有機構和個人。埃克森美孚（ExxonMobil）的首席執行官。摩根大通（JPMorgan Chase）的傑米·戴蒙（Jamie Dimon）他們做出決策，並且決策在某種程度上反映了他們自己的目標，優先事項，情感等等。但是它們受到了嚴格的限制。因此，舉例來說，埃克森美孚（ExxonMobil）的首席執行官肯定會像您或我一樣了解全球變暖，至少在他從自己的科學家和工程師那裡讀到有關他的材料的情況下，可能會了解更多它持續了50年。埃克森美孚（ExxonMobil）的科學家處於領先地位，早在許多人警告說環境中存在著巨大的加熱危險之前。實際上，當著名的地球學家詹姆斯·漢森（James Hansen）在1988年發表演講警告全球變暖的威脅並將其納入公共領域時，埃克森美孚公司做出了巨大的努力，以破壞存在威脅的想法。他們沒有愚蠢地做。他們沒有否認這一點，因為這很容易被駁斥。他們所做的是試圖引起懷疑-“也許我們不知道”，“我們沒有看過烏雲”，“讓我們推遲任何重大決定，以便我們有一個更富裕的社會，”從現在開始很長時間了。”等等。他們都知道這是胡說八道。他們都知道，如果我們不迅速採取行動，就會面臨嚴重的危險。
Back to your question. Suppose a different individual CEO came in and said, “Let’s tell the population the truth. Let’s tell them that we are destroying the prospects for organized human life on earth. Let’s tell them that we are going to stop doing it. We’re going to move to renewable energy, because we care about your grandchildren and ours.” He would be out in five minutes. That’s part of the institutional structure. If you aren’t maximizing profit and market share, you aren’t going to stand. Of course, there is a point to criticizing individuals, but the real point is that, within the system, they don’t have a lot of choices. Therefore, we have to ask, “What is it about the structure of our institutions that is leading us in this direction?”
回到您的問題。假設另一位個人CEO進來說：“讓我們告訴人們真相。告訴他們，我們正在破壞地球上有組織的人類生活的前景。告訴他們我們將停止這樣做。我們將轉向可再生能源，因為我們關心您的孫輩和我們的孫輩。”他會在五分鐘內出局。那是製度結構的一部分。如果您沒有最大化利潤和市場份額，那麼您將站不住腳。當然，批評個人是有道理的，但真正的意義是，在系統內，他們沒有太多選擇。因此，我們必須問：“導致我們朝這個方向前進的機構結構是什麼？”
Let’s take another current example, right in the headlines. We are in the midst of a pandemic. It is well understood, across the board, that unless vaccines are provided quickly to the poor, suffering areas of the world, such as parts of Africa, it is going to be a disaster, not only for them, but for us. Mutations will take place. It is unpredictable, but some might be lethal. They’ll get back to Europe and the United States, and we’ll all be in deep trouble. So, we have a choice. We can work on a people’s vaccine, sending the vaccine freely and openly to the people of Africa. That’s good for them, of course, but it will also protect us from future disaster. That’s one choice. The other choice is to protect the profits of the major pharmaceutical corporations, already loaded with profits because of the highly protectionist elements of the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Which are we pursuing? Not just us, but Europe as well. The idea is you work for yourself, for the system of power within your society, and if it kills people elsewhere, that’s someone else’s problem. That is the way the institutions work.
讓我們再舉一個標題為標題的最新示例。我們正處於大流行之中。眾所周知，除非迅速向世界上的貧困地區（如非洲部分地區）提供疫苗，否則這將是一場災難，不僅對他們而且對我們都是如此。將會發生變異。這是不可預測的，但有些可能會致命。他們將回到歐洲和美國，我們都將陷入困境。因此，我們有一個選擇。我們可以開發一種人民疫苗，將其免費和公開地發送給非洲人民。當然，這對他們有好處，但也可以保護我們免受將來的災難。那是一種選擇。另一種選擇是保護主要製藥公司的利潤，這些公司由於貼錯標籤的“自由貿易協定”中的高度保護主義因素而已經獲利。我們追求什麼？不只是我們，還有歐洲。這個想法是您為自己，為社會內部的權力體係而工作，如果它殺死了其他地方的人，那將是另一個人的問題。這就是機構的工作方式。
In fact, if you look at the details, it is pretty shocking. Imagine yourself a rational observer from outer space watching this species. Take a look at the United States, which has one of the best — or least bad — records on the vaccine. There happens to be a surplus of vaccines in the United States, because the FDA has not yet authorized the use of AstraZeneca, and there’s a large extra supply. So, Biden did the sensible thing. He dispensed them to other countries. Which countries? The first one is Canada, which is the world’s champion in storing unused vaccines that it will never be able to use because it has hoarded them way beyond any potential use. So, that’s the first recipient. The second recipient is Mexico, as part of a bribe to violate international law and minimal ethics by keeping desperate refugees away from our border. This isn’t because Biden is a bad person. He seems like a nice guy. It is just the way that institutions structure decisions. That said, there are different forces operating on how decisions are structured. There are the corporate boardrooms, and there are the activists in the streets. Who is going to win? That’s the issue, and it’s not subtle.
實際上，如果您查看詳細信息，那將非常令人震驚。想像一下，您是一個來自外太空的理性觀察者，正在觀察該物種。看看美國，該國的疫苗記錄是最好的（或最壞的）之一。在美國，由於FDA尚未授權使用阿斯利康，並且疫苗的供應量很大，因此疫苗的供應量過剩。因此，拜登做了明智的事情。他把它們分配到其他國家。哪些國家？第一個是加拿大，它是世界上儲存未使用的疫苗的冠軍，因為它已經將它們儲存在任何潛在用途之外，因此永遠無法使用。所以，這是第一個收件人。第二個接收國是墨西哥，這是通過使絕望的難民遠離我們的邊界而違反國際法和最低道德規範的賄賂的一部分。這不是因為拜登是個壞人。他看起來像個好人。這就是製度結構的方式
Go back to the beginning of this 40-year assault on the general population called “neoliberalism.” It was pretty obvious at the start. You may not be old enough to have heard it, but I’m sure you’ve read about Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981. The punchline was, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” Okay, so if government is not the solution, who is the solution? Where will decisions be made if not in government? Does it take a genius to figure this out? They’ll be made in corporate boardrooms. So, in other words, we shift decisions from government — which whatever its flaws, is, at least, partially responsive to the general population — to private tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the public, and which are dedicated, explicitly — there’s no secret about it — to maximizing what’s called “shareholder value”: dividends, benefits to management. That’s their task. The name for that in the United States is “libertarianism.”
翻訳結果
All of these are ways in which, to go back to my and Marv’s course, “common sense” is instituted. We happen to start with Gramsci. We go back to earlier sources, even David Hume’s “Of the First Principles of Government.” These themes run through, and it is understood that you have to impose common sense. You have to manufacture consent. As progressive democratic theorists have argued, “The people are too stupid and ignorant to do what is in their own interest. So, we the responsible men have to make decisions for them.” Of course, the intellectuals and the responsible men are actually following the dictates of private power. They don’t like that part of the story. They like to see themselves as running the show.
所有這些都是建立“常識”的方法，回到我和馬夫的課程。我們碰巧從葛蘭西開始。我們回溯到更早的資料來源，甚至是大衛·休ume（David Hume）的“政府的第一原則”。這些主題貫穿始終，並且您必須強加常識。您必須徵得同意。正如進步的民主理論家所指出的那樣：“人民太愚蠢和無知，無助於他們自己的利益。因此，我們負責任的人必須為他們做出決定。”當然，知識分子和負責任的人實際上是在遵循私人權力的指示。他們不喜歡故事的那一部分。他們喜歡把自己看作是表演的開始。
In my lifetime, I’ve seen it over and over. During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the technocratic and meritocratic elite, my colleagues from Harvard and MIT, were flocking down to Washington to show how the world should be run. Well, in Vietnam, we saw what came of that. It was not unpredictable. Those of us in the streets were warning of it all along.
一生中，我一遍又一遍地看到它。在肯尼迪和約翰遜時代，來自哈佛大學和麻省理工學院的我的技術官僚和精英階層精英蜂擁而至，向華盛頓展示如何運轉世界。好吧，在越南，我們看到了結果。這不是不可預測的。我們這些在街上的人一直在警告這一點。
Now, it is the same. Neoliberalism, whatever is in the minds of people who advocate for it, maybe they don’t even think about it, is an explicit effort, and it is evident from the structure, to hand power to private institutions, which are dedicated to self-enrichment. It would be obvious to a 10-year-old, even if economists don’t see it, because they have some theory that says it leads to “Pareto optimality.” Whatever. We have 40 years of experience, and we can see what’s happened. It was totally predictable. To give you just one example, you may have seen it, but a couple of months ago the RAND Corporation did a detailed study trying to determine how much wealth was transferred from the working class and middle class to the superrich during the 40 neoliberal years. They estimated $47 trillion. Some call it “transfer.” “Robbery” is a better term. Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent of the population doubled their share of total wealth from 10 percent to 20 percent. Take a look at the effects: the majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck. Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to what you mentioned before — unfocused anger. Is it surprising? People aren’t told what is really robbing them. Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon. Anything but what is actually happening. That’s another mode of manufacturing consent and establishing “common sense.”現在，它是相同的。新自由主義，無論倡導它的人的想法是什麼，也許他們甚至都沒有考慮它，這是一種明確的努力，並且從結構上可以明顯看出，將權力移交給了致力於自我保護的私人機構。豐富。即使經濟學家沒有看到，對於一個10歲的孩子來說，這也是顯而易見的，因為他們有某種理論認為會導致“帕累托最優”。任何。我們有40年的經驗，我們可以看到發生了什麼。這是完全可以預見的。僅舉一個例子，您可能已經看過，但是幾個月前，蘭德公司（RAND Corporation）進行了詳細的研究，試圖確定在40個新自由主義時期從工人階級和中產階級向超級富豪的財富轉移量。他們估計有47萬億美元。有人稱其為“轉移”。 “搶劫”是一個更好的術語。同時，最高的0.1％人口將其總財富份額從10％翻了一番，增至20％。看一下其效果：大多數人口通過薪水獲得薪水。實際工資停滯了40年。生產力增長的收益集中在很少的領域。這導致您之前提到的-不專心的憤怒。令人驚訝嗎？人們沒有被告知是什麼真正在搶劫他們。相反，如果您相信QAnon，他們會被告知是移民，黑人，一些來自外太空的戀童癖者。除了實際發生的一切。這是製造同意並建立“常識”的另一種方式。
The job of people like you, activists on the streets, people who are trying to change the world for the better, is to dismantle all of this stuff. It is to get people to see what is not that far from right in front of their eyes. None of it is very profound. You can talk about it to high school students. They often understand it better than graduate students at major universities, who have been more indoctrinated.像您這樣的人，街頭上的維權人士，試圖改變世界的人們的工作就是拆除所有這些東西。它是為了讓人們看到眼前不遠處的事物。沒有一個是非常深刻的。您可以和高中生談談。他們通常比主要大學的研究生更好地理解它，而這些大學的教育程度更高。
As we discuss in the book, this is a point George Orwell made. Something that not many people read but should is the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is seen as safe, because it is a satire of the totalitarian enemy. The introduction, which was not initially published, is addressed to the people of England. Orwell warns not to feel too self-righteous, because in free England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. He calls it “literary censorship in England,” and one of the means he describes is simply a good education. You go to the best schools, like Oxford and Cambridge (similar to Harvard and Yale), and have it instilled in you that there are certain things that it just wouldn’t do to say, or even think about.
正如我們在書中討論的那樣，這就是喬治·奧威爾（George Orwell）提出的觀點。動物農場的介紹是很少有人讀的，但應該讀的東西。動物農場被認為是安全的，因為它是極權主義者的諷刺。該引言最初並未發布，是針對英格蘭人民的。奧威爾警告說不要太自以為是，因為在自由的英格蘭，不使用武力就可以壓制不受歡迎的思想。他稱其為“英格蘭的文學檢查”，他描述的手段之一就是接受良好的教育。您上了牛津大學和劍橋大學等最好的學校（類似於哈佛大學和耶魯大學），並把它們灌輸給您，有些事情是他們根本不想說甚至想不到的。
It is funny the way it works. A couple of days ago I had a talk with a group of Latin American activists. They were from all over Latin America. Well, just for fun, I read for them a column that appeared in The New York Times that day by one of their top foreign affairs specialists. It was about how the United States has been committed to the rule of law, human rights, and democracy. They just burst out laughing. They’re living in the real world, not the world of US intellectual culture.
它的工作方式很有趣。幾天前，我與一群拉丁美洲活動家進行了交談。他們來自拉丁美洲各地。好吧，只是為了好玩，我為他們讀了一篇專欄文章，該專欄那天被他們的頂級外國人之一刊登在《紐約時報》上。
For a long time, you’ve discussed and written about the responsibility of intellectuals. What is the responsibility of a genuine intellectual with a serious commitment to telling the truth on issues of consequence, as opposed to the Kennedy and Johnson advisors who planned and directed the war in Vietnam, the so-called “best and brightest,” a phrase most people now don’t realize David Halberstam meant as ironic?
很長時間以來，您已經討論並撰寫了有關知識分子的責任的文章。一個真正的知識分子的責任是認真地在後果問題上講真相，而不是計劃和指揮越南戰爭的肯尼迪和約翰遜顧問，即所謂的“最聰明”。現在大多數人都沒有意識到戴維·哈爾伯斯坦（David Halberstam）具有諷刺意味嗎？
It’s pretty simple, like most things. If telling the truth about important matters is significant, that’s what you do. What happens to you? It’s usually not pretty. Let’s go back to classical Greece. There was a guy who was “corrupting the youth” by asking too many questions. He drank the hemlock, not the people who were not asking the questions. Go back to the biblical record. There were people who were condemning the acts of the evil kings, and calling for justice and mercy for widows and orphans. What happened to them? They were imprisoned, driven into the desert, bitterly condemned. Many centuries later, they’re honored and called “prophets.” We might want to remember that the first “self-hating Jew,” a common term now for Jews who are critical of Israel, was the prophet Elijah. He was called before King Ahab, who was the epitome of evil in the Bible. Ahab condemned Elijah as a “hater of Israel,” because he was criticizing the acts of the evil king. That’s the first “self-hating Jew.”
就像大多數事情一樣，這非常簡單。如果說出重要事情的真相很重要，那就是您要做的。你怎麼啦？通常不漂亮。讓我們回到古典希臘。有一個人問了太多問題而“腐敗了年輕人”。他喝了鐵杉，而不是不問問題的人。回到聖經的記錄。有人譴責邪惡國王的行為，呼籲寡婦和孤兒伸張正義和憐憫。他們發生了什麼？他們被囚禁，被驅趕到沙漠，受到嚴厲譴責。許多世紀以後，他們被尊稱為“先知”。我們可能想記住，第一個“自我憎恨的猶太人”是先知以利亞，這是現在對批評以色列的猶太人的通稱。他在聖經中是邪惡縮影的亞哈王之前被召喚的。亞哈譴責以利亞為“以色列的仇恨”，因為他在批評邪惡的國王的行為。那是第一個“自我憎恨的猶太人”。
This runs through history. The term “intellectual” in the modern sense pretty much came into use in the Dreyfus trial in France, during the late 19th century. The Dreyfusards, Émile Zola and others, were condemning the atrocious court case against Alfred Dreyfus as an antisemitic attack against an innocent person. We honor the Dreyfusards, but not then. Zola had to flee France for his life. He and the others were all bitterly condemned, pretty much the way “the best and the brightest” condemned antiwar activists. They said, “What do you bunch of activists, and students, and writers have to say about anything? How dare you criticize the august state?” The antiwar activists were the people that McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor for Kennedy and Johnson (and former Harvard dean), called “wild men in the wings.” This was in 1968, when there was already a major antiwar movement. He wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in which he essentially said, “Yes, we’ve done some things wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. It is perfectly legitimate to question our tactics, but then there are people who have the audacity to question our objectives and motives: Wild men in the wings.” So, the “wild men in the wings” were those who looked into the institutional structure that led us to carry out major war crimes, crimes for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg. Like the Dreyfusards, like Socrates in classical Greece.這貫穿歷史。現代意義上的“知識分子”一詞在19世紀後期的法國Dreyfus審判中幾乎被使用。德雷福薩德人，埃米爾·佐拉（ÉmileZola）等人譴責針對阿爾弗雷德·德雷福斯（Alfred Dreyfus）的殘酷法院案件，認為這是對無辜者的反猶太主義襲擊。我們尊重德雷福薩德人，但不是那時。左拉一生不得不逃離法國。他和其他人都遭到了嚴厲的譴責，幾乎就像“最聰明的人”譴責反戰活動家一樣。他們說：“你們這些激進分子，學生和作家必須說些什麼？你怎麼敢批評八月的狀態？”反戰活動人士是肯尼迪和約翰遜（以及前哈佛大學教務長）的國家安全顧問麥格奧爾·邦迪（McGeorge Bundy）所稱的“狂熱分子”。那是在1968年，當時已經有一場大規模的反戰運動。他為外交事務寫了一篇文章，他在本質上說：“是的，我們做錯了一些事情。每個人都會犯錯誤。質疑我們的策略是完全合法的，但是有些人卻敢於質疑我們的目標和動機：狂野的人在翅膀上。”因此，“機翼上的野人”是那些研究導致我們執行主要戰爭罪行的製度結構的人，這些戰爭罪行是納粹分子在紐倫堡被絞死的。就像德雷富薩德（Dreyfusards），像古典希臘人的蘇格拉底一樣。
This is a much freer country, of course. Most of us, or at least those with relative privilege, didn’t have to flee for our lives, but some did. If you were a Black activist, like Fred Hampton, you could have been murdered by the FBI.當然，這是一個更加自由的國家。我們大多數人，或者至少是那些享有相對特權的人，不必為自己的生命而逃亡，但有些人則逃亡了。如果您是弗雷德·漢普頓（Fred Hampton）這樣的黑人活動家，您可能會被聯邦調查局謀殺。
To go back to your question: What does a genuine intellectual do? Tell the truth about回到您的問題：真正的知識分子做什麼？ 向必須聽的人說出重要事情的真相，並期望承受後果。
Do you think that what we might loosely refer to as “intellectual culture,” even on the left, has become too detached from working people and ordinary life in the United States? I’ve heard you reminisce about your childhood, your uncle’s newsstand and the radical leftists who would congregate there, and how professors and writers would regularly comingle with working and poor people.
It wasn’t just where I grew up. Intellectuals were teaching courses in the labor movement. They were writing books for the general population — books like Mathematics for the Million, written by a very good mathematician. Science for the People is that type of organization. It was part of the task of the intellectual to be part of the activist, working-class movements. It hasn’t disappeared. We still have things like that, but much less so now. Science for the People is still active, but through no fault of their own, they have much less reach in our society than they did during the activist periods.
A large part of the reason was the labor movement. The labor movement was virtually destroyed in the 1920s. The United States has a very violent labor history. To a large extent, the US is a business-run society. By the 1920s, the labor movement was crushed, but it revived in the 1930s. It took a couple of years after the Depression, but by 1934 and ’35, you were starting to get CIO organizing, militant labor actions, and they had enthusiasm and support. As a kid, I could see it. My own family was first-generation immigrant, mostly working class. It was a big part of their lives. My aunts, for example, were seamstresses working for the garment industry. It was pretty rotten work, but they were members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. That was part of a rich life. It wasn’t just some defense of a job. It was also cultural activities, social activities, a week in the Catskills. It was life. In that context, you had intellectuals deeply involved. We’ve gone a long way away from that. The Democrats, basically, gave up on the working class in the 1970s. The last gasp was the Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill of 1978. Carter didn’t veto it, but he watered it down so much that it was meaningless. The Democrats decided they didn’t have much use for the working class, and became the party of affluent professionals. It is now changing.
The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich, understood in the 1970s that you can’t get votes by coming to people and saying, “I want to rob you, and hand everything you have over to the rich and corporate sector.” Somehow that doesn’t work. You have to turn to what are called “cultural issues,” meaning everything but what matters for your life. So, Paul Weyrich, one of the main Republican strategists, by the mid-1970s got a flash of insight and realized that, if the Republicans pretend, stress “pretend,” to be opposed to abortion, they’ll pick up the evangelical vote and the Northern Catholic vote. So, they all switched on a dime. Reagan had been a strong supporter of a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California, he signed one of the strongest bills protecting it. He then became a passionate opponent of abortion. George H. W. Bush, who was supposed to have had some character, did the same. It became the mantra of the Republican Party. If you look into the details, it’s pretty grotesque. In fact, what the party platform is doing is increasing abortion, and they know it. When you undermine family planning, block contraceptives, cut health care, defund Planned Parenthood, then you increase abortions, especially illegal and dangerous ones. It doesn’t matter to them, because this is a way to pick up votes.
It’s an extension of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. That was their first big breakthrough. Nixon was a terrible racist himself, and he realized that by not so subtly advocating racism he could pick up the Southern vote. Reagan, who was a dedicated racist, just did it as second nature.
Now, take guns. The whole gun culture in the United States is mostly manufactured. It is PR. There never was a gun culture in the 19th century. There were just farmers who had old muskets to drive coyotes away. There was a huge propaganda campaign, actually the first PR campaign, concocting fantasies about the Wild West — stuff I grew up with as a kid. You want to be Wyatt Earp, a fast draw, all that nonsense. Nothing like that ever really existed, but it was built up, and the bottom line was, “You better buy your son a fancy Winchester rifle or he won’t be a real man.” It sort of worked. It was picked up by the tobacco companies. They did the same thing — the Marlboro man, tough cowboy riding to the rescue. It is a big part of the culture, all fabricated, and it developed a gun culture. Then, in 2008, the Heller decision of the Supreme Court turned it into holy writ. It reversed a century of interpretation of the Second Amendment, and said, “Yeah, everybody has to have an assault rifle.” Now, if you ask people what is in the Constitution, about the only thing they know is the Second Amendment, “Our Second Amendment rights.” For Republicans, this is big. This is the way to pick up votes. If you kill a lot of people, it’s not our business. Killing huge numbers of people in Central America where American guns flow is someone else’s problem. We have to get power for our corporate friends, the guys we serve. So, that’s the Republican Party. It was turned into a cartoon by Trump, but it was like that for a long time. The working class is hung out to dry.
Now, you are right about the left. The left has not filled that gap. It has moved onto things that are important and worthwhile, what is called “identity politics” — race, gender, sexual orientation. These are all important, but they shouldn’t come at the expense of fighting the class war, protecting and participating with the people who are getting it in the neck under the neoliberal regime. The left can and should do it all. So, what you say is quite right.
On the subject of class war, and the streets versus the boardroom, you use a term in the book, “capitalist realism.” I’d like to you talk about that, but I wonder if you could do so in response to something I recently heard from Al Gore when he was asked if capitalism is at the root of the climate crisis. The former vice president said:
I think the current form of capitalism we have is desperately in need of reform. The short-term outlook is often mentioned, but the way that we measure what is of value to us is also at the heart of the crisis of modern capitalism. Now, capitalism is at the base of every successful economy and it balances supply and demand. It unlocks the higher fraction of human potential, and it’s not going anywhere. But it needs to be reformed, because the way we measure what’s valuable now ignores so-called “negative externalities” like pollution. It also ignores positive externalities like investments in education, health care, mental health care, family services. It ignores the depletion of resources like groundwater and topsoil, and the web of living species. And it ignores the distribution of incomes and net worth. So that we have — when GDP goes up, people cheer — two percent, three percent, wow, four percent, and they think, “Great.” But it is accompanied by vast increases in pollution, chronic underinvestment in public goods, the depletion of irreplaceable natural resources, and the worst inequality crisis we’ve seen in more than 100 years that is threatening the future of both capitalism and democracy. So, we have to change it.
I found that interesting, because his criticism of capitalism resembles much of what you’ve said.
Yes.
Right, but he embeds within that criticism what you refer to as “capitalist realism.” The idea that there is no way out, there’s no real alternative, and therefore we are stuck with it.
I can’t say the exact meaning of his words, but I assume that when he says, “unlocks the higher fraction of human potential,” he means that capitalism gives us all the wonderful things we have, like computers, the internet, and all the great achievements of modern industrial society. That’s Econ 101. Is it true? Well, let’s take a look.
Let’s take what we’re now using — computers, internet, satellites, microelectronics, GPS. Where did it all come from? A lot of it came from the research labs where I was working in the 1950s and ’60s: public institutions funded by the taxpayer, doing the hard, innovative, creative work, which led, finally, to the point where Steve Jobs could sell the personal computer in 1977. It went private after about 30 years of extensive work, mostly in the public sector under public funding. The internet was developed in the public sector, and then handed over to private capital. There’s nothing new about this.
I do have one criticism of the “capitalist realism” idea. The slogan for it is, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I’d like to revise that. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the beginning of capitalism. We don’t have an actual capitalist system. Business would never permit it. A capitalist system would self-destruct in no time. So, business, from way back, has always called on a powerful state to protect it from the ravages of the market, which is for the poor, not for them, and to subsidize it in all sorts of ways. So, every developed country has some variety of state capitalism. Some have overt, direct industrial policy. We have more indirect, slightly more subtle forms of industrial policy. That is how it works. Since World War II, it became overwhelming, but it goes further back. In the 19th century, the railroads were the main part of industrial capitalism. They were much too complicated for private business to work. So, the Army Corps of Engineers ran it, and handed over the profits to private companies. What was called the American system of manufacturing — interchangeable parts, quality control — became the wonder of the world. It was developed in government arsenals, and for good reasons. There, it doesn’t matter what the expenses are, just like developing computers and the internet. It doesn’t matter what the expenses are, you just do it, and ultimately private capital will profit from it. Steve Jobs was a smart guy, but he was living off the creative, risky work that was done mostly in the public sector. We don’t have capitalism. We have a form of state capitalism.
Well, do we have to have state capitalism? Or could there be a system in which people don’t have to spend their waking lives as subjects of a master living under totalitarian control? That’s called “having a job.” “Having a job” means that, for most of your life, you’re following orders from somebody. For 2,000 years, that was considered an utter abomination. From ancient Rome all the way through the 19th century, it was considered such an obvious attack on human rights and dignity that the slogan of the Republican Party, under Abraham Lincoln, was that wage slavery was no different from slavery, except that it is temporary. This wasn’t just idealism. It was the picture of the working-class movement — a major movement that developed in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. It took different forms in different countries. Here, it was based on a very popular movement of working people in Eastern Massachusetts, young women from the farms driven into the mills called “factory girls” — very militant, very articulate, and very educated. They didn’t have formal education, but they were reading Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They didn’t know Marx, but they were discussing interesting ideas about how, if labor is stolen from the worker, that’s robbery. Whatever labor goes into the goods we are producing is okay, but if some other guy, like an owner or investor, is taking part of it, that’s illegitimate. People who work in the mills should own them and run them.
There was a genuine populist movement, not what populism is today. In the late 19th century, it was a movement of American farmers, starting in Texas and going through Oklahoma and Kansas, and so on, and it was very radical. They wanted to be free of Northeastern bankers who loaned them the money for the seeds and charged usurious interest. They said, “We want to get out of that. We want to do it ourselves. We’ll have our own cooperative banks, our own market system, and a cooperative commonwealth.” They started to link up with the major workers movement — the Knights of Labor. It was the most radical movement in American history. It was crushed by force — state force, corporate force. This is a very violent, class-run country.
Can we go back to that sensibility? Can people understand that being the serf of a master is not the greatest thing in life? Maybe.
That returns us to the power of the streets. We’ve seen a wonderful and encouraging explosion of activism in the past year. But perhaps you find the same thing that I do. I find that my students aren’t apathetic, but those that are withdrawn are typically hopeless, because they feel they are powerless.
That’s right.
Well then, what have you said to your students who feel powerless, and what would you say to a student, or anyone else, who stumbles upon this interview, and feels powerless?
First of all, in the class that Marv Waterstone and I teach, every week we bring in outside people who are activists working on some concrete thing. They talk about the work they are doing, and the work that can be done. In earlier years when I was at MIT, I co-taught a similar course. The Institute didn’t really like that I was doing it, but they were kind enough to give us a room. We brought in people who were local activists. That’s what you can do: bring in people who show what you can do. One of the best ways of control is to impose hopelessness, to make it seem like nothing can be done. Well, take a look at what people are achieving. In the class and the book, we talk about the triumph of activism. Look at what’s been done by the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement. It looked more hopeless then than it does now, and if you were involved, you were directly told it was hopeless. You were also told that it is none of your business.
One of the things we discuss is the liberal intellectuals and their conception of democracy: Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other great figures of liberal intellectual culture. Their point of view was typical of the ruling class: If people are too stupid and ignorant to know what they want, for their own benefit, we have to direct and control them. At the same time, the corporate system was describing itself as “soulful corporations” — people who are dedicated night and day to the common good. We’re seeing a revival of that now in the corporate sector. They know they are in trouble, and they are facing what they call “reputational risk.” The peasants are coming with pitchforks. So, now they say, “We have to be good citizens. We made mistakes. Now, we’re getting better. We’re going to serve you the way we used to.” It’s coming from major corporations, the Chamber of Commerce. We’re hearing it all over the place.
But this is a form that the class war takes: make people feel hopeless. Tell people, “You aren’t smart enough. Those guys are smart enough, not you. So, let them run things, and they are wonderful people dedicated to your welfare. You can trust them. You’re not smart enough, and even if you were, there’s nothing you can do. The power is too great.” Every organizer knows how to deal with this. What you find when you go to a community is that everyone feels hopeless. Then, you find some feasible task. I’ll give you a real case. There was a neighborhood of downtrodden immigrants. A group of mothers were organized to get a traffic light at a dangerous intersection to make things safer for their children. They were willing to try, and they succeeded. So, they realized there are things they can do. That’s organizing.
At your school where you teach, one thing you could do is find out whether the university invests in fossil fuels. If they do, let’s see if we can do something about it. First, you can learn about it. You can help students learn why they are doing it. Then, organize them to do something about it. I’ve seen it happen many times. Start on something understandable and feasible, and get to work on it. Achieve it, and you’ve broken through the hopelessness.
Many people have wildly oscillated from despair to hope and back again many times over the past year. The right-wing is getting increasingly dangerous, and brazenly antidemocratic. The Atlantic, one of those mainstream intellectual publications, is predicting that we are entering a new era of progressive government. What’s your sense of the lay of the land between the rabidly antisocialist right-wing and the Democratic Party, which as you said earlier is beginning to show some promising signs of positive change?
It is a very serious issue. We can see it gestating right in front of our eyes. The Republican Party leadership, as reported in some of the major journals, is salivating with joy over the prospect that the Democrats might do something moderately humane, like instead of putting children in concentration camps at the border, they might try to help them a little. Instead of insanely increasing tensions with Iran, they might try to ameliorate them. They might try to do something on climate. They love it, because then they can mobilize the people they’ve turned into raging monsters, and get them to attack these communist rats who want the country flooded with rapists and murderers so that the white race suffers genocide. You know the whole story. That’s the Republican Party. It’s not a political party anymore. It’s very dangerous.
There are other parts of it that are just as dangerous. For example, just recently, Pew Research Center came out with one of its regular polls on major issues facing the country. They had a choice of 15 major issues, and people were asked to rank them. It was divided between Republicans and Democrats. Take a look at Republicans. At the very bottom — 13 percent — the most important question that has ever arisen in human history: global warming. They don’t call it that. They call it “climate change,” which is more neutral. But only 13 percent think that is a major problem. It is only the most important problem that’s ever arisen — the question of survival. Then you go to the problems they are most concerned about — illegal immigration, the deficit. This is the result of very effective propaganda. Imposing common sense, manufacturing consent, year after year — turning people into the kind of people that supported the Nazis. Going back to my childhood, I remember them right here in the United States. These were the people who wanted to get rid of the Jews, because “the Jews are destroying civilization.”
If people are isolated, atomized, with no support groups, no involvement in constructive activities, they are prey to this attack on their moral and intellectual integrity. Go back to what I said, the Republican leadership is overjoyed at the moves toward some humane behavior on the part of Democrats. They know, especially with Trump who is a genius at this, that they can organize and mobilize crazed groups who really believe they need their guns to save the white race from genocide. You can drive people to that.
There’s going to be a lot of work to overcome it, but it can be done. One of the things that happened in 1930s labor organizing was that it managed to overcome very serious racism. Whites and Blacks were working together to organize steel workers. It can be done again, but it isn’t going to be easy. The labor movement has been crushed through bipartisan policies. With the Democrats, it was abandonment, and with the Republicans, it was harsh attack. As you said before, the left has not compensated for it. That’s a big job, but it can happen.
Take a look at what happened after the murder of George Floyd. People of all races marched together in the streets. The marches had two-thirds public approval. Martin Luther King Jr. never reached anything like that support. You can nurture that and develop it.
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Featured image: "A photograph of Noam Chomsky" by Σ, retouched by Wugapodes is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Image has been cropped.
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訪談中的人物 (56)：92歲的"大師"Noam Chomsky接受《紐約客》訪問，他認為( Believes )：Trump 是人類史最要不得的罪犯( “the Worst Criminal in Human History}
Noam Chomsky - Wikipedia
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Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic ...
Children： 3, including Aviva
Influenced： show
Influences： show
Thesis： Transformational Analysis (1955)
Chomsky has always been extremely pragmatic in his political analysis, diverging from some other leftists in his belief in the necessity of voting for mainstream Democrats against Republicans.Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria; Source photograph by Heuler Andrey / AFP / Getty
Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, activist, and political writer, is one of the most famous and harshest critics of American foreign policy. His critiques of Presidential Administrations from Nixon to Obama, and the stridency of his views—comparing 9/11 to Bill Clinton’s bombing of a factory in Khartoum, for example—have made him the target of much ire, as well as a hero of the global left. “Chomsky always refuses to talk about motives in politics,” Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in her Profile of him for The New Yorker, in 2003. “Like many theorists of universal humanness, he often seems baffled, even repelled, by the thought of actual people and their psychologies.”
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