Chomsky: Just think about it for a minute: almost everybody spends most of their life living in a totalitarian system. It's called having a job. When you have a job, you're under total control of the masters of the enterprise. They determine what you wear, when you go to the bathroom, what you do – the very idea of a wage contract is selling yourself into servitude. These are private governments. They're more totalitarian than governments are.
Interviewer: but they can't legally murder you or... [imprison you]
Chomsky: They can't legally murder you but they can control everything that you do.
Interviewer: Well, again, the right-wing libertarian argument will be "well, you're free to leave at any time".
Chomsky: Yes, you're free to starve, that's exactly right. You have a choice between starving or selling yourself into tyranny. Very libertarian. The right-wing libertarians, whatever they believe, are actually deep authoritarians. They're calling for the subordination to private tyrannies, the worst kind of tyrannies.
Seems to ignore the idea of competition between companies to provide good working conditions and pay in a free labor market. The choice isn't between staying and being abused or starving. The choice is between a variety of employers offering a range of working conditions and a range of pay and benefits.
Chomsky's take is interesting because it makes you think about it in a different way than you might normally but as a practical matter I don't think his take reflects reality at least not in the US.
> competition between companies to provide good working conditions and pay in a free labor market
Sure - but we could live in an alternative universe where Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and all the other billionaires conspired to drive down their workers salaries. Where Eric Schmidt sent e-mails instructing they be deleted as they pointed to an illegal cabal crushing wage competition between companies.
Of course - this alternative universe to yours is the one we actually do live in.
That isn't so true of the bottom of the job market or places outside of high-tech. Most call centers aren't competing for anything and they treat their employees like cattle. Things like random drug testing to enforce your compliance after-hours and outside the workplace. Dress-code to enforce uniformity. Zero tolerance for dissension or disagreement with managers (e.g. Insubordination) regardless of merit. I think this is largely because they are bureaucracies and require absolute rigid compliance from its constituents in order to function.
"The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity." [0](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-bureaucracies-97e9805...)
After being poor for several years I realized something.
People like Chomsky have never been in a situation where they were starving. He is clueless as to what this is really like. Only an out of touch wealthy person would say such ridiculous things. Or a child whose parents take care of their basic survival needs.
Survival takes work. Always has. Always will. Food and shelter will never be magically provided to everyone. Someone somewhere has to grow the food, harvest the food, hunt the food, prepare the food, store the food, preserve the food, harvest building materials, manufacture building materials, assemble building materials, maintain buildings, clean buildings, etc. Or if we're talking about AI robot utopian future, someone has to build and maintain the robots, and prevent them from making humanity obsolete.
If you don't want to work for another human then you have to work for yourself at the whims of nature.
If you expect other people to give you food and shelter to you for free, then you are expecting other people to be slaves for you.
What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI?
I believe most people will be subjected as a "non-capital, "non-equity" class, consumers at the base. How will they consume? purchasing power of consumption?
Man the future looks interesting...definitely gearing up for major societal changes, this is uncharted territory with technology
> What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI?
IIRC, he's an anarcho-syndicalist, so the tl;dr version is that he thinks existing capitalist-model businesses should be replaced with worker-owned, worker-controlled co-ops.
False equivocation all over the place. If you need to shift the language to extremes to persuade people you are doing so by "borrowing" from those extremes. Ie., fascism is widely regarded as "bad" so the tactic here is to borrow its badness and spread it around without actually arguing about the situation at-hand.
When you work for someone, as in many areas, you trade sovereignty for wealth. Freedom for security. And so on.
This is always a tradeoff in your interactions with others. A promise is an obligation; commitment, "slavery" etc. if one wishes to put these things so inflammatorily.
The relevant question is: in this particular situation, how serious is this tradeoff?
In the case where there are many jobs you are never "starving", likewise when welfare exists. The governmental and economic context of a system isnt something extrinsic to the system that you can just dismiss: it is part of its functioning.
Yes, welfare may well be a precondition of a free market system to ensure that in extreme cases it isnt "starve or else". Or equally, a big dynamic economy might be a predoncition. Maybe our sorts of markets don't work with monopolistic employeers for the reasons he says.
However this does not generalize to work for a company as such which is always particular and always situated in an economic and political context which turns it from "slavery" to "having to get in by 9am".
> if you need to shift the language to extremes to persuade people you are doing so by "borrowing" from those extremes
As in what, calling an economic system the "free market"? Which has nothing to do with markets as one could buy potatos with rubles in Soviet markets just as one could buy them with dollars in US markets. So it is a misdirection - the commanding heights of the economy - production, not the market - controlled by the government (or in Yugoslavia or China, other mechanisms), not by heirs and the Vanderbilt type aristocracy. I don't have to go into the propaganda term of "free" for the system (versus a presumably "unfree" system where government or workers control the means of production).
Or let us look at the word economics. The field was called political economy - until it became political and supporting the status quo. Then the word political is dropped and the word changed more to like physics. The bank of Sweden even drudged up that old dynamite maker Nobel's prize and started granting it to economic commissars in the 1960s, which I'm sure has Nobel rolling in his grave.
There are innumerable other examples. A "right to work" law does not mean a right to work, it means the government can interfere in a union/business agreement, that a union not be able to get an agreement for a workplace monopoly (of course, companies like Verizon have no such monopoly restrictions). Or "earnings" are what the money, the expropriated dividends of worker's surplus labor time, is called as it is sent to the heirs controlling the corporation.
The flip side of this is what was once called wage slavery is now called career opportunities. The heirs expropriating surplus labor time from the workers who create wealth at as joint stock company are called "job creators". Even the AFL used to call for industrial democracy.
Chomsky isn't shifting the language, he just remembers the language of the Depression before the language shifted.
Work was never called "fascism" which is about the establishment of an ethnic monoculture via aggressive authoritarian means.
Yes language does have this unfortunate (and best avoided) "advertising" function which which we associate terms and relabel for the sake of association. Making firing a person easier becomes a "right to work".
"Work" becomes "fascism".
How deeply propagandistic, "advertising", political, wrong, stupid and duplicitous.
Perhaps the free in "free market" is like this, in which case I'd be happy to remove it for "markets regulated qua markets".
> "fascism" which is about the establishment of an ethnic monoculture
Fascism comes from the Italian (and Latin) word fascism. Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Also Chomsky never used the word fascism, fascist etc. here
Ah. For some reason I remembered 'fascism' rather than 'totalitarianism' however the former is an example of the latter.
Totalitarianism is just as bad.
A totalitarian system is, by definition, total -- reaching, by centralized force and authority, into the political, economic, cultural, etc.
There is no centralized power dictating "work" as our culture, our politics, etc.
To call "work" totalitarian is somewhat helpfully revealing of the common mistake ideologues make: narrativizing the world. Turning systems into stories, forces into people.
There is no person dictating work, so there is no totalitarianism. To think as if there were is to turn society into a conspiracy. One may as well call gravity totalitarian.
We make economic promises to each other, and from this arises work.
> Fascism comes from the Italian (and Latin) word fascism.
No, it comes from the Italian “fascismo” which ultimately derives from the Latin “fasces" for a particular symbol of the authority of Roman Republican and Imperial magistrates.
> Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Mussolini was talking about Fascism being about the needs of the “Aryan and Mediterranean race” in 1921, before the Nazis had power in Germany much less influence on he Italian fascists (the influence ran more the other way that early on.)
I'm in the middle of reading "The Jungle", by Upton Sinclair. The working conditions described within were pretty cruel and totalitarian. However it's also easy to compare and contrast the corporate greed and suffering within to modern day concepts like minimum wage and see that we've obviously made tons of progress and things continue to get better. Like all extremist positions, though, this will never be enough for Noam Chomsky - from where he sits, reality itself is totalitarian. How dare humans have to work for their food? What a tragedy it is that wolves must run to hunt their prey, and that this prey must die an agonizing death so someone else can live! At some point you have to suffer in life; if you agree with this then "wage-based servitude" doesn't sound so bad, and modern white-collar work is really only "wage-based servitude" by technical definition.
The point is that there is a class of humans who do not work for their food - the heirs. The Saint Grottlesex aristocracy who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. Who are calling right now in the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek to increase unemployment and enlarge the industrial reserve army, no doubt then to bemoan the grain then handed to those workers left idle, like the optimates of two thousand years ago.
Chomsky's whole argument is against the parasitic elite who do not work expropriating from those of us who do.
If that was his argument, it didn't gracefully survive being taped and uploaded to Twitter. He seemed to be against the idea of contracts, working for pay, and hierarchy itself.
> You do have an alternative to work for yourself in one form or another. You lose this alternative under socialism.
I don't think you even understand what socialism is, and seem to think that it's just "central planning." If you're going to talk about socialism like you did, I think it's important to specify which socialism you're referring to.
In Chomsky's case, given his ideological sympathies, I don't think the kind of "socialism" he desires would have any issue if someone chose "to work for [themselves] in one form or another." Here are some references that might help with understanding where he's coming from:
> Libertarian socialism (also known as socialist libertarianism)[1] is a group of anti-authoritarian[2] political philosophies inside the socialist movement that rejects the conception of socialism as centralized state ownership and control of the economy.[3] Libertarian socialism is close to and overlaps with left-libertarianism[4][5] and criticizes wage labour relationships within the workplace,[6] instead emphasizing workers' self-management of the workplace[7] and decentralized structures of political organization.[8][9][10]
> Syndicalists consider their economic theories a strategy for facilitating worker self-activity and as an alternative co-operative economic system with democratic values and production centered on meeting human needs.
> The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are solidarity, direct action (action undertaken without the intervention of third parties such as politicians, bureaucrats and arbitrators) and direct democracy, or workers' self-management. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery.
> I grew up in the USSR. How could I possibly understand what socialism is?
I don't doubt you have a very good understanding of the Soviet type, due to your experience there. However, your original comment seemed to present a false binary choice between Western capitalism and that Soviet-style centrally-planned socialism. It's clear that Chomsky opposes both the former and the latter, so brining up the latter seems like a bit of a straw man in the context of this video and its subject.
22 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] threadInterviewer: but they can't legally murder you or... [imprison you]
Chomsky: They can't legally murder you but they can control everything that you do.
Interviewer: Well, again, the right-wing libertarian argument will be "well, you're free to leave at any time".
Chomsky: Yes, you're free to starve, that's exactly right. You have a choice between starving or selling yourself into tyranny. Very libertarian. The right-wing libertarians, whatever they believe, are actually deep authoritarians. They're calling for the subordination to private tyrannies, the worst kind of tyrannies.
Chomsky's take is interesting because it makes you think about it in a different way than you might normally but as a practical matter I don't think his take reflects reality at least not in the US.
Sure - but we could live in an alternative universe where Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and all the other billionaires conspired to drive down their workers salaries. Where Eric Schmidt sent e-mails instructing they be deleted as they pointed to an illegal cabal crushing wage competition between companies.
Of course - this alternative universe to yours is the one we actually do live in.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/jobs-and-schmidts-gentleme...
"The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity." [0](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-bureaucracies-97e9805...)
People like Chomsky have never been in a situation where they were starving. He is clueless as to what this is really like. Only an out of touch wealthy person would say such ridiculous things. Or a child whose parents take care of their basic survival needs.
Survival takes work. Always has. Always will. Food and shelter will never be magically provided to everyone. Someone somewhere has to grow the food, harvest the food, hunt the food, prepare the food, store the food, preserve the food, harvest building materials, manufacture building materials, assemble building materials, maintain buildings, clean buildings, etc. Or if we're talking about AI robot utopian future, someone has to build and maintain the robots, and prevent them from making humanity obsolete.
If you don't want to work for another human then you have to work for yourself at the whims of nature.
If you expect other people to give you food and shelter to you for free, then you are expecting other people to be slaves for you.
I believe most people will be subjected as a "non-capital, "non-equity" class, consumers at the base. How will they consume? purchasing power of consumption?
Man the future looks interesting...definitely gearing up for major societal changes, this is uncharted territory with technology
IIRC, he's an anarcho-syndicalist, so the tl;dr version is that he thinks existing capitalist-model businesses should be replaced with worker-owned, worker-controlled co-ops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
When you work for someone, as in many areas, you trade sovereignty for wealth. Freedom for security. And so on.
This is always a tradeoff in your interactions with others. A promise is an obligation; commitment, "slavery" etc. if one wishes to put these things so inflammatorily.
The relevant question is: in this particular situation, how serious is this tradeoff?
In the case where there are many jobs you are never "starving", likewise when welfare exists. The governmental and economic context of a system isnt something extrinsic to the system that you can just dismiss: it is part of its functioning.
Yes, welfare may well be a precondition of a free market system to ensure that in extreme cases it isnt "starve or else". Or equally, a big dynamic economy might be a predoncition. Maybe our sorts of markets don't work with monopolistic employeers for the reasons he says.
However this does not generalize to work for a company as such which is always particular and always situated in an economic and political context which turns it from "slavery" to "having to get in by 9am".
As in what, calling an economic system the "free market"? Which has nothing to do with markets as one could buy potatos with rubles in Soviet markets just as one could buy them with dollars in US markets. So it is a misdirection - the commanding heights of the economy - production, not the market - controlled by the government (or in Yugoslavia or China, other mechanisms), not by heirs and the Vanderbilt type aristocracy. I don't have to go into the propaganda term of "free" for the system (versus a presumably "unfree" system where government or workers control the means of production).
Or let us look at the word economics. The field was called political economy - until it became political and supporting the status quo. Then the word political is dropped and the word changed more to like physics. The bank of Sweden even drudged up that old dynamite maker Nobel's prize and started granting it to economic commissars in the 1960s, which I'm sure has Nobel rolling in his grave.
There are innumerable other examples. A "right to work" law does not mean a right to work, it means the government can interfere in a union/business agreement, that a union not be able to get an agreement for a workplace monopoly (of course, companies like Verizon have no such monopoly restrictions). Or "earnings" are what the money, the expropriated dividends of worker's surplus labor time, is called as it is sent to the heirs controlling the corporation.
The flip side of this is what was once called wage slavery is now called career opportunities. The heirs expropriating surplus labor time from the workers who create wealth at as joint stock company are called "job creators". Even the AFL used to call for industrial democracy.
Chomsky isn't shifting the language, he just remembers the language of the Depression before the language shifted.
Yes language does have this unfortunate (and best avoided) "advertising" function which which we associate terms and relabel for the sake of association. Making firing a person easier becomes a "right to work".
"Work" becomes "fascism".
How deeply propagandistic, "advertising", political, wrong, stupid and duplicitous.
Perhaps the free in "free market" is like this, in which case I'd be happy to remove it for "markets regulated qua markets".
Fascism comes from the Italian (and Latin) word fascism. Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Also Chomsky never used the word fascism, fascist etc. here
Totalitarianism is just as bad.
A totalitarian system is, by definition, total -- reaching, by centralized force and authority, into the political, economic, cultural, etc.
There is no centralized power dictating "work" as our culture, our politics, etc.
To call "work" totalitarian is somewhat helpfully revealing of the common mistake ideologues make: narrativizing the world. Turning systems into stories, forces into people.
There is no person dictating work, so there is no totalitarianism. To think as if there were is to turn society into a conspiracy. One may as well call gravity totalitarian.
We make economic promises to each other, and from this arises work.
No, it comes from the Italian “fascismo” which ultimately derives from the Latin “fasces" for a particular symbol of the authority of Roman Republican and Imperial magistrates.
> Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Mussolini was talking about Fascism being about the needs of the “Aryan and Mediterranean race” in 1921, before the Nazis had power in Germany much less influence on he Italian fascists (the influence ran more the other way that early on.)
The point is that there is a class of humans who do not work for their food - the heirs. The Saint Grottlesex aristocracy who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. Who are calling right now in the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek to increase unemployment and enlarge the industrial reserve army, no doubt then to bemoan the grain then handed to those workers left idle, like the optimates of two thousand years ago.
Chomsky's whole argument is against the parasitic elite who do not work expropriating from those of us who do.
I don't think you even understand what socialism is, and seem to think that it's just "central planning." If you're going to talk about socialism like you did, I think it's important to specify which socialism you're referring to.
In Chomsky's case, given his ideological sympathies, I don't think the kind of "socialism" he desires would have any issue if someone chose "to work for [themselves] in one form or another." Here are some references that might help with understanding where he's coming from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky:
> Ideologically, [Chomsky] aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
> Libertarian socialism (also known as socialist libertarianism)[1] is a group of anti-authoritarian[2] political philosophies inside the socialist movement that rejects the conception of socialism as centralized state ownership and control of the economy.[3] Libertarian socialism is close to and overlaps with left-libertarianism[4][5] and criticizes wage labour relationships within the workplace,[6] instead emphasizing workers' self-management of the workplace[7] and decentralized structures of political organization.[8][9][10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
> Syndicalists consider their economic theories a strategy for facilitating worker self-activity and as an alternative co-operative economic system with democratic values and production centered on meeting human needs.
> The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are solidarity, direct action (action undertaken without the intervention of third parties such as politicians, bureaucrats and arbitrators) and direct democracy, or workers' self-management. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery.
I grew up in the USSR. How could I possibly understand what socialism is? Especially the fictional varieties. Mordor has a wiki page too, right?
I don't doubt you have a very good understanding of the Soviet type, due to your experience there. However, your original comment seemed to present a false binary choice between Western capitalism and that Soviet-style centrally-planned socialism. It's clear that Chomsky opposes both the former and the latter, so brining up the latter seems like a bit of a straw man in the context of this video and its subject.