post 202

By anders pearson 17 Nov 2000

i suppose i should write a little bit about the lecture i attended last night by Noam Chomsky.
in general, Chomsky isn’t the greatest public speaker. if you’ve read any of his writing, you know that he writes in a very dense, academic style that takes a bit of concentration to work through. well, he talks like he writes. but if you can actually focus and follow what he’s saying, he has some interesting things to say.

the title of his talk was “Freedom, Sovereignty, and other Endangered Species”. it was basically on human rights and the effect of globalization thereon. his first point was that the term “globalization” is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on. true globalization would simply remove all boundaries and would probably have a much different result than the current “western companies are allowed to exploit the third world nations” interpretation of the term that the IMF, World Bank, etc are currently using (eg, NAFTA allows an american company like Ford to go into mexico to build a plant and be afforded all the opportunities and rights of a citizen there but just watch what happens when a mexican citizen tries to come into the US to get a job). he then spoke for a while on the effects that “globalization” would have/is having on workers both in the third world countries and in the US: nothing good, of course.

one of the more interesting points he made was the irony of how human rights issues in china have been twisted to serve the corporate power structure. people protesting about opening trade up with china on the grounds that china uses prison labor to produce goods to sell to the US don’t seem to acknowledge the fact that prison labor is used in the US by american companies to produce goods that are sold domestically and abroad. so while it’s ok for US companies to undercut workers’ wages by using cheap prison labor, it’s not ok for anyone else to. the corporations have managed to manipulate the liberal and progressive movement to put pressure on the chinese government to block their competition from using the same techniques that they use.

i was a little soured on the evening by one comment he made though. talking about the repurcussions that the corporate invasion of china would have, he mentioned that things would get pretty messy when the 900 million chinese peasants are displaced from their farms by agribusiness companies and flock to the cities. while it is true that there are at least 900 million people in china who would qualify as “peasants” and agribusiness would displace most of the people who are currently farming the land, those numbers are not quite accurate. there are 1.2 billion people in china in all and about 80-90% of the population lives in the cities. so i’m not sure how he figures that 900 million people would be displaced. i agree with most of what he says but it’s a little sad to see him stoop to the same propaganda based tactics that he so vocally attacks the corporations and governments for using. his arguments hold up on their own and are only weakened by embellishments like that.