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QUESTION: If the basic defense is the political appeal, or the appeal of the political and economic organization, perhaps we could look in a little more detail at that. You wrote, in one of your essays, that "
in a decent society, everyone would have the opportunity to find interesting work and each person would be permitted the fullest possible scope for his talents." And then, you went on to ask: "
What more would be required in particular, extrinsic reward in the form of wealth and power? Only if we assume that applying one's talents in interesting and socially useful work is not rewarding in itself." I think that that line of reasoning is certainly one of the things that appeals to a lot of people. But it still needs to be explained, I think, why the kind of work which people would find interesting and appealing and fulfilling to do would coincide at all closely with the kind which actually needs to be done, if we're to sustain anything like the standard of living which people demand and are used to.
CHOMSKY: Well, there's a certain amount of work that just has to be done if we're to maintain that standard of living. It's an open question how onerous that work has to be. Let's recall that science and technology and intellect have not been devoted to examining that question or to overcoming the onerous and self-destructive character of the necessary work of society. The reason is that it has always been assumed that there is a substantial body of wage slaves who will do it simply because otherwise they'll starve. However, if human intelligence is turned to the question of how to make the necessary work of the society itself meaningful, we don't know what the answer will be. My guess is that a fair amount of it can be made entirely tolerable. It's a mistake to think that even back-breaking physical labor is necessarily onerous. Many people, myself included, do it for relaxation. Well, recently, for example, I got it into my head to plant thirty-four trees in a meadow behind the house, on the State Conservation Commission, which means I had to dig thirty-four holes in the sand. You know, for me, and what I do with my time mostly, that's pretty hard work, but I have to admit I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have enjoyed it if I'd had work norms, if I'd had an overseer, and if I'd been ordered to do it at a certain moment, and so on. On the other hand, if it's a task taken on just out of interest, fine, that can be done. And that's without any technology, without any thought given to how to design the work, and so on.
QUESTION: I put it to you that there may be a danger that this view of things is a rather romantic delusion, entertained only by a small elite of people who happen, like professors, perhaps journalists, and so on, to be in the very privileged situation of being paid to do what anyway they like to do.
CHOMSKY: That's why I began with a big "If". I said we first have to ask to what extent the necessary work of the society -- namely that work which is required to maintain the standard of living that we want -- needs to be onerous or undesirable. I think that the answer is: much less than it is it today. But let's assume there is some extent to which it remains onerous. Well, in that case, the answer's quite simple: that work has to be equally shared among people capable of doing it.
QUESTION: And everyone spends a certain number of months a year working on an automobile production line and a certain number of months collecting the garbage and...
CHOMSKY: If it turns out that these are really tasks which people will find no self-fulfillment in. Incidentally, I don't quite believe that. As I watch people work, craftsmen, let's say, automobile mechanics for example, I think one often finds a good deal of pride in work. I think that that kind of pride in work well done, in complicated work well done, because it takes thought and intelligence to do it, especially when one is also involved in management of the enterprise, determination of how the work will be organized, what it is for, what the purposes of the work are, what'll happen to it, and so on -- I think all of this can be satisfying and rewarding activity which in fact requires skills, the kind of skills people will enjoy exercising. However, I'm thinking hypothetically now. Suppose it turns out there is some residue of work which really no one wants to do, whatever that may be -- okay, then I say that the residue of work must be equally shared, and beyond that, people will be free to exercise their talents as they see fit.
QUESTION: I put it you, Professor, that if that residue were very large, as some people would say it was, if it accounted for the work involved in producing ninety per cent of what we all want to consume -- then the organization of sharing this, on the basis that everybody did a little bit of all the nasty jobs, would become wildly inefficient. Because, after all, you have to be trained and equipped to do even the nasty jobs, and the efficiency of the whole economy would suffer, and therefore the standard of living which it sustained would be reduced.
CHOMSKY: Well, for one thing, this is really quite hypothetical, because I don't believe that the figures are anything like that. As I say, it seems to me that if human intelligence were devoted to asking how technology can be designed to fit the needs of the human producer, instead of conversely -- that is, now we ask how the human being with his special properties can be fitted into a technological system designed for other ends, namely, production for profit -- my feeling is that if that were done, we would find that the really unwanted work is far smaller than you suggest. But whatever it is, notice that we have two alternatives. One alternative is to have it equally shared, the other is to design social institutions so that some group of people will be simply compelled to do the work, on pain of starvation. Those are the two alternatives.
QUESTION: Not compelled to do it, but they might agree to do it voluntarily because they were paid an amount which they felt made it worthwhile.
CHOMSKY: Well, but you see, I'm assuming everyone essentially gets equal remuneration. Don't forget that we're not talking about a society now where the people who do the onerous work are paid substantially more than the people who do the work that they do on choice -- quite the opposite. The way our society works, the way any class society works, the people who do the unwanted work are the ones who are paid least. That work is done and we sort of put it out of our minds, because it's assumed that there will be a massive class of people who control only one factor of production, namely their labor, and have to sell it, and they'll have to do that work because they have nothing else to do, and they'll be paid very little for it. I accept the correction. Let's imagine three kinds of society: one, the current one, in which the undesired work is given to wage-slaves. Let's imagine a second system in which the undesired work, after the best efforts to make it meaningful, is shared. And let's imagine a third system where the undesired work receives high extra pay, so that individuals voluntarily choose to do it. Well, it seems to me that either of the two latter systems is consistent with -- vaguely speaking -- anarchist principles. I would argue myself for the second rather than the third, but either of the two is quite remote from any present social organization or any tendency in contemporary social organization.
QUESTION: Let me put that to you in another way. It seems to me that there is a fundamental choice, however one disguises it, between whether you organize work for the satisfaction it gives to the people who do it, or whether you organize it on the basis of the value of what is produced for the people who are going to use or consume what is produced. And that a society that is organized on the basis of giving everybody the maximum opportunity to fulfill their hobbies, which is essentially the work-for-work's-sake view, finds its logical culmination in a monastery, where the kind of work which is done, namely prayer, is work for the self-enrichment of the worker and where nothing is produced which is of any use to anybody and you live either at a low standard of living, or you actually starve.
CHOMSKY: Well, there are some factual assumptions here, and I disagree with you about the factual assumptions. My feeling is that part of what makes work meaningful is that it does have use, that its products do have use. The work of the craftsman is in part meaningful to that craftsman because of the intelligence and skill that he puts into it, but also in part because the work is useful, and I might say, the same is true of scientists. I mean, the fact that the kind of work you do may lead to something else -- that's what it means in science, you know -- may contribute to something else, that's very important quite apart from the elegance and beauty of what you may achieve. And I think that covers every field of human endeavor. Furthermore, I think if we look at a good part of human history, we'll find that people to a substantial extent did get some degree of satisfaction -- often a lot of satisfaction -- from the productive and creative work that they were doing. And I think that the chances for that are enormously enhanced by industrialization. Why? Precisely because much of the most meaningless drudgery can be taken over by machines, which means that the scope for really creative human work is substantially enlarged.
Now, you speak of work freely undertaken as a hobby. But I don't believe that. I think work freely undertaken can be useful, meaningful work done well. Also, you pose a dilemma that many people pose, between desire for satisfaction in work and a desire to create things of value to the community. But it's not so obvious that there is any dilemma, any contradiction. So, it's by no means clear -- in fact, I think it's false -- that contributing to the enhancement of pleasure and satisfaction in work is inversely proportional to contributing to the value of the output.
QUESTION: Not inversely proportional, but it might be unrelated. I mean, take some very simple thing, like selling ice-creams on the beach on a public holiday. It's a service to society: undoubtedly people want ice-creams, they feel hot. On the other hand, it's hard to see in what sense there is either a craftsman's joy or a great sense of social virtue or nobility in performing that task. Why would anyone perform that task if they were not rewarded for it?
CHOMSKY: I must say, I've seen some very cheery-looking ice cream vendors...
QUESTION: Sure, they're making a lot of money.
CHOMSKY: ... who happen to like the idea that they're giving children ice-creams, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable way to spend one's time, as compared with thousands of other occupations that I can imagine.
Recall that a person has an occupation, and it seems to me that most of the occupations that exist -- especially the ones that involve what are called services, that is, relations to human beings -- have an intrinsic satisfaction and rewards associated with them, namely in the dealings with the human beings that are involved. That's true of teaching, and it's true of ice cream vending. I agree that ice cream vending doesn't require the commitment or intelligence that teaching does, and maybe for that reason it will be a less desired occupation. But if so, it will have to be shared.
However, what I'm saying is that
our characteristic assumption that pleasure in work, pride in work, is either unrelated to or negatively related to the value of the output is related to a particular stage of social history, namely capitalism, in which human beings are tools of production. It is by no means necessarily true. For example, if you look at the many interviews with workers on assembly lines, for example, that have been done by industrial psychologists, you find that one of the things they complain about over and over again is the fact that their work simply can't be done well; the fact that the assembly line goes through so fast that they can't do their work properly. I just happened to look recently at a study of longevity in some journal on gerontology which tried to trace the factors that you could use to predict longevity -- you know, cigarette smoking and drinking, genetic factors -- everything was looked at. It turned out, in fact, that
the highest predictor, the most successful predictor, was job satisfaction.
QUESTION: People who have nice jobs live longer.
CHOMSKY:
People who are satisfied with their jobs. And I think that makes a good deal of sense, you know, because that's where you spend your life, that's where your creative activities are. Now what leads to job satisfaction? Well, I think many things lead to it, and the knowledge that you are doing something useful for the community is an important part of it. Many people who are satisfied with their work are people who feel that what they're doing is important to do. They can be teachers, they can be doctors, they can be scientists, they can be craftsmen, they can be farmers. I mean, I think the feeling that what one is doing is important, is worth doing, contributes to those with whom one has social bonds, is a very significant factor in one's personal satisfaction.
And over and above that there is the pride and the self-fulfilment that comes from a job well done -- from simply taking your skills and putting them to use. Now, I don't see why that should in any way harm, in fact I should think it would enhance, the value of what's produced.
But let's imagine still that at some level it does harm. Well, okay, at that point, the society, the community, has to decide how to make compromises. Each individual is both a producer and a consumer, after all, and that means that each individual has to join in these socially determined compromises -- if in fact there are compromises. And again I feel the nature of the compromise is much exaggerated because of the distorting prism of the really coercive and personally destructive system in which we live.
QUESTION: All right, you say the community has to make decisions about compromises, and of course communist theory provides for this in its whole thinking about national planning, decisions about investment, direction of investment, and so forth. In an anarchist society, it would seem that you're not willing to provide for that amount of governmental superstructure that would be necessary to make the plans, make the investment decisions, to decide whether you give priority to what people want to consume, or whether you give priority to the work people want to do.
CHOMSKY: I don't agree with that. It seems to me that anarchist, or, for that matter, left-Marxist structures, based on systems of workers' councils and federations, provide exactly the set of levels of decision-making at which decisions can be made about a national plan. Similarly, state socialist societies also provide a level of decision-making -- let's say the nation -- in which national plans can be produced. There's no difference in that respect. The difference has to do with participation in those decisions and control over those decisions. In the view of anarchists and left-Marxists -- like the workers' councils or the Council Communists, who were left-Marxists -- those decisions are made by the informed working class through their assemblies and their direct representatives, who live among them and work among them. On the state socialist systems, the national plan is made by a national bureaucracy, which accumulates to itself all the relevant information, makes decisions, offers them to the public, and says, "You can pick me or you can pick him, but we're all part of this remote bureaucracy." These are the poles, these are the polar opposites within the socialist tradition.
QUESTION: So, in fact, there's a very considerable role for the state and possibly even for civil servants, for bureaucracy, but it's the control over it that's different.
CHOMSKY: Well, see, I don't really believe that we need a separate bureaucracy to carry out governmental decisions.
QUESTION: You need various forms of expertise.
CHOMSKY: Oh, yes, but let's take expertise with regard to economic planning, because certainly in any complex industrial society there should be a group of technicians whose task it is to produce plans, and to lay out the consequences of decisions, to explain to the people who have to make the decisions that if you decide this, you're likely to get this consequence, because that's what your programming model shows, and so on. But the point is that those planning systems are themselves industries, and they will have their workers' councils and they will be part of the whole council system, and the distinction is that these planning systems do not make decisions. They produce plans in exactly the same way that automakers produce autos. The plans are then available for the workers' councils and council assemblies, in the same way that autos are available to ride in. Now, of course, what this does require is an informed and educated working class. But that's precisely what we are capable of achieving in advanced industrial societies.
QUESTION: How far does the success of libertarian socialism or anarchism really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man, both in his motivation, his altruism, and also in his knowledge and sophistication?
CHOMSKY: I think it not only depends on it but in fact the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it. It will contribute to a spiritual transformation -- precisely that kind of great transformation in the way humans conceive of themselves and their ability to act, to decide, to create, to produce, to enquire -- precisely that spiritual transformation that social thinkers from the left-Marxist traditions, from Luxembourg, say, through anarcho-syndicalists, have always emphasized. So, on the one hand, it requires that spiritual transformation. On the other hand, its purpose is to create institutions which will contribute to that transformation in the nature of work, the nature of creative activity, simply in social bonds among people, and through this interaction of creating institutions which permit new aspects of human nature to flourish. And then the building of still more libertarian institutions to which these liberated human beings can contribute. This is the evolution of socialism as I understand it.
QUESTION: And finally, Professor Chomsky, what do you think of the chances of societies along these lines coming into being in the major industrial countries in the West in the next quarter of a century or so?
CHOMSKY: I don't think I'm wise enough, or informed enough, to make predictions and I think predictions about such poorly understood matters probably generally reflect personality more than judgment. But I think this much at least we can say: there are obvious tendencies in industrial capitalism towards concentration of power in narrow economic empires and in what is increasingly becoming a totalitarian state. These are tendencies that have been going on for a long time, and I don't see anything stopping them really. I think those tendencies will continue. They're part of the stagnation and decline of capitalist institutions.
Now, it seems to me that the development towards state totalitarianism and towards economic concentration -- and, of course, they are linked -- will continually lead to revulsion, to efforts of personal liberation and to organizational efforts at social liberation. And that'll take all sorts of forms. Throughout all Europe, in one form or another, there is a call for what is sometimes called worker participation or co-determination, or even sometimes worker control. Now, most of these efforts are minimal. I think that they're misleading -- in fact, may even undermine efforts for the working class to liberate itself. But, in part, they're responsive to a strong intuition and understanding that coercion and repression, whether by private economic power or by the state bureaucracy, is by no means a necessary feature of human life. And the more those concentrations of power and authority continue, the more we will see revulsion against them and efforts to organize and overthrow them. Sooner or later, they'll succeed, I hope.http://libcom.org/library/relevance-ana ... -peter-jay*
