MK: What do you make of the situation in Burma?
NC: As long as India and China support the junta there’s no reason for them to back off, I mean if they back off they are just going to be killed, they are not going to survive if there is a popular uprising, so you can’t expect them to give up peacefully.
MK: So you’re not optimistic about the prospects?
NC: I’m not optimistic, no, because there’s no real pressure. I mean the U.S. makes a fuss about it at the UN, but it’s just showboating. If they meant anything they would say they are going to sanction India for cooperating with the Burmese junta.
MK: What is the history of the US and the Burmese junta? Was it always such an adversarial relationship?
NC: It is an ugly history which is being not talked about. In the 1950’s – the period of decolonization – Burma kicked the British out, like they were everywhere, they were moving towards a functioning parliamentary democracy, with some major international statesman like Rhutan, who was Secretary-General of the UN and a decent person, I met him.
In 1958 the Eisenhower administration was involved in serious clandestine operations all over the region – they were trying to overthrow the government of Indonesia, they were sponsoring an insurrection in Cambodia, Vietnam we know about – but they were also trying to harass China, and one of the ways they were doing this was by bringing Chinese nationalist forces and exporting them to northern Burma so that they could carry out terrorist attacks from China. Well, the Chinese nationalist generals had different ideas.
Instead of moving into China and getting killed by the Red Army, they decided that it would be more fun to organise the tribesman in the hill areas and start narcotics production and enrich themselves and in fact that’s one of the main sources of the famous Gold Triangle. It became one of the major centers of opium production over the world. The Burmese tried to repress it, but they were unable to, and the military were upset about it and there was a military coup which overthrew the parliamentary government and the junta is still there now.
MK: So why is the US being so vocal about Burma now?
NC: Because it’s cheap.
MK: Cheap words?
NC: Yeah. So they can say they are terribly upset about something we can’t do anything about. Why were they upset about Pol Pot? It was horrible, did they have a suggestion? You take a look back, there was not one suggestion about what we should do about it. So it’s a cheap way to pontificate and look righteous.
MK: So you’d agree with sanctions on Burma now?
NC: I would think that sanctions on Burma would make sense. But what I think would really make sense would be diplomatic efforts that would involve primarily India where the US has plenty of influence, it doesn’t have that much influence on China, but India is different. To pressure Indian and China and Thailand also, to make moves towards some kind of rapprochement, sanctions are probably meaningless or harmful. But diplomatic steps could be made – some way to ease the Burmese junta out without committing suicide, you’ve got to give them some options otherwise they won’t let go. As long as they have the complete loyalty of the army which apparently they do have, no uprising is going to take place, people are going to get slaughtered in the streets.
MK: Yeah it’s apparently dying out now.
NC: It was not a major show of force. It was a show of force enough, maybe a dozen people got killed. It’s not the kind of thing we’ve seen elsewhere, like, say, Pinochet in Chile where they killed 3,000 people.
MK: I just wanted to move on to your views of human nature. You’re an innatist.
NC: Everyone is an innatist.
MK: Yes, but you are unique in the fact that you are an innatist but you have an optimist view of human nature.
NC: Not really. I mean, you can’t have a view a of human nature. When you talk about human nature there’s many aspects of it. So the fact that we have a mammalian visual system is human nature. But what we are talking about now is human nature in social and moral domains, and there you can’t have an opinion, we don’t know anything.
MK: Really? But what do you think about the findings of evolutionary psychology that certain intuitions and moral structures have developed because of natural selection. You know Robert Trivers and his reciprocal altruism theory…
NC: Well Trivers work is serious, but he’s not one of the standard evolutionary psychologists. I mean his work is actually serious and they have shown things for animals; you can’t show much for humans because you can’t do experiments and so on. He has developed a theory of reciprocal altruism which is intellectually interesting and has some empirical support in the animal world, so that makes sense. He is an intelligent guy, if you read him you are not going to find him saying, This proves that humans have to socialists, or something.
MK: Yeah, so do your political opinions rest on some conception of human nature?
NC: Well everybody’s political opinions rest…
MK: Well exactly, then one does exist.
NC: One knows it exists.
MK: Yes, well then you are making a guess at what it is.
NC: Every political opinion you have, where you are a revolutionary or a reformist, fascist, whatever you may be, is based on some assumption about what’s right for people, unless you’re a pure opportunist and you say, I’ll beat you over the head with a club. But if you belong within the moral universe, any proposal you make is based on some assumptions about human nature.
There is a very limited basis, scientific basis.
MK: But ideas about innatism have changed in the 20th century. I mean it wasn’t always like this. In your field now it’s accepted across the board.
NC: Well the whole discussion is almost meaningless. In fact there’s been a big debate about innatism, the innatist hypothesis and so on. But if you look at the debate it’s completely one-sided. There are people who denounce it and criticise it but there’s no-one who defends it. I mean I have never said I defend the innatist hypothesis, which is because there is no hypothesis. There’s a truism – our genetic endowment is crucially implicated in our attitudes, beliefs, intellectual achievements and so on. The only alternative to that is miracles, so if you dispense with miracles, then yes there’s a genetic endowment. But to try to find out how it is is a very hard scientific problem. We can’t answer questions like that for insects. Take say bee communication or ant navigation – they are pretty spectacular achievements and you can study them and learn a lot about them, but to try to find a genetic basis, it’s a very difficult scientific problem, nobody knows how to solve it.
MK: So what do you base your ideas about anarchism on, then?
NC: Hope.
MK: Hope?
NC: Well there’s some experience to support that. You can pick out of human history and human experience and human intuition various strains that make it credible that this is a decent way for people to live. But if you ask for proof, you can’t give proofs in areas like that.
MK: But am I right in saying that you think that humans are capable of all sorts of things and that it depends on the society that they are bought up in that represses certain aspects and promotes others.
NC: Yes, that’s part of it, a large part of it. And that much we know. Children bought up in different conditions will behave quite differently. And probably everyone of us has the genetic capacity to be a torturer or a saint. The question has to do with the particular circumstances in which one develops – people do differ, there may be different innate tendencies, but largely it’s a question of what the social circumstances support and what they reject. So we happen to live in a society where there is tremendous pressure to accept the view that you should be out for yourself and what’s important is to maximize your own gain.
Take an economics course they teach you that rational man is a utility maximizer for himself. It doesn’t come from any scientific basis, it’s just that’s the ideology – it’s the natural ideology to develop in a semi-capitalist society which is dominated by an ideology that says you should really look to gain personal wealth and power. And there is a strain in human nature which that supports, but there’s nothing universal about it. In fact if you look back at the classics, like Adam Smith – he was meant to be their hero, it wasn’t his view. His view was that the fundamental element of human nature is sympathy.
MK: But he did believe in capitalism. Maybe not in the form we have it now, but he believed in it.
NC: In an interesting sense. He did argue in favor of markets. If you read Wealth of Nations – his argument was pretty nuanced – his argument in favor of markets was an argument that claimed – it’s not true – that under conditions of perfect of liberty markets will lead to perfect equality – and he meant equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. So his argument for markets is it will lead to equality of outcome.
MK: But that is Milton Friedman’s argument about perfect liberty also.
NC: That’s Adam Smith’s argument, not Milton Freidman’s. Freidman’s argument is that it will lead to the best society, but he’s not saying it’s going to lead to perfect equality. In fact, for him it’s fine if one person owns everything. He just says we need it because it works. But that’s not what Adam Smith said. He had an argument saying that it’s justified because it will lead to equality.
MK: How can markets lead to equality? Is that not naïve?
NC: There’s sort of an argument. You can make an argument for it. You can say if you had conditions of perfect liberty prices and wages would stablize at fixed points, everybody does what they can. It’s not a good argument. But there’s nothing in economics that’s a good argument.
But anyway, if you want to look at the moral basis of this position. The moral basis was a commitment to sympathy, solidarity, equality of outcome, not opportunity; and he thought markets could contribute to that. His view of markets is pretty nuanced. In fact Adam Smith is nothing like what he is described. I don’t know if you’ve taken an economics course?
MK: No, I’ve read Wealth of Nations.
NC: Well take the courses. Everybody who’s gone to college has read the first paragraph of Wealth of Nations about distribution of labor, how wonderful it is, baker bakes bread, everybody is happy. Not many people go on a couple of hundred pages where he discusses distribution of labour and he says it’s “a crime”, he says division of labor will turn people into creatures “as stupid and ignorant as a human being can possibly be.” Because, you know, it leads to one guy turning an assembly line. So he says in any civilized society the government is going to have to intervene to prevent division of labour. Well, that’s Adam Smith. That’s not what you read.
MK: But you are fundamentally anti-capitalist unlike Smith.
NC: Yeah, but it doesn’t even mean anything. What’s capitalism?
MK: Well, the production of surplus value, the privatization of the means of production. The structure of capitalist relations is an unequal one with wage-labor and the rest.
NC: It could be, and in fact it is, so I don’t think Adam Smith’s argument works. But, yeah, I think being forced to rent yourself to survive is not very different from being forced to sell yourself to survive. Furthermore there’s nothing radical about that view, it was the majority view of Americans in the 19th century.
MK: But it’s often said that people on the left don’t have any ideas of what to replace it with. Is there an idea?
NC: Sure, there are lots of ideas.
MK: But they just don’t like them.
NC: Yeah, they don’t like them. Some are spelt out in extensive detail. Take things like guild socialism. In the literature written after the Spanish revolution it spells out in meticulous detail what an anarcho-syndaclist Spain should look like, too much detail I think. If you come to the modern period there are lots of proposals, maybe the most developed ones are the participatory-economics proposals, but there are plenty of others. You can argue about whether they have the right idea of not but it’s not difficult to make proposals.
MK: But we’re so far from anywhere near that. The socialist leaders in the world now – say Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia – they are not arguing to overturn capitalism, they are saying they want to attenuate it with social democratic type stuff…
NC: Well, it’s not so clear. You know, Venezuela is a complicated place, there’s elements of authoritarianism, there’s elements of participatory democracy, but if the later develops, if the community organisations really begin to function and if power is really devolved to community organisations – communes, cooperatives and so on, it could be a move in that direction. It’s not impossible. Same could happen in Bolivia. Same could happen here.
In fact, there have been and there still are a fairly substantial array of worker managed bits of the economy. They’re not General Electric, but they’re not zero either. Incidentally there are people on the right who have developed models of social organization which do not involve wage-labor, like Dave Elinor, who was an economist who was close to Joseph Stiglitz, he was his assistant at the World Bank, but he’s been an activist on work-managed industry for a long time. You know, elaborate discussions of how renting yourself for survival is in violation of fundamental principles of human rights.
MK: Do you borrow any ideas from Karl Marx when you talk about this?
NC: You can’t because Marx had no ideas.
MK: He was a critic rather than a……
NC: He was a critic, he was a theorist of capitalism, a certain abstract form of capitalism and out of that theory came a lot of interesting observations and insights. But if you look through Marx’s huge works and try to find some description of a future society you’ll find a couple of scattered sentences here and there: we’ll ultimately overcome animal needs and be able to pursue human needs, you’ll be able to be a fisherman in the afternoon and a writer in the evening. A couple of odd sentences like that.
But his belief was that there are historical laws and he tried to show that they will lead towards a social form in which working people will take over and run the society.
MK: Do you think it would always end up like Leninist Russia?
NC: Didn’t have to. You know, for orthodox Marxists a revolution in Russia made absolutely no sense.
MK: Because it wasn’t an advanced capitalist society?
NC: It wasn’t advanced society, right, they were actually looking for a revolution in Germany, in fact there was one was but it was smashed. Lenin himself was a pretty orthodox Marxist. He didn’t think – I mean he talked about it – but I’m sure he didn’t think you could have a socialist revolution in Russia. In fact, if you look at what he did, not his talk but his policies, and Trotsky too, the policies were to drive the country by force through industrialism and then sooner or later the laws of history and so on. Incidentally that’s not Marx, that’s Marxism. Marx in the last probably 20 years of his life was very much interested in peasant communal life in Russia. He was doing elaborate work on data collected by the Nuradniks, the populists who went out into the villages to look at what was happening, and Marx was pretty impressed by the sort of communist structure of the peasant society and wrote about it. That work was mostly suppressed by the Marxists. The Leninists didn’t like it for obvious reasons: it didn’t leave any goods for the central committee. And the social democrats, the mainstream of Marxism, they opposed it. They were urban intellectuals, for them the peasants were a backward mass that needed to be driven to urbanization, that was not Marx’s view. In fact, now this Marx literature is finally beginning to be revised.
MK: So do you think current day Marxists are adhering to some sort of religion?
NC: Almost anything that ends in ism is a religion. You don’t have Einsteinism in physics.
MK: OK on the topic of religion, you don’t talk out very often about religion and the pernicious things it does in the world. Is that conscious or it just doesn’t come up in the sort of topics you are discussing?
NC: Well actually I do, but some of the most pernicious religions are the secular religions. Nationalism, for example. That’s kind of like a secular religion. Let’s go right back to Bakunin- mixed story but he had some real insights, and one of the main insights he had, which turned out to be very accurate, was that there would be what he called a new class of scientific intellectuals who would try to appropriate the knowledge that’s developing – this explosion of knowledge and understanding and that they would appropriate it and use it to their advantage to dominate society and the world. And he said they would go in two directions. One would be what he called a ‘red bureaucracy’, which will establish the most brutal iron rule in history, and the others would be the ones who recognise that capitalism is not going to be overthrown and they become its servants; they become the servants of the capital class and they will beat the people with the peoples stick, as he put it, talk about democracy, the people that beat the people.
It’s a very good foretaste of what happened. And it led to what you could call religions, that is, doctrines based on faith.
MK: But they have a rational basis, surely.
NC: What’s the rational basis?
MK: Well, they have self-interest at heart.
NC: What’s rational about that? If the position said: I’m a gangster, I have my self interest at heart, I got a bigger club than you so I’m going to take everything you have, fine. That’s not what they are saying. What you are presented with is what you are taught by in school: it’s all for everyone’s benefit, the people are too dumb to rule themselves so we have to do it and so on and so forth. That’s a religion.
Just like the idea we have a society based on markets in which informed consumers make rational choices, that’s religion. I mean, is that what you see on television when you look at an advert?
But the actual religion – what we call religion – the so-called monotheistic religions, well they have a very ugly history. And personally I don’t think people should have irrational beliefs. On the other hand I have no right – say some child is dying and the child’s mother would like to believe that she’ll see him again in heaven, do I have a right to tell her there’s no rational basis for that.
MK: No, but if there’s a Zionist settler in the West Bank who thinks they were given that land by God, then you definitely have a right in that case.
NC: No, but that’s pernicious just like the secular religion that says, We own the world, is pernicious. Let’s take something concrete. Right now there’s a big debate going on about whether Iran is disrupting Iraq. You can’t have that debate unless you are a religious fanatic, you can’t have that debate unless you assume that the US is there by right, so if the US owns the world and the US is there by right, then if anybody is disrupting US control they’re criminals.
MK: But that’s religion without a God though, right?
NC: It’s worse, it’s religion with a State.
MK: Yes but at least the State exists in reality whereas God doesn’t.
NC: It’s a much worse religion. With God you can believe anything – maybe He’s benevolent. The state is just violent. And that’s probably 100% of the US discussion. Try to find an article anywhere in a newspaper that says whether Iran is sending roadside bombs or not we don’t have any right to be there.
Like in Russia in the 1980s, the US was purposefully and openly supporting Islamic fundamentalist maniacs to kill Russians. Did we think that was wrong? No, because the Russians had no right to be in Afghanistan. But unless you are an absolute religious fanatic you can’t believe that the US has a right to be in Iraq. And now I’m talking about close to 100% of opinion. This is much more dangerous than Christian evangelics and right-wing Zionists.
MK: So what do you think of the current atheist revival. The books out by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. They all think it’s a very important war to fight.
NC: Dawkins is serious. The others are frauds. I mean what’s the debate about. Do people like us have to debate about whether God exists? I mean, yeah, we know it doesn’t. In fact, take the religious people. Go to most of the religious faiths, they don’t literally believe in the Bible.
I mean there’s a sector that believes literally in the Bible, but first of all we don’t have to argue about that because nobody who’s going to read one word you are writing believes it, so you are talking to an audience that’s already convinced. And those who believe in the literal word of the Bible you are not going to convince them, so what’s the point?
MK: Well, a lot of terrible things are still happening because of religion…
NC: Certainly are. There are a lot of terrible things done because of religion, and there are even worse things done because of state religion.
MK: Yeah but can you fundamentalist religion without moderate religion? Don’t you have to fight it all on one plain?
NC: Depends someone’s religion is. Take the Bible, let’s say. I sort of memorized it when I was a kid. On the one hand it’s the most genocidal text in the whole literary canon. It’s just beyond belief. If you talk about the God; that God was willing to destroy every living thing on earth because some human being offended Him. You can’t beat that. On the other hand, there’s some very elevated sentiments, usually by dissidents, by people who were persecuted.
The prophets were what we call dissidents, they were imprisoned, driven into the desert, persecuted, and like other dissidents they had some good things to say. So you find what you like.
