[stop-imf] Chomsky on IMF, WTO, Seattle, etc. (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

http://www.thenation.com/ 

April 24, 2000 

THERE'S A MOVEMENT OUT THERE, AND IT'S GATHERING STEAM. 
TIME TO GET ON BOARD. 

Talking 'Anarchy' With Chomsky 

Noam Chomsky is a longtime political activist, writer and professor of 
linguistics at MIT. His latest books are The Common Good and The New 
Military Humanism. He was interviewed for The Nation in late February 
by David Barsamian, director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado 
(www.alternativeradio.org). An edited version of that interview follows. 

DB: Let's talk about what occurred in Seattle in late November/early 
December around the WTO ministerial meeting. What meaning do you 
derive from what happened there, and what are the lessons to be 
drawn? 

Chomsky: I think it was a very significant event. It reflected a very broad 
opposition to the corporate-led globalization that's been imposed under 
primarily US leadership, but by the other major industrial countries, too. 
The participation was extremely broad and varied, including 
constituencies from the United States and internationally that have rarely 
interconnected in the past. That's the same kind of coalition of forces 
that blocked the Multilateral Agreement on Investment a year earlier and 
that strongly opposed other so-called agreements like NAFTA and the 
WTO. 

One lesson from Seattle is that education and organizing over a long 
term, carefully done, can really pay off. Another is that a substantial part 
of the domestic and global population, I would guess probably a majority 
of those thinking about the issues, ranges from being disturbed by 
contemporary developments to being strongly opposed to them, primarily 
to the sharp attack on democratic rights, on the freedom to make your 
own decisions and on the general subordination of all concerns to the 
specific interests, to the primacy of maximizing profit and domination by 
a very small sector of the world's population. 

Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, called the 
demonstrators at Seattle "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates." 

>From his point of view that's probably correct. From the point of view of 
slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. For 
the 1 percent of the population that he's thinking about and representing, 
the people who are opposing this are flat-earthers. Why should anyone 
oppose the developments that we've been describing? 

Would it be fair to say that in the actions in the streets in Seattle, mixed 
in with the tear gas was also a whiff of democracy? 

I would take it to be. A functioning democracy is not supposed to happen 
in the streets. It's supposed to happen in decision-making. This is a 
reflection of the undermining of democracy and the popular reaction to it, 
not for the first time. There's been a long struggle, over centuries, in
fact, 
to try to extend the realm of democratic freedoms, and it's won plenty of 
victories. A lot of them have been won exactly this way, not by gifts but 
by confrontation and struggle. If the popular reaction in this case takes a 
really organized, constructive form, it can undermine and reverse the 
highly undemocratic thrust of the international economic arrangements 
that are being foisted on the world. And they are very undemocratic. 
Naturally one thinks about the attack on domestic sovereignty, but most 
of the world is much worse. Over half the population of the world literally 
does not have even theoretical control over their own national economic 
policies. They're in receivership. Their economic policies are run by 
bureaucrats in Washington as a result of the so-called debt crisis, which 
is an ideological construction, not an economic one. That's over half the 
population of the world lacking even minimal sovereignty. 

Why do you say the debt crisis is an ideological construction? 

There is a debt, but who owes it and who's responsible for it is an 
ideological question, not an economic question. For example, there's a 
capitalist principle that nobody wants to pay any attention to, of course, 
which says that if I borrow money from you, it's my responsibility to pay it 
back, and if you're the lender, it's your risk if I don't pay it back. But 
nobody even conceives of that possibility. Suppose we were to follow 
that. Take, say, Indonesia, for example. Right now its economy is 
crushed by the fact that the debt is something like 140 percent of GDP. 
You trace that debt back, it turns out that the borrowers were something 
like 100 to 200 people around the military dictatorship that we supported, 
and their cronies. The lenders were international banks. A lot of that debt 
has been by now socialized through the IMF, which means Northern 
taxpayers are responsible. What happened to the money? They 
enriched themselves. There was some capital export and some 
development. But the people who borrowed the money aren't held 
responsible for it. It's the people of Indonesia who have to pay it off. And 
that means living under crushing austerity programs, severe poverty and 
suffering. In fact, it's a hopeless task to pay off the debt that they didn't 
borrow. What about the lenders? The lenders are protected from risk. 
That's one of the main functions of the IMF, to provide free risk 
insurance to people who lend and invest in risky loans. That's why they 
get high yields, because there's a lot of risk. They don't have to take the 
risk, because it's socialized. It's transferred in various ways to Northern 
taxpayers through the IMF and other devices, like Brady bonds. The 
whole system is one in which the borrowers are released from the 
responsibility. That's transferred to the impoverished mass of the 
population in their own countries. And the lenders are protected from 
risk. These are ideological choices, not economic ones. 

In fact, it even goes beyond that. There's a principle of international law 
that was devised by the United States over a hundred years ago when it 
"liberated" Cuba, which means it conquered Cuba to prevent it from 
liberating itself from Spain in 1898. At that time, when the United States 
took over, it canceled Cuba's debt to Spain on the quite reasonable 
grounds that the debt was invalid since it had been imposed on the 
people of Cuba without their consent, by force, under a power 
relationship. That principle was later recognized in international law, 
again under US initiative, as the principle of what's called "odious debt." 
Debt is not valid if it's essentially imposed by force. The Third World debt 
is odious debt. That's even been recognized by the US representative at 
the IMF, Karen Lissaker, an international economist, who pointed out a 
couple of years ago that if we were to apply the principles of odious 
debt, most of the Third World debt would simply disappear. 

Newsweek had a cover story on December 13 called "The Battle of 
Seattle." It devoted some pages to the anti-WTO protests. There was a 
sidebar in one of the articles called "The New Anarchism." The five 
figures the sidebar mentioned as being somehow representative of this 
new anarchism included Rage Against the Machine and Chumbawamba. 
I don't suppose you know who they are. 

I know. I'm not that far out of it. 

They're rock bands. The list continues with the writer John Zerzan and 
Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, and then MIT professor 
Noam Chomsky. How did you figure into that constellation? Did 
Newsweek contact you? 

Sure. We had a long interview [chuckles]. 

You're pulling my leg. 

You'd have to ask them. I can sort of conjure up something that might 
have been going on in their editorial offices, but your guess is as good 
as mine. The term "anarchist" has always had a very weird meaning in 
elite circles. For example, there was a headline in the Boston Globe 
today on a small article saying something like "Anarchists Plan Protests 
at IMF Meeting in April." Who are the anarchists who are planning the 
protest? Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, labor organizations and others. 
There will be some people around who will call themselves anarchists, 
whatever that means. But from the elite point of view, you want to focus 
on something that you can denounce in some fashion as irrational. 
That's the analogue to Thomas Friedman calling them flat-earthers. 

Vivian Stromberg of Madre, the New York-based NGO, says there are 
lots of motions in the country but no movement. 

I don't agree. For example, what happened in Seattle was certainly 
movement. Students have been arrested in protests over failure of 
universities to adopt strong antisweatshop conditions that many student 
organizations are proposing. There are lots of other things going on that 
look like movement to me. In many ways what happened in Montreal a 
few weeks ago [at the Biosafety Protocol meeting] is even more dramatic 
than Seattle. 

It wasn't much discussed here, because the main protesters were 
European. The United States was joined by a couple of other countries 
that would also expect to profit from biotechnology exports. But primarily 
it was the United States against most of the world over the issue that's 
called the "precautionary principle." That means, is there a right for a 
country, for people, to say, I don't want to be a subject in some 
experiment you're carrying out? The United States is insisting on exactly 
that, internationally. In the negotiations in Montreal, the United States, 
which is the center of the big biotech industries, genetic engineering and 
so on, was demanding that the issue be determined under WTO rules. 
According to those rules, the experimental subjects have to provide 
scientific evidence that it's going to harm them, or else the transcendent 
value of corporate rights prevails. Europe and most of the rest of the 
world insisted [successfully] on the precautionary principle. That's a very 
clear indication of what's at stake: an attack on the rights of people to 
make their own decisions over things even as simple as whether you're 
going to be an experimental subject, let alone controlling your own 
resources or setting conditions on foreign investment or transferring your 
economy into the hands of foreign investment firms and banks. It's a 
major assault against popular sovereignty in favor of concentration of 
power in the hands of a kind of state-corporate nexus, a few mega-
corporations and the few states that primarily cater to their interests. The 
issue in Montreal in many ways was sharper and clearer than it was in 
Seattle. 

Do you think the food-safety issue might be one around which the left 
can reach a broader constituency? 

I don't see it as a particularly left issue. In fact, left issues are just 
popular issues. If the left means anything, it means it's concerned with 
the needs, welfare and rights of the general population. So the left ought 
to be the overwhelming majority of the population, and in some respects 
I think it is. In that sense it could be a left issue that is a popular
issue. 

Talk more about the student antisweatshop movement. Is it different 
from earlier movements that you're familiar with? 

It's different and similar. In some ways it's like the antiapartheid 
movement, except that in this case it's striking at the core of the relations 
of exploitation. It's another example of how different constituencies are 
working together. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the 
National Labor Committee in New York and other groups within the labor 
movement. It's now become a significant student issue in many areas. 
Many student groups are pressing this very hard, so much so that the 
US government had to, in order to counter it, initiate a kind of code. They 
brought together labor and student leaders to form some kind of 
government-sponsored coalition, which many student groups are 
opposing because they think it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. 

Students are not calling for a dismantling of the system of exploitation. 
Maybe they should be. What they're asking for is the kinds of labor rights 
that are theoretically guaranteed. If you look at the conventions of the 
International Labor Organization, the ILO, which is responsible for these 
things, they bar most of the practices, probably all of them, that the 
students are opposing. The United States does not adhere to those 
conventions. Last I looked, the United States had ratified very few of the 
ILO conventions. I think it had the worst record in the world outside of 
maybe Lithuania or El Salvador. Not that other countries live up to the 
conventions, but they have their name on them at least. The United 
States doesn't accept them on principle. 

Tell me what's happening on your campus, at MIT. Is there any 
organizing around the sweatshop movement? 

There are very active undergraduate social-justice groups doing things 
all the time, more so than in quite a few years. What accounts for it is the 
objective reality. It's the same feelings and understanding and perception 
that led people to the streets in Seattle. The United States is not 
suffering like the Third World. But although this is a period of reasonably 
good economic growth, most of the population is still left out. The 
international economic arrangements, the so-called free-trade 
agreements, are basically designed to maintain that. 

Comment on an African proverb that perhaps intersects with what we're 
talking about: "The master's tools will never be used to dismantle the 
master's house." 

If this is intended to mean, don't try to improve conditions for suffering 
people, I don't agree. It's true that centralized power, whether in a 
corporation or a government, is not going to willingly commit suicide. But 
that doesn't mean you shouldn't chip away at it, for many reasons. For 
one thing, it benefits suffering people. That's something that always 
should be done, no matter what broader considerations are. But even 
from the point of view of dismantling the master's house, if people can 
learn what power they have when they work together, and if they can 
see dramatically at just what point they're going to be stopped, by force, 
perhaps, that teaches very valuable lessons in how to go on. The 
alternative to that is to sit in academic seminars and talk about how awful 
the system is.