Here's
Noam Chomsky's latest. It comes from his 2021 book, Consequences
of Capitalism. In it he discusses the workers in Western
Civilization under the capitalist political and socio-economic
system:
"[T]he great majority of the population is governed for most of their waking lives by private governments, more accurately, private tyrannies." (p. 86)
"When you rent yourself to some concentration of capital in the private sector – that’s what taking a job is – you’re giving your life over to a dictatorship, in fact, an extreme form of a dictatorship that reaches far beyond political dictatorships. The tyranny to which you are handing yourself over to has almost total control over you. It controls every minute of your working day: what you wear and are allowed to say, when you’re allowed to get a bathroom break, how your hands and legs move, whether you smoke cigarettes at home. Just about everything in your life is controlled by this extreme dictatorship, which goes far beyond any totalitarian dictatorship in the degree of control it exercises." (p. 86)
Chomsky rejects the notion that the capitalist "socioeconomic system is legitimate if it subjects people to extreme forms of tyranny for most of their lives". He similarly rejects the notion that the capitalist "wage labor contract is itself legitimate". (p. 86) Chomsky repeatedly calls such workers "wage slaves". (p. 62) He says by itself "wage labor [is] a violation of inalienable rights". (p. 87)
Chomsky mocks those who deny this, claiming that "The argument in favor of legitimacy is that the contract is freely undertaken – in the sense of Anatole France’s remark that the rich and poor are equally free to sleep under the bridge at night. In the real world, the contract is accepted under duress. You accept it or you starve". (p. 86)
Chomsky rejects the capitalist system overall because "people have to rent themselves to dictatorships to survive". Moreover, capitalism violates the "inalienable rights of human beings, like the right not to be a slave, for example, or the right not to be property". (p. 86-87)
Noam Chomsky’s beliefs about economic liberty
and capitalism are so fatuous and depraved as to virtually not need
refutation. It’s enough to merely list them.
(from Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, 2021)
Like all good Marxists, Chomsky is blaming capitalism for the evils of landlordism, which was even more oppressive prior to the rise of capitalism. The free-enterprise philosophers prior to Marx proposed to solve this by putting the tax burden on land values. That would be John Locke, William Penn, Francois Quesnay, Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, William Cobbett, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Mirabeau, Turgot and others.
ReplyDeleteThis was also proposed by American progressives contemporary to Marx, such as Henry George, Terence Powderly, John Stuart Mill, etc., and more recent free-market advocates such as Winston Churchill, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and so on.
The reality is that these superior thinkers had labor and capital united against privilege, and that Marx rescued the landed aristocracy by turning labor against capital. Chomsky is just promoting the Marxist delusion.
Dan Sullivan -- Thanks for sharing! I didn't realize all that. I knew that the great classical liberal Albert J. Nock was partially, and a bit humorously, on the side of innovative (if somewhat foolish) "single-taxer" Henry George.
DeleteHere's my simple answer to all this: Traditional "great" families, who were high up in the clergy and nobility, partially EARNED their great landed estates and partially STOLE them. Hence the socialists with their huge desire for "land reform" were partially right.
I also think Marx, Lenin, Bukunin, and the rest were intellectually freaked out by the emerging giant businesses and factories of the 1800s semi-capitalist world-- so they created a false solution (socialism/communism/collectism) to this problem.
The REAL solution: pure freedom and capitalism. No more welfare statism and corporate/crony capitalism.
Could I tell you something that might make you think that I'm a commie, it is that Russia after the end of the Soviet Union was in a very bad condition. Bandits were roaming across the wastes occupying all the factories https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=VRZagEpiB08 pls watch this for more info.
DeleteChomsky rejects Marx, Lenin, etc.
ReplyDeleteHe's an Anarcho-syndicalist.
He rejects the labels, but he unwittingly embraces much of the dogma.
DeleteSick Boy -- You're mostly right. Still, Chomsky mentions Marx quite a bit in his current book (over 50 times), and in many other places. At times he DOES agree with Marx when most people don't.
DeleteChomsky deserves a bit of credit in that he likes 1700s classical liberalism, and also sometimes damns the slave states of China and the old Soviet Union. But he goes badly wrong with his belief in anarchy, socialism, and democraticallly-run businesses.
Dan Sullivan -- You're mostly right too! As a person and intellectual, I love Chomsky. But I truly hate his unending attacks upon Western Civilization, America, capitalism, and liberty.
DeleteAs Nock pointed out, Henry George's economics were spot on, but his mass-movement approach was fatally flawed. Like all mass movements, his was constantly subject to hijacking attempts by Marxists and then attacks when those attempts failed. The method that has proven successful for replacing other taxes with land value tax was quiet reasoning with elected officials, and even with the large landowners themselves.
ReplyDeleteDan Sullivan -- There's some logic with what Henry George thinks, but I find land taxes a bit strange and unbalanced. I favor a straight-up (voluntary) gov't fee or "tax" based on income, such as 5% for all, or else 1% net worth, whichever is higher (to fund police, military, courts, jails, and tiny administration).
DeleteThe Dictatorship of the Capitalists is very real. The evidence of its existence is easy to find. You just have to look at the suffering and death of those who reject their rule. Chomsky's books provide endless examples of the brutality and inhumanity of the "masters" of mankind.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous -- To be fair to Chomsky, he does seem to partially understand that true capitalism doesn't exist and never has. What we had, even in the late 1700s in Britain, Holland, and America, was crony capitalism or corporate capitalism. Then it got much worse.
DeleteAs best I can understand him, Chomsky seems to think that that significantly deviant form of pseudo-capitalism is somehow the real deal. Naomi Klein thinks the same thing in her great book, 'The Shock Doctrine', in which she bashes the crony capitalist version of welfare statism.
But for the most part, these two and other socialists DON'T understand the crucial difference. "Capitalism" is just a poor, Marxist word for pure freedom -- for pure personal, social, and economic liberty. That's political perfection. That's utopia.
It's never existed so far. But it's EASY to create.
However, Chomsky is quite good at attacking Western and American political conservatism and crony capitalism which are, as you note, brutal and inhumane.
(If you want to discuss this further, or at least consider my thinking on it, maybe check out my two recent essays on the 'Communist Manifesto').