1 00:00:01,501 --> 00:00:03,870 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:03,870 --> 00:00:05,238 Commons license. 3 00:00:05,238 --> 00:00:07,474 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:07,474 --> 00:00:11,544 continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:11,544 --> 00:00:14,080 To make a donation, or to view additional materials 6 00:00:14,080 --> 00:00:18,051 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:18,051 --> 00:00:24,591 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:24,591 --> 00:00:26,226 AUDIENCE: You mentioned before, like we 9 00:00:26,226 --> 00:00:28,595 were talking about Trump not winning the popular vote. 10 00:00:28,595 --> 00:00:31,197 So how do you feel about our system of voting 11 00:00:31,197 --> 00:00:34,834 in the United States versus a preferential voting system? 12 00:00:34,834 --> 00:00:37,737 NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it's a kind of a-- 13 00:00:37,737 --> 00:00:42,475 it's a fact known among political scientists, 14 00:00:42,475 --> 00:00:46,579 but not the population that the American political system is 15 00:00:46,579 --> 00:00:49,496 so regressive that it would not be accepted 16 00:00:49,496 --> 00:00:51,885 by the European Court of Justice. 17 00:00:51,885 --> 00:00:55,388 Literally. 18 00:00:55,388 --> 00:00:57,757 Some of the East European states that 19 00:00:57,757 --> 00:01:00,026 have come into the European Union 20 00:01:00,026 --> 00:01:03,897 have proposed voting systems like the American one 21 00:01:03,897 --> 00:01:08,501 and they're rejected because they're so undemocratic. 22 00:01:08,501 --> 00:01:10,804 This goes back to the-- 23 00:01:10,804 --> 00:01:13,726 If you take a look at a-- we don't 24 00:01:13,726 --> 00:01:16,042 have any political parties in the United States. 25 00:01:16,042 --> 00:01:19,245 Remember, they do in Europe. 26 00:01:19,245 --> 00:01:23,783 You can't be a member of the Democratic Party. 27 00:01:23,783 --> 00:01:26,986 What you can do is go into the voting booth 28 00:01:26,986 --> 00:01:29,122 and put an x somewhere. 29 00:01:29,122 --> 00:01:32,926 That's your role as a citizen. 30 00:01:32,926 --> 00:01:37,896 Elite party managers set up the programs, 31 00:01:37,896 --> 00:01:41,334 pretty much pick the can-- they vet the candidates. 32 00:01:41,334 --> 00:01:45,071 Only certain ones get through. 33 00:01:45,071 --> 00:01:50,410 You look at a ballot, it says, Republican, Democrat, nothing 34 00:01:50,410 --> 00:01:51,945 else. 35 00:01:51,945 --> 00:01:53,780 Those are your choices. 36 00:01:53,780 --> 00:01:56,950 So these are candidate-producing machines. 37 00:01:56,950 --> 00:02:00,787 The role of the citizen is to show up every couple of years 38 00:02:00,787 --> 00:02:03,623 and put in an x, and then go home. 39 00:02:03,623 --> 00:02:08,495 That's not democratic politics. 40 00:02:08,495 --> 00:02:10,597 But that's a deeply ingrained system. 41 00:02:10,597 --> 00:02:13,833 It comes out of the way the party system developed here 42 00:02:13,833 --> 00:02:19,739 in the 19th century post-Civil war, mainly. 43 00:02:19,739 --> 00:02:22,275 I mean, these are really serious issues. 44 00:02:22,275 --> 00:02:25,044 It makes it almost impossible for an independent party 45 00:02:25,044 --> 00:02:27,680 to participate. 46 00:02:27,680 --> 00:02:30,783 And those things are not graven in stone. 47 00:02:30,783 --> 00:02:34,890 They can all be changed. 48 00:02:34,890 --> 00:02:36,723 MICHEL DEGRAFF: Talking about black matters, 49 00:02:36,723 --> 00:02:39,192 there's been claims that this system of voting 50 00:02:39,192 --> 00:02:43,163 reflects earlier concerns about blacks in America. 51 00:02:43,163 --> 00:02:44,100 NOAM CHOMSKY: It does. 52 00:02:44,100 --> 00:02:46,266 MICHEL DEGRAFF: So can you say something about that? 53 00:02:46,266 --> 00:02:47,233 NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. 54 00:02:47,233 --> 00:02:50,035 Well, you go back to the-- slavery 55 00:02:50,035 --> 00:02:52,805 lasted until the Civil War. 56 00:02:52,805 --> 00:02:55,475 And incidentally, it was the most vicious system 57 00:02:55,475 --> 00:02:57,543 of slavery in world history. 58 00:02:57,543 --> 00:02:59,312 There was never anything like it. 59 00:02:59,312 --> 00:03:03,483 Slavery is bad enough, but the American system was unique. 60 00:03:03,483 --> 00:03:08,221 Also, it's worth remembering that the slave system is 61 00:03:08,221 --> 00:03:10,990 the basis of our prosperity. 62 00:03:10,990 --> 00:03:16,696 The main commodity in the early 19th century was cotton. 63 00:03:16,696 --> 00:03:21,401 Cotton was the fuel of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. 64 00:03:21,401 --> 00:03:24,938 Cheap cotton led to the manufacturing industries 65 00:03:24,938 --> 00:03:26,839 in New England. 66 00:03:26,839 --> 00:03:30,210 The early manufacturing, big manufacturing industries 67 00:03:30,210 --> 00:03:32,412 in Lowell and Lawrence were textiles. 68 00:03:32,412 --> 00:03:36,883 It led to the development of the financial system. 69 00:03:36,883 --> 00:03:39,052 Credit, loans, and so on, was mostly 70 00:03:39,052 --> 00:03:41,321 for the cotton-based system. 71 00:03:41,321 --> 00:03:42,622 Same in England. 72 00:03:42,622 --> 00:03:44,424 That's why Liverpool was one of the richest 73 00:03:44,424 --> 00:03:47,327 countries in the world. 74 00:03:47,327 --> 00:03:49,762 It's where the slave cotton came in. 75 00:03:49,762 --> 00:03:52,799 So cotton, if you look at it, was the real basis right 76 00:03:52,799 --> 00:03:56,302 through the 19th century for commercial and industrial 77 00:03:56,302 --> 00:03:57,670 development. 78 00:03:57,670 --> 00:04:00,740 And it was based on extremely cheap and highly-productive 79 00:04:00,740 --> 00:04:02,008 labor. 80 00:04:02,008 --> 00:04:06,412 The productivity of labor was improved by technology, 81 00:04:06,412 --> 00:04:08,815 but the technology was very simple. 82 00:04:08,815 --> 00:04:10,883 It was the whip and the pistol. 83 00:04:10,883 --> 00:04:13,720 That's all you needed to improve technology. 84 00:04:13,720 --> 00:04:18,124 The whole story is unbelievably hideous when you look at it. 85 00:04:18,124 --> 00:04:23,930 OK, theoretically it ended with the emancipation declaration. 86 00:04:23,930 --> 00:04:26,199 But that was only theoretical. 87 00:04:26,199 --> 00:04:30,103 There was a 10-year period, the Reconstruction, 88 00:04:30,103 --> 00:04:33,473 in which federal troops were in the South, union troops. 89 00:04:33,473 --> 00:04:39,212 And that's one of the decades in which African Americans had 90 00:04:39,212 --> 00:04:41,881 a small chance to get into the system. 91 00:04:41,881 --> 00:04:42,548 And they did. 92 00:04:42,548 --> 00:04:43,750 They were elected. 93 00:04:43,750 --> 00:04:48,087 There were people running towns and legislatures. 94 00:04:48,087 --> 00:04:51,324 There was a bit of economic development and so on. 95 00:04:51,324 --> 00:04:56,195 It ended in 1877 with a North-South compact 96 00:04:56,195 --> 00:05:00,800 that essentially left the South free to do whatever it wanted. 97 00:05:00,800 --> 00:05:03,970 So what they did was re-institute slavery. 98 00:05:03,970 --> 00:05:05,171 Literally. 99 00:05:05,171 --> 00:05:07,707 In fact, the main book on this is called Slavery 100 00:05:07,707 --> 00:05:13,346 by Another Name by a Wall Street Journal bureau chief 101 00:05:13,346 --> 00:05:15,181 who studied it in some depth. 102 00:05:15,181 --> 00:05:19,585 Scholarship [inaudible] wrote a good, popular book about it. 103 00:05:19,585 --> 00:05:24,190 What happened was black life was criminalized. 104 00:05:24,190 --> 00:05:27,927 So if a black man is standing on a street corner, 105 00:05:27,927 --> 00:05:31,397 he can be charged with vagrancy and given 106 00:05:31,397 --> 00:05:32,832 a fine which he can't pay. 107 00:05:32,832 --> 00:05:35,101 So he's in jail forever. 108 00:05:35,101 --> 00:05:38,104 If a black men look, somebody says somebody 109 00:05:38,104 --> 00:05:39,172 looked at a white woman. 110 00:05:39,172 --> 00:05:42,193 OK, he's charged with attempted rape 111 00:05:42,193 --> 00:05:43,943 and he's in jail for the rest of his life. 112 00:05:43,943 --> 00:05:46,245 And pretty soon, most of the black male population 113 00:05:46,245 --> 00:05:47,814 was in jail. 114 00:05:47,814 --> 00:05:50,950 That's a wonderful slave labor force. 115 00:05:50,950 --> 00:05:52,719 From the point of view of the capitalist, 116 00:05:52,719 --> 00:05:55,621 it's much better than slavery because you don't 117 00:05:55,621 --> 00:05:58,624 have to sustain your workforce. 118 00:05:58,624 --> 00:06:01,761 If you have slaves, you have to keep them alive. 119 00:06:01,761 --> 00:06:05,531 If it's a prison population, the taxpayer keeps them alive. 120 00:06:05,531 --> 00:06:07,667 You just get the profit. 121 00:06:07,667 --> 00:06:09,902 And a large part of the second wave 122 00:06:09,902 --> 00:06:12,171 of industrialization in the United States 123 00:06:12,171 --> 00:06:13,840 was based on that. 124 00:06:13,840 --> 00:06:20,279 Mining, steel, so on, used essentially incarcerated slave 125 00:06:20,279 --> 00:06:21,381 labor. 126 00:06:21,381 --> 00:06:24,417 I mean, we were familiar with the chain gangs 127 00:06:24,417 --> 00:06:25,785 because you see them. 128 00:06:25,785 --> 00:06:27,954 We don't see them, but you did see them. 129 00:06:27,954 --> 00:06:29,822 The agricultural workers. 130 00:06:29,822 --> 00:06:32,392 But it was happening all over the economy. 131 00:06:32,392 --> 00:06:36,462 Well, that lasted almost until the Second World War. 132 00:06:36,462 --> 00:06:41,567 And now we have another version of it. 133 00:06:41,567 --> 00:06:45,037 The massive incarceration since the Reagan years 134 00:06:45,037 --> 00:06:48,007 is kind of reconstituting that in many ways. 135 00:06:48,007 --> 00:06:50,042 Well, all of this has to do with voting. 136 00:06:50,042 --> 00:06:51,844 These people don't vote. 137 00:06:51,844 --> 00:06:55,381 What's more, we have very harsh voting laws. 138 00:06:55,381 --> 00:06:58,518 People convicted of what's called a felony, which 139 00:06:58,518 --> 00:07:03,089 could be being caught with pot three times or something, 140 00:07:03,089 --> 00:07:04,190 they don't vote anymore. 141 00:07:04,190 --> 00:07:06,826 They're out of the system. 142 00:07:06,826 --> 00:07:08,728 This is a big part of it. 143 00:07:08,728 --> 00:07:12,031 Also, their families are destroyed, so they don't vote. 144 00:07:12,031 --> 00:07:19,477 They live in-- I once took a walk 145 00:07:19,477 --> 00:07:22,666 through-- with a sociologist friend who 146 00:07:22,666 --> 00:07:25,859 studies these things through an area of the Bronx, 147 00:07:25,859 --> 00:07:28,397 which I happen to know from childhood because a lot 148 00:07:28,397 --> 00:07:30,550 of my family lives there. 149 00:07:30,550 --> 00:07:33,553 There used to be immigrant communities, poor communities. 150 00:07:33,553 --> 00:07:35,955 But now, they've been gentrified. 151 00:07:35,955 --> 00:07:37,356 High rises, and so on. 152 00:07:37,356 --> 00:07:43,129 And I asked this woman, sociologist from Columbia, 153 00:07:43,129 --> 00:07:45,398 what happened to the people? 154 00:07:45,398 --> 00:07:50,603 She said, well, the men are in jail in upstate New York. 155 00:07:50,603 --> 00:07:53,439 The women and children sort of followed them, 156 00:07:53,439 --> 00:07:55,608 so they can visit them on Sunday. 157 00:07:55,608 --> 00:07:57,977 So they're in upstate New York. 158 00:07:57,977 --> 00:08:01,547 And now, the rich people live here. 159 00:08:01,547 --> 00:08:02,482 Things like that. 160 00:08:02,482 --> 00:08:05,651 That is happening in South Boston. 161 00:08:05,651 --> 00:08:07,920 We've seen it in my lifetime. 162 00:08:07,920 --> 00:08:09,722 It's happening all over the country. 163 00:08:09,722 --> 00:08:11,724 These are things that are going on constantly 164 00:08:11,724 --> 00:08:13,526 right in front of our eyes. 165 00:08:13,526 --> 00:08:14,827 And voting? 166 00:08:14,827 --> 00:08:17,497 Sure, it's knocking a large part of the population out 167 00:08:17,497 --> 00:08:20,466 of the voting list. 168 00:08:20,466 --> 00:08:24,270 By now, I'm sure you know the Republicans particularly 169 00:08:24,270 --> 00:08:27,807 are dedicated to trying to reduce the vote. 170 00:08:27,807 --> 00:08:31,177 Because the more people vote, the more trouble they're in. 171 00:08:31,177 --> 00:08:34,813 So you have all these ludicrous-- 172 00:08:34,813 --> 00:08:38,584 Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice, 173 00:08:38,584 --> 00:08:40,786 head of Department of Justice, is now 174 00:08:40,786 --> 00:08:45,258 in charge of trying to figure out ways to, what they call, 175 00:08:45,258 --> 00:08:46,692 prevent voter fraud. 176 00:08:46,692 --> 00:08:48,895 There's virtually no voter fraud. 177 00:08:48,895 --> 00:08:52,431 It's so minuscule, it's physically undetectable. 178 00:08:52,431 --> 00:08:57,403 But on that claim to try to readjust the voting so that you 179 00:08:57,403 --> 00:09:03,075 can keep the poor and black people out. 180 00:09:03,075 --> 00:09:06,612 The French election, if you noticed, was on Sunday. 181 00:09:06,612 --> 00:09:08,047 There's a good reason for that. 182 00:09:08,047 --> 00:09:11,050 Sunday. people are free, so they can go and vote. 183 00:09:11,050 --> 00:09:14,954 Here, it's on a workday, making it hard to vote. 184 00:09:14,954 --> 00:09:15,955 Except for the rich. 185 00:09:15,955 --> 00:09:17,657 They can do it easily. 186 00:09:17,657 --> 00:09:20,359 If you're an executive, leave your office. 187 00:09:20,359 --> 00:09:23,563 Or a college professor, you can take off. 188 00:09:23,563 --> 00:09:27,300 But for a lot of people, you just can't vote on a workday. 189 00:09:27,300 --> 00:09:29,302 And there are all sorts of other rules now. 190 00:09:29,302 --> 00:09:33,940 You have to have a driver's license, photo ID. 191 00:09:33,940 --> 00:09:35,441 And a lot of people don't have that. 192 00:09:35,441 --> 00:09:35,975 OK. 193 00:09:35,975 --> 00:09:39,011 Poor people. 194 00:09:39,011 --> 00:09:45,718 Along with the gerrymandering, which is by now a bad joke. 195 00:09:45,718 --> 00:09:47,954 Many devices are being used to try 196 00:09:47,954 --> 00:09:51,624 to prevent the limited democratic system 197 00:09:51,624 --> 00:09:53,392 from functioning. 198 00:09:53,392 --> 00:09:58,831 But again, all of this can be changed. 199 00:09:58,831 --> 00:10:08,474 Bigger gains have been won in the past. 200 00:10:08,474 --> 00:10:09,809 Forget blacks. 201 00:10:09,809 --> 00:10:11,277 Think about women. 202 00:10:11,277 --> 00:10:15,481 I mean, if you go back to the early days of the republic, 203 00:10:15,481 --> 00:10:18,618 women were not considered people. 204 00:10:18,618 --> 00:10:22,755 Literally, they were property. 205 00:10:22,755 --> 00:10:26,525 In our constitutional system, the early days, 206 00:10:26,525 --> 00:10:30,396 a woman is the property of her father, which is transferred 207 00:10:30,396 --> 00:10:32,031 over to her husband. 208 00:10:32,031 --> 00:10:33,265 Then she's his property. 209 00:10:33,265 --> 00:10:36,035 In fact, if you take a look at the early debates 210 00:10:36,035 --> 00:10:39,639 about whether women should be allowed to vote, 211 00:10:39,639 --> 00:10:41,540 one of the arguments against it was 212 00:10:41,540 --> 00:10:44,910 that it would be unfair to unmarried men 213 00:10:44,910 --> 00:10:48,414 because a married man would have two votes, his own boat 214 00:10:48,414 --> 00:10:50,449 and the property's vote. 215 00:10:50,449 --> 00:10:56,055 And this lasted for a long time until pretty recently. 216 00:10:56,055 --> 00:11:02,297 It wasn't until 1975-- not that far back-- that women 217 00:11:02,297 --> 00:11:06,465 had a right to serve on federal juries meaning 218 00:11:06,465 --> 00:11:08,968 being treated as peers. 219 00:11:08,968 --> 00:11:11,103 That's half the population. 220 00:11:11,103 --> 00:11:13,172 It's not African Americans. 221 00:11:13,172 --> 00:11:16,075 It's been a long way to go to achieve 222 00:11:16,075 --> 00:11:19,011 some kind of real right. 223 00:11:19,011 --> 00:11:21,681 And a lot has been achieved. 224 00:11:21,681 --> 00:11:22,581 Lot of victories. 225 00:11:22,581 --> 00:11:23,949 It's a sign of where you can go. 226 00:11:23,949 --> 00:11:27,119 A lot of things we take for granted 227 00:11:27,119 --> 00:11:29,689 just didn't exist years back. 228 00:11:29,689 --> 00:11:31,557 Take this class. 229 00:11:31,557 --> 00:11:37,963 When I came to MIT in 1955, it was white males, period. 230 00:11:37,963 --> 00:11:43,502 Well-dressed, ties and jackets, deferential, do your homework. 231 00:11:43,502 --> 00:11:45,304 That was MIT. 232 00:11:45,304 --> 00:11:46,839 It's not what it is now. 233 00:11:46,839 --> 00:11:50,013 And it didn't happen that way-- change by magic.