Global Day of Action - Greater Boston

Boston's contribution to the Global Day of Action was a series of events held over the weeks before and after January 26, 2008. Following demonstrations against the Siege of Gaza, Colombia's US-fueled reign of terror, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's raids against migrant workers, Noam Chomsky closed the week with a wide ranging survey of recent US imperial history. Entitled "Impacts of War: Consequences of the US Invasion of Iraq," his talk focused on the world's "Unpeople" (a term borrowed from British scholar Mark Curtis' survey, "Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses").

In order to do so, Chomsky first addressed the projects of the people who matter in terms of the Washington schema. For Iraq, Chomsky feared that the US project remains as it was before the invasion. Now it is being codified in the "Declaration of Principles for a Long Term Relationship Between Iraq and the U.S." that the Bush Administration intends to sign (with token Democratic Party opposition). The declaration provides for:

• aiding its [Iraq's] transition to a market economy"
• encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments"
• permanent bases to "deter foreign [sic] aggression."

To achieve this, the United States has essentially destroyed Iraq. Indeed, Kim Foltz, who introduced Chomsky, cited two chilling, closely related statistics that spoke to this point. First, there are now 5 million Iraqi orphans (out of population of less than a 30 million, i.e. nearly 1 in 2 children); second, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the war will have cost $750 billion by the end of this year (expressed in terms of results, that is $150,000/orphan). Chomsky added another widely-cited set of numbers, 2 million people displaced internally and an additional 2 pushed in Jordan and Syria. Cap this off with today's estimate by British polling company Opinion Research Business, that a million Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 invasion and Chomsky's extreme-sounding claim with respect to the destruction of Iraq comes off as a clinical statement of fact.

The current downward trajectory in terms of violent deaths are mainly the result of 2 processes that, contrary to received media wisdom, are unconnected with the Bush-Petraeus surge: (1) the successful ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods (fewer people left to kill) and (2) Moqtada Al-Sadr's decision to consolidate his gains by declaring a ceasefire. The net result of all of this is that Bush—for the time-being at least—has succeeded in emulating Putin in his "victory" over Chechnya. There too we have a dazzling success with the restoration of electricity and a building boom!

Characteristic of Chomsky's talks are his constant reminder that these imperial "successes" are only possible with the complicity and often active cooperation of the media and this country's intellectuals. He therefore extended his conversation to point out that the difference between the hawks and doves among the rulers is that the former demand a military victory while the latter only believe it (i.e. the victory) to be too costly. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent liberal historian and Kennedy administration advisor, embodied this in the 1960s when he eventually came to oppose the war in Vietnam (after initially supporting). In 1967, Chomsky famously challenged Schlesinger and Rostow in a signature work of that generation, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"; this time round, perhaps closing the circle on the recently departed Schlesinger, Chomsky noted that the mainstream media reinforces this amoral calculating "dovishness." Schlesinger's obituaries, Chomsky observed, affirmed the former's late and utilitarian opposition to the Vietnam war, but they generally failed to mention his moral outrage over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The relationship between US imperial interests and intellectuals came under scrutiny again in Chomsky's talk as he outlined his critique of the "Israel Lobby" argument. While accepting much of the evidence adduced for the power of the lobby, Chomsky presented a very different explanation. Where Walt and Mearsheimer argue that the US policy in the Middle East runs contrary to US national interests due to the influence of an Israeli Lobby that distorts the policy formation process, Chomsky argues that the US establishment supports Israel because it does the US's bidding. The key event for Chomsky was the 1967 "Six Day War." Before that time, American intellectuals paid very little attention to Israel despite the temporal proximity of the Holocaust. After the '67 war, however, widespread American support for the Israeli state emerged. In Chomsky's reading, that war achieved two American objectives: first, it forever weakened secular Arab nationalism (embodied by Nasser); second, the same act elevated the relative power Saudi Arabia's Islamic fundamentalism. American intellectuals, ever subservient to the state, for this reason are part of the Israeli lobby and not because of any intrinsic interest in that state. By way of illustration, Chomsky points to Commentary's former editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz. Before '67 the dean of America's neoconservatives paid little attention to Israel despite the magazine's Jewish focus in Chomsky's opinion, after that fateful year however, its identity with the state of Israel was sealed. This take on the lobby finds corroboration in Commentary's self description:

"Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970's, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards."

Note the 1970s as an inflection point. But it also points the difficulty in isolating one strand of causation from another: Israel's interests => lobby pressure => US action versus US interests => lobby support =>US and Israel actions. In other words, Chomsky's illustrations here leave me sympathetic to, but unconvinced by, his claims.

There was a second line of reasoning offered by our speaker. The Israel Lobby's power pales by comparison with that of the American Chamber of Commerce and other institutions of big capital, he argues. Indeed, if the lobby were arguing against interest of capital, the Chamber of Commerce in response would squelch it.

Further, Chomsky states that if we really believed that the Israel Lobby were acting against US interests, then the practical response should be that we dress up in suit and ties and inform the American Chamber of Commerce that this is the case… Of course, Chomsky's tongue-in-cheek recommendation seems to be Walt and Mearsheimer's approach! They are sounding the alarms to US elites. So his inference for activism may actually confirm their argument rather than his.

In another vein, a regular feature of a Chomsky lecture is the question and answer period in which someone throws up their arms and declares, "Well, given everything you've said, where should get our information from and what should we do?" This time it took the form of someone asking about the situation of women in Iraq and what we should do to get the antiwar movement to address this aspect of the invasion. While Chomsky's response noted the aggravated status of women in American occupied, post-Baathist Iraq and the US support elsewhere for extreme misogynistic versions of Sha'aria, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's attack on women who refused the veil or Zia ul-Haq's Pakistan, he did not address the tasks of the antiwar movement. In a subsequent response to an audience member, Chomsky emphasized the value of joining organizations. This approach on Chomsky's part lead Cynthia Peters 4 years ago to start "Talking back to Chomsky." She argues that there are 3 problems with Chomsky's answer: (1) proportionality – organizations that we can join are small and weak compared to the scale of the problems to be addressed; (2) strategy – we don't get a sense of where to invest our energies i.e. Chomsky's talks don't identify the empire's weaknesses; (3) vision – what should we demand?

These are by no means ungrateful and impertinent questions. In fact, Peters starts out by observing that "our social movements have benefited enormously" from his work and finally by concluding that he, "has laid bare the workings of the beast and explained its functioning." Despite my doubts about Chomsky's outright rejection of the "Israel Lobby" thesis, I believe that his talks generally addresses Peter's problems in ways that Chomsky probably finds satisfactory given his approach to humanity and democracy. On the problem of scale (proportionality) he often draws on the experience of the Zapatistas and their ability to network on a world scale in order to hold the Mexican state at bay. The claim here seems to be that modest organizations can achieve scale via networking. In this evening's Bikes Not Bombs 2008 lecture, Chomsky adds to this the example of social movements in Cochabamba also networking on a global scale to defeat Bechtel Corporation (something the people of Massachusetts failed to do with respect to the same corporation and the Big Dig). Interestingly, Arundhati Roy offered a similar response when speaking alongside Chomsky at the World Social Forum in 2003 by declaring the "each in our own way" have "laid siege to empire."

Strategy in this view emerges out of practice and not out any ready-made model; successful strategy from his examples are deeply historical but tied to the actions of ordinary people making their lives and struggles intelligible. This evening, then, Chomsky could celebrate the 500 years of struggle that it took to produce Evo Morales as an indigenous president committed to fundamental social change. More fundamentally, because Chomsky believes that ordinary people can understand their world, but that they can only do so in concert with one another, the means of communication become central to his thinking about social change. It is obvious therefore why he is so frustrated by the media oligopolies and ideological conformity that maintains the situation. It also helps explain why, according to answer he gave, he spends 4 -5 hours a day answering e-mails. The main query in each of these e-mails, he says, "What is a good source of information for…"

The "vision problem" may also find similar solution: Evo Morales proposed reforms that Chomsky lauds and even the secular Arab nationalism that the US represses and that Chomsky chronicles all seem to be experiments in resistance and change that resonate with people in those countries. These are visions that Chomsky may not embrace for the United States but that have an authenticity to those engaged in those struggles. Vision is deeply historical and contextual and not readily portable from experience to experience. Indeed, similar laments are made about Karl Marx who offered socialism as a solution but with one, possibly two, exceptions refused to speculate about its content. This is, of course, the fundamental paradox of vision in social change: vision is supposed to be transcendental of a particular situation but is intimately tied to that situation.

But there is another feature of a Chomsky lecture in Boston that really gets to his model of social change and why most of his audience never gets it. As important as any lecture is, so is its context, more true if the lecturer deliberately chooses that context. Characteristic of these Boston-area Chomsky lectures is the fact that he uses these lectures as a means to support the fundraising efforts of local grassroots organizations. In this evening's case, it was Bikes Not Bombs. In the last year, he addressed City Life/Vida Urbana, the Middle East Crisis Coalition and Massachusetts Global Action among others. In other words, beyond a general injunction to the audience to join organizations, Chomsky supports local organizations and allows them to promote themselves to a large audience via his presence. Regrettably, this strategy has one flaw, for just as the speaker and the context are important, so too is the audience. In each of the talks that I have attended over the last few years, a large chunk of the audience ups and leaves right after Chomsky finishes answering questions and right before the sponsoring organization has a chance to present its particular answers to the proportionality/strategy/vision problems that Peters calls to our attention.

In this evening's example, Bikes Not Bomb's founder reviewed their organization's history and its particular angle on economic development and solidarity. Their strategy is to increase productivity by promoting a green technology seemed eminently practical while connected to a broader (if implicit) vision of a good society. Following Chomsky's model, their vehicle for achieving scale is to network on a global level with projects ranging from El Salvador to South Africa all while organizing locally in Jamaica Plain. When one takes into account the dollar value of their work locally and purchasing power parity value of the thousands of bicycles they ship to the Global South, their scale and its impact is impressive and worthy of the kind of emulation necessary for it to have a meaningful impact. Unfortunately, more than half of Chomsky's audience missed this part of his theory of social change by leaving early. Similarly neglected answers may be offered for many of the other talks he has given in support of local organizations.

Still, in light of Chomsky's evaluation of the situation in Iraq, Peter's questions remain for the antiwar movement. Given the scale of the carnage in Iraq and empire's other frontiers, which of our efforts to end the war matches its scope and intensity? Given the diversity of the antiwar movement, which strategies are likely to prevail? And, following on the need for a vision, what does it mean to prevail? Similarly we must ask these questions of the other actions that accompanied the Chomsky lecture. Boston's contributions to the Day of Action included many and well-attended events given the admittedly modest standards of the American left. But do they get us where we (and the rest of the Unpeoples) need to be?  Surveying the world's activities for the Global Day of Action, Alejandro Kirk complains that it offered, "more words than action," and that it "did not fill avenues," or make headlines. Two local, Day-of-Action events may illustrate the way forward albeit differently from that offered by Bikes Not Bombs. The Boston May Day Coalition, joined by anarchists and members of Students for a Democratic Society turned 60 people out in below freezing temperatures to protest anti-worker, anti-migrant policies of the US government. This mobilization was part of a building up and relationship generating process toward marking May Day 2008. It did generate Spanish-language headlines in Siglo21 and left the participants thinking about future collaboration. The event and action in solidarity with Colombia turned out about 50 people on a cold Saturday morning. There they heard from a Colombian trade unionist and marched on the Colombian consulate. While their action did not fill St. James Avenue, it set the basis for meetings between the trade unionist, local solidarity activists and legislators who are going to vote on the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement. In these meetings, a key legislator stated that he will not vote in favor of the agreement. The labor and solidarity groups that came together to sponsor Colombia Global Day of Action event in Boston will be working to hold the legislators to that position and hope thereby to thwart a major ruling class initiative to further exploit Colombia. Again modest solutions offered, but perhaps these are threads weaving toward something greater?