Forum Post: Noam Chomsky: Occupy the World

Excerpt:

The fact that the demonstrations are unprecedented is quite appropriate. It is an unprecedented era - not just this moment - but actually since the 1970s. The 1970s began a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society with ups and downs. But the general progress was toward wealth and industrialization and development - even in dark and hope - there was a pretty constant expectation that it's going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I'm just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s, although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that we're going to get out of it, even among unemployed people. It'll get better. There was a militant labor movement organizing, CIO was organizing. It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are very frightening to the business world. You could see it in the business press at the time. A sit-down strike was just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. Also, the New Deal legislations were beginning to come under popular pressure. There was just a sense that somehow we're going to get out of it.

It's quite different now. Now there's kind of a pervasive sense of hopeless, or, I think, despair. I think it's quite new in American history and it has an objective basis. In the 1930s unemployed "working people" could anticipate realistically that the jobs are going to come back. If you're a worker in manufacturing today - and the unemployment level in manufacturing today is approximately like the Depression - if current tendencies persist, then those jobs aren't going to come back. The change took place in the '70s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying reasons, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Bernard, who has done a lot of work on it, is a falling rate of profit. That, with other factors, led to major changes in the economy - a reversal of the 700 years of progress towards industrialization and development. We turned to a process of deindustrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued, but overseas (it's very profitable, but no good for the workforce). Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise, producing things people need, to financial manipulation. Financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

Before the '70s, banks were banks. They did what banks are supposed to do in a capitalist economy: take unused funds, like, say, your bank account, and transfer them to some potentially useful purpose, like buying a home or sending your kid to college. There were no financial crises. It was a period of enormous growth; the largest period of growth in American history, or maybe in economic history. It was sustained growth in the '50s and '60s and it was egalitarian. So the lowest percentile did as well as the highest percentile. A lot of people moved into reasonable lifestyles - what's called here "middle class" (working class is what it's called in other countries).

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Without going on with details, what's being played out for the last 30 years is actually a kind of a nightmare that was anticipated by the classical economists. If you take an Adam Smith, and bother to read Wealth of Nations, you see that he considered the possibility that the merchants and manufacturers in England might decide to do their business abroad, invest abroad and import from abroad. He said they would profit but England would be harmed. He went on to say that the merchants and manufacturers would prefer to operate in their own country, what's sometimes called a "home bias." So, as if by an invisible hand, England would be saved the ravage of what's called "neoliberal globalization."

That's a pretty hard passage to miss. In his classic Wealth of Nations, that's the only occurrence of the phrase "invisible hand." Maybe England would be saved from neoliberal globalization by an invisible hand. The other great classical economist David Ricardo recognized the same thing and hoped it wouldn't happen. Kind of a sentimental hope. It didn't happen for a long time, but it's happening now. Over the last 30 years that's exactly what's underway. For the general population - the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movement - it's really harsh and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent, or furthermore 1/10th of 1 percent, it's just fine. They're at the top, richer and more powerful than ever in controlling the political system and disregarding the public, and if it can continue, then sure why not? This is just what Smith and Ricardo warned about.

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http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8210-occupy-the-world