Barsamian: One of the heroes of
the current rightwingrevival [] is AdamSmith. You've done some prettyimpressive
research onSmith that has excavated [] a lot of information that's not coming
out. You've oftenquoted him describing the "vile maxim of the masters of
mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people."
Chomsky: I didn't do any research at all onSmith. I just read him.
There's no research. Just
read it. He's precapitalist, a figure of theEnlightenment. What we would
callCapitalism, he despised. People read snippets ofAdamSmith, thefewphrases
they teach in school. [Accurate. Soderbergh.] Everybody reads thefirstparagraph
of theWealthOfNations where he talks about how wonderful theDivisionOfLabour
is. But
notmanypeople get to the point hundredsofpageslater, where he says that DivisionOfLabour
will destroy humanbeings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant
as it is possible for a humanbeing to be, and therefore in any civilised
society, theGovernment is going to have to take some measures to preventDivisionOfLabour
from proceeding to its limits. He did give an argument for markets,
but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will
lead to perfect equality. That's the argument for them, because he thought that
equality of condition, not just opportunity, is what you should be aiming at.
It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would
callNorthSouthpolicies. He was talking about-(England and India). He bitterlycondemned
the british experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India./He
also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way States work. He pointed
out that it’s totallysenseless to talk about a nation and what we would
nowadays call nationalinterests. He simplyobserved
in passing, because it's so obvious, that inEngland, which is what he's
discussing, and it was themostdemocratic society of the day, the principal
architects of policy are the "merchants and manufacturers," and they
make certain that their own interests are, in his words, "most peculiarly
attended to," no matter what the effect on others, including the people ofEngland
who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn't have the data to prove
it at the time, but he was probablyright. This truism was, a century later,
called classanalysis, but you don't have to go toMarx to find it. It's
veryexplicit inAdamSmith. It's so obvious that any tenyearold can see it. So he
didn't make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that's correct. If you
read through his work, he's intelligent. He's a person who was from theEnlightenment.
His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and
feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like
other Enlightenment and early romantic thinkers. He's part of that period, the scottishEnlightenment.
The version of him that's given today is just ridiculous. But I didn't have to
any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you're literate, you'll
find it out. I did do a little research in the way it's treated, and that's
interesting. For example, theUChi, the great bastion of freemarketEconomics,
etc., etc., published a bicentennial edition of the hero, a scholarlyedition
with all the footnotes and the introduction by aNobelPrizewinner, GeorgeStigler, a huge index, a real scholarly
edition. That's the one I used. It's thebestedition. The scholarlyframework was
veryinteresting, including Stigler'sintroduction. It's
likely he neveropened theWealthOfNations. [Soderbergh & StephenGaghan.]
Just about everything he said about the book was completelyfalse. I went
through a bunch of examples in writing about it, inYear501 and elsewhere. But evenmoreinteresting in some ways was the index. AdamSmith
is very well known for his advocacy ofDivisionOfLabour. Take a look atDivisionOfLabour
in the index and there are lots and lots of things listed. But there's onemissing,
namely his denunciation ofDivisionOfLabour, the one I just cited. That's
somehow missing from the index. It goes on
like this. I wouldn't call this research, because it's tenminuteswork, but if
you look at the scholarship, then it's interesting. I want to be clear about
this. There is goodSmithscholarship. If you look at the seriousSmithscholarship,
nothing I'm saying is any surprise to anyone. How could it be? You open the
book, and you read it, and it's staring you right in the face. On the other
hand, if you look at the myth ofAdamSmith, which is theonlyone we get, the
discrepancy between that and the Reality is enormous. This is true of classicalLiberalism
in general. The founders of classicalLiberalism, people like AdamSmith and
WilhelmVonHumboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classicalLiberalism,
and who inspiredJohnStuartMill, they were what we would call libertarian
socialists, at least that is the way I read them. For example, Humboldt, like
Smith, says, Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says, If
he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he
does, but we despise what he is. [e.g. Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg,
DePalma, Siegel, Mann, Ford, Fincher, Soderbergh, Fuller, Altman, Corman, EliRoth,
and many others.] On the other hand, if he
does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under freewill,
not under external coercion of wagelabour, then we alsoadmire what he is,
because he's a humanbeing. He said any decent socioeconomicsystem will
be based on the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create, since
that's the fundamental nature of humans, in freeassociationwithothers, but
certainly not under the kinds of external constraints that came to be calledCapitalism.
It's thesame when you readJefferson. He lived a halfcenturylater, so he sawStateCapitalism
developing, and he despised it, of course. He said it's going to lead to a form
ofAbsolutism worse than the one we defended ourselves against. In fact, if you
run through this whole period you see a very clear, sharp critique of what we
would later callCapitalism and certainly of (the twentiethcenturyversion of it),
which is designed to destroy individual, even entrepreneurialCapitalism. There's
a sidecurrent here which is rarely looked at, but which is alsoquitefascinating.
That's the workingclassliterature of the nineteenthcentury. They didn't read-AdamSmith
and -WilhelmVonHumboldt, but they're saying thesamethings. Read journals put
out by the people called the "factory girls of Lowell," young women
in the factories, mechanics, and other working people who were running their
own newspapers. It's the same kind of critique. There was a real battle fought
by working people in England and theUS to defend themselves against what they
called the degradation and oppression and violence of the industrial capitalistsystem,
which was not only dehumanising them, but was
evenradicallyreducing their intellectual level. So, you go back to the
midnineteenthcentury and these socalled factorygirls, young girls working in
theLowell[Mass.]mills, were reading serious contemporaryLiterature. They
recognised that the point of the system was to turn them into tools who would
be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so on. And they fought against it
bitterly for a long period. That's theHistory of the rise ofCapitalism. The
other part of the story is the development of corporations, which is an
interesting story in itself. AdamSmith didn't say much about them, but he did
criticize the early stages of them. Jefferson lived
long enough to see the beginnings, and he was verystronglyopposed to them.
But the development of corporations really took place in the
earlytwentiethcentury and verylate in the nineteenthcentury. Originally,
corporations existed as a public service. People would get together to build a
bridge and they would be incorporated for that purpose by theState. They built
the bridge and that's it. They were supposed to have a publicinterestfunction.
Well into the1870s, States were removing corporatecharters. They were granted
by theState. They didn't have any other authority. They were fictions. They
were removing corporatecharters, because they weren't serving a public
function. But then you get into the period of the trusts and various efforts to
consolidate power that were beginning to be made in the latenineteenthcentury.
It's interesting to look at the literature. The courts didn't really accept it.
There were some hints about it. It wasn't until the earlytwentiethcentury that
courts and lawyers designed a new socioeconomicsystem. It was never done byLegislation.
It was donemostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over
individualStates. NewJersey was thefirstState to offer corporations any right
they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenlystarted to flow
toNewJersey, for obvious reasons. Then the otherStates
had to do thesamething just to defend themselves or be wiped out. It's kind of a smallscale globalisation. Then the
courts and the corporatelawyers came along, and created a whole new body of doctrine,
which gave corporations authority and power that they never had before. If you
look at the background of it, it's thesamebackground that led to-Fascism and -Bolshevism.
A lot of it was supported by people called progressives, for these reasons.
They said, Individual rights are gone. We are in a period of corporatisation of
power, consolidation of power, centralisation. That's supposed to be good if
you're a progressive, like a MarxistLeninist. Out of thatsamebackground came
three major things: Fascism, Bolshevism, and corporateTyranny. They all grew
out of the same more or less Hegelian roots. It's fairlyrecent. We think of
corporations as immutable, but they were designed. It was a conscious design
which worked as AdamSmith said, “The principal architects of policy consolidate
power and use it for their interests.” It was certainly not popular will. It's
basically courtdecisions and lawyers'sdecisions, which created a form of
privateTyranny which is now moremassive in many ways than even StateTyranny was.
These are major parts of modern twentiethcenturyHistory. The classical liberals
would be horrified. They didn't even imagine this. But the smaller things that
they saw, they were already horrified about. This would have totally scandalised-AdamSmith
or -Jefferson or anyone like that.
Barsamian: You're verypatient
with people, particularly people who ask themostinane kinds of questions. Is
this something you've cultivated?
Chomsky: 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, theonlything I ever get irritated about is
eliteintellectuals, 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 perfectlyhonest
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 veryrational
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 borrowAdamSmith'sphrase, "as stupid and ignorant as it is
possible for a humanbeing to be." A lot of the educationalsystem 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 independentminded in school, you're
probably going to get into trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's
being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus
corporatepropaganda, 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 are completelyreasonable.
Barsamian: At the Mellon
lecture that you gave inChicago... you focused primarily on the ideas
of-JohnDewey and -BertrandRussell [regardingEducation]
Chomsky: These were highlylibertarian
ideas. Dewey himself comes straight from the american
mainstream. People who read what he actuallysaid
would now consider him some [“]far out[“] antiamerican lunatic or something.
He was expressing mainstream thinking before the ideological system had so
grotesquelydistorted the tradition. By now, it's unrecognisable. For example,
not only did he agree with the wholeEnlightenmenttradition 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 ofDemocracy. There were
many different, conflicting strands of 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 economicsystem, talk aboutDemocracy is a [fucking]
joke. RepeatingbasicallyAdamSmith, 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 aboutDemocracy until you have
democraticcontrol 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 theEnlightenment, an outgrowth of the views of the kind that we were talking
about before from classicalLiberalism. Dewey represented these in the modern
period, as did Bertrand Russell, from another tradition, but again with roots
in theEnlightenment. These were two of the major, if not the two major
thinkers, of the twentiethcentury, whose ideas are about as well known as the
realAdamSmith, which is a sign of how efficient the educationalsystem has been,
and the propagandasystem, in simply destroying even our awareness of our own
immediate intellectual background.
Barsamian: In that same
Mellonlecture, you paraphrasedRussell onEducation. 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.
Chomsky: That's an eighteenthcenturyidea.
I don't know if Russell knew about it or reinvented it, but you read that as standard
in earlyEnlightenmentliterature. That's the image that was used. Humboldt, the founder of classicalLiberalism, 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 seriousEducation would be from kindergarten
up through graduateschool. You do get it in advancedScience, because there's no
other way to do it. But most of the educationalsystem is quitedifferent. MassEducation was designed to turn independent farmers into
docile, passive tools of production. [Accurate. They say it straightforwardly.]
That was its primarypurpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew
it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to massEducation
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 callEducation, they're going to take control, “they”
being what AlexanderHamilton called the "great beast," namely the
people. The antidemocratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic
societies is reallyferocious. And for good reason. 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 completelymarginalised and unknown, although
everybody sings praises to them, as they do toAdamSmith. What they
actuallysaid 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 antiamerican can exist, forget
the way it's used, exhibits a totalitarian streak that's prettydramatic.
That concept, antiAmericanism, the only real counterpart to it in the modernworld
is antiSovietism. In theSovietUnion, theworstcrime was to be antiSoviet. That's
the hallmark of a totalitarian society, to have concepts like antiSovietism or antiAmericanism.
Here it's considered quitenatural. Books on antiAmericanism, by people who are
basicallyStalinistclones, are highlyrespected. That's true of angloamerican
societies, which are strikingly the more democratic societies. I think there's
a correlation there. 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.
SamBowles and
HerbGintis, two economists, in their work on the americaneducationalsystem
some years back pointed out that theeducationalsystem is divided into
fragments. The part that's directed toward working people and the general
population is indeed designed to impose obedience. But theEducation 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 thesamething in the press. That's why I
read theWallStreetJournal and theFinancialTimes and BusinessWeek. They just
have to tell the truth. That's a contradiction in the mainstream press, too.
Take, say, theNewYorkTimes or theWashingtonPost. They
have dual functions and they're contradictory. Onefunction is to subdue the
great beast. But anotherfunction is to let their audience, which is an
eliteaudience, gain a tolerablyrealistic 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 educationalsystem as well. It's
totallyindependent of another factor, namely just professionalintegrity, 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.
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