Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

Author: Noam Chomsky (interviewed by David Barsamian) | Published: 1996

Summary

Class Warfare is a collection of interviews conducted by David Barsamian with Noam Chomsky in 1994-95, covering American political economy, the media, US foreign policy, labor relations, and what Chomsky calls the “class war” waged by capital against labor—a war that, in Chomsky’s analysis, is continuous and largely invisible in mainstream political discourse. The interviews cover specific events of the period (NAFTA, the Contract with America, the telecommunications act debates) and use them as entry points for Chomsky’s broader structural analysis: that the American political system is organized to protect the interests of corporate capital against those of the working population, that the media reinforces this arrangement, and that real democracy would require challenging both.

Chomsky’s analytical framework—developed across dozens of books and hundreds of interviews—is consistently materialist: he argues that political behavior is best explained by following material interests rather than stated ideologies, that the language of freedom and democracy typically conceals rather than describes the actual organization of power, and that the history of US foreign policy is a history of protecting capital investment and access to resources rather than spreading democratic values. The interviews allow Barsamian to press Chomsky on specific points and to introduce counter-arguments, which makes the format more dialogic than Chomsky’s solo books, though the fundamental positions are unchanged across formats.

Class Warfare is one of several interview collections Barsamian published with Chomsky through Z Magazine and South End Press; it is representative of the genre. Chomsky’s analysis is more valuable as a corrective and a challenge—a systematic articulation of the class-based perspective that mainstream political discourse excludes—than as a complete account; his critics argue that he systematically overstates intentionality and conspiracy and understates the genuine complexity of political causation. Both points are partly right.

Critical Takeaways

  • Manufacturing Consent: Chomsky’s media analysis—developed in Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Edward Herman)—underlies many of the interview’s points; the interviews are the accessible version of a more systematic argument.
  • Class analysis: Chomsky’s insistence on class as a primary analytical category in American political life—against the American mainstream’s resistance to class analysis—is the book’s most important corrective contribution.
  • Critique of neoliberalism: The interviews were conducted during the Clinton administration’s embrace of “free trade” and deregulation; Chomsky’s analysis of NAFTA and the WTO as instruments of capital rather than workers anticipated subsequent events.
  • Interview format: Barsamian’s interviews make Chomsky’s positions more dialogic and accessible than his solo books; the format is particularly suited to Chomsky’s mode of analysis, which builds through specific examples.
  • Critiques of Chomsky: Alan Dershowitz, Michael Albert, and others have noted Chomsky’s tendency to attribute to intentional conspiracy what might be explained by systemic incentives; this is a genuine analytical limitation, not merely political disagreement.

My Takeaways

  1. Chomsky’s systematic practice of asking “follow the money”—identifying who benefits from a political arrangement as a way of explaining why it exists—is a method that remains useful as a corrective even when the specific conclusions are contested.
  2. The analysis of mainstream media as structurally aligned with capital—not through conspiracy but through ownership, advertising dependency, and sourcing patterns—is the most useful framework I know for understanding why certain subjects are systematically absent from political coverage.
  3. The NAFTA analysis—that “free trade” agreements primarily protect investor rights rather than worker rights, and that this is intentional—was controversial in 1995 and has been at least partially validated by subsequent distributional outcomes.
  4. Reading Chomsky productively requires maintaining the distinction between his analytical framework (useful, consistently applied, often illuminating) and his specific historical claims (requiring independent verification, sometimes overstated).

Footnotes