Noam Chomsky: Wage Slavery [VOLUME UP] 

March 24, 2021
00:00 Antonio Gramsci - "hegemonic common sense"
00:52 Hume's paradox and Walter Lippman - "manufacture of consent"
03:07 Unquestionable common sense today - having a job
03:54 Subordination to discipline far more extreme than in a totalitarian state
06:40 Renting oneself for survival - having a job - is hegemonic common sense today but it wasn't in the past
13:04 John Stuart Mill in favor of democracy in a workplace
15:14 Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature and free labor
18:33 Adam Smith's critique of division of labor
19:27 Only work freely undertaken is an acceptable social condition
19:44 Control of all institutions within a framework of free association
21:10 "New spirit of the age - gain wealth forgetting all but self"
24:09 "The Freedom of the Press" - George Orwell's unpublished introduction to Animal Farm
25:56 "Manufacture of consent" - liberal progressive democratic theory
27:24 Framer's coup against democracy
29:36 Adam Smith - "masters of mankind"
30:50 James Madison in 1792 on the collapse of the quasi-democratic experiment that he had designed
32:02 Radical democratic movements of farmers and working people
34:46 Comments on recent labor-related developments
43:39 Threats to survival of organized human life
44:14 The path is open to a much better world based on freedom and independence for all
45:03 Engaged public can break the fetters of submission and passive conformity
SOURCE:
KAPA Network - www.diktio-kapa.dos.gr/
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TRANSCRIPT WITH QUOTES & REFERENCES:
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SELECTED QUOTES & REFERENCES:
Michael Sandel: Free Labour versus Wage Labour (1996)
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Alexander Gourevitch: From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (2014)
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Antonio Gramsci: "hegemonic common sense"
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The Knights of Labor: Wage Slavery and Chattel Slavery (May 25, 1884; 702)
"When a man is placed in a position where he is compelled to provide the benefits of his labor to another, he is in a condition of slavery."
Thomas Skidmore: The Rights of Man to Property! (1829)
slavery - "being compelled to labor while the proceeds of that labor is taken by others"
"[property owners] have no just right to use [property] in such a manner, as to extract from others, the result of their labors, for the purpose of exempting themselves from the necessity of laboring as much as others must labor"
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David Ellerman: Neo-Abolitionism: Abolishing Human Rentals in Favor of Workplace Democracy (2021)
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John Stuart Mill: Principles of Political Economy (1885)
"The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves."
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Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Limits of State Action, Chapter 3: On the solicitude of the State for the positive welfare of the citizen
"Naturally, freedom is the necessary condition without which even the most soul-satisfying occupation cannot produce wholesome effects. [...] Whatever task is not chosen of man's free will, whatever constrains or even only guides him, does not become part of his own nature. It remains forever alien to him; if he performs it, he does so not with true humane energy but with mere mechanical skill. [...] all peasants and craftsmen could be transformed into artists, i.e., people who love their craft for its own sake, who refine it with their self-guided energy and inventiveness, and in so doing cultivate their own intellectual energies, ennoble their character, and increase their enjoyments. This way humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, however beautiful they might be, degrade it."
"This urge for self-realization is man's basic human needs from childhood as distinct from
mere animal needs. One who fails to recognize this ought, justly, to be suspected of failing to regard human nature as what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines. To determine whether the fundamental human rights are being honored we must consider not just what a person does but the conditions under which he does it. Whether it is done under external control or spontaneously to fulfill a human need. If an artisan produces a beautiful work on command we may admire what he does but we despise what he is - an instrument in the hands of others not a free human being."
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