Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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and social justice within our vast domains and that constantly drive it
towards militarization of the economy. There is no simple formula to
determine how limited energies should be distributed among these many
tasks; all must be addressed if there is to be a chance of survival in a
world in which a decent person would want to live.
As our society is constituted, public policy will be guided by the
imperatives of intervention and military Keynesianism; protests against
particular excrescences, however successful, will lead to pursuit of the
same objectives by similar means along other paths, since the state—in
the broad sense of earlier discussion—relies on them for its survival in
its present form. Alternatives to existing forms of hierarchy, domination,
private power and social control certainly exist in principle, and are wellknown,
and even supported by much of the population despite their
remoteness from the intellectual scene, as already briefly noted. But to
make them realistic will require a great deal of committed work,
including the work of articulating them clearly. 50 Similarly, opposition to
slavery would have failed if no realistic alternative had been advanced:
rental rather than ownership of labor, in our own history, not the end to
which we should strive, but a major advance nonetheless. Determined
opposition to the latest lunacies and atrocities must continue, for the
sake of the victims as well as our own ultimate survival. But it should be
understood as a poor substitute for a challenge to the deeper causes, a
challenge that we are, unfortunately, in no position to mount at present
though the groundwork can and must be laid. Protest over Star Wars,
massacre in El Salvador, and so on, is a sign of our weakness. A strong
peace movement would be challenging military-based state capitalism
and the world system it dominates while seeking to support similar
forces to the extent that they can survive in the so-called “socialist
world.”
The latter phrase, incidentally, should be recognized as a joint