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Quote by Noam Chomsky

“I would like to see the kind of society that classical liberals wanted, like John Stuart Mill, for example, or Abraham Lincoln, or even Adam Smith among the last of the classical liberals. They wanted to see a society with, to quote Mill, in which the natural form of organization is free association among participants. That’s the way the industrial system should move according to Mill. That’s what they should do in Denmark. Instead of having a master-slave relation, master-serf relation, if you want to call it that. Or it should have a relation of direct participation and control. Now, maybe, the Danish don’t want that. Up to them, I’m not their master. But I would like this option to be brought forth and liberated, discussed, developed. I think they probably would want it, just as free working people in the early days of the Industrial Revolution wanted. It’s just their nature.”

Quote by Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, born on December 7, 1928, is a renowned linguist from the United States. His research in generative grammar and transformational grammar has had a profound impact on modern linguistics. Chomsky's academic achievements extend beyond linguistics, as he is also an active political commentator and philosopher, known for his unique perspective and profound insights. more

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Wage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“It's very useful to consider what we take for granted as unquestionable common sense, what we consent to without reflection. Not just what we consent to, but what we often go on to regard as the highest goal of life. So, in today's world, one of the highest goals in life is having a job. The best advice that one can give to a young person is to prepare to find employment. That is, to prepare to spend your waking life in servitude to a master. For many, that means subordination to discipline that is far more extreme than in a totalitarian state. The whole system of renting oneself for survival, holding a job, well, that may be hegemonic common sense today, but it certainly has not been in the past. From classical antiquity right through the 19th century, the idea of being dependent on the will and the domination of others was considered an intolerable attack on elementary rights and human dignity. In fact, workers in late 19th-century New York warned that a day might come when wage slaves will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect. They hoped to be able to block the efforts to instill a new hegemonic common sense in which workers would not only accept but, in fact, glory in a system that turns them into menial and humble servants, wage slaves, under tight control, abandoning their independence for the larger part of their lives.”

Wage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there? Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.”

SlaveryWage Slavery
Author:Lucy Parsons
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“Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived. People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery. It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the laborer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery. And as, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the people of Europe began little by little to understand that what formerly seemed a natural and inevitable form of economic life-namely, the position of peasants who were completely in the power of their lords-was wrong, unjust and immoral, and demanded alteration, so now people today are beginning to understand that the position of hired workmen, and of the working classes in general, which formerly seemed quite right and quite normal, is not what it should be, and demands alteration.”

SlaveryWage Slavery
Book:Slavery of Our Times
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