Noam Chomsky Quotes
In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference-I don’t want to say it’s zero-but the differences are going to be very slight.
Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. The New Press, 2002.
Nelson was referring to the past. The industrial revolution created other forms of wealth and power as a huge factory could be built on a small piece of land. In farming, the yield is proportional to the acreage tilled. Not so in manufacturing. With the knowledge era, intellectual property could produce much wealth and power, and factory size and land ownership was not necessary.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
