If every day you wake up early to begrudgingly go to work and hate your job, you're told you're just lazy and childish, and that's just how life is and you need to get used to it. But people know deep down that it's not natural, it's not the default, and that it is nefarious. People may not admit it on the surface, but deep down they realize that they're being exploited for someone else's gain and that nearly half their waking life (or more) is going to be wasted making money for some faceless corporate entity and they'll be able to finally break free from those chains when they're elderly and life is nearing its end.
Well that is why there are supposed to be unions and such to ensure work is tolerable and people want work life balance enjoy time off to rest enjoy home life but for women for instance many would maybe be happy stay at home housewives as their job if they are abused and unappreciated though they have no pleasant work or life experiences at home and there is now union etc. for the "birthing people" nannies cooks maids and other job responsibilities of a "homemaker" so the men don't have that to come home to either.
Sure. Being forced to provide value in exchange for food, shelter, and every luxury known to man is akin to chattel slavery. How does anyone continue to listen to such nonsense? Let's see Lincoln's quote in context.
@@juanito714ok VALUE,? what value. not a turm that within this conxt registers within this context or that is a part that comes into th equasion in this scenario , oh you mean the "rIcH " ppl as ill humor your insophisticaton and incmpnce getting hand outs for stealing the geniuses behind and actual value creators creating geniues who they stol this inphostructure from violence and inserted this means
That's not true. We are all free to make our choices. My choice is to be an ordinary working person, who would want the hassle of running a big corporation? Who would want to be isolated from the rest of their community by having a lot of money and being seen as different? - none of that makes for a good life. The idea that we're downtrodden, exploited and in chains is just absolute bollocks, pushed by pseudo-intellectuals for their own reasons. The fact is many of us just chose a simple, ordinary life, not because we're exploited, or stupid, but because it's *what we want*.
For that, you'll have to get rid of private-car dominance, TV-centric culture, privatized food-growing. To accomplish this, however, you only need to add FLV to the cost of public goods transferred into the economy.
That is sparked by the individual, my friend. It’s sparked by me and by you, when we reach out to our immediate community. Because really it starts with community.
The nineteenth century working class that he talks about were demanding to be educated and culturally respectable, especially the trade unionists. They wanted a fair share in the profits, legal rights for their unions, political rights and power. His point is that we came close once, after centuries of degradation, and indeed made some real gains (compulsory bargaining, better wages and benefits, shorter hours). Why can’t it happen again?
As a business owner and a fan of Chomsky - I've thought about worker owned businesses a lot. First, nothing is stopping anyone in the U.S. from starting a worker-owned business. I wish more people would give it a shot. I think the issue is just "workers" don't want to do this in the U.S. It's waaaaaaay easier to find employment and not deal with the headaches of starting and managing an entire business that may or may not fail. The thought experiment I run is: ok get a group of like-minded people together, ideate a business, either bootstrap funding or get a loan, hope that we have a business that won't fail, hope that it makes enough profit to pay salaries and benefits. It's quite an uphill battle to get something functional up and running. Finally, to some extent this does happen in small partnerships, maybe law firms, small marketing agencies - it's just not labeled as "worker-owned".
There actually are employee owned businesses and other forms of businesses that don’t revolve around one major key individual. Also unions do exist as well amongst other forms of business to entrepreneurialism. It’s literally a melting pot of ideas out there that many haven’t cracked or put upon themselves
I understand your 'headaches' yet there are 1000's of business run in this way. They are not in the news. There has been a network of consultants in Europe and beyond looking at new organisational forms. See Reinventing Organisations by Fredric Laloux, Freedom Inc by Isaac Getz. Universities hardly teach it.
I completely agree with you. There are several implications of employee-owned business that Noam overlooks. What if employees want to change jobs? Will they have to sell their ownership? What if they do not want to assume business risks? Will they put in equity? Probably Noam is refering to a profit participation programme or options scheme for employees that is more widespread, and not just for top executirves.
@@andreperusso Noam is speaking from an armchair perspective on what he experienced as an injustice and probably targets just those areas without focusing on solutions. People like him, no matter how intelligent, educated, or scholarly, gain influence through negative perception. Everyone is upset about something in life but focus a hate towards a cause. People would become very nonsensical in believing that’s all reality is for them that they would create a cult like following upon what they believe is a problem. It is a political tactic that has been used for millennia and further than that. It’s a great way to create a “cause” to fight for
The problem is that big businesses have made it incredibly difficult for the smaller guy to get started. That is part of what Noam is getting at here. In a true capitalist society government would be set up to help the smaller guy, whereas what we have now, government is set up to favor the large corporations.
So what is your definition of a free market? A market that is biased against WSDE'S is not a free market economy, a market that allows choice is. That is what Chomsky and Wolff are saying.
zalamander8 Couldn't there be some aspects that are capitalistic? I'm for workers cooperatives, but I agree there has to be a market of choice. That's what capitalism was originally based on.
MaghoxFr: I think anyone who has ever worked somewhere with an incompetent manager and ignorant corporate management and has thought to themselves "we could this ourselves" will have came to the same conclusion as Wolff and Chomsky and others on workers self management
KentAllard Perfect! Then set up your own cooperative business, involving your own risk. That's the beauty of a capitalist regime: ypu can run your business in a socialist fashion. Why do you have to forcefully take over private property?
When you think about it, that is a very intuitive and biased way to look at it. Life is always slavery with freedom being death. When you remove the personal sensationalism or culturally instilled ideas, it makes perfect sense... It's kinda just immature... Like Fair weather friends... When things are good, you don't care about the consequences, but when things go bad, suddenly life sucks... It's just a childish, short sighted way to fabricate existence, don't you think?
@@Vscustomprinting Its just a quote. But i dont agree that life is always slavery. Some people do enjoy their work, unfortunately this group only represents about 20% of the work force.
You either work for yourself, rely on charity or coerce someone else to work for you. I would say the only people who owe you anything are your parents because they brought you into this world.
underlying flaw in capitalism....infinite growth system (it demands it - profit motivated) in a finite resource reality. Whether resources are cheaper labor (whose going to buy your product or service when labor costs is an inevitable race to the bottom) or material resources that are the opposite of infinite.
"How is labor cost a race to the bottom?" In a competitive free market, the unemployed will be trying to outcompete each other for jobs by offering to work for less than their competition. This wage competition could drive wages (i.e. labour costs), as a whole, down. And even in today's government-regulated markets, more 3rd world nations are relaxing their labour laws and minimum wages in an attempt to attract MNCs to their country (that's why most stuff is made in Asian countries where labour is cheap and minimum wages are almost non-existent). And finally, the more open your country is to immigration (which is somewhat the case in this increasingly globalised world), the more wages in your country will go down, as the new supply of labour will drive down the cost of labour (basic supply and demand).
You're saying it's a race to the price equilibrium. That's only a race to the bottom if the job isn't worth anything. Globalization can drive labor costs either way. It both increases the number of people available for a job and expands the market. That means the demand will also go up and the number of necessary laborers increases.
Jeremiah Wilson dude ur so fucking dumb that is literally the most anti intellectual thing I have ever fucking heard. All economic systems strive for growth you fucktard. Capitalism deals with finite resources by allocating them through trade. Other systems do it through government intervention. You're making a fucking simple description of capitalism that is so wrong. Again, ALL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS STRIVE FOR GROWTH!!! WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO JUST STOP TRYING TO GROW OUR STANDARD OF LIVING???? LMAOOO. All resources are finite and the difference between capitalism and communism is that capitalism can actually deal with finite resources and ur beloved communism praised by ur pseudo intellectual buddy noam can not deal with it.
Therefore, capitalism is essentially unstable form of social organization and ALWAYS leads ultimately to its own destruction and never to the perpetual stability of a smoothly functioning social order.
@Bruno56 There are almost no corporations in existence today that were in existence 120 years ago. Most business that were in existence in 1900 are not in business today; they have been bought up and incorporated into larger corporations. The corporations "cannibalized" these other businesses.
Bruno56 You seem to make that observation in a casual statement of honesty, without realizing the lives and dreams that were destroyed in the process, which is my original point entirely. The social economic order of Capitalism buys, mines. grows, and manufactures everything it can as fast as possible and destroys everything it encounters in the process (by converting it into salable product, or profit). Nothing is spared this cannibalizing destruction.
Bruno66 the results of our labor are being stolen from us by the one percent that control the government and the courts. There is as much "disparity of wealth" and "concentration of wealth" in the USA as there was in France before the French Revolution. The system is unstable and the entire "house of cards" will fall. Just wait and see...
Interesting that manufacturing in Germany of all places, the richest country in Europe also providing the longest vacations, actually has such systems already in place, where both workers and management have an equal say in policy... instead of always being an 'adversarial' relationship, as it is in the supposed "Free Market" in the U.S.
Interesting that Germany is and has been an overwhelmingly ethnically Northern European, extremely homogenous country for most of it's history, with rule of law as strict as you could possibly imagine, with selection pressures so eugenic that it produced some of the highest IQs and greatest levels of achievement ever seen on the planet. Funny because Noam Chomsky would have never said that could happen if he looked at their history in the abstract. So perhaps Noam Chomsky shouldn't be taken that seriously.
"The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence."
Před 5 lety+3
Those who would purchase security at the cost of freedom deserve neither. (A paraphrase of Ben Franklin.)
@Ogutu-TishOg M Ahahahah! That's an argumentum ad hominem, a fallacy. The above statement is not mine, if you searched you would know, but you aren't the kind of people who likes to search... Here's another one for you: "The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes." Aldous Huxley
@Ogutu-TishOg M “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti czcams.com/video/e9dZQelULDk/video.html
@Ogutu-TishOg M "Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beliving what they're told. And privilege and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on." Noam Chomsky Authority!? That's hilarious. You are the one whom in a paternalistic way tries to impose your opinion doing diagnoses... Return to the" rat race", it seems you are enjoying it... The video from Steve Cutts is clear, if you need to diggest, the problem is your ability to digest your own prejudices... Now I will listen to Bob: czcams.com/video/7SKJDv_pgs0/video.html Ahahahah!
What he says right here people need to understand this: "First of all we should bear in mind that we don’t have a capitalist system. No capitalist system has ever survived; they would self-destruct in 5 minutes. So what we have is a kind of State Capitalist system, with the state playing a substantial role in American history, a very substantial role in production, research, and development, um, lots of other types like bailouts, lots of other devices to keep the private sector viable." The problem is we have to move back to giving people control of the workplace and give them their rights back. What he says about "wage labor" being slavery is true. Again, he makes the point that wage labor is nothing more than renting yourself out. But then you as a worker have given up control of your rights as a worker and have given up any say or control of the management of production and you lose ownership of production. I know this is very very hard for Americans and most of the Westerners to understand but as he points out this was something America did and it was successful up until wealthy elites began pushing propaganda to make people think this was a bad thing. Then you have the propaganda that somehow if you aren't educated you don't deserve better wages. This is hogwash, but the American public has been brainwashed to believe this. If you work any job you should be paid not according to your education level but according to your work load and production. If you work hard labor you shouldn't be paid less you should actually be paid more.
I take issue with the state-capitalist label, and his rhetoric regarding what we currently have. There are many definitions of capitalism with overlap between them (state, state monopoly, popular, crony, turbo, etc). By itself "capitalism" usually means private ownership of means of production, distribution, wealth exchange, etc maintained primarily by individuals or corporations. I think that term does safely apply to large segments of the US economy. No doubt government funds and regulates significant sectors and in doing so has a heavy hand we might call 'management' of private companies. But it's not like PRC's tendency to central management, is it? And we see also a degree of crony capitalism in which industry forms the government, but that's a different causal model we might mistake for state capitalism if we aren't careful. "State capitalism" as I understand it involves government ownership of shares, central management, etc. There might be sectors where that's the case, or close to it. Like military industry. But I think his application is too definitive and broad. I think he might be being a bit dramatic.
Sorry, help me understand: what alternative did he offer to wage labor? And who will build the production means; those who will inevitably own and run them? And what if someone wants to build a private company; will that be forbidden? Thanks anyone, for any answers.
@@localman9063 When he said that there was no economic or political theory that disagreed with what he was saying The Austrian School of Economics, for one, is most vehemently against him All serious schools of economic thought can explain perfectly well why it makes no sense for labourers to own the places they work in To deny the value of the capitalist is to admit you know nothing about economics
It is truly a bizarre proposition that a group of people should work the better parts of their lives in order to advance the size and profitability of some enterprise, for wages that are less than the value of their work, and if the owner is shrewd enough perhaps much less, so that when the enterprise is sold or shut down one person, or perhaps a select few, walk away with riches, while those same workers are left to struggle into their old age with a pittance. Even at it's best (whatever that is) such a system is rooted in rapacity, exploitation, and the commoditization of both nature and of other human beings, typically carried out under the supposed sanction of some imagined god. The system is downright undemocratic. It is evil at its core.
@@programmer1840 If you work for a company, your work allows the company to make a certain amount of money. Some of that money comes back to you as your pay and benefits, some is necessarily spent on things that make your work possible like raw materials and rent, and the rest goes to the owners to do with as they please. The latter portion is called surplus value. Any employee paid well enough (or not doing enough profitable work) to produce surplus value is costing the owners money and will be eliminated if the owners notice, so most people must work for less than the value of their labor.
@@programmer1840 in every profitable business, the employees are by definition earning less than their labor is worth. Otherwise, the owner at the top of the business, would have no profits with which to pay himself a salary.
Frankly no one should work, except for very brief periods of extreme necessity, for any less than the market value of his labor. Also no employer should ever pay more than the value expected from labor. Chomsky skips right over the value that capital and managerial skill contributes to any concern. If the workers own the factory no one will be tasked with providing the tools from machinery to marketing plans to research/development. Just as scientists are not very qualified to operate presses or lathes machinists are not trained nor have the temperament to creating a budget that moves a strategic plan forward.
You would have to re-define a "good standard". What's a good standard? A standard to what? To the system that was designed for us and we live in now (getting a nice car, house, money, expensive hotel visits) ? If you want that good standard, you'll have to play by the rules. Sell your time with the aim to get money in return. Nothing stops you from grabbing a bike right now and just drive away. I'm sure you can get here or there some food for helping in return with something else (a big cheeseburger is probably not what you'll get).
yeah... except you can grow your own food if you want to. In fact you can hunt, and harvest whatever you plant, sure you might need a permit if its on public places, but nobody is stopping you from doing it inside your own property.... specially in rural areas. Also, define 'good' standard.
...and what do you have if the job you did no longer exists and there are no resources to learn a new job. How do you live while you try to learn a new trade. It is all part of the criminalization of the electorate. That is another way to gain a majority vote.
Maybe the term ‘work’ has been too narrowly defined. The person (i.e., man or woman) that stays at home to raise children (e.g. the next generation of leaders) works very intensely, yet they may not earn any financial compensation. These people do a critically important job for society as a whole. However, this important contribution does not seem to be recognised as such by our ‘mixed’ economic system. Therefore, many people work but do not earn sufficient money to eat, let alone support a living environment that provides the basic essentials of life.
@@bruisersdilemma354 Poor people are slaves of the state . Government can make vacations too expensive so poor cannot leave . Government will make more vacancies in the Mechanical than CSE in education if goverment needs more mech. Government controls media to control us. and Poor are in delusion that it's all bad with them because they are the ones who aren't skilled enough to be rich like Americans. it is called capitalism. Government can , give homeless homes , unemployed a job but they will only do it if they get more taxes that way !
Hi Conrad I agree with you, any long-term one-way relationship even unconscious is slavery. Your family and friends could make you a slave it's called conditional love. I'm more worried about that than work.
Man is inherently born a slave. You have to work in order to survive. Hunting and gathering getting, farming, a desk job - they are all forms of work. You are relieved from work and responsibility when you die.
@@joshuajones353 yeah, but the phrase "basically no different" gives further context to the point being made. Which "basically" means the point seems to have a either a pedestrian view of chattel slavery or earning a wage. In any case, the difference is enough for the two to NOT "basically" be the same. Peace.
Name Again nah they are basically the same. If you don’t understand what he’s saying then that’s a you problem. Nothing more, nothing less. Wage slavery exists. It’s a concept that’s been talked about for a longtime.
Incredibly stupid statement, because voluntarily taking a job with a wage, is voluntary. Involuntary servitude is *the entirety of what's wrong with slavery* and choosing a wage labor job entirely lacks that.
all of this talk on 'capitalism' immediately crops up in my mind a youtube essay brilliantly elaborating upon the unique ending of Lord of the Rings trilogy-whereby it isn't the hero that defeats the villain, but rather the villain is defeated by its own greed becoming too unstable to sustain itself!
That's not true, Frodo is the hero as he delivers the ring to the mount Doom and drops it there, if he didn't take that long journey to Mordor then in no way would evil and sauron be destroyed.
...[and] mainstream media call the Chinese economy "State-sponsored capitalism". It turned out, rightly, according to Noam all states are (US, Germany,etc). Long live, Noam, please stay with us forever.
"I wish more people would see and understand this." Oh I think they understand it well enough. Many experiments in socialism and communism. Essentially zero success, hundreds of millions of people starve, suffer and some die because of failed social experiments. People of the Left have two extremes that do not work: the liberal elite, intellectuals that want to make or re-make society in their image; versus the egalitarian everyone-is-everyone and don't need no experts anywhere proletariat.
@@franzschubertv2874 is this a joke? Nobody is stopping me? Please tell me you don't believe capitalism is a meritocracy where everyone has the opportunities to succeed.
@@benjaminr8961 lmao that is not all entirely true - capitalists and government go hand in hand they are the wealthy capitalists and everything you think you know is all bs by the system of capital, who do you think controls the education system? arts? movies? the media? capitalism through history does not end well for people. Look at the world now as it is, you have pollution, to many cars, to many people, etc. the system is not sustainable it's designed strictly for profits and the exploitation of everything.
I believe free market capitalism died when the zionist banksters finally got control of our economy in 1913 with the privately owned federal reserve with every boom and bust the gained more control and bought and blackmailed politicians and fooling the people into thinking a social democracy was good "I am from the government and here to help" then the trap was set no society in history has ever survived it's government.
In our present system, so without workers owning the factories too, people can IMHO accept that those with a talent for business or other very useful field might be rewarded a bit more than a low status worker. This talent will still need work to blossom. However, the difference should not go excessive because it's also obvious that a) there are given, almost undeserved, coincidental aspects surrounding talent and b) a high talent in business could not be rewarded much more than a huge talent in taking care for people or even cleaning . I wish we could reward in accordance to the invested "psychological" effort that one is doing but the machine to measure that, has not yet been invented.
The problem is that capitalism also creates opportunity cost. That makes it hard for societies to decide to experiment with new ways of doing things. It takes good will and faith on a global scale.
"the invisible hand," but this is made impossible by the nature of competition, the indifference of bureaucracies, and human nature subjected to these conditions
Theoretically it will work. Its interesting how it always works in theory. But in practice, it never seems to pan out. I'm not a MIT professor and indeed am a product of the modern public educational system so please excuse my handicap of ignorance and help me understand the idea that the workers should own the mill. Do the workers then also assume all of the risk in investing the money to construct the mill? If they do not have a job before the mill is built, where did they get the money to invest in its construction? If they do have a job before the mill is built, why would they leave this Utopian position where they worked out of love for the business they 'own' rather than for a salary, and then what happens to their share of the company they leave? Further, if they dont have a job, where do these hypothetical workers get the money to start the mill and if they already have the money necessary to start a mill, why would they want to spend it on a mill? For the first several years when the mill (assuming that the mill here is symbolic of a modern privately owned business) doesn't make any money, do these employee/owners not take a salary and work for free? Wait, a major problem, as I am thinking about this, is primarily in the initial outlay of capital to start the business. Hmmm, maybe the only way to do this is if the government owns all business and distributes all wages. Then because all subjects, er I mean citizens, pay taxes to start and maintain all businesses, they really could be said to 'own' them. Or, better yet, since the government owns all businesses (which would include services like food production, and medical care) as well as controlled the distribution of all wages, money could effectively be eliminated. Of course there would be those free-thinking rebels out there that would believe that they are somehow entitled to the fruits of their individual labor and they would have to be coerced into following the rules. And, yes, there would certainly be those instances where violence would be necessary in order to force people into the collective - perhaps some lives might even be lost. But, it would be for the good of the collective, right? Pretty sure there are literally millions of people who were exterminated because they resisted this idea and yet this Nirvana of equality of outcomes just can seem to manifest itself. Maybe its because I am a product of the public educational system but I cant think of a place where this idea has worked, and it certainly isnt for a lack of trying.
The control of the company's capital and decision making doesn't have to be equal for all employees. It just has to be more representative or democratic. One simple method would be that all the company's shareholders have to be employees of the company. Thus it is the workers who are electing the board of directors, who in turn hire the management. The owner/founder might still retain a majority or plurality of shares, and so would receive proportionally the most benefit from company profits and growth. But now the people running the company answer to the employees, rather than some venture capital firm with a 20% stake, representing a thousand faceless millionaires and only invested in the welfare of the company as long as it maximizes quarterly returns.
Okay Phil. As neither an economics expert nor a business executive, I cannot say that your suggestion is a bad idea. Are there any organizations that have tried this approach and were any of them successful? Do you think that it should be up to the business to decide if they should try structuring their organization based on this model, or do you think that it should be mandated by the government?
They can seize the pre-existing mill and run it. In Brazil, for example, one can see something similar at work. The colonization of the lands which we today understand as Brazil was undertaken through a system of immense land concessions by the Portuguese crown to wealthy citizens of that kingdom, which would then operate plantations, mining and other commodity-producing activities with the employment of slave-labor. These lands were so large that each comprised areas equivalent to that of several European nations combined. Once slavery was abolished, those land rights, however, were not significantly altered, therefore the labor dynamics remained more or less the same, with former enslaved workers often remaining in the same plantations, but now as precarious wage laborers. That is to say that the property relations vis-à-vis the means of production, in this case the land itself, remained as previously. The same person who was previously the slave master was now the employer and those who were formerly enslaved, now sold their labor to this slave master turned employer. Throughout its history, Brazil never successfully conducted a comprehensive land reform which could redistribute this concentration of vast swathes of land among the citizenry and, even today, the country is home to immense properties of such kind, whose ownership has often been passed down hereditarily through unbroken lines of succession. The Brazilian constitution of 1988, however, enshrined a framework for a process of land reform determining that land must serve a social function, whose definition is given through a set of principles, one of which pertains to its productivity, which must be secured. That is to say that an unproductive land properties do not fulfill its social function and may be expropriated by the state and redistributed in smaller allotments among the landless peasantry. I won't go into all the details of this process, but briefly I must mention that this may only be applied to very large properties (above 1.000 hectar) which are considered by Brazilian law to be unproductive under a set of pre-established criteria. If this is the case, the landless peasantry may occupy that land, effectively setting up encampments there, and then start a formal requirement for land expropriation in the court system. If all criteria are met, the land is then bought up by the Brazilian State, allotted and distributed among those landless peasants, which then proceed to operate those lands either on a familiar basis, with small families each working their own plot of land, or collectively through cooperatives. My brother, while studying agricultural engineering at university, once visited one such cooperative where chocolate was collectively produced and sold with each single production step being carried out within the community. Some people took care of tending to the cocoa plants and the harvest, others processed the chocolate, others would commercialize it and some were also responsible for producing food crops for the community's consumption. All the monetary proceedings from their final commercial handling were equally distributed among members, regardless of the labor they carried out in the production chain. One must not think very much to realize that, just as these lands were seized by a colonizing power and given or sold to third parties, they may be re-seized and re-distributed among the population. That is to say, the mill is often already exists, one must "only" decide collectively, as a society, what to do with it. Nothing else gives legitimacy to property rights than popular consent. If a society decides that "the mills" ought to be seized from the capitalist class and henceforth be operated by the working class, then so it shall be. I am not saying this is a seamless transition that would just take place magically, but one must remember that no laws amongst men exist beyond popular consensus. They do not exist by themselves beyond human society. There are no ethereal, ideal, immutable laws in society and it is up to each society to sustain only those laws which are collectively understood as just and legitimate. If property over land and means of production becomes collectively understood as illegitimate, so they can be dissolved and the operation of those "mills" can then be reorganized as most appropriate.
I see someone in the comments has said 'privatise the profits and socialise the losses'. This is exactly what is happening in England in 2024. The water utilities were privatised by the Thatcher capitalists in the 1980's. Thames water, one of the largest has paid £7 Billion to shareholders, whilst having debt of £18 Billion. 25% of customers bills goes just to service that debt. The utility has savagely polluted the rivers, particularly the Thames, to the extent that this year the Oxford & Cambridge boat race participants were warned against falling into the water or ingesting any of it. Customers are now being told they face a 40% increase in their bills to clean up the pollution and shareholders are walking away. The taxpayer is likely to have to pay off the £18 billion debt.
In France, something was tried under Charles De Gaulle's presidency : it was called participation. Unhappy with both Capitalism and Communism, he thought of such a system where everyone could get involved in society and get a share out of it. Unfortunately it was abandoned by his successors for political reasons...
No matter how sensible and viable the philosophy and alternatives suggested by Noam Chomsky be, the Corpocracy would never let it happen. That's why 'anything' that can challenge the existing status quo has been outlawed or painted black for instance "anarchy" et al. Sorry, if I sound pessimistic but there's no better way to put it across and no amount of sugarcoating will help either. With the advent of surveillance capitalism in a corpocratic set-up, they've got us by the balls as George Carlin said.
But you literally can start (or join) a cooperative as Noam discusses in the video as many other people have done! If you do a good job it will succeed, if you don't it will fail. A good example of a very successful cooperative is John Lewis in the UK but they exist here in the US as well.
Riiiiiiight! Name these companies! I will bet you that the major shareholders make ALL of the important decisions other than how much toilet paper to put in the bathrooms or what snacks are in the vending machines in the lunch room.
In startups you get stock options meaning that you sort of own the company that you are working for, but thats only for the top 1 or 2% of skilled workers...
Those that work in the factories should own it? This is a worker cooperative. It can be done in virtually any type of business. Its basically giant partnership among all.
thats why public and private education is so expensive. They don't want the masses to be empowered and educated because knowledge is power. the irony is that some computer video game makers and programmers make more money than any person working in an office or factory or even a bank.
By building worker power thru coops + unionization we'll have taken a smart leap forward in democratizing society. We'll need strategies to overcome govt structures that keep inequalities in place + we need momentum: communication reaching ever wider constituencies - while defeating the extremely powerful Dark Money-ed interests who oppose us ✊
Modern Unions are corrupt!! They protect the lazy !! They treat productive workers and useless workers equally …. There is no reward for doing a good job or punishment for doing a poor job .
People who think this way assume that all companies succeed when the vast majority do not. Does labor want to be exposed to this risk of failure? Or do they want their wage? You can't have both.
Well I can't believe the way the people are commenting. When I was 12 years old I started a lawn mowing business, when I was 15 years old I lied and got a job at a carwash. I work 45 years I never once considered myself anything but self-employed. I don't work for a company I work for myself I work for my family. I trade what I have to trade my efforts, the only crime committed here is the government taxing us for our efforts
Alberturkey54 He's an anarchist, or to use the term I think he prefers, a libertarian socialist. He doesn't believe in the state so therefore I'm sure he has no desire to run one.
You can if you maintain allegiance to the principles that define each system. Taxation destroys the integrity of the capitalist system and communism destroys itself.
@@JoeKoOhNo Without taxation, how would there be any maintenance or funding for schools, the military, roads, police departments, parks, etc? How would a society like that even function?
he mentions a few concepts that 'm unfamiliar with... where can I learn more about state capitalism, self-managed enterprises, and the short-lived era of free press among the working class in America during the industrial revolution?
Graceanne Warburton Chomsky has written several interesting books on these issues. They're all good, but the two that I own are On Anarchism and How the World Works.
I was a wage slave for 36 years . Through saving and not getting into dept I am now a freeman. I do not have to rent myself out to anyone. My life is now my own and I feel content. Many of my friends could do the same but for some reason they go on working.
if you do it just for yourself its just escapism. And thats legitimate, dont get me wrong, but if you want to do something for change, help others to self-organize in solidarity
No system is 100% ONE system. A country’s system is a mix of systems. The “system” that works best is the one that produces the most amount of stuff, and gives its people the most amount of freedom. Nothing’s perfect.
if we truly had a capitalist system, there's be about a 6 month period of frantic "capitalism" followed by the brief twitching one mortally wounded person left at the end of "business". then the critters would feast..., well, the ones left, anyway.
I have my own business making jewelry, built it from scratch, put everything on the line to invest in the equipment. I now employ two people. If you're going to tell me they own an equal share, I'm going to tell you to got to hell.
Workers owning the mills? Interesting idea. What if that idea was taken a bit further? What if the people doing work and giving value to currency were the same people doing the issuing of currency? This could begin by simply issuing your own gift certificates.
He wasn't downplaying anything. Firstly he was referencing a quote, and secondly he mentioned that the difference to him is the lens in time. Wage labour or wage slavery is basically the worst type of human exploitation you can get away with in modern times, just like slavery was back then
I'm confused. So let's say a group of 4 engineers decide to make a product that benefits the lives of many people and they succeed in making the prototype. They then start a company around this invention. At this moment, the "workers" technically own the company. They do a little research and sell a few devices. They now realize that there is a MASSIVE demand for their product. But they are only 4 people (4 people out a population of millions). This group of engineers now want to expand their company. The only feasible way to do this would be to hire employee's. Are you saying that that when they hire a receptionist (lets say that's the first person they hire, so the company now has 5 people in it) should own 20% of the company and shares dilute more the more people join? If this group expands large enough they could potentially hire hundreds, even thousands of people. This people may or may not have had jobs in the past. But that has definitely increased the amount of people getting money each month who can now at least afford food. Listen guys, I am actually super open-minded so please reply to me if I misunderstood or there's something I'm not thinking about. Thanks
Eric Gericke there are different ways a cooperative can function. Typically the business model is created through by-laws that govern the cooperative, rules that everyone agrees to. Look up Cooperative By-laws to get a glimpse. So a cooperative of 4 people, can increase workers through shares that can not be sold and decreases in percentage the more people are hired. The original patent copyright product they can continue to gain royalties from even as more people are entered into the cooperative as separate product. The cooperative can then hire a CEO or a central manager by voting in candidates whose pay is voted by the cooperative. Or they don't have a CEO they could chose several different independent contractor advisors that provide the same functions as the CEO and the information is channeled through the board by vote.
@@matthewkopp2391 Thanks! I'll look it up. I know there are many ways of going about it. But I'm still confused as to how a massive group of workers could own a company. I mean aside from the fact that most minimum wage workers don't know how to run a business. Maybe i'm wrong about that but that's how it looks to me. Thanks for the genuine reply
Eric Gericke I really only know and have seen how cooperatives work on small scales. So I don't know what it would be like for bigger organizations and the bylaws they would create. I asked this same question at the time of the Obama auto industry bailout. If workers and politicians were prepared the bankrupt auto industry could have been bailed out in favor of the workers by providing them a loan to buy the industry at recession prices. But the government gave free money to the bankrupt owner shareholders. The issue is that their is no alternative policy that would aid the workers to purchase a large industry like this and turn it into a cooperative. There really is no real large left wing politics to make things like this happen. Even with Bernie Sanders it is vague idea he heard about but no ideas or plans in this direction. Sanders, Warren, Yang, Cortez policies are really social welfare state capitalist policies. This model originated not from socialism but from Bismarck Germany, specifically to prevent socialism. It is really ironic in the USA. A politician suggesting that workers have the right of first refusal to buy an industry through a government loan would be a radical idea in the USA. It also would have saved multiple industries we gave away to China for pennies on the dollar.
@@matthewkopp2391 interesting. I'm from South Africa so don't know that much about American politics. Although I probably do know more than the average US citizen haha. Anyway, thanks for the information. Corruption everywhere I guess
@@FollowerofDuck "If you find employment conditions unfavourable, there's nothing preventing you from seeking alternative avenues" . . . Right . . . social revolution. Renting oneself to one or another private owner is not freedom. It just isn't. Which is not to say that every owner is a jerk. Many of them are fine people. But the arrangement is bad, even for them.
I think in general it's extremely hard to talk about economic systems on the basis of human function, because there is absolutely no system that can have both a functioning economy, and an equality between all workers, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's often vastly overestimated how much "Capitalism" has to play in our own concept of inequality, because realistically speaking, what happens in the economic system is not the driving force, but a side effect of a major worldwide change from Modernization to globalization. This concept isn't new, but I think it's really not well understood, especially considering how problematic it is for a lot of us. When you consider capitalism, or at this how it was at the Height of its functionality, look at 1950s America. You have a massive amount of diverse industry competing quality of products, availability, and overall good business practices. Then something changed, and something that is not talked about enough. The world opened up. You had not just major American companies doing business, but now you had tons of opportunities world wide, which would continue to expand even to today. And what happens then? Functioning Capitalism requires some basic regulations, mostly to prevent major monopolies because Monopolies are actually extremely disadvantageous to a free market, who would have guessed. But what happened was, a large amount of already extremely wealthy and successful corporations realized that they could play the best of both worlds, and continue the majority of their business practices while also taking advantage of globalized resource and worker availability. This caused 2 issues. The first one, was the companies themselves entered this problematic economic "grey" area, where technically their business practices adhered to their national regulations, and past that, they could do whatever they wanted else ware, and the US was quite aware of this, but for most of these companies, which propped up a major sector of the US economy, it was within their best interest to turn a blind eye to morally ambiguous and technically corrupt business practices. The second problem was a long term issue involving corporatism and the job market. What has been shown throughout history and through economic growth, is a pretty consistent tier system for how much economic growth a country can endure, and when countries grow massively, and raise the quality of living, their population begins to drop, and they lose workers for this growth. It's basically long term demographic stagnation, and we've been seeing it for a while now. During the Migrant crisis in Europe recently, a massive amount of immigrants were taking in by the German Republic, and the actual reasoning behind it is quite clear. Germany has been seeing a population decline for a few generations, and this was a solution, albeit temporary, too a major future issue, labor shortage. It's happening everywhere. Japan currently has the most rapid effects of it, and will likely be the first place to look towards to understand its impact, but the United States, a large portion of Europe, China, Russia, and a few other countries are also experiencing this. The strangest part about this is, it was sort of the opposite of what was predicted. In actual hard scientific predictions and demographics, it was projected that humanity would never exceed a population of 10 billion unless there was an incredibly massive change on a global scale, both socially and physically, and its likely to be true. The likelihood that we will exceed 7 billion people isn't as high as you might think, and thats a major issue. So back to corporations and globalism, the problem isn't that they can hire worldwide, but rather they are completely cherry-picking in grey zones that really dont give a net benefit to anyone. The workers are likely to be completely underpaid and live in inhumane conditions, the company isn't investing nearly anything back into the market for this purchase, and the product isn't making a significant impact economy wise, so what we're doing is we're bleeding less developed countries and people dry for labor, while our own countries are struggling with a huge labor shortage. Eventually we're going to stop seeing an excess of easy to use cheap labor, and if our economic system is still built upon outsourcing low menial labor, the ramifications of that will be deadly.
there is no balance to be made between freedom and responsibility...the former immediately entails the other. Freedom comes hand in hand with responsibility. Capitalism offers maximum freedom. Freedom to own, produce and exchange without a central authority intervening in the transaction. In the current social climate of blame (the antithesis of responsibility) Capitalism is disdained because its places responsibility in the individual.
@@maambomumba6123not sure, capitalism always needed state to affirm itself, from the english Parliament legislating to deduct common land to big private owners (wich ignited the Industrial Revolution), to taxpayers' money funding XSpace and Tesla's Carbon Credits. It's a system entwined with the monopoly of public violence to avoid responsabilities and grant freedom (or better, licence) to a élite by corruption of officers.
Can someone tell me where I can find an example of ending wage slavery being part of the republican platform? An old newspaper clipping, photo, or something
How does a free market system contradict workers to own some industries themselves? What stops people who want it that way to pursuit the collective ownership while those who are in favor of private entrepreneurship to pursue their goals in that way? I'm not sure why both are not possible - or even desirable - in a free market scenario. Why would it be?
Free market is not a synonym of capitalism. He is giving an example of an economic system not based in capital that is free market as you already pointed
Impressive insights. Bright thoughts indeed. America has no free markets, it has a state regulated market. It has ensured certain prosperity, it needs to make progress to avoid the all looming anarchist mood. Every society produces some surplus, some too big a surplus owing to industrial processes. The ethical use of surplus will ensure long term stability, a misused surplus is sure to cause devaluation of human worth, as long we protect the human fabric, non negotiable tenets, we can have different methods to employ the surplus as different from others. Be as creative as possible.
Mr. Chomsky, we do have capitalism that is run by the one percent who the state is on its side. Your dismissal of Karl Marx genius is mind-boggling considering your genuine desire to be on the side of the oppressed.
@@johnwood8441 Hi John, Marx scientifically analysed capitalism as a system of exploitation in addition to being a revolutionary philosopher. Most read after Bible. Yet if you dig through Chomsky’s literature of books or interviews you do not see adequate regard for this genius of a human being.
@@zacoolm oh ok, cuz in the video it didn't sound as if he was against Marx, and I haven't read much of Chomsky's work. I, personally, am a fan of Engels and Marx, as well as their contemporaries
@@johnwood8441 watch some if his videos when he talks about Marx. Watch Michael Parenti talk about Chomsky. Chomsky’s solution does not go beyond taking personal responsibility as the antidote to capitalism’s crime against humanity dispensing machine. His continual denigration of communism is fully inline with our ruling class. Chomsky for me was only an eye opener but was able to move beyond him.
@@zacoolm first of all, the number of people reading something doesnt equal its quality. second, maybe he doesnt praise him because he thinks his ideas also have some flaws.
Chomsky's Philosophy and would not be able to compete in the real world because business decisions made by committee are often crap. Apple is a great example of that.
+ndyt not sure if I'm following correctly. Apple is run by a committee as a publicly traded company with a board of investors (who's only incentive is ROI) and Apple gets much of its technology and workers from the public sector (MIT, Stanford, etc) off the public tax dollar. GPS, Internet among lots of others advances are based off high risk, low return investment over large periods of time.
Chomsky is not actually talking about a preferential overarching systemic alternative. He makes suggestions as to how the Private monopolies can be disassembled, and replaced with a multitude of niche economic and social models, none of which when taken together or individually lead to stability or order of any kind. For a nation to survive, there needs to be internal congruence. 'Private' need not mean bad. Many workers move from being participants to owners in the system also. And in any collective, be it a family, a school, a business, some are always 'more equal than others'. Nor is there anyone stopping workers / Unions from publishing their own press. We have access to endless social media channels also to challenge the ' unfree media' . C - Mr Chomsky. Could do better.
The whole institute of Law is based on the idea of moral and human rights. Who maintains the rule of law in a, whatchamacallit? democracy from below? Who prevents one enterprise from encroaching onto the rights of other people?
Nothing stopping anyone from making a socialist company. Everyone gets capital, pulls it together and starts a company together. Everyone gets a say and everyone gets money if it's successful. The reason why it's not a popular system is because people are either risk takers or risk averse. If you take risks then you'd make your own company and reap all the rewards if you succeed but lose everything if you fail. As a "wage slave" you have no risk. No matter how well or poor the company does you still get paid. If you work at one for 10 years and make $500k over that period and the company tanks you still have that $500k. Not many people want to invest a large portion of their money in a company that might be comprised of morons who get a say in how the company functions, just to lose their investment.
I mean you are certainly right that some people don’t want to take risks. Does this really justify paying a lot of people way below the value they actually created? Does this justify a minimum wage that is so low that you basically have to either have multiple jobs or starve? Also why do I have to start a new company if there is already one me and my fellow workers work at? Where we produce all the value. Where we work for long days without a fair wage. Where we are robbed of part of the value because some “risk taker” invested some of his fortune. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?
@@VivaLaAntifa3 It is perfectly fair. The only reason your labor has any value at all is because of the company. The reason you have business (work) and tools to complete that work is because of the company which exists because people took a risk with their assets. If I buy land, machinery and seeds and hire someone to farm for me why should they get the lion's share of the money? What did I invest in land, equipment and materials for? If I'm not getting rewarded for my risk I won't make the investment to begin with and the poor farmer will have no work to do at all. As far as wages go, when has anyone ever offered to pay more for anything? When you go to the grocery store do you argue with cashier to pay more for the goods you want? Of course not, you try to get them as cheaply as possible within the level of quality you require. So why should a business owner have to pay more for an employee when someone who is good enough is willing to do it for less?
@@makokx7063 I see what you are getting at. And I can partially agree. No owner of a company has any rational incentive to pay their workers more than the bare minimum. That is why there is a reserve army of labour, the group of people who are without a job and willing to do your job for less. This is an artificially created problem. There are enough jobs and there is enough work to be done so that everybody could work. However that would drive wages up because employees would not have to fear being replaced by another worker because… well everybody already has a job. Also is it really fair that you or some investor inherits a big fat stack of cash and can use that to make even more money by investing it and have other people work for you/them? I mean a certain profit motive is of course needed in a capitalist society so there has to be some monetary incentive to investing in the long run. But does this make a fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars reasonable? I mean sure billionaires at least in part worked for their success. But are they really a million times more important than their workers? Do they really carry that big of a risk especially if they diversified their portfolio? Do the common workers not suffer harder if their company closes and they lose the job they needed to feed their families than the owner who already made millions?
@@VivaLaAntifa3 I also think that level of wealth is absurd and certainly detrimental to the well-being of a state. As far as, is any individual really worth a million time more than another human being? From an economic standpoint, sure. I think we'd agree that the value the person who finally cures cancer provides for the world v.s. the value that a cashier provides for the world is millions of times different. One will save countless lives, the other can be replaced by a machine at this point. So I think people being billionaires is justified but not great for a society. However I think that it's a problem of corruption more than capitalism. The government is supposed to prevent the darker sides of capitalism from running amok but the institutions that are supposed to be doing that work for the rich and do the opposite, make laws that make it easier for the rich to get richer. I don't think that's a capitalism v.s. socialism problem. If every human being was good and decent we wouldn't even need gov't or economic theories.
@@makokx7063 I certainly agree that the inventor of a cure to cancer is worth more than a cashier. They probably create a lot of value in an economic sense. But do they really have to be a billionaire after their invention? Billionaires are certainly not good for society, I agree with you there but I don’t think there is any justification for someone to be a billionaire especially while there are people starving or without basic necessities. The problem I have with blaming corruption instead of capitalism for these problems is that the corruption is only a logical development of capitalism. The main goal under capitalism is to make as much money as possible. For the capitalist class (that has other people work for them) this means trying to squeeze as much surplus value out of the production process as possible. Laws about minimum wage and working conditions should of course prevent some of the damage dealt by those practices. But if it is more profitable to bribe a politician or campaign for office than to better the working conditions it is only logical to do the first one. If profit is the only motive that counts all decisions are only based on those economic factors. This is inherent to all capitalist societies. Corruption is a logical development of capitalism. So yes current institutions are corrupt but this is not because of a different movement or human nature but instead because of capitalism
There are not many workable alternatives to the current form of governance. It's likely that the current form is not workable either. People (instincts), their behaviour, their numbers, their resources and external influences and events continuously change. This by definition suggests that what works today might not work tomorrow and what didn't work yesterday might work today. We only cooperate if it suits us, otherwise all bets are off.
Companies owned by the workers still must compete in the market, so it is still a capitalistic system. If those workers refuse to accept, or are not allowed to accept investment from outside sources, then that capital will go elsewhere. If it is Federal legislation, then all of the remaining capital investment leaves this country and goes overseas. Foreign labor with US (and worldwide) investment then becomes the competitor to the "company owned" businesses. The US companies would have limited both their intellectual and financial resources to a closed set in a global competitive environment. That sounds like a vanishing act to me. No, it is not a law of nature that we have to import our green technologies from China. But, perhaps it is because that sector in the US is still dominated by the left-leaning self-limiting concepts he proscribes. China has made large capital investments in production facilities. We lag even when supported by short-lived crony capitalism (e.g. Solyndra). So it is economically driven that we buy oversees precisely because of what he offers as a solution. This is not to say that, at some point, one of these self-limited companies is not started by, or does not employ a genius with an idea that eclipses existing paradigms, a product twice as efficient at half the costs. If that idea is limited by the capital investment of the workers of the company, then it can never meet the demand to address the social need. The inventor is therefore offered far more than the company can match, and the intellectual property goes off to China as well. And thus such restrictions keep the self owned companies sub-optimized and severely limited, dropping like singers in a six grade choir in June. Sounds like the kind of thinking that made Detroit what it became before we unadvisedly bailed it out.
You might be right. Noam doesn't seem to have taken into consideration either the uneven terrains of the globalized world, or the innate human need for self-actualization through innovation.
@@aerobique 'No' to what though? are you saying that my refutation is wrong, or are you saying that Noam hasn't taken these factors into consideration?
Agnel Vishal do you think the elites and globalist don't have any power over cyber currency? It was their plan all along, they sold this illusion to people but in reality they have it all under control.
DAOs built on ethereum and eventually Bitcoin will be the purist form of capitalism and liberalism. Chomsky doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to capitalism. Bitcoin is inherently 100% anarcho capitalistic, 100% free market, 100% classical liberal, this is a good thing by the way, it's all about combatting collectivism, since all collectivism does is it rots an entire civilization into absolute despair.
It is historically interesting that during the transition to greater capitalism and loss of autonomy that wages were equated with a form of slavery. But let us not pretend that it is equivalent to ACTUAL SLAVERY; an individual still has some autonomy. Still some states like mine cloak the ability to be fired without reason as "Right to Work" as if it is somehow something protecting the worker. And when I say fire without reason, basically it is a license to discriminate or fire for revenge against someone.
" Still some states like mine cloak the ability to be fired without reason as "Right to Work"" I love Right To Work states. Blue states have little or no liberty; businesses become mere agents of the State. True it is it may be harder to get fired in a blue state, but it can also be harder to be hired since the employer knows it is nearly impossible to fire someone.
@Retrosenescent I see. So right to work is ONLY just about unions. I wondered why people talked about it so much as if unions are a thing anymore anyways. I always took it to mean a two-way right to either not work for someone or someone not employ another without cause.
Perhaps in an alternative system in which things are more democratic, the system could be made more efficient by reinvesting economic gains that would have by siphoned off by greedy billionaires. more of the money stays in the business and grows the business faster. not to mention the fact that all the stakeholders would have a higher quality of life
If every day you wake up early to begrudgingly go to work and hate your job, you're told you're just lazy and childish, and that's just how life is and you need to get used to it.
But people know deep down that it's not natural, it's not the default, and that it is nefarious. People may not admit it on the surface, but deep down they realize that they're being exploited for someone else's gain and that nearly half their waking life (or more) is going to be wasted making money for some faceless corporate entity and they'll be able to finally break free from those chains when they're elderly and life is nearing its end.
Part of the propaganda system is making sure enough people suffer those situations that they grow to hate anybody who questions them.
a statment of repreative propaganda repetatively spewed as a direct result of toddler fragility of a child child lik fragility
Well that is why there are supposed to be unions and such to ensure work is tolerable and people want work life balance enjoy time off to rest enjoy home life but for women for instance many would maybe be happy stay at home housewives as their job if they are abused and unappreciated though they have no pleasant work or life experiences at home and there is now union etc. for the "birthing people" nannies cooks maids and other job responsibilities of a "homemaker" so the men don't have that to come home to either.
Sure. Being forced to provide value in exchange for food, shelter, and every luxury known to man is akin to chattel slavery. How does anyone continue to listen to such nonsense? Let's see Lincoln's quote in context.
@@juanito714ok VALUE,? what value. not a turm that within this conxt registers within this context or that is a part that comes into th equasion in this scenario , oh you mean the "rIcH " ppl as ill humor your insophisticaton and incmpnce getting hand outs for stealing the geniuses behind and actual value creators creating geniues who they stol this inphostructure from violence and inserted this means
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
@@prithvib8662 I too can respond to aphorisms with snark.
You forgot the full cycle: privatize the profits, socialize the losses; tax the profits, protect the middle class.
@@Luberama that would require truth to be present in the quip
@@prithvib8662 tell that to the banks and many other bail out industries
@@defos8692c bailing out banks that everyone uses benefits everyone who has an account there lmao, the FDIC is a good thing.
We have never enjoyed the full power of democracy nor have we shared the true value of freedom.
Free people are harder to control, they wouldn't want that.
@@CreamBootlegs that was a very strange conclusion....you must be in a very sick enviroment. Here in sweden we want responsibility
That's not true. We are all free to make our choices. My choice is to be an ordinary working person, who would want the hassle of running a big corporation? Who would want to be isolated from the rest of their community by having a lot of money and being seen as different? - none of that makes for a good life. The idea that we're downtrodden, exploited and in chains is just absolute bollocks, pushed by pseudo-intellectuals for their own reasons. The fact is many of us just chose a simple, ordinary life, not because we're exploited, or stupid, but because it's *what we want*.
That's true. We are all free to choose one nation under god.
@@user-vp1vl6yp9t god.....i hope we forget god and religion and live wirhout Beeing poisined
A cultured and educated population whose citizens are interested and engaged in the political systems is required for this type of society.
For that, you'll have to get rid of private-car dominance, TV-centric culture, privatized food-growing. To accomplish this, however, you only need to add FLV to the cost of public goods transferred into the economy.
That is sparked by the individual, my friend. It’s sparked by me and by you, when we reach out to our immediate community. Because really it starts with community.
But they love beer and NASCAR more. And guns.
The nineteenth century working class that he talks about were demanding to be educated and culturally respectable, especially the trade unionists. They wanted a fair share in the profits, legal rights for their unions, political rights and power. His point is that we came close once, after centuries of degradation, and indeed made some real gains (compulsory bargaining, better wages and benefits, shorter hours). Why can’t it happen again?
As we engage in a struggle for a better society and our social relations of production change so will our mindset and behavior
I have tried to watch this 11 times and I can't. Chomsky's voice is so soothing, I can't focus!
Share same encumbrance with you 👩lady.
Share same encumbrance with you lady.
That's funny, I actually select one of his talks to listen to at bedtime and off a go zzzzzzz
It's part of the act.
1.5 speed lol
As a business owner and a fan of Chomsky - I've thought about worker owned businesses a lot. First, nothing is stopping anyone in the U.S. from starting a worker-owned business. I wish more people would give it a shot. I think the issue is just "workers" don't want to do this in the U.S. It's waaaaaaay easier to find employment and not deal with the headaches of starting and managing an entire business that may or may not fail. The thought experiment I run is: ok get a group of like-minded people together, ideate a business, either bootstrap funding or get a loan, hope that we have a business that won't fail, hope that it makes enough profit to pay salaries and benefits. It's quite an uphill battle to get something functional up and running. Finally, to some extent this does happen in small partnerships, maybe law firms, small marketing agencies - it's just not labeled as "worker-owned".
There actually are employee owned businesses and other forms of businesses that don’t revolve around one major key individual.
Also unions do exist as well amongst other forms of business to entrepreneurialism.
It’s literally a melting pot of ideas out there that many haven’t cracked or put upon themselves
I understand your 'headaches' yet there are 1000's of business run in this way. They are not in the news. There has been a network of consultants in Europe and beyond looking at new organisational forms. See Reinventing Organisations by Fredric Laloux, Freedom Inc by Isaac Getz. Universities hardly teach it.
I completely agree with you. There are several implications of employee-owned business that Noam overlooks. What if employees want to change jobs? Will they have to sell their ownership? What if they do not want to assume business risks? Will they put in equity? Probably Noam is refering to a profit participation programme or options scheme for employees that is more widespread, and not just for top executirves.
@@andreperusso Noam is speaking from an armchair perspective on what he experienced as an injustice and probably targets just those areas without focusing on solutions.
People like him, no matter how intelligent, educated, or scholarly, gain influence through negative perception.
Everyone is upset about something in life but focus a hate towards a cause. People would become very nonsensical in believing that’s all reality is for them that they would create a cult like following upon what they believe is a problem.
It is a political tactic that has been used for millennia and further than that. It’s a great way to create a “cause” to fight for
The problem is that big businesses have made it incredibly difficult for the smaller guy to get started. That is part of what Noam is getting at here. In a true capitalist society government would be set up to help the smaller guy, whereas what we have now, government is set up to favor the large corporations.
Prof. Richard Wolff and other socialists agree with Chomsky about worker self directed enterprises replacing actually existing capitalism.
So what is your definition of a free market? A market that is biased against WSDE'S is not a free market economy, a market that allows choice is. That is what Chomsky and Wolff are saying.
zalamander8 Couldn't there be some aspects that are capitalistic? I'm for workers cooperatives, but I agree there has to be a market of choice. That's what capitalism was originally based on.
Are you saying that academics, desktop thinkers and armchair problem-solvers agree with Chomsky? Nahhh.
MaghoxFr: I think anyone who has ever worked somewhere with an incompetent manager and ignorant corporate management and has thought to themselves "we could this ourselves" will have came to the same conclusion as Wolff and Chomsky and others on workers self management
KentAllard Perfect! Then set up your own cooperative business, involving your own risk. That's the beauty of a capitalist regime: ypu can run your business in a socialist fashion. Why do you have to forcefully take over private property?
When work is a duty, life is slavery.
-Maxim Gorky
When you think about it, that is a very intuitive and biased way to look at it.
Life is always slavery with freedom being death.
When you remove the personal sensationalism or culturally instilled ideas, it makes perfect sense...
It's kinda just immature... Like
Fair weather friends...
When things are good, you don't care about the consequences, but when things go bad, suddenly life sucks...
It's just a childish, short sighted way to fabricate existence, don't you think?
@@Vscustomprinting Its just a quote. But i dont agree that life is always slavery. Some people do enjoy their work, unfortunately this group only represents about 20% of the work force.
You either work for yourself, rely on charity or coerce someone else to work for you. I would say the only people who owe you anything are your parents because they brought you into this world.
@@craigschiele4976 I agree. I´m lucky enough to have parents that would take care of me if i needed but unfortunately a lot of parents don´t.
@@PedroTRamos1 you need to get it on your own, man. To get my vote, anyway.
underlying flaw in capitalism....infinite growth system (it demands it - profit motivated) in a finite resource reality. Whether resources are cheaper labor (whose going to buy your product or service when labor costs is an inevitable race to the bottom) or material resources that are the opposite of infinite.
How does being profit driven imply that infinite resources are required?
How is labor cost a race to the bottom?
"How is labor cost a race to the bottom?"
In a competitive free market, the unemployed will be trying to outcompete each other for jobs by offering to work for less than their competition. This wage competition could drive wages (i.e. labour costs), as a whole, down.
And even in today's government-regulated markets, more 3rd world nations are relaxing their labour laws and minimum wages in an attempt to attract MNCs to their country (that's why most stuff is made in Asian countries where labour is cheap and minimum wages are almost non-existent).
And finally, the more open your country is to immigration (which is somewhat the case in this increasingly globalised world), the more wages in your country will go down, as the new supply of labour will drive down the cost of labour (basic supply and demand).
You're saying it's a race to the price equilibrium. That's only a race to the bottom if the job isn't worth anything.
Globalization can drive labor costs either way. It both increases the number of people available for a job and expands the market. That means the demand will also go up and the number of necessary laborers increases.
Jeremiah Wilson dude ur so fucking dumb that is literally the most anti intellectual thing I have ever fucking heard. All economic systems strive for growth you fucktard. Capitalism deals with finite resources by allocating them through trade. Other systems do it through government intervention. You're making a fucking simple description of capitalism that is so wrong. Again, ALL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS STRIVE FOR GROWTH!!! WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO JUST STOP TRYING TO GROW OUR STANDARD OF LIVING???? LMAOOO. All resources are finite and the difference between capitalism and communism is that capitalism can actually deal with finite resources and ur beloved communism praised by ur pseudo intellectual buddy noam can not deal with it.
You think your humanity is at stake...and you want socialism. Good luck with keeping your humanity there.
"Capitalism is a self cannibalizing social order." - Mr. Atwater
atwaterpub yes it is, alone at least. Infinite growth is what destroys capitalism. It destroys itself.
Therefore, capitalism is essentially unstable form of social organization and ALWAYS leads ultimately to its own destruction and never to the perpetual stability of a smoothly functioning social order.
@Bruno56 There are almost no corporations in existence today that were in existence 120 years ago. Most business that were in existence in 1900 are not in business today; they have been bought up and incorporated into larger corporations. The corporations
"cannibalized" these other businesses.
Bruno56 You seem to make that observation in a casual statement of honesty, without realizing the lives and dreams that were destroyed in the process, which is my original point entirely. The social economic order of Capitalism buys, mines. grows, and manufactures everything it can as fast as possible and destroys everything it encounters in the process (by converting it into salable product, or profit). Nothing is spared this cannibalizing destruction.
Bruno66 the results of our labor are being stolen from us by the one percent that control the government and the courts. There is as much "disparity of wealth" and "concentration of wealth" in the USA as there was in France before the French Revolution. The system is unstable and the entire "house of cards" will fall. Just wait and see...
Interesting that manufacturing in Germany of all places, the richest country in Europe also providing the longest vacations, actually has such systems already in place, where both workers and management have an equal say in policy... instead of always being an 'adversarial' relationship, as it is in the supposed "Free Market" in the U.S.
Is important to understand why you would ask someone who isn’t qualified, what should we do next?
@@KKolbet You think workers aren't qualified ? What ?
@@MTLGSE its called unions. They keep bosses honest. Union aer great in capitalism.
@@KKolbet Workers are qualified. They are the one working in the Factory. So they best know how to max the efficiency and work moral etc.
Interesting that Germany is and has been an overwhelmingly ethnically Northern European, extremely homogenous country for most of it's history, with rule of law as strict as you could possibly imagine, with selection pressures so eugenic that it produced some of the highest IQs and greatest levels of achievement ever seen on the planet. Funny because Noam Chomsky would have never said that could happen if he looked at their history in the abstract.
So perhaps Noam Chomsky shouldn't be taken that seriously.
"The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence."
Those who would purchase security at the cost of freedom deserve neither. (A paraphrase of Ben Franklin.)
Who said that? Marx?
@Ogutu-TishOg M Ahahahah! That's an argumentum ad hominem, a fallacy. The above statement is not mine, if you searched you would know, but you aren't the kind of people who likes to search... Here's another one for you:
"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes."
Aldous Huxley
@Ogutu-TishOg M
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
czcams.com/video/e9dZQelULDk/video.html
@Ogutu-TishOg M "Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beliving what they're told. And privilege and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on."
Noam Chomsky
Authority!? That's hilarious. You are the one whom in a paternalistic way tries to impose your opinion doing diagnoses... Return to the" rat race", it seems you are enjoying it... The video from Steve Cutts is clear, if you need to diggest, the problem is your ability to digest your own prejudices... Now I will listen to Bob:
czcams.com/video/7SKJDv_pgs0/video.html
Ahahahah!
What he says right here people need to understand this: "First of all we should bear in mind that we don’t have a capitalist system. No capitalist system has ever survived; they would self-destruct in 5 minutes. So what we have is a kind of State Capitalist system, with the state playing a substantial role in American history, a very substantial role in production, research, and development, um, lots of other types like bailouts, lots of other devices to keep the private sector viable." The problem is we have to move back to giving people control of the workplace and give them their rights back. What he says about "wage labor" being slavery is true. Again, he makes the point that wage labor is nothing more than renting yourself out. But then you as a worker have given up control of your rights as a worker and have given up any say or control of the management of production and you lose ownership of production. I know this is very very hard for Americans and most of the Westerners to understand but as he points out this was something America did and it was successful up until wealthy elites began pushing propaganda to make people think this was a bad thing. Then you have the propaganda that somehow if you aren't educated you don't deserve better wages. This is hogwash, but the American public has been brainwashed to believe this. If you work any job you should be paid not according to your education level but according to your work load and production. If you work hard labor you shouldn't be paid less you should actually be paid more.
I take issue with the state-capitalist label, and his rhetoric regarding what we currently have. There are many definitions of capitalism with overlap between them (state, state monopoly, popular, crony, turbo, etc).
By itself "capitalism" usually means private ownership of means of production, distribution, wealth exchange, etc maintained primarily by individuals or corporations. I think that term does safely apply to large segments of the US economy.
No doubt government funds and regulates significant sectors and in doing so has a heavy hand we might call 'management' of private companies. But it's not like PRC's tendency to central management, is it? And we see also a degree of crony capitalism in which industry forms the government, but that's a different causal model we might mistake for state capitalism if we aren't careful.
"State capitalism" as I understand it involves government ownership of shares, central management, etc. There might be sectors where that's the case, or close to it. Like military industry. But I think his application is too definitive and broad.
I think he might be being a bit dramatic.
Have a look at www.cluborlov.com - most recent post, for more on this line of thought.
Sorry, help me understand: what alternative did he offer to wage labor? And who will build the production means; those who will inevitably own and run them? And what if someone wants to build a private company; will that be forbidden? Thanks anyone, for any answers.
His alternative was worker owned and managed
Von Huxley he's talking about anarchism
Thank you, Noam, for all you do, for all you've enlightened and clarified, for all you've taught me and for the humanity you exemplify.
HUmanity? Nothing humane about sex slaves on pedo island.
Bloviating about nonsense, devoid of reality, is enlightening to you? When are you giving out the kool-aid Mr. Jones?
@@ralphalf5897What is nonsense about what he said in this video?
@@localman9063 When he said that there was no economic or political theory that disagreed with what he was saying
The Austrian School of Economics, for one, is most vehemently against him
All serious schools of economic thought can explain perfectly well why it makes no sense for labourers to own the places they work in
To deny the value of the capitalist is to admit you know nothing about economics
@@localman9063 Equating willingly entered into wage labor with slavery is objectively nonsensical.
Title: The Alternative to Capitalism
Video: Not telling the alternative to capitalism
I think he said it very clearly….
@@jadennesbitt2859 If u know it already say it in one word not a sentence to say it was clear...
The guy is a toxic socialist clown ❤
It is truly a bizarre proposition that a group of people should work the better parts of their lives in order to advance the size and profitability of some enterprise, for wages that are less than the value of their work, and if the owner is shrewd enough perhaps much less, so that when the enterprise is sold or shut down one person, or perhaps a select few, walk away with riches, while those same workers are left to struggle into their old age with a pittance.
Even at it's best (whatever that is) such a system is rooted in rapacity, exploitation, and the commoditization of both nature and of other human beings, typically carried out under the supposed sanction of some imagined god.
The system is downright undemocratic. It is evil at its core.
Why would you work for less than the value of your labour?
@@programmer1840 maybe because you need to earn for a living? And there’s a bunch of others the same as you ready to hop on the spot
@@programmer1840 If you work for a company, your work allows the company to make a certain amount of money. Some of that money comes back to you as your pay and benefits, some is necessarily spent on things that make your work possible like raw materials and rent, and the rest goes to the owners to do with as they please. The latter portion is called surplus value.
Any employee paid well enough (or not doing enough profitable work) to produce surplus value is costing the owners money and will be eliminated if the owners notice, so most people must work for less than the value of their labor.
@@programmer1840 in every profitable business, the employees are by definition earning less than their labor is worth. Otherwise, the owner at the top of the business, would have no profits with which to pay himself a salary.
Frankly no one should work, except for very brief periods of extreme necessity, for any less than the market value of his labor. Also no employer should ever pay more than the value expected from labor.
Chomsky skips right over the value that capital and managerial skill contributes to any concern. If the workers own the factory no one will be tasked with providing the tools from machinery to marketing plans to research/development. Just as scientists are not very qualified to operate presses or lathes machinists are not trained nor have the temperament to creating a budget that moves a strategic plan forward.
Working is not voluntary because if you don't work you will not eat and live life to a good standard
Exactly right, in a capitalist system work is not voluntary its mandatory because to exist in a system based on capital one must earn capital.
You would have to re-define a "good standard". What's a good standard? A standard to what? To the system that was designed for us and we live in now (getting a nice car, house, money, expensive hotel visits) ?
If you want that good standard, you'll have to play by the rules. Sell your time with the aim to get money in return.
Nothing stops you from grabbing a bike right now and just drive away. I'm sure you can get here or there some food for helping in return with something else (a big cheeseburger is probably not what you'll get).
yeah... except you can grow your own food if you want to. In fact you can hunt, and harvest whatever you plant, sure you might need a permit if its on public places, but nobody is stopping you from doing it inside your own property.... specially in rural areas. Also, define 'good' standard.
...and what do you have if the job you did no longer exists and there are no resources to learn a new job. How do you live while you try to learn a new trade. It is all part of the criminalization of the electorate. That is another way to gain a majority vote.
Maybe the term ‘work’ has been too narrowly defined. The person (i.e., man or woman) that stays at home to raise children (e.g. the next generation of leaders) works very intensely, yet they may not earn any financial compensation. These people do a critically important job for society as a whole. However, this important contribution does not seem to be recognised as such by our ‘mixed’ economic system. Therefore, many people work but do not earn sufficient money to eat, let alone support a living environment that provides the basic essentials of life.
I always held the belief that slavery never really ended but has merely evolved. Thank you Professor Chomsky. CMN.
Sounds like you've also held nothing of the ability to reason with logic...
@@bruisersdilemma354 Poor people are slaves of the state .
Government can make vacations too expensive so poor cannot leave .
Government will make more vacancies in the Mechanical than CSE in education if goverment needs more mech.
Government controls media to control us.
and Poor are in delusion that it's all bad with them because they are the ones who aren't skilled enough to be rich like Americans. it is called capitalism.
Government can , give homeless homes , unemployed a job but they will only do it if they get more taxes that way !
Evolved? Into PTO, air conditioning and the 35 hour work week with Healthcare benefits? Brilliant take.
Hi Conrad I agree with you, any long-term one-way relationship even unconscious is slavery. Your family and friends could make you a slave it's called conditional love. I'm more worried about that than work.
Man is inherently born a slave. You have to work in order to survive. Hunting and gathering getting, farming, a desk job - they are all forms of work. You are relieved from work and responsibility when you die.
Noam Chomsky gives me hope when I am down about society.
And then you learn he was a regular at Pedophile Island. Cheer up, the digital dollar is just around the corner.
It will take a little more than Chomsky. Biblical-level, radical transition plans.
If you think Noam is great, wait till you learn about Jesus Christ!
@@richardaustin4770ewww Jesus
🤣@@richardaustin4770
Sweet vid. Really dig this sort of stuff.
Would like to see more. Keep it up.
1:43 "Wage labor is basically no different from chattel slavery"
But it is though
Name Again Thats why the word “basically” is in there.
@@joshuajones353 yeah, but the phrase "basically no different" gives further context to the point being made. Which "basically" means the point seems to have a either a pedestrian view of chattel slavery or earning a wage. In any case, the difference is enough for the two to NOT "basically" be the same. Peace.
Name Again nah they are basically the same. If you don’t understand what he’s saying then that’s a you problem. Nothing more, nothing less. Wage slavery exists. It’s a concept that’s been talked about for a longtime.
Incredibly stupid statement, because voluntarily taking a job with a wage, is voluntary. Involuntary servitude is *the entirety of what's wrong with slavery* and choosing a wage labor job entirely lacks that.
all of this talk on 'capitalism' immediately crops up in my mind a youtube essay brilliantly elaborating upon the unique ending of Lord of the Rings trilogy-whereby it isn't the hero that defeats the villain, but rather the villain is defeated by its own greed becoming too unstable to sustain itself!
That's not true, Frodo is the hero as he delivers the ring to the mount Doom and drops it there, if he didn't take that long journey to Mordor then in no way would evil and sauron be destroyed.
And it's a fantasy in LOTR as well.
@@_Michal_Michal_ Frodo wasn't the one to drop the ring tho
@@hopebringer2348but he delivered it
@@hopebringer2348 using his energy and fighting to survive all the way to the end of the journey, for the greater good
...[and] mainstream media call the Chinese economy "State-sponsored capitalism". It turned out, rightly, according to Noam all states are (US, Germany,etc). Long live, Noam, please stay with us forever.
There is nothing profound about this at all. Nothing.
@@johreh do you just go around rating 2 year old comments based on their profoundness? I'm autistic too, dude, but come on lmao
@@dwaynejohnson4085 do you just run around CZcams making stupid comments. I am an idiot too, but come on man. Lmao.
@@drshuvamghosh are you calling me an insect?
0:04 - 0:10 the best thing I've heard. Chomsky's a badass :D
Simp 😂
Unintentional ASMR. ☔
I wish more people would see and understand this.
"I wish more people would see and understand this."
Oh I think they understand it well enough. Many experiments in socialism and communism. Essentially zero success, hundreds of millions of people starve, suffer and some die because of failed social experiments.
People of the Left have two extremes that do not work: the liberal elite, intellectuals that want to make or re-make society in their image; versus the egalitarian everyone-is-everyone and don't need no experts anywhere proletariat.
There's nothing to understand. He said nothing that is grounded in reality.
Go start a coffee company, worker staffed, worker owned. Good luck.
What is the “this”? Nobody is stopping you from making a community company.
@@franzschubertv2874 is this a joke?
Nobody is stopping me?
Please tell me you don't believe capitalism is a meritocracy where everyone has the opportunities to succeed.
@@itcouldbelupus2842 Meritocracy and equality is not what I said is it? Please read again. Go start a company. You can do it.
US capitalism ended in the 1930s when millions of small businesses went bankrupt or had to sell to larger companies.
Because of government intervention into the economy. It was not an accident.
@@benjaminr8961 lmao that is not all entirely true - capitalists and government go hand in hand they are the wealthy capitalists and everything you think you know is all bs by the system of capital, who do you think controls the education system? arts? movies? the media? capitalism through history does not end well for people. Look at the world now as it is, you have pollution, to many cars, to many people, etc. the system is not sustainable it's designed strictly for profits and the exploitation of everything.
I believe free market capitalism died when the zionist banksters finally got control of our economy in 1913 with the privately owned federal reserve with every boom and bust the gained more control and bought and blackmailed politicians and fooling the people into thinking a social democracy was good "I am from the government and here to help" then the trap was set no society in history has ever survived it's government.
In our present system, so without workers owning the factories too, people can IMHO accept that those with a talent for business or other very useful field might be rewarded a bit more than a low status worker. This talent will still need work to blossom.
However, the difference should not go excessive because it's also obvious that
a) there are given, almost undeserved, coincidental aspects surrounding talent and b) a high talent in business could not be rewarded much more than a huge talent in taking care for people or even cleaning . I wish we could reward in accordance to the invested "psychological" effort that one is doing but the machine to measure that, has not yet been invented.
The problem is that capitalism also creates opportunity cost. That makes it hard for societies to decide to experiment with new ways of doing things. It takes good will and faith on a global scale.
"the invisible hand," but this is made impossible by the nature of competition, the indifference of bureaucracies, and human nature subjected to these conditions
Theoretically it will work. Its interesting how it always works in theory. But in practice, it never seems to pan out. I'm not a MIT professor and indeed am a product of the modern public educational system so please excuse my handicap of ignorance and help me understand the idea that the workers should own the mill. Do the workers then also assume all of the risk in investing the money to construct the mill? If they do not have a job before the mill is built, where did they get the money to invest in its construction? If they do have a job before the mill is built, why would they leave this Utopian position where they worked out of love for the business they 'own' rather than for a salary, and then what happens to their share of the company they leave? Further, if they dont have a job, where do these hypothetical workers get the money to start the mill and if they already have the money necessary to start a mill, why would they want to spend it on a mill? For the first several years when the mill (assuming that the mill here is symbolic of a modern privately owned business) doesn't make any money, do these employee/owners not take a salary and work for free?
Wait, a major problem, as I am thinking about this, is primarily in the initial outlay of capital to start the business. Hmmm, maybe the only way to do this is if the government owns all business and distributes all wages. Then because all subjects, er I mean citizens, pay taxes to start and maintain all businesses, they really could be said to 'own' them. Or, better yet, since the government owns all businesses (which would include services like food production, and medical care) as well as controlled the distribution of all wages, money could effectively be eliminated. Of course there would be those free-thinking rebels out there that would believe that they are somehow entitled to the fruits of their individual labor and they would have to be coerced into following the rules. And, yes, there would certainly be those instances where violence would be necessary in order to force people into the collective - perhaps some lives might even be lost. But, it would be for the good of the collective, right? Pretty sure there are literally millions of people who were exterminated because they resisted this idea and yet this Nirvana of equality of outcomes just can seem to manifest itself. Maybe its because I am a product of the public educational system but I cant think of a place where this idea has worked, and it certainly isnt for a lack of trying.
The control of the company's capital and decision making doesn't have to be equal for all employees. It just has to be more representative or democratic. One simple method would be that all the company's shareholders have to be employees of the company. Thus it is the workers who are electing the board of directors, who in turn hire the management. The owner/founder might still retain a majority or plurality of shares, and so would receive proportionally the most benefit from company profits and growth. But now the people running the company answer to the employees, rather than some venture capital firm with a 20% stake, representing a thousand faceless millionaires and only invested in the welfare of the company as long as it maximizes quarterly returns.
Okay Phil. As neither an economics expert nor a business executive, I cannot say that your suggestion is a bad idea. Are there any organizations that have tried this approach and were any of them successful? Do you think that it should be up to the business to decide if they should try structuring their organization based on this model, or do you think that it should be mandated by the government?
@@banuhamabeed9900 mandated by the government)
They can seize the pre-existing mill and run it. In Brazil, for example, one can see something similar at work. The colonization of the lands which we today understand as Brazil was undertaken through a system of immense land concessions by the Portuguese crown to wealthy citizens of that kingdom, which would then operate plantations, mining and other commodity-producing activities with the employment of slave-labor. These lands were so large that each comprised areas equivalent to that of several European nations combined. Once slavery was abolished, those land rights, however, were not significantly altered, therefore the labor dynamics remained more or less the same, with former enslaved workers often remaining in the same plantations, but now as precarious wage laborers.
That is to say that the property relations vis-à-vis the means of production, in this case the land itself, remained as previously. The same person who was previously the slave master was now the employer and those who were formerly enslaved, now sold their labor to this slave master turned employer. Throughout its history, Brazil never successfully conducted a comprehensive land reform which could redistribute this concentration of vast swathes of land among the citizenry and, even today, the country is home to immense properties of such kind, whose ownership has often been passed down hereditarily through unbroken lines of succession.
The Brazilian constitution of 1988, however, enshrined a framework for a process of land reform determining that land must serve a social function, whose definition is given through a set of principles, one of which pertains to its productivity, which must be secured. That is to say that an unproductive land properties do not fulfill its social function and may be expropriated by the state and redistributed in smaller allotments among the landless peasantry. I won't go into all the details of this process, but briefly I must mention that this may only be applied to very large properties (above 1.000 hectar) which are considered by Brazilian law to be unproductive under a set of pre-established criteria. If this is the case, the landless peasantry may occupy that land, effectively setting up encampments there, and then start a formal requirement for land expropriation in the court system. If all criteria are met, the land is then bought up by the Brazilian State, allotted and distributed among those landless peasants, which then proceed to operate those lands either on a familiar basis, with small families each working their own plot of land, or collectively through cooperatives.
My brother, while studying agricultural engineering at university, once visited one such cooperative where chocolate was collectively produced and sold with each single production step being carried out within the community. Some people took care of tending to the cocoa plants and the harvest, others processed the chocolate, others would commercialize it and some were also responsible for producing food crops for the community's consumption. All the monetary proceedings from their final commercial handling were equally distributed among members, regardless of the labor they carried out in the production chain.
One must not think very much to realize that, just as these lands were seized by a colonizing power and given or sold to third parties, they may be re-seized and re-distributed among the population. That is to say, the mill is often already exists, one must "only" decide collectively, as a society, what to do with it. Nothing else gives legitimacy to property rights than popular consent. If a society decides that "the mills" ought to be seized from the capitalist class and henceforth be operated by the working class, then so it shall be. I am not saying this is a seamless transition that would just take place magically, but one must remember that no laws amongst men exist beyond popular consensus. They do not exist by themselves beyond human society. There are no ethereal, ideal, immutable laws in society and it is up to each society to sustain only those laws which are collectively understood as just and legitimate. If property over land and means of production becomes collectively understood as illegitimate, so they can be dissolved and the operation of those "mills" can then be reorganized as most appropriate.
I see someone in the comments has said 'privatise the profits and socialise the losses'. This is exactly what is happening in England in 2024. The water utilities were privatised by the Thatcher capitalists in the 1980's. Thames water, one of the largest has paid £7 Billion to shareholders, whilst having debt of £18 Billion. 25% of customers bills goes just to service that debt. The utility has savagely polluted the rivers, particularly the Thames, to the extent that this year the Oxford & Cambridge boat race participants were warned against falling into the water or ingesting any of it. Customers are now being told they face a 40% increase in their bills to clean up the pollution and shareholders are walking away. The taxpayer is likely to have to pay off the £18 billion debt.
In France, something was tried under Charles De Gaulle's presidency : it was called participation. Unhappy with both Capitalism and Communism, he thought of such a system where everyone could get involved in society and get a share out of it. Unfortunately it was abandoned by his successors for political reasons...
Thank You Mr. Chomsky!
How can we help? Patronize worker-owned businesses, such as Winco food stores. What other businesses are worker-owned?
Small businesses. Independent contractors.
what is this video from? original source?
No matter how sensible and viable the philosophy and alternatives suggested by Noam Chomsky be, the Corpocracy would never let it happen. That's why 'anything' that can challenge the existing status quo has been outlawed or painted black for instance "anarchy" et al. Sorry, if I sound pessimistic but there's no better way to put it across and no amount of sugarcoating will help either. With the advent of surveillance capitalism in a corpocratic set-up, they've got us by the balls as George Carlin said.
Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?
One could make the same argument about the powerful French aristocracy, which ended up with its neck under the guillotine.
But you literally can start (or join) a cooperative as Noam discusses in the video as many other people have done! If you do a good job it will succeed, if you don't it will fail. A good example of a very successful cooperative is John Lewis in the UK but they exist here in the US as well.
1:41 "They also held that wage labor is basically no different from chattel slavery, except it is temporary."
@Matt Guitar we need to support the broken and unworthy that cannot be employable. This is life.
@Matt Guitar "feel the love"
We have many industries today that are run as cooperatives, owned and run by the workers. This I believe is the wave of the future.
Riiiiiiight! Name these companies! I will bet you that the major shareholders make ALL of the important decisions other than how much toilet paper to put in the bathrooms or what snacks are in the vending machines in the lunch room.
In startups you get stock options meaning that you sort of own the company that you are working for, but thats only for the top 1 or 2% of skilled workers...
I worked for Davey tree and they're employee owned company. Probably one of the better jobs ive had tbh
thanks for traduction
Dear old Noam, I hang on his every word, truly. However, his nickname amongst our tiny taking group is Uncle Chuckles.
Damn I wish his voice wasnt making me sleepy : (
Brilliant. Wage slavery is what it is..
Those that work in the factories should own it? This is a worker cooperative. It can be done in virtually any type of business. Its basically giant partnership among all.
Thank you
thats why public and private education is so expensive. They don't want the masses to be empowered and educated because knowledge is power. the irony is that some computer video game makers and programmers make more money than any person working in an office or factory or even a bank.
Not sure what your example with game makers is meant to prove. In any case, they are some of the most exploited coders around.
I wonder if Dr. Chomsky ever implemented an anarchic, grass-roots model in his classes.
Good people! Can you help assess and evaluate the Value based economic system, the link is in this channels descriptions. Thank you.
what exactly is the 'self directed enterprises' he is talking about? Did he say at the end of the video the alternative is 'anarchism'?
By building worker power thru coops + unionization we'll have taken a smart leap forward in democratizing society. We'll need strategies to overcome govt structures that keep inequalities in place + we need momentum: communication reaching ever wider constituencies - while defeating the extremely powerful Dark Money-ed interests who oppose us ✊
Modern Unions are corrupt!! They protect the lazy !! They treat productive workers and useless workers equally …. There is no reward for doing a good job or punishment for doing a poor job .
People who think this way assume that all companies succeed when the vast majority do not. Does labor want to be exposed to this risk of failure? Or do they want their wage? You can't have both.
Well I can't believe the way the people are commenting. When I was 12 years old I started a lawn mowing business, when I was 15 years old I lied and got a job at a carwash. I work 45 years I never once considered myself anything but self-employed. I don't work for a company I work for myself I work for my family. I trade what I have to trade my efforts, the only crime committed here is the government taxing us for our efforts
he is on the dot.. good analysis..this guy is good
Why is this man not president?
Alberturkey54 because most people aren't intelligent enough to understand what he's talking about.
Jérémy Fabre The irony...
Alberturkey54 nothing would change if he was president. not because he would be a bad president, but because the president has no power
Alberturkey54 Because we may be dumb but were not that dumb.
Alberturkey54 He's an anarchist, or to use the term I think he prefers, a libertarian socialist. He doesn't believe in the state so therefore I'm sure he has no desire to run one.
I think that this shows that you can't call something "capitalist" or "communist" everything has a great deal of nuance.
Nuance is dead in today's society.
You can if you maintain allegiance to the principles that define each system. Taxation destroys the integrity of the capitalist system and communism destroys itself.
@@JoeKoOhNo Without taxation, how would there be any maintenance or funding for schools, the military, roads, police departments, parks, etc? How would a society like that even function?
@@petera9836 There has to be a limit on spending and a concomitant limit on taxation. Deficit spending generally requires increased taxes.
Nice
What would it look like in practice, for the workers to own the factories. Would it mean that they are run by a sort of parliament?
Imagine if he had a position of influence or power...
He'd resign.
he's an anarchist, after all
Thank God he isn't.
He has power upon the peoples minds
@@sallytwotrees5250 which is more powerful
he mentions a few concepts that 'm unfamiliar with...
where can I learn more about state capitalism, self-managed enterprises, and the short-lived era of free press among the working class in America during the industrial revolution?
Graceanne Warburton google?
twopax17 but google's so big...I was hoping for some book or article suggestions
start with adam smith's wealth of nations. karl marx the capital. but this is just my opinion. Please forgive me if you find out i'm wrong.
Graceanne Warburton Chomsky has written several interesting books on these issues. They're all good, but the two that I own are On Anarchism and How the World Works.
Richard Wolff, Gar Alperovitz; for self-managed enterprises
The interview is taken from the film THE KINGDOM OF SURVIVAL
Bravo
I was a wage slave for 36 years . Through saving and not getting into dept I am now a freeman. I do not have to rent myself out to anyone. My life is now my own and I feel content. Many of my friends could do the same but for some reason they go on working.
grandslam1998 what do you do now a days to survive?
I also wish you and your friends the best of luck by the way, comrade :)
if you do it just for yourself its just escapism. And thats legitimate, dont get me wrong, but if you want to do something for change, help others to self-organize in solidarity
grandslam1998 Don't complain. You are the one that willingly pit yourself in that situation
grandslam1998 Don't complain. You are the one that willingly pit yourself in that situation
I was born into it. I was not complaining. It is just a fact!
thanks for posting
the links to other videos are annoying.
:)
+David Peacock Just turn them off then :)
No system is 100% ONE system. A country’s system is a mix of systems. The “system” that works best is the one that produces the most amount of stuff, and gives its people the most amount of freedom. Nothing’s perfect.
ARISE slaves against the wage thieves. G'day from Australia 🇦🇺 😊
if we truly had a capitalist system, there's be about a 6 month period of frantic "capitalism" followed by the brief twitching one mortally wounded person left at the end of "business".
then the critters would feast..., well, the ones left, anyway.
Oct 2019 - Bernie is talking about ownership by the workers/laborers right now
@LᗩᑎDO LᗩᑎD He isnt a capitalist.
He is a writer, therefore, he is a worker.
He sold his book to a publisher...so yeah, he sold his labor.
I have my own business making jewelry, built it from scratch, put everything on the line to invest in the equipment. I now employ two people. If you're going to tell me they own an equal share, I'm going to tell you to got to hell.
@@RFLCPTR he profited from the work of people who work in the printer shops .
Workers owning the mills? Interesting idea. What if that idea was taken a bit further? What if the people doing work and giving value to currency were the same people doing the issuing of currency? This could begin by simply issuing your own gift certificates.
Options for economic approaches are not binary choices, but exist in a continuum of degrees and potentially integrated elements.
i like the man, but he downplays the fact that chattel slaves had NO rights. None.
He wasn't downplaying anything. Firstly he was referencing a quote, and secondly he mentioned that the difference to him is the lens in time. Wage labour or wage slavery is basically the worst type of human exploitation you can get away with in modern times, just like slavery was back then
@@joshuaajani1221 I´m convinced one day people will look back and make no big distinction between slavery and wage slavery.
I'm confused. So let's say a group of 4 engineers decide to make a product that benefits the lives of many people and they succeed in making the prototype. They then start a company around this invention. At this moment, the "workers" technically own the company. They do a little research and sell a few devices. They now realize that there is a MASSIVE demand for their product. But they are only 4 people (4 people out a population of millions). This group of engineers now want to expand their company. The only feasible way to do this would be to hire employee's. Are you saying that that when they hire a receptionist (lets say that's the first person they hire, so the company now has 5 people in it) should own 20% of the company and shares dilute more the more people join?
If this group expands large enough they could potentially hire hundreds, even thousands of people. This people may or may not have had jobs in the past. But that has definitely increased the amount of people getting money each month who can now at least afford food.
Listen guys, I am actually super open-minded so please reply to me if I misunderstood or there's something I'm not thinking about. Thanks
Eric Gericke there are different ways a cooperative can function. Typically the business model is created through by-laws that govern the cooperative, rules that everyone agrees to.
Look up Cooperative By-laws to get a glimpse.
So a cooperative of 4 people, can increase workers through shares that can not be sold and decreases in percentage the more people are hired.
The original patent copyright product they can continue to gain royalties from even as more people are entered into the cooperative as separate product.
The cooperative can then hire a CEO or a central manager by voting in candidates whose pay is voted by the cooperative.
Or they don't have a CEO they could chose several different independent contractor advisors that provide the same functions as the CEO and the information is channeled through the board by vote.
@@matthewkopp2391 Thanks! I'll look it up. I know there are many ways of going about it. But I'm still confused as to how a massive group of workers could own a company. I mean aside from the fact that most minimum wage workers don't know how to run a business. Maybe i'm wrong about that but that's how it looks to me.
Thanks for the genuine reply
Eric Gericke I really only know and have seen how cooperatives work on small scales. So I don't know what it would be like for bigger organizations and the bylaws they would create.
I asked this same question at the time of the Obama auto industry bailout.
If workers and politicians were prepared the bankrupt auto industry could have been bailed out in favor of the workers by providing them a loan to buy the industry at recession prices.
But the government gave free money to the bankrupt owner shareholders.
The issue is that their is no alternative policy that would aid the workers to purchase a large industry like this and turn it into a cooperative.
There really is no real large left wing politics to make things like this happen. Even with Bernie Sanders it is vague idea he heard about but no ideas or plans in this direction.
Sanders, Warren, Yang, Cortez policies are really social welfare state capitalist policies. This model originated not from socialism but from Bismarck Germany, specifically to prevent socialism. It is really ironic in the USA.
A politician suggesting that workers have the right of first refusal to buy an industry through a government loan would be a radical idea in the USA. It also would have saved multiple industries we gave away to China for pennies on the dollar.
@@matthewkopp2391 interesting. I'm from South Africa so don't know that much about American politics. Although I probably do know more than the average US citizen haha.
Anyway, thanks for the information.
Corruption everywhere I guess
@@egericke123 Take a look at John Lewis in the UK and Mondragón in Spain, each having around 80.000 worker/owners.
Topic is still relevant!
..Recent Fan...ah read his books...
Great. How do you enforce it?
@Matt Guitar why are u copying the same paragraph from the other reply
@@FollowerofDuck "If you find employment conditions unfavourable, there's nothing preventing you from seeking alternative avenues" . . . Right . . . social revolution. Renting oneself to one or another private owner is not freedom. It just isn't. Which is not to say that every owner is a jerk. Many of them are fine people. But the arrangement is bad, even for them.
@Matthew Apsey Even if this is a majorly copied reply... You really love living in the world of theory don't you?
I think in general it's extremely hard to talk about economic systems on the basis of human function, because there is absolutely no system that can have both a functioning economy, and an equality between all workers, and that's not a bad thing. I think it's often vastly overestimated how much "Capitalism" has to play in our own concept of inequality, because realistically speaking, what happens in the economic system is not the driving force, but a side effect of a major worldwide change from Modernization to globalization. This concept isn't new, but I think it's really not well understood, especially considering how problematic it is for a lot of us. When you consider capitalism, or at this how it was at the Height of its functionality, look at 1950s America. You have a massive amount of diverse industry competing quality of products, availability, and overall good business practices. Then something changed, and something that is not talked about enough. The world opened up. You had not just major American companies doing business, but now you had tons of opportunities world wide, which would continue to expand even to today. And what happens then? Functioning Capitalism requires some basic regulations, mostly to prevent major monopolies because Monopolies are actually extremely disadvantageous to a free market, who would have guessed. But what happened was, a large amount of already extremely wealthy and successful corporations realized that they could play the best of both worlds, and continue the majority of their business practices while also taking advantage of globalized resource and worker availability. This caused 2 issues. The first one, was the companies themselves entered this problematic economic "grey" area, where technically their business practices adhered to their national regulations, and past that, they could do whatever they wanted else ware, and the US was quite aware of this, but for most of these companies, which propped up a major sector of the US economy, it was within their best interest to turn a blind eye to morally ambiguous and technically corrupt business practices. The second problem was a long term issue involving corporatism and the job market. What has been shown throughout history and through economic growth, is a pretty consistent tier system for how much economic growth a country can endure, and when countries grow massively, and raise the quality of living, their population begins to drop, and they lose workers for this growth. It's basically long term demographic stagnation, and we've been seeing it for a while now. During the Migrant crisis in Europe recently, a massive amount of immigrants were taking in by the German Republic, and the actual reasoning behind it is quite clear. Germany has been seeing a population decline for a few generations, and this was a solution, albeit temporary, too a major future issue, labor shortage. It's happening everywhere. Japan currently has the most rapid effects of it, and will likely be the first place to look towards to understand its impact, but the United States, a large portion of Europe, China, Russia, and a few other countries are also experiencing this. The strangest part about this is, it was sort of the opposite of what was predicted. In actual hard scientific predictions and demographics, it was projected that humanity would never exceed a population of 10 billion unless there was an incredibly massive change on a global scale, both socially and physically, and its likely to be true. The likelihood that we will exceed 7 billion people isn't as high as you might think, and thats a major issue. So back to corporations and globalism, the problem isn't that they can hire worldwide, but rather they are completely cherry-picking in grey zones that really dont give a net benefit to anyone. The workers are likely to be completely underpaid and live in inhumane conditions, the company isn't investing nearly anything back into the market for this purchase, and the product isn't making a significant impact economy wise, so what we're doing is we're bleeding less developed countries and people dry for labor, while our own countries are struggling with a huge labor shortage. Eventually we're going to stop seeing an excess of easy to use cheap labor, and if our economic system is still built upon outsourcing low menial labor, the ramifications of that will be deadly.
A socially corrected market economy, striking a balance between freedom and responsibility/solidarity
there is no balance to be made between freedom and responsibility...the former immediately entails the other. Freedom comes hand in hand with responsibility. Capitalism offers maximum freedom. Freedom to own, produce and exchange without a central authority intervening in the transaction. In the current social climate of blame (the antithesis of responsibility) Capitalism is disdained because its places responsibility in the individual.
@@richardbirch2544 please explain what you mean by equality of power and how you envision this working.
@@maambomumba6123not sure, capitalism always needed state to affirm itself, from the english Parliament legislating to deduct common land to big private owners (wich ignited the Industrial Revolution), to taxpayers' money funding XSpace and Tesla's Carbon Credits. It's a system entwined with the monopoly of public violence to avoid responsabilities and grant freedom (or better, licence) to a élite by corruption of officers.
there are principles that guide, and principles that rule. Those that rule most often fail to guide.
Ocean Spray is a huge co-op, run by and for the cranberry farmers.
Can someone tell me where I can find an example of ending wage slavery being part of the republican platform?
An old newspaper clipping, photo, or something
How does a free market system contradict workers to own some industries themselves? What stops people who want it that way to pursuit the collective ownership while those who are in favor of private entrepreneurship to pursue their goals in that way?
I'm not sure why both are not possible - or even desirable - in a free market scenario. Why would it be?
Free market is not a synonym of capitalism. He is giving an example of an economic system not based in capital that is free market as you already pointed
We need a Chomsky news channel.
We have one. It's called Comedy Central.
Impressive insights. Bright thoughts indeed. America has no free markets, it has a state regulated market. It has ensured certain prosperity, it needs to make progress to avoid the all looming anarchist mood.
Every society produces some surplus, some too big a surplus owing to industrial processes. The ethical use of surplus will ensure long term stability, a misused surplus is sure to cause devaluation of human worth, as long we protect the human fabric, non negotiable tenets, we can have different methods to employ the surplus as different from others. Be as creative as possible.
Mr. Chomsky, we do have capitalism that is run by the one percent who the state is on its side. Your dismissal of Karl Marx genius is mind-boggling considering your genuine desire to be on the side of the oppressed.
How is he dismissing Marx? He said it himself that we're not in a thre capitalist economy. And what he seemed to describe was anarcho communism
@@johnwood8441 Hi John, Marx scientifically analysed capitalism as a system of exploitation in addition to being a revolutionary philosopher. Most read after Bible. Yet if you dig through Chomsky’s literature of books or interviews you do not see adequate regard for this genius of a human being.
@@zacoolm oh ok, cuz in the video it didn't sound as if he was against Marx, and I haven't read much of Chomsky's work. I, personally, am a fan of Engels and Marx, as well as their contemporaries
@@johnwood8441 watch some if his videos when he talks about Marx. Watch Michael Parenti talk about Chomsky. Chomsky’s solution does not go beyond taking personal responsibility as the antidote to capitalism’s crime against humanity dispensing machine. His continual denigration of communism is fully inline with our ruling class. Chomsky for me was only an eye opener but was able to move beyond him.
@@zacoolm first of all, the number of people reading something doesnt equal its quality. second, maybe he doesnt praise him because he thinks his ideas also have some flaws.
democracy and capitalism are not apples to apples. You cant replace an economic system with a political system :P
+ndyt a real participatory democracy with workers' self-management would be non-capitalist.
Chomsky's Philosophy
and would not be able to compete in the real world because business decisions made by committee are often crap. Apple is a great example of that.
+ndyt First of all, you're changing the subject, and secondly, co-ops work very well: czcams.com/video/8vJDhKMrncw/video.html
+ndyt not sure if I'm following correctly. Apple is run by a committee as a publicly traded company with a board of investors (who's only incentive is ROI) and Apple gets much of its technology and workers from the public sector (MIT, Stanford, etc) off the public tax dollar. GPS, Internet among lots of others advances are based off high risk, low return investment over large periods of time.
+Blake Bjornstad from the government, mostly the Pentagon*
Chomsky is not actually talking about a preferential overarching systemic alternative. He makes suggestions as to how the Private monopolies can be disassembled, and replaced with a multitude of niche economic and social models, none of which when taken together or individually lead to stability or order of any kind. For a nation to survive, there needs to be internal congruence. 'Private' need not mean bad. Many workers move from being participants to owners in the system also. And in any collective, be it a family, a school, a business, some are always 'more equal than others'. Nor is there anyone stopping workers / Unions from publishing their own press. We have access to endless social media channels also to challenge the ' unfree media' . C - Mr Chomsky. Could do better.
The whole institute of Law is based on the idea of moral and human rights. Who maintains the rule of law in a, whatchamacallit? democracy from below? Who prevents one enterprise from encroaching onto the rights of other people?
Nothing stopping anyone from making a socialist company. Everyone gets capital, pulls it together and starts a company together. Everyone gets a say and everyone gets money if it's successful.
The reason why it's not a popular system is because people are either risk takers or risk averse.
If you take risks then you'd make your own company and reap all the rewards if you succeed but lose everything if you fail.
As a "wage slave" you have no risk. No matter how well or poor the company does you still get paid. If you work at one for 10 years and make $500k over that period and the company tanks you still have that $500k.
Not many people want to invest a large portion of their money in a company that might be comprised of morons who get a say in how the company functions, just to lose their investment.
I mean you are certainly right that some people don’t want to take risks. Does this really justify paying a lot of people way below the value they actually created? Does this justify a minimum wage that is so low that you basically have to either have multiple jobs or starve? Also why do I have to start a new company if there is already one me and my fellow workers work at? Where we produce all the value. Where we work for long days without a fair wage. Where we are robbed of part of the value because some “risk taker” invested some of his fortune. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?
@@VivaLaAntifa3 It is perfectly fair.
The only reason your labor has any value at all is because of the company. The reason you have business (work) and tools to complete that work is because of the company which exists because people took a risk with their assets.
If I buy land, machinery and seeds and hire someone to farm for me why should they get the lion's share of the money? What did I invest in land, equipment and materials for?
If I'm not getting rewarded for my risk I won't make the investment to begin with and the poor farmer will have no work to do at all.
As far as wages go, when has anyone ever offered to pay more for anything?
When you go to the grocery store do you argue with cashier to pay more for the goods you want? Of course not, you try to get them as cheaply as possible within the level of quality you require.
So why should a business owner have to pay more for an employee when someone who is good enough is willing to do it for less?
@@makokx7063 I see what you are getting at. And I can partially agree. No owner of a company has any rational incentive to pay their workers more than the bare minimum. That is why there is a reserve army of labour, the group of people who are without a job and willing to do your job for less. This is an artificially created problem. There are enough jobs and there is enough work to be done so that everybody could work. However that would drive wages up because employees would not have to fear being replaced by another worker because… well everybody already has a job.
Also is it really fair that you or some investor inherits a big fat stack of cash and can use that to make even more money by investing it and have other people work for you/them? I mean a certain profit motive is of course needed in a capitalist society so there has to be some monetary incentive to investing in the long run. But does this make a fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars reasonable? I mean sure billionaires at least in part worked for their success. But are they really a million times more important than their workers? Do they really carry that big of a risk especially if they diversified their portfolio? Do the common workers not suffer harder if their company closes and they lose the job they needed to feed their families than the owner who already made millions?
@@VivaLaAntifa3 I also think that level of wealth is absurd and certainly detrimental to the well-being of a state.
As far as, is any individual really worth a million time more than another human being? From an economic standpoint, sure.
I think we'd agree that the value the person who finally cures cancer provides for the world v.s. the value that a cashier provides for the world is millions of times different. One will save countless lives, the other can be replaced by a machine at this point.
So I think people being billionaires is justified but not great for a society.
However I think that it's a problem of corruption more than capitalism.
The government is supposed to prevent the darker sides of capitalism from running amok but the institutions that are supposed to be doing that work for the rich and do the opposite, make laws that make it easier for the rich to get richer.
I don't think that's a capitalism v.s. socialism problem. If every human being was good and decent we wouldn't even need gov't or economic theories.
@@makokx7063 I certainly agree that the inventor of a cure to cancer is worth more than a cashier. They probably create a lot of value in an economic sense.
But do they really have to be a billionaire after their invention? Billionaires are certainly not good for society, I agree with you there but I don’t think there is any justification for someone to be a billionaire especially while there are people starving or without basic necessities.
The problem I have with blaming corruption instead of capitalism for these problems is that the corruption is only a logical development of capitalism.
The main goal under capitalism is to make as much money as possible. For the capitalist class (that has other people work for them) this means trying to squeeze as much surplus value out of the production process as possible. Laws about minimum wage and working conditions should of course prevent some of the damage dealt by those practices.
But if it is more profitable to bribe a politician or campaign for office than to better the working conditions it is only logical to do the first one. If profit is the only motive that counts all decisions are only based on those economic factors. This is inherent to all capitalist societies. Corruption is a logical development of capitalism.
So yes current institutions are corrupt but this is not because of a different movement or human nature but instead because of capitalism
These college professor lectures are so smart they should all go start there own societies , should be wonderful .....
The alternative to the present world money/profit system = A classless stateless moneyless Global Community.
The government of a true capitalist country doesnt use tax payer money to bail out failed corporations or any other company.
Dude is a generous that's honest!
What language are you trying to speak?
There are not many workable alternatives to the current form of governance. It's likely that the current form is not workable either. People (instincts), their behaviour, their numbers, their resources and external influences and events continuously change. This by definition suggests that what works today might not work tomorrow and what didn't work yesterday might work today. We only cooperate if it suits us, otherwise all bets are off.
We’ll get there.
Just whats needed to put me slee...
Companies owned by the workers still must compete in the market, so it is still a capitalistic system. If those workers refuse to accept, or are not allowed to accept investment from outside sources, then that capital will go elsewhere. If it is Federal legislation, then all of the remaining capital investment leaves this country and goes overseas. Foreign labor with US (and worldwide) investment then becomes the competitor to the "company owned" businesses. The US companies would have limited both their intellectual and financial resources to a closed set in a global competitive environment. That sounds like a vanishing act to me.
No, it is not a law of nature that we have to import our green technologies from China. But, perhaps it is because that sector in the US is still dominated by the left-leaning self-limiting concepts he proscribes. China has made large capital investments in production facilities. We lag even when supported by short-lived crony capitalism (e.g. Solyndra). So it is economically driven that we buy oversees precisely because of what he offers as a solution.
This is not to say that, at some point, one of these self-limited companies is not started by, or does not employ a genius with an idea that eclipses existing paradigms, a product twice as efficient at half the costs. If that idea is limited by the capital investment of the workers of the company, then it can never meet the demand to address the social need. The inventor is therefore offered far more than the company can match, and the intellectual property goes off to China as well. And thus such restrictions keep the self owned companies sub-optimized and severely limited, dropping like singers in a six grade choir in June. Sounds like the kind of thinking that made Detroit what it became before we unadvisedly bailed it out.
You might be right. Noam doesn't seem to have taken into consideration either the uneven terrains of the globalized world, or the innate human need for self-actualization through innovation.
@@vinayseth1114
No. Sounds fancy but, no.
:)
@@aerobique 'No' to what though? are you saying that my refutation is wrong, or are you saying that Noam hasn't taken these factors into consideration?
Decentralized Autonomous Organization is being made possible through Blockchain tech today. Chomsky has predicted it back then.
Give me a working example of a DAO...
It's a scam dude, controlled by centralized power
@@danarsarkawt2694 How?
Agnel Vishal do you think the elites and globalist don't have any power over cyber currency? It was their plan all along, they sold this illusion to people but in reality they have it all under control.
DAOs built on ethereum and eventually Bitcoin will be the purist form of capitalism and liberalism. Chomsky doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to capitalism. Bitcoin is inherently 100% anarcho capitalistic, 100% free market, 100% classical liberal, this is a good thing by the way, it's all about combatting collectivism, since all collectivism does is it rots an entire civilization into absolute despair.
What is stopping the worker from being a contractor or starting his own business to do his work ?
English subtitles???
It is historically interesting that during the transition to greater capitalism and loss of autonomy that wages were equated with a form of slavery. But let us not pretend that it is equivalent to ACTUAL SLAVERY; an individual still has some autonomy. Still some states like mine cloak the ability to be fired without reason as "Right to Work" as if it is somehow something protecting the worker. And when I say fire without reason, basically it is a license to discriminate or fire for revenge against someone.
" Still some states like mine cloak the ability to be fired without reason as "Right to Work""
I love Right To Work states. Blue states have little or no liberty; businesses become mere agents of the State. True it is it may be harder to get fired in a blue state, but it can also be harder to be hired since the employer knows it is nearly impossible to fire someone.
You’re confusing Right to Work with At Will. Very different things.
@Retrosenescent I see. So right to work is ONLY just about unions. I wondered why people talked about it so much as if unions are a thing anymore anyways.
I always took it to mean a two-way right to either not work for someone or someone not employ another without cause.
2021- The system is on life support and at any moment will suffer a cardiac arrest.
Perhaps in an alternative system in which things are more democratic, the system could be made more efficient by reinvesting economic gains that would have by siphoned off by greedy billionaires. more of the money stays in the business and grows the business faster. not to mention the fact that all the stakeholders would have a higher quality of life
Send all of your books to The FIL
GUADALAJARA
CLEVELAND AUGUSTUS DODGE just ask miguel!!