Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (11 page)

There’s really something qualitatively different about contemporary poverty, I think. Some of you must share these experiences. I mean, I was a kid back then, so maybe my perspective was different. But I remember when I would go into the apartment of my cousins—you know, broken family, no job, twenty people living in a tiny apartment—somehow it was hopeful. It was intellectually alive, it was exciting, it was just very different from today somehow.

W
OMAN
: Do you attribute that to the raised political consciousness of that era as compared to now?

It’s possible: there was a lot of union organizing back then, and the struggles were very brutal. I remember it well. Like, one of my earliest childhood memories is of taking a trolley car with my mother and seeing the police wade into a strike of women pickets outside a Philadelphia textile mill, and beating them up—that’s a searing memory. And the poverty was extreme: I remember rag-pickers coming to the door begging for money, lots of things like that. So it was not pretty by any means. But it was also not hopeless. Somehow that’s a tremendous difference: the slums are now hopeless, there’s nothing to do except prey on one another.

In fact, a lot of life is hopeless today, even for middle-class kids. I mean, for the first time in I think human history, middle-class kids now assume they are not going to live as well as their parents—that’s really something new, that’s never happened before.
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My kids, for example, assume that they are probably not going to live the way that we live. Think about it, that’s never happened before in history. And they’re probably right, except accidentally—like, some of them may, but on average they won’t.

M
AN
: Do you have an explanation of what’s happened to the cities?

I don’t entirely understand it, to tell you the truth.
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You could see it beginning in the late 1940s—New York City, for example, started to become a hostile place around then. I mean, as a kid when I would go to New York, I would think nothing of walking through Central Park alone at night, or walking along Riverside Drive by the river alone at night—the kinds of things you wouldn’t do now without a platoon of Marines around you, you just took for granted back then; you didn’t even give it a second thought. You never thought twice about taking a walk through Harlem, let’s say—what the heck, you know? But that all began to change after the Second World War, and it changed throughout the whole United States: cities just became hostile.

I mean, New York always had the
reputation
of being hostile, like there were always jokes about the guy lying in the street and everybody walking over him. But you just didn’t feel that you were taking your life into your hands and that people there were going to kill you, the sense you get when you walk through a lot of the city today. And also, you didn’t have the same sense of super-wealth right next to grinding poverty—like today you see people sitting at a fancy restaurant drinking wine, and some homeless person lying on the street right in front of them. There wasn’t quite that kind of thing either.

W
OMAN
: Is the change maybe related to the internationalization of the economy, and the broadening of the super-rich class here?

Maybe. I really don’t know, to tell you the truth, and I don’t want to pretend that I know. But my feeling is, it’s beyond just economics, I mean, there were radical differences in wealth at that time, and people in the slums were extremely poor—it’s just that they weren’t desolate.

W
OMAN
: It wasn’t such a consumer culture at the time
.

Yeah, certainly not to the extent that it is now—like, everybody didn’t have a television set where they were seeing some impossible life in front of their eyes all the time. Although you had something like it, don’t forget: in those days the movies were what television is today; you’d go to the movies for a dime, and that’s where you’d get your fantasy world. And the movies were all glitter, all upper-class fake glitter. But it just didn’t have the same devastating effect, I don’t know why. There’s something really hopeless about contemporary life that’s new, I think.

M
AN
: The bomb had a lot to do with it
.

Maybe—but does that really account for what happens in the slums? Look, I mean, I never see much of it. In the late 1960s, I was with a mainly white group, RESIST [a national draft-resistance movement], but we had good contacts with the Black Panthers, and with them I did get into slum areas. In general, though, I don’t tend to see the slums very much. But from the few times I’ve walked around poor areas of Harlem and other places like that since then, I just can’t recall anything remotely like it in the 1930s, even in the poorest parts of Brownsville [a low-income section of Brooklyn]. Also, older friends of mine who’ve been teachers in New York since the 1920s tell me they think it’s totally different today as well—kids were poor in the Thirties, but they weren’t rat-bitten.

W
OMAN
: For myself, as a radical who does a lot of political work in my community, the despair is unbelievable—what we have to fight against at the lowest rung is just incredible, I can really understand just giving up. Don’t you have some explanation of how we’ve come to this point?

Well, I think if you look over American history, you can point to at least a few factors behind it. This is an immigrant society, and before the Depression virtually every wave of immigrants who came here was more or less absorbed, at least the ones who wanted to stay—a lot of them didn’t, remember; in fact, the rate of return was rather high during the peak periods of immigration.
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But for the immigrants who did stay, the United States really
was
a land of opportunity. So, my father could come from Russia and work in a sweatshop, and manage finally to get to college, and then see his son become a professor—that stuff was real. And it was real because there was a lot of manual labor around which could absorb the waves of immigrants: people could work in sweatshops for sixteen hours a day and make enough to live on, then accumulate a little excess, and things would gradually start to get better. But in the 1930s, there was a big break in this system—the Depression ended those opportunities. And the United States has basically never gotten out of the Depression.

See, the post-World War II economic boom has been a different sort of economic growth from anything that ever happened before. For one thing, it’s been basically state-funded and primarily centered in high technology-based industries, which are tied to the military system. And that kind of economic growth just does not allow for absorbing new waves of immigrants. It allowed for it briefly during the Second World War, when there was a labor shortage and people could come off the farms in the South and work in the war industries. But that ended. And since then, the jobs have mostly been in high-tech or in the service sector—which is rotten, you don’t go anywhere. So there just aren’t the same possibilities for people to move up: if you can get into high-tech industry, you probably were there already, and if you’re working at sweeping the streets or something, that’s where you’re going to stay.

Now, maybe that situation would have been livable if there hadn’t been a new wave of immigration, but there was. There was a huge wave of immigration. It happened to have been
internal
immigration this time, but from the point of view of the society it was like a foreign wave: it came from rapid mechanization of agriculture in the South, which drove the black population, the former slaves, off the land. Then on top of that, there’s also been a major influx of Hispanic immigration. So you had these two big waves of immigration coming up to the Northern cities, and nothing for them to do: they couldn’t do what my father did, because there wasn’t the same kind of manual labor going on which could occupy millions more workers. So what in fact happened is these two huge waves of immigrants were just herded into concentration camps, which we happen to call “cities.” And the vast majority of them are never going to get out—just because there’s nothing for them to do. The economy simply is not growing; I mean, the Gross National Product goes up, but it goes up in a way which does not constitute economic growth for a poor urban population.

And with the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries in recent years, it’s getting worse, not better. As capital becomes more fluid and it becomes easier for corporations to move production to the Third World, why should they pay higher wages in Detroit when they can pay lower wages in Northern Mexico or the Philippines? And the result is, there’s even more pressure on the poorer part of the population here. And what’s in effect happened is they’ve been closed off into inner-city slums—where then all sorts of other pressures begin to attack them: drugs, gentrification, police repression, cutbacks in limited welfare programs, and so on. And all of these things contribute to creating a very authentic sense of hopelessness, and also to real anti-social behavior: crime. And the crime is mostly poor people preying on one another, the statistics show that very clearly—because the rich are locked away behind their barricades.
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You can see it very clearly when you drive through New York now: the differences in wealth are like San Salvador. I mean, I was giving a talk there a little while ago, and as you walk around it’s kind of dramatic: there are these castles, and there are guards at the gate, and a limousine drives up and the people go inside; inside I guess it’s very elegant and beautiful. But it’s like living in a feudal system, with a lot of wild barbarians outside—except if you’re rich, you don’t ever see them, you just move between your castle and your limousine. And if you’re poor, you’ve got no castle to protect you.

M
AN
: You mentioned drugs having an impact on the problem—I’m wondering whether you agree with the theory that drugs were maybe introduced to the ghettos intentionally, to try to demoralize people there and keep them from coming together to organize to change things?

It’s a good question—activists who work in the ghettos and slums have been charging that for years. I mean, a lot of people have pointed out that just at the time when you started to get serious organizing in the urban ghettos in the 1960s, all of a sudden there was this huge flow of drugs which absolutely devastated the inner-city communities. And the communities just couldn’t defend themselves against it: the parents couldn’t do it, the churches couldn’t do it, you’ve got guys hanging around on street corners giving ten-year-olds free drugs, and in a couple of months the neighborhood’s gone. And the timing, in fact,
was
about when serious political organizing was beginning to take place. Beyond that, I don’t know: maybe it was planned, maybe it just happened.
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But I think you can make a good case that the way the criminal justice system has been set up ever since then
does
have a lot to do with social control.

So just take a look at the different prosecution rates and sentencing rules for ghetto drugs like crack and suburban drugs like cocaine, or for drunk drivers and drug users, or just between blacks and whites in general—the statistics are clear: this is a war on the poor and minorities.
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Or ask yourself a simple question: how come marijuana is illegal but tobacco legal? It can’t be because of the health impact, because that’s exactly the other way around—there has never been a fatality from marijuana use among 60 million reported users in the United States, whereas tobacco kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.
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My strong suspicion, though I don’t know how to prove it, is that the reason is that marijuana’s a weed, you can grow it in your backyard, so there’s nobody who would make any money off it if it were legal. Tobacco requires extensive capital inputs and technology, and it can be monopolized, so there are people who can make a ton of money off it. I don’t really see any other difference between the two of them, frankly—except that tobacco’s far more lethal and far more addictive.

But it’s certainly true that a lot of inner-city communities have just been devastated by drugs. And you can see why people would want them—they do give you a sense of temporary relief from an intolerable existence, whatever else they might do. Plus I’m just convinced that by now a lot of the drug stuff is around mainly because people can make money off it—so I don’t really think there’s much hope for dealing with the problem without some form of decriminalization to remove that incentive. It’s not a pretty solution, but it’s probably part of the solution, I suspect. And of course, decriminalization doesn’t have to mean
no
regulation—like, in England over the years, they’ve tried to regulate alcohol through tax policies and so on, to encourage use of more benign products like beer rather than more dangerous ones, and something like that could be looked into here. But obviously something should be tried, I think.

Religious Fanaticism

W
OMAN
: Fundamentalist religion has really taken off in the last decade, maybe as an outlet for some of this despair. Do you have any thoughts about the significance of that development in the U.S.?

It’s pretty amazing what’s happened, actually. There have been a lot of cross-cultural studies of what social scientists call “religious fanaticism”—not people who just believe in God or go to church, but they’re really kind of fanatic about it, it’s the kind of fanatic religious commitment that permeates your whole life. And what these studies demonstrate is that this is a typical characteristic of pre-industrial societies—in fact, it correlates very closely with industrialization: as industrialization goes up, this kind of religious fanaticism goes down. Well, there are two countries that are basically off the curve. One of them is Canada, which has more fundamentalist commitment than you would expect given its level of industrialization. The other is the United States—which is totally off the chart: we’re like a shattered peasant society. I mean, the last study I saw of it was done in around 1980, and the United States was at the level of Bangladesh, it was very close to Iran.
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Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or something—half the population. You just don’t find things like that in other industrial societies.
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