Noam Chomsky: ‘You Can’t Expect Instant Gratification’

October 2011 - Photo Credit Ewa Janisz

Zuccotti Park just off Wall Street, New York’s financial district, has gained fame in recent weeks as the birthplace of the “occupy Wall Street” movement currently raging in New York City. Steadily, it’s increasingly attracting widespread press attention. When I met with the world-renowned political dissident and academic Noam Chomsky, in London for a media conference, I asked him for his thoughts on the new movement.

  “I think it’s extremely important,” he says. “It’s expanding and it’s expressing very legitimate anger over whats been happening. Not just the last couple of years, but back to the 1980s when Reagan and Thatcher initiated a campaign to try and concentrate wealth and power among a narrow sector and everyone else can just fend for themselves. So, in the United States since then real wages, real incomes, have essentially stagnated for the majority of the population. There’s wealth created but it’s literally going into the pockets of say one tenth of 1% of the population. Concentration of wealth translates into concentration of political power that sets off a vicious cycle of legislation and regulation that intensifies the concentration. Of course, a lot of it is built on sand. The wealthy don’t except free market principles for themselves, they like to impose them on others and that goes way back to the origins of imperialism; it’s how England became a great power. Reagan and Thatcher drew on a very powerful state which intervened massively in the economy and put it all to the benefit of the wealthy. So, if you had anything like capitalism the financial institutions would have disappeared a long time ago. Ever since the Reagan years, they started a series of fiscal crises, one in 1984, and every time they get bailed out by the taxpayer the market system disappears. But they don’t want markets. And it’s the same ones all the time. So let’s say Citigroup, had huge debts and it was first bailed out in 1981 under Reagan and then repeatedly since and they’re expecting it next time too.” 

In recent days we have witnessed popular resistance on a global scale. From Asia to Europe the world is standing in solidarity with the US protestor. What did Noam Chomsky make of these new struggles? 

“Makes a lot of sense,” he tells me. “The economic profession and the banks somehow were incapable of seeing an incredible bubble in the US housing market. It has an $8 trillion housing inflation which has absolutely no basis in any fundamentals at all. It’s like housing just shot up. Economists at the Federal Reserve didn’t pay attention because they are enthralled to a deeply religious doctrine called the Free Market or Efficient Markets. So markets are efficient - it’s dogma - and therefore whatever happens must be right. So that if housing prices [are] inflated by $ 8 trillion before it crashed, then that must be right. Otherwise, markets wouldn’t be doing it. I think it’s kind of intriguing that this whole intellectual edifice has totally collapsed without any noticeable impact. It’s hard to think of a historical analog to that. The intellectual evidence [for Free Markets] never had any foundations, it was just dogma. It was known, 15 years ago, before this, Joseph Stieglitz - Nobel Laureate - knew it!  [He] was condemning it to the profession for what he called the ‘religion that markets know best’. And yes, it’s a religion. It’s [also] one that you can understand it’s popularity, it’s convenient for the rich and powerful. So, I guess it’s exactly why it’s supported. In fact, the whole thing just gets rebuilt and we go on to the next one. Well because it’s convenient for the wealthy and the powerful so coming back to the question, sure I think people should be protesting that. It’s destroying society.” 

Ron Suskind argued in his recent book Confidence Men that President Obama’s failures are  linked to his advisers, who are unwilling to carry out his plans. I put Suskind’s view of the Obama administration to Professor Chomsky.

“I don’t have any reason to believe that Obama wanted to do anything other than what he [did],” he says.  “He picked the advisers. The advisers he picked are precisely the ones who tanked the economy. In fact the business press understood [this] very well. There was an article in Bloomberg Business Week that as soon as he picked his advisers they went through the advisers one by one and concluded that these guys shouldn’t be advising the government they should be answering subpoenas because of their criminal acts That’s the business press! I don’t know where Suskind got his idea from but I don’t know of any particle of evidence for it. [Obama] picked the advisers he wanted, he knew what they were going to do and they were the ones who tanked the economy and he picked them.”

How has the Obama administration dealt with Palestinian demands for UN recognition of Statehood and what do you think the outcome will?

“Well, there is what Europe and the United States call a framework for negotiations. The framework is that the United States is an honest broker and it runs the negotiations. And it faces these two recalcitrant sides - Israel and the Palestinians - and tries to bring them together. In the real world, the United States and Israel are one side of the negotiations. For 35 years, the United States has unilaterally been blocking an overwhelming international consensus, first on settlements which is pretty well known and excepted by, and includes, almost everyone. The first US veto is 1976. It continues after that. I mean if they were honest negotiations they would be administered by some neutral party. Maybe Brazil? And on one side would be Israel and the US and on the other side would be the Palestinians. Anyone with their eyes open in europe must understand that. The Palestinians made an effort to try and get around it by appealing to the UN. The US, of course, strongly opposed this. It wants to keep running things. Israel opposed it because it put a damper on their project of taking over the West Bank and Gaza. The crucial question is that, most of the world agrees with the Palestinians - we’re talking about 130 countries - so the question was how will Europe react? And it reacted with its usual cowardliness. They put Tony Blair - which is pathetic - to convey to the Palestinians the orders that it got from the White House. Which he did because of his usual obsequious style and that undermines the efforts. And, if you noticed, it kind of disappeared. And now it goes off into bureaucratic manipulations to keep it from happening. And that is basically Europe’s fault. Of course, it was obvious what the US was going to do. The question is whether Europe will ever have the integrity to take an independent stance.”

Sometimes reading Chomsky’s books one can feel disheartened, or that there is no hope in the world. Is there any hope on a global scale, I ask him.

“Well if that’s the impression I convey it’s my fault! In fact, I sort of go out of my way to try and point out that the changes that have taken place, just through dedicated activism, are changes that are very substantial and whole. [Even though they] haven’t changed class structure. That’s hard. But they’ve changed a lot of other things: minority rights, women’s rights, concern over the environment, opposition to aggression. All kind of things that didn’t exist in the 1950s or 1960s are now part of just general consciousness. It’s progress, that didn’t happen as a gift from above any more than anything else ever did. It came, a lot of it, from people initiating it. There is a kind of tendency to feel, especially when you’re young, that I’m going to try something, if it doesn’t work out I’m going to give up hope. But that’s a bad mistake, it’s a long haul. 

“In fact the Occupy Wall Street movement is a very good illustration of this. Take a look at their document, they have a general assembly and what they said was; that we’re now on the front end of change and we’re going to be like the popular movements of the1930s, the Civil Rights movement and the Arab Spring. The achievements [of these] which are not insignificant, are very closely correlated with the presence and involvement of an active and militant labour movement that’s been struggling for a long time. That’s the way things change and it’s not to say that it’s not going to happen here but it’s really important, I think. [Occupy] has a lot of promise but be realistic nothing’s going to happen overnight. So, there’s no reason to be hopeless but you can’t expect instant gratification.”

(An edited version of this article appeared in Pi Newspaper issue 35 - October 2011) 

Cycle-hire phobia and the new Fringelettes

We’re all social creatures. Nibbling away at our overburdening neuroses through the transcendental wet dream of digital narcissism that is social media. We blog, tweet, comment and constantly bellow: “LISTEN TO MEEEEE!”. I’m guilty of doing that right now. Pathetically demanding an audience for my rehashed views and unoriginal take on conventional issues. We’re all guilty of it. We are as a generation, undoubtably, all in this together. Yet, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, we all insist on trying to locate the next great ‘fringe’ and leave our communality behind. The fringe doesn’t even have to be “fringe-y” as long as it purports to being a fringe-worthy activity. The Edinburgh Fringe is a good example of a large scale “fringe” event whose large crowds makes it more of a popular event. Spend any given day around Brick Lane and the “fringe” will exude confidence in their ‘natural habitat’. Not to mention the new wave glitterati Fringelettes flocking en masse to, what is right now, the fringiest place in London: Tooting (South London). It’s a curious thing, but ‘fringe culture’ extends into all aspects of our lives. Academics constantly rally around fringe intellectuals. Music whores are constantly sniffing out new “fringe” talent. What’s new and crucially, unknown.

In London, not so long ago, cycling was anything but a fringe culture favourite. The only people who cycled were either young school kids or professionals arriving at major train stations and coaxed into cycling that last mile to work. Or risk facing the sardine squish of the rush-hour tube which will, most certainly, turn you into a pumpkin before midday. Yet, with time, more people joined the delights of the open road. There was a gradual build up and increasingly cyclists took to the roads, carving out cycle routes which were later baptised by local governments and TFL bureaucrats as designated cycle ‘highways’.

The Parisian style “velib” scheme was bound to descend onto London’s streets sooner or later. Finally in summer 2010 they appeared in earnest. Those of us who signed up immediately basked in the joy of our new found freedom. Sure, there was the expected slippery start and near fatal mistakes which could only be made by a new cyclist. Nevertheless we all enjoyed it. At first the casual hurling of insults by cycling ‘fringelettes’ - those whom identified cycling as a fringe “must have” - was just waved aside as a just punishment for incompetent cycling. I picked myself up after a couple of scrapes and falls and just reasoned that getting upset was pointless. ‘It’s not me’ I thought. ‘London is a busy place and it’s brash rudeness is exactly it’s je ne sais quoi’.

Over time it became apparent that what I and other Cycle Hire enthusiasts were being subjected to was a sinister form of casual hirecyclist-phobia. We’re being vehemently discriminated against by those who see themselves as “real cyclists”. Who take their cycling seriously. You know the ones I mean, those sporting skin tight spandex shorts and the wind resistant protective eyewear with the extra grip gloves who cycle at 50 mph. The looks of incredulity offered to us by those intent on the subjugation of the Cycle Hire cyclist is bad enough, but occasionally the fringelettes’ frustration boils over into real and unwavering anger which just explodes extemporaneously at the unsuspecting Hire cyclist.

‘I’m going to spit in your fucking face you stupid little shit’, one of the Fringelette cyclist yelled to me just the other day. I had attempted an uncomfortable manoeuvre which was designed to let the Fringelette overtake me, a judgement based upon the berating and wholly inappropriate wheel skidding that I was being exposed to at the previous junction by said fringelette. A typical fringe seeker on her immaculate bike with a perfectly positioned beret which screamed “LOOK AT MEEEEE!”. Confident in my cycling skills, I knew I was not, this time, at fault. As she cycled on, the hurled insults continued. Turning her head to look at me and veering so far into the road that she was on the verge of a collision. At the zebra crossing ahead she surged forward and carried on, completely disregarding the pedestrians attempting to cross. Bewildered by her complete hypocrisy I, too, exploded in a fit of rage. That’s the thing about hirecyclist-phobia, be careful who you dish it out to. Some of us won’t stand for it. Who knows where she was cycling off to. Tooting perhaps, where she can join her other Fringlettes and renege on any responsibility for her behaviour. After all, she’s the “proper cyclist”.

Ultimately, cyclists should embrace one another: hire or “proper”. Daily we duel with the spectre of death and flirt with the possibility of a serious injury. The reason we do this are threefold: getting to your destination faster, keeping healthy and saving the planet. We all hire/proper do it for the same reasons. So please, if you’re a “proper” cyclist. Just chillax, it’s not fringe anymore and, I claim, that’s a good thing!

Media Studies - Friend not foe.

‘Did you hear that Watson? That poor chap thinks Media Studies is an actual subject!’ ‘What a piefaced, shambling refugee from hell’! ‘Let’s admit it’, we’re repeatedly told, ‘it’s not really a proper subject.

They “study” camera angles and filming techniques which is all fair and well, but come on it’s not exactly the stuff of

masterful algebraic manipulations now is it?’ Well, no,

actually it’s not. But aren’t those undertaking the study of

media entitled to the same degree of tolerance as those

studying other subjects? ‘No!’ They insist.

Trawling through the OCR Media Studies syllabus, It didn’t take much to put this obloquial ‘Subject Bashing’ from the likes of some of Britain’s best selling daily’s to rest. Be honest now, how well would you be able to cope with: ‘How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation?’ Regardless of what you think, that’s a tricky question. Especially if one had not revised. ‘No, no, no!’ Protestations from the beasts of Fleet Street, ‘these subjects are devoid of any substance. They are shallow and meaningless!’ Somewhat like the charges levied perhaps?

Students who have undertaken to do a Media Studies A-level, as provided by OCR, are expected to engage with issues of complex social and political theory. The wealth of scholarly records on the subject extends across over 200 years. No short feat. These students are being treated with exactly the same degree perpetuating hatred from the mass media and society-at-large as students who studied English in the 1920s. Back then we were told that learning in one’s own language was a serious step down from the preferred Latin and Greek. So you see, all English students can, in light of this new information, empathise with their Media Studies brethren. For it wasn’t long ago that they were being berated by others too.

There is actually very good reason why Media Studies is being ostracised by the mass media and the higher echelons of societal privilege. With questions as inflammatory and dangerous to them as: “[What are] the issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice?” These piercing questions are, obviously, not the right ones to ask. They reveal too much to kids about the actual workings of some in the media. The subject is seriously popular and therefore has the ability to enfranchise vast swathes of the populous. The political classes, as they are sometimes called, however, seriously indoctrinated as they are, feed the attempts to discredit the subject. Indoctrinated to protect the system which is controlled by a handful of corporations and powerful individuals, they dutifully do their masters bidding and eat away at the serious scholarship presented to thousands of students every year - in the appealing format of a Media Studies A-level.

Unanimous blind hatred for a single subject? Unabateing ‘Subject Basing’? All together? … You might very well think that, Dear Reader, I couldn’t possibly comment. Nevertheless, what is obvious is the fierce advocacy of Media Studies as the perfect example of a substandard subject. Those perpetuating the substandard myth seem to be protecting their interests in two ways: attempting to discourage future pupils from learning to question the media and building a society which discredits those who hold these qualifications. We, ordinary serfs, must blindly accept the “analysis” given to us and ignore the thousands of students who actually take the subject and are learning to question the media and its powerful multifaceted dominance.