The Return of Predatory Capitalism 2 страница

As I mentioned, there is now a World Court case in process right now—that you really don’t see coverage of. It’s on kind of technical issues. The World Court isn’t going to deal with the question of whether a country favored by the West is allowed to occupy and massacre other people. That’s beyond courts. But they will look at the technical side. The London Financial Times, a major business journal, just had a big

article on January 30th timed with the opening of the World Court hearing, describing it as one of the most important court trials ever, because it is going to establish the basis for commercial exploitation or, to be more accurate, robbery of the resources of a conquered people. It’s a major issue. That’s quite apart from the fact that with U.S. assistance Indonesia managed to slaughter maybe a quarter of the population, a couple hundred thousand people. And it’s still going on.

DBI’d like to put readers in this office space for a moment. Your desk is pretty neat right now. There are usually even higher piles of books. There are at least six or seven piles, stacks of books and papers, and on your filing cabinets even more. How do you divide your labor? You’ve just been away for about two weeks. You come back and have this avalanche of mail, phone calls, things to read. How do you get through this? What are you prioritizing here? Is there an order to this madness?

First of all, it looks remarkably neat now because while I was away they did something really nasty. They painted and cleaned the office, which I never would have permitted while I was here. So it looks surprisingly clean. You may have noticed I’m trying to take care of that. So it does look neater than usual. But if you want to know what it’s like, you’ve been at our house. Around 4:30 this morning there was what we thought was an earthquake, a huge noise. Our bedroom is right next to the study. We went in and discovered that these big piles of books, six feet high, a couple of piles had fallen and were scattered all over the floor. That’s where I put the books that are urgent reading. Sometimes when I’ve having an extremely boring phone call, I try to calculate how many centuries I’d have to live in order to read the urgent books if I were to read twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week at some speed

reading pace. It’s pretty depressing. So the answer to your question is, I don’t get anywhere near doing what I would like to do.

DBJust in the last year or so you’ve written introductions to Paul Farmer’s book (The Uses of Haiti) on Haiti, Jennifer Harbury’s book (Bridge of Courage) on Guatemala, the Frederic Clairmont book on world trade.

And Alex Carey’s book, and several books of my own, a lot of articles, plus all the linguistics, which is a totally different thing. On the way back from Australia, it’s a long flight, about seventeen or eighteen hours, I spent it all proofreading a very technical manuscript on a totally different topic. Plus I have a couple articles coming out in Mind and other philosophy journals.

DBThose long flights must provide at least a sense of respite for you because you’re not bombarded with telephone calls and people like me knocking on the door.

One thing that surprised me in Australia, and I hope it doesn’t come here, is that they’re very high tech in some ways that we aren’t. So everybody had a mobile phone. As we were driving around in cars there were phone calls going up and back. One thing I’ve always liked about driving, like flying, is that you’re inaccessible. But apparently not any longer. Flying is very good in that respect. You’re totally anonymous. Nobody can bother you.

DBOne of the things I’ve observed over the years of working with you and watching you interact with others is a sense of balance and enormous patience. You’re very patient with people, particularly people

who ask the most inane kinds of questions. Is this something you’ve cultivated?

First of all, I’m usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside isn’t necessarily what’s inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating. I shouldn’t. I should expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on the other hand, what you’re describing as inane questions usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People have no reason to believe anything other than what they’re saying. If you think about where the questioner is coming from, what the person has been exposed to, that’s a very rational and intelligent question. It may sound inane from some other point of view, but it’s not at all inane from within the framework in which it’s being raised. It’s usually quite reasonable. So there’s nothing to be irritated about.

You may be sorry about the conditions in which the questions arise. The thing to do is to try to help them get out of their intellectual confinement, which is not just accidental, as I mentioned. There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it’s possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get in trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view sound inane, but from their point of view are completely reasonable.

DBYou either have ESP or you’ve been looking at my notes, because I was going to ask you a question about education. You’re fond of quoting an anecdote of a former colleague of yours at MIT, Vicky Weisskopf.

Vicky Weisskopf, who just retired, is a very famous physicist. One of the good things about this place is that the senior faculty teach introductory courses. He used to teach introductory physics courses. He’s one of the most distinguished physicists of the twentieth century, not a minor figure. The story—I don’t know whether it’s true or not—is that students would ask him, What are we going to cover in the course? His answer always was that the question is not what we’re going to cover, but what we’re going to discover. In other words, it doesn’t matter what coverage there is. What matters is whether you learn to think independently. If so, you can find the material and the answers yourself. Anyone who teaches science, at least at an advanced level, is perfectly aware of the fact that you don’t lecture. You may be standing in front of a room, but it’s a cooperative enterprise. Studying is more a form of apprenticeship than anything else. It’s kind of like learning to be a skilled carpenter. You work with somebody who knows how to do it. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t get it. If you get it, you’re a skilled carpenter. How it’s transmitted, nobody can say. Science is a lot like that. You just sort of have to get it. The way you get it is by interacting. The same is true here. You go to a class in linguistics and it’s a discussion. The people sitting in the seat where you’re sitting are usually so-called students who are talking about things, teaching me about what they’ve discovered. That was Weisskopf’s point.

DBAt the Mellon lecture that you gave in Chicago in October, you

focused primarily on the ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. It was very different from one of your political talks, for obvious reasons. Not to say you’re not engaged in the political analysis as well, but there was really a different tone and timbre to your voice. There was a certain intellectual excitement when you were talking about these ideas that really matter to you and from what you said influenced you a great deal.

They did. Not so much by reading as by living. From about eighteen months old, both my parents were working, and I was in what was called school. It happened to be an experimental school run by Temple University on Deweyite lines. So until I was about twelve years old I just experienced Deweyite ideas, rather well executed, incidentally. Progressive education isn’t what’s called that, but this was the real stuff. It was an exciting period. Later I read the thinking behind it. I didn’t read about it when I was eight years old. I just lived it. These were highly libertarian ideas. Dewey himself comes straight from the American mainstream. People who read what he actually said would now consider him some far-out anti-American lunatic or something. He was expressing mainstream thinking before the ideological system had so grotesquely distorted the tradition. By now it’s unrecognizable. For example, not only did he agree with the whole Enlightenment tradition that, as he put it, “the goal of production is to produce free people,” (“free men,” he said, but that’s many years ago). That’s the goal of production, not to produce commodities. He was a major theorist of democracy. There were many different, conflicting strands to democratic theory, but the one I’m talking about held that democracy requires dissolution of private power. He said as long as there is private control over the economic system, talk about democracy is a joke. Repeating basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big

business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesn’t do much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical. Basically a classical liberal view. His main point was that you can’t even talk about democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking, everything. That means control by the people who work in the institutions, and the communities.

These are standard libertarian socialist and anarchist ideas which go straight back to the Enlightenment, an outgrowth of the views of the kind that we were talking about before from classical liberalism. Dewey represented these in the modern period, as did Bertrand Russell, from another tradition, but again with roots in the Enlightenment. These were two of the major, if not the two major thinkers, of the twentieth century, whose ideas are about as well known as those of the real Adam Smith. Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has been, and the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our awareness of our own immediate intellectual background.

DBIn that same Mellon lecture, you paraphrased Russell on education. You said that he promoted the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather assisting a flower to grow in its own way. That’s poetic.

That’s an eighteenth-century idea. I don’t know if Russell knew about it or re-invented it, but you read that as standard in early Enlightenment literature. That’s the image that was used. That’s essentially what Weisskopf was saying, too. Humboldt, the founder of classical liberalism, his view was that education is a matter of laying out a string along which the child will develop, but in its own way. You may do some guiding. That’s what serious education would be, from kindergarten up through graduate school. You do get it in advanced

science, because there’s no other way to do it.

But most of the educational system is quite different. Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control—“they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reasons. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

On the other hand, there are exceptions, and Dewey and Russell are among those exceptions. But they are completely marginalized and unknown, although everybody sings praises to them, as they do to Adam Smith. What they actually said would be considered intolerable in the autocratic climate of dominant opinion. The totalitarian element of it is quite striking. The very fact that the concept “anti-American” can exist— forget the way it’s used—exhibits a totalitarian streak that’s pretty dramatic. That concept, anti-Americanism—the only real counterpart to it in the modern world is anti-Sovietism. In the Soviet Union, the worst crime was to be anti-Soviet. That’s the hallmark of a totalitarian society, to have concepts like anti-Sovietism or anti-Americanism. Here it’s considered quite natural. Books on anti-Americanism, by people who are basically Stalinist clones, are highly respected. That’s true of Anglo-American societies, which are strikingly the more democratic societies. I think there’s a correlation there. That’s basically Alex Carey’s point. As freedom grows, the need to coerce and control opinion also grows if you

want to prevent the great beast from doing something with its freedom.

DBThese qualities that I think you’re looking for and want to elicit from your students, a sense of inquiry, skepticism, challenging you, maybe just saying, You’re a nice guy but you don’t know what you’re talking about, how do you foster those? You come in with a certain amount of baggage into a classroom. People say, This is Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics and all that. Do you find students are in awe of you or are hesitant to speak out?

Not most. Most of them are pretty independent-minded. And they soon pick up the atmosphere around. Walk around and you’ll see. It’s a very informal atmosphere of interchange and cooperation. These are ideals, of course. You may not live up to them properly, but it’s certainly what everyone is committed to. There are students who find it harder, especially ones who come from Asian backgrounds. They’ve had a much more authoritarian tradition. Some of them break through quite quickly, some don’t. But by and large the people who make it into elite graduate programs are that tiny minority who haven’t had the creativity and independence beaten out of them. It doesn’t work 100%.

There was some interesting stuff written about this by Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on the American educational system some years back. They pointed out that the educational system is divided into fragments. The part that’s directed towards working people and the general population is indeed designed to impose obedience. But the education for elites can’t quite do that. It has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won’t be able to do their job of making money. You find the same thing in the press. That’s why I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and Business Week. They just have to tell the truth. That’s a contradiction in

the mainstream press, too. Take, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. They have dual functions, and they’re contradictory. One function is to subdue the great beast. But another function is to let their audience, which is an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what’s going on in the world. Otherwise they won’t be able to satisfy their own needs. That’s a contradiction that runs right through the educational system as well. It’s totally independent of another factor, namely just professional integriry, which a lot of people have: honesty, no matter what the external constraints are. That leads to various complexities. If you really look at the details of how the newspapers work, you find these contradictions and problems playing themselves out in complicated ways.

DBDo you find that when you’re doing these one-on-one’s with the students in your office that they’re more open and communicate more easily with you than in class?

My classes have a funny property. They’ve become a kind of institution. There’s the Thursday afternoon seminar. The participants are from all over the place, as we discussed earlier, including faculty from several fields and many places and more advanced students who may have taken the course officially before. Actual students are a small minority and sometimes tend to be somewhat intimidated. The discussions are mostly among faculty. What I’ve done over the years is to break the class into two, so there’s two and a half hours of free-floating interchange with everyone. Then everybody gets kicked out and only the actual students are left. These are just discussion sections, which the actual students run. I don’t have any agenda for them, so it’s whatever they feel like talking about. That’s turned out to be a useful way to run the courses to take care of this special problem that arose.

DBIn addition to your office being relatively neat and tidy, there are also some additions to the photography section on your wall.

The latest photo has my three grandchildren sitting in a bathtub. I try to keep the other side of life, something to look at that’s nice.

DBThere’s a connection between my question and what I want to ask you about. There is much talk now of family values and children. You’ve been citing a UNICEF study by the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett on Child Neglect in Rich Societies. What’s that about?

That’s one of several interesting studies. That’s the best. It came out in 1993. It has yet to be mentioned anywhere, as far as I know. UNICEF usually studies poor countries, but this is a study on rich countries and how they take care of children. She’s a good, well-known American economist. She found, basically, in the last fifteen years, two different models. There’s an Anglo-American model and a European/Japanese model. They’re radically different. The Anglo-American model has been basically a war against children and families. The European/Japanese model has been supportive of families and children. And it shows. The statistics show it very well, as does experience. In Europe and Japan, family values have been maintained. Families have been supported. Children don’t go hungry. Parents stay with children. There’s bonding in early childhood because both husbands and wives are purposely given time to spend with children. There are day care centers. There’s a whole support system. The U.S. and England, on the other hand, are basically at war with children and families and have destroyed them, purposely. Purposeful, conscious social policy has been to attack and destroy family values and children.

So there are extremely high rates of child poverty and malnutrition, child abuse, parents and children having very little contact under the Anglo-American system. Contact time has fallen about forty percent over the past generation, in large part because two parents have to work 50-60 hours a week to survive, to keep the children alive. So you have latchkey children, television supervision, abuse of children by children, violence against children, etc. The amazing thing about the U.S., and this is an intriguing element of our intellectual culture, is that the people who are carrying out this war are able to say that they’re defending family values and nobody cracks up in ridicule. That takes a really disciplined intellectual climate. The fact that nobody discusses it publicly—this is serious research, not the kind of junk that’s called research—that’s also revealing.

DBI’m getting a signal from your office manager to wind this up. You’ve been citing some Hallmark cards that reflect these trends you’ve described. Where did you get them?

I didn’t. That’s reported in the same study. As part of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s UNICEF study, the discussion of the breakdown of families under the conscious social policy of the Anglo-American system, she mentions as one sign of it this line of Hallmark cards, one of which is intended to be put under a child’s breakfast cereal, saying, Have a nice day, because the parents are out somewhere. The other is to be tucked under the pillow at night, saying, Wish I were there. She gives that as an illustration of what’s also shown by the heavy statistics. Incidentally, this is not the only such study. There is a bestseller in Canada by a woman who is a personal friend of mine, Linda McQuaig. She used to be a journalist and became a freelance writer. She’s a very good social critic. She wrote a book (The Wealthy Banker’s Wife) on the Canadian

model. So it’s Canada-focused. But she pointed out, rightly, that Canada is kind of poised between the Anglo-American model and the European model, moving toward the Anglo-American one. She describes in some detail what that’s doing to families and children in a country that used to have a sort of civilized social contract. It’s eroding under the pressure of the Anglo-American system that they’re a part of. The book was a bestseller in Canada, but you’re not going to find it around here. My own book, Necessary Illusions, was also a bestseller in Canada. It wasn’t even reviewed here. There are other studies. And the facts are quite dramatic.

I notice you have a newspaper article.

DBIt’s yesterday’s Denver Post. Of course, the obligatory Superbowl coverage dominates the front page. But there’s a story on a new study which reports that six million U.S. kids are poor and the numbers are increasing.

Child poverty in the U.S. is just off the scale. Poverty altogether is. The U.S. has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any industrial country, and that’s been radically increasing in recent years. Poverty among children is just awesome. In New York City it’s about forty percent below the poverty line. New York City has as high a level of inequality as Guatemala, which has the worst record of any country for which there are data. People know what that means. Poverty among children is enormous. Malnutrition is unbelievably high and getting worse. The same is true of infant mortality. It’s unique in the industrial world. And it’s social policy.

Take, say, family leave. Most civilized countries nurture that. They want parents to be with children when they’re little. That’s when bonding takes place and a lot of child development takes place in those

early months, even neural development. It’s well known. So in a civilized country you try to provide for it. The U.S. does not even have the level of plantation workers in Uganda for these things. That’s part of the war against children and families and in general against poor people that’s carried out under the rubric of “family values.” The idea is, only rich people should have state support. They have to be subsidized by massive transfer payments, like Newt Gingrich and his constituents. But poor people have to be smashed. Poor means most of the population. Incidentally, it’s not only children who are suffering poverty, but also the elderly, surprisingly. There was a big article in the Wall Street Journal recently about how starvation, in their words, is “surging” among the elderly, reaching maybe 15 or 16% of the population over sixty. Again, that’s a phenomenon unknown in industrial societies, and indeed, unknown in poor societies, because there they have support systems, extended families or whatever. But we’re unusual. Civil society has been basically destroyed. Family structure has been devastated. There is a powerful nanny state, but it’s a welfare state for the rich. That’s an unusual system. And it comes from having a highly class-conscious business class and not much in the way of organized opposition.

DBI’m afraid I’m going to be thrown out of here in an organized fashion. See you in a couple of days.

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DBI want to impress upon our listeners about how competent and able we are. The other day we got off to a real Marx-like start, and I don’t mean Karl. I forgot to turn the tape recorder on. Then when I did the phone rang and then you spilled your entire cup of coffee on the floor. It was a precious sequence.

I’ll avoid that now by cutting the phone connection.

DBJust on a pile update, I see there has been some shifting of the piles. The left-hand pile has grown considerably.

There’s a Barsamian thermos mug on top of one of the piles, which helps.

DBAnd the piles on the file cabinets behind you have grown significantly, just in a couple of days. Let’s continue a little bit about Australia and what you found there. We did talk about East Timor, but in terms of the Australian economy, are they also part of the neoliberal paradigm?

Australia is the only country in history, I think, that has decided to turn itself from a rich, First World country into an impoverished Third World country. It is now unfortunately busily at work at it. Australia is in the grips of a fanatic ideology called “economic rationalism,” which is a souped-up version of the free market theology that’s taught in economics departments but that nobody in the business world believes for a second. It’s the ideology which has been forced on the Third World, which is one of the reasons why it’s such a wreck, but which rich

countries have never accepted for themselves. They’ve always insisted on and demanded massive state intervention and protectionism, with the U.S. usually leading the pack, since 1800. You can see the differences. You go back to the eighteenth century and the First World and the Third World weren’t all that different. They’re rather different today, and this is one of the reasons.

Australia, which is in the Anglo-American orbit, and not a leading power, obviously, is a small country. They have taken the ideology seriously. They are doing what they call “liberalizing” their economy, meaning opening it up to foreign penetration and control, and to the main sources of capital in that area. East and Southeast Asia is a big growth area in the world. In fact, with one exception it’s an enormous growth area. The one basket case is the Philippines, which has been enjoying our tutelage for a century. You’re not supposed to notice that. But apart from that the area’s in a big growth boom, in pretty awful ways, but nevertheless a growth boom. The source of it is mainly Japanese and overseas Chinese capital, which are two big imperial concentrations, although the overseas Chinese one is scattered. It’s not territorially based. What they’re trying to do is pretty clear. They want to turn Australia into their Caribbean. So they’ll own the beach fronts and have the nice hotels and the Australians can serve the meals and there will be a lot of resources that they can pull out. Australia is still a rich country. In fact, at the time of the First World War it was the richest country in the world, so it has lots of advantages. It’s not going to look like Jamaica very soon, but it’s heading in that direction.

Since they dropped tariffs in this neoliberal fanaticism, the manufacturing deficit, meaning the ratio of manufacturing imports to exports has increased very sharply, meaning importing manufactures and exporting resources, services, tourism basically. It’s moving in that direction. It’s under very careful design, with a lot of smugness. Because

the economists who studied at the University of Chicago and so on probably believe the stuff they were taught. Business leaders have never been willing to tolerate it for a second. But it is part of the ideological fanaticism that is part of the technique for smashing down poor people and sometimes rich people who take it on for themselves and suffer the consequences. The same thing happened in New Zealand.

DBWhat was Australia’s role in the U.S. attack on Indochina?

Australian documents have been released up till the early 1960s and we now know that the Menzies government, the government of Australia in the early 1960s, was greatly afraid of Indonesia. That was their big concern. That concern still hasn’t abated. They are on the edge of Asia. They regard themselves as a white outpost on the edge of Asia. There’s always a yellow peril concern, very racist. It’s being overcome now, I should say, but back then it was very racist. They felt that they had to switch. The British fleet used to be what protected them. But illusions about that collapsed during the Second World War, when the Japanese very quickly sank the British fleet. They realized that their protection was going to be the U.S., so they better be a subservient client to the U.S. As the U.S. moved into Indochina, they went along. They provided not a huge amount of aid—it’s a small country—but they sent troops, so they carried out plenty of torture, atrocities, and so on.