Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
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When you work for someone, as in many areas, you trade sovereignty for wealth. Freedom for security. And so on.
This is always a tradeoff in your interactions with others. A promise is an obligation; commitment, "slavery" etc. if one wishes to put these things so inflammatorily.
The relevant question is: in this particular situation, how serious is this tradeoff?
In the case where there are many jobs you are never "starving", likewise when welfare exists. The governmental and economic context of a system isnt something extrinsic to the system that you can just dismiss: it is part of its functioning.
Yes, welfare may well be a precondition of a free market system to ensure that in extreme cases it isnt "starve or else". Or equally, a big dynamic economy might be a predoncition. Maybe our sorts of markets don't work with monopolistic employeers for the reasons he says.
However this does not generalize to work for a company as such which is always particular and always situated in an economic and political context which turns it from "slavery" to "having to get in by 9am".
As in what, calling an economic system the "free market"? Which has nothing to do with markets as one could buy potatos with rubles in Soviet markets just as one could buy them with dollars in US markets. So it is a misdirection - the commanding heights of the economy - production, not the market - controlled by the government (or in Yugoslavia or China, other mechanisms), not by heirs and the Vanderbilt type aristocracy. I don't have to go into the propaganda term of "free" for the system (versus a presumably "unfree" system where government or workers control the means of production).
Or let us look at the word economics. The field was called political economy - until it became political and supporting the status quo. Then the word political is dropped and the word changed more to like physics. The bank of Sweden even drudged up that old dynamite maker Nobel's prize and started granting it to economic commissars in the 1960s, which I'm sure has Nobel rolling in his grave.
There are innumerable other examples. A "right to work" law does not mean a right to work, it means the government can interfere in a union/business agreement, that a union not be able to get an agreement for a workplace monopoly (of course, companies like Verizon have no such monopoly restrictions). Or "earnings" are what the money, the expropriated dividends of worker's surplus labor time, is called as it is sent to the heirs controlling the corporation.
The flip side of this is what was once called wage slavery is now called career opportunities. The heirs expropriating surplus labor time from the workers who create wealth at as joint stock company are called "job creators". Even the AFL used to call for industrial democracy.
Chomsky isn't shifting the language, he just remembers the language of the Depression before the language shifted.
Yes language does have this unfortunate (and best avoided) "advertising" function which which we associate terms and relabel for the sake of association. Making firing a person easier becomes a "right to work".
"Work" becomes "fascism".
How deeply propagandistic, "advertising", political, wrong, stupid and duplicitous.
Perhaps the free in "free market" is like this, in which case I'd be happy to remove it for "markets regulated qua markets".
Fascism comes from the Italian (and Latin) word fascism. Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Also Chomsky never used the word fascism, fascist etc. here
Totalitarianism is just as bad.
A totalitarian system is, by definition, total -- reaching, by centralized force and authority, into the political, economic, cultural, etc.
There is no centralized power dictating "work" as our culture, our politics, etc.
To call "work" totalitarian is somewhat helpfully revealing of the common mistake ideologues make: narrativizing the world. Turning systems into stories, forces into people.
There is no person dictating work, so there is no totalitarianism. To think as if there were is to turn society into a conspiracy. One may as well call gravity totalitarian.
We make economic promises to each other, and from this arises work.
No, it comes from the Italian “fascismo” which ultimately derives from the Latin “fasces" for a particular symbol of the authority of Roman Republican and Imperial magistrates.
> Mussolini talked little about an ethnic monoculture - in fact there were even some prominent Jewish fascists before German influence over Italy began to increase.
Mussolini was talking about Fascism being about the needs of the “Aryan and Mediterranean race” in 1921, before the Nazis had power in Germany much less influence on he Italian fascists (the influence ran more the other way that early on.)
I believe most people will be subjected as a "non-capital, "non-equity" class, consumers at the base. How will they consume? purchasing power of consumption?
Man the future looks interesting...definitely gearing up for major societal changes, this is uncharted territory with technology
IIRC, he's an anarcho-syndicalist, so the tl;dr version is that he thinks existing capitalist-model businesses should be replaced with worker-owned, worker-controlled co-ops.
Interviewer: but they can't legally murder you or... [imprison you]
Chomsky: They can't legally murder you but they can control everything that you do.
Interviewer: Well, again, the right-wing libertarian argument will be "well, you're free to leave at any time".
Chomsky: Yes, you're free to starve, that's exactly right. You have a choice between starving or selling yourself into tyranny. Very libertarian. The right-wing libertarians, whatever they believe, are actually deep authoritarians. They're calling for the subordination to private tyrannies, the worst kind of tyrannies.
Chomsky's take is interesting because it makes you think about it in a different way than you might normally but as a practical matter I don't think his take reflects reality at least not in the US.
"The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity." [0](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-bureaucracies-97e9805...)
Sure - but we could live in an alternative universe where Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and all the other billionaires conspired to drive down their workers salaries. Where Eric Schmidt sent e-mails instructing they be deleted as they pointed to an illegal cabal crushing wage competition between companies.
Of course - this alternative universe to yours is the one we actually do live in.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/jobs-and-schmidts-gentleme...
People like Chomsky have never been in a situation where they were starving. He is clueless as to what this is really like. Only an out of touch wealthy person would say such ridiculous things. Or a child whose parents take care of their basic survival needs.
Survival takes work. Always has. Always will. Food and shelter will never be magically provided to everyone. Someone somewhere has to grow the food, harvest the food, hunt the food, prepare the food, store the food, preserve the food, harvest building materials, manufacture building materials, assemble building materials, maintain buildings, clean buildings, etc. Or if we're talking about AI robot utopian future, someone has to build and maintain the robots, and prevent them from making humanity obsolete.
If you don't want to work for another human then you have to work for yourself at the whims of nature.
If you expect other people to give you food and shelter to you for free, then you are expecting other people to be slaves for you.
I don't doubt you have a very good understanding of the Soviet type, due to your experience there. However, your original comment seemed to present a false binary choice between Western capitalism and that Soviet-style centrally-planned socialism. It's clear that Chomsky opposes both the former and the latter, so brining up the latter seems like a bit of a straw man in the context of this video and its subject.
The point is that there is a class of humans who do not work for their food - the heirs. The Saint Grottlesex aristocracy who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. Who are calling right now in the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek to increase unemployment and enlarge the industrial reserve army, no doubt then to bemoan the grain then handed to those workers left idle, like the optimates of two thousand years ago.
Chomsky's whole argument is against the parasitic elite who do not work expropriating from those of us who do.