Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
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Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#2Chomsky: Just think about it for a minute: almost everybody spends most of their life living in a totalitarian system. It's called having a job. When you have a job, you're under total control of the masters of the enterprise. They determine what you wear, when you go to the bathroom, what you do – the very idea of a wage contract is selling yourself into servitude. These are private governments. They're more totalitarian than governments are.
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.
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#3What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI?
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
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#4What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI? 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
> What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI?
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.
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#5False 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".
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#6Chomsky: Just think about it for a minute: almost everybody spends most of their life living in a totalitarian system. It's called having a job. When you have a job, you're under total control of the masters of the enterprise. They determine what you wear, when you go to the bathroom, what you do – the very idea of a wage contract is selling yourself into servitude. These are private governments. They're more totalit…
Seems to ignore the idea of competition between companies to provide good working conditions and pay in a free labor market. The choice isn't between staying and being abused or starving. The choice is between a variety of employers offering a range of working conditions and a range of pay and benefits.
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.
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#7Chomsky: Just think about it for a minute: almost everybody spends most of their life living in a totalitarian system. It's called having a job. When you have a job, you're under total control of the masters of the enterprise. They determine what you wear, when you go to the bathroom, what you do – the very idea of a wage contract is selling yourself into servitude. These are private governments. They're more totalit…
The parent is a transcription of the video, and I think it should be pinned to the top of the thread.
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#8What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI? 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
> What does Chomsky propose, (economically/socially) in the coming age of automation, is he into UBI? 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
Ah, the joys of categorizing people into boxes. The man is an Anarcho-Syndicalist, so ergo, we now can derive all he thinks from this assumption.
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
#9I'm in the middle of reading "The Jungle", by Upton Sinclair. The working conditions described within were pretty cruel and totalitarian. However it's also easy to compare and contrast the corporate greed and suffering within to modern day concepts like minimum wage and see that we've obviously made tons of progress and things continue to get better. Like all extremist positions, though, this will never be enough for Noam Chomsky - from where he sits, reality itself is totalitarian. How dare humans have to work for their food? What a tragedy it is that wolves must run to hunt their prey, and that this prey must die an agonizing death so someone else can live! At some point you have to suffer in life; if you agree with this then "wage-based servitude" doesn't sound so bad, and modern white-collar work is really only "wage-based servitude" by technical definition.
Re: Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
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