Noam Chomsky Quotes
The Second World War ended with a radicalization of the population in the United States and everywhere else, and called for all kinds of things like popular takeovers, government intervention, and worker takeovers of factories. Business propagated a tremendous propaganda offensive. The scale surprised me when I read the scholarship - it's enormous, and it's been very effective. There were two major targets: one is unions, the other is democracy.
Chomsky, Noam. Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power. Seven Stories Press, 2017.
Ever since the end of WWII, many Republicans have called their Democratic Opponents Marxists and Communists even for a conservative Democrat like Kennedy. Even Ronald Reagan stooped to this tactic before he ran for the Presidency.
One important observation of this quotation is the pejorative language Mises used to describe “Union Bosses” as opposed to “Union Leaders.” There were indeed a few Union “Bosses” but most unions had popularly elected leaders. It is similar to the left wing critic who refers to Corporate Executives as “Greedy Monopolists.” A few are but most are not. Historically, in the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the conservatives tended to be much better at pejorative language and used it more frequently and uniformly than the liberals who tended to be better in the last part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
The best examples are Social Security and Medicare.
The president was surprised by the rapid spread and expansion of the anti-war movement at the time was convinced that the communists were organizing the effort. After all the investigations and histories, it was an extremely fast growing movement—perhaps the first of the digital political movements as e-mail was one of the tools used in the universities where e-mail was then coming into use.
What the Supreme Leader did not understand was that the very books that he recommended to see the faults of America were the very instruments that influenced the American reformers to change and improve America. And the lesson he missed is that he would not allow authors to heavily criticize the current Iran and have a wide audience so that Iran could improve. His examples were very well chosen. The lesson is the wrong one however.
Many of the far left grew disillusioned with the British Labor Movement and how it was relating to the capitalist companies, the government, and the workers. The Unions had become very undemocratic and controlling with the government pressuring both labor and companies to the degree that many felt that the institutions themselves were no longer free institutions. Ironically, they preferred the open competition of the American system at the time where unions and companies were free to fight out their differences.
In the latter half of the 20th century socialist thinking generally shifted from seeing Capitalism as the problem of society to viewing capitalism as a necessary component of modern democratic socialism. See {637821} as an example. The standard of living of all the workers depended in great part on the success of capitalism in the country. With that importance came more and more influence on government officials by capitalists. Many of the socialists and other left wingers frequently think the situation has gone too far, and it is the capitalists who are running the nation and not the citizens.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. He favored and argued for a middle ground of a capitalistic socialism or a socialized capitalism, which is what most democracies became.
This was a fascinating definition of socialism in that it was not an absolute definition. It was to the ediors simply and improvement over the status quo in certain areas. Also, unlike Communism, democracy is a required element of Socialism.
Many people had come to the conclusion that capitalism as it then existed was not sufficient to correct some of the serious inequities in society. They saw that socialism tended more to focus on those. However, they also saw in socialism per se, as it was than advocated, many other problems. Steffens seems to be the first person to describe that type of person, in this case, himself.
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.
