This is the latest collection of interviews that C. J. Polychroniou has conducted with Noam Chomsky. This is the first Chomsky-based collection of interviews that is published by Haymarket Books since Illegitimate Authority, which came out in 2020.

Most of what is discussed in this book are very current topics and, to Chomsky, the most immediate that we should deal with if humanity is to survive beyond the immediate future: the climate catastrophe, the risk of nuclear war (which means the annihilation of humankind), the ongoing war in Ukraine, and growing fascist threats.

Chomsky shares realism through optimism like a beacon shares light to aid seafarers. There’s no light without caution: simply put, if humanity won’t struggle to solve our immediate problems, there will be dire consequences, some of which we already clearly see, perhaps especially in terms of the climate catastrophe.

In recent years, Chomsky has clearly stated that the end of humankind could happen sooner than one wishes, mainly due to one of two things: nuclear war or climate catastrophe. Both, Chomsky say, are clearly avoidable.

There are solutions to our problems. Chomsky has always pointed to the fact that things can and do change, and that these changes are never initiated from the top. Capitalism is just fascist structure and the ones with power and money don’t want to give it up as they’re blinded by greed. Chomsky is not at all as black-and-white as I might seem in this regard, which partly explains why he is listened to.

Chomsky’s answers are always interesting, regardless of what one may think of what he says.

Q: India has overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, and its population is certain to continue to grow in the decades ahead. Do we have to reduce global population to save the planet?

A, Chomsky: The global population should be reduced, perhaps considerably. Fortunately, there is a method to achieve this result, one that is furthermore humane and should be undertaken irrespective of the goal of saving the planet: education of women. That’s been shown to lead to sharp population reduction in both rich countries and poor.

Education of women should be supplemented by other humane methods, such as those prescribed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”

Together with Robert Pollin, at times a co-interviewee with Chomsky throughout this book, Chomsky has clearly commented on how a New Green Deal were possible.

Q: What about the job losses from the state’s fossil fuel industry phase out?

A, Pollin: There are presently roughly 40,000 people employed in West Virginia’s fossil fuel industry and ancillary sectors, comprising about 5 percent of the overall West Virginia labor force. But it is critical to recognize that all 40,000 workers are not going to lose their jobs right away. Rather, about 20,000 jobs will be phased out by 2030 as fossil fuel production is cut by 50 percent. This averages to a bit more than 2,000 job losses per year. However, we also estimate that about 600 of the workers holding these jobs will voluntarily retire every year. This means that the number of workers who will face job displacement every year is in the range of 1,400, or 0.2 percent of the state’s labor force. This is while the state is also generating about 25,000 new jobs through its clean energy transformation.

In short, there will be an abundance of new job opportunities for the 1,400 workers facing displacement every year. We estimate that to guarantee these workers comparable pay levels and intact pensions, along with retraining, job search, and relocation support, as needed, will cost about $42,000 per worker per year. This totals to an average of about $143 million per year. This is equal to about 0.2 percent of West Virginia’s overall level of economic activity, GDP. In short, generous just transition policies for all displaced fossil fuel workers will definitely not create major cost burdens, even in such a heavily fossil fuel dependent state as West Virginia.

Chomsky always speaks clearly on North American hegemonic interests:

It may be a caricature to describe the capitalist state as the executive committee of the ruling class, but it’s a caricature of something that exists, and has existed for a long time. We may recall again Adam Smith’s description of the early days of capitalist imperialism, when the “masters of mankind” who owned the economy of England were the “principal architects” of state policy and ensured that their own interests were properly served no matter how grievous the effects on others. Others included the people of England, but much more so the victims of the “savage injustice” of the masters, particularly in India in the early days of England’s destruction of what was then, along with China, the richest society on earth, while stealing its more advanced technology.

Some principles of global order have a long life.

There should be no need to review again how closely US foreign policy has conformed to Smith’s maxim, to the present. One guiding doctrine is that the US will not tolerate what State Department officials called “the philosophy of the new nationalism,” which embraces “policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses” along with the pernicious idea “that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.” They are not. The first beneficiaries are the investor class, primarily from the US.

This stern lesson was taught to backward Latin Americans at a hemispheric conference called by the US in 1945, which established an Economic Charter for the Americas that stamped out these heresies. They were not confined to Latin America. Eighty years ago, it seemed that at last the world would finally emerge from the misery of the Great Depression and fascist horrors. A wave of radical democracy spread throughout much of the world, with hopes for a more just and humane global order. The earliest imperatives for the US and its British junior partner were to block these aspirations and to restore the traditional order, including fascist collaborators, first in Greece (with enormous violence) and Italy, then throughout Western Europe, extending as well to Asia. Russia played a similar role in its own lesser domains. These are among the first chapters of postwar history.

While Smith’s masters of mankind quite generally ensure that state policy serves their immediate interests, there are exceptions, which give a good deal of insight into policy formation. We’ve just discussed one: Cuba. It’s not just the world that objects strenuously to the sanctions policy to which it must conform. The same is true of powerful sectors among the masters, including energy, agribusiness, and particularly pharmaceuticals, eager to link up with Cuba’s advanced industry. But the executive committee prohibits it. Their parochial interests are overridden by the long-term interest of pre venting “successful defiance” of US policies tracing back to the Monroe Doctrine, as the State Department explained sixty years ago.

Any Mafia don would understand.

In an interview published in 2023, Chomsky spoke about AI. I really appreciate how Chomsky uses simple metaphors to cast light to show ‘magic’ for what it really is.

As always, possible benefits of technology have to be weighed against potential costs.

Quite different questions arise when we turn to Al and science.

Here caution is necessary because of exorbitant and reckless claims, often amplified in the media. To clarify the issues, let’s consider cases, some hypothetical, some real.

I mentioned insect navigation, which is an astonishing achievement. Insect scientists have made much progress in studying how it is achieved, though the neurophysiology, a very difficult matter, remains elusive, along with evolution of the systems. The same is true of the amazing feats of birds and sea turtles that travel thousands of miles and unerringly return to the place of origin.

Suppose Tom Jones, a proponent of engineering AI, comes along and says: “Your work has all been refuted. The problem is solved.

Commercial airline pilots achieve the same or even better results all the time.”

If even bothering to respond, we’d laugh.

Take the case of the seafaring exploits of Polynesians, still alive among aboriginal tribes, using stars, wind, currents to land their canoes at a designated spot hundreds of miles away. This too has been the topic of much research to find out how they do it. Tom Jones has the answer: “Stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time.”

Same response.

Let’s now turn to a real case, language acquisition. It’s been the topic of extensive and highly illuminating research in recent years, showing that infants have very rich knowledge of the ambient language (or languages), far beyond what they exhibit in performance.

It is achieved with little evidence, and in some crucial cases none at all. At best, as careful statistical studies have shown, available data are sparse, particularly when rank-frequency (“Zipf’s law”) is taken into account.

Enter Tom Jones: “You’ve been refuted. Paying no attention to your discoveries, LLMs that scan astronomical amounts of data can find statistical regularities that make it possible to simulate the data on which they are trained, producing something that looks pretty much like normal human behavior. Chatbots.”

This case differs from the others. First, it is real. Second, people don’t laugh; in fact, many are awed. Third, unlike the hypothetical cases, the actual results are far from what’s claimed.

These considerations bring up a minor problem with the current LLM enthusiasm: its total absurdity, as in the hypothetical cases where we recognize it at once. But there are much more serious problems than absurdity.

One is that the LLM systems are designed in such a way that they cannot tell us anything about language, learning, or other aspects of cognition, a matter of principle, irremediable. Double the terabytes of data scanned, add another trillion parameters, use even more of California’s energy, and the simulation of behavior will improve, while revealing more clearly the failure in principle of the approach to yield any understanding. The reason is elementary: the systems work just as well with impossible languages that infants cannot acquire as with those they acquire quickly and virtually reflexively.

It’s as if a biologist were to say: “I have a great new theory of organisms. It lists many that exist and many that can’t possibly exist, and I can tell you nothing about the distinction.”

Again, we’d laugh. Or should.

Even when Chomsky seems pessimistic, he is illuminatingly realistic and truthful. This is from an interview in 2023:

C. J. Polychroniou: The war in Ukraine is approaching its one-year anniversary and not only is there no end in sight to the fighting, but the flow of weaponry from the US and Germany to Ukraine is increasing. What’s next on the NATO/US agenda, one wonders? Urging the Ukrainian military to retaliate by striking Moscow and other Russian cities? So, what’s your assessment, Noam, of the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

Noam Chomsky: We can usefully begin by asking what is not on the NATO/US agenda. The answer to that is easy: efforts to bring the horrors to an end before they become much worse. “Much worse” begins with the increasing devastation of Ukraine, awful enough, even though nowhere near the scale of the US-UK invasion of Iraq or, of course, the US destruction of Indochina, in a class by itself in the post-World War II era. That does not come close to exhausting the highly relevant list.

To take a few minor examples, as of February 2023, the UN estimates civilian deaths in Ukraine at about seven thousand. That’s surely a severe underestimate. If we triple it, we reach the probable death toll of the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. If we multiply it by thirty, we reach the toll of Ronald Reagan’s slaughter in Central America, one of Washington’s minor escapades. And so it continues.

But this is a pointless exercise, in fact a contemptible one in Western doctrine. How dare one bring up Western crimes when the official task is to denounce Russia as uniquely horrendous! Furthermore, for each of our crimes, elaborate apologetics are readily available.

They quickly collapse on investigation, as has been demonstrated in painstaking detail. But that is all irrelevant within a well-functioning doctrinal system in which “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” to borrow George Orwell’s description of free England in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm.

But “much worse” goes far beyond the grim toll in Ukraine. It includes those facing starvation from the curtailing of grain and fertilizer from the rich Black Sea region; the growing threat of steps up the escalation ladder to nuclear war (which means terminal war); and arguably worst of all, the sharp reversal of the limited efforts to avert the impending catastrophe of global heating, which there should be no need to review.

Unfortunately, there is a need. We cannot ignore the euphoria in the fossil fuel industry over the skyrocketing profits and the tantalizing prospects for decades more of destruction of human life on Earth as they abandon their marginal commitment to sustainable energy as profitability of fossil fuels soars.

And we cannot ignore the success of the propaganda system in driving such concerns from the minds of the victims, the general population. The latest Pew poll of popular attitudes on urgent issues did not even ask about nuclear war. Climate change was at the bottom of the list; among Republicans, 13 percent.

It is, after all, only the most important issue to have arisen in human history, another unpopular idea that has been effectively suppressed.

Chomsky speaks truth. It’s fairly simple to see why he is the most quoted human alive today.

If real wages had continued to track productivity gains, “the average worker’s hourly wage in 2021 would have been $61.94, not $25.18.” And if the assault on the public had been curbed, big corporate CEO pay would not have risen “from being 33 times higher than the average worker in 1978 to 366 times higher in 2019-i.e., a more than tenfold increase in relative pay.” That’s only one part of the serious blows against working people and the poor that we expect, on institutional grounds, once the reins are cast off.

It should be of great concern that talk of nuclear war is being bandied about casually as a possibility to be considered. It is not. It is most definitely not.

What does Russia hope to achieve? As we’ve discussed, there are two ways to approach this question.

One way is to explore the depths of Putin’s mind, as George W. Bush did when he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his “soul,” and pronounced it good. And as many amateur psychologists do today, with supreme confidence.

A second way is to look at what Putin and his associates are saying. As in the case of other leaders, this may or may not reflect their hidden intentions. What matters, however, is that what they say can be a basis for negotiations if there is any interest in bringing the horrors to an end before they get even worse. That’s how diplomacy works.

There is an old Kurdish proverb that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. There is just concern that Turkish-Swedish NATO maneuverings might confirm it.

This is yet another magnificent and sober collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky. In my mind, this is a book that should be read by most people.

Last year, Chomsky suffered a stroke which left him unable to speak. He has since been convalescing in Brazil. May he recover faster than expected!

A Livable Future is Possible is published by Haymarket Books on 2024-12-10.