[PAA-Discuss] Worker Occupations and the Future of Radical Labor

Fri Nov 20 09:54:40 EST 2009

Worker Occupations And The Future Of Radical Labor

An Interview With Noam Chomsky

November 20, 2009 

By Noam Chomsky 
and Diane Krauthamer

Noam Chomsky's <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/noamchomsky>  ZSpace
Page 
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This interview was conducted on Oct. 9, 2009, at Professor Noam Chomsky's
office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. 

DK: I would like to start this interview with a discussion of the economic
crisis and how workers can deal with the issues which we face. In your
recent piece titled "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours," which was published
in the Boston Review, you state that the "the financial crisis will
presumably be patched up somehow, while leaving the institutions that
created it pretty much in place." Following on that, there has been a recent
upsurge of militant industrial action in workplaces, primarily throughout
Europe, and also in North America. As you know, the Republic Windows and
Doors Factory in Chicago was the first factory occupation in the U.S. since
the 1930s. 

NC: No, not quite, because the 1979 strike against U.S. Steel in Youngstown,
Ohio was an occupation-and actually, that's a model that really should be
pursued now. They went on from striking to trying to have the workforce and
the communities take over the abandoned factories that U.S. Steel was
dismantling. The legal effort that followed was led by the radical labor
lawyer Staughton Lynd. They didn't win in the courts, but they could have
won, and they would have had enough support. It could have meant a lot. 

DK: That leads me to my question about how workers are responding to mass
layoffs. I feel what they are aiming for are parochial gains without
thinking more long-term of how they can move towards workers'
self-management. 

NC: That's what the IWW should be doing: providing that spark. You're right,
it's reactive. But the same was true of the sit-down strikes in the 1930s. I
mean the reason the sit-down strikes struck such fear in the hearts of
management was that they knew that a sit-down strike was just one step short
of taking over the factory. 

DK: I feel at the moment we're gaining numbers and we're gaining a lot of
strength and power, but the rest of the American labor movement does not
perceive that we are very serious.  It is a very difficult feat to go from
what we're doing now to really being a part of the broader labor movement in
the U.S., which is important if we are to provide that spark. 

NC: The U.S. is different from Europe and other industrial countries in this
respect. The U.S. is, to a very unusual extent, a business-run society.
There are all kinds of reasons for that-it has no feudal background, so
institutions that remained in place in Europe did not remain in place here.
There are a lot of reasons. But the fact of the matter is that the U.S. is
run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a
very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe. The attack on unions
has been far more extreme here, and it has been much more successful. Also,
the business propaganda has been far more successful. Anti-union propaganda
has been considerably more successful here than in Europe, even among
working people who would benefit [from] unions. In fact, a rather striking
aspect of business propaganda in the United States is the demonization of
government, starting after the Second World War. 

The Second World War ended with a radicalization of the population in the
United States and everywhere else, and called for all kinds of things like
popular takeovers, government intervention, and worker takeovers of
factories. Business propagated a tremendous propaganda offensive. The scale
surprised me when I read the scholarship-it's enormous, and it's been very
effective. There were two major targets: one is unions, the other is
democracy. Well, [to them] democracy means getting people to regard
government as an alien force that's robbing them and oppressing them, not as
their government. In a democracy it would be your government. For example,
in a democracy the day when you pay your taxes, April 15, would be a day of
celebration, because you're getting together to provide resources for the
programs you decided on. In the United States, it's a day of mourning
because this alien force-the government-is coming to rob you of your
hard-earned money. That's the general attitude, and it's a tremendous
victory for the opponents of democracy, and, of course, any privileged
sector is going to hate democracy. You can see it in the healthcare debate. 

The majority of the population thinks that if the government runs
healthcare, they're going to take away your freedom. At the same time, the
public favors a national healthcare program. The contradiction is somehow
unresolved. In the case of the business propaganda, it's particularly ironic
because while business wants the population to hate the government, they
want the population to love the government. Namely, they're in favor of a
very powerful state which works in their interest. So you have to love that
government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and
that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been
carried out very well. You can see it in the worship of Reagan, which
portrays him as somebody who saved us from government. Actually he was an
apostle of big government. Government grew under Reagan. He was the
strongest opponent of free markets in the post-war history among presidents.
But it doesn't matter what the reality is; they concocted an image that you
worship. It's hard to achieve that, especially in a free society, but it's
been done, and that's the kind of thing that activists in the IWW have to
work against, right on the shop floor. It's not so simple, but it's been
done before.   

DK: You mentioned that business is very class conscious. Can you elaborate
on that statement? 

NC: Well, all you have to do is read the business literature. In the 1930s
they were very frightened and they were concerned about how the rising power
of the masses was hazardous to industrialists. They used straight Marxist
rhetoric-just the values were changed. The literature is like that-they are
constantly talking about the masses, the danger they pose, and how to
control them. They understand what they're doing, and they're very class
conscious. They press policies which work for their interests. For example,
the insurance industries and the big banks are absolutely euphoric now-on
the business pages they don't even conceal it-because they've succeeded in
coming out of the crisis even stronger than they were before, and in a
better position to lay the basis for the next crisis. But they don't care,
because they'll get bailed out again. That's class consciousness with a
vengeance. 

DK: On the topic of how businesses use propaganda. I would say now they use
propaganda more so for union-busting than they use the violent tactics.
Would you agree? 

NC: For a while, after the Second World War, when there was strong support
for labor, this was done subtly. But since Reagan, it has been done openly.
I mean Reagan bitterly hated unions and wanted them destroyed. This began
with the air controllers' strike and went on from there. The Reagan
administration told the business world that they were not going to enforce
the labor laws. The number of illegal firings tripled during the Reagan
years. It was at that time that you started getting these companies that
specialized in how to destroy unions. They don't make it a secret, and they
have all sorts of techniques for management to destroy unions. Well, when
Clinton came along, it sort of moderated a little bit, but Clinton had a
different device for breaking unions called NAFTA [North America Free Trade
Agreement]. Because the government was entirely lawless, employers could
exploit NAFTA to threaten union organizers with transfer. It's illegal, but
when you've got a lawless government, it doesn't matter if it's illegal. I
think the number of union drives blocked increased by about 50 percent. Part
of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was
quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to
undermine and destroy unions. Well, that was going on in the Clinton years,
then, of course Bush...who we don't need to even talk about. But starting
with Regan it became quite open, the attack on unions. It wasn't the
Pinkertons anymore, but it was just not applying the laws. 

DK: We're seeing that very much in the IWW, especially in the Starbucks
Workers Union, whereby Starbucks will put out all kinds of anti-union
propaganda both internally, within the company, and externally. A lot of
what they do is tell workers that they don't need a union. 

NC: They're better off without it, that's the Whole Foods line. 

DK: Right, they use the line of Corporate Social Responsibility, and a lot
of it is very effective. 

NC: It is. 

DK: So how could we, as a small, independent labor union, work to fight
against that kind of propaganda? 

NC: You've just got to get people organized and tell them the truth. There
aren't any magic tricks to it. You know, sometimes it's pretty amazing.
Actually, I mentioned a pretty striking case of this in "Crisis and Hope,"
which was the Caterpillar case in the early 1990s. Caterpillar was quite
important because that was the first manufacturing industry that used
Reaganite strike-breaking techniques. They illegally called in scabs to
break a major strike. It was reported pretty well in the Chicago Tribune,
who pointed out something very interesting. They said that the workers got
very little support in Peoria when scabs illegally broke the strike, and
that was particularly striking because that whole community had been built
up by the union-it was a union-based community. But when it came to the
crunch, the community itself didn't support the union. Now that's kind of
interesting about Obama, because Obama was supposedly a community organizer
in Chicago at that time. Now I'm sure he read the Chicago Tribune, so he
knew about it, but when he went to show his solidarity with the workforce,
the first place he went was Caterpillar. I don't think he's forgotten, and
the labor movement didn't react. Even radical labor historians didn't
remember. It was only 15 years ago, after all, but that's a real triumph of
propaganda in many ways. 

It's a lot of work to reconstruct a strong labor offensive, but it's
happened before. I mean in the 1920s the labor movement was almost
completely destroyed. Well, in the 1930s it really revived and became pretty
radical. Things can happen, but not by themselves. I mean, then you had the
Communist Party, who was right at the heart of civil rights activism and
labor activism and so on, but something else has to provide it. You don't
want to have their Russia worship, but domestically they had a pretty good
record. I can remember it pretty well from childhood, because my family was
mostly union people. 

DK: Your father was in the IWW, right? 

NC: He was in the IWW... but do you want to know the truth? [laughs] 

DK: Yes I do. 

NC: He came over as an immigrant and didn't know any English. He went to
work at a sweat shop in Baltimore. He told me later that this guy was coming
around, and the guy seemed to be for the workers, so he signed up. It turned
out that guy was an IWW organizer [laughs]. My father didn't regret signing
up; he just really didn't know what was going on. 

DK: What industry was he in? 

NC: I don't even know if I ever knew [laughing]-some sweatshop in Baltimore.
I knew with my other relatives-some of the women were in the International
Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and men were shop boys and things like that.
I happened to be in Philadelphia, but the family was in New York. I could
see what the union was doing for them. It really saved their lives. I had
two spinster aunts who were seamstresses, and of course unemployed in the
1930s, but the union gave them a life. They had a couple of weeks in the
country for a union installation and they had educational programs and all
sorts of things. There was a life, you know, a real community. And they were
members of the Communist Party-they didn't care one way or another about
Russia, they just cared about the United States.  

DK: On that note, I'm also looking to think ahead with what's in the future
for the labor movement and the IWW.  More generally, if you had one piece of
advice to offer future generations of Wobblies-especially in light of the
tough financial times that we are facing and will probably continue to face
for a long time in the Western world-what would it be? 

NC: Well, I get a lot of letters from people. When I go home tonight I'll
have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who don't like what's going on
and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] if I can give them some
advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them what to read or
something. It doesn't work like that. I mean, everything depends very much
on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what
circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and
that determines what you ought to be doing. There are some very general
ideas that people can keep in mind; they're kind of truisms. It's only worth
mentioning them because they're always denied. 

First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So if
Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing
this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true,
which it often is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates-gifts
don't come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and
you win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of
the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right
now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common,
even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction.
If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are
people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of
interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just
enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand
them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who
feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all
my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard,
and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting
shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages
have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the
children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody
must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush
Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the
government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you-they
just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and
communists and so on. 

Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule,
but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the
ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are
historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to
be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to
groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least
they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was
the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem]. 

I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American,
"Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established
over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an
answer. And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an
internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and
the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very
self-confident, and they have an answer to everything-a crazy answer, but
it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done
is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real
grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take over your
factories." 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full
interview, please email  <mailto:iw at iww.org> iw at iww.org or visit
http://www.authoritysmashers.wordpress.com. Thanks to Charngchi Way and the
Authority Smashing Hour radio show. 

  _____  

From:

Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

URL:

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23178

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