Thomas Ray's Reviews > Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002, based on talks he gave 1989–1999. 401 pages. isbn 1565847032. 449 pages of footnotes at understandingpower.com


Real power is not in the political system. It’s in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs. Political changes can make only a minor difference. So long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody has to make sure the rich are happy. If they’re happy, they’ll invest, the economy will work, things will function, maybe something will trickle down to you. If they’re not happy, everything grinds to a halt.

Suppose Massachusetts were to increase business taxes. Most of the population is in favor of it. Business would run a public relations campaign, saying, truthfully, “Raise taxes on us, capital will flow elsewhere, you’ll have no jobs, you’ll have nothing. You make us happy or you’ll have nothing. You live here, but we own the place.” [p. 63]

For me, this is the indispensable insight Chomsky clearly states and illustrates in this book. Understanding it, we lose our unrealistic expectations of politicians.

Until there’s popular control of industry—workers’ control, community control, extending democracy to economic power—unless that happens, political power will be feeble. [p. 64] Real democracy will require that corporate capitalism be dismantled. You have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society’s investment decisions to be moved to working people and communities. A participatory economy. [p. 140] [The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, usworker.coop is a few people making a start. Very few. As of 2016, the Democracy at Work Institute counts just 7,000 co-op workers in the entire U.S., in 350 worker co-ops, working for an average of $25,000/year per worker. goodreads.com/review/show/2000479083]

Build community. Organize. When people get together, all sorts of things are possible. If you’re isolated, you’re going to break. [pp. 121, 185]

If you could get to the point where a reformist candidate had a chance, you’d already have won; you’d already have done the main thing—build mass support. [p. 139] Power was never in popular hands. [p. 267] But there’s progress. Keep fighting. [p. 268]

And yet—a century ago, governments were revoking corporate charters when corporations didn’t live up to the public interest. [p. 347]

Every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, has to prove that it’s justified. [p. 201]

States are not moral agents. They’re vehicles of power, working in the interests of particular internal power structures in their societies. [p. 163]

The product of the media is audiences! Their market is advertisers! [p. 14] “I asked an editor why coverage of Palestine is so awful. He laughed, ‘How many Arab advertisers do you think we have?’” [p. 22] Mainstream press portrays a uniformly pro-corporate world. A New York Times columnist says angrily, “Nobody tells me what to write!” True. He already knew what to write. That’s why he’s a New York Times columnist. [p. 112] Warner Communications closed a publisher to keep a Chomsky book from being distributed. [p. 209] Universities, corporate-funded, select for obedience and conformity, punish independence. [pp. 236, 265] Chomsky can teach in any department except political science. [p. 244]

In communities with listener-supported community radio and other alternative media, the mood is strikingly different. [p. 180]

In economically weak countries around the world, the U.S. prevents the rise of independent governments—to keep siphoning wealth from the global poor to the global rich—through corporate control of land and resources, low wages, industry-friendly policies. [p. 64] The United States arms foreign militaries, so they can and do overthrow their own governments that don’t pursue the welfare of multinational corporations. [p. 7] Noriega was our thug in 1985. In 1989 he was getting independent. [p. 152] Around the world, the countries that developed economically are those that weren’t colonized by the West. [p. 65] The U.S. government spends some $10 billion a year to maintain U.S. domination of Central America—probably exceeds the profits banks and corporations plunder there. [p. 67]

Free-market capitalism led to the Great Depression. Every economically successful country is near-fascist—massive government intervention in the economy. Every industrial economy has a massive state sector. In the U.S. it’s mainly through the military. The government funds corporate research and development; if something profitable comes out of it, the corporations take the profit. The parts of the American economy that are competitive internationally get massive government subsidies: agriculture, high-tech, pharmaceuticals. The U.S. prevents third-world countries from doing as we’ve done. [pp. 72–73] Military spending goes to the rich. Social spending goes to the poor. The rich have the power, so that’s where we spend it.

Violence or its threat empowers authoritarianism. [pp. 11, 70, 90]

Cuba’s “crime” is successfully caring for its people: a virus that could spread, and interfere with corporate plunder. [p. 149] Vietnam was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the third world. So far we’ve won. [p. 91]

Chomsky is, I think, wrong about some things:

Chomsky is right that mostly, the boot of wealth is on everyone’s neck. Mostly. “Pursuit of self-interest helps everybody” is mostly a lie. But since owners haven’t yet vacuumed up all wealth and power, they sometimes have to give some of the rest of us something for their gains in wealth.

So it’s not enough to simply destroy capitalism, have all business decisions made by worker co-ops. Permitting people to make a profit, when it also benefits the nonwealthy, can be a good thing.

Chomsky’s right that wealth will always fight hard to eat our lunch. We have to win that fight, muzzle not kill the beast. With progressive taxation of corporate and individual wealth and income; regulation; and, public-interest research-and-lobbying groups on every issue that wealth lobbies on (in the Citizens’ Utility Board mold).

Chomsky is right that, to curb wholesale environmental destruction, enserfment, and rampant authoritarianism, the power of the rich to get richer at everyone’s cost must be destroyed. It’s true that worker co-ops replace dictatorial owner power, serving wealth concentration—at any cost to workers and community—with workplace democracy, with goals of business survival, decent pay, and service to community. Yet majority rule doesn’t mean fairness. (Ask any minority!) Longtime co-op workers vote themselves higher pay for the same work as newcomers—far above any claimed greater productivity. A co-op can degenerate to rule by popular clique.

Chomsky is a bit of a free speech fundamentalist. You can forgive him, in that, if public opinion had not shifted so fast and strongly to antiwar in 1968, Chomsky would have been sentenced to many years in prison for criticizing the government’s prosecution of the war.

But there must be limits on speech. Not just “you don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater,” but also:

You have no right to say, “Do what I want or I will hurt you.” That’s felony assault or felony extortion.

You have no right to say to a public official, “I bought you. I own you. You work for me.” That’s graft.

You have no right to say, “Here, try this!” when “this” will harm you and take away your ability to choose not to do it. In my view, advertising is the only truly criminal act of the illegal drug trade. And neither should nicotine, alcohol, and gambling advertising be permitted. (John Warren Kindt, "College and Amateur Sports Gambling: Gambling away our Youth" online here (33 pages):
paperity.org/p/81539170/college-and-a...
Legal gambling's socioeconomic costs, including addictions, crime, corruption, and bankruptcies, exceed costs of illegal drugs.)

You have no right to present lies as news.

Chomsky feels we can’t trust the government to censor speech. He has good reason to feel that way. Yet we have to trust the government to evaluate safe foods and drugs, keep snake-oil salesmen from making false ads.


“Too much competition” Chomsky sees as a very bad thing—and it is, for the profiteers. For the rest of us, “too much competition” is the Econ 101 world, “many buyers, many sellers, no one has control over price”—and if anyone who wants to produce and sell, can do so, then the best anyone can do is recover long-run marginal cost—and if they do, they can stay in business forever, all the employees, supervisors, managers, and suppliers getting paid, the customers getting a fair price. The only people who don’t get paid are the investors, and why should they? Why should they expect to keep getting more and more wealth, for doing nothing, merely because they started with more money than they needed to spend?

But Chomsky is wrong that “excess competition” causes depressions. What causes depressions is insufficient aggregate demand—which happens when many people, who need lots of stuff, have too little money and can’t buy it—because a few people, who already have everything they could use and then some, have hoarded all the wealth. [pp. 72, 74]

Chomsky thinks boycotts are not much use. [p. 337] To the contrary, as Howard Zinn said, to live, today, as we think people should live, is itself a great victory. As much as we can deny exploiters profit by our participation in their system, we should.

Chomsky thinks there’s no evidence the CIA isn’t under White House control. [p. 349] To the contrary. The CIA does what the CIA wants. Sometimes that’s the same as what the white house wants. Sometimes not. Thoroughly documented in, for example, Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, and JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass.

Chomsky cites many worthwhile authors, including:

Mishel, Lawrence
Rothstein, Richard
Carnoy, Martin
Bivens, Josh
McQuaig, Linda
Sellers, Charles Grier
Noble, David F.
Ware, Norman
Sklar, Holly
Medoff, Peter
Collins, Chuck
Stockwell, John
Hertsgaard, Mark
Parenti, Michael
Bagdikian, Ben H.
Herman, Ed
Postman, Neil


Mishel, Lawrence
Rothstein, Richard
Carnoy, Martin
Bivens, Josh
McQuaig, Linda
Sellers, Charles Grier
Noble, David F.
Ware, Norman
Sklar, Holly
Medoff, Peter
Collins, Chuck
Stockwell, John
Hertsgaard, Mark
Parenti, Michael
Bagdikian, Ben H.
Herman, Ed
Postman, Neil

Mishel, Lawrence
Rothstein, Richard
Carnoy, Martin
Bivens, Josh
McQuaig, Linda
Sellers, Charles Grier
Noble, David F.
Ware, Norman
Sklar, Holly
Medoff, Peter
Collins, Chuck
Stockwell, John
Hertsgaard, Mark
Parenti, Michael
Bagdikian, Ben H.
Herman, Ed
Postman, Neil

And if you’ve ever seen a video of him speaking, you know it’s almost all without notes. Chomsky is mind-bogglingly well-informed about precisely the things the powers that be don’t want us to know. Thank you, Noam.