Home / Quotes / Quote by Noam Chomsky

Quote by Noam Chomsky

“You can make a case that humans have always been striving for freedom and resist constraints on their activity. Now, this can be suppressed, and there are very interesting cases of it. So, take something in our ordinary experience - getting a job. Suppose you're out of work, you don't have anything to eat, you look for a job. It's considered a wonderful thing to get a job. It wasn't always that way. You go back to the origins of the Industrial Revolution, mid-19th century, and take a look at the literature, the working-class literature. There was a very rich working-class literature and political discussions. The idea of having a job was considered a totally intolerable assault on elementary human dignity and human rights. Why should you be subjected to a master? Why should anybody spend most of their waking hours following orders given by a totalitarian ruler? That's what having a job is. It means you're following the orders of a master. And in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, this was regarded as not really different from slavery. In fact, it was called wage slavery. It was different from slavery only in that it was temporary, until you could become a free, independent human being again. That was the slogan of the major working-class organization, the major one in American history, Knights of Labor. It was a slogan of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party held that to be subordinate to a master and under wage labor is intolerable, it can't be tolerated. Now, that's been beaten out of people's heads over 150 years, but I don't think it's far below the surface, and I think it can be elicited. And there are many other cases like that. It's the kind of thing that Gramsci talked about when he discussed how hegemonic common sense captures people and imprisons them, and gets them to not comprehend their own natural instincts and desires. And this is, for a revolutionary, the first step: to try to unravel these kinds of constraints on thinking that make us automatically obedient and subservient, instead of asking, "Is that right?”

Author

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

“In fact, in my opinion, corporations are themselves illegitimate. I take a very conservative position on this. As you may know, the modern corporation was created about a century ago by state intervention, mostly judicial intervention. There wasn't any legislation about it. But when corporate law, in the current sense, was established in the early 20th century by the courts, there were people who bitterly opposed it, namely conservatives. There used to be conservatives in those days; now the term's around, but not the concept. Conservatives bitterly condemned that as a return to feudalism, which in a way it was, and a form of Communism. That was the reaction to the radical revision of corporate law in the United States and elsewhere to grant corporations—collectivist legal entities—the rights of people of flesh and blood. It was a major attack against classical liberal principles, and conservatives, meaning classical liberals, were bitterly offended by that. And I think they had a good point. Corporations are private tyrannies. A corporation, if you look at its structure, is about as close to the totalitarian model as anything human beings have created. The control is completely from top to bottom. You can be inserted in the middle somewhere, like a junior manager, take orders from the top, and hand them down below. At the very bottom, people are allowed to rent themselves to it; it's called getting a job.”

Capitalism Corporations Feudalism Wage Slavery Classical Liberalism

Author:Noam Chomsky

“What really matters is the fact that the major institutions in the society are under totalitarian control. After all, what's a corporation? A corporation is just a tyrannical system, one of the most tyrannical systems that humans have ever devised.”

Capitalism Corporations Wage Slavery

Author:Noam Chomsky

“The responsibility of raising the challenge is typically in the hands of those who recognize that they have a subordinate status. It's very hard to recognize that. People lived for millennia without recognizing that they are being subordinated in systems of power. It's true of women for example or slaves. Most slave societies were accepted by the slaves as legitimate and, in fact, necessary. And the same is true of, for example, people who have jobs today in our society. Almost without exception they consider it legitimate for them to be in a position where they have to rent themselves in order to survive. That's certainly not obvious. And in fact, if you go back a century ago, it was not only considered not obvious, it was considered outlandish by ordinary working people. I'm not talking about Marxists or socialists or anybody like that, but say mill hands in Lowell, Massachusetts who never heard of socialism, who regarded it [renting oneself] as a form of slavery and were complaining that they had not fought the civil war to replace chattel slavery by wage slavery, and that therefore those who work in the mills ought to own them, because that's the republican rights that we won in the American revolution and so on and so forth. So, you know, it's not obvious. But, by now, I think enough indoctrination and propaganda and so on has taken place so people do regard that form of subordination to external authority as legitimate. Whether they should is another question, but the fact is they do, just as, for most of history, women have accepted a subordinate role as correct and proper and so on, and slaves did, and people living in feudal societies [did]. In a feudal society, people had a place, some kind of role, and, quite typically, these societies were stable because people regarded those structures as legitimate. The same is true of religious structures. Throughout human life there's a whole variety of systems of authority and oppression and domination and so on, which are usually accepted as legitimate by the people subordinated to them. When they don't, you have the struggles and revolutions and sometimes changes and sometimes brutality and so on.”

Power Authority Slavery Oppression Domination Anarchism Feudalism Wage Slavery

Author: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.”

Wage Slavery Classical Liberalism

Author:Noam Chomsky