(Audio) How the World Works, by Chomsky

Saturday October 26, 2024

“How the World Works” is a collection of four Chomsky books:

Chomsky says the world is violent. Very violent! He agrees with Dalio that international law means little to power. He describes the Pentagon as an economic stimulus mechanism, which I thought was an interesting framing.

I first heard about Chomsky in connection with linguistics. The only linguistic thing he talks about here is the idea of language being debased, in a similar sense to Orwellian Newspeak, making it hard to talk about certain things. I've felt something like this in trying to talk about a post-work world. To stop selling your labor is called "retiring," which connotes a kind of withdrawal, which I don't like. One might also say that to retire is to "stop working," because "work" can only mean "sell your labor," even if you carry on doing things you think are useful and productive. It's a similar frustration to that of the "stay-at-home" parent, who is engaged in effortful activity over 40 hours a week and yet said to "not work." (These aren't Chomsky's examples.)

And Chomsky mentions interesting things here and there... I don't think I'd known about the New Party, which continues in part as Progressive Dane, a party in Dane County, where I went to college. I had heard of Progressive Dane, I think, but I wasn't aware of its historical context.

Some more interesting bits quoted below...

cover

“expanding the floor of the cage”

“So Argentina is “minimizing the state”—cutting down public expenditures, the way our government is doing, but much more extremely. Of course, when you minimize the state, you maximize something else—and it isn’t popular control. What gets maximized is private power, domestic and foreign.

I met with a very lively anarchist movement in Buenos Aires, and with other anarchist groups as far away as northeastern Brazil, where nobody even knew they existed. We had a lot of discussions about these matters. They recognize that they have to try to use the state—even though they regard it as totally illegitimate.

The reason is perfectly obvious: When you eliminate the one institutional structure in which people can participate to some extent—namely the government—you’re simply handing over power to unaccountable private tyrannies that are much worse. So you have to make use of the state, all the time recognizing that you ultimately want to eliminate it.

Some of the rural workers in Brazil have an interesting slogan. They say their immediate task is “expanding the floor of the cage.” They understand that they’re trapped inside a cage, but realize that protecting it when it’s under attack from even worse predators on the outside, and extending the limits of what the cage will allow, are both essential preliminaries to dismantling it. If they attack the cage directly when they’re so vulnerable, they’ll get murdered.

That’s something anyone ought to be able to understand who can keep two ideas in their head at once, but some people here in the US tend to be so rigid and doctrinaire that they don’t understand the point. But unless the left here is willing to tolerate that level of complexity, we’re not going to be of any use to people who are suffering and need our help—or, for that matter, to ourselves.

In Brazil and Argentina, you can discuss these issues even with people in the highest political echelons, and with elite journalists and intellectuals. They may not agree with you, but at least they understand what you’re talking about.” (page 174)

“rationality and science”

“In the 1930s, left intellectuals were involved in worker education and writing books like Mathematics for the Millions. They considered it an ordinary, minimal responsibility of privileged people to help others who’d been deprived of formal education to enter into high culture.

Today’s counterparts of these 1930s left intellectuals are telling people, You don’t have to know anything. It’s all junk, a power play, a white male conspiracy. Forget about rationality and science. In other words, put those tools in the hands of your enemies. Let them monopolize everything that works and makes sense.

Plenty of very honorable left intellectuals think this tendency is liberatory, but I think they’re wrong. A lot of personal correspondence on related topics between me and my close, valued old friend Marc Raskin has been published in a book of his. There were similar interchanges in Z Papers in 1992–93, both with Marc and a lot of other people with whom I basically feel in sympathy, but with whom I differ very sharply on this issue.” (page 194)

This "Z" thing still exists, as ZNetwork.

“the South Commission”

“As recently as the early 1990s, the South Commission, which represented the governments of nonaligned countries, came out with a very important critique of the antidemocratic, neoliberal model that’s being forced on the Third World. (The commission included pretty conservative people, like Indonesia’s development minister.)

They published a book that called for a new world order (they introduced the term before George [H. W.] Bush did) based on democracy, justice, development and so on. The book wasn’t obscure—it was published by Oxford University Press. I wrote about it, but I couldn’t find much else. They subsequently published another book of essays commenting on the first one, and I’ve never seen a reference to that either.

The South Commission happened to represent most of the world’s population, but the story they were telling just isn’t one the Western media wanted to hear. So the “new world order” we learned about was Bush’s, not the one advocated by the South Commission, which reflects the interests of most of the people of the world. Back in the 1950s, there were Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Nkrumah, Sukarno and others…” (page 203)

“Here’s what I’m doing. What do you think about it?”

“Over the years, I have noticed a very striking difference between talks I give to more or less elite audiences, and meetings and discussions I have with less privileged people. A while back I was in a town in Massachusetts at a meeting set up by very good local organizers in the urban community—people who were pretty poor, even by world standards. Not long before that, I spent time in the West Bengal countryside. Then I was in Colombia, talking to human rights activists who are working under horrifying conditions.

In places like that, people never ask, What should I do? They say, Here’s what I’m doing. What do you think about it? Maybe they’d like reactions or suggestions, but they’re already dealing with the problem. They’re not sitting around waiting for a magic answer, which doesn’t exist.

When I speak to elite audiences, I constantly get asked, What’s the solution? If I say obvious things like Pick your cause and go volunteer for a group that’s working on it, that’s never the answer they want. They want some sort of magic key that will solve everything quickly, overwhelmingly and effectively. There are no such solutions. There are only the kind that people are working on in Massachusetts towns, in self-governing villages in India, at the Jesuit Center in Colombia.” (page 206)