Last night I watched a recording of a lecture that Noam Chomsky gave at the University of Cologne on 7th June of this year. This was the second lecture that Chomsky gave at the university, the first having taken place the previous day. Whilst that lecture was on language, the one I watched concerned the current global political order. It was, unsurprisingly, a fantastic lecture and Chomsky deservedly received much applause.
Chomsky spoke very broadly about the post-1945 geo-political world order and about some of the prospects that we may all face. As usual Chomsky displayed his vast knowledge of political history along with his courageous spirit of activism. As I sat listening to him speak I felt stunned at the fact that here is a man of 82 years who is still full of life and energy, who continues to travel all over the world to give talks (he once said in an interview that he is booked at least 2 years in advance!), and who bravely continues to speak truth to power.
In December 2002, Harold Pinter introduced Chomsky at St. Paul's Cathedral for the Kurdish Human Rights Project's 10th Anniversary lecture. In his introduction, Pinter said of Chomsky that:
"...he will not be bullied. He will not be intimidated. He is a fearless, formidable, totally independent voice. He does something which is really quite simple but highly unusual. He tells the truth"
Indeed, I can think of no better way of introducing Noam Chomsky. During the lecture I watched Chomsky recalled so many important historical events, policies and decisions made, which we rarely hear about in the mainstream media. In this way, Chomsky is doing the world an invaluable service - at least to people who care about democracy, freedom and civil society - by saving important information from oblivion. One of the things that must strike anyone on hearing him speak is his extraordinary memory. Because of it, he can remind us of things worth remembering and can facilitate important and much-needed historical and comparative debates. When one learns about the bloody involvement that the West has had in, say, the Middle East, for example, it puts things in a different perspective - such as whether the West should necessarily intervene in the struggles in the Middle East today.
To take an issue closer to home for many of us: the financial crisis. When the mainstream media interview people in the streets and ask them about austerity measures, people going on strike, and so forth, one hears many voices of capitulation and resignation: "well, the country is in trouble so we all have to cut back and make do with less", "I don't think teachers should go on strike because we have to accept what is going on right now" and so on. Perhaps if these people heard what Chomsky and others have been saying for many years now, they might stop and think, and say very different things when interviewed. Perhaps they wouldn't blame themselves, perhaps they would be more in favour of strike-action, and perhaps then we could sort out our collective problems by going to the roots of them.
As Chomsky says in the lecture:
"the major [financial] players [in the U.S.] benefit from a government insurance policy, which is called 'too big to fail', and as one commentator quipped 'too big to jail' [...] the result is that with the government insurance policy they can make, and do make, very risky transactions which mean rich rewards while adhering to a basic market principle that you ignore externalities - a market system where you make a transaction and you ignore the effect on others, what economists call externalities - in this case the externality is systemic risk, the risk that if one of your transactions goes bad the whole system may collapse. Well, the system inevitably crashes, it's happened over and over again since the Reagen years, each time more serious than the last, but that's not a problem because they can run to the 'nanny state' that they nurture and ask for a taxpayer bailout meanwhile they clutch their copies of Hayek, and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand in their hands."
It's a sad fact that many people blame themselves for the problems we now face, or alternatively lay the blame on a group of people that are merely the scapegoat for our woes (the rise in xenophobia during economic crises is not surprising, for example). I've seen many interviews in the mainstream news media with the general public, and I'm always staggered at how many people accept the austerity measures, blame themselves or a minority group (immigrants, the unemployed, benefit claimers, and so on), and often criticise those who go on strike. The same is true in the U.S. As commentators like Chomsky have pointed out, after the foreclosures crisis in the U.S., many people from poor neighbourhoods, when interviewed by the news media, reportedly blamed themselves for losing their homes. Is not this at least partly due to the dominant myth or ideology of the U.S.: the American Dream, the dream of the self-made man, the hope that everyone who works hard can make it to the top?
We should be grateful to intellectuals like Chomsky for having the courage to speak out and critically analyse the institutions which we are dominated by in our societies, and which are responsible for the problems we face today. It is clear that many of the problems we face are not private or personal problems, but systemic institutional problems. It is not a case of "a few bad apples" as too many people have said, but rather a case of rotten barrels.
One brilliant example that Chomsky gives during his lecture is that of the Great Depression. Chomsky reports that during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said to the union leaders that they have to make him do things for them because otherwise he is powerless against big business. This is still true today and just as relevant. In the last 40 years or so, many countries have undergone processes which have increased the power of businesses: the financialisation of the market, privatisation, deregulation of corporations, and so on. Because of the dogma of the 'efficient market' hypothesis in the economic profession, because of the rise to power of neo-liberal economics, and because of the growing fluidity of capital flows, we have seen our civil and political freedoms either taken away or made to seem irrelevant by contrast with the more pressing issues of individualistic, consumer culture.
What someone like Chomsky does is help us to engage more with social and political issues. He shows us how institutions work, how they arose in the first place, and how it is possible to change them, since they are not eternal and unchangeable. With the help of intellectuals like him we can begin to make sense of our shared social space, learn how to think for ourselves, and see that changes are always possible (because we've changed things before). People like him do us all an enormous favour: after all, how many people have the time or desire to trawl through all the news in order to see what is said and what is left unsaid, to see how things are presented differently amongst different broadcasters, and to critically analyse what is being said? How many of us have studied U.S. foreign policy between 1945 and the present? We cannot rely on the mainstream media to inform us properly or to encourage us to think for ourselves and perhaps change society for the good of the many, not the few. We must recognise the valuable role that intellectuals play. By devoting their life to critically analysing the media, political and corporate institutions, and many other things besides, they help us to see how problems are often institutional in character, and thereby help us to start to change those institutions.
To take another example from Chomsky's lecture which casts new light on one of the global issues today: we often hear about the shift of global power from West to East. We hear many commentators talking about China and India rising to power. But again, Chomsky has much to say that can illuminate these discussions as the following transcription from the lecture demonstrates:
"There is in fact a very noticeable and significant global shift of power, but a different one. Not from the West to the Asian Giants, but from the global workforce all around the world to the very rich. That's happening everywhere. The tendency is implicit in what are called Free Trade Agreements which have little to do with free trade and certainly aren't agreements, at least if people are part of their countries they're mostly opposed. But what are called Free Trade Agreements, they're designed to set working people in competition with one another, globally, while protecting wealthy professionals and providing investors with extraordinary rights; among other benefits for investors these agreements allow free movement of capital but they firmly reject Adam Smith's principle that free circulation of labour is a foundation of free trade and in many other ways too they violate basic free trade principles. And these tendencies are exaserbated in very ugly ways by growing xenophobia in the rich societies, notably in Europe."
Once again, it is refreshing to hear a different point of view. We've all heard talk about the rise of China and India, but have we heard about the shift in power between the global workforce and the very rich? Chomsky further illustrates his point by telling his audience about a brochure for investors published by CitiGroup. In this brochure, CitiGroup outlines how the world is becoming more and more split between two groups: the plutonomy, i.e. the super-rich, and what they call the 'precariats', which is a word combining 'proletariat' and 'precarious'. What the report goes on to say, according to Chomsky, is that there are massive opportunities for the plutonomous (the rich) because of the rise of worker precarity. And, as Chomsky also recalls, Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress made it clear why the economy under his leadership was booming: the working conditions for the 'precariats' were extremely insecure. This makes obvious sense: if the workers have poor worker security then they won't go on strike, ask for a wage increase, or ask for more worker rights. These kinds of things are not said enough, if they are said at all, in the mainstream media. It is thanks to intellectuals such as Chomsky that we can learn about things which are highly important and relevant, and which will undoubtedly help us to understand the problems we face today in order that we can change our societies for the better.
I hope that after reading this blog post, many of you will go and listen to Chomsky speak, or perhaps read one of his many excellent books. As you can tell, I have been hugely inspired by him and I would recommend him to anyone. Before I started reading him I was largely uninterested in political and social issues. But since that time I have become more interested in politics and have discovered many wonderful books, documentaries and alternative news websites, as well as other courageous and intelligent thinkers. There is, of course, still the issue of practical engagement, the question of what is to be done. I confess I find this immensely difficult. However, I think that education is an important component of being politically engaged and I hope that throughout my life I will experiment more and more with forms of practical engagement alongside reading and discussion. Noam Chomsky's work has at least helped me and inspired me. I will continue to blog about these issues in the future, so stay tuned for more blogs about other exciting videos, documentaries and books that I've come across.
Finally, I'd like to end this post with a wonderfully empowering comment by Chomsky, made at the end of an interview with Jeremy Paxman, back in March of this year. In response to Paxman's question "Why haven't you mellowed [since you are 82 years old]?" Chomsky replied:
"Because I look at the world, and there are things happening in the world which should lead anyone to become indignant, outraged, active and simply engaged..."
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Links:
Chomsky's second lecture at the University of Cologne on 7th June 2011:
Harold Pinter's introduction to Chomsky:
Paxman's March 2011 interview:
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