Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

False equivocation all over the place. If you need to shift the language to extremes to persuade people you are doing so by "borrowing" from those extremes. Ie., fascism is widely regarded as "bad" so the tactic here is to borrow its badness and spread it around without actually arguing about the situation at-hand.

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".

> if you need to shift the language to extremes to persuade people you are doing so by "borrowing" from those extremes

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.

Work was never called "fascism" which is about the establishment of an ethnic monoculture via aggressive authoritarian means.

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" which is about the establishment of an ethnic monoculture

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

Ah. For some reason I remembered 'fascism' rather than 'totalitarianism' however the former is an example of the latter.

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.

> Fascism comes from the Italian (and Latin) word fascism.

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.)

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