Reply #125: "I don't think most people regard themselves as slaves." [View All]

[personman]

True, and unfortunate. This reflects a profound lack of class consciousness.

"In fact, the period of the freest press in the United States was probably around the 1850s. In the 1850s, the scale of the popular press, meaning run by the factory girls in Lowell and so on, was on the scale of the commercial press or even greater. These were independent newspapers -- a lot of interesting scholarship on them, if you can read them now. They spontaneously, without any background. never heard of Marx or Bakunin or anyone else; they developed the same ideas. From their point of view, what they called "wage slavery," renting yourself to an owner, was not very different from the chattel slavery that they were fighting a civil war about. You have to recall that in the mid-nineteenth century, that was a common view in the United States -- for example, the position of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln's position. It's not an odd view, that there isn't much difference between selling yourself and renting yourself. So the idea of renting yourself, meaning working for wages, was degrading. It was an attack on your personal integrity. They despised the industrial system that was developing, that was destroying their culture, destroying their independence, their individuality, constraining them to be subordinate to masters.

There was a tradition of what was called Republicanism in the United States. We're free people, you know, the first free people in the world. This was destroying and undermining that freedom. This was the core of the labor movement all over, and included in it was the assumption, just taken for granted, that "those who work in the mills should own them." In fact, one of the their main slogans, I'll just quote it, was they condemned what they called the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self." That new spirit, that you should only be interested in gaining wealth and forgetting about your relations to other people, they regarded it as a violation of fundamental human nature, and a degrading idea.

That was a strong, rich American culture, which was crushed by violence. The United States has a very violent labor history, much more so than Europe. It was wiped out over a long period, with extreme violence. By the time it picked up again in the 1930s, that's when I personally came into the tail end of it. After the Second World War it was crushed. By now, it's forgotten. But it's very real. I don't really think it's forgotten, I think it's just below the surface in people's consciousness."

- Noam Chomsky, http://www.anarchismtoday.org/News/article/sid=89.html">Conversations with History: Activism, Anarchism, and Power (with video, audio and transcripts)

"And I don't think most people want upheaval of the entire society."

"Most people" don't politically or historically know their asshole from a hole in the ground. Though this is a free society, it is not entirely their fault; Our educational system, political system, and media are tools of indoctrination, and what Chomsky referred to as "imposed ignorance." This is clearly illustrated by the fact that many working class people have no understanding of their own interests. However, as the excerpt above shows, this wasn't always the case, and there is no reason to believe it must continue to be.

-personman