Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Disuguaglianze, Propaganda, Destra, Sinistra

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LETTER FROM 
NOAM CHOMSKY 
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PEOPLE MAY BE CONFUSED ABOUT THE CAUSES OF THE GREAT INEQUALITY THEY
SEE, BUT THEY UNDERSTAND THAT BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT ARE NOT TO BE
TRUSTED. NOW, MORE THAN EVER, CHOMSKY'S INSIGHT INTO THE MECHANICS AND
ROLE OF PROPAGANDA IS CRUCIAL.
DEAR CAQ,
Like all of us, I was sorry to learn that Lies of Our Times could not
be sustained. It's a real loss, and another signal that we have our
work cut out for us in times that are in many ways ominous, but that
also offer a good deal of hope. I had been writing occasional pieces
for LOOT, informal reflections on the passing scene. It began with a
suggestion by Ed Herman that I put my letter-answering neurosis to
some broader use. Thanks for inviting me to take another crack at it.
Today happens to be July 4 as always, marked by lofty rhetoric about
the significance of this traditional American celebration of
independence and democracy (and maybe a day at the beach). Reality is
not so uplifting. Independence Day was designed by the first state
propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information
(CPI), created during World War I to whip a pacifist country into
anti- German frenzy and, incidentally, to beat down the threat of
labor which frightened respectable people after such events as the IWW
(Industrial Workers of the World) victory in the Lawrence, Mass.,
strike of 1912. The CPI's successes greatly impressed the business
world; one of its members, Edward Bernays, became the leading figure
in the vastly expanding public relations industry. Also much impressed
was Adolf Hitler, who attributed Germany's failure in World War I to
the ideological victories of the British and U.S. propaganda agencies,
which overwhelmed Germany's efforts. Next time, Germany would be in
the competition, he vowed. The influence of the great generalissimo on
the propaganda front, as Wilson was described by political scientist
Harold Lasswell, was not slight. Independence Day was one
contribution.
This particular propaganda exercise began with business-government
initiatives to Americanize immigrants, to inculcate loyalty and
obedience and expel from their minds alien notions about the rights of
working people. Such programs would turn immigrants into the natural
foe of the IWW and other destructive forces that undermine the
country's ideals and institutions, the CPI founding document read. At
a major conference of civic organizations (organized labor excluded),
government and private organizations of all kinds and creeds had
pledged themselves to cooperate in carrying out Americanization as a
national endeavor, the organizers reported, while issuing plans for a
successful Americanization program for the coming Fourth of July. The
CPI took up the cudgels, now using the wartime fanaticism it had
helped engender as another weapon against pacifists, agitators and
other anti-American groups, notably the hated Wobblies.2 The General-
issimo joined in with a May 1918 endorsement. The title of the
indoctrination ceremonies was to be Americanization Day ; on
reflection, Independence Day seemed preferable.
 Labor leaders were aware of what was happening. A United Mine Workers
(UMW) official objected that the business-government project was
"attempting to set up a paternalism that will bring the workers of
this country even more absolutely under the control of the employers,
... strengthening the chain of industrial tyranny in this country. ...
[That is what lies behind these efforts] to sanctify and confirm
oppression by waving the American flag in the face of its victims and
by insidiously stigmatizing as unpatriotic any attempts they may make
to throw off the yoke of the exploiting interests [that the
organizers] represent."
But labor could not compete with state-corporate power, and lost this
battle just as it failed to save May Day. (A jingoist holiday in the
U.S., it is celebrated elsewhere as a labor festival which was begun
in solidarity with the struggles of brutalized American workers.)
As the war ended and industrial strife renewed, Generalissimo Wilson
launched his Red Scare, which devastated labor and independent
thought, initiating a reign of virtually unchallenged business rule
that was happily thought to be permanent.
Many of the features of a corporate-run, propaganda-managed democracy
are illustrated by the achievements of the Generalissimo and his
business associates, among them the very concept of Americanism and
anti-American. Such notions are expected in totalitarian cultures (
anti-Sovietism, etc.), though rarely elsewhere. Their prominent place
in a society that is unusually free is a far more significant
phenomenon, hence rarely investigated.
Wre living in a strange period. Z magazine's Mike Albert described the
country as an organizer's paradise. True, though there are chilling
prospects as well. Perhaps the most likely in the short run at least
is the continuation, even acceleration, of the deliberate policy of
driving the country toward a kind of Third World model, with sectors
of great privilege, growing numbers of people sinking into poverty or
real misery, and a superfluous population confined in slums or
expelled to the rapidly expanding prison system. Lurking not too
deeply in the shadows is the threat of movements of a fascist
character, perhaps with a populist streak (as often in the past), and
imbued with the religious extremism that is a striking feature of
American culture.
But there are also more hopeful opportunities in a country where over
80 percent of the population recognize that the economic system is
inherently unfair and the government run for the benefit of the few
and the special interests, not the people. (This figure is up from a
steady 50 percent for a similarly worded question in earlier years
though what is meant by special interests is another question.) The
general population stubbornly maintains social democratic attitudes
that have resisted the propaganda assaults of the past half century.
Substantial majorities believe the government should assist people in
need, oppose increased Pentagon spending and budget-balancing that
entails cuts for health and education (contrary to the message of many
a headline and lead paragraph), and so on, pretty much across the
board.
There has, furthermore, been no genetic change since the mid-19th
century when a lively and independent press run by factory girls,
mechanics, and other working people condemned the degradation and the
loss of that self-respect which had made the mechanics and laborers
the pride of the world, as free people were forced to sell themselves,
not what they produced. Its writers described the destruction of the
spirit of free institutions, with working people reduced to a state of
servitude in which they see a moneyed aristocracy hanging over us like
a mighty avalanche threatening annihilation to every man who dares to
question their right to enslave and oppress the poor and unfortunate.
They bitterly condemned the New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth,
forgetting all but Self, a demeaning and shameful doctrine that no
decent person could tolerate.
They who work in the mills ought to own them, working people wrote
without benefit of radical intellectuals. In that way, they would
overcome the monarchical principles that were taking root on
democratic soil well before the modern corporation was given its
remarkable powers early in this century, mainly by courts and lawyers.
Years later, that became a rallying cry for the organized labor
movement. It is by the people who do the work that the hours of
labour, the conditions of employment, the division of the produce is
to be determined, Henry Demarest Lloyd urged in what labor historian
David Montgomery calls a clarion call to the 1893 AFL convention. It
is by the workers themselves, Lloyd continued, that the captains of
industry are to be chosen, and chosen to be servants, not masters. It
is for the welfare of all that the coordinated labour of all must be
directed. ... This is democracy.
Such values and insights into reality have only recently been
suppressed, and can be recovered.
While attitudes are resilient remarkably so, given that they receive
little support and are often held in virtual isolation the propaganda
offensive has taken its toll. Irrational cults are proliferating
alongside of the traditional supercult of mainstream intellectual
culture, with its mindless rituals about the Purpose of America and
the dedication of our leaders to democracy, markets, and human rights,
all visibly under attack. People who would have been working to build
the CIO 60 years ago are now joining paramilitary organizations. Many
people are not only angry not surprisingly, as their lives and world
collapse but also deeply confused.
There are many illustrations of this. While over 80 percent of the
population think that workers have too little influence, only 20
percent feel that way about unions and 40 percent consider them too
influential. Despite a huge propaganda barrage, popular opposition to
NAFTA remained high coupled, however, with condemnation of unions
lobbying for very much the views of the NAFTA critics, something they
may not have known, thanks to the exclusion of the major union
positions from the media.
The welfare debate reveals similar confusions. The same people who
believe that the government should help the poor oppose welfare. Few
are aware that the Pentagon system is largely a welfare system for the
rich, catering to welfare freaks like Newt Gingrich, who brings more
federal subsidies to his district than any other suburban county
outside the federal system itself while his wealthy constituents
self-righteously denounce the nanny state and commentators admire the
entrepreneurial values of people who know only how to feed at the
public trough. Nor are many aware that the Pentagon system was
established in explicit recognition that high-tech industry could not
survive in a competitive, unsubsidized, `free enterprise' economy, and
that the private sector has relied extensively on such subsidy,
including advanced technology readily transferred to commercial use,
until the present, as is at last being investigated and acknowledged
even in mainstream academic work. The authors believe that their
(useful) discoveries refute beliefs of analysts from both the right
and the left, but that is because they ignore the business press and
left publications, which have long made just the same points. They
conclude that the defense industrial base should be maintained
appropriately, on the understanding that the wealthy must be protected
from market discipline and the population tricked into subsidizing
them. Nor are many likely to discover the euphoria in the business
press about record-shattering profit growth while real wages continue
their decline from 1980.
Propaganda depicting unions as the enemy of the worker, welfare queens
driving Cadillacs and breeding like rabbits, liberal elites and
pointy-headed bureaucrats stealing our money and interfering in our
lives, and the rest of the familiar refrain, may have left attitudes
substantially unchanged. But it has reduced much of the population to
bewilderment and irrationality. If the current mood is one of
antipolitics, that is in no small measure a tribute to the success of
campaigns to erase the understanding of elementary reality expressed
by the UMW leader quoted earlier. That reality, traceable back at
least to Adam Smith, was well-described by John Dewey: Politics is the
shadow cast on society by big business, and as long as this is so, the
attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.
The scale and intensity of these propaganda crusades is rarely
appreciated, and little studied. What has been unearthed confirms the
judgment of the late Alex Carey, the Australian social scientist who
pioneered the investigation of corporate propaganda, including his
study of Americanization campaigns, from which I drew earlier. The
twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of
great political importance, Carey wrote in a 1978 paper:the growth of
democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate
propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
From their modern origins, the corporations that now dominate much of
the domestic and global economies, casting their shadow on all other
aspects of life, recognized the need to control the public mind and
engineer consent by what their leaders frankly called propaganda in
more honest days.
In his 1943 classic, Business As a System of Power, Robert Brady
pointed out a natural correlation: Propaganda tends to be more
prevalent in societies that are more free. At the same time, in his
(unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm on literary censorship in
England, George Orwell observed that in free societies, Unpopular
ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any
need for any official ban. Dewey, Robert Dahl, and others made similar
observations, which have been supported in the last few years by
substantial documentation. It is intriguing to see the reaction among
the more passionate ideologues, who take such work to imply that its
authors believe that the U.S. is a totalitarian or fascist society,
equivalent to Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany; they utterly fail to
comprehend that the clear and explicit thesis is precisely the
opposite. (I'm citing current commentary, so foolishly as to be hardly
worth refuting, and interesting only for what it reveals about the
intellectual culture.)
Seventy years ago, the business world and the responsible men who
arrogated to themselves the right of political and doctrinal
management assumed mistakenly, the popular struggles of the 1930s
revealed that the great beast, as Alexander Hamilton termed the
people, had been caged. Business reacted with alarm, warning of the
hazard facing industrialists in the newly realized political power of
the masses.
We are definitely heading for adversity unless their thinking is
directed to more proper channels, the National Association of
Manufacturers (NAM) warned. Its PR budget increased over 20-fold from
1934 to 1937.
The hazard only grew in severity as Americans joined the social
democratic currents sweeping the world after the war. One PR firm
warned in 1947 that our present economic system, and the men who run
it, have three years maybe five at the outside to resell our so-far
preferred way of life as against competing systems. A huge campaign
was undertaken to win the everlasting battle for the minds of men, in
the words of the chair of the NAM's PR Advisory Committee; only the
tools of the PR industry were powerful enough to stem the current
drift toward Socialism, he warned. From 1946 to 1950, the NAM
distributed over 18 million pamphlets: Forty percent went to employees
as part of extensive programs to indoctrinate employees, Fortune
reported; the rest mostly to students and community leaders. Business
propaganda had a circulation of 70 million people, Fortune editor
Daniel Bell wrote, along with other propaganda that was staggering and
prodigious in scale. By the early 1950s, 20 million people a week were
watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was
enlisted for the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider
disrupting the harmony of the American way of life, and otherwise
helping to indoctrinate citizens with the capitalist story, as
business leaders formulated the task. Every aspect of social life was
targeted, and permeated: schools and universities, churches, even
recreational programs. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools
reached half the amount spent on textbooks.
 
The floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Labor sought to combat the plan to sell the American people on the
virtues of big business, recognizing that the commercial media would
follow the policy of damning labor at every opportunity while
carefully glossing over the sins of the banking and industrial
magnates who really control the nation. With a circulation of 20-30
million, the 800 labor newspapers that still survived sought to expose
racial hatred and all kinds of antidemocratic words and deeds and to
provide antidotes for the worst poisons of the kept press. But labor
utterly lacked the resources to compete.
The story continues to the present, including the concerted efforts of
corporate America to change the attitudes and values of workers and
convert worker apathy into corporate allegiance, advertising Council
campaigns saturating the media and reaching practically everybody
(Fortune), university Chairs of Free Enterprise and other measures to
subvert the educational system, as well as the whole panoply of
devices available to those for whom cost is no consideration. So
effectively has functioning civil society been dismantled, that
Congress can now ram through programs opposed by large majorities who
are left in fear, anger, and hopelessness.
The achievement is real. For working people, David Montgomery
observes, the most important part of the Jeffersonian legacy was the
shelter it provided to free association, diversity of beliefs and
behavior, and defiance of alleged social superiors in society. The
structures of civil society obstructed bourgeois control of American
life at every turn. Hence, the unremitting campaigns to demolish the
independent press and eliminate effective forms of community
solidarity, from trade unions to political clubs and organizations.
They have been conducted with passionate intensity and considerable
success.
The propaganda assault is fully in accord with prevailing concepts of
democracy, a matter I've discussed at length elsewhere. It adapts to
the conditions of 20th century America the principle on which the
sociopolitical system was founded: To protect the minority of the
opulent against the majority, as James Madison formulated the primary
concern of government in the debates of the Constitutional Convention
in 1787. But history records many successes of popular resistance and
struggle and only the most dedicated commissar can believe that it is
somehow at an end.
This year is a stellar one in one respect at least: Fones-Wolf's
Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism,
1945-1960, the first extensive academic study of corporate propaganda
appeared, and Carey's essays on the American system of thought control
are finally available, at least in Australia. The discussion of
corporate propaganda in this letter is largely drawn from this
important work.
We can take heart in other current developments, among them, the huge
growth of the left. We learn of its scale from the congressional
program to defund the left outlined by Stephen Moore of the Cato
Institute, which helped develop the project. Republicans Take Aim at
Left-Leaning Groups, a headline in the Wall Street Journal reads.
Leading the campaign, Newt Gingrich blasts those who would extort
money out of the taxpayer unlike the Speaker of the House who holds
the prize. The issue is philosophical, a policy analyst at the
Heritage Foundation explains: Taxpayers should not be forced to
support activities they may not agree with. So that explains why the
Heritage Foundation budget proposal, basically adopted by Congress,
calls for an increase in the Pentagon budget (beyond what the military
requests) in accord with the wishes of one out of six taxpayers, while
sharply cutting funds for education, drug addiction programs, the
environment, and other social spending favored by two-thirds of the
public.
Philosophy is a subtle discipline, beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.
What then is the left that has to be barred from its evil practice of
extorting public funds? By far the major criminal targeted is Catholic
Charities, which receives public funds to help run more than a dozen
programs ranging from low-income heating assistance to Head Start, the
Wall Street Journal reports, with the aid of nuns and priests working
for very low wages ... out of faith, a health-policy advocate at
Catholic Charities adds. Next on the list of extortionists are the
American Association of Retired Persons and the National Council of
Senior Citizens, which run programs aimed at helping elderly Americans
find jobs. Their depravity is highlighted by another article in the
Journal, which notes that hunger among the elderly is surging, as
several million older Americans are going hungry and their numbers are
growing steadily, many literally starving to death. Next comes the
World Wildlife Fund. And far below, the National Center for
Neighborhood Enterprise, the only target not identified as
left-leaning.
There will be no human cost to defunding the left, the Heritage
Foundation policy analyst explains: If these charities are doing
something that people want to support, they'll get adequate funding
from the private sector.
The terms of political discourse have been virtually deprived of
meaning, but it is helpful to learn how the reactionary statists in
the guise of libertarians understand the concepts the people and the
left.
The people are the private sector, which can provide adequate funding.
The people are thus a shrinking category in a country with far higher
inequality than any other in the developed world, now reaching the
artificially inflated level of 1929, right before the crash. The share
of marketable net worth held by the top one percent is now twice that
of England and 50 percent higher than that of France, the nearest
competitor. In 1980, differences among these countries were slight,
but Reaganite programs directed 60 percent of marketable wealth gain
to the top 1 percent of income recipients, while the bottom 40 percent
suffered an absolute loss of net worth in real terms; other measures
are still more stark.
As for the left, it consists of anyone with the slightest concern for
the featherless bipeds who do not rank among the people a rather
flattering image, for those who consider themselves on the left. These
non-people are to be subjected to the harsh and morally purifying
discipline of the market. But not the minority of the opulent, who can
shelter under the wings of the nanny state they nurture. Such are the
doctrines of the people.
The awesome scale of the left is revealed further in a study by the
Clemson University Center for Policy Studies, one of the many
components of the huge right-wing assault against independent schools
in recent years. The study condemns corporations for funding left-wing
groups, such as the National Audubon Society, the Trilateral
Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Contrary to what
some of us have believed, the left has the media on its side as well,
including the Newspaper of Record, the New York Times, which Foreign
Policy editor Charles William Maynes calls the establishment left in
one of the many odes to Washington's crusade to spread the cause of
democracy.
So the left can hardly complain of marginalization. It includes major
institutions, as well as just about everyone who isn't an outright
monster removed from the moral realm, if we can believe the few
embattled souls who are at last trying to weaken its grip on the
social order.
Still, the left has its problems. One is that the lefties of Catholic
Charities and the American Association of Retired Persons are going to
find it harder to locate the non-people they seek to assist. So we
learn from New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who finally came clean
about his fiscal policies, including the radically regressive shift in
the tax burden that he and the governor are implementing: reduction in
taxes on the rich ( all of the Mayor's tax cuts benefit business, the
Times comments) and increase in taxes on the poor (concealed as rise
in subway fares for school children and working people, higher tuition
at city schools, etc.). Coupled with severe cutbacks in public funds
that serve public needs, these policies should help the poor move out
of New York State, enabling them to move freely around the country,
the report in the establishment left press explained under the
headline: Giuliani Sees Welfare Cuts Providing a Chance to Move. 
At last, those who were bound by the welfare system are liberated from
their chains. The compassion for the poor brings tears to the eyes.
Where will the liberated masses go? Perhaps to favelas on the
outskirts, so they can be free to find their way into the city somehow
to do the dirty work for those who are entitled to enjoy the richest
city in the world, with inequality greater than Guatemala and with 40
percent of children already below the poverty line before these new
measures of tough love are instituted.
Bleeding hearts who cannot comprehend the benefits being lavished on
the poor should at least be able to see that there is no alternative.
The lesson of the next few years may be that New York is simply not
wealthy or economically vital enough to afford the extensive public
sector that it has created over the post great Depression period, we
learn from an expert opinion featured in a Times front-page story. The
loss of economic vitality is real enough, in part a result of
government policy that eliminated a flourishing manufacturing base in
favor of the expanding financial sector. The city's wealth is another
matter. The expert opinion to which the Times turned is the report to
investors of the J.P. Morgan investment firm, fifth in the ranking of
commercial banks in the current Fortune 500 listing, suffering from a
mere $1.2 billion in profits in 1994. To be sure, it was not a great
year for J.P. Morgan as compared with the stunning profit increase of
54 percent for the 500 with a mere 2.6 percent increase of employment
and 8.2 percent sales gain in one of the most profitable years ever
for American business, Fortune reported exultantly. The business press
hailed another banner year for U.S. corporate profits, while U.S.
household wealth seems to have actually fallen in this fourth straight
year of double-digit profit growth and 14th straight year of decline
in real wages. The Fortune 500 have attained new heights of economic
might, with revenues close to two-thirds of the gross domestic
product, a good bit more than Germany or Britain, not to speak of
their power over the global economy an impressive concentration of
power in unaccountable private tyrannies, and for the people, a
welcome blow against democracy and markets. 
We live in lean and mean times, and everyone has to tighten their
belts; so the mantra goes. In reality, the country is awash in
capital, with surging profits that are overflowing the coffers of
Corporate America, Business Week exulted even before the grand news
came in about the record-breaking final quarter of 1994, with a
phenomenal 71 percent advance for the 900 companies in BW's Corporate
Scoreboard. 
Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich, and tough for
everyone else.
The business press explains Why Profits Will Keep Booming, and the
1994-95 annual review of The State of Working America explains why
wages and family wealth are likely to keep falling. Deliberate social
policy to achieve these goals is facilitated by significant changes in
the international economy from the 1970s; the restoration of a huge
sector of the traditional Third World to its service role with the end
of the Cold War, offering new weapons against what the business press
calls the pampered Western workers with their luxurious lifestyles,
added a further contribution.
One crucial factor was the deregulation of financial markets in the
early 1970s. Its consequences were quickly understood. In 1978,
economist James Tobin proposed that foreign exchange transactions be
taxed to slow the hemorrhage of capital from the real economy
(investment and trade) to financial manipulations that now constitute
95 percent of foreign exchange transactions (as compared with 10
percent of a far smaller total in 1970). As Tobin observed at this
early stage, these processes would drive the world toward a
low-growth, low-wage economy. A study directed by Paul Volcker,
formerly head of the Federal Reserve, attributes about half of the
substantial slowdown in growth since the early 1970s to this factor.
International economist David Felix makes the interesting observation
that even the productive sectors that would benefit from the Tobin tax
have joined financial capital in resisting it. The reason, he
suggests, is that elites generally are bonded by a common objective,
.. to shrink, perhaps even to liquidate, the welfare state. The
instant mobility of huge sums of financial capital is a potent weapon
to force governments to follow fiscally responsible policies, which
can bring home the sharply two-tiered Third World model to the rich
societies. By enhancing the shadow cast by big business over society
and restricting the capacity of governments to respond to the public
will, these processes also undermine the threat of democracy, another
welcome consequence. The shared elite interest, Felix suggests,
overcomes the narrower self-interest of the owners and managers of
productive sectors of the economy.
The suggestion is a reasonable one. The history of business and
political economy yields many examples of the subordination of narrow
gain to the broader interest of the opulent minority, which is
unusually class conscious in a business-run society like ours.
Illustrations include central features of the modern world: the
creation and sustenance of the Pentagon system of corporate welfare
despite its well-known inefficiencies; the openly proclaimed strategy
of diversion of soaring profits to creation of excess capacity abroad
as a weapon against the domestic working class; the design of
automation within the state system to enhance managerial control and
de-skill workers even at the cost of efficiency and profitability; and
many other examples, including a large part of the foreign policy.
In the real world, the left includes a considerable majority of the
population, to judge by public opinion and the lessons of history or
it should, if the authentic left could get its act together. That is
where hope lies, in otherwise dismal times.
Sincerely yours,
Noam Chomsky
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io anche se in due riprese ;-)) 
e lo ho trovato molto interessante. Dice che li' da loro la propaganda
nazionalista e' al servizio del complesso militar-industriale (che lui
chiama il sistema pentagono), li' da loro ...
Luigi Bianca