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NOAM CHOMSKY CLASS WARFARE interviews with DAVID BARSAMIAN ESSENTIAL CLASSICS IN POLITICS: NOAM CHOMSKY EB 0007 ISBN 0 7453 1345 0 London 1999 The Electric Book Company Ltd Pluto Press Ltd 20 Cambridge Drive 345 Archway Rd London SE12 8AJ, UK London N6 5AA, UK www.elecbook.com www.plutobooks.com © Noam Chomsky 1999 Limited printing and text selection allowed for individual use only. All other reproduction, whether by printing or electronically or by any other means, is expressly forbidden without the prior permission of the publishers. This file may only be used as part of the CD on which it was first issued. Class Warfare Noam Chomsky Interviews with David Barsamian Pluto Press London 4 First published in the United Kingdom 1996 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA This edition is not for sale in North America Copyright 1996 © Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian All rights reserved Transcripts by Sandy Adler British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1138 5 hbk Digital processing by The Electric Book Company 20 Cambridge Drive, London SE12 8AJ, UK www.elecbook.com Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky 5 Contents Click on number to go to page Introduction ................................................................................. 6 Looking Ahead: Tenth Anniversary Interview..................................... 8 Rollback: The Return of Predatory Capitalism ................................. 23 History and Memory.................................................................... 81 The Federal Reserve Board .........................................................130 Take from the Needy and Give to the Greedy .................................152 Israel: Rewarding the Cop on the Beat..........................................206 Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky 6 Introduction In this third book in a series of interview collections, Noam Chomsky begins with comments about the right-wing agenda that have turned out to be prescient. Corporations with their political allies are waging an unrelenting class war against working people. A vast social engineering project is being implemented under the guise of fiscal responsibility. In this latest incarnation of class warfare, there is no doubt as to which side Chomsky is on. For him, solidarity is not an abstract concept but a vital and unifying principle. The interviews were recorded in Chomsky’s office at MIT and by phone from 1994 to 1996. Some were broadcast nationally and internationally as part of my Alternative Radio weekly series. Others were aired on KGNU in Boulder, Colorado. The accolades and accusations accorded Noam Chomsky are too numerous—and too well known—to warrant discussion here. For those sympathetic to his views there are a number of possible responses. One is to stand in awe of his prolific output and unwavering principles, limited by the sense that his abilities are unmatchable. A second choice is to implement his simple formula for learning about the world and creating social change: “There has not in history ever been any answer other than, Get to work on it.” Indeed, it’s not like mastering quantum physics or learning Sanskrit. Class Warfare is provided in the hopes the reader might choose to engage in political action. After countless books, interviews, articles and speeches, Chomsky concludes with one wish: “What I should be doing Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky 7 is way more of this kind of thing.” That a person of his commitment is seeking ways to increase his contribution is, for me, a source of continued inspiration. —David Barsamian March 10, 1996 Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky Looking Ahead Tenth Anniversary Interview December 20, 1994 DB Noam, it was ten years ago that we did our first interview. I know that you do so few interviews it probably is very vivid in your mind. Absolutely. I recall every word [laughs]. DB I remember it well because I had all sorts of technical problems. I couldn’t operate the tape recorder. I called you and said, We can’t do it. Then I managed to figure it out. Anyway, that was ten years ago. A review of Keeping the Rabble in Line says we have a “symbiotic relationship.” Is that something that we need to worry about? As long as it’s symbiotic at long distance, I guess it’s OK. DB All right, good. Actually, we usually end on this kind of note. I want to start with your upcoming plans. I know you have a trip to Australia coming up in January. That one’s been in the works for about twenty years, I guess. DB Any new books? Looking Ahead 9 Right now I’m in the middle of a very technical book on linguistics and I have in the back of my mind a long-promised book on the philosophy of language. On the political issues, I’m not exactly sure. I might be putting together some essays and updating them. Several people have asked for updated and extended essays on current matters and I might do that. I’m not really sure. I have sort of a feeling that I’ve saturated the market a bit with books. I might wait a while. DB How about writing for Z? Are you going to continue that? Oh, sure. I have a couple of articles coming out right now. There’s a long one, which was too long, so it was broken into two parts. It will be coming out in January and February. There’s a bunch of other things. And other journals. DB The last time we had a conversation you said that the linguistics work was particularly exciting. There was a certain animation in your voice. What particularly is attractive to you about the work you’re doing now in linguistics? It’s hard to explain easily. There’s a kind of a rhythm to any work, I think, probably to any scientific work. Some interesting ideas come along and change the way you look at things. A lot of people start trying them and applying them. They find all kinds of difficulties and try to work it out. There’s a period of working on things within a relatively fixed framework. At some point they converge, or something leaps out at you and you suddenly see there’s another way of looking at it that is much better than the old one and that will put to rest a lot of the problems that people have been grappling with. Now you go off to a new stage. Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky Looking Ahead 10 Right now there’s a good chance that it’s that kind of moment, which for me at least has happened maybe two or three times before altogether. It happens to be particularly exciting this time. There seems to be a way possibly to show that a core part of human language, the core part of the mechanisms that relate sound and meaning, are not only largely universal, but in fact even from a certain point of view virtually optimal. Meaning on very general considerations if you were to design a system, like if you were God designing a system, you would come close to doing it this way. There are a lot of remarkable things about language anyway. It has properties that, it has been known for a long time, you just wouldn’t expect a biological organism to have at all, properties which in many ways are more similar to things you find in the inorganic world, for unknown reasons. If this turns out to be on the right track, it would be even more remarkable in that same sense because the last thing you would expect of a biological system is that it would be anything like optimally designed. DB Is this input coming from students and colleagues? A lot of it’s work of mine, but of course it’s all highly interactive. These are all very cooperative enterprises. I have a course every fall which is a sort of lecture-seminar. People show up for it from all over the place. It’s developed a certain pattern over the past thirty or forty years. A lot of faculty show up from other universities, other disciplines. There are many people who have been sitting in for twenty and thirty years, people from other universities. A lot of people come from the whole northeast region, from Canada and Maryland. There are plenty of European visitors. It’s a very lively, ongoing sort of lecture-seminar. I lecture and then there’s a lot of discussion. It’s dealing with questions at the borders of research, always. Sometimes it’s really interesting. Classics in Politics: Class Warfare Noam Chomsky Looking Ahead 11 Sometimes it’s not so interesting. This last fall, in fact the last two years, particularly this fall, a lot of things fell together as I was lecturing. I’m writing them up right now. DB That’s great. I’m excited for you, too, that you find your work engaging. I always find it engaging, but as I say, there’s a rhythm. Sometimes it’s more a matter of patchwork within a framework, and sometimes it’s a matter of suddenly seeing another way of looking at things which seems to cut through a lot of problems and to have exciting prospects. This is maybe the most interesting thing I’ve thought of, at least. Whether it’s right or not is another question. DB And given that, and this vital work that you’re involved with, I was wondering if any thoughts of retiring come up. Sure. I have to at my age. And there are also questions about what’s the best way of developing continuity in the department, and the impact on the field, and there’s personal life, and so on.
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