>> nobody said it was 1992, the presidential election and the democratic primary and the candidates were -- no one's told you, there was no narrator. and nothing appeared to help you. it was -- and payback is, to pull that off creatively. but what people, but i've asked people what they like is they feel like that what they get is what the campaign wants you to get. and the reason that i think it's survived for so long is people feel like that they're getting to see something that wouldn't normally be available to 'em. although it was nothing strategic or anything like that, they felt the sense of sort of realness. and i think that's why the film has sort of survived to the extent it has. and it was, you know, if you're gonna have somebody make a movie about you, have a brilliant film maker. and penny, obviously, was that. it's really come from a study of -- by the way, did y'all see this "american hustle"? wow. that's a good movie. [laughter] damn good movie. so i think that was what really carries that thing. i just want to really tell you how, i know i speak for mary, how honored we are to be at this press club and to have so many of you turn out on a day, and we're very proud of the book, and we're very glad that we could share this with y'all. and i want to thank the press club for doing this. it was very much appreciated. >> and we are surprised. who's going to come out a saturday afternoon in the rain? thank you, thank you, thank you. and i have one final who dat? who dat? [laughter] thank you. [applause] >> folks, thank you very much. i hope you all had a great time. i think you did. i had a great time. i'd like to present our guests with the coveted national press club coffee mug. [applause] >> great, thank you. [inaudible conversations] [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> on tuesday former defense secretary robert gates will publish his memoir, titled "duty." mr. gates who served as secretary of defense under president bush and president obama, discusses his management of the wars in afghanistan and iraq and his relationship with the white house and congress. in excerpts from the book that appeared on the "wall street journal" web site earlier this week, secretary gates writes about his conflicts with the obama administration. the controlling nature of the obama white house and its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the career folks in the trenches who'd actually done the work offended secretary clinton as much as it did me. he also writes about the pain of dealing with congress, noting that: >> and on the topic of war, he opis that: >> you can watch robert gates discs his book live from the national constitution center in philadelphia this coming friday, january 17th, at 6:30 p.m. eastern on c-span2. or catch the re-air on booktv on sunday, january 19th, at 10 p.m. eastern. >> noam chomsky examines the political ideology of anarchism from its history and early opponents to the author's thoughts on its current usage and practicality. this hour and ten minute program begins now here on booktv. [applause] >> it's hardly a secret that the terms of political discourse are not exactly models of precision, and considering the way with terms are use -- the way terms are used, it's next to impossible to try to give a meaningful answer to such questions as what is socialism or what is capitalism or what are markets, free markets and many others in common usage. and that's even more true of the term "anarchism" for reasons that nathan pointed out. it's been not only subject to varied use, but also quite extreme abuse sometimes by bitter enemies, sometimes unfortunately by people who hold its banner high. so much so that, so much is the variation and abuse that it risks any simple characterization. in fact, the only way i can see to address the question that is posed this evening, what is anarchism, is to try to identify some ideas that animate at least major currents of the rich and complex and often contradictory traditions of anarchist thought and virtually anarchist action. well, i think a sensible approach can start with remarks by the perceptive, important anarchist/intellectual and also activist rudolph rocker. i'll quote him. he saw anarchism not as a fixed, self-enclosed social system with multifarious questions and problems of human live, but rather as a definite trend in the historic development of mankind which strives for the free, unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. that's from the 1930s. these concepts are not really original. they're both from the enlightenment and the early romantic period, in rather similar words one of the founders of classical liberalism among many other achievements described the leading principle of his thought as the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity. that's a phrase that john stewart mill too took at the epigraph to his own liberty. it follows from that that institutions that constrain such human development are illegitimate unless, of course, they couldn't somehow justify themselves. you find a similar conception widely in enlightenment thought. so, for example, in adam smith -- everyone has read the opening paragraphs of "wealth of nations" where he extols the wonders of the division of labor, but not many people have gotten farther inside to read his bitter condemnation of division of labor and his insistence that in any civilized society, the government will have to intervene to prevent it because it will destroy personal integrity and essential human rights. it will turn people, he said, into creatures as stupid and ignorant as a human can be. it's not too easy to find that passage, whatever the reason may be. if you look in the standard scholarly edition, the university of chicago bicentennial edition, it's not even listed in the index. or but it's one of the most important passages in the book. looked at in these terms, anarchism is a tendency in human development that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, authority and others that constrain human development. and then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge; justify yourself, demonstrate that you're legitimate, and maybe in some special circumstances or conceivably in principle. and if you can't meet that challenge, which is the usual case, the structure should be dismantled. and as nathan rightly adds, not just dismantled, but reconstructed from below. of -- the ideals that found expression during the enlightenment and the romantic era, they foundered on the shoals of rising industrial capitalism which is completely ant net call to them. but rocker argues, i think quite. plausibly, that they remain alive in the socialist traditions. these range pretty widely. they range from left anti-bolshevik marxism that people like anton -- [inaudible] paul maddock and others including the cynicism that reached its peak of achievement in the revolutionary period in spain in 1936 and it's well to remember that despite its substantial achievements and successes, it was crushed by the combined force of fascism, communism and western democracy. they had differences, but they agreed that this had to be crushed, the effort of free people to control their own lives. that had to be crushed before they turned to their petty differences which are what we call the spanish civil war. the same, the same tendencies reach further to worker-controlled enterprises. they're springing up in large parts of the old to rust belt in the united states, in northern mexico. they've reached their greatest development in the bask country in spain -- basque country in spain. partly a reflection of the achievements of the long, complex, rich spanish tradition of anarchism, and partly it comes out of christian anarchist sources. there's also included in this general tendency are the quite substantial and cooperative movements that exist in many parts of the world. and i think it also encompasses at least a good part of feminist and human rights activism. well, in part all of this sounds like truism. so why should anyone defend illegitimate structures? no reason, of course. and i think that perception's correct. it really is truism, i think. anarchism might be called truism. one is a merit of being true, unlike most political discourse. this particular truism belongs to an interesting category of principles, principles that are not only universal, but doubly universal. they're universal, and they're almost universeally accepted, and universal in that they're almost universeally rejected and practiced. this is one of many of these. for example, the general principle that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, if not harsh ones. a few would object, a few would practice it. or more specific policy proposals like democracy promotion or the humanitarian intervention, professed generally, rejected in practice almost universally. all doubly universal. and this truism is the same, the truism that we should challenge and coercive institutions of all kinds demand that they justify themselves, dismantle and reconstruction. if they do not, easy to stay but not so easy to act on in practice. well, proceeding with similar thoughts, i'll quote rocker again: anarchism seeks to free labor from economic exploitation and to free society from ecclesiastical or political guardianship. and by doing that, opening the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community. now, rocker was an anarchist/activist as well as political thinker, and he goes on to call on the workers' organizations, other popular organizations to create not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself within the current society. that's an injunction that goes back to the conant. one traditional anarchist slogan is -- [speaking in native tongue] no god, no master. it's a phrase that was the title of the very valuable collection of anarchist classics. i think it's fair to understand the phrase no god in the terms that i just quoted from rocker, opposition to ecclesiastical guardianship. individual beliefs are a different matter. that's no matter of concern to a person concerned with free development of thought and action. that leaves the door open to the lively and impressive tradition of religious anarchism, for example. dorothy day's very impressive catholic workers movement. but the phrase "no master" is different. that refers not to individual belief, but to a social relation, a relation of subordination and dominance. a relation that anarchism, if taken seriously, seeks to dismantle and rebuild from below unless it can somehow meet the harsh burden of establishing its legitimacy. well, by now we've departed from truism. in fact, too ample controversy. in particular right at this point, the rather peculiar american brand of what's called libertarianism that departs very sharply from thelibertarian tradition, it accepts and, indeed, strongly advocates the subordination of working people to the masters of the economy. and furthermore, the subjection of everyone to the restrictive discipline and destructive features of markets. these are topics worth pursuing. i'll take them up later, if you'd like, but i'll put them aside here. though also recommending to you nathan's comment, his suggestion about bringing together in some way the energies of the young libertarian left and right. as is, indeed, sometimes done. for example, it's done in the quite important work of valuable theoretical and practical work of economist david ellerman and some others. well, anarchism, of course, is famously opposed to the state while statement advocating planned administration of things in the interests of the community, rocker's phrase again. and beyond that broader ped rations -- federations of self-governing communities, workplaces. well, in the real world of today, the same dedicated anarchists who are opposed to the state often support state power to protect people and society and the earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital. so it takes a venerable anarchist journal like freedom. it goes back to 1886, journal of socialist anarchism by supporters of kerr pot ken. if you open its page, you'll find that much of it is devoted to defending rights of people, the environment, society often by invoking state power. like regulation of the environment or safety in health regulations and the workplace. there's no contradiction here as sometimes thought. people live and suffer and endure in this world and not some world that we imagine. and all the means available should be used to safeguard and benefit them even if the long-term goal is to displace these devices and construct preferable alternatives. discussing this, i've sometimes used an image that comes from the brazilian workers' movement. it's a discussed and interesting work by mayberry lewis. the image is widening the floors of the capable. the cage is existing coercive institutions that can be widened by committed popular struggle. happened effectively over many years. and you can extend the image beyond. think of the cage of coercive state institutions as a kind of protection from savage beasts that are roaming outside; namely, the predatory state-supported capitalist institutions that are dedicated to the principle of private gain, power, domination with the interest of the community at most a footnote. maybe revered in rhetoric, but dismissed in practice and, in fact, even in anglo american law. well, it's worth, also worth remembering that anarchists condemned really existing states, not visions of unrealized democratic dreams such as government of, by and for the people. they bitterly opposed the rule of what was called the red bureaucracy which was predicted 50 years in advance would be among the most savage of human creations. and be they also opposed parliamentary systems that are instruments of class rule. the contemporary united states, for example, which is not a democracy, it's a plutocracy. very easy to demonstrate. the majority of the population has no influence over policy. as you move up the income, wealth scale, you get more and more influence. people get way what they want. well established by political science, but familiar to everyone who looks at the way the world works. a truly democratic system would be quite different. it would have the character of, quote again, an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interests of the community. in fact, that's not too remote from one version of the mainstream democratic ideal. actually, one version, i stress that. i'll return to others. so take, for example, the leading american social philosopher of the 20th century, john dewey. his major concerns were democracy and education. no one took dewey to be an anarchist. but pay attention to his ideas. in his conception of democracy, illegitimate structures of coercion must be dismantled. and that includes, i'll quote him, domination by business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, other means of publicity and propaganda. he recognized, still quoting, that power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. whoever owns them, rules the life of the country each if democratic forms remain. and until these institutions are in the hands of the public, politics will remain the shadow cast on big -- cast by big business on society. very much what we see around us, in fact. but it's important that dewey went beyond calling for some form of public control. that could take many forms. he went beyond. and in a free and democratic society, he wrote, the workers should be the masters of their own industrial fate. not tools rented by employers. not directed by state authorities. now, that position goes right back to the leading ideas of class call liberalism -- classical liberalism articulated by smith, others, and extended in the anarchist tradition. turning to education, dewey held that it is ill liberal and immoral to train children to work not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the work earned. to achieve test scores, for example. in which case their activity is not free because it's not freely participated in, and it's quickly forgotten, too, as all of us know from our experience. so he proceeded to conclude that industry must be changed from a feud listic to a democratic social order, and educational practice should be designed to encourage creativity, exploration, independence, cooperative work. exactly the opposite of what's happening today. well, these ideas lead to a vision of society based on workers' control of productive institutions, the link to community control within the framework of free association and federal organization. in the general style of thought that includes, of course, along with many anarchists others too, say g.d.h. cowles, the left anti-bolshevik marxism, the current developments, for example, the participatory or economics in politics of michael albert, stephen shall um and ores along -- others along with important work in theory and practice by the late seymour mehlman, his associates and many others. and notably -- [inaudible] very valuable recent contributions on worker-owned enterprise and cooperatives. not just talk, but actual taking place. well, going back to dewey, he was as american as apple pie, to borrow the old cliche. right in the mainstream of american history and culture. and, in fact, all of these ideas and developments are very deeply rooted in the american tradition. and in american history. a fact which is kind of suppressed, but is very, very obvious when you look into it. and when you pursue these questions, you enter into an important terrain of inspiring, often bitter struggle. ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution which was right around here, eastern massachusetts, mid 19th century. the first serious scholarly work, study of the industrial worker this those years was 90 years ago by norman ware. he reviews the hideous working conditions that were imposed on formerly-independent craftsmen and farmers, immigrants as well as the so-called factory girls, young women brought from the farms to work in the textile mills around boston. he mentions that. he reviews it. but he focuses anticipation on something -- attention on something else, on what he calls the degradation suffered by the industrial worker, the lossover status and independence who could not be canceled even where there occasionally was some material improvement. and he focuses on the radical capitalist social revolution in which sovereignty and economic affairs passed from the community as a whole into the keeping of a special class of masters, often promoting production, a group alien to the producers. and where it shows, i think pretty convincingly, that for every protest against machine industry and privation, there could be found a hundred protests against the new power of capitalist production and its discipline. in other words, workers were struggling and striking not just for bread, but for roses in the traditional slogan of the workers' communities and organizations. they were struggling for dignity and independence and for their rights as free men and women. their journals are very interesting. there's a rich and lively labor press written by working people, artisans from boston, factory girls from the farms. and these journals, they condemned what they called the blasting influence of ma narc call principles on democratic soil which will not be overcome until they who work in the mills will own them. the slogan of the massive knights of labor. and sovereignty will return to free and independent producers. then they will no longer be menials or the humble subjects of a foreign december can pot, the ab -- despot, the absentee owner, slaves in the strictest sense of the world who toil for their masters. rather, they will regain their status as free american citizens. capitalist revolution instituted a crucial change from price to wage. it was very important. when a producer sold his product for a price, he retained his purse. but when he came to sell his labor, he sold himselfment -- himself. quoting from the press. that's a big difference. he lost his dignity as a person as he became a slave, a wage slave, to use the common term of the period. 160 years ago a group of skilled workers repeated the common view that a daily wage was equivalent to slavery. they weren't warned perceptively that a day might come when wage slaves will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect. a day that they hoped would be far distant. these were very popular notions in the mid 19th century. in fact, so popular that they were a slogan of the republican party. you could read them in editorials of the new york times. and that's then, not now. but they may come back, let's hope. be labor activists at the time warned bitterly often of what they called the new spirit of the age, gain wealth forgetting all but self. that was a new spirit of the age 150 year ago. and in sharp reaction to this demeaning spirit, there were quite enormous and active rising movements of working people and radical farmers. radical farmers actually began in texas and spread through the midwest and much of the country. it was, of course, an agricultural country then. these are the most significant democratic popular movements in american history. they were dedicated to solidarity, mutual aid. it's a battle -- they were crushed by force. we have a very violent labor history compared to other countries, but it's a battle that's not over. far from over. despite setbacks, often violent repression. there are apologists, familiar apologists for the radical revolution of wage slavery. they have an argument. they argue that the workers should, indeed, glory in a system of free contracts voluntarily undertaken. there was an answer to that 200 year ago by shelley in his great poem, "mask of anarchy." this was written right after the peterloo massacre or in manchester, england, when the british craflly brutally attacked a crowd of people, a major example of a huge nonviolent protest of the reaction of the state authorities to it. they were calling for parliamentary reform. so shelley wrote that we know what slavery is, tis to work and have such pay as just keeps life from day-to-day. in your limbs as many a cell, for the or tyrant's use to dwell. 'tis to be slave in soul and to hold no strong control over your own wills, but all that others make of ye. that's slavery. that's what working people and dependent farmers were struggling against. and the artisans and factory girls who struggled for dignity and independence and freedom might very well have known shelley's words. observers at the time note that they were highly literate. they had good libraries. they were acquainted with the standard works of english literature. before, this is before mechanism and wage slavery, the wage system ended the days of, at least curtailed the days of independence, high culture and security. before that, ware points out, a workshop might be what he called a lie see yum. a journeymen would hire boys to read to them while they worked. these were social businesses with many opportunities for reading, discussion, mutual improvement. along with the factory girls, the journeymen, the artisans bitterly condemned the attack on their culture. same was true in england, incidentally, where conditions were much harsher. there's actually a great book by jon that be rose called "the intellectual life of the british working class." it's a monumental study of the reading habits of the working class in england. and he contrasts what he calls the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts with a pervasive fill standtism of the british aristocracy. actually, i'm old must have to remember residues that remained among working people right here in new york in the 1930s who were deeply immersed in the high culture of day. it's another battle that may have receded, but i don't think it's lost. well, i mentioned that dewey and american workers and farmers held one version of democracy with very strong libertarian elements. but the dominant version has been radically different. its most instructive expression is at the progressive end of the spectrum, mainstream spectrum. so that is among people who are good; woodrow wilson, fdr, kennedy -- liberals. here's a few representative quotes from icons of the intellectual liberal establishment on democratic theory. the public rig market and meddlesome outsiders. they have to be put in their place. decisions must be in the hands of an intelligent minority of responsible men, namely us. and we have to be protected there the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd out there. the herd does have a function in a democratic society. they're supposed to lend their weight every few years to a choice among the responsible men. apart from that, their function is to be spectators, not participants in action. and all of this is for their own good. we should not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. they're not. they're like young chirp, you have to take -- young children, you have to take care of them. we're best judges of their interests. so their attitudes and opinions have to be controlled for their own benefit. we have to regiment their minds the way an army regiments bodies. we have to discipline the institutions responsible for what they called the indoctrination of the young. schools, universities, churches. be we can do this -- if we can do this, we can get back to the good old days. this is complaints about the '60s. we can get back to the good old days when truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of wall street lawyers and bankers, then we'll have true democracy. these are quotes from icons of liberal establishment. walter litman, harold glasswell, founder of modern political science, samuel huntington, trilateral commission which largely staffed the carter administration. well, the conflict between these conceptions of democracy goes far back, goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolution in 17th century england. at that time, as you know, there was a war raging between supporters or of the king and supporters of parliament. there was more. the gentry, the men who called themselves the men of best quality, they were appalled by the rabble who didn't want to be ruled by either king or parliament. like the spanish workers in 1936. neither side. they wanted to be ruled as they had their own pamphlet literature, and they said they wanted to be ruled by countrymen like ourselves that know our wants, that will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us and and do not know the people's sores. that's 17th century edge land. the essential -- england. the essential nature of this conflict which is far from dead, it was captured nicely by thomas jefferson in his later years when he had serious concerns about both the quality and the fate of the democratic experiment. he made a distinction between what he called aristocrats and democrats. the aristocrats, i'm quoting him, are those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. the democrats in contrast identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the honest and safe -- although not the most wise -- depository of the public interest. the modern progressive intellectuals -- the wilson, roosevelt, kennedy intellectual left -- those who are free from democratic dogmatisms about the capacity of the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders to enter the political arena, they're jefferson's aristocrats. these basic views are very widely held, though there are some disputes; namely, who should play the guiding role? should it be what the liberal intellectuals call the technocratic and policy-orr p cented intellectuals, the ones we celebrate as the camelot intellectuals? who run the progressive knowledge society? should it be bankers or corporate executives? in other versions should it be the central committee or the guardian council of clerics? all pretty similar ideas. and they're all examples of the ecclesiastical and political guardianship that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below. while also changing industry from feudalistic to a democratic social order, one that's based on workers' control, community control, respects the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others. in accordance with the libertarian tradition that has deep roots. and like marx's old mole, is always burrowing quite close to the surface and ready to spring forth. thanks. [applause] >> so for the discussion, i'd like to invite anybody who has a question to line up behind the microphones on either side and, please, try to to keep it concise. and as you do that, i'd like to start, if you don't mind. i just wonder or if you could say something about the images that represent some of your first encounters with anarchism. i mean, i think for people who have gotten excited about these ideas through the occupy movement, it was important to see it in practice somehow. i wonder what those images have been for you. >> well, i grew up in the 1930s. when i was a kid, there was a deep depression. and plenty of suffering. there were images that kind of stick in my mind. people coming -- my parents were teachers, so we had some money. not rich, but got along. and, in fact, the whole family of unemployed working class kind of converged around our house. we had at least something. but there were images of people coming to the door trying to sell rags to try to get a piece of bread to survive. i remember riding with my mother on trolley cars and watching, going past textile plants -- this is philadelphia -- and watching women on strike being brutally beaten by security forces. my own family was, extended family was mostly unemployed working class. and as i mentioned, very high culture. as the new deal sort of began to have an impact, they were able to engine shakespeare -- enjoy shakespeare plays in the park, string quartet. my unemployed seamstress aunts who were members of the, you know, ladies' garment member union could get a couple weeks in the countryside at a solidarity camp. that was life. a lot of it was communist party. you were not allowed to say anything nice about the communist party, that's a rule. and there were a lot of things wrong with it. i've mentioned some of them. but there were things that were right about it. like one was that it overcame the amnesia that nay than talked about -- nathan talked about. it was always there. people remembered. somebody will bed how to turn a mihm -- remembered how to turn a mimeograph machine. you went from a civil rights demonstration to labor organizing to something else. that crazy international idea, but that was kind of in the back of their minds. it wasn't what was really going on. the destruction of the communist party was quite important. killed off the radical continuing element that kept a lot of the left traditions going. you know the reasons. it was in a cold war framework. that was all there. as far as the anarchists were concerned, the place i learned about that was by reading. i went, when i was a kid, i'd go to visit my relatives, and as soon as i got old enough to get on the train, about 11 or 12 years old, i'd take the train to new york and stay with me relatives. but spend most of my time down on, for those of you who know new york, union square used to be the place where the anarchist offices were. lots of pamphlets, lots of interesting people. quite eager to talk to a young kid, you know? [laughter] not hard to have discussions. and down below union square on 4th avenue -- not today, but then -- there were rows of small bookstores. a lot of them run by european emigres, many of them spanish refugees, spanish anarchist refugees who were also quite eager to talk and had lots of pamphlets. and direct, you know, original documentary material. actually, when i wrote about this 20 years later, i used mostly documentary material i had picked up as a young teenager. it wasn't available, a lot of it's available now, it wasn't then. and that was a pretty inspiring picture, i felt. of the spanish revolution. at least i felt and feel, was a really inspiring moment which i think is why it elicited such a vicious response from every corner of power. that's quite important to remember. communists, fascists, liberal democracies all combined on crushing this. this was something they couldn't tolerate. then they could have a fight late about -- later about who picks up the spoils. actually, there were anarchist proposals that i felt were not unreasonable. they're disparaged, of course, in the west, but for how to win the civil war, it was -- anarchist thinkers like banary who was murdered by the communists in may 1937, one of the leading anarchist thinkers. he proposed that, he had pointed out -- i think as it turned out, quite correctly -- that they'd never win a conventional war. for one reason, because the commitment to the war on the part of the population had severely declined after the revolution was crushed. they had lost what they had fought for. and they didn't care very much who was going to pick up the spoils. he pointed out, and, of course, the fascists or were directly supported by hitler and mussolini. and the west was not opposed to that. i forget now, but fascism had a pretty good image in the west in the late '30s. mussolini was that admirable italian gentleman, as roosevelt called him. hitler was regarded by the state department in the late '30s as a moderate who was holding off the forces of left and right, so we shouldn't be too critical of him. the united states had a consul in berlin up until pearl harbor who was sending back dispatches saying you shouldn't be too hard on the nazis. they're doing some things we don't like, but they're still kind of moderates. his name is george ken non. you don't read that in the biographies. that's not untypical of the period. roosevelt, for example, bitter -- there was a neutrality act, theoretically. the united states was not supposed to allow support for either side in the civil war. and roosevelt was very bitter about any attempt to, by somebody to, say, send a pistol to the republic. he couldn't stop it by force, but he bitterly condemned it. on the other hand, the state department couldn't notice what i was reading in the left-wing press at the time and was later conceded 20 years later, that the united states had authorized the texaco oil company which was run by an outright nazi, open nazi, had authorized them to -- they were, they had contracts to ship oil to the republic. they swished it to shipping -- switched it to shipping oil to the fascist forces which is the one thing that hitler and mussolini couldn't provide. they couldn't find that. the left press could find it, but the state department couldn't. well, going back to bernary, what he proposed was that in spain itself the popular forces should fight a guerrilla war. that's an old spanish tradition. in fact, that's where guerrilla wars were initiated, under napoleon. fight war in spain itself and in morocco, call for -- support the moroccan liberation forces that were trying to free themselves from french and british imperial and spanish imperial control. that was the basis of the army. there were moorish troops coming from northern africa. so his idea was to fight a revolutionary war, support them in their efforts to overthrow imperialist control that he thought would erode the spanish, the fascist armies just as in spain itself the popular forces were fighting. but -- until they were crushed. well, that's -- if you read the scholarship on the matter up til today, that's kind of dismissed as a sort of romantic joke. as the whole anarchist movement is. but i don't think it was. that's where, that was my initial exposure. [laughter] >> hi, professor chomsky, this is an unimaginable honor. thank you so much for doing this. i just wanted -- you touched briefly, you had this wonderful shelley quote and your family's engagement with high culture, and i was just going to ask you to reflect briefly on the contemporary state of serious art and how important you think engagement with that, you know, serious contemporary literature, music, cinema, whatever it is, how important it is in exploring the sort of the vanguard of political thought and, you know, whether or not contemporary artists and contemporary audiences are rising to that challenge. >> oh, i think it's very important. and i'm not the only one who thinks so. i think people with power think so. that's why famous rivera mural wasn't allowed to be put in rockefeller center. that's why if you go back to cinema, say go back 60 years, early '50s. some of you'll will be. so in 1953, or interesting year for cinema, there were two major films that came out. one finish well, two film -- one -- well, two films that came out on the labor movement. one, which was a huge box office success, ton of, you know, pr, advertising and so on, featured marlon brando. it was about a corrupt union leader and how the heroic, you know, joe with his lunchbox finally overcame the corrupt union leader at the end of film, throws him into the water, and everybody cheers. that was one. there was another film, a marvelous film called "salt of the earth." a low budget film which was about a victorious strike led by an his pan pick woman. it was a really great film. you should look at it. no one ever heard of it. you could find it maybe in a small art theater in down on the new york somewhere. but that wasn't the kind of film that was going to get publicity. and that runs through consistently. and i think when people in power believe something firmly, it's worth paying attention to them. and i hi they believe firmly -- i think they believe pirmly that you should not have revolutionary popular art in which people participate. actually, i think that's one of the reasons, i think, for destroying the graffiti in the new york subways. that's considered a great achievement of bloomberg, you know, graffiti, popular art all over the subways. because that's just too dangerous. it's part of the drug war. grotesque drug war, race war, murders. a large part of it came from the fact that the harlem renaissance, black artists in harlem, were playing jazz and smoking marijuana. so that had to be destroyed. that became the great criminal of the age. mexicans were doing it too. this is pretty constant. so, yeah, i think it's real important. >> noam, what is preventing people, if anything, from organizing themselves into worker-controlled cooperatives? you alluded to co-ops. and if not money is preventing them from doing so, to what do you attribute their relative lack of popularity? and the related question would be why -- what could, um, union-controlled pensions, for example, be doing if the problem is capital, for example? why aren't more entities like worker -- punitively worker-controlled pensions investing the capital they have some control over in supporting these kinds of worker-controlled alternatives? >> well, first of all, pensions are not in the hands of working people. the unions are not popular democracies. [laughter] pensions are in the hands of bureaucrats and money managers, and they're not about to hand over power to popular organizations. actually, that's not entirely true. there are some interesting initiatives. i don't know if they're going to get anywhere, but they're interesting. united steelworkers, which is one of the more progressive steel unions, has recently made some tentative arrangements with the basque country, this huge worker-owned industrial banking, housing, school/educational cooperative that could get somewhere. and i mentioned work that discussed very well the spread of worker-owned enterprises in mostly northern ohio, the old rust belt. they have kind of an interesting history which relates very much to this. back in 1977 at the beginning of the concerted effort to destroy industrial production in the united states and sort of beginning of the neoliberal assault on the population we've been through in the last generation, u.s. steel decided to close its main steel plants in youngstown, ohio. it was a steel town, like other working class towns like detroit. it had actually been built by the working classes. it was their town. they didn't get the profit be, because they were tools. but they built it. they wanted to keep it. u.s. steel wanted to sell it. to close it down. and the union offered to buy it. they had community support, they even had some support of, i think it was a republican governor. just let the workers buy the plant and keep running it. well, u.s. steel didn't want that. in fact, this was pretty consistent. i mentioned dave ellerman before, he's the one that's written about it and worked on it. very commonly around here too, eastern massachusetts, when workers decide to try to take over an enterprise, an enterprise which may be perfectly profitable but not profitable enough for the multi-national who runs et. maybe they don't want to keep it in their books. when they try to buy it, which would be a good deal for the pulte national, they refuse to sell it for class reasons. they have class interests. they do not want to see the spread of popular democratic organizations for perfectly obvious reasons. this just happened -- i'll come back to youngstown in a minute. but it just happened a couple years ago right here in talk ta. it was a small, but quite successful manufacturing plant that made specialized parts for aircraft, doing pretty well. but the multi-national didn't want to bother with it, so they were going to close it down. the union, ue in this case can, tried to buy it. multi-nationals usually refuse to sell it, and there wasn't enough support, popular support to push it through. if there had been an occupy movement at that time, real, i think that's something they might have pushed through. actually on a much larger scale a couple of years ago obama virtually nationalized the auto industry. not entirely, but virtually. there were a couple of option toes. one option was to -- optionings. one option was to restructure it, use taxpayer funding, hand it back to the original owners or other people just like them, maybe a different face but, you know, bankers, ceos, and so on. and then have it continue to do what it had been doing before, building cars. that's what they chose. there was another option. hand it over to the work force, have them build what's needed for the countries which is not more cars for traffic jam, but high-speed transportation. united states is very backward in the world in this respect. i mean, you can take a high-speed train from beijing to kazahkstan, but try to take a train from boston to new york. it's about as slow as it was 60 years ago. you know, this is really backward. the country needs it. and the former auto industry could have been handed over to the work force and maybe give them some support, probably less than the auto industry got to do this. suppose there had been a large scale occupy movement, you know? significant. it was significant but broader, expanded. well, i think that could have been pushed through. takes popular consciousness. going back to youngstown, the case went to court in 1977. the union lost, workers lost, and it was -- the steel mills were destroyed. but they didn't give up. they didn't just say, okay, we'll starve to death or go somewhere else. they began to organize small, worker-owned enterprises. and they've been spreading around the cleveland area, youngstown, a good bit of northern ohio into other areas. so it is taking place. but, you know, it's happening elsewhere too. in northern mexico there are quite successful worker-owned plants. it's not ease she, because -- easy, because the banks don't like to give them capital, and the government doesn't like them and won't support them. again, for class reasons. but if the sufficient popular support, these things can develop. and it's not easy, you know? it's hard work. and the people who organize usually suffer for it. but that's typical of almost everything. civil rights movement, the, you know, practically any movement that has ever gotten anywhere, the people up front usually take it in the chin, you know? it's hard. and people have to be willing to end door for a longer -- endure for a longer-term gain, and that's not easy. but it can happen, and it does. >> hi. i'm just curious if you could address the role of surveillance technologies and increasingly the militarization of police as far as moving forward in radical thought today and in the future. kind of what you see that, where that is now. >> well, i think there are two things to bear in mind about that. the first thing is that the phenomena itself shouldn't be at all surprising. the second is that the scale, at least to me, is kind of surprising. i hadn't really expected that scale. but the phenomenon be is normalment and -- normal. and it's, again, as american as apple pie. you can go back a century. take, say, the philippine war early in the 19th century, 20th century. it was a vicious war. the u.s. conquered the philippines, killed a couple hundred thousands people. it was a -- hundred thousand people. it was a major national populist movement. after the military victory, it had to be suppressed and controlled, and a huge pacification campaign was initiated using the highest technology of the day more surveillance -- for surveillance, subversion, breaking up groups, you know, building off hostilities. all kinds of things. very sophisticated. it was very quickly transferred home. it was used by woodrow wilson in the red scare, the worst repression in american history, and developed further since. its had a lethal effect on the philippines. people mourned the typhoon that killed tens of thousands of people. that doesn't happen in functioning societies. it's very striking in the caribbean that when a tropical storm goes through the caribbean in haiti, one of the major victims of imperial violence, it's vicious. right next door in cuba three people died, you know? some buildings are knocked over. same storm. depends on the society. well, the philippines is a society that we created, have maintained. it's the one part of southeast asia that hasn't taken part in the so-called asian miracle, you know? it's not one of the asian tigers. there's a reason for that, good reason. but these techniques, you can be confident that any state or commercial enterprise, any system of power, is going to use whatever technology is available to try to control and dominate what amounts to its major enemy, namely the population. that's what power systems are going to do. the scale of what was revealed, i think, was a little surprising. but it actually shouldn't be. and there's more to come. those of you who read technical journals like, say, the mit technology review, they should know what's coming. so, for example, just in the tech review recently there have been articles on things like -- there and elsewhere -- on the hardware in computers which is now being designed, they blame china, but, of course, it means it's being done ten times as much here -- [laughter] to put in the components in the hardware that will enable the manufacturer to record every keystroke, everything that's happened on your computer. american businesses are worried because if they have chinese computers, they're be picking up the people's liberation army. but they don't point out that the american systems are doubtless much more advanced and doing the same thing. robotics is a field that's been worked on pretty hard for many years here too. and one of the goals, quite explicit -- nothing secret -- is to develop fly-sized drones, tiny robots which can, you know, get on the ceiling of your living room and carry out constant surveillance. and drones tend to go from surveillance to lethal capacities very quickly. so we can expect that pretty soon. and these are things that are in development. any system of power is going the use them. and pretty strikingly, jihadis are going to use them. one of the things we're doing right now is creating perfect technology for terrorist attacks. it's not a secret. you take a rook at done -- a look at drone technology. today already it's claimed that for $300 you can purchase a small drone online. that's improving very fast. and for terrorist activity, it's just perfect. if you want to get a picture of it, there's an article in this month's leading journal of "foreign affairs" in britain, the royal institute journalover international affairs -- journalover international affairs describing how we are rapidly creating the technology to permit massive terrorist attacks on ourselves. that's also typical. power systems seek short-term power and domination. they are not concerned with security. contrary to academic dogma. easily show that. they're interested in power, domination, the welfare of their primary domestic constituencies which are wealth, concentrated wealth. and if there's a disaster in the long term, it's not their business. you can show -- it's obvious with environmental issues, the same with nuclear weapons, the same right now with drone technology. so, sure, this sufficient stuff is going to go on unless we stop it. you can stop it, too. it doesn't have to go on. >> can you offer a critique of start-up culture and entrepreneurship? [laughter] which offers many of the seeming characteristics of autonomy but isn't so? >> seeming characteristics. start-up culture is, you know, it's okay. people like their apps and so on. [laughter] it's based very heavily on state subsidy. it's not, it's kind of a narrow form of entrepreneurship. so take, for example, silicon valley culture. what are they using? well, they're using computers, the internet, microelectronic, so on and so forth. republican all developed in the state -- almost all developed in the state sector for decades before it's handed over to private power to, for commercialization and application. so, yeah, there's initiative there. people are having fun doing, making interesting things. but relying very heavily on the background state subsidy which takes many forms. actually, everyone at mit ought to know it, its paid our salaries for years. [laughter] it's, you know, for decades computers and the interbe net, you know, the -- internet, the whole base of the i.t. culture were being built right here, similar places. and finally after decades it was handed over the bill gates and steve jobs to market and commercialize and make profit and make little things that you carry around with you. but, so it's a kind of a -- it has entrepreneurial aspects, but it's parasitic on much more fundamental development. the really hard work, the hard research and development, the creative work is quite substantial in the state sector. incidentally, it's not just subsidy. there are many other devices of taxpayer support for private enterprise. one of the main ones is procurement. so, for example, in the early '60s ibm, through the '50s, had learned mostly in government laboratories and places like this, had learned to switch from punch cards to digital computers. and they built the world's biggest computer in the early '60s, stretch computer, fastest computer. but it was much too expensive for business. so the government bought it. that's the purchaser of last resort. and i think it went to los alamos. that goes on all the time. procurement's a major form of public subsidy to private enterprise. and there are many other ways. it's one of the reasons why private capital does not want markets. they want markets for other people but not for themselves. for themselves they want a nanny state, powerful nanny state that'll support them. what the significance of the entrepreneurial culture -- as you can judge, i'm not overwhelmed by the fact that there's thousands of new apps coming. i think there are more important things. [laughter] yeah. >> [inaudible] >> um, so i had a question about how you reconcile the e chance pa story tradition of anarchism to the kind of abstractness of the ideology itself around authority and power and coercion. because it could be argued, for example, that the federal government intervened in the south during the civil war, was coercive to the confederates' tastes. we know that it was, the civil war was a revolution of slaves against slavery, and the federal government ended up intervening much later. but that could be argued that was a form of authority. because -- yeah, so how do you actually navigate that with, say, for example, the marxist definition which should be between labor and capital, for example? to you see that as something that -- do you see that as something that is maybe different from or offers a sort of a different perspective from anarchism? because i think that could account for the reason why, for example, there are such things as capitalism and it can be argued that, you know, several different ways that the state is intervening on my ability to pay my workers a low wage or what not. >> i'm not sure, i didn't understand -- >> the question, so my question is authority itself is a really abstract term, authority, i feel like -- >> i don't think there's anything abstract about authority. we all live with it all the time. i mean, that's true if you're a worker, namely a wage slave as workers understood. it's true if you're, until very recently for more women, it's been obvious. nothing abstract about it. women didn't, women didn't even have legal rights in the united states until pretty recently. >> oh, my question is like if there's -- do workers have the authority, for example, to take over a factory? >> do they have the authority? yeah, why not. >> that's what i -- >> i mean, they built the plant, they do the work, why should they be tools rented by some banker somewhere else? i mean, that's the way our institutional structure happens to be formulated, but it doesn't mean it's legitimate. i mean, when you talk about authority, you're asking questions about legitimacy. do people have the right to run their own lives, or do they have to be sort of tools in the hands of foreign masters? well, you know, that's a question of legitimacy, not authority. you mentioned the civil war, and there's ample evidence by now that there was a very significant slave initiative in the civil war. there's more to say about that, a lot more. so take the american revolution. to a large extent, that was a revolution carried out in order to maintain slavery. you look back at the history in 17, around 1770 in britain. the legal system was beginning to undertake strong condemnations of slavery. there was one famous case, somerset case in 1772 where slave owners from the united states brought their slaves with them to england, and one of them escaped. there was an effort to --

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