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AUDIENCE: You mentioned
before, like we
were talking about Trump not
winning the popular vote.
So how do you feel about
our system of voting
in the United States versus
a preferential voting system?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well,
it's a kind of a--
it's a fact known among
political scientists,
but not the population that the
American political system is
so regressive that
it would not be
accepted by the European
Court of Justice.
Literally.
Some of the East
European states that
have come into
the European Union
have proposed voting systems
like the American one
and they're rejected because
they're so undemocratic.
This goes back to the--
If you take a look at a--
we don't have any political
parties in the United States.
Remember, they do in Europe.
You can't be a member
of the Democratic Party.
What you can do is go
into the voting booth
and put an x somewhere.
That's your role as a citizen.
Elite party managers
set up the programs,
pretty much pick the can--
they vet the candidates.
Only certain ones get through.
You look at a ballot, it says,
Republican, Democrat, nothing
else.
Those are your choices.
So these are
candidate-producing machines.
The role of the citizen is to
show up every couple of years
and put in an x,
and then go home.
That's not democratic politics.
But that's a deeply
ingrained system.
It comes out of the way the
party system developed here
in the 19th century
post-Civil war, mainly.
I mean, these are
really serious issues.
It makes it almost impossible
for an independent party
to participate.
And those things are
not graven in stone.
They can all be changed.
MICHEL DEGRAFF: Talking
about black matters,
there's been claims that
this system of voting
reflects earlier concerns
about blacks in America.
NOAM CHOMSKY: It does.
MICHEL DEGRAFF: So can you
say something about that?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.
Well, you go back to the--
slavery lasted
until the Civil War.
And incidentally, it was
the most vicious system
of slavery in world history.
There was never
anything like it.
Slavery is bad enough, but the
American system was unique.
Also, it's worth remembering
that the slave system is
the basis of our prosperity.
The main commodity in the
early 19th century was cotton.
Cotton was the fuel of the 19th
century Industrial Revolution.
Cheap cotton led to the
manufacturing industries
in New England.
The early manufacturing,
big manufacturing industries
in Lowell and Lawrence
were textiles.
It led to the development
of the financial system.
Credit, loans, and
so on, was mostly
for the cotton-based system.
Same in England.
That's why Liverpool
was one of the richest
countries in the world.
It's where the slave
cotton came in.
So cotton, if you look at
it, was the real basis right
through the 19th century for
commercial and industrial
development.
And it was based on extremely
cheap and highly-productive
labor.
The productivity of labor
was improved by technology,
but the technology
was very simple.
It was the whip and the pistol.
That's all you needed
to improve technology.
The whole story is unbelievably
hideous when you look at it.
OK, theoretically it ended with
the emancipation declaration.
But that was only theoretical.
There was a 10-year
period, the Reconstruction,
in which federal troops were
in the South, union troops.
And that's one of the decades
in which African Americans had
a small chance to
get into the system.
And they did.
They were elected.
There were people running
towns and legislatures.
There was a bit of economic
development and so on.
It ended in 1877 with
a North-South compact
that essentially left the South
free to do whatever it wanted.
So what they did was
re-institute slavery.
Literally.
In fact, the main book
on this is called Slavery
by Another Name by a Wall
Street Journal bureau chief
who studied it in some depth.
Scholarship [inaudible] wrote
a good, popular book about it.
What happened was black
life was criminalized.
So if a black man is
standing on a street corner,
he can be charged with
vagrancy and given
a fine which he can't pay.
So he's in jail forever.
If a black men look,
somebody says somebody
looked at a white woman.
OK, he's charged
with attempted rape
and he's in jail for
the rest of his life.
And pretty soon, most of
the black male population
was in jail.
That's a wonderful
slave labor force.
From the point of view
of the capitalist,
it's much better than
slavery because you don't
have to sustain your workforce.
If you have slaves, you
have to keep them alive.
If it's a prison population,
the taxpayer keeps them alive.
You just get the profit.
And a large part
of the second wave
of industrialization
in the United States
was based on that.
Mining, steel, so on, used
essentially incarcerated slave
labor.
I mean, we were familiar
with the chain gangs
because you see them.
We don't see them,
but you did see them.
The agricultural workers.
But it was happening
all over the economy.
Well, that lasted almost
until the Second World War.
And now we have
another version of it.
The massive incarceration
since the Reagan years
is kind of reconstituting
that in many ways.
Well, all of this has
to do with voting.
These people don't vote.
What's more, we have
very harsh voting laws.
People convicted of what's
called a felony, which
could be being caught with
pot three times or something,
they don't vote anymore.
They're out of the system.
This is a big part of it.
Also, their families are
destroyed, so they don't vote.
They live in--
I once took a walk through--
with a sociologist friend
who studies these things
through an area of
the Bronx, which
I happen to know from childhood
because a lot of my family
lives there.
There used to be immigrant
communities, poor communities.
But now, they've
been gentrified.
High rises, and so on.
And I asked this woman,
sociologist from Columbia,
what happened to the people?
She said, well, the men are
in jail in upstate New York.
The women and children
sort of followed them,
so they can visit
them on Sunday.
So they're in upstate New York.
And now, the rich
people live here.
Things like that.
That is happening
in South Boston.
We've seen it in my lifetime.
It's happening all
over the country.
These are things that
are going on constantly
right in front of our eyes.
And voting?
Sure, it's knocking a large
part of the population out
of the voting list.
By now, I'm sure you know
the Republicans particularly
are dedicated to trying
to reduce the vote.
Because the more people vote,
the more trouble they're in.
So you have all
these ludicrous--
Jeff Sessions, the
Department of Justice,
head of Department
of Justice, is now
in charge of trying to figure
out ways to, what they call,
prevent voter fraud.
There's virtually
no voter fraud.
It's so minuscule, it's
physically undetectable.
But on that claim to try to
readjust the voting so that you
can keep the poor
and black people out.
The French election, if
you noticed, was on Sunday.
There's a good reason for that.
Sunday.
people are free, so
they can go and vote.
Here, it's on a workday,
making it hard to vote.
Except for the rich.
They can do it easily.
If you're an executive,
leave your office.
Or a college professor,
you can take off.
But for a lot of people, you
just can't vote on a workday.
And there are all sorts
of other rules now.
You have to have a
driver's license, photo ID.
And a lot of people
don't have that.
OK.
Poor people.
Along with the gerrymandering,
which is by now a bad joke.
Many devices are
being used to try
to prevent the limited
democratic system
from functioning.
But again, all of
this can be changed.
Bigger gains have
been won in the past.
Forget blacks.
Think about women.
I mean, if you go back to the
early days of the republic,
women were not
considered people.
Literally, they were property.
In our constitutional
system, the early days,
a woman is the property of her
father, which is transferred
over to her husband.
Then she's his property.
In fact, if you take a
look at the early debates
about whether women
should be allowed to vote,
one of the arguments
against it was
that it would be
unfair to unmarried men
because a married man would
have two votes, his own boat
and the property's vote.
And this lasted for a long
time until pretty recently.
It wasn't until 1975--
not that far back--
that women had a right to
serve on federal juries meaning
being treated as peers.
That's half the population.
It's not African Americans.
It's been a long
way to go to achieve
some kind of real right.
And a lot has been achieved.
Lot of victories.
It's a sign of where you can go.
A lot of things we
take for granted
just didn't exist years back.
Take this class.
When I came to MIT in 1955,
it was white males, period.
Well-dressed, ties and jackets,
deferential, do your homework.
That was MIT.
It's not what it is now.
And it didn't happen that way--
change by magic.
