The Occupy Times Interview
Since 2008, the latest crisis of capitalism has given birth to a new wave of horizontal and collective forms of organising in the United States: The occupation of the State Capitol of Wisconsin in early 2011 in opposition to Governor Scott Walker’s plan to drastically reduce collective bargaining rights. The Occupy movement and its notorious occupation of Zuccotti Park in late 2011, followed by similar occupations of public space across hundreds of American cities. And most recently, the network of relief hubs, organised at a community level and aimed at cultivating an atmosphere of mutual aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, Occupy Sandy has been at the forefront of filling the gaps where the state seems absent. The last few months has witnessed the development of tools for debt resistance, exemplified by numerous debtors’ assemblies held in city squares across America, and more recently by the Rolling Jubilee, which aimed to display the power of collective refusal of debt peonage.
One unifying thread that runs through these recent and varied forms of collective organisation is the lack of institutionalisation. In fact, institutionalised forms of collective bargaining have been declining for some time. Today, US union membership is lower than at any other time since 1933. Losses in private and public sector unions saw total union density fall from 11.8% to 11.3% last year. Meanwhile, anti-union laws are being pushed through state legislatures, most recently in Michigan.
One of the most prominent voices in the debates around collective bargaining and organising has been the MIT linguist and long-time political commentator Noam Chomsky. Recently, the OT sat down with Professor Chomsky in the hope that he might provide a few insights into recent developments on the American Left, and into conservatives’ fight against unions. Below are excerpts from the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.–Occupy Times.
OT: After Hurricane Sandy, New York City seemed to turn into an authoritative vacuum. Nobody expected much help from the feds. Do you think that Occupy Sandy can capitalise on that feeling?
Noam Chomsky: The trouble is, it is a double-edged sword, because to the extent that Sandy or other citizens efforts are effective, they reduce the pressure on the federal government to stand up and do what it is supposed to do. That is a trap you want to be able to avoid. There also ought to be pressure on the feds to say: “You guys are supposed to be doing this.”
OT: So, Occupy Sandy and these various movements that have come out in the last year, they are double-edged in the sense that they alleviating the pressure we should put on [governments], but they are also desired responses in many ways.
NC: What ways? The trouble with saying “the government backs off” is that it only feeds the libertarians. The wealthy and the corporate sector are delighted to have government back off, because then they get more power. Suppose you were to develop a voluntary system, a community type, a mutual support system that takes care of social security – the wealthy sectors would be delighted.
OT: Absolutely, so it’s an interesting dilemma. The idea of mutual aid is very prevalent within Occupy Sandy. Because of the failure of government responses, it has resulted in this thing that can potentially be used against us in lots of ways.
NC: It’s difficult. In principle you are doing what a lot of communities ought to be doing. An organised community is just a government – in a democratic society at least, thus not in ours. Your problem is the effectiveness of the whole doctrinal system which has undermined any belief in democracy. You see it on the front page of every newspaper. Why is there a fuss now about raising taxes? In a democratic society, you would have the opposite pressure to raise taxes, because you appreciate taxes, taxes are what we pay for the things we decide to do. But if the government is a big alien force, we don’t want them to steal our money, so we’re against taxes.
OT: The idea of taxation seems so thoroughly demonised, even though it obviously results in things that everybody takes for granted.
NC: I think the demonisation is a consequence of the feeling that the government is not simply all of us formulating and carrying out our plans. If that’s what the government was, people wouldn’t object to taxes.
OT: There’s a lot of spillover from that sentiment – taxation and its implications for the average individual – to what we are seeing in terms of attacks on labour unions, like what just happened in Michigan.
NC: Its been going on for a 150 years, and it’s a very business-driven society today. In every society business hates labour, but the United States is run by businesses to an unusual degree. It has a very violent labour history. Several times in the last century, labour has been practically destroyed, just through violence, government violence, business violence. Strikers were being murdered in the United States in the late 1930s, and in other countries for decades.
Many legal instruments have been used to discipline the labour force across the USA over the past few decades. One of the most damaging forms of legislation is known as Right to Work law. It exists on the statute books of nearly half of American states, primarily in the South. Its main function is to prohibit the requirement that workers pay union fees as a condition of employment. This doesn’t prevent those who do not pay union membership fees from receiving the benefit of collective bargaining. The long term effects of the legislation, as with most laws designed to restrict labour rights, is a lowering of wages and worsening safety and health conditions for workers. Regions which utilise these laws are often dismissively referred to as “right to work for less” states by their opponents.
OT: What do you think of Michigan’s legalisation of collective bargaining or in-shop organising? Did the integration of potentially radical tactics from the labour force take the ground away from under it? Or have they been normalised?
NC: It just depends how it works. Legalising collective bargaining made it possible to develop labour unions, but it really depends how they work. Take the United States and Canada. They are pretty similar societies but organised labour has worked in quite different ways. The reason that Canada has a health system, and the US doesn’t, is because of the way the labour unions handled it. You had the same United Auto Workers on both sides of the border, and it was about the same time in the 1950s. The Canadian unions pressed for healthcare for everybody, the American unions pressed for healthcare for only themselves. So the Americans got a good contract, a reasonably good contract for UAW workers, but nobody else did, and so we end up with this monstrosity.
Furthermore the UAW leadership weren’t just thugs, they were serious and unbelievably naive. They thought they could make a compact with management and work together. But by 1979, the head of the UAW, Rick Frazier, gave an important speech – it’s probably on the internet. He pulled out of some labour management group that the Carter administration was setting up, realising it was a farce. He said that he realised a little late that business was fighting a one-sided class war against working people, that they don’t mean it when they sign these contracts, that they are just waiting for a chance to cut back and get out of them. And he said that he had finally figured out what workers knew 150 years ago: business is fighting a bitter class war, all the time. The business world is full of dedicated, vulgar Marxists who are always fighting a class war and the labour leadership didn’t understand it, or wanted not to understand it. In any event, they entered into these compacts. Business wanted to undercut them, they did, which is what is happening. Unions were demonised by massive propaganda. We have movies, advertising, everything; it’s moderately well studied. It’s pretty dramatic when you look at it, and it has had an effect.
My daughter teaches in a state college where the students are mostly working class. They don’t call themselves working class, she’s not allowed to use the term – it’s called middle class. Basically, they want to be nurses, police officers or skilled workers. She said she teaches labour history, and she says they just hate unions. Because they regard the union as something which forces you to go on strike, which steals your dues and doesn’t do anything for you. As far as that’s the case, they just hate unions.
Over the past few months, there has been a noticeable focus from activists on debt and its relationship to people’s labour and livelihoods. While debt is not a new phenomenon, the level of analysis has become more detailed after the 2008 crash and the rise of the Occupy Movement. There’s the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which has campaigned for some time against sovereign debt clawed from impoverished countries. Strike Debt is developing ideas around the debtor as a new political subject. The Rolling Jubilee collectively purchased distressed medical debt on secondary markets in order to instantly write it off as an act of solidarity. These initiatives, along with the European We Won’t Pay campaign, are some of the more recent movements against illegitimate debt that have grown to prominence.
OT: Looking at the Rolling Jubilee, it also is a double edged sword. On one hand you are helping someone dramatically by abolishing their thousands of dollars worth of medical debt. So instead of debt collectors buying it on the market and saying “You owe this amount of money” and giving you a principle balance and some other fee, you don’t have to pay it back. But on the other hand, you’re giving five-hundred thousand dollars to speculators on the market.
NC: And you’re also undercutting the government responsibility to do it in the first place. Political pressure that would lead them to do it. The same issue arises all the time. Let’s say with charity, when you give aid to homeless people, you’re taking away the community responsibility to do it, and in a democratic society, that usually means the government. And this is true, you can’t escape the world you’re in, you can tonly ry and change it. It’s not an argument against giving to charities…
OT: Absolutely. I don’t want to use the term morality, but there’s definitely a sense that it’s time to take action.
NC: We are responsible to other people. We should at the same time, and I think that’s what Occupy ought to be doing, create an understanding that there is a community responsibility. It’s not our responsibility, we’re doing it, because the community isn’t. It’s like schools: there’s community responsibility to make sure that kids go to school. People who want to privatise schools would be delighted if an individual charity sent particular kids to school, then it wouldn’t have to be a community responsibility and it would cost them less in tax money. But I think much deeper than that is that they want to undermine the conception of communal responsibility. That also goes back 150 years, back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. It’s remarkable to see how persistent it is – this idea that workers and working people were being driven from the farms into the factories. In England, the same thing happened basically a century earlier, and they bitterly resented it. The labour press from that time is very striking; people should read it and reprint it. I mean, it’s very radical. They had never heard of Marx, never heard of communists, but the press was just instinctively very radical. They were opposed to wage labour and regarded it as not very different from slavery. The main thing they opposed was what they called the “New Spirit of the Age” – ‘you gain wealth, forgetting anybody else’. So that’s what they’ve been driving into people’s heads for 150 years. I talk to MIT students, kind of upwardly mobile students, not Harvard, a lot of them are kind of behind [Ayn] Rand, “Why should I do anything for anyone else? I should be after it for myself.”
That sentiment has spread. Actually I think that’s what happened in Michigan. The anti-union feeling that has been built up is, “Why should that guy over there have a pension when I don’t?” In Wisconsin, that feeling was very strong. The labour movement was never able to get across the fact that these guys are hard working people who gave up their wages so they could have some benefits, they’re not stealing from you. That never got across. So the very widespread feeling even among union members was, ‘They got a pension, they got tenure. I don’t have a pension, I don’t got tenure, I’m just after myself, I don’t care.’ And that’s one of the problems with volunteer and popular activism: It builds a sense of solidarity among participants, but it undermines another sense of solidarity in the community at large. That’s really significant. I think that’s what underlies the massive attack against social security, which is really a bipartisan attack. Obama says we have to cut it, too. There’s no economic problem, but social security is based on the conception that you care about other people. That argument has become unpopular. But you got to drive that out of people’s heads. You have to make sure not to contribute to that.
OT: We were trying to think that if we had to describe Occupy Wall Street and the protests of the last year in a very succinct kind of way, it would probably be based on the idea that for generations prior there was a sense of working class solidarity and the idea of having collective power.
NC: You’re right, I thought the most important contribution of the Occupy movement was to recreate this mutual support system which was lacking in society. But it has this dual character: You have to figure out ways to do it which don’t undermine the broader conception of solidarity. ‘Actual solidarity’ is the slogan of the labour movement – well, it used to be.
OT: With that in mind, if Strike Debt is taking this approach where it’s focusing on debt, the commonality is that we’re not all workers, but we’re all debtors. Would you say that this is a rallying point?
NC: Sure. There are many points of commonality among people, say… schools. I don’t have kids who go to school, I suppose you don’t either, but nevertheless, many of us, we’re committed to making sure kids go to school. We’re part of that community and lots of other communities.
OT: But it’s much easier to say, “you’re a worker, you sell your labour for a wage.” It’s much easier to say that than it is to say: “You owe a debt and you have a solidarity to this person who also has debt.” How do you articulate that bond of solidarity?
NC: That’s the obvious point of contact. That’s the way health organising ought to work: Everybody is going to face health problems.
OT: It’s obvious that there is a need for that kind of thinking. But I’m not sure that it’s so obvious that you could communicate it to people and get people out on the street and organising amongst themselves.
NC: Well, you know, it certainly happened in other places. Again, Canada is not that different but at least it had something of that concept of solidarity. That’s how they got a national health system. Actually, one of the amazing things in Michigan is how the unions were never able to get across the point that even the concept ‘right to work’ is a lie. It’s ‘right to scrounge’. It has got nothing to do with work, but they could never get it across. When you mention that to people they say “yeah, I never thought of it”.
They don’t know what a scam it is to even call it “right to work.” That should have been a major educational issue, just like with pensions for public workers. They should have said: ‘Pension cuts mean that they cut back your wages’. Or take when Obama froze wages for federal workers and it was praised across the board. He was raising taxes – and this is right in the middle of saying ‘You’re not allowed to raise taxes’. A pay freeze for federal workers is identical with a tax on federal workers. Almost nobody pointed it out. We’re just losing a lot of opportunities
The same thing is to be done about debt, as I’m sure you’re doing it. A lot of the debt is just totally illegitimate. Take student debt. There’s no economic basis for it, it is just a tactic of control. You can prove that there’s no economic basis. Other countries don’t have it. Poor countries don’t have it, rich countries don’t have it, it exists only in the US – so it can’t be economically necessary. The United States was a much poorer country in the 1950’s, much poorer, but it had basically free education.
OT: Sure, the NHS in the UK was founded after World War II when the debt was far greater in proportion to the nation’s wealth.
NC: Even in the US, which came out of the war very rich, it was nowhere near as rich as it is today. But the GI bill gave us free education. Yes it was selective: only whites, very few women, but it was free education for a huge amount of people who would have never gone to school. In the 1940s, when I went to college, I went to an IVY league school, it was $100 tuition. That’s a poor country compared to today’s standards.
Noam Chomsky’s book, Occupy, is available from Zuccotti Park Press as part of the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series, www.zuccottiparkpress.com.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) this
week reported that global music sales posted a 0.3% increase in 2012,
with sales topping $16.5 billion - ending a 13-year slide. Noting that
digital sales were the primary growth factor, Sony Music President/
International Edgar Berger told Reuters, "At the beginning of the
digital revolution it was a common theme to say digital is killing
music. Well, the reality is, digital is saving music. I absolutely
believe that this marks the start of a global growth story. The industry
has every reason to be optimistic about its future." IFPI figures
indicate digital sales were up 9% vs. 2011, to $5.6 billion, accounting
for 34% of overall income for the music business. Meanwhile, download
sales were up 12% percent to 4.3 billion units, and digital album sales
jumped 17% to 207 million units, vs. 2011 figures. "While the overall
0.3% rise was modest, it was fueled in part by a 9% jump on the digital
side, an exciting development that bodes well for the future," National
Association of Recording Merchandisers President Jim Donio said in a
statement. "The year also saw a significant expansion of subscription
and streaming models, with a 40% rise in the number of fee-paying
customers. We have now had a full year to measure the impact of these
services such as Spotify, Rdio, and more in the U.S., and they are
expected to account for more than 10% of total digital revenues
worldwide for the first time." [Full story: 
What at one time frightened the recorded music business now is causing
music execs to (mildly) rejoice, as "music has not only adapted to the
internet - it is at the very heart of its development." That's the word
from Frances Moore, chief executive of the IFPI (acronym explained
above), who said a symbiotic relationship has helped drive technology
growth and device sales while boosting such outside industries as
television and social networks. "These are hard-won successes for an
industry that has innovated, battled, and transformed itself over a
decade," she said. "They show the music industry has adapted to the
internet world, learned how to meet the needs of consumers and monetized
the digital marketplace." Additionally, Warner Music Group EVP Stu
Bergen emphasized the new revenue streams the digital market has opened
up for music companies. "We have plenty to do and some amazing
opportunities ahead of us," he explained. "Until recently, the vast
majority of our revenues came from a handful of countries. Today,
digital channels mean we can monetize markets worldwide much more
effectively." Still, every silver lining has its cloud, and IFPI
Chairman Plácido Domingo said copyright issues - and the ability of
artists to make a living from their craft - remains a top issue.
"Copyright is the key ingredient to ensure this," he said in a
statement. "Policymakers around the world are now debating how best to
protect artists' rights in the digital age." [Full story: 
Hidden in this week's positive music sales report was another bit of
good news: music piracy is on the decline. As reported by the Washington Post,
not only have free or low-priced streaming services (think Pandora
and Spotify) provided music lovers easy access to their favorite tunes,
the NPD Group found in a separate study that broader access to music is
also driving fewer people to download songs illegally. These services
have gained some industry support because they allow consumers to get
the music they want while still supporting artists, record labels, and
others in the industry. In fact, the NPD analysis strongly suggests that
not only is the volume of illegally downloaded music files over
file-sharing networks down 26% compared to 2011, but the number of
people who burn and rip CDs, swap music files on hard drives, and
download music from digital lockers also is down sharply. The NPD Group
said a crackdown on sharing sites and questions about their digital
safety, combined with the rise of easy, legitimate music streaming has
fueled the decline. As a result, tearly 20% of users have stopped using
these sites because they've been shut down or because of issues with
spyware and viruses. [Full story: 
The only digital music company that isn't cheering the positive jump in
recorded music business revenue may be Pandora, which this week
announced it would cap the number of monthly free hours on its mobile
apps to 40. According to company founder Tim Westergren, "Limiting
listening is a very unusual thing to do, and very contrary to our
mission. [However], Pandora's per-track royalty rates have increased
more than 25% over the last 3 years, including 9% in 2013 alone, and are
scheduled to increase an additional 16% over the next two years."
Noting that only 4% of Pandora's active listeners will be affected,
Westergren told users in an email that "most of you reading this will
never hit the limit. For perspective, the average listener spends
approximately 20 hours listening to Pandora across all devices in any
given month." History shows that those "power-users" who tune to Pandora
more than 40 hours a month are unlikely to upgrade to a paid
subscription. because they know the "free ride" starts over in just a
few days. Still, Pandora says the cap has proven to be a smart lever to
impact royalty costs. [Full story: 
While the recorded music industry must work with such subscription
music services as Spotify and Deezer to provide listeners with a free
experience, a Google streaming service would provide the largest
"funnel" the industry could hope for. That's the word from Francis
Keeling, Universal Music's Global Head of Digital Business, who this
week said that Google's entrance into music streaming would provide the
industry with "arguably the biggest funnel" with regards to turning
music consumers onto legal licensed services. As reported by Billboard,
Keeling said, "With the likes of Spotify and Deezer and Rdio and other
subscription services, we give consumers a free experience because we
know that we need to change behavior. By giving a free experience to
legal services we can encourage consumers to subscribe. Google, with its
hundreds of millions of users through search, and YouTube with more
than 800 million users [per month], arguably is the biggest funnel we
can have. Clearly, if we can get consumers into a legal funnel through
that route and encourage them into subscription, that would have a very
positive impact on the business." Noting that "music tastes are complex
and ever-changing," Keeling proclaimed that "music continues to drive
the digital space." [Full story: 
Ford
Motor Co. and Spotify this week jointly announced a new app designed to
bring the music streaming service to the Sync Applink platform.
Unveiled at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, the deal marks
Spotify's first partnership of this type with a car manufacturer and it
means Ford owners will be able to access the music service's entire
song catalog via voice activation technology on their smartphones. The
app will support such voice commands as "play music," "shuffle."
"repeat," and "choose playlist." The service will initially be made
available to more than one million Applink-enabled cars in the U.S. but
will eventually come SYNC-equipped vehicles in Europe too. "As one of
the world's most popular music streaming services, Spotify is the
perfect partner to demonstrate the benefits of the Ford SYNC AppLink
system," gushed Paul Mascarenas, Ford's chief technical officer. [Full
story: 
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