Noam Chomsky and the Critique of Wage Labor

Noam Chomsky has consistently argued that wage labor, far from being the foundation of freedom, is better understood as a form of domination. He often invokes the 19th-century labor movement’s own language, which described wage labor as “wage slavery.” For Chomsky, the analogy is not rhetorical excess but a structural truth: in both slavery and wage labor, one person is compelled to subordinate their life and activity to the will of another. The difference is in degree, not in kind.

Drawing from classical liberal thinkers like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Chomsky points out that freedom and dignity require that individuals control the conditions of their own labor. Yet under capitalism, workers are forced—through economic necessity rather than formal chains—to rent their time and energy to employers. This coerced dependency means that work is not a site of self-realization but of alienation, producing profits for others while stunting the worker’s capacities.

Chomsky also stresses the ideological inversion that props up this system. Wage labor is framed as “voluntary exchange,” disguising the structural coercion of economic necessity. Workers are formally free to leave a job, but they are not free to leave the system of wage labor itself; their survival depends on selling labor power in one form or another. This, for Chomsky, is a deeply authoritarian arrangement: the workplace is one of the most undemocratic spaces in modern society, organized around hierarchy, command, and obedience.

In this sense, Chomsky’s critique links directly to broader critiques of inequality and abandonment. Just as Fisher identifies the psychic despair of capitalism and Gilmore identifies its carceral excess, Chomsky highlights the daily authoritarianism that organizes most people’s waking lives. Wage labor becomes the normalized background of domination, one that is accepted precisely because its coercive structure is obscured by the language of choice and contract.

LLM