So, yes, there are periods of regression and of progress, but the class war never ends, the masters never relent. They're always looking for every opportunity and, if they're the only participants in class struggle, we will indeed have regression. But they don't have to be, any more than in the past.
Barsamian: In your Masters of Mankind book, you have an essay, "Can Civilization Survive Really Existing Capitalism?" You write, "Really existing capitalist democracy " RECD for short (pronounced 'wrecked')" is "radically incompatible" with democracy and add that "it seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive really existing capitalism and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. Could functioning democracy make a difference? Consideration of nonexistent systems can only be speculative, but I think there's some reason to think so." Tell me your reasons.
Chomsky: First of all, we live in this world, not in some world we would like to imagine. And in this world, if you simply think about the timescale for dealing with environmental destruction, it's far shorter than the time that would be necessary to carry out the significant reshaping of our basic institutions. That doesn't mean you have to abandon the attempt to do so. You should be doing that all the time " working on ways to raise consciousness, raise understanding, and build the rudiments of future institutions in the present society.
At the same time, the measures to save us from self-destruction will have to take place within the basic framework of existing institutions " some modification of them without fundamental change. And it can be done. We know how it can be done.
Meanwhile, work should continue on overcoming the problem of RECD, really existing capitalist democracy, which in its basic nature is a death sentence and also deeply inhuman in its fundamental properties. So, let's work on that, and at the same time, ensure that we save the possibility of achieving it by overcoming the immediate and urgent crisis we face.
Barsamian: Talk about the importance of independent progressive media like Democracy Now! and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. And may I say, Alternative Radio? Publishers like Verso, Haymarket, Monthly Review, City Lights, and The New Press. Magazines like Jacobin, The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times. Online magazines like TomDispatch, The Intercept, and ScheerPost. Community radio stations like KGNU, WMNF, and KPFK. How important are they in countering the dominant corporate narrative?
Chomsky: What else is going to counter it? They are the ones holding up the hope that we'll be able to find ways to counter these highly harmful, destructive developments we're discussing.
The core method is, of course, education. People have to come to understand what's happening in the world. That requires the means to disseminate information and analysis, opening up opportunities for discussion, which you're not going to find, for the most part, in the mainstream. Maybe occasionally at the margins. A lot of what we've been talking about is not discussed at all, or only marginally within the major media. So, these conversations have to be brought to the public through such channels. There is no other way.
Actually, there is another way: organization. It is possible and, in fact, easy to conduct educational and cultural programs inside organizations. That was one of the major contributions of the labor movement when it was a vibrant, lively institution, and one of the main reasons why President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were so determined to destroy labor, as they both did. Their first moves were attacks on the labor movement.
There were educational and cultural programs that brought people together to think about the world, to understand it, and develop ideas. It takes organization to do that. Doing that alone, as an isolated person, is extremely difficult.
Despite the corporate effort to beat back the unions, there was a lively, independent labor press in the United States as late as the 1950s, reaching lots of people, condemning the "bought priesthood," as they called it, of the mainstream press. It took a long time to destroy that.
There's a history in the United States of a vibrant, progressive labor press that goes back to the nineteenth century, when it was a major phenomenon. That can and should be revived as part of the revival of a militant, functioning labor movement at the forefront of progress toward social justice. It happened before and it can happen again. And independent media are a critical element of this.
When I was a kid in the 1930s and early 1940s, I could read Izzy Stone in the Philadelphia Record. It wasn't the major journal in Philadelphia, but it was there. In the late 1940s, I could read him in the New York newspaper PM, which was an independent journal. It made a huge difference.
Later, the only way to read Stone was to subscribe to his newsletter. That was the independent media in the 1950s. In the 1960s, it began to pick up a little bit with the magazine Ramparts, radio programs like Danny Schechter's on WBCN in Boston, and others like it.
And today, this continues around the country. The ones you mentioned are forces for independence, for thinking.
Barsamian: There are multiple mentions of Antonio Gramsci in two of your most recent books, Consequences of Capitalism and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal " specifically, of his comment, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Right now, though, the quote of his I'd like you to address is: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." Talk about his relevance today and the meaning of that quote.
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