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Power Systems: Conversations On Global Democratic Uprisings And The New Challenges To U.S. Empire (2013)

by Noam Chomsky(Favorite Author)

4.18 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0805096159 (ISBN13: 9780805096156)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Metropolitan Books

review 1: It's a light book.I like reading and watching Chomsky. A lot of people would think his a follower of conspiracy theories, or has an active imagination, but the truth is he's not. To people living in the Middle East (and I'd imagine elsewhere that's not North America & Europe) he's just stating obvious things.Now, it's worth noting that there are people in the Middle East who actually take things too far and make it seem like we're completely helpless and without power or will, those people are loved by the tyrants because those are the ones who are definitely never going to do anything. That's not the message of this book. And, in fact, this is demonstrated by the many coalitions formed with no US involvement.The world is changing, and the US government doesn't like that. ... moreIt doesn't like seeing its power and control over developing countries weakening and even lost in some. It doesn't like being isolated and alone in its decisions.A big part, in fact I'd argue almost the sole part, of why there seems to be much dislike to the United States Government is its own actions. How do you expect people in Iraq for example to like you when you invade them, kill them, then start a war with no end in sight, all in the name of democracy that never came (and never will), and the real object of petrol? How can Palestinians support the US when it's actively supplying Israel with weapons and dollars, then saying it supports peace? How can the American people themselves support their government when that same government that's supposed to protect & serve them is actually the one that threatens their well-being? Double-standards and doublespeak are never the path to sustainability & prosperity.This all sounds like it's "anti-American", "terrorist", "democracy hating", "communist" talk... whatever it is, but it's not. Actually, the "American" thing to do is to ask these questions, and question the government and its actions.The book itself is in the form of conversations. It reads somewhat like an interview, but it's not. In the middle of the book, Chomsky starts talking about the educational system, and the educational process & method... I felt like he veered a bit. Although education is strongly connected to control & the subject of the book, which he covers, he talks about the history of education, and many things that aren't necessarily related to Power Systems.
review 2: Good collection of interviews from 2010-2012 by long-time Chomsky interrogator David Barsamian. Includes a lengthy discussion of his linguistics work and his thoughts on social media and ebooks.Here are some quotes I liked:Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. I think talk about American decline should be taken with a grain of salt. Indian forces attacking the tribal areas are apparently using Israeli technology.Small countries hire individual terrorists like Carlos the Jackal. The United States hires terrorist states. It’s much more efficient. You can do a much more murderous and brutal job. Israel is one. Taiwan is another. Britain has also played that role.If you go back to the nineteenth century, the indigenous population of the United States resisted... India is now in the stage the United States was in during the nineteenth century.No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things.What’s lacking is the consciousness that began to arise in the 1930s—we’ll take it over and run it ourselves. The things that really put the fear of God into manufacturers and the government in the 1930s were the sit-down strikes. A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, “Look, instead of sitting down, we’ll run this place. We don’t need owners and managers.” That’s huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.The major propaganda systems that we face now, mostly growing out of the huge public relations industry, were developed quite consciously about a century ago in the freest countries in the world, in Britain and the United States, because of a very clear and articulated recognition that people had gained so many rights that it was hard to suppress them by force. So you had to try to control their attitudes and beliefs or divert them somehow. As the economist Paul Nystrom argued, you have to try to fabricate consumers and create wants so people will be trapped. It’s a common method.Private power doesn’t like public education, for many reasons. One is the principle on which it’s based, which is threatening to power. Public education is based on a principle of solidarity. So, for example, I had my children fifty years ago. Nevertheless, I feel and I’m supposed to feel that I should pay taxes so that the kids across the street can go to school. That’s counter to the doctrine that you should just look after yourself and let everyone else fall by the wayside, a basic principle of business rule. Public education is a threat to that belief system because it builds up a sense of solidarity, community, mutual support.But public education and Social Security are residues of a dangerous conception that we’re all in this together and we have to work together to create a better life and a better future. If you’re trying to maximize profit or maximize consumption, then working together is the wrong idea. It has to be beaten out of people’s heads.If we’re talking about feasible objectives in the short term, it’s kind of meaningless to talk about socialism. There isn’t a popular base for it. There isn’t an understanding of it.The most recent financial crisis, apart from what it has done to the general population, has been absolutely devastating for the African American population. Their net worth is now one twentieth that of whites. It’s the lowest it’s been since statistics were first taken.In Egypt or Tunisia you follow the traditional game plan. It’s as old as the hills. If there is a dictator you support who’s losing control, support him until the end. If this becomes impossible, because maybe the army or the business community turns against him, shelve him, send him off somewhere, issue dramatic proclamations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime to the extent it’s possible.There are enormous propaganda efforts to try to denigrate it [the Occupy movement] and undermine the movement, to say it’s the politics of envy. Why don’t you shower and get a job? And this has its effect, undoubtedly. Unless the labor movement is revitalized and becomes a core part of the movement, I don’t think it’s going to get very far. Revitalizing the labor movement may seem like a real long shot, if you take a look at the country today, but conditions now are actually no worse than they were in the 1930s. Remember that by the 1920s the American labor movement, which had been militant and successful, had been virtually crushed... But the labor movement was resurrected.Sectarianism is very serious. The core of U.S. popular activism in the 1960s was the civil rights movement. But by the mid-1960s it had basically shattered.[I]f a multinational corporation is shutting down an efficient manufacturing installation because it doesn’t make enough profit for them and they would rather shift it to China, the workforce and community could decide that they want to take it over, purchase it, direct it, and keep it running. In fact, that’s something proposed in standard works of business economics, which point out that there is no law of economics or capitalism that says firms have to act in the interest of shareholders, not stakeholders. The stakeholder is anybody their actions have an impact on: the workforce, the community, others. The Occupy movement could at least be as imaginative as a standard business economics text. If they pursue that, it could lead to quite far-reaching changes.[T]he basis of a corporation is limited liability, meaning as a participant in a corporation you’re not personally liable if it, say, murders tens of thousands of people at Bhopal.Also, these institutions are directed to maximize shareholder rights at the expense of stakeholder rights by law. Why should we accept that? It’s not an economic principle, certainly.[W]e’ve never had capitalism, so it can’t end. [I]t’s the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren’t able to do that, the whole thing is going to collapse.If you can trap people into not noticing, let alone questioning, crucial doctrines, they’re enslaved. They’ll essentially follow orders as if there was a gun pointed at them.Anyone who has taken care of children knows it’s work, hard work.The driving force behind these changes is people who claim that they are fighting for “family values.” The people who call themselves conservatives say, “We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That’s how we preserve family values.” The internal contradictions are amazing.Actually, there is a third set of scientists, who almost never make it into print, and it’s much larger than the fringe of [climate change] denialists: people who say that the consensus is much too conservative, that the risks are much higher. [Social media] reminds me of a close friend of mine as a kid who had a little booklet in which he wrote the names of all his friends. He used to boast that he had two hundred friends, which meant he had no friends, because you don’t have two hundred friends. And I suspect that it’s similar to that. If you have a whole bunch of friends on Facebook or whatever, it almost has to be pretty superficial. If that’s your outlet to the world, there’s something really missing in your life.You’re walking down the street, a thought comes to you, you tweet it. If you thought for two minutes, or if you had made the slight effort involved in looking up the topic, you wouldn’t have sent it.If you have a free education that engenders creativity and independence, the way of looking at the world that we were talking about before, people are going to come for your throat because they won’t want to be governed. So yes, let’s have a mass education system, but of a particular kind, one that inculcates obedience, subordination, acceptance of authority, acceptance of doctrine. One that doesn’t raise too many questions.This was described nicely by one of the great modern physicists, Victor Weisskopf, who died some years ago. When students would ask him what his course would cover, he would say, “It doesn’t matter what we cover. It matters what you discover.”Students are burdened by huge debts. The laws have been changed so there’s no way out—no bankruptcy, no escape. So you’re trapped for life. That’s quite a technique of indoctrination and control. There’s no economic basis for rising tuition costs. In the 1950s, our society was much poorer, but education was essentially free.When people talk about the government in the United States, they’re talking about some alien force. Hatred of democracy is so deeply embedded in the doctrinal system that you don’t think of the government as your instrument. It’s some alien instrument. It’s taken a lot of work to make people hate democracy that much. In a democratic society, to the extent that it’s a democratic society, the government is you. It’s your decisions. But the government here is depicted as something that’s attacking us, not our instrument to do what we decide.April 15, the day when you pay your taxes, gives you a good index of how democracy is functioning. If democracy were functioning effectively, April 15 would be a day of celebration. That’s a day on which we get together to contribute to implementing the policies that we’ve decided on. That’s what April 15 ought to be. Here it’s a day of mourning. This alien force is coming to steal your hard-earned money from you. That indicates an extreme contempt for democracy. And it’s natural that a business-run society and doctrinal system should try to inculcate that belief.Every night when I come home and start to answer the day’s hundreds of e-mails, a fair number are from young people saying, “I don’t like the way the world is going. In fact, I can’t stand it. What should I do?” By now I receive so many that I’m almost compelled to resort to form responses. And what I point out is that you’re well on the way to answering the question yourself, because you recognize there’s a problem. There is no general answer for everybody. There is no right answer for every person, in all circumstances. It depends on who you are, what your concerns are, what your options are, how much you want to devote yourself to it, what your talents are. But you’re probably pretty privileged. Otherwise you wouldn’t be writing me a letter on the Internet. That means you have a lot of opportunities—much more than your counterparts in other countries, or even here a generation ago. So there is a legacy that you can use. It’s not going to be easy—it never is. But you can make a difference. You just have to find your own way. less

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