Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (81 page)

Since the mid-Seventies, the economy has slowed down: there’s been a period of much lower growth than the post-war period. Virtually all the wealth that’s been created has gone to the very top part of the income distribution. The typical family is now working about fifteen weeks a year more than they did twenty years ago, at stagnating or declining real incomes. The United States now has the heaviest workload in the industrial world. It’s also the only country in the industrial world that doesn’t have legally mandated vacations. And with that, incomes are at best stagnating for the majority of the population.
  ⁶⁵

Now, it
is
a “fairy tale” economy—and the reason it’s a “fairy tale” economy is because for the top few percent of the population, incomes have gone through the roof. The book points out that essentially the only gains in the past twenty years have been to C.E.O.s, and through asset inflation in the stock market. Well, you take a look at assets on the stock market, they also give figures for that: it turns out that roughly half are owned by the top one percent of the population—and of that, most is owned by the top one-half percent. So one percent owns roughly half the stock; the top ten percent own most of the rest. About 85 percent of the total increase in stock values in this great stock-boom have gone to the top ten percent of the population, mostly to the top one-half percent.
  ⁶⁶
In fact, the second decile—you know, the 90th to 80th percentiles in income levels—have actually lost net worth during the Clinton recovery (net worth meaning assets minus debt). Below that, it’s mostly worse.
  ⁶⁷
The ones who have been hit hardest are the youngest. So entry-level wages are about 20 to 30 percent lower than they were twenty years ago, which tells you what’s going to happen up the road. It’s now even true for white-collar workers, even scientists and engineers. Unless they’re in a very high bracket, their wages and incomes are declining.
  ⁶⁸
So that’s the “fairy tale” economy.

This Clinton recovery—which one kind of wonders about—is the first one certainly in post-war history, maybe in American history, in which most of the population has been left out. I mean, it wasn’t until the end of 1997 that median real income reached the level of 1989, which was the peak of the last business cycle.
  ⁶⁹
That’s unheard of: in every other recovery, median income has been way higher this many years after the peak of the last business cycle.

But for some sectors, it’s fantastic. And part of the reason is just intimidating working people with job insecurity.

So this is a very good book—it’s put out by the Economic Policy Institute. It’s out in paperback, and it’s not that expensive. I think the data won’t surprise you, because I think you sort of know it from your lives and your neighborhoods and so on.
  ⁷⁰
But it’s not what you’re reading in the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
. Actually, in the
Wall Street Journal
you
do
read it sometimes—but not in the popular press.

Building International Unions

W
OMAN
: Noam, facing an international power structure like the one you describe, which seems to be showing no signs of letting up as it extends its grip, clearly the response has to be organized and coordinated on a mass scale internationally. But given the size of the problems and just the scale of the task we’re faced with, it seems nearly impossible to me, frankly. Even just building the kinds of unions we need to develop in the United States seems like a daunting prospect. Do you think it’s really possible in today’s world?

Reconstructing a democratic trade-union movement in the United States? Sure, I don’t see why that’s an impossible task, it’s certainly something that’s been done before. But you’re right that it’s not going to be so simple.

For one thing, in the contemporary period something that’s surely going to be required, which does make it a lot harder than before, is that a real labor movement simply
has
to be international today. I mean, in the old days, labor activists used to talk about “Internationals,” but that was mostly a joke. Now the labor movement just
has
to be international—because there has to be something to prevent Daimler-Benz, for example, from destroying German work standards by shifting production over to Alabama, where wages are much lower, and the labor’s not unionized, and legislative protections for workers are much weaker. Or take the original Free Trade Agreement with Canada [implemented in 1989]: in the first few years of that, Canada lost a couple hundred thousand manufacturing jobs to the Southeastern United States for the same reasons.
  ⁷¹

In fact, it’s gotten to the point where some major corporations don’t even worry about strikes anymore, they see them as an opportunity to destroy unions. For instance, the Caterpillar corporation recently broke an eighteen-month strike in Decatur, Illinois [from June 1994 to December 1995], and part of the way they did it was by developing excess production capacity in foreign countries. See, major corporations have a ton of capital now, and one of the things they’ve been able to do with it is to build up extra overseas production capacity. So Caterpillar has been building plants in Brazil—where they get far cheaper labor than in the United States—and then they can use that production capability to fill their international orders in the event of a strike in the U.S. So they didn’t really mind the strike in Decatur, because it gave them an opportunity to finally break the union through this international strategy.
  ⁷²
That’s something that’s relatively new, and given this increasing centralization of power in the international economy, and the ability of big transnational corporations to play one national workforce against another to drive down work standards everywhere, there just has to be international solidarity today if there’s going to be any hope—and that means
real
international solidarity.

Another thing that has to happen for an international trade union movement to really be successful, in my opinion, is that it is simply going to have to be started from the ground up and be run by its participants. And that kind of serious organizing is something that is very difficult to do. It’s going to be particularly tricky in the United States—because the labor leadership here has traditionally been almost completely divorced from the workforce. So take a look at the world-wide destruction of unions after the Second World War: that’s had a really major impact on working conditions throughout the world, and some of the people who were doing it were in fact the American labor leadership at the time—they were a big part of the whole effort to break up the Italian unions, and the Japanese unions, and the French unions, and so on.
  ⁷³

If you look back to the history of the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe, American planners were very intent on preventing the rise of popular-democratic movements there which would have been based in the former anti-fascist resistance, which had a lot of prestige right then. And the reason was, the world in general was very social-democratic after the war, especially as a result of the anti-fascist struggles that had taken place. And with the traditional order discredited and a whole lot of radical-democratic ideas around, powerful interests in the United States were extremely concerned that a unified labor movement could develop in a place like Germany or Japan.

Actually, the same kind of problem also existed at home right then as well: the U.S. population was very social-democratic after the war—it was extremely pro-union, it wanted more government involvement in regulating industry, probably a majority thought there should even be
public
industry—and business was terrified by it, they were very scared. They in fact said in their publications things like, “We have about five or six years to save the private enterprise system.”
  ⁷⁴
Well, one thing they did was to launch a huge propaganda program in the United States, aimed at reversing these attitudes.
  ⁷⁵
It was actually called at the time part of “the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” who have to be “indoctrinated in the capitalist story”; that’s a standard straight quote from the P.R. literature.
  ⁷⁶
So in the early 1950s, the Advertising Council [an organization begun during World War II and funded by the business community to assist the government with propaganda services at home] was spending huge amounts of money to propagandize for what they called “the American way.”
  ⁷⁷
The public relations budget for the National Association of Manufacturers I think went up by about a factor of twenty.
  ⁷⁸
About a third of the textbooks in schools were simply provided by business.
  ⁷⁹
They had 20 million people a week watching propaganda films about worker-management unity, after the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed propaganda to be shown to basically captive audiences in companies.
  ⁸⁰
They continued on with the “scientific methods of strikebreaking” that had been developed in the late 1930s: devoting huge resources into propaganda instead of goon-squads and breaking knees.
  ⁸¹
And it was all tied up with the “anti-Communist” crusade at the time—that’s the true meaning of what’s referred to as “McCarthyism,” which started well before Joseph McCarthy got involved and was really launched by business and liberal members of the Democratic Party and so on.
  ⁸²
It was a way of using fear and jingoism to try to undermine labor rights and functioning democracy.

And the point is, the leadership of the U.S. labor movement was right in the center of the whole post-war destruction of unions, internationally. In fact, if you look back at their records, which are very fascinating, one of the things that they were most afraid of when they helped to smash the Italian unions, for example, was that they were just too democratic—they wanted them to be more like American unions, and they said so. “American unions” means the A.F.L. leadership sits in a room somewhere and none of the workforce knows what’s going on, the leaders make the decisions, then they go out and have lunch with some guy in the government or a corporation—that’s the way a union’s supposed to work here. The trouble is, the Italian unions weren’t like that. I might be exaggerating it a little—but if you look back at these guys’ records, they say it in roughly those words, actually.
  ⁸³

Well, when you have a history of labor leadership like that, it’s another reason why reconstituting a union movement here is simply going to have to start from the bottom up—and I don’t think that’s an impossible job. It’s certainly been done under much harsher conditions than we face. I mean, if it’s possible in El Salvador to organize a union when you’ve got death squads running after you and murdering you, and then we ask, “Is this too hard for us?”—it’s kind of like a joke. If it’s not happening, it’s because people aren’t doing it: it’s not because it’s too hard, it’s because people aren’t doing it.

So take Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Hemisphere. I don’t know if any of you have ever traveled to Haiti, but if you go there, you can barely believe it—I’ve gone to a lot of parts of the Third World, and Haiti is just something else. But in Haiti in the late 1980s, under extremely repressive and impoverished conditions, Haitian peasants and slum-dwellers were able to create an organized civil society: they succeeded in creating unions, and grassroots organizations, and a whole network of popular groupings which achieved such strength that, with no resources at all, they were able to take over the government. Now, it turns out they immediately got smashed by a military coup which we were assisting—but that shows you what people can do in the world.
  ⁸⁴
If you read the American press when the coup collapsed [in 1994], they were all saying, “Now we have to go down and teach lessons in democracy to the Haitians”—but anybody except a complete commissar ought to have burst out in ridicule at that. We have to
learn
about democracy from the Haitians, Haitian peasants have a lot to teach
us
about democracy, they show how it really works.

But the point is, if you can do it in Haiti, and if you can do it in El Salvador, you can certainly do it right now in the United States—we are much better off than those people.

So you’re right, it’s certainly not going to be a walk-over—but I don’t really see any reason why these things are beyond our reach. And I should say that if they
are
beyond our reach, we’re all in trouble—
bad
trouble. Because if it turns out that building genuine mass popular movements on an international scale can’t be done, it’s not so obvious that there will continue to be human civilization for very long—because part of the whole capitalist ethic is that the only thing that matters is how much money you make tomorrow: that’s the crucial value of the system, profit for tomorrow. Not just profit, but the bottom line has to look good
tomorrow
. And the result is that planning for the future, and any kind of regulatory apparatus that would sustain the environment for the long-term, become impossible—and that means the planet is going to go down the tubes very fast.

In fact, this was just demonstrated kind of dramatically in the United States a little while ago. Right as the “Gingrich army” was coming into office in 1994 and describing how they’re going to destroy the country’s environmental regulatory system, right at that very same time a number of scientific reports of considerable significance were released.
  ⁸⁵
One had to do with New England—or really, the world: it had to do with the Georges Bank fishing ground, an offshore shelf off the coast of New England. Georges Bank has always been the richest fishing area in the world, and it remained so through the 1970s. But in the 1980s, the Reaganites deregulated the fishing industry and at the same time subsidized it—because that’s how the “free market” works: you deregulate so the industries can do anything they want, and then the public pays them off to make sure they stay in business. Well, when you deregulate and you subsidize the fishing industry, it doesn’t take a great genius to figure out what’s going to happen—what happened is, they wiped out the ground-fish.