Chomsky: An Agent of the CIA?

It's hard to know what to believe sometimes. Not too long ago I read an article that raised the question of whether or not Timothy Leary was a CIA agent (when I say 'raised the question', I'm not being facetious: the author himself wasn't sure what to believe, and the result is an article that really makes you think. Definitely recommended.)

And now, through a link posted by a friend on the Infowars SNS, comes this damning denunciation of Noam Chomsky: Controlled Asset of the New World Order.

Now, accusations like this fly at almost everyone. Even Ron Paul and Alex Jones have been accused of being part of the New World Order, though the evidence is usually pretty shaky, based more on paranoia than on any solid factual basis. It's inevitable, in a world where secret societies - intelligence agencies, crime syndicates, fraternal brotherhoods, and other sub-species - wield so much behind-the-scenes power. In the end, though, the only test that can be relied upon is an evaluation of actions and words, and Chomsky fails that test. From the article:

Since 9-11, he has steadfastly refused to discuss the evidence of government complicity and prior knowledge. Furthermore he claims that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg Committee, and Trilateral Commission are "nothing organizations." When critiquing poverty, he never mentions the Federal Reserve and their role in manipulating the cycle of debt.

Similarly, he claims the CIA was never a rogue organization and is an innocent scapegoat; that JFK was killed by the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; that the obvious vote fraud in 2004 did not occur; and that peak oil is real and good for humanity.

What he does advocate is population control, gun control, support for U.N.E.S.C.O., and the end of national sovereignty in favor of a one-world government under the UN. In other words, the major goals of the New World Order.

Chomsky's role in propaganda paradigm is much like that of Karl Marx: to present a false liberation ideology which actually supports the desired solutions of the elite. Marx pointed out the inequalities and brutality of capitalism and then advocated a one world bank, army, and government with the abolition of private property and religion; in other words, the major goals known of the New World Order.

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Economics is the Shadow Cast on Society by Technology

Jay mentioned a Dewey quote from the Democracy and Education lecture which, coincidentally enough, had been echoing through my head all day: "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."

For a long time I've felt much the same way myself, though I phrased it to myself rather less poetically, as: economics determines politics. That's not the full formulation, though, because if economics determines politics, then technology determines economics.

It's not cut and dry, of course. There's mutual feedback at all levels: politics can affect economics (to a degree), and technology (to a much weaker degree.) Similarly, economics can feedback to technology. But The ultimate direction of influence is technology -> economics -> politics.

A large part of Chomsky's lecture deals with the political changes that occurred between the founding of the US, and it's eventual emergence as an industrial superpower, and he's pretty unflinching in his judgment that those political changes were mostly for the worse. He places the blame for this primarily at the feet of the big corporations that have sought to neuter democracy in favor of establishing a technocratic state whose elites operate in total isolation from the humors of the masses.

But when the US was founded, the industrial revolution had yet to begin. With the exception of printing presses, gunpowder, and transoceanic sailing vessels technology was not terribly more advanced than it had been at any time in the past 2000 years. Most of the American population - or at least those who were allowed to vote - consisted of farmers (who owned their own land), and tradesmen (who sold things they made with their own hands.)

Advances in technology rendered that world almost obsolete within a hundred years: a single person simply can't build or operate a factory, or even design the products it turns out. Larger, semi-permanent organizations, in which people of their own free will agree to participate - corporations, in other words - have to be created out of sheer economic necessity. The development of corporations was a pretty huge thing in terms of the ability to organize human action over a large scale, probably one of the greatest social innovations of the past few hundred years.

Of course, corporations came with some societal costs that mirror the benefits. They reaped enormous economic benefit by harnessing division of labor on scales undreamt of before, but by doing that replaced a society of independent tradesman (whose work was interesting and challenging) with a society of factory workers, whose work was repetitive and often dangerous. As a natural result, the workers demanded greater compensation, and the owners (also quite naturally) resisted, leading to one of the great political tensions of the 20th century. At the same time, corporations thrive best under conditions of stable regulatory oversight; they can adjust to almost any ruleset, so long as those rules don't change very much. It was only natural that they would seek to subvert democracy as far as they could.

Chomsky says all this happened because of the mendaciousness of rich men and powerful corporations (generally the same thing, at least for the past hundred years or so.) I'd say the ultimate source was in technology. Steam engines, electrical power, mass production, these were things without which corporations would have been basically impossible, save in a few isolated fields.

Smith's goal of “creative work freely undertaken in association with others" is partly met by corporations, at least if you omit the 'creative' part. I think maybe this century, we'll be able to do better.

Once again, it comes down to technology. The pieces aren't all in place yet, but then the industrial revolution wasn't invented all at the same time either. The internet allows spontaneous networks to form around information that is instantly and universally available, a capability that was most certainly not part of the last century's experience. The maturation of the next two big technologies - solar power and home fabrication - are all that is required to complete the setup for the next massive social revolution.

Economics change pretty radically when you add home fabrication to the internet. Suddenly it's not just about downloading music and porn and looking at pictures of cats; now you can download blueprints and make your own technology, anything from a hammer to a cell phone to a house, including another copy of the home fabricator, dependent only on how much time you have. Decent solar power means that you can go out anywhere you want with a fabricator, a few solar panels, some raw materials (when the technology is mature, this will mean: dirt and sand), and build your own house from scratch.

The cost of manufactured goods trends very steeply down in this scenario, at least from the point of view of corporations; there's no point in building a global supply chain to mass-produce your widgets if everyone can just make their own at a cost of energy and raw materials. Essentially, companies that make things are fucked, unless they can find a way to force people to pay for the CAD/CAM files they download. The current IP struggles are deeply important because of this; if manufacturing companies succeed where media companies are failing so spectacularly, it'll do untold harm to the global economy by raising the cost of goods far above their logical price. I expect this to become one of the defining political battles of the 21st century: the fight between people who want to get paid for their creative work, and the vastly larger number who want it all for free.

Basically, it's a fight between corporations and networks, and in the long run I expect the networks to win, replacing corporations as the dominant form of social organization. Getting paid for your work will cease to lose all meaning, after a while: with the plans for everything freely available, and the ability to make as much of it as you'd like, the main incentive for inventing something new (ie, adding to the archive of blueprints) will be social recognition. This would seem to me to be pretty close to creative work freely undertaken in association with others, and long before this century is done I think we'll be moving very rapidly in that direction.

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What Kings and Presidents Have in Common

Jay sends in this 1994 essay from Chomsky, Democracy and Education. This paragraph really popped out at me:

Independently of Jefferson and Bakunin, others were coming to the same understanding in the nineteenth century. One of the leading American intellectuals was Charles Francis Adams, who in 1880 described the rise of what is now called the "post-industrial society" by Daniel Bell and Robert Reich and John Kenneth Galbraith and others. This is 1880, remember. A society in which, Adams says, "the future is in the hands of our universities, our schools, our specialists, our scientific men and our writers and those who do the actual work of management in the ideological and economic institutions." Nowadays they're called the "technocratic elite" and the "action intellectuals" or the new class or some other similar term. Adams, back in 1880, concluded that "the first object of thinking citizens, therefore, should be not to keep one or another political party in power, but to insist on order and submission to law." Meaning that the elites should be permitted to function in what's called "technocratic isolation," by the World Bank -- I'm being a little anachronistic here, that's modern lingo -- or, as the London Economist puts the idea today, "policy should be insulated from politics." That's the case in free Poland, they assure their readers, so they don't have to be concerned about the fact that people are calling for something quite different in free elections. They can do what they like in the elections, but since policy is insulated from politics and technocratic insulation proceeds, it really doesn't matter. That's democracy.

I have to admit, that's pretty much what I see as the main social utility of modern democracies. As a rule, elections are all about blowing off steam, great spectacles in which power is symbolically shifted from one group of people to another, often fought bitterly over points of trivial importance. Bleak, yes, but it is better than living under one strongman after another. Sure, you get longer periods of stable government, but at the expense of civil wars every thirty years or so. Hereditary monarchs are superior to warlords for the same reason; the primary aim of any political system is the maintenance of civil order over as long a period of time as possible, regardless of how ridiculous the system used to maintain that stability may appear.

Roman emperors achieved stability for a few decades by means of buying the loyalty of the largest fraction of the Roman army; the problem with that was, armies can be defeated in battle, or their loyalty bought by someone with a heavier treasure-chest (at which point order breaks down and you get a civil war). Monarchs kept stability it for lifetimes by giving ultimate power to hereditary lines; of course, you can't always be sure the king will have boys, or even children (at which point order breaks down, and you get a civil war). Democratic States place ultimate power in the hands of a leader whose chosen by the people; instead of trying to keep the same guy in place for life, he's rotated regularly, but in an orderly fashion, with no blood being spilled. The only problem is ...... (at which point order breaks down, and you get a civil war?).

Seriously, I'm not sure about what's necessary to bring out actual civil war conditions in a democracy. The failure states of warlord autocracies or monarchies are fairly obvious, and while democracy is obviously much more stable on the long term than either previous form of government, it too is imperfect, and bound to have a failure state.

I'm thinking an obvious candidate would be something like an election so closely contested that there was no clear winner. The sheer venom of the Bush years certainly points in favor of this. Still, no actual civil war broke out, and there are plenty of cases of close elections in which violence failed to materialize. Perhaps if too-close-to-call elections became a common occurrence, though - especially in a context of technocratic isolation, as Chomsky puts it - elections would cease to let off pressure, and social tensions might, after stewing for a decade or two, blow up into a civil war of dire proportions.

Then there's historical Civil War, which I'm not a historian of, and thus can't really say what touched it off. Anyone?

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