Wednesday , December 18 2024
Home / Socialdem. 21st Century / Chomsky Praises Capitalism

Chomsky Praises Capitalism

Summary:
And now I have your attention, we have the relevant quotation below, and, yes, it is a type of back-handed compliment to capitalism: “See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist—just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic—there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced—that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.” form Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (2002) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Understanding_Power This is yet another reason why Chomsky must be distinguished from the modern regressive left or the extreme anti-capitalist Postmodernist or Marxist left.

Topics:
Lord Keynes considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:
And now I have your attention, we have the relevant quotation below, and, yes, it is a type of back-handed compliment to capitalism:

“See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist—just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic—there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced—that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”
form Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (2002)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Understanding_Power

This is yet another reason why Chomsky must be distinguished from the modern regressive left or the extreme anti-capitalist Postmodernist or Marxist left. For most of the latter leftists think that capitalism is inherently racist, and they vehemently and irrationally blame capitalism for virtually everything.

But clearly Chomsky’s views are different. For him, “capitalism is not fundamentally racist.”

But I imagine even Chomsky cannot – or will not – make a further inference: that if, say, mass immigration is good for capitalism and helps to destroy organised labour and reduce wages, then we should find that many modern capitalists are strongly in favour of mass immigration.

And, yes, that is exactly what we find. But what is bizarre is that large parts of the modern left support endless mass immigration as well and, even worse, support the bizarre cult of open borders.

There is a strange alliance of big business and fanatical left wing support for mass immigration and open borders.

So what went wrong on the left? Why are large parts of the left in bed with the corporations and big business on this issue?

This is one of the most serious political issues of our time, whether people on the left like it or not.

Lord Keynes
Realist Left social democrat, left wing, blogger, Post Keynesian in economics, but against the regressive left, against Postmodernism, against Marxism

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *