The Philosophy of Noam Chomsky

 

Noam Chomsky is possibly the most intellectually powerful enemy of economic capitalism and political liberty since Vladimir Lenin. His opposition to free enterprise, free trade, laissez-faire, and post-1960s neoliberalism is notorious. He seems to leave such Big Brother advocates as John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Thomas Piketty, and Paul Krugman in the dust.

Chomsky is a formidable advocate of anarchism, socialism, and collectively-owned, democratically-run businesses – however odd, contradictory, and foolish that may seem. He’s also a close ally of the current woke fascism and bigotry, as well as a profound proponent of what I call post-2016, post-Bernie Sanders, Monster Leftism.

No-one is more intelligent than Noam Chomsky. His IQ is probably off the charts. And no-one is better educated. He attended an Ivy League university at 16 and eventually earned a Ph.D.

As a speaker and writer, Chomsky is remarkably erudite, scholarly, honest, brave, direct, comprehensible, low-key, and beguiling. As a person, he is a charmingly avuncular figure. In a whole variety of ways, Chomsky is a pedagogic and philosophical delight.

That said, no-one on the planet is more intellectually fatuous and depraved. No-one has more asinine and heinous political views. An especially good example of this is found in his current book Consequences of Capitalism (2021). Here are most of his central ideas on capitalist workers, as well as many of his foundational philosophical and political beliefs:

• "[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)

(from Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, 2021)

Reading thru this rubbish one can’t help but wonder: Is Chomsky serious? Isn’t this all just some kind of joke? But, evidently, it isn’t.

Nothing is more strange than Chomsky’s claim that working for a big company means "giving your life over to a dictatorship, in fact, an extreme form of a dictatorship that reaches far beyond political dictatorships." What is he even talking about? Is he arguing that if you deliver packages for FedEx, or sell cosmetics in Macy’s, or ring up groceries at A & P, that this is worse than living under Hitler, Stalin, or Mao? Has Chomsky ever actually worked at such a job in his life?

The answer is no. Noam Chomsky went directly from attending college to teaching at one. He’s never done an honest day’s work in his life. If he had, he likely wouldn’t make such outrageous remarks. Altho’ Chomsky has read a lot about "the workers" and "factory labor", his whole deluded existence has been inside the warped and diseased Groves of Academe.

And Chomsky has never lived inside a political dictatorship either. Based on what he says and writes, he seems to have never even visited. If he had, probably he wouldn’t spout such tripe as the above.

One common Chomsky theme, which probably appears in his talks and writings hundreds of times, is the off-kilter idea that someone taking a job with someone else is thusly engaged in the horrific act of “renting himself”. But how in the name of Zeus is this voluntary and contractual behavior a bad thing? You’re doing it willingly. While working, you still wholely own yourself. You still control your behavior completely. Even as a loyal and obedient employee, you’re still 100% your own man and entirely free. You can stay at, or quit, your job at will. Ultimately, you’re answerable to no-one other than yourself. So how is this voluntary, chosen, temporary, compensated self-renting any sort of "servitude"?

Moreover, aren’t you also "renting yourself" every time you freely decide to expend time, effort, money, mind, and soul at the rewarding activities of being with your family and friends? In the Game of Life, in which you have to do something with yourself and your time, how is "renting yourself" something to be avoided? Even if you’re entirely self-sufficient, and live completely alone, any activity you engage in, commit to, and invest in, can accurately be thought of as Chomsky-style self-rental.

I think Chomsky got this absurdity from the Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Near the end of section One, they complain about capitalist "laborers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, [and] are a commodity, like every other article of commerce". Chomsky consistently says "rent" instead of "sell" in his writing and speaking, but the idea is exactly the same.       

And despite what Chomsky seems to think, people who own their own, small, independent farm (like most Westerners in the pre-capitalist 1700s), or who run their own mom ‘n’ pop store, or who even work at some Chomsky-style “cooperative” or kibbutz-type business, still have to surrender some large part of their life, mind, spirit, time, and effort in some extremely rent-like fashion. Small, collectively-owned, democratically-run businesses where you have a prominent place in the management still demand that you “rent out” your bodily labor and efforts to it.

And, yes, you still have to do the job, or make the product, or run the service, while expending time and toil, as you significantly cater to the customer, and willingly engage in some popularly-demanded productive activity, in some hugely rent-like behavior. But how in hell is this demeaning, humiliating, and awful? Is every effort in life thus? How in the name of Adam Smith is this a form of “enslavement”? Chomsky’s reasoning here seems like a farce.

Ultimately, Noam Chomsky seems very similar in his thought to such coercive collectivists as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Vladimir Lenin. They all observed something new, strange, and marvelous emerge in the early 1800s in the West: giant, well-run factories and impossibly-complex, big businesses. They ran with great harmony and made everybody rich.

But a certain class of intellectuals freaked out at this. They gaped at the wondrous, new phenomenon and couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. So they created an intricate, convoluted, contradictory, intellectual system to explain it all. And they set to work solving a problem which, in fact, only lightly and briefly existed: abuse of low-level workers.

But Marx, Lenin, and Chomsky had no real idea what caused worker abuse, and so couldn’t figure out how to end it. The truth is abuse of low-level employees in giant companies only existed where the welfare state, corporate state, and crony capitalism were allowed to flourish. Only where the new, large companies were allowed to bribe the legislatures and create government-enforced, coercive monopolies.

But even this mistreatment radically faded over time. And even at the very beginning of the early-1800s, Big Business era, the humblest employee was free to not leave the farm, or to work for a better company, or to work in a different industry, or to take a job in a different city. Despite all the propaganda to the contrary, the “workers” of the 1800s were little “exploited” or “oppressed”. And even if they were, the solution to the problem, then and now, was more capitalism and economic freedom – not less, as Marx, Lenin, and Chomsky believed.

The fact is, under true social libertarianism and real economic laissez-faire, even the poorest workers are massively in control of their lives and fate. This includes their giant corporation work life.

Under political liberty, unskilled workers of the lowest variety can still seek or avoid any job they want for any reason they want. No-one can stop them. They can freely pick and choose their job, industry, company, neighborhood, city, region, and everything else. If the offered salary and work conditions are not to their liking, they can quickly and easily find a different job.

Altho’ it isn’t well known, and Chomsky doesn’t know it at all, under true capitalism, the unemployment rate is always zero. There’s always a labor shortage. Business owners are in a constant hunt and panic for new workers, which they inevitably seek to lure in with high wages and good working conditions.

And as even Chomsky knows, worker salary and conditions improved radically thruout the 1800s and 1900s. The rise only slowed when the Chomsky-style, 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society finally did too much to replace economic liberty and capitalism with government-regulated welfare statism.

Chomsky’s claim that working for Big Business means you are “property” and a “slave” is surreal. One is tempted to ask: Just what planet does this intellectual clown live on? Only full-scale, Chomsky-style socialism turns workers into property-like and slave-like persons.

But this strange idea also seems to come from the Communist Manifesto. Also near the end of section One, Marx and Engels claim: "Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are...slaves of the bourgeois class, and the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself."

But if one wanted to tweak poor Professor Chomsky even more, one could point out that under true capitalism – not the grossly-flawed welfare statism and crony capitalism of the 1800s and today – the poor are not “free to sleep under the bridges at night”. Bridges and roads are privately owned under capitalism and thus the bedraggled, poor people desperately seeking rest would be trespassing and thus thrown out. Yes, capitalism is so cold, cruel, and evil that it won’t even let pathetic, homeless bums sleep on the filthy, hard dirt under the drafty, nasty bridge!

Of course, in real life, poverty declines radically under laissez-faire capitalism, as homes surge in luxury, and prices drop like a rock. Charitable giving also rises radically.

One bizarre but common theme of intellectual failures like Marx, Lenin, and Chomsky is their evidently sincere belief that under capitalism the workers are “wage slaves”. Business owners are something like slave masters.

But the exact opposite is true. In the unending but impossible attempt by owners to find and keep enough workers, the “big bosses” have to cater to the whims of even the worst of their employees. Business owners and managers are virtually forced to submit and conform to the many, irrational needs and wants of their workers and effective business partners. The reality is, Big Business owners practically face coercion under the stress of economic liberty and competition.

Thus the workers are actually “wage masters” or “wage kings”. The company owners and managers, in turn, are “pay slaves”. On this issue, Marx, Lenin, and Chomsky couldn’t be more stupid if they tried.

One reason rich business owners are so accommodating and servile to their low-level workers is that, unlike the hired help, they can’t easily quit and move on. They have tremendous resources committed to their business, factory, land, and equipment. It isn’t a simple matter to sell these specialized, expensive things, and then move on to some new industry or city. Nor is it easy for them to hire new, skilled managers; or find a fresh, competent, experienced, labor team; or create a new, manufacturing system; or come up with a new, ingenious, business idea to make money.

So they’re trapped. They’re pay slaves. The workers rule. Owners and managers have to kiss the ass of their employees – or else.

Economic liberty and competition demands this. Capitalism creates nothing less than a Workers’ Paradise.