Chatting with Chomsky

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from In These Times:


Chatting with Chomsky
The linguistics professor, political theorist and activist discusses the Occupy movement, Obama’s first term and the economic crisis in Europe

BY Sebastian Meyer



.....(snip).....

You've been a public intellectual, criticizing U.S. domestic and foreign policy for more than 50 years. Have you ever thought about becoming a politician yourself?

No. First of all, I'd be terrible at it (laughs). I'll just give you one simple example. My department internally runs very democratically, so there has to be a department administrator of some sort and one member of the faculty has to take that position and it circulates. But the one person who has never been allowed to take it is me, because I ruin everything so quickly. So it wouldn’t be worth it. But also I wouldn’t want to be.

Why?

Because whatever I can do about the issues that concern me I can do better outside the political realm.

Does it also have something to do with your beliefs about how the political system actually works?

I don’t criticize people who are inside the political system. But I think I can do more elsewhere. Usually, the system responds to popular activism. So, take New Deal legislation. It was implemented because the president in office, Roosevelt, was more or less sympathetic. But also because there was at that time a large array of popular movements that were pressing for responses to the crisis of the Great Depression. Same in the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson's reforms were again the reaction to large-scale popular mobilization.

The social movement of the day camps at public spaces and calls itself Occupy. You've called it the first major popular response to 30 years of class war in the United States. What do you think has Occupy achieved so far?

It achieved a lot, in two aspects. It very significantly affected public sensibility and public discourse. The imagery of the one percent versus the 99 percent, that’s spread over right through the mainstream, that’s now standard discourse. And that’s not insignificant. It brings to public attention the massive inequality and the striking maldistribution of power. There are also specific policy proposals that make a lot of sense. Efforts to try to return the electoral system to something approximating the democratic process and not just being bought by major corporations and the super rich, proposals about a financial transaction tax, ending foreclosures of kicking people out of their homes, concern for the environment and so on. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13673/chatting_with_chomsky

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