Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy by Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian

Author:Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, History, Philosophy, Interviews
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2017-12-05T02:00:00+00:00

9

TOWARD A BETTER SOCIETY

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (MARCH 11, 2016)

“Socialism” was one of the most looked-up words in 2015, and several polls indicate that young people ages eighteen to twenty-nine have favorable views of socialism.1 Are you surprised by that?

Not so much surprised as uncertain. The question is what they mean by it. I suspect they mean something like social democracy, which is essentially New Deal welfare-state capitalism. And if that’s the case, it’s not surprising, because polls have shown for years that this matches widely held goals of most of the population.

You’ve been involved in myriad struggles and actions over the decades. Are there any you feel have lessons for today?

Just about all of them. Take organizing poor people. The civil rights movement has plenty to teach about that, as does the labor movement. There are some common elements to all kinds of organizing; you have to find issues that meet several conditions. First, people have to care about them. Second, the fixes have to be feasible. And third, it has to be possible to convince people that they are feasible, because one of the major impediments to organizing is the feeling of “you can’t fight city hall.” So you have to show that you can fight city hall. The way it’s typically done in successful organizing is to find small things that people recognize could be achieved, see if you can achieve those, then encourage the sense that success is possible, and proceed to the next thing.

Take a real case that I heard of not long ago, about a group working in working-class immigrant communities in South Boston. At the beginning, just to break through the sense of hopelessness, they started with something very simple: women organized to see if they could get the town to put in a traffic light where their kids cross the road to go to school. They worked on the issue, they pressured local officials, and they won. Then they recognized that they could do things if they worked together. And they went on to the next campaign. That’s how you build. That’s organizing and activism.

Let’s talk about Latin America, a region historically under the U.S. thumb. Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. He was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro. What’s your evaluation of what’s happened there?

What’s happened in Venezuela, first of all, is an extreme case of what’s happening in Latin America generally—and it’s pretty tragic. Chávez himself tried to create significant and positive changes, but the way he did it had fundamental flaws. For one thing, it was top-down. It was not coming from the base. There were some efforts to organize popular activism, but it’s very hard to find out—at least I haven’t been able to find out—how successful they were.

Then there was a significant amount of corruption and incompetence that seriously undermined his efforts. How high it went, we don’t know. Finally, there was no real dent in the reliance of the economy on a single resource, oil. In fact, Venezuela probably became even more dependent on it.

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