Noam Chomsky is a long-time political activist, writer, and professor of linguistics at MIT. Among his many books are World Orders Old and New, Class Warfare and Powers and Prospects. His latest books are The Common Good and The New Military Humanism.

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?

I think it was a very significant event. It reflected a broad feeling that has been growing and developing in intensity around a good part of the world. What was interesting in Seattle was, first of all, the events reflected very extensive programs of education and organizing, and it shows what can be achieved by that. Secondly, the participation was extremely broad and varied. There were constituencies brought together that have rarely interconnected in the past. That was true internationally—Third World, indigenous, peasant, labor leaders, and others. Here in the U.S., environmentalists, large labor participation, and other groups, which had separate interests but a shared understanding. That’s the same kind of coalition of forces that blocked the Multilateral Agreement on Investment a year earlier and that had strongly opposed other so-called agreements like NAFTA or the WTO agreements, which are not agreements, at least if the population counts. Most of the population has been opposed to them. It has reached a point of a kind of dramatic confrontation. Also it will presumably continue and I think could take very constructive forms.

Are there any lessons to be derived from Seattle?

One lesson 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, range 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 primacy of maximizing profit and domination by a very small sector of the world’s population—very small. Global inequality has reached unprecedented heights.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting took place in Bangkok. Andrew Simms, writing in the Guardian Weekly in mid-February, said that “UNCTAD, given the right power and resources, could help overcome failings in the international system” and it has “the confidence of developing countries.”

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. UNCTAD is basically a research organization. It has no enforcement powers. It does reflect to some extent the interests of the so-called developing countries, the poorer countries. That’s the reason it’s so marginalized. For example, there was very little reporting of the UNCTAD conference in the U.S. apart from the business press here and there. It has Third World, South participation. When UNCTAD does reflect the concerns of the great majority of the world’s people, it is generally ignored. One example, with substantial contemporary repercussions is the UNCTAD initiative to stabilize commodity prices 30 years ago, so that poor peasant farmers would be able to survive. Agribusiness can handle a collapse in prices for a year; poor farmers can’t tell their kids to wait until next year to eat. The proposals conformed to policies routinely adopted in the rich countries, but were blocked by the rich, following the advice of “sound liberal economists,” as political economist Susan Strange puts it—advice that is followed when it contributes to profit and power, ignored otherwise. One consequence is the shift from production of “legitimate crops” (coffee, etc.) to coca, marijuana, and opium, which are not subject to ruinous price fluctuations. The U.S. reaction is to impose even harsher punishments on the poor, abroad and at home, sharply intensifying next year if current proposals are implemented.

It’s not the only case. UNESCO was undermined for rather similar reasons. But to speak of “confidence of developing countries” would be overstating it. Have a look at Third World-based publications, say from the Third World Network in Malaysia. One of their important publications is Third World Economics. A recent issue has run several very critical reports of the UNCTAD conference because of its subordination to the agenda of the powerful. It’s true that UNCTAD is more independent and more reflects the interests of the developing countries than, say, the WTO, which is run by the industrial states. So yes, it’s different. But one shouldn’t exaggerate.

The issue of inequality is certainly hard to ignore. Even the Financial Times recently commented that “At the start of the nineteenth century, the ratio of real incomes per head between the world’s richest and poorest countries was three to one. By 1900, it was ten to one. By the year 2000 it had risen to sixty to one.”

That is extremely misleading. It vastly understates what’s going on. The real and striking difference is not the difference among countries but the difference within the global population, which is a different measure. Within countries the divisions have sharply risen. I think it’s now gone from about something like 80 to 1 to about 120 to 1, just in the last 10 years or so. Those are rough figures. The top 1 percent of the population of the world now probably has about the income of roughly the bottom 60 percent. That’s close to three billion people.

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. If you want some numbers, a recent issue of Doug Henwood’s invaluable Left Business Observer gives the global facts. This is a recent estimate by a World Bank economist. It only goes as far as 1993. In 1993, the richest 1 percent of the population had as much wealth as the bottom 57 percent. So that’s 2.5 billion people. The ratio of average incomes from the world’s top 5 percent and the world’s bottom 5 percent, that’s the one that increased from 78 to 1 in 1988 to 114 to 1 in 1993, and probably considerably more since. The inequality index, the Gini index, as it’s called, has reached the highest levels on record. That’s world population. One might argue that this doesn’t matter much if everyone is gaining, even unequally. That is a terrible argument, but we don’t have to pay attention to it, because the premise is incorrect.

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 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 an 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, which says that if I borrow money from you, let’s say, I’m the borrower, so it’s my responsibility to pay it back and you’re the lender, so it’s your risk if I don’t pay it back. That’s the capitalist principle. The borrower has the responsibility and the lender takes the risk. But 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 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. 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.

These are ideological choices, not economic ones. It even goes beyond that. There’s a principle of international law, which was devised by the U.S. over 100 years ago when it “liberated” Cuba, which means conquered Cuba to prevent it from liberating itself from Spain in 1898. At that time, when the U.S. took over Cuba, it cancelled Cuba’s debt to Spain on the quite reasonable grounds that that 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 disappear.

Getting back to Seattle and other recent actvism, Vivian Stromberg of MADRE, the New York-based NGO, says there’s lots of motion in the country but no movement.

I don’t agree. For example, what happened in Seattle was certainly movement. Just a couple of days ago students were arrested in protests over the failure of universities to adopt strong anti-sweatshop conditions that many student organizations are proposing. There are lots of other things going on that look like movement to me. While we’re on the Seattle matter, in many ways what happened recently in Montreal is even more dramatic.

That was the Biosafety Protocol meeting.

A kind of ambiguous compromise was reached, but the lineup was very sharp. The U.S. was virtually alone most of the time in the negotiations leading to the compromise. The U.S. was joined by a couple of other countries that would also expect to profit from biotechnology exports. But primarily it was the U.S. against most of the world over a very significant issue, 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 an experimental subject in some experiment you’re carrying out? At the personal level, that is permissible. For example, if somebody comes into your office from the university biology department and says, You’re going to be a subject in an experiment. I’m going to stick electrodes into your brain and measure this, that, and the other thing, you’re permitted to say, I’m sorry, I don’t want to be a subject. They are not allowed to come back to you and say, You have to be, unless you can provide scientific evidence that this is going to harm you. But the U.S. is insisting on exactly that internationally. That’s the precautionary principle. In the negotiations at Montreal, the U.S., 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 and they can do what they want. That’s what Ed Herman calls “producer sovereignty.” Europe and most of the rest of the world insisted on the precautionary principle. The right of people to say, I don’t want to be an experimental subject. I don’t have scientific proof that it’s going to harm me, but I don’t want to be subjected to that.

The issue of food safety, irradiation, and genetic engineering seems to touch a chord in people and also to cross traditional what’s called left-right, liberal-conservative lines. For example, French farmers, who are fairly conservative, are up in arms around these issues, as well as farmers in India.

There’s a lot of concern about being forced to become experimental subjects for interventions in the food system, both in production and consumption, that have unknown consequences. At some point last fall the concerns became manifested over here as well, to the extent that something quite unusual happened. Monsanto, the major corporation that’s pushing biotechnology and genetically engineered crops, their stock started to fall notably. They had to make a public apology and at least theoretically cancel some of their more extreme projects, like terminator genes, genes that would make seeds infertile so that, say, poor farmers in India would have to keep purchasing Monsanto seeds and fertilizers at an exorbitant cost. That’s quite unusual, for a corporation to be forced into that position.

In the U.S. it’s essentially a class issue. Among richer, more educated sectors, there are tendencies which amount to protecting themselves from being experimental subjects, for example, buying high- priced organic food.

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 for 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. There are other related matters that are very hard to keep in the background. They’re coming to the fore all over the place, dramatically in the poorer countries again, but it’s showing up here, too. Take, say, the price of pharmaceuticals. They are exorbitant. In the U.S. they’re much higher than in other countries. So drugs in the U.S. are 25 percent higher than in Canada and probably twice as high as Italy. This is because of monopolistic practices that are strongly supported by the U.S. government and were built into the WTO rules, highly protectionist devices called intellectual property rights which essentially guaranteed to the huge megacorporations to charge what amount to monopoly prices for a long period. This is being very strongly resisted in Africa, Thailand, and elsewhere.

In Africa, the spread of AIDS is extremely dangerous. Here, when Clinton or Gore makes a speech, they talk about the need for Africans to change their behavior. Well, OK, maybe Africans should change their behavior. But the crucial element is our behavior of guaranteeing that the producers, mainly, though not entirely, U.S.-based, be able to charge prices so high that nobody can afford them. According to the latest reports, about 600,000 infants a year are having HIV transmitted to them from the mother, which means they’ll probably die of AIDS. That’s something that can be stopped by the use of drugs that would cost a couple of dollars a day. But the drug companies will not permit them to be sold under what’s called compulsory licensing, that is, allowing the countries to produce them themselves at a much cheaper rate than the drug companies charge under the monopolistic conditions. There may soon be 40 million orphans just from AIDS alone in Africa [See McClarty’s article in this issue for changes in AIDS policy].

Similar things are going on in Thailand and they’re protesting. They have their own pharmaceutical industries in Thailand and Africa, particularly trying to gain the right to produce generic drugs, which would be far cheaper than the ones sold by the major pharmaceutical corporations. This is a major health crisis. There are tens of millions of people involved. The same is true in other domains: malaria, tuberculosis. There are preventable diseases that are killing huge numbers of people because the means of prevention are kept so expensive that people can’t use them.

Why do drug companies have enormous monopolistic rights, in effect? They claim that they need it because of the costs of research and development. But that’s mostly a scam. A substantial part of the costs of research and development is paid by the public. Up until the early 1990s, it was about 50 percent, now maybe it’s 40 percent. Those numbers underestimate the actual public cost because they don’t take into account the fundamental biology on which it’s all based, and that’s almost all publicly supported. Dean Baker, a very good economist who has studied this carefully, asked the obvious question. He said, OK, suppose the public pays all the costs, double the public cost, and then insists that the drug go on the market. His estimates are a colossal welfare saving from this. We’re talking about the lives and deaths of tens of millions of people just in the next few years.

Returning to the U.S., talk more about the student sweatshop movement. Is it different from earlier movements that you’re familiar with?

It’s different and similar. In some ways it’s like the anti-apartheid movement, except in this case it’s striking at the core of the relations of exploitation that are used to reach these incredible figures of inequality that we were talking about. It’s very serious. 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 U.S. government had to, in order to counter it, initiate a kind of code. They brought together labor and student leaders to form a government-sponsored coalition, which many student groups are opposing because they think it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Those are the issues that are now very much contested.

Aren’t student asking capitalists to be less mean?

They’re not calling for a dismantling of the system of exploitation. Maybe they should be. What they’re asking for are 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, bars most of the practices, probably all of them, that the students are opposing. The U.S. does not adhere to those conventions. Last I looked, the U.S. had ratified virtually none 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 U.S. doesn’t accept them on principle.

What’s happening on your campus, at MIT. Is there any organizing around the sweatshop movement?

Yes, and on a lot of issues. There are very active undergraduate social justice groups doing things all the time, more so than in quite a few years.

What accounts for that?

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. Take the U.S. The U.S. is not suffering like the Third World. In Latin America, after 20 years of so-called reforms, they haven’t moved. The president of the World Bank has just reported that they’re where they were 20 years ago. Even in economic growth. This is unheard of, for the whole so-called developing world, I don’t like the term, but it’s the one that’s used for the South, they’re pulling out of the 1990s with a slower rate of growth than in the 1970s. Welfare gaps are increasing. That’s in the rest of the world. In the U.S., there’s also an unprecedented development. The economic growth by all macro-economic measures, growth of the economy, productivity, capital investment, the last 25 years have been a relatively slow period compared with the preceding 25 years. Many economists call it a “leaden age” as compared with the preceding golden age. But there has been growth, even though slower than before. For the majority of non-supervisory workers, which is the majority of the workforce, wages are maybe 10 percent or more below what they were 25 years ago. That’s absolute level. Relative, of course, much farther below. There has been productivity growth and economic growth during that period, but it is not going to the mass of the population. Median incomes, meaning half below, half above, are now barely getting back to what they were ten years ago, well below what they were 10 and 15 years before that. This is in a period of reasonably good economic growth in the last two or three years. They call it amazing, but the last two or three years has been about what it was in the 1950s or 1960s, which is high by historical standards. It’s still left out most of the population.

The international economic arrangements, the so-called free trade agreements, are basically designed to maintain that. They undergird what’s called a “flexible labor market,” meaning that people have no security. The growing worker insecurity that Alan Greenspan once said was one of the major factors in the fairy-tale economy. If people are afraid, they don’t have job security, they’re just not going to ask for better conditions. If they have a fear of job transfer, which is one of the consequences of the mislabeled free trade agreements, and there’s a flexible labor market, meaning you don’t have security, people are not going to ask for better conditions and benefits.

The World Bank has been very clear about the matter. They recognize, I’m now quoting, that labor market flexibility, which they say is essential for all regions of the world has acquired a bad name as a euphemism for pushing wages down and workers out. That’s exactly what it does. It acquired that bad name for a good reason. That’s what labor market flexibility is. They say it’s essential for all regions of the world. It’s the most important reform, I’m quoting from a World Bank development report. It calls for lifting constraints on labor mobility and on wage flexibility. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that workers should be free to go anywhere they want, say, Mexican workers come to New York. What it means is they can be kicked out of their jobs. They want to lift constraints on kicking people out of their jobs and on wage flexibility, which means flexibility down, not up. People are at some level aware of this. You can hide a lot under glorification of consumption and huge debt, but it’s hard to hide the fact that people are working many more hours a week than they did 25 years ago just to keep incomes stagnating or declining.

What about state colleges in Massachusetts?

That’s much harder in many ways. These are mainly students from poor, urban inner-city or working-class backgrounds, many immigrants, ethnic minorities and others. Although I think most of them are white working class, who have a chance to get ahead, meaning become a nurse or policeman. The pressures on them are very tight. They don’t have a large margin to maneuver the way you do in an elite school. I think that has a strong disciplinary effect not only on what they do but even on what they think. Also, these colleges are under great pressure.

In what way?

My feeling is that, I can’t prove this, there’s an effort on the part of the state authorities to essentially undercut the state schools that do offer these opportunities for poor and working people. What’s happening is that they are raising standards for admission to the state colleges, meaning basically poor and working-class schools. They’re raising the admissions standards but they’re not improving the K through 12 public schools. It’s easy to predict what happens. If you raise the admissions standards and don’t improve the schools, that means fewer people can qualify, so you have reduced admissions. The reduction in admissions is quite sharp in the last year or two. If you reduce the admissions, you have to go back to the state legislature and the businesspeople who run the place. They say, cut the staff and faculty, which then reduces the opportunities even more. It introduces labor market flexibility into staff and faculty, meaning they won’t have any security either, less commitment to the college. The long-term tendency, is to diminish or possibly eliminate the public education system that is geared to the poorer and the working people in the state, which will leave the options of not going to college or paying $30,000 a year at one of the private colleges.

Let’s talk about the Internet and issues of privacy. Businesses are collecting profiles and data on people’s preferences. What are the implications of that?

The implications could be pretty serious, but in my view they are still secondary to another issue, which is Internet access. The huge media mergers that are going on carry the threat that they’ll be able to effectively direct access to favored sites, meaning turning the Internet system even more than it is now into a home shopping service rather than information and interaction. Norman Solomon, a media critic, has pointed out that in the early 1990s, while the system was still under government control, the Internet was commonly referred to as an “information superhighway.” In the late 1990s, after it was handed over as a gift to private corporations in some manner that nobody knows, it’s become e-commerce, not an information superhighway. The megamergers like AOL-Time Warner, offer technical possibilities to ensure that getting on the Internet will draw you into what they want you to see, not what you want to see. This is a tremendous tool for information, organizing, and communication. There is no doubt that the business world intends to turn it into something else.                                                        Z

David Barsamian is founder of Alternative Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado. He is frequent contributor to Z and other publications.