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Fakeer Ishavardas

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“I don't see an enormous difference between a society in which you sell yourself to someone and a society in which you rent yourself to someone. I mean, they seem to me approximately equally inhuman. Well, we agree now, though we didn't 100 years ago, on the first - that slavery is wrong. But there's another thing, which in the old days used to be called wage slavery, which means that you rent yourself to somebody else in order to survive. It means that control over resources, and production, and investment is in the hands of a particular, and rather small group of people, and everyone else has the choice of either dying or renting themselves to them, more or less on their terms. And that seems to me a totally intolerable form of human life, you know. I mean, there's no reason to accept that any more than there was a reason to accept slavery, or feudalism, or whatever. How do you change that? Well, you try to change it through existing institutions. You probably fail. In which case you change the institutions, which are not graven in stone, you know. History hasn't come to an end.”

Wage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that. The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not. That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive. In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system." Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff. Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.”

EnlightenmentCapitalismSlaveryAnarchismWage SlaveryClassical Liberalism
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery. Vulgar we must consider those also who buy from wholesale merchants to retail immediately; for they would get no profits without a great deal of downright lying; and verily, there is no action that is meaner than misrepresentation. And all mechanics are engaged in vulgar trades; for no workshop can have anything liberal about it. Least respectable of all are those trades which cater for sensual pleasures.”

EmploymentWage SlaverySocial ClassesOccupationsRespectibility
Book:On Duties
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“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?”

Wage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“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.”

CapitalismCorporationsFeudalismWage SlaveryClassical Liberalism
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“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.”

PowerAuthoritySlaveryOppressionDominationAnarchismFeudalismWage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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