The Unspeakable Economic Truth

Post date: Jan 15, 2011 8:37:25 AM

Noam Chomsky: One can understand why so many liberal intellectuals were terrified at the end of the sixties, why they describe this period as one of totalitarianism of the left: for once they were compelled to look the world of facts in the face. A serious threat, and a real danger for people whose role is ideological control. There is a recent and quite interesting study put out by the Trilateral Commission—The Crisis of Democracy, by Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki—in which an international group of scholars and others discuss what they see as contemporary threats to democracy. One of these threats is posed by "value-oriented intellectuals" who, as they correctly point out, often challenge the institutions that are responsible for "the indoctrination of the young"—an apt phrase. The student movement contributed materially to this aspect of "the crisis of democracy."

By the late sixties the discussion had gone beyond the question of Vietnam or the interpretation of contemporary history; it concerned the institutions themselves. Orthodox economics was very briefly challenged by students who wanted to undertake a fundamental critique of the functioning of the capitalist economy; students questioned the institutions, they wanted to study Marx and political economy.

Perhaps I can illustrate this once again with a personal anecdote: In the spring of 1969 a small group of students in economics here in Cambridge wanted to initiate a discussion of the nature of economics as a field of study. In order to open this discussion, they tried to organize a debate in which the two main speakers would be Paul Samuelson, the eminent Keynesian economist at MIT (today a Nobel laureate), and a Marxist economist. But for this latter role they were not able to find anyone in the Boston area, no one who was willing to question the neo-classical position from the point of view of Marxist political economy. Finally I was asked to take on the task, though I have no particular knowledge of economics, and no commitment to Marxism. Not one professional, or even semiprofessional, in 1969! And Cambridge is a very lively place in these respects. That may give you some idea of the prevailing intellectual climate. It is difficult to imagine anything comparable in Western Europe or Japan(17-18).

One must not forget that while the U.S. government suffered a setback in Vietnam, it succeeded only too well in Indonesia, in Chile, in Brazil, and in many other places during the same period. The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates—indeed, encourages—a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category, not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment offeree by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.based corporations—that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.

In the same way, the respectable members of the academic world must ignore the substantial documentation concerning the principles that guide U.S. foreign policy, and its concern to create a global economic order that conforms to the needs of the U.S. economy and its masters. I'm referring, for example, to the crucial documentation contained in the Pentagon Papers, covering the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the basic policies were clearly set, or the documents on global planning for the postwar period produced in the early 1940s by the WarPeace Studies groups of the Council on Foreign Relations, to mention only two significant examples. Quite generally, the question of the influence of corporations on foreign policy, or the economic factors in policy formation, are reserved for the barest mention in a footnote in respectable studies of the formation of policy, a fact that has been occasionally studied, and is easily docu mented when studied.

Mitsou Ronat: To reveal the profits of "philanthrophy," that is hardly in good taste.

In fact, all that you have been saying suggests to me a curious convergence, in the form of a provisional conclusion, that goes back to the initial question: What can the links be between a theory of ideology and the concepts of your linguistic theory, generative grammar?

The imperialist ideology, you say, can readily tolerate a quite large number of contradictions, infractions, and criticisms—all these remain acceptable, except one: to reveal the economic motives. You have a situation of the same kind in generative poetics. I am thinking of the analysis which Halle and Keyser8 proposed for English iambic pentameter.

The verse has a structure of alternating strong and weak stresses:

WS, WS, WS, WS, WS.

(where W = weak and S = strong)

But if one studies the corpus of English poetry, one finds an enormous number of contradictions to the meter, of "infractions" of the dominant schema, and these verses are not only acceptable but often even the most beautiful. One thing only is forbidden: to make a weak position in the meter (in the abstract verse schema) correspond to a stressed vowel surrounded by two unstressed vowels. (Halle and Keyser's concept of "maximum stress.") The observation of this kind of forbidden statement in the media permits the hope that the theory of ideology can reveal the objective laws which underlie political discourse; but for the time being all that is only a metaphor (40-42 my emphasis).

Noam Chomsky.

Language and Responsibility: Based on conversations with Mitsou Ronat.

New York: Pantheon Books (KnopfDoubleday), 1979.

Translated by John Viertel. ISBN0394736192 (Out of Print, but you might like the book behind this hyperlink.)