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Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Book by Noam Chomsky · 2 quotes · Canada, Capitalism, Inequality

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Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky Quotes

“Well, our economic system "works," it just works in the interests of the masters, and I'd like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the "principal architects" of policy, to borrow Adam Smith's phrase. I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated, whether in the economic or the political system, you know who's going to benefit from the policies―you don't have to be a genius to figure that out. That's why democracy would be a good thing for the general public. But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled―because it's radically anti-democratic. And that can't be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society's investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities. That's a long job, it requires building up an entire cultural and institutional basis for the changes, it's not something that's just going to happen on its own. There are people who have written about what such a system might look like―kind of a "participatory economy," it's sometimes called. But sure, that's the way to go, I think.”

InequalityWealth Inequality
Book:Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
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“The rich and powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real―and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility―certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it―that within a couple hundred years the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed.”

CapitalismClimate ChangeInequalityGlobal Warming
Book:Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
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