From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: CHOMSKY -- "Vile Maxim of the Masters" (I)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 02:46:21 GMT


*Subject: Chomsky/Z: Year 501 (part II), Part 2/8 
*From: JASKE@bat.bates.edu 
The following article by Noam Chomsky appeared in: 
     Z Magazine, July-August 1992 
and is reprinted here with the magazine's permission. 
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Year 501: World Orders Old and New: Part II (PART 2 OF 8; 11.5KB) 
================================================================= 

2. The "Vile Maxim of the Masters" 
------------------------------------------------------------ 

The world economy has not returned to the growth rates of the 
Bretton Woods era.  The decline of the South was particularly 
severe in Africa and Latin America, where it was accompanied by 
rampant state terror.  The catastrophe was accelerated by the 
neoliberal economic doctrines dictated by the world rulers.  The 
UN Economic Commission for Africa found that countries pursuing 
the recommended IMF programs had lower growth rates than those 
that relied on the public sector for basic human needs.  The 
disastrous impact of neoliberal policies in Latin America was 
particularly striking, heightened by the openness of their 
economies to international capital markets.  This led to huge 
capital flight, unlike the East Asian state-run economies which 
allow no such frivolity. <<<NB: See _Deterring Democracy_, chap. 
7; Nancy Wright, _Multinational Monitor_, April 1990, cited in 
Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, _Diplomatic History_, Spring 1992; 
James Petras, _Monthly Review_, May 1992.>>> 

There is a technical term for the predictable effects of the 
dictates of the powerful; they are called "economic miracles" -- 
meaning, improvement of the investment climate and the prospects 
for domestic elites associated with the foreign beneficiaries, 
along with rapid increase in poverty, starvation, and general 
misery for the undeserving public.  Another concomitant is great 
satisfaction and self-adulation in the commissar culture. 

Meanwhile, the same state authorities and their minions preach 
ruinous economic doctrines and block the way to independent 
development in the South, and in numerous other ways ensure that 
wealth and power centralize among the truly deserving in the 
corporate board rooms.  It is not their business that the 
doctrines they preach have regularly been evaded when necessary 
by the victors in the game while punishing those subjected to 
these dogmas, once again through the 1980s.  Approved doctrine 
holds that the "trickle down" and "export promotion" policies 
that have always led to disaster in the past will succeed today. 
And they will, for the usual beneficiaries, who run the process 
and understand it well enough.  The basic truth is captured in 
the headline of a lead article in the _Wall Street Journal_ on 
the "initial [sic] social costs" of the "shock therapy" 
administered by their benefactors: "People Say the New Wealth Is 
Slow to Trickle Down; Leaders: Stay the Course." <<<NB: Thomas 
Kamm, _WSJ_, April 16, 1992.>>> 

On occasion, developed societies too take the rhetoric seriously 
and fail to protect themselves from the destructive impact of 
unregulated markets.  The consequences are the same, though not 
so lethal as in the traditional colonial domains.  Australia in 
the 1980s is a case in point.  Deregulation and other free market 
experiments (carried out by a labor government that adopted the 
prescriptions of the right) created what one leading economic 
commentator calls a "capital disaster" (Tom Fitzgerald).  The 
approved policies succeeded in reducing national income by over 
5% a year by the end of the decade.  Real wages declined, 
Australian enterprises fell under foreign control, and the 
country advanced towards the status of a resource base for the 
Japan-centered state capitalist region, which maintained its 
dynamic growth thanks to radical departures from neoliberal 
dogma. <<<NB: Tom Fitzgerald, _Between Life and Economics_ (1990 
Boyer lectures of the Australian Broadcasting Company, ABC, 
1990).>>> 

Fitzgerald observes that nothing different should be expected 
from selective obeisance to Adam Smith, ignoring his warnings 
about "the vile maxim of the masters": "All for themselves, and 
nothing for other people." 

The rich industrial societies themselves are taking on something 
of a Third World cast, with islands of extreme wealth and 
privilege amidst a rising sea of poverty and despair.  This is 
particularly true of the US and Britain, subjected to 
Reagan-Thatcher discipline.  Continental Europe is not too far 
behind, despite the residual power of labor and the social 
contract it has defended, and Europe's ability to export its 
slums through the device of "guest workers." The distribution of 
privilege and despair in a society with the enormous advantages 
of ours is not, of course, what one finds in Brazil or Mexico. 
But the tendencies are not hard to see. 

The collapse of the Soviet empire offers new means to establish 
the North-South divide more firmly within the rich societies. 
During the May 1992 strike of public workers in Germany, the 
chairman of Daimler-Benz warned that the corporation might 
respond to strikes of production workers by transferring 
manufacturing facilities for its Mercedes cars elsewhere, perhaps 
to Russia, with its ample supply of trained, educated, healthy 
and (it is hoped) docile workers. <<<NB: Marc Fisher, "Why Are 
German Workers Striking? To Preserve Their Soft Life," _WP_ 
service, _International Herald Tribune_, May 4, 1992.>>>  The 
chairman of General Motors can wield similar threats with regard 
to Mexico and other sectors of the Third World that remained 
economic colonies of the West, and thus do not offer as favorable 
a work force.  Capital can readily move; people cannot, or are 
not permitted to. 

It is not that Daimler-Benz is greatly suffering from the labor 
costs that management deplores.  Two weeks after issuing the 
threat to move Mercedes production to Russia, the same chief 
executive, Edzard Reuter, announced the "excellent result" of an 
exceptionally strong first quarter performance for 1992, with a 
profit rise of 14% and a 16% increase in sales, largely abroad: 
German workers are not quite the intended market for the Mercedes 
division, the chief profit earner for this huge conglomerate. 
Such facts, however, do not impress the US press, where the news 
columns bitterly assailed the strikers for their "soft life," 
long vacations, and general lack of understanding of their 
proper place as tools of production for the rich and powerful. 
They should learn the lessons taught to American workers by the 
Caterpillar corporation at the same time: profits and 
productivity up, wages down, the right to strike effectively 
eliminated by the free resort to "permanent replacement 
workers." <<<NB: Andrew Fisher, _FT_, May 20; Fisher, _op. 
cit._; Elaine Bernard, "The Defeat at Caterpillar," ms. Harvard 
Trade Union Program, May 1992.>>> 

These are the fruits of the fierce corporate campaign undertaken 
as soon as American workers finally won the right to organize in 
the mid-1930s, after long years of bitter struggle and violent 
repression unmatched in the industrial world.  Perhaps we may 
even return to the days when the admired philanthropist Andrew 
Carnegie could preach the virtues of "honest, industrious, 
self-denying poverty" to the victims of the great depression of 
1896, shortly after he had brutally crushed the Homestead steel 
strike, to great media applause, while announcing that the 
defeated workers had sent him a wire saying "Kind master, tell us 
what you wish us to do and we will do it for you." It was because 
he knew "how sweet and happy and pure the home of honest poverty 
is" that Carnegie sympathized with the rich, he explained, 
meanwhile sharing their grim fate in his lavishly-appointed 
mansions. <<<NB: Patricia Cayo Saxton, _The War on Labor and the 
Left_ (Westview, 1991, 83f.).>>> 

So a well-ordered society should run, according to the "vile 
maxim of the masters." 

It is, therefore, only natural that when the battered unions 
finally recognize the reality of the ceaseless class war waged 
against them by the highly class-conscious corporate sector, the 
business press should react with wonder at the fact that some 
_unions_ still cling to outdated "class-warfare ideology" and 
the "battered Marxist view" that "workers form a class of 
citizens with shared interests separate from those who own and 
control business" -- not to speak of such "quirks" as low pay for 
executives, who are treated like other members (_New York 
Times_).  The masters, in contrast, keep firmly to this "battered 
Marxist view," often expressing it in vulgar Marxist rhetoric -- 
with values reversed, of course. <<<NB: Barnaby Feder, _NYT_, May 
25, 1992.>>> 

Under existing conditions of social organization and 
concentration of power, selective free trade is hardly likely to 
increase the general welfare, as it might under other social 
arrangements.  The two-year experience of the US-Canada free 
trade agreement illustrates the process.  Canada has lost 
hundreds of thousands of jobs, many to industrialized regions of 
the US where government regulations virtually bar labor 
organizing (the Orwellian term is "right to work," meaning 
"effectively illegal to organize").  These state policies, 
natural in a business-run society with the public largely 
marginalized, leave workers unprotected and much easier to 
exploit than in Canada, with its more vigorous union movement and 
its cultural climate of solidarity.  The agreement has also been 
used to require Canada to sell water to the US even in times of 
local water scarcity; to abandon measures to protect the 
threatened Pacific salmon; to bring pesticide regulations in line 
with laxer US standards; to ban sale of irradiated food and steps 
to reduce emissions from lead, zinc and copper smelters; and to 
end subsidies for replanting of forests after logging.  All such 
practices have been judged illegal barriers to free trade.  By 
similar reasoning, the US objects to a GATT provision that allows 
countries to restrict food exports in times of need, demanding 
that US agribusiness must control raw materials no matter what 
the human cost. 

At the same time, Canada, an asbestos exporter, is bringing 
charges against the US for imposing EPA standards on asbestos use 
in violation of trade commitments and the "international 
scientific evidence" about health risks of asbestos: the EPA has 
improperly gone beyond the "least burdensome requirements" for 
the corporations, Canada claims.  At the GATT negotiations, the 
US is backing corporate proposals to restrict environmental and 
consumer protection to cases supported by "scientific evidence," 
to be judged by an agency made up of government officials and 
executives from chemical and food corporations. <<<NB: Jim 
Stanford, "Going South: Cheap Labour as an Unfair Subsidy in 
North American Free Trade," Canadian Centre for Policy 
Alternatives, Dec. 1991; Edward Goldsmith, Mark Ritchie, _The 
Ecologist_, Nov./Dec. 1990; Kevin Watkins, _Fixing the Rules_ 
(Catholic Institute of International Relations, London, 1992, 
102); brief amicus curiae of Government of Canada, US Court of 
Appeals, "Corrosion Proof Fittings, et al., vs. EPA and William 
K. Riley," May 22, 1990.>>> 


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