Excerpted from the book The Common Good by Noam Chomsky ... its ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? Theyre totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. Theres about as much freedom as under Stalinism. Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. Thats just fine. Its just the poor who arent supposed to cooperate. Now that ... workers are superfluous, what do you do with them? First of all, you have to make sure they dont notice that society is unfair and try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to hate and fear one another. A corporate executives responsibility is to his stockholders - to maximize profit, market share and power. If he can do that by paying starvation wages to women wholl die in a couple of years because their working conditions are so horrible, hes just doing his job. Its the job that should be questioned. ... corporations are fundamentally illegitimate, ... they dont have to exist at all in their modern form. Just as other oppressive institutions - slavery, say, or royalty - have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed of eliminated. What are the limits? There arent any. Everything is ultimately under public control. You liberate yourself through participation with others ... Popular organizations and umbrella groups help create a basis for this. ... rights are the result of popular engagement and struggle. So that’s a future that can be looked forwardto, including things like we were talking about before, supporting and maybe even initiating things like worker-owned, worker-managed enterprises. It sounds reformist, but it’s revolutionary. That’s changing—at least giving the germs for changing—the basic structure of this society in a fundamental way. Why should banks own the enterprise in which people work? What business is it of theirs? Why should they decide whether you move it to Mexico or Bangladesh or where the next place will be? Why shouldn’t the workers decide, or the communities? There’s a lot to say about this.
Posted on: Tue, 20 May 2014 19:52:48 +0000
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