Can civilisation survive really existing capitalism? | Noam Chomsky

So, as Maria tells it, when I arrived here with Karen, I arrived here without passports, it was actually a very nice gesture on the part of the Irish government to organize it because they knew that I would come here and as a guest of Amnesty International. to speak at a campaign they were running condemning the government for its involvement and the globalized terror campaign at Shannon Airport, but they went ahead anyway. Well, you've seen the title. I guess it's a question: can civilization

survive

actually

existing

capitalism

? in reference to actually

existing

capitalism

. I have in mind what actually exists and is called capitalism, although whether that is what it should be called is another question and the United States is the most important example, for obvious reasons the term capitalism itself is vague enough that it can cover many odds. in fact, that is correct for the fact that it is used to describe the economic system of the United States, which deviates quite crucially from market capitalism: free market capitalism, as indeed Britain did before and In fact, all other developed societies, the only societies that could authentically be called capitalism are those on which the imperial powers imposed the free market;

They are what we now call the third world, and not least for that reason it is worth taking into account how the scale of deviations from capitalism actually exists from the official doctrine of free market capitalism, so it is enough that the United States United mention just a few examples. Over the past 20 years, the profit ratio of the 200 largest corporations in the United States has increased very sharply, partly as a result of the Internet, which was supposed to have the opposite effect, but is having the effect of intensifying the oligopolistic character. of the core US economy, so the law No.

In another sector, the largest banks with trillions of dollars in assets have repeatedly merged to become even larger, they are now the six largest by a large extent . responsible for the current global financial crisis have increased their assets from 18% of gross domestic product 20 years ago to 63% today. Oligopoly, of course, undermines markets and automatically leads to collusion to avoid price wars that competitors don't want and resorting to mostly meaningless product differentiation to try to get people to buy their products instead of others. someone else's identical ones, that's done through massive advertising, advertising itself was a huge industry, maybe marketing maybe 1/6 of the gross domestic product that their advertising is explicitly dedicated to. undermining markets took an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational decisions, which is not exactly what you see if you turn on the television said that creativity and innovation have also been substantially in public sector and have not been highly appreciated, so let's go back to Alan Greenspan in the days when he was still revered as a saintly Alan, before the crisis caused in large part by the adherence to the market fundamentalist doctrines he preached in Back then, in his glory days, he gave a speech to editors extolling the wonders of our free market system with a free enterprise system based on entrepreneurship and consumer choice, but he actually made a mistake.

He listed examples. Every example he listed was a textbook case of the crucial role of the state sector in all. Actually, there was one exception that was instructive in itself, namely transistors. The transistors were developed in a private laboratory. Bell Telephone Laboratories and the laboratory were a great laboratory for a long time. This was when AT&T had a government-secured monopoly on telephone service, so it could therefore impose monopoly prices. Millat had great resources, he could use them to establish a fantastic laboratory as soon as the company was dissolved, the laboratory had to be dismantled, it is still there, but is now dedicated to short-term applications for industry, furthermore, The development of transistors, although it took place in the laboratory, was largely based on wartime technology.

World War II technology which, of course, was all in the state sector and there was no market for high-end transistors, they were too expensive, so the government had bought a hundred percent of them, procurement is, indeed, an important form of government subsidy to the industry. In fact, there is something of an analogy here in the way the core sectors of the Irish economy have developed. Construction services vary substantially by government in the type of contract they are paid for. paying them to do things for which there is no requirement Saint Allan's speech was, by the way, at the same time that he was testifying before Congress and soberly explaining the wonders of the great economy that he was running with great success at the time when He attributed what he called to the growing job insecurity that is intimidating workers from making any unreasonable efforts to try to keep wages at par with inflation much less increase the productivity they should maintain; that is an obvious contribution to the health of the economy.

Under actually existing capitalism, computers and the Internet, in fact, all the building blocks of the IT revolution were in the state sector for substantially four decades before being handed over to private companies for marketing and profit, including subsidies for the development of creative and innovative research. procurement and other devices again have very little role for consumer choice and entrepreneurship, at least in the difficult and risky period, except for initiative and obtaining government subsidies for what you are doing, and the same applies applies to much of the high-tech economy and actually goes back to the early days of English industrialization in one domain, the financial sector, state intervention is notable and has expanded enormously.

Lee, of course, in the past generation in the United States it's hard to remember, but back in the '50s and '60s during the period of great growth and the banks were banks that put their money in them, lent money to some presumably useful purposes, that is, they were not interstate banks, there were no financial crises that changed in the past generation and now their companies were engaged in complex and risky transactions. They have grown enormously at that time in the US - at the time of the 2007 crisis they had risen to 40 percent of corporate profits - now the way they can get away with it is because they rely heavily on one policy government insurance policy, a tacit insurance policy, informally called too big to fail and is the one that provides the largest banks with great benefits and the scale has been roughly estimated by economists at about $40 billion a year approximately, however, there is a recent IMF study that indicates that this may be a considerable underestimate.

I will quote the business press reporting that the study says that perhaps the largest in the US are not

really

profitable at all and the billions of dollars they supposedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from the American taxpayers in a variety of ways, including bailout, but many other things like cheap credit, etc., that's more. Evidence supporting a judgment by the most respected financial correspondent in the English-speaking world, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times of London, describes what he says is that an out-of-control financial sector is devouring the modern market economy from within, from within.

So the larva of a spider wasp devours the host in which it has been deposited with an observation with a certain grim resonance right here and it is thanks to the generous contributions of contributors, unknowingly, to the maintenance of this destructive system that the term capitalism it is also used for many In other systems, it is sometimes used for systems that do not have any capitalists, such as the large Mondragón conglomerate in the Basque Country or the worker in companies emerging in the decaying Rust Belt of the United States; some might even use the term capitalism to include some version of the industrial democracy advocated by, among others, John Dewey, America's leading social philosopher of the last century.

He asked that workers be, in his words, masters of their own industrial destiny and that all institutions be under public control. including the means of production, exchange, advertising, transportation and communications, apart from this, Dewey concluded that politics will continue to be the shadow cast by big business on society. His main work, as some of you know, was on democracy and that was his conception of democracy and he was condemning truncated democracy. The version of democracy that actually existed has now been left in tatters far worse than when he described government control. I'm talking about the United States, but it's not much different elsewhere.

Government control is highly concentrated at the top of democracy. the income scale, the vast majority at the bottom are effectively disenfranchised, that's been pretty good for John just because of mainstream political science. One of the main themes is to investigate the very rich polling data so that you know what people think and of course you can take a look at the policies that We can compare them and recent racial research in the mainstream estimates that 70 bottom percent on the income and wealth scale have essentially no influence on policy, so they are effectively disenfranchised. Influence slowly increases as you move up the ladder and as you get to the top you get what you want, there has always been a lot of truth in that, but it has increased enormously over the last 30-odd years of the neoliberal period. , truly a very harmful assault on the population in almost all the places where it has been suffered. here the current political economic system is actually a form of plutocracy it is very misleading to call it democracy it differs radically from democracy if by democracy we mean political arrangements in which what the public thinks has some influence on policy there have been serious debates and academic debates over the years about whether a capitalism is in principle consistent with democracy, but if we talk about a

really

existing capitalism, the questions answered are certainly not a really existing capitalist democracy for short or ECD, you can pronounce it rekt if you do. you want, they are radically incompatible, that is easily demonstrated.

For reasons to which I will return, it seems unlikely to me that civilization can

survive

actually existing capitalism and the markedly attenuated democracy that accompanies it, and an important question is whether a real democracy that works, a democracy that can make a difference. It's hard to speculate about non-existent systems, but there is some reason to believe that this would be the case, so let's stick to the most critical immediate problem facing civilization. There are many of them, but this is the main one. Environmental catastrophe policies and public attitudes differ quite a bit in the United States, that is commonly the case, but surprisingly in this case there is actually an issue from the recent recent issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that addresses this, So read some quotes that researchers found that one hundred and nine countries have enacted some type of policy regarding renewable energy; 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy;

In contrast to this hundred, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to mandate the promotion of the use of renewable energy. Now, renewable energy is not public opinion that is taking policies out of the national spectrum, but quite the opposite, the public is much closer to the global norm than the policies and is much more supportive of actions to face the probable disaster. environment we face, perhaps not too much. our grandchildren's lives could be very far away this is what researchers found the same problem a large majority of the public has favored measures by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utility companies produce electricity in 2006 Eighty-six percent of respondents were in favor of requiring utility companies or at least encouraging them with tax breaks to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit.

Also in that year eighty-seven percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind or sunlight and these majorities have held to this day. recent studies are verydifferent from policies and I just cited well the fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply worrying to those who dominate the economy and largely control state policy as a very interesting current example that there is an organization called Alec the American. The Legislative Exchange Council is a corporation-funded organization that advocates for legislation they try to induce states to adopt. They have a new program called the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, so the law is intended for k12 schools, you know, kindergarten through 12th grade and Act Manit meant, I'm quoting it now, the Act requires balanced teaching of climate science throughout these years.

Balanced teaching is a code phrase that means teaching climate change denial to balance conventional climate science. It is analogous to what is called the balanced teaching that is defended. by creationists to allow the teaching of creation science in schools and, in fact, legislation based on this law has already been introduced by a number of states in which aLEC has been influential due to the enormous corporate funding behind Of course, this is all disguised as rhetoric about the wonders of critical thinking about a good idea, but one can think of better options than an issue that threatens decent survival and accidentally contributes to corporate profits. is based on a proposal or project from the Heartland Institute, which is a corporate-funded institute that is openly dedicated to rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change that the Institute's project calls for, calling for a global warming curriculum for kindergarten classrooms.

Kindergarten through 12th grade. Its goal is to teach that there is great controversy over whether humans are changing the climate or not, and in fact there is controversy that is regularly reported in the media. On the one hand, you have the overwhelming majority of scientists, all the major national academies of sciences in the world, all the professional scientific journals, the comprehensive or interview panel and the intergovernmental panel on climate change, that's one side, all They agree that global changes, global warming, are occurring, this important human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps. terrible and that very soon, perhaps within decades, the world could reach a tipping point where there is nothing to do about it;

The process will begin to sharply intensify and will be irreversible, with very serious economic and social effects; It is quite rare to find a consensus on this. On a complex scientific topic, there is another side to nature, it is made up of skeptics, including some serious and respected scientists, who correctly warn that much is still unknown, meaning it might not be as bad as anticipated or it could be worse, only the first part is reported and then omitted. From the artificial debate emerges a much larger group of skeptics, so highly respected climate scientists including the climate change group at my own university, MIT, consider that the IPCC's periodic reports are too conservative and have been shown repeatedly that they are correct.

Unfortunately, they are not part of the public debate, although they are very prominent in the scientific literature. Well, the Heartland Institute and Alec are just one part of a huge campaign by corporate lobbies to cast doubt on the near-unanimous consensus of scientists that human activities are having a major impact on global warming with possibly sinister implications. and there is nothing hidden in the campaign. It's quite public. It has been openly announced. It includes, of course, the main lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry. It includes the United States Chamber of Commerce, which is the main one. corporate lobby and others, the efforts of Alec and the famous Koch brothers that you have probably read about, however, a fraction of what is going on is much more that is hidden in complex ways, every now and then something leaks, There was a story in The London Guardian recently Buses and Goldenberg uncovers that Tory billionaires used a secret funding route to funnel nearly $120 million last year to more than a hundred groups that question the science behind climate change and helped De Ville to build a vast network of think tanks. and activist groups working with the sole purpose of redefining climate change from a neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing issue for hardcore conservatives, and the propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on public opinion in the United States, which is a little more skeptical than world public opinion.

The standard is not much, but the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the Teachers and that is why there are sectors of the business world that are launching their attack on the education system - in an effort to counter the dangerous tendency of the public to pay attention to the overwhelming conclusions of scientific research a couple of months ago there was a meeting of the Republican National Committee if you read about a governor Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana warned Republican leaders his words we must stop being the stupid party we must stop being insult the intelligence of the voters but Alec and his corporate sponsors don't agree, they want to go much further by turning it into this stupid nation and they do it for principled reasons that are rooted in these central institutions of law.

One of the dark money organizations funding climate change denial is a group called Donor Trust. It is also a major contributor to efforts to deny voting rights to poor black people in the United States. poor in general, there's a good reason for that, it's perfectly sensible now that they tend to be democrats if you look at their attitudes, they even tend to be democrats. If social democrats adopt welfare state measures and the like, they might even go so far as to pay attention to science, unlike those who are adequately trained in critical thinking through balanced teaching, and these efforts direct attention elsewhere aspect of justice that is quite important.

About half the population of the United States does not vote and if you look at the non-voters, they skew toward the lower end of the income scale and in fact, they overwhelmingly and overwhelmingly identify as Democrats and their attitudes tend toward a social democrat. There has been no serious investigation into why they don't vote, that's probably one reason: the main barriers put in their way are modern versions of the old poll tax and other devices that were designed to keep the riffraff in their place. , but that reason is likely that, without studying the professional literature, they know that their opinions don't matter, even if they are expressed at the ballot box, so why go to the trouble of regularly resorting to the most serious threat to decent survival from the main scientific journals? how surreal this corporate campaign is to produce a stupid nation, so let's take science, the largest science weekly in the United States a couple of months ago had three articles side by side, one of them reporting that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the United States that continues a long trend, a new US study reported. research program on global climate change that provided additional evidence that rapid climate change is the result of human activities, they also discussed likely more severe impacts, and a third news story reported on appointments to chair the science policy committee who were chosen by the US House of Representatives, the House of Representatives is overwhelmingly Republican, the votes for the House are overwhelmingly Democratic, the last election was surprising, that is another consequence of the destruction of the political system, well, there are three presidents, all three deny that humans contribute to climate change and deny that.

The same issue of the magazine is even taking place and has a white paper with new evidence that the irreversible tipping point may be much closer than anticipated. I was followed a couple of weeks later by another scientific report underscoring the need to ensure that Americans become a stupid nation. This report provides evidence that even slightly warmer temperatures than anticipated could begin to melt permafrost, which would in turn could trigger the release of huge amounts of very dangerous greenhouse gases, worse than carbon dioxide, that are trapped in the ice. It is better to maintain a balanced education at least if you can cope with the grandchildren whose lives are being destroyed at home.

It is extremely important as an institutional necessity that the US Become the stupid nation that does not allow itself to be fooled by science and rationality for the sake of the short-term benefits of the Masters of the economy and the political system that is not easy to change because it is integrated into the institutional structures of society, in reality it is the same people who are making these decisions in their individual lives; they may be contributing to environmental groups; They can read scientific journals as well as anyone else, but in their institutional role they are limited by the structure of those institutions, which again makes it very difficult to change and explains why policies like this are necessary and the push towards Stupidity goes far beyond climate change, which is why federal funding for critical R&D research and development has been falling sharply as a percentage of GDP compared to other countries, the publisher of the leading scientific journal in the US .US describes the government being unhinged and sacrificing tremendous future benefits for the sake of short-term gains and deceptions and deceptions about debt that are mainly driven by financial institutions much as in Europe, where it is in fact more severe than in In the United States these commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist doctrines preached within the United States, although they are observed very selectively.

If you look closely, a couple of examples are given because it is also necessary to preserve a very powerful State to serve the interests. of wealth and power, that's what economist Dean Baker calls a conservative nanny state. Well, it goes beyond this. Market fundamentalism has a number of lazy built-in and, in fact, quite well-known effects, so one that is not analyzed enough is that market fundamentalism, while seeking to expand options, in fact drastically restricts them, in fact So, for example, if I have to go home from work, I can choose in the market whether to buy a Toyota or a Chevy, say, but I can't choose between buying. a car and having a public transport system, that is not an option that is open in principle in a market system, it requires collective decision making and that is not an option, in effect, it is ruined by the tatters of democracy For example, you can take a high-speed train from Beijing to Kazakhstan and will probably soon reach Turkey, but you can't take a high-speed train on the busiest corridor. of the world, the northeast.

Corridor in the United States from Boston to Washington The fact that the trains there are barely faster than they were 60 years ago, when my wife and I first took it, and that is a natural aspect of a really existing and destroyed capitalism with a democratic system in tatters, there are also what are called market inefficiencies in the professional literature. One of them, a well-known series that receives a very economical text, is the failure to take into account the effect on others in a market transaction. The so-called externalities. These externalities can be quite substantial, even truly simple transactions between individuals when you move to major institutions become enormous, in fact the current financial crisis is an example of which is partially traceable and substantially traceable until ignoring what is called systemic risk, that is I mean, the risk that if some and you know some are risky.

The transaction has taken place perhaps the entire system will crash. That's not a new discovery. By the way, fifteen years ago, at the height of the euphoria about efficient markets, there were two prominent economists, one English, one American, John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, wrote an important book on global finance at risk in which they explained the consequences of these market inefficiencies and the dire consequences that we are experiencing now with another one that is worse to come and suggested means to address them that of course were ignored. There is anotherimportant international economist, David Felix. Having been warning about this for many years, since the liberalization of capital in the 1970s, he has been warning that the increasing frequency of financial crises during the period of financial liberalization could end in an uncontrollable crisis.

There was a good argument for this, the fact that there was plenty of evidence that this was beginning to happen, but these voices were not heard during the corporate-sponsored deregulatory fury with, incidentally, the intellectual backing of theses about efficient markets. and rational behavior that had no empirical basis but were proclaimed with great confidence within the economics profession between every two markets. the minutes of the Federal Reserve collapse the US central bank that is published after five years it is a fairly open society the US you can learn a lot about what is happening they just published the two transcripts from 2007 and they make a interesting reading from 2007 in its entirety The system was collapsing, but here is a group of very distinguished economists and important professionals of the banking system who could not see that the huge real estate bubble that is not based on any economic foundation by then reached eight trillion of dollars in meaningless paper money. in the transcripts to recognize what is happening before your eyes and it is a good reason why there is a religion, the religion is market fundamentalism, it preaches that markets are efficient and investors are rational, so what is happening cannot be happening, therefore we move on to the next.

Long after the predicted disaster occurred, some people predicted it. Leading economists again in the mainstream reported on what they called an emerging consensus on the need for macroprudential oversight of financial markets that pays attention to the overall stability of the economy. financial system and not just its individual parts, the two prominent international economists stated that there is a growing recognition that our financial system is running an apocalyptic cycle every time it fails, on which we depend, lacks money and fiscal policies to rescue it. This response teaches a lesson to the The financial sector accepts the big Gamble, they pay them generously and do not worry about the costs because the taxpayers will pay them and thus the financial system is resurrected.

They say that you play again and fail again, worse and worse. The official of the Bank of England. who is responsible for financial stability after the subsequent crisis described it as a fatal loop. Well, there is legislation being considered in the United States, the so-called Dodd-Frank bill that is supposed to put Band-Aids on sores and goes very deep, but it is business as usual. They are being reduced by armies of corporate lobbyists who are not countered, there are no public interest lobbyists who are destroyed only by the banks and it is very unlikely that much will come of the legislation once they are done with it, so let's move towards The next and probably the worst crisis has been a regular occurrence for the last 30 years since Reagan in the United States and never before.

Previous crises because New Deal regulations were in effect and there were capital controls on international financial flows until 1970 , by the way, under the IMF rules that still exist, they have now been forgotten, but in fact they are being instituted again more recently in Cyprus to try to overcome the crisis. latest European catastrophe under suicidal austerity policies during stagnation that fail miserably every time they are implemented, although failure is a misleading word because they work quite well for the policy makers, they simply fail for the people in general and that is Vivek infecta not only an interesting pamphlet that just came out in the United States published by the Economics Policy Institute is the main source of regular economic data on the state of the economy and workers half poly was called failure by design they review the policies of the last 30 years years of the neoliberal period and review the I won't give the data review what is familiar from what happened to the public during this period the enormous tremendous concentration of wealth in the top tenth of one percent stagnation or decline for the great majority a deterioration of relatively weak benefit systems, etc., and the brochures call failure by design, but they point out the design because there were always alternative policies, known, but they point out as a class failure for the designers, is in a fantastic situation. success, you know they are richer than imaginable and doing better the whole time they have committed this disaster, they make better corporate profits for example, they are at record levels in the United States, corporations have so much money that they don't want to have nothing to do with it.

They do not invest it because there is no demand, but they use it for financial speculation, which and the banks are bigger and richer than before the crisis they caused, so their failure is intentional and classist, and more or less what same is true. The fact that Europe is simply being careful when people talk about this is either a failure or, as I just did, suicidal policies. Well, there is a much more serious example of the danger of ignoring externalities that are dismissed as a footnote under fundamentalist market fundamentalist doctrine and that is environmental catastrophe. Here the externality that is ignored is the destiny of the species and in this case there is no one to run to and ask for rescue.

The taxpayer cannot help in this case. Well, these consequences have very deep roots in the shipwreck. than their guiding doctrines, which also dictate that the Masters will go to great lengths to escalate the threats even though they are acutely aware of them again. An institutional fact is one reason, and not the only one, why it seems quite unlikely that civilization will survive without a serious solution. It blows well, if there are historians in the future, there may not be any, but if there are, they will look back at this period, they will see a very strange phenomenon developing before our eyes.

With your eyes open, the world is. marching towards a serious disaster without secret eyes --as the facts are there, read it right in front of you under of course the efforts to counter it vary and vary in an interesting way the most far-reaching efforts to counter the crisis are found in pre-societies industrial societies, what are called primitive societies anyway, do not have the benefit of education, indigenous societies, tribal societies, First Nations, etc., and the most strenuous efforts to intensify the threats are found in the more advanced societies, more educated, richer and more powerful, so take the Western Hemisphere Ecuador, which has a large indigenous population and is an oil producer, is making efforts under pressure from the indigenous population to obtain support from Europe, which they surely will not get to leave oil in the ground where it should be and Turn to other forms of growth and development, which are poor and uneducated indigenous societies, Bolivia, which has an even larger indigenous population, to lead internationally and do something about it, and then go to the other extreme, to the north of the United States and Canada, they are running like crazy. try to make the crisis as rapid and extreme as possible, that's what it's called, you read enthusiastic, you know, euphoric reports about a century of energy independence, which are in all the newspapers, including the financial ones, and both political parties agree It's really a big deal that we're going to have a hundred years of energy independence trying to extract every drop of fossil fuels from the ground, including things like the Canadian tar sands, which are extremely harmful to the environment that the local environment and , in fact, global. but we have to do that and energy independence has almost no meaning, so we have to make sure the crisis is as quick and severe as possible.

All these euphoric discussions do not mention the posing of the question: what is the word? In a hundred years it will not be someone else's business, don't ask that question, well that is the scene that a future historian will see if there is one who looks back and it will be very surprising and it is up to us to decide if that scenario is going to happen , it is very imminent. Thank you.