#150 - The Government of the Future: Noam Chomsky on Libertarianism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Political Implications of Marxism, Individualism v Collectivism, and Prospects for Democracy and Survival

Hey everybody, this is William Ingalls, the creator of the History of Philosophy audio archive. If you haven't already, come on over to my Patreon page. I've got some links in the description below and a bunch of bonus episodes on history and politics waiting right over there. So, if you haven't already, I will see you on the page. Now, back to the History of Philosophy. The sound seminar you're about to hear was recorded at the Poetry Center of the New York YM YWHA on February 16, 1970. This program presents Noam Shomsky speaking on government in the future. Here is Noam Shomsky. I think it's useful to set up as a framework for discussion for somewhat idealized positions with regard to the role of the state in an advanced industrial society. I want to call these positions first classical liberal, second libertarian socialist, third state socialist, four state capitalist, and I want to consider each in turn. Also, I'd like to make clear my own point of view in advance so you can evaluate and judge what I'm saying. I think that the libertarian socialist concepts, and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through anarchism, I think that these are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society. In contrast, it seems to me that the ideology of state socialism, that is what has become of Bolshevism, and of state capitalism, the modern welfare state, these of course are dominant in the industrial countries and industrial societies, but I believe that they are regressive and highly inadequate social theories, and a large number of our really fundamental problems stem from a kind of incompatibility and the inappropriateness of these social forms to a modern industrial society. Well, then let me consider these four points of reference in sequence, beginning with the classical liberal point of view. Classical liberalism asserts, as its major idea, an opposition to all but the most restricted and minimal forms of state intervention in personal or social life. Well, this conclusion is quite familiar. However, the reasoning that leads to it is less familiar, and I think a good deal more important than the conclusion itself. One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in Wilhelm von Humboldt's "Limits of State Action," which was written in 1792, though not published for 60 or 70 years after that. In his view, the state tends to, quote, "tends to make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends overlooking his individual purposes." And since man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a profoundly anti-human institution. That is, its actions, its existence, are ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity, hence incompatible with what Humboldt, and in the following century Marx, Bakunin, Mill, and many others, what they see as the true end of man. And for the record, I think that this is an accurate description. The modern and conservative tends to regard himself as the lineal descendant of the classical liberal in this sense, but I think that that can be maintained only from an extremely superficial point of view, as one can see by studying more carefully the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian thought, as expressed in my opinion in its most profound form by Humboldt. I think the issues are of really quite considerable contemporary significance, and if you don't mind what may appear to be a somewhat antiquarian excursion, I'd like to expand on them. For Humboldt, as for Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man's essential attribute is his freedom. "To inquire and to create, these are the centers around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve. But," he goes on to say, "all moral culture springing solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and artificial contrivances. The cultivation of the understanding as of any of man's other faculties is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of others." Well, from these assumptions quite obviously an educational theory follows, and he develops it, but I won't pursue it, but also far more follows. Humboldt goes on to develop at least the rudiments of a theory of exploitation and of alienated labor that suggests, in significant ways, I think the early Marx. So let me, Humboldt, in fact, continues these comments that I made, that I quoted about the cultivation of understanding through spontaneous action in the following way. He says, "Man never regards what he possesses as so much his own as what he does, and the laborer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their unplastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often tend to degrade it. Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuit's most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. And if a man acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, he says we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is. For humble, then man is born to inquire and create. And when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice, then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of production or a well-trained parrot. This is the essence of his concept of human nature. And I think it's very revealing and interesting to compare it with Marx, with his early, with the early Marx manuscripts in particular, his account of, quote, "the alienation of labor when work is external to the worker, not part of his nature, so that he does not fulfill himself in his work, but denies himself and is physically exhausted and mentally debased, his alienated labor that casks some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines, thus depriving man of his species' character of free conscious activity and productive life." Recall also Marx's well-known and often quoted reference to a higher form of society in which labor has become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life. And recall also his repeated criticism of the specialized labor, which, quote again, "mutilates the worker into a fragment of a human being, good grades him to become a mere pertinence of the machine, makes his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed, estranges from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science has incorporated into it as an independent power." Robert Tucker, for one, has rightly emphasized that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a frustrated producer than as a dissatisfied consumer. And this far more radical critique of capitalist relations of production flows directly, often in the same words, from the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment. For this reason, I think one must say that classical liberal ideas, in their essence, though not in the way they developed, are profoundly anti-capitalist. The essence of these ideas must be destroyed for them to serve as an ideology of modern industrial capitalism. Writing in the 1780s and early 1790s, Humboldt had no conception of the forms that industrial capitalism would take. Consequently, in this classic of classical liberalism, he stresses the problem of limiting state power, and he's not overly concerned with the dangers of private power. The reason is that he believes in and speaks of the essential equality of condition of private citizens. Of course, he has no idea, writing in 1790, of the ideas and of the ways in which the notion private person would come to be reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism. He did not foresee, I now quote the anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, he did not foresee that democracy, with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and liberalism, with its right of man over his own person, both would be wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. Humboldt did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence, prevent the destruction of the physical environment. I speak optimistically, of course. As Karl Polanyi for one has pointed out, the self-adjusting market could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. It would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. I think that's correct. Humboldt also did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character of labor. The doctrine, again in Polanyi's words, that it is not for the commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale, to what purpose it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed. But the commodity in this case is, of course, a human life, and social protection was therefore a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the classical free market. Nor did Humboldt understand in 1790 that capitalist economic relations perpetuated a form of bondage, which long before that, in fact, as early as 1767, Simon Lange had declared to be even worse than slavery, writing, "It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? He's free, you say. That is his misfortune. These men, it is said, had no master. They had one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence. And if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage, as every spokesman for the Enlightenment would insist, then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited. What Fourier referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history, the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second wage earners out of serfs, and the third which will transform the proletariat, free men, by eliminating the commodity character of labor, ending wage slavery, and bringing the commercial, industrial, and financial institutions under democratic control. These are all things that Humboldt and his classical liberal doctrine did not express and didn't see, but I think he might have accepted these conclusions. He does, for example, agree that state intervention in social life is legitimate if freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom, but even existence itself would be inconceivable, which are precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy. And he does, as in the remarks that I quoted, vigorously condemn the alienation of labor. In any event, his criticism of bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as a very eloquent forewarning of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history. And the important point is that the basis of his critique is applicable to a far broader range of coercive institutions than he imagined, in particular to the institutions of industrial capitalism. Though he expresses a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no primitive individualist in the style of, for example, Rousseau. So Rousseau extols the savage who lives within himself, but Humboldt's vision is entirely different. He sums up his remarks as follows. He says, "The whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this, that while they would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered." And he, in fact, looks forward to a community of free association without coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions in which free men can create and inquire, achieve the highest development of their powers. In fact, far ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate, perhaps, to the next stage of industrial society. We can perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely exists today, though its elements can perhaps be perceived. For example, in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved so far its fullest realization, though still tragically flawed in the western democracies, or in the Israeli kibbutzine, or in the experiments with workers' councils in Yugoslavia, or in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and to create a new involvement in the social process, which is a fundamental element in the Third World revolutions, coexisting on easily with indefensible authoritarian practice. So let me summarize its first point. The first concept of the state that I want to set up as a point of reference, classical liberal, its doctrine is that these state functions should be drastically limited, but this familiar characterization is a very superficial one. More deeply, the classical liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature, one that stresses the importance of diversity and free creation. And therefore, this view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism, with its wage slavery, its alienated labor, and its hierarchic and authoritarian principles of social and economic organization. At least in its emboldened form, classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts of possessive individualism, which are intrinsic to capitalist ideology. So it seeks to eliminate social fetters, but to replace them by social bonds, not by competitive greed, not by predatory individualism, not of course by corporate empire, state, or private. Classical libertarian thought seems to me therefore to lead directly to libertarian socialism or anarchism, if you like, when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism. Well, the second point of reference that I want to discuss is the libertarian socialist vision of the state. A French writer rather sympathetic to anarchism once wrote that anarchism has a broad back, like paper that endures anything. And there are many shades of anarchism, and I'm concerned here only with one, namely the anarchism of Bakunin, who wrote in his Anarchist Manifesto of 1865, that to be an anarchist one must first be a socialist. I'm concerned with the anarchism of Adolf Fischer, one of the martyrs of the A-market affair in 1886, who said that every anarchist is a socialist, but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist. A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production. Such property is indeed, as Rudon's famous remark asserted, a form of theft. But a consistent anarchist will also oppose the organization of production by government, I'm quoting. It means state socialism, the command of the state officials over production, and the command of managers, scientists, shop officials in the shop. The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation, and this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production by some form of workers' councils. His remarks, it happens, are quoted from the left-wing Marxist Anton Panakuk, and in fact radical Marxism, what Menon once called infantile ultra-leftism, merges with anarchist currents. This is an important point, I think, and let me give one further illustration of this convergence between left-wing Marxism and socialist anarchism. Consider the following characterization of revolutionary socialism. The revolutionary socialist denies that state ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the state cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks, industrial administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an industrial system. Its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activity and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When the central administrative industrial committee meets, it will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of socialism. The transition from one social system to the other will be the social revolution. The political state throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling classes. The Republic of Socialism will be the government of industry administered on the half of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the many. The latter will mean the economic freedom of all. It will be, therefore, a true democracy. These remarks are taken from a book called The State of its Origins and Punction written by William Paul in early 1917 just prior to Lenin's state of revolution, which is his most libertarian work. William Paul was one of the founders of the British Communist Party, later the editor of the British Communist Party Journal. And it's interesting that his critique of state socialism resembles, very closely, I think, the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists. In particular, in its principle, that the state must disappear to be replaced by the industrial organization of society in the course of the social revolution itself. Proudhon in 1851 wrote that what we put in place of the government is industrial organization, and many, many similar comments can be cited. That, in a sense, is the fundamental idea of anarchist revolutionaries. What's more important than the fact that many such statements can be cited is that these ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action several times, for example, in Germany and Italy after the First World War in Catalonia in 1936. One might argue, at least I would argue, that council communism in this sense, in the sense of the long quotation that I read, is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, technocrats, vanguard party, estate bureaucracy, or whatever. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination, the classical liberal ideals, which are expressed also by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries, cannot be realized. Man will, in other words, not be free to inquire and create, to develop his own potentialities to their fullest. The worker will remain a fragment of a human being degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from above. Now, the ideas of revolutionary libertarian socialism in this sense, they've been submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism and state capitalism. But there's been an interesting resurgence in the last couple of years. In fact, the theses that I quoted from Anton Pannecook, these were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers group. And the quotation that I read from William Paul on revolutionary socialism was taken from a paper by Walter Kindle at the National Conference on Workers' Control in Sheffield, England last March. Both of these groups, the French and the Englishman, represent something significant. The Workers' Control Movement in England, in particular, has developed into a, I think, remarkably significant force in the last few years. It includes some of the largest trade unions, for example, the Malthemate Engineering Federation, which I think is the second largest trade union in England, and which has taken these principles as its fundamental ideas. It's had a series of successful conferences putting out an interesting pamphlet literature. And on the continent, there are parallel developments. May 1968 in France, of course, accelerated the growing interest in council communism and similar ideas, other forms of libertarian socialism in France and Germany, as it did in England. Given the general conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it's not too surprising that the United States is relatively untouched by these currents. But that too may change. The erosion of the Cold War mythology at least makes it possible to discuss some of these questions. And if the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build on the achievements of the past decade, the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines with democratic control in the workplace as well as in the community, this should become the dominant intellectual issue for those who are live to the problems of contemporary society. And as a mass movement for revolutionary libertarian socialism develops, as I hope it will, speculation should proceed to action. Now may seem quixotic to group left Marxism and anarchism under the same rubric as I've done given the antagonism throughout the past century between Marxists and anarchists, beginning with the antagonism between Marx and Engels on the one hand, and for example, Proudhon, Bakunin on the other. In the 19th century, at least, their differences with regard to the question of the state was significant. But in a sense, it was tactical. The anarchists were convinced that capitalism and the state must be destroyed together. Engels in a letter of 1883 expressed his opposition to this idea as follows. The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society, without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers, similar to those after the Paris Commune. Now, the Paris Commune, I think it's fair to say, did represent the ideas of libertarian socialism, of anarchism, if you like, and Marx, of course, wrote about it with great enthusiasm. He, in fact, experienced the Commune, led him to modify his concept of the role of the state. As you can see, for example, by looking at the introduction to the Communist Manifesta, the edition of it was published in 1872, and to take on something like a more anarchist perspective of the nature of social revolution. While the Commune was, of course, drowned in blood, as the anarchist Commuines of Spain were destroyed by fascist and communist armies, and, unlike they argued, that more dictatorial structures would have defended the revolution against such forces. But I doubt this very much. At least in the case of Spain, it seems to me that a more consistent libertarian policy might have provided the only possible defense of the revolution. Of course, this can be contested in its long story, which I don't want to go into here. But at the very least, it's clear that one would have to be rather naive after the events of the past half century to fail to see the truth in Bakunin's repeated warnings that the red bureaucracy would prove the most vile and terrible lie of the century. He once said, "Take the most radical revolutionary and place him on the throne of all Russian," he said in 1870, "for give him a dictatorial power, and before a year is passed, he will become worse than the Tsar himself." I'm afraid in this respect, Bakunin was all too perceptive, and this kind of warning was repeatedly voiced from the left. For example, the anarcho-syndicalist for non-pilotiers in the 1890s must even the transitory state to which we have to submit, necessarily and fatally be the collectivist jail. Can't it consist in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared? I don't pretend to know the answer to that question, but I think it's tolerably clear that unless the answer is positive, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are perhaps rather slight. I think Martin Buber put the problem quite succinctly when he said, "One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club that put forth leaves." For just this reason, it's essential that a powerful revolutionary movement exist in the United States if there are to be any reasonable possibilities for democratic social change of a radical sort anywhere in the capitalist world, and comparable remarks, I think, undoubtedly hold for the Russian Empire. Lenin, until the end of his life, stressed the idea, "that it is an elementary truth of Marxism that the victory of socialism requires the joint effort of workers in a number of advanced countries. At the very least, it requires that the great centers of world imperialism be impeded by domestic pressures from counter-revolutionary intervention. Only such possibilities will permit any revolution to overthrow its own coercive state institutions as it tries to bring the economy under direct democratic control." Well, let me summarize briefly again. I've mentioned so far two reference points for a discussion of the state, classical liberalism and libertarian socialism. They're in agreement that the functions of the state are repressive and that state action must be limited. The libertarian socialist goes on to insist that the state power must be eliminated in favor of the democratic organization of industrial society, with direct popular control over all institutions by those who participate in, as well as those who are directly affected by the workings of these institutions. So one might imagine then a system of workers' councils, consumers' councils, commune assemblies, regional federations, and so on with the kind of representation that's direct and revocable in the sense that representatives are directly answerable to and return directly to the well-defined and integrated social group for which they speak in some higher-order organization, something obviously very different than our system of representation. Now, it might very well be asked whether such a social structure is feasible in a complex, highly technological society. There are counter-arguments, and I think they pull into two main categories. First category is that such an organization is contrary to human nature. And the second category says roughly that it's incompatible with the demands of efficiency, and I'd like to briefly consider each of these. Consider the first that a free society is contrary to human nature. It's often asked, "Do men really want freedom? Do they want the responsibility that goes with it, or would they prefer to be ruled by a benevolent master?" Consistently, apologists for the existing distribution of power have held to one or another version of the idea of a happy slave. 200 years ago, Rousseau denounced the sophistic politicians and intellectuals who searched for ways to obscure the fact, so he maintained, that the essential and defining property of man is his freedom. They attributed to man a natural inclination to servitude, without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue. Their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and a taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them. As proof of this doctrine, he refers to the marvels done by all free peoples to guard themselves from oppression. True, he says, those who have abandoned the life of a free man do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy and their change. But when I see the other sacrifice pleasures repose wealth power and life itself for the preservation of this soul good, which is so disdained by those who have lost it, when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom. A comment which, to which we can perhaps give a contemporary interpretation. Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant 40 years later. He cannot, he says, accept the proposition that certain people are not right for freedom, for example the surface of some landlord. If one accepts this assumption he writes, freedom will never be achieved, for one cannot arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it. One must be free to learn how to make use of one's powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition, under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one's own experiences, and one must be free to be able to undertake them. To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one's control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever is an infringement on the right of God himself who has created man to be free. This particular remark is interesting because of its context as well. Kant, on this occasion, was defending the French Revolution during the terror against those who claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of freedom. And his remarks too, I think, have obvious contemporary relevance. No rational person will approve of violence and terror, and in particular the terror of the post-revolutionary state which has fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. At the same time, no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs when long subdued masses rise against their oppressors or take their first steps towards liberty and social reconstruction. Humboldt, just a few years before Kant, had expressed a view very similar to that. He also said that freedom and variety are the preconditions for human self-realization. Nothing promotes this rightness for freedom so much as freedom itself. His truth perhaps may not be acknowledged by those who have so often used this unrightness as an excuse for continuing repression, but it seems to me to follow in questionably from the very nature of man. The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power. To heighten this power is the only way to supply the want, but to do so presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. And those who do not comprehend this, he says, may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature and wishing to make men into machines. Rosa Luxemburg's fraternal sympathetic critique of Bolshevik ideology and practice was given in very similar terms. Only the active participation of the masses in self-government and social reconstruction could bring about what she described as the complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule. Just as only their creative experience and spontaneous action can solve the myriad problems of creating a libertarian socialist society. One might say that historically the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest central committee. And I think that these remarks can be translated immediately for the somewhat parallel ideology of the soulful corporation, which is now fairly popular among American academics. For example, Carl Kazan, who writes, "No longer the agent of proprietorship seeking to maximize return on investment, management sees itself as responsible to stockholders, employees, customers, the general public, and perhaps most important to firm itself as an institution. There is no display of greed or graspingness. There's no attempt to push off on the workers of the community, at least part of the social costs of the enterprise. The modern corporation is a soulful corporation." Similarly, the vanguard party is a soulful party. In both cases, those who urge that men submit to the rule of these benevolent autocracies may, I think, justly be accused of wishing to make men into machines. Now, the correctness of the view, which is expressed by Rousseau and Kant and Humboldt and Luxembourg and innumerable others, I don't think that the correctness of this is the moment susceptible to scientific proof. One can only evaluate it in terms of experience and intuition. But one can also point out the social consequences of adopting the view that men are born to be free or that they are born to be ruled by benevolent autocrats. What of the second question, the question of efficiency? Is democratic control of the industrial system down to its smallest functional units incompatible with efficiency? This is very frequently argued on several grounds. Some say, for example, that centralized management is a technological imperative. But I think the argument is exceedingly weak when one looks into it. The very same technology that brings relevant information to the board of managers can bring it at the time that it is needed to everyone in the workforce. The technology that's now capable of eliminating the stupefying labor that turns men into specialized tools of production, this technology permits in principle the leisure and the educational opportunities that make them able to use this information in a rational way. And furthermore, even an economic elite which is dripping with soulfulness, to use Ralph Miliband's phrase, is constrained by the system in which it functions to organize production for certain ends, power, growth, profit. But not in the nature of the case, human needs, needs that, to an ever more critical degree, can be expressed only in collective terms. It's surely conceivable, and perhaps even likely, that decisions made by the collective itself will reflect these needs and interests, as well as those made by various soulful elites. In any event, it's a bit difficult to take seriously arguments about efficiency in a society that devotes such enormous resources to waste and destruction. As everyone knows, the very concept of efficiency is dripping with ideology. Maximization of commodities is hardly the only measure of a decent existence. The point is familiar, and no elaboration is necessary. Well, let me turn, finally, to the two final points of reference, the Bolshevik or state socialist and the state capitalist. As I've tried to suggest, they have points in common, and in interesting respects, they diverge from the classical liberal ideal or its later elaboration in libertarian socialism. Since I'm concerned with our society, let me make a few rather elementary observations about the role of the state, its likely evolution, and the ideological assumptions that accompany and sometimes disguise these phenomena. It's obvious to begin with that we can distinguish two systems of power, the political system and the economic system. The former consists in principle of elected representatives of the people who set public policy. The latter, in principle, is a system of private power, a system of private empires that are free from public control, except in the remote and indirect ways in which even a feudal nobility or totalitarian dictatorship must be responsive to the public will. There are several immediate consequences of this organization of society. The first is that in a subtle way, an authoritarian cast of mind is induced in a very large mass of the population, which is subject to arbitrary decree from above. I think this has a great effect on the general character of culture. We affect the belief that one must obey arbitrary dictates and exceed to authority. And I think, in fact, a remarkable and exciting fact about the youth movement in recent years is that it's challenging and beginning to break down some of these authoritarian patterns. Second fact that is important is that the range of decisions that are in principle subject to public democratic control is quite narrow. For example, it excludes in law and in principle the central institutions in any advanced industrial society, that is the entire commercial, industrial and financial system. And a third fact is that even within the narrow range of issues that are submitted in principle to democratic decision making, the centers of private power, of course, exert an inordinately heavy influence in perfectly obvious ways through control of the media, through control of political organizations, or in fact, by the simple and direct means of supplying the top personnel for the parliamentary system itself, as they obviously do. Dick Barnett in a recent study of this reports his study of the top 400 decision makers in the post-war national security system that most have, I quote now, "come from executive suites and law offices within shouting distance of each other in 15 city blocks and five major cities." And every other study shows the same thing. In short, the democratic system had best functions within a very narrow range in a capitalist democracy. And even within this narrow range, its functioning is enormously biased by the concentrations of private power and by the authoritarian and passive modes of thinking that are induced by autocratic institutions, such as industries, for example. It's a truism, but one that must be constantly stressed that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible. And a careful look at the matter, I think, nearly strengthens this conclusion. There are perfectly obvious processes of centralization of control taking place in both the political and the industrial system. As far as the political system is concerned, in every parliamentary democracy, not only ours, the role of parliament in policy formation has been declining in the years since World War II, as everyone knows, and political commentators repeatedly point out. The executive, in other words, has become increasingly more powerful as the planning functions of the state become more significant. The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes quarrelous but essentially kindly uncle, who complains while furiously puffing on his pike, but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance. And fearful studies of civil military decisions since World War II show that this is quite an accurate perception. Senator Vandenberg, 20 years ago, expressed his fear that the American chief executive would become the number one world warlord of the earth, his phrase. That has since occurred. Clearest decision is the decision to escalate in Vietnam in February 1965 and cynical disregard of the express will of the electorate. This incident reveals, I think, perfect clarity, the role of the public in decisions about peace and war, the role of the public in decisions about the main lines of public policy in general. And it also suggests the irrelevance of electoral politics to major decisions of national policy. Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out because you never voted them in in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on, who overwhelmingly staffed the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based Mandarin class, these people remain in power, no matter whom you elect. And furthermore, it's interesting to note that this ruling elix is pretty clear about its social role. As an example, take Robert McNamara, whose person widely praised in liberal circles for his humanity, his technical brilliance and his campaign to control the military. His views of social organization, I think, are quite illuminating. He says vital decision-making and policy matters as well as business must remain at the top. That is partly, though not completely, what the top is for. And he goes on to suggest that this is apparently a divine imperative. I quote, "God is clearly democratic. He distributes brain power universally, but he quite justifiably expects us to do something efficient and constructive with that priceless gift. That's what management is all about. Management is in the end the most creative of all the arts for its medium, this human talent itself. The real threat to democracy comes from under management. The under management of society is not the respect of liberty. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. If it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential." End of quote. So reason, then, is to be identified as the centralization of decision-making at the top in the hands of management. Popular involvement in decision-making is a threat to liberty, a violation of reason. Reason is embodied in autocratic, tightly managed institutions. Strengthening these institutions within which man can function most efficiently is, in his words, a great human adventure of our time. Well, this has a faintly familiar meaning to it, and I think it is the authentic role of the authentic voice of the technical intelligentsia, the liberal intelligentsia, the technocratic corporate elite in a modern society. There is a parallel process of centralization in economic life. There's a recent FTC report which notes that the 200 largest manufacturing corporations now control about two-thirds of all manufacturing assets. At the beginning of World War II, the same amount of power was spread over a thousand corporations. I quote the report. It says, "A small industrial elite of huge conglomerate companies is gobbling up American business and largely destroying competitive free enterprise. Furthermore, it says these 200 corporations are partially linked with each other and with other corporations in ways that may prevent or discourage independent behavior and market decisions. What is novel about such observations is only their source, the FTC. They are familiar to the point of cliché among left liberal commentators on American society. The centralization of power also has an international dimension." Again, pointed out that on the basis, I'm quoting from foreign affairs, that on the basis of the gross value of their output, U.S. enterprises abroad in the aggregate comprised the third largest country in the world, with a gross product greater than that of any country except the United States and the Soviet Union. American firms control over half the automobile industry in England, almost 40% of petroleum in Germany, over 40% of the telegraphic, telephone, and electronic and business equipment in France, 75% of the computers. Within a decade, given present trends, more than half of the British exports will be from American owned companies. And furthermore, these are highly concentrated investments. 40% of direct investment in Germany, France, and Britain is by three firms, American firms. George Ball has explained that the project of constructing an integrated world economy dominated by American capital, an empire in other words, is no idealistic pipe dream, but a hard headed prediction. It's a role he says into which we are being pushed by the imperatives of our own economy, the major instrument being the multinational corporation which George Ball describes as follows. In its modern form, the multinational corporation or one with worldwide operations and markets is a distinctly American development. Through such corporations, it has become possible for the first time to use the world's resources with maximum efficiency. But there must be greater unification of the world economy to give full play to the benefits of multinational corporations. These multinational corporations are the beneficiary of the mobilization of resources by the federal government. And it's worldwide operations and markets are backed ultimately by American military force, now based in dozens of countries. It's not difficult to guess who will reap the benefits from the integrated world economy, which is the domain of operation of these American based international economic institutions. Well, at this stage in discussion, one has to mention the specter of communism. What is the threat of communism to this system? For a clear and cogent answer, one can turn to an extensive study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Planning Association, called the Political Economy of American Foreign Policy, a very important book, which was compiled by a representative segment of the tiny elite that largely sets public policy whoever is technically in office. In effect, it's as close as you can come to a manifesto of the American ruling class. Here they define the primary threat of communism as, I quote, "the economic transformation of the communist powers in ways which reduce their willingness or ability to complement the industrial economies of the West." That is the primary threat of communism. Communism, in short, reduces the willingness and ability of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist economy in the manner of, for example, the Philippines, which has developed a colonial economy of a classic type after 75 years of American tutelage and domination. It's this doctrine which explains why the British economist Joan Robinson describes the American crusade against communism as a crusade against development. The Cold War ideology and the international communist conspiracy function in an important way as essentially a propaganda device to mobilize support at a particular historical moment for this longtime imperial enterprise. In fact, I believe that this is probably the main function of the Cold War. It serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems. I think that the persistence of the Cold War can be in part explained by its utility for the managers of the two great world systems. Well, there's one final element that has to be added to this picture, namely the ongoing militarization of American society. How does this enter in? To see, I think one has to look back at World War II and to recall that prior to World War II, of course, we were deep in the depression. World War II taught an important economic lesson. It taught the lesson that government-induced reduction in a carefully controlled economy, centrally controlled, could overcome the effects of the depression. I think this is what Charles E. Wilson had in mind in 1944 when he proposed that we then, that we have a permanent war economy in the post-war world. Of course, the trouble is that in a capitalist economy, there are only a number of ways in which government intervention can take place. It can't be competitive with private empires, for example, which is to say that it can't be any useful production. In fact, it has to be the production of luxury goods, goods not capital, not useful commodities, which would be competitive. And unfortunately, there's only one category of luxury goods that can be produced endlessly with rapid obsolescence, quickly wasting, and no limit on how many of them you can use. We all know what that is. This whole matter is described pretty well by the business historian, Alfred Chandler. He describes the economic lessons of World War II as follows. "The government spent far more than the most enthusiastic new dealer had ever proposed. Most of the output of the expenditures was destroyed or left on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. But the resulting increased demand sent the nation into a period of prosperity, the like of which had never before been seen. Moreover, the supplying of huge armies and navies fighting the most massive war of all time required a tight centralized control of the national economy. This effort brought corporate managers to Washington to carry out one of the most complex pieces of economic planning in history. That experience lessened the ideological fears over the government's role in stabilizing the economy." This is a conservative commentator, I'm going to point out. It may be added that the ensuing Cold War carried further the de-collidicization of American society and created the kind of a psychological environment in which the government is able to intervene in part through fiscal policies, in part through public work and public services, but very largely, of course, through defense spending. In this way, to use Alfred Chandler's words, "The government acts as a coordinator of last resort when managers are unable to maintain a high level of aggregate demand." As another conservative business historian, Joseph Monson writes, "Enlightened corporate managers, far from fearing government intervention in the economy, view the new economics as a technique for increasing corporate viability." Of course, the most cynical use of these ideas is by the managers of the publicly subsidized war industries. There was a remarkable series in Washington Post about this last about a year ago by Bernard Nossedet. For example, he quoted Samuel Downer, financial vice president of LTV Aerospace, one of the big new conglomerates, who explained why the post-war world must be bolstered by military orders. He said, "It's basic. It's selling appeal as defense of the home. This is one of the greatest appeals the politicians have to adjusting the system. If you're the president and you need a control factor in the economy and you need to sell this factor, you can't sell Harlem and Watts, but you can sell self-preservation and new environment. We're going to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia are ahead of us." The American people understand this. Of course, those bastards aren't exactly ahead of us in this deadly and cynical game, but that's only a minor embarrassment to the thesis. In times of need, we can always follow Dean Rusk, Hubert Humphrey, and other luminaries and appeal to the billion Chinese armed to the teeth and setting out on world conquest. Again, I want to emphasize the role in this system of the Cold War as a technique of domestic control, technique for developing the psychological climate of paranoia and psychosis in which the taxpayer will be willing to provide an enormous and less subsidy to the technologically advanced sectors of American industry and the corporations that dominate this increasingly centralized system. Of course, perfectly obvious that Russian imperialism is not an invention of American ideologists. It's real enough to the Hungarians and the Czechs, for example. What is an invention is the uses to which it's put. For example, by D. Atchison in 1950 or Walt Rostow a decade later, when they pretend that the Vietnam War is an example of Russian imperialism, or by the Johnson administration in 1965, when it justifies the Dominican intervention with reference to the Sino-Soviet military blood, or by the Kennedy intellectuals, who, as Townsend Hoops put it in an article in the Washington Monthly last month, "were diluted by the tensions of the Cold War years and could not perceive that the triumph of the national revolution in Vietnam would not be a triumph for Moscow and P. King, the most remarkable degree of delusion on the part of presumably literate men." Or, for example, by Eugene Rostow, who, in a recent book that was very widely praised by liberal senators and academic intellectuals, outlined the series of challenges to world order in the modern era as follows. Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm Hitler, and continuing in the post-war world, general strikes in France and Italy, the Civil War in Greece, and the attack on South Vietnam, where, he writes in 1968, "Russia has put us to severe tests in its efforts to spread communism by the sword." Now, this is a very interesting series of challenges to world order. Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, general strikes in France and Italy, the Civil War in Greece, and the Russian attack on South Vietnam. If one thinks it's true, he can reach some pretty interesting conclusions about modern history. While one can continue with this indefinitely, I mean to suggest that the Cold War is highly functional, both to the American elite and its Soviet counterpart, who in a perfectly similar way exploit Western imperialism, which they did not invent, as they send their armies into Czechoslovakia. It's important in both cases in providing an ideology for empire and for the government subsidized system here of military capitalism. It's predictable, then, that challenges to this ideology will be bitterly resisted by force, if necessary. Now, in many ways, American society is indeed open and liberal values are preserved. However, as poor people and black people and other ethnic minorities know very well, the liberal veneer is pretty thin. Mark Twain once wrote that it is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. Those who lack the prudence may well pay the cost. Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, the political system is well, at least in very large measure. The people so-called do exercise an occasional choice among those who Mark's once called the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling class. And those who find this characterization too harsh may prefer the formulations of a modern democratic theorist like Joseph Schumpeter, who describes modern political democracy favorably as a system in which the deciding of issues by the electorate is secondary to the election of the men who are to do the deciding. A political party, he says accurately, is a group whose members proposed to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power. If that were not so, it would be impossible for different parties to adopt exactly or almost exactly the same program. That's all the advantages of political democracy as he sees it. This program that both parties adopt more or less exactly, and the individuals who compete for power, they express a narrow conservative ideology, basically the interests of one or another element in the corporate elite with some modifications. Now, this is obviously no conspiracy. I think it's simply implicit in the system of corporate capitalism. These people and the institutions they represent are in effect in power. And their interests are the national interest. It's this interest that is served primarily and overwhelmingly by the overseas empire and the growing system of military state capitalism at home. If we were to withdraw the consent of the government, as I think we should, we're withdrawing our consent to have these men and the interests today represent government and manage American society and impose their concept of world order and their criteria for legitimate political and economic development in much of the world. Although an immense effort of propaganda and mystification is carried on to conceal these facts, nonetheless facts they remain. We have today the technical and material resources to meet man's animal needs. We have not developed the cultural and moral resources or the democratic forms of social organization that make possible the humane and rational use of our material wealth and power. Conceivably, the classical liberal ideals as expressed and developed in their libertarian socialist form are achievable. But if so, only by a popular revolutionary movement rooted in wide strata of the population and committed to the elimination of repressive and authoritarian institutions, state and pride. To create such a movement is the challenge we face and must meet if there's to be an escape from contemporary barbarism. If you've enjoyed this episode of the History of Philosophy Audio Archive, please come on over to my Patreon page. You will find a link in the description below, and we've got a bunch of bonus episodes over there waiting for you. So, looking forward to seeing you on the page. Bye for now.