Chomsky

Individual stupidity can be remedied, but institutional stupidity is much more resistant to change. At this stage of human society, it truly endangers our survival. That’s why I think institutional stupidity should be a prime concern.  

       Noam Chomsky

Well, do we have to have state capitalism? Or could there be a system in which people don’t have to spend their waking lives as subjects of a master living under totalitarian control? That’s called “having a job.” “Having a job” means that, for most of your life, you’re following orders from somebody. For 2,000 years, that was considered an utter abomination. From ancient Rome all the way through the 19th century, it was considered such an obvious attack on human rights and dignity that the slogan of the Republican Party, under Abraham Lincoln, was that wage slavery was no different from slavery, except that it is temporary. This wasn’t just idealism. It was the picture of the working-class movement — a major movement that developed in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. It took different forms in different countries. Here, it was based on a very popular movement of working people in Eastern Massachusetts, young women from the farms driven into the mills called “factory girls” — very militant, very articulate, and very educated. They didn’t have formal education, but they were reading Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They didn’t know Marx, but they were discussing interesting ideas about how, if labor is stolen from the worker, that’s robbery. Whatever labor goes into the goods we are producing is okay, but if some other guy, like an owner or investor, is taking part of it, that’s illegitimate. People who work in the mills should own them and run them.

There was a genuine populist movement, not what populism is today. In the late 19th century, it was a movement of American farmers, starting in Texas and going through Oklahoma and Kansas, and so on, and it was very radical. They wanted to be free of Northeastern bankers who loaned them the money for the seeds and charged usurious interest. They said, “We want to get out of that. We want to do it ourselves. We’ll have our own cooperative banks, our own market system, and a cooperative commonwealth.” They started to link up with the major workers movement — the Knights of Labor. It was the most radical movement in American history. It was crushed by force — state force, corporate force. This is a very violent, class-run country.

Can we go back to that sensibility? Can people understand that being the serf of a master is not the greatest thing in life? Maybe.

       Noam Chomsky