Noam Chomsky: A Critique of Democracy (1997)

[Applause] the announced title which I suppose is somewhere was critique of Madisonian democracy and that title is both too broad and too narrow for what I'm actually going to do it's too broad because I'm not going to try to give a really close analysis of Madison's complex and evolving views over half a century there is very good scholarship on the topic including several recent studies that reach quite different assessments I'm going to keep to my own choices about the what seemed to me the leading themes that are important for understanding the special nature of the Madisonian democratic experiment and also the forms that it took as it evolved and is taking today it's in this latter respect that the title is a bit too narrow there's also a lot more to say about the implications of all of this for a global society but that I'll have to put aside for reasons of time well the American experience is surely the most important and interesting one to study if we want to understand the world of today and tomorrow there are some very obvious reasons for that one is simply the power and the primacy of the United States which is completely without parallel the second is that it's stable and long-standing institutions which are also democratic institutions which are exceptional and arguably unique thirdly the United States was as close to a tabula rasa as it's possible to find in the historical world and that was understood at the time I'm Tom Paine and 1776 remarked that America can be as happy as she pleases she hath a blank slate to write on and that was more or less true not necessarily for pretty reasons but it was true the indigenous societies which were themselves rich and complex were largely swept away and the neighboring regions were conquered by force including third of Mexico there was a vast and rich land with unparalleled resources and also advantages which was in fact open as a blank slate to write on the United States was also unusually free from external threat which again gave opportunities for acting independently the the national territory of the United States hasn't been threatened since 1812 there's there's a history of contrived threats long and interesting history so for example a century ago the US Navy was defending our national territory off the coasts of Chile just to take one example during the Cold War last 50 years or so the threats were mounting contrived but consciously and rather deceitfully contrived and that's sort of conceded so for example after the second well a SPECT of the Golden Age of what's called the Golden Age of capitalist development after the first 25 years or so after the Second World War a crucial aspect of it was an enormous government subsidy and it was recognized in the late 1940s that the economy couldn't survive otherwise the business press fortune and the Businessweek and so on pointed out right after the war that advanced industry cannot survive in a free enterprise competitive unsubsidized economy and the government must be the savior the Truman administration moved in with huge military expenditures and explain sort of on the side that the word to use is not subsidy the word to use is security so you can get people to pay to agree to massive transfers of public funds to high-tech industry if you frighten them enough and that's in fact been one function of the Cold War since the beginning the same is true of intervention it's recognized pretty much that a good deal of the intervention in fact probably you could argue almost all of it and military action over the last 50 years was under the guise of security but was motivated by something else that fact too is not unfamiliar to scholarship so for example although it isn't very well advertised and Samuel Huntington the well-known political scientist at Harvard around 1980 when the Reagan administration was setting forth on a new wave of state terrorism and intervention pointed out that we may have to sell intervention and other military action by creating the misimpression that it's the Soviet Union that we're fighting it and he added that that's what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine which is more or less accurate these are among the reasons why this so-called peace dividend quickly vanished it it was never realistic to believe that there would be one and of course there isn't and why policies continue approximately as before very little change after the tactical change but nothing much with the end of the Cold War and the reason is that the whole Pentagon system which is a very broad system had other motives and the concern the contrived security threats were designed to facilitate them but now they go on with other pretexts in Ament the country really was uniquely free from external threat it's hard to find an analog there's also over in the United States very little residue of earlier European structures or and CENTAC conservative tradition we don't really have conservatives in the united states there are people who call themselves conservatives but they're mostly radical status who combined support for an extremely powerful intrusive state with coercive social norms something that a genuine conservative would certainly win set the lack of a conservative tradition in the United States maybe in fact probably is part of the reason for the weakness the relative weakness of the social contract and of support systems by comparative standards these typically had their roots in pre capitalist institutions and they don't exist much here the blank slate didn't have them it's not that they're missing but they're here to much less extent than say Europe the this blank slate did provide opportunities to carry out political and the economic and social experiments without very much constraint well in studying history also final comment about this to quite an unusual extent again really unique the social social socio-political order was consciously designed using the advantages that were available now in studying history it's you can't construct the experiments but the United States is about as close to the ideal case of state capitalist democracy as you could as one can find and for that reason alone is particularly important to study aside from its power and the stability to institutions well furthermore the main designer James Madison was an astute political thinker and also a very lucid one his views largely prevailed Madison eloquently upheld the call for the preservation of the sacred faith of sacred fire of Liberty that he wrote into George Washington's inaugural dress but it's important to understand his quite clear and explicit ideas about the kind of Liberty that had to be preserved these ideas perhaps come out most clearly and the debates on the Constitutional Convention 1787 Madison focused on England naturally that's the model for a Democratic Society that they would look at at the time and he pointed out that I'm quoting him in England at this day if elections were open to all classes of people the property of landed proprietors would be insecure and agrarian law would soon take place what we would call agrarian reform which would infringe on property rights and the sacred fire of Liberty that he spoke is to burn most brightly to preserve the rights to own property which are privileged above all others Madison went on in the debates to warn that the new government that they were framing that they were constructing has to be designed in such a way to ward off the unjustice that would come from a functioning democracy as in the example mentioned that is it would have to UM quoting him again it would have to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation with a variety of devices to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority the permanent interests of the country that have to be preserved against innovation our property rights in particular the rights of the opulent minority who have to be protect protected against the majority meaning that democracy has to be a very limited system well that remained the guiding principle from the framing of the Constitution up until today not only here but also in the forms of democracy that the United States has been willing to tolerate elsewhere that's an important topic I wish there were time to go into it but I'll have to put it aside for lack of time it's easy to be misled by the public record the public rhetoric in which these ideas are generally framed so in the Federalist Papers which people read which were of course written for a public you know kind of a propaganda document the Federalist Papers do discuss the rights of minorities and the need to protect their rights but the discussion is framed and rather abstract and general terms however Madison made it quite clear that he had a particularly in mind namely the minority of the opulent who have to be protected against the majority the that fact I should say is recognized pretty much across the range of Madison scholarship so even among those scholars who most strongly defend the interpretation of Madison as a committed Democrat you find the same recognition the most important of those is Lance bannings fine scholar published the most recent extensive Madison biography and he argues against other Madison scholars that Madison differed most profoundly from other leading framers by according the people's right to rule the same importance as the protection of the rights of property as manning puts it throughout his life Madison kept to his principle that in a just and free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectively guarded notice he's arguing against another stream of scholarship which holds that Madison concentrated on property rights not the rights of persons and he takes the view that Madison insisted that both both be preserved that however even banning who's at the extreme in this respect agrees that I'm quoting him in Madison's determination to protect minorities against majority infringement of their rights it is absolutely clear that he was most especially concerned for the properties for the proper deed of minorities among the people that positions somewhat obscured in the Federalist Papers is unambiguous forceful and explicit particularly in the original constitutional debates as in the passages I quoted although it's sometimes masked by the public presentation I should know important to recognize that although there is a consensus in Madison scholarship about Madison's special concern for the propertied minorities the way that the consensus is formulated very much understates the point so have a look again at the defense of Madison as a true Democrat at the outer limits lands banning Madison kept to his principle that in a just and free government the right both of property and of persons ought to be effectively guarded and that's a standard formulation but it's kind of misleading you really have to think about what it means so we have the rights of persons and we have the rights of property and they have to be balanced but what are the rights of property so for example take say this pin okay it's my property what rights does this pin have well the answer is the pen doesn't have any rights property has no rights that's meaningless maybe I have a right to property so somebody could say okay I have a right to own the pen you could argue that but the pen itself has no rights so rights of property is an extremely misleading phrase but it refers to and sort of masks is the rights of persons to own property well furthermore it's worth noting that that particular right is not like other rights so for example my right to free speech doesn't infringe on your right to free speech okay but my right to own the pen does infringe on your right to own the pen fight on it you don't okay so here we have a special right namely the right of persons to own property which has to be balanced against all other rights and happens to be different from others and it's the one right that excludes other people right so the Madisonian principle once we sort of take away the array of you know misleading formulations the Madisonian principle is that government must guard the rights of persons generally but it must provide special additional guarantees for the rights of one class of persons namely property owners and their that particular right of theirs which infringes on the rights of others has to be privileged among all other rights that means the landed proprietors in England who might be threatened by agrarian reform in a Democratic Society and the opulent minority generally who have to be protected against the majority in the new society that they're developing this all took on quite a different meaning a century later I'll get to that but Madison foresaw that the threat of democracy was going to become more severe over time because of the increase quoting because of the increase in the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings he warned that equality of suffrage the equal laws of suffrage might in time shift power into their hands he said this is still the constitutional conventions he said no agrarian attempts have yet been made in this country but the symptoms of a leveling spirit have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give warning of the future danger the future danger is a danger of democracy notice the basic tasks that Madison faced in framing a system which we wish to last for ages was to ensure that the actual rulers will be the opulent minority they will as he put it secure the rights of property again the misleading formulation that means the privileged right to property which stands above all other personal rights so they will secure the rights of property against the dangers from an equality of universal of universal universality of suffrage which would vest complete power over property in hands without a share in it which will certainly be true as under his accurate prediction that the proportion of those who labor under the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its benefits will only grow how do you do this well first of all notice that this is one position that Madison never changed throughout his life so in 1829 when he was reflecting on half a century of American democracy he stressed again that those without property or or the hope of acquiring it cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights to be the safe depository of power over them again not rights of property but rights to property the solution that he came up with back in 1787 was to ensure that the upper house which would have the Senate which would have the main power I would ought to come from and represent the wealth of the nation the more capable set of men who will sympathize sufficiently with the rights of property and will protect the opulent minority against the majority and the system that was designed the voting patterns that checks and balances the distribution of powers it was arranged for the same end the idea was that the the wealthy would run it and the general society would be fragmented offered only kind of a limited participation in the public arena which is to be effectively in the hands of the wealthy and their agents let me stress the consensus among Madison Scholars on this topic so again Lance banning who most strongly affirms Madison's dedication to popular rule agrees according him that Madison's Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the Democratic tendencies of the period that it was designed to deliver power to a better sort of people as he put it excluding those who were not rich well born were prominent from exercising political power now there is a debate about how well how firmly that line was held in the years that followed but there's no serious debate about the original intent which was quite clear and becomes still more clear I think if we think through the reasoning that led to it as particularly is expressed in the constitutional debates which I quoted and whatever room for debate there might be about the early years of the of the system by with the time we reached the end of the 19th century or not until today I think there can be very little doubt that the Democratic tendencies of the Revolutionary period were very well contained and that power is firmly in the hands of the wealth of the nation who safeguard the principle that the minority of the opulent must be project protected against the majority well this account of the Madisonian roots of the prevailing conceptions of democracy is unfair in one important respect like Adam Smith and other founders of classical liberalism Madison was pre-capitalist and anti-capitalist in spirit Lance banning describes him as an eighteenth-century gentleman of honor to depths that we today are hardly able to imagine he had nothing but contempt for what Adam Smith called the vile maximum of the Masters of mankind all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else I and it's quite likely that Madison would have sympathized with the so called factory girls and artisans of eastern Massachusetts in the early days of the Industrial Revolution which began around here when they condemned what they called the new spirit of the age gained wealth forgetting all but self which they regarded as a degrading and demeaning doctrine that destroyed human values and signaled the defeat of the American Revolution to working people in the rising industrial society by now it's perhaps hard for us to remember how shocking was the radical capitalist ideology that started to come along around the 1820s it was given its sharpest doctrinal form in what was called the new science of economics of David Ricardo and morphus and so a senior and others the new science rejected the traditional view that people have a right to live that was taken for granted in traditional societies feudal societies slave societies and so on it was assumed that people have some kind of a place a right to be in that place generally a pretty rotten place but at least some kind of a place however the new science challenged that it proved with the certainty of Newton's laws as Ricardo put it modestly it proved that people have no rights apart from what they can gain in the market you only hurt the poor by trying to help them so the news it's approved and if people can't survive in the labor market since they have no other rights they should go somewhere else which was not impossible in those days recall that free movement of labour is a fundamental principle of free-market doctrine you know in free you know a free movement of labor you don't have free market that's one of the many principles that are overlooked as the theory has been converted into a weapon an ideological weapon of oppression in the service of the vile Maxim and the opulent minority relying very heavily on state power for example subsidies under the guise of security I should add that even Ricardo who was the leading exponent of the new science was unable to free himself completely from traditional human sentiments so Ricardo recognized that his famous principle of comparative advantage was based on the assumptions that labor is mobile and that capital is immobile if you drop those assumptions doesn't work that's it's only the opposite of what prevails today labor is immobile and capital is mobile but we're still supposed to worship at the shrine even though the assumptions on which the conclusion rests have been reversed in Ricardo's day the assumptions were not all that unrealistic there were vast open spaces which were being cleared of their inhabitants and that met a place for impoverished people of Europe and criminals there was much less need for prisons in those days because he could send him off to the United States and Australia and also for poor people they could move once the land was cleared but what about Capital well capital was largely a matter of land and land is immobile so that part of the assumption is correct but as for the rest Ricardo remained a captive of pre-capitalist values he argued that the rich would be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth and foreign nations and the reason they would do that is just because of human sentiment community spirit and so on Adam Smith had a much clearer view in this regard years earlier when he said no they're going to follow the vile Maxim so the point is even Ricardo found it hard to free himself from the taint of human sentiments despite the teachings of the new science but it was a dramatic change the restriction sharp restriction and the concept of human rights that was a central component of rising industrial capitalism that continues right to the present as a result of quite extensive and often violent popular struggle over long periods there is now a reasonably large array of rights that have been won and there are now even international conventions on human rights the basic one is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 1948 that declaration inspires quite a good deal of noble rhetoric and you know posturing before TV cameras and so on it can also be used by the powerful very selectively as a weapon against some current enemy but the reality of the matter is that no state takes the principles of the Universal Declaration seriously the United States for example flatly reject a good part of its solemn commitments as expressed in the Universal Declaration namely the whole range of articles concerning social and political rights which we simply assert not apply we declare that they are invalid though we signed them of course the this is a residue of the principle denial of such rights under the pure form of market doctrine that was prescribed and preached by the new science that meanwhile incidentally the United States parades courageously as the defender of human of the Universal Declaration against third world relativists all kind of bad guys that's a pretty impressive propaganda achievement and it's a tribute to the obedience of the educated classes folks like us that they can get away with it as they do there's never any challenge to this even though it's radically false on the most obvious and transparent grounds the fate of the new science as a weapon of class warfare and in the limiting the importance of human rights that's an interesting part of the history of the last hundred and eighty years and a very lively and important topic today but a different one and again I'll have to put it aside well let's go back to Madison as an 18th century gentleman his values were pre-capitalist he expected the wealthy men who would be given power to be as he put it in lightened statesmen pure and Noble benevolent philosophers who will work selflessly for the public good he soon learned differently as the opulent minority used their power exactly as Adam Smith had described namely pursuing their vile Maxim and by 1792 madison already recognized that there were problems he warned that the Hamiltonian developmental state was substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty leading to a real domination of the few under an apparent Liberty of the many Madison deplored the daring depravity of the time as the stock jabbers become the praetorian guard of government at once its tools and its tyrants bribed by its largesses and over eyeing it with their powers and combinations well apart from the eloquence of the rhetoric it's not a bad picture of the modern world and the state of democracy in it it's a picture incidentally that's shared by over 80% of the population in the United States who hold that the government works for the few the few and the special interests not for the people that's up from a regular 50 percent or so about 15 years ago there are related judgments the same percentage over 80 percent regards the economic system as inherently unfair about the same percentage holds that business has too much power working people too little and by about 20 to 1 which is a huge number for a poll it's believed that business should sacrifice profits for workers and communities that's another ominous sign of that leveling spirit that Madison warned about and the need for vigilance to protect the opulent minority against the majority by ensuring that democratic forms have very limited function well with all of its flaws from the standpoint of democratic principle Madisonian democracy did take a long step towards popular democratic government it was a new departure but in fact in complex ways at the doctrinal level there were in the regressive features that's of course a value judgment but I think it's sustainable and it becomes clearer I think if we look back at the history of democratic theory which goes way back before Madison so let's get go back to its origins the sort of founding document of modern political theory Aristotle's politics which is careful and well argued and very timely it focuses on central themes of everybody's agenda Aristotle quite carefully discusses many different kinds of possible society and democracy this preference he discusses what a democracy should be it should be a community of equals aiming at the best possible best life possible for all at the common good it should be a community of free men equal and participatory and notice incidentally freemen that's meant literally it doesn't not women not slaves of course so his concept of people is limited but before being too critical of Aristotle we should remember that it's only in very recent years that these fundamental flaws and democratic theory have begun to be addressed in this century and still only quite partially well to achieve these ends democracy Aristotle went on to say must be a welfare state he didn't use the phrase but that's what he's describing a democracy he said must provide lasting prosperity for all by distribution of public revenues by means that he goes on to describe the goal is relative equality of outcome of condition ok the notice that the contemporary doctrine equality of opportunity that's a much more recent innovation it's related to the rise of industrial capitalism with its narrowing of the concept of human rights namely to those that can be obtained through the market although in the real world stress again there's a rather large footnote the rich and the powerful demand and receive ample protection from market discipline for this they rely on a very powerful nanny state which transfers public revenues to them on a massive scale and protects them in other ways it sometimes reaches the level of sheer farce as in the United States recently or Anglo where the Reaganites here extolled the glories of the free market to the poor at home and abroad while at the same time they were boasting proudly to the business community that they were breaking all post-war records in protectionism and public subsidy for the rich as indeed they were or say when Newt Gingrich preaches Stern lessons to seven-year-old children on the need to learn responsibility and overcome the debilitating culture of dependency while at the same time he holds the record the championship for bringing federal subsidies to his own rich constituents who can if they had to face market discipline would perhaps be selling rags but they can applaud their entrepreneurial values and their conservatism under the wing of the nanny state and all get away with it again so this proceeds without comment thanks to the extremely impressive self-discipline of the educated classes you really have to give credit to the educational institutions they do their job the classic thesis going back to Aristotle is that in a free and just society we should seek to achieve equality of outcome therefore it must be a welfare state in which as he put it everyone has moderate and sufficient means with the extremes of wealth and power eliminated that isn't achieved talk of democracy is not serious because there cannot be free and equal participation in self-government quite apart from the resulting injustice and the infringement on fundamental human rights again in the pre capitalist sense of human rights in which human beings are considered to have intrinsic value other than market value these ideas persist right through the Enlightenment and classical liberalism for example take Adam Smith Adam Smith as everyone knows gave a argument for markets but a rather nuanced argument if you look closely and it's also interesting to look at his reasoning his argument nuanced argument for markets was based on the assumption that under conditions of perfect Liberty markets would lead to perfect equality that is they would lead to equality of outcome which is an obvious desideratum for a free and just society they didn't bother to argue that point because it was taken for granted and his for the same reason Adam Smith was in favor of as he put it government regulation in favor of the workman which he said is always just inequitable but not in favor of the masters everyone is familiar with Adam Smith's remarks about how wonderful division of labor is in the first paragraph of Wealth of Nations but not too many people go a hundred and couple hundred pages later where he points out that division of labor is an atrocity and that in any civilized government any civilized society the government will have to intervene to protect people against the division of labor because it will turn human beings into creatures as stupid and as ignorant as it's possible for a human being to be and therefore it must be stopped same principle we have to can't accept these things when they don't lead to relative equality of outcome and that's common take another major figure of the liberal pantheon alexis de tocqueville he also took it for granted that equality of outcome was the desideratum to be sought he warned in fact of the danger he was talking about democracy in america remember the 1830s and he praised it he warned however of the danger of a permanent inequality of condition and an end of democracy if the manufacturing aristocracy rising before our eyes one of the harshest that has ever existed escapes its bounds as of course it did beyond his worst nightmares this I should say that another related and very important element in classical liberalism was opposition to wage labor which goes much deeper a classic formula is that if a person produces on command let's say under wage labour if an artisan produces something beautiful on command we may admire what he does but we despise what he is because he's not a free human being using his own initiative and powers to create de Tocqueville took the same view as he put it the art advances but the artisan recedes the Adam Smith's had the same view his critique of division of labor which I mentioned is at a deep level a critique of labor on command wage labor which violates the essential human right to freedom to be a free creative person modern political theory sometimes recognizes a version of this picture but rather attenuated one I think it recognizes that opposition to wage labor was quite real but it atributes it to the Republican conception of civic virtue that is wage labor undermines the independence of spirit that's essential for self-government that interpretation is certainly correct but I think it's only part of a much deeper and more interesting story that is a deeper opposition to wage labor based on a conception of natural rights and human nature a conception which is quite interesting in itself but interesting roots but that is it's another topic again well however one interprets the fact the opposition to wage labor remained a very powerful current of American thought and also struggle right through the 19th century the labor movement from the 1830s up to the huge nights of labor organization through the end of the century it condemned wage labor as an infringement an intolerable infringement on essential human rights the independent labor press which was just being done by working people in their own factories and so on it held to the principle that those who work in the Middle's should own them all of this I should say is as American as apple pie without the dubious contributions of radical intellectuals and it extended well beyond the working class so Abraham Lincoln for example held that it is wrong for capital to buy labor in slave societies and it is no less wrong for capital to hire labor under what was always called wage slavery except as a temporary expedient on the way to freedom that was the ideological banner under which northern work workers fought the civil war Michael Sandel over at Harvard points out correctly the Republican Party proudly presented itself quoted slogans as not only the anti-slavery party but emphatically as the party of free labor free labor meaning free from wage slavery from working on command that's the Republican Party the New York Times in 1869 condemned the advance of wage labor as the rise of a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the south well come quite a long way since those days but these ideas which are truisms in my opinion remained alive well into this century take say John Dewey the leading American social philosopher again as American as apple pie his root serve right here his the main focus of his work was on democracy and he held the talk of democracy is idle when big business rules the life of the society controlling production and commerce communication and press democracy he said presupposes also presupposes a transition from a futile istic to a democratic social order in which workers are masters of their own industrial fate not tools who lent them so have to rent themselves to private tyrannies as long as the feudalistic social order remains in place he held politics is nothing more than the shadow cast over society by big business the tools and the tyrants of government in Madison's phrase and democracy is only a matter of form well that's a powerful and central tradition in Western intellectual history that goes from the origins of recorded thought about democracy and Aristotle and democracy and freedom right into the 20th century including substantial currents of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism and Madisonian democracy was a departure from it for reasons I've already mentioned but actually it was a departure in an even deeper sense than I've already indicated so let's go back to Aristotle remember that for him a leveling spirit is essential to democracy otherwise it cannot be free and equal and participatory but Aristotle also gave another reason this one's kind of hypothetical he said imagine that a de Montcalm of a logical reason he said suppose a democracy could exist in which there really was free participation suffrage in other words but there was the majority of the population were poor and wealth were concentrated well under those circumstances he said the majority would use their voting power to for their own ends not for the common good of all and well-run democracy should be run for the common good of all notice that James Madison faced exactly the same problem raised exactly the same problem in the Constitutional Convention in the remarks that are quoted about the threat of agrarian reform he said suppose there were a democracy in England people could vote then they would carry out an agrarian reform they devote their own interests and they would threaten the rights of landed proprietors what he misleadingly called the rights of property well they both face the same dilemma Aristotle and Madison exactly the same dilemma but they gave different solutions Aristotle solution was to restrict poverty with a welfare state then democracy would be possible Madison facing exactly the same dilemma drew the opposite conclusion we must restrict democracy so that the privilege of the opulent minority is protected now these are crucially important facts about American democracy which in a free society would be taught in high schools civics courses in my opinion and would be common knowledge notice I'm not using any exotic sources these are absolutely the standard major you know intellectual roots of our society and thought it's a crucially important departure from a classical tradition taken on pre-capitalist assumptions however as I mentioned well all of these issues took on a very different form towards the end of the nineteenth century and since recall the Madisonian principal departure from traditional theories of democracy and rights but still a principle namely the rights of persons must be protected but certain of these rights namely the right to property must be privileged above others now for Madison persons meant persons but toward the end of the 19th century the concept of person underwent a radical change in a highly undemocratic manner with the growth of the industrial economy and the concentration of power in new corporate entities that brings us to the last century in which all of this takes a very different form recall that corporations were initially considered to be that the theory of the corporation was a grant or concession theory so for example if we want to get the and you know build a bridge across a river or something we can become incorporated to carry out that task we can we are partners it's a partnership we can get a state charter to carry out that task that's corporation the corporation was legally bound to keep to the stated limits namely build that bridge that's we got the Charter for and the corporation had no rights and the only rights were the rights of the participants the individuals in the partnership individual owners know that's what a corporation was okay through the 19th century the picture began to change there were huge economic changes especially after the Civil War by the end of the 19th century by around 1890 three-quarters of the wealth of the country was controlled by corporations by now the top few hundred controlled most of the domestic economy and most of the International economy itself an enormous infringement on freedom and rights as the economy changed legal theory changed along with it not by legislation but in the hands of courts and lawyers and intellectuals it began to recognize corporations had been are difficult artificial entities set up as partnerships with no rights for a stated purpose and chartered that way but they came to be regarded as natural entities as collectivist legal institutions as the leading legal historian of the process over Harvard Merton Horowitz describes it these natural entities were granted the rights of persons in fact mostly early in this century in fact in mortal persons so much more than the rights of persons and there were no longer any limits on what they could do they didn't have to keep to their stated purpose so they could acquire property or they had First Amendment rights and so on this became very serious when New Jersey kind of broke ranks and permitted the right of incorporation in 1889 with no constraints at all corporations could do anything they want they all started flocking to New Jersey that's why you have things like Standard Oil of New Jersey and so on that forced other states to go along you know to destroy the traditional constraints as well it's one of the reasons incidentally why business is so much in favor of devolution these states of reducing power from the federal government to the states then it's much easier to play one State against another and to make sure that public revenues really go to the opulent minority not to anyone else so if federal grants go from government federal to state level you can be pretty sure that the the New Jersey legislation is a typical example the intellectual roots of this transition from corporations as artificial partnerships to collectivist legal institutions that the electoral roots of that are Neoga Galen do with the idea that organic entities that stand over and above people have greater rights than people the same intellectual roots are the roots of fascism and Bolshevism means and in fact the three systems are very much on par corporations fascism and Bolshevism I think that becomes pretty clear when you look at the thinking that lies behind that's the essentially the end of the national rights doctrine the idea that rights derive from the nature of people there was a parallel shift which is interesting the courts began to change originally the corporation was the owners the participants like us if we form a partnership that picture gradually shifted and the corporation was identified with the directors okay not the people so the corporation became a so it became the directors in legal theory there was a parallel shift in in the Bolshevik system in fact it was predicted by Rosa Luxemburg and and by Trotsky in fact in the early days before he joined in himself what they pointed out and predicted was that the Bolshevik system would talk about the people but the people and the working class but the working class would be placed under the rule of the party and the party under the rule of the Central Committee and the Central Committee under the rule of the maximal leader just exactly what happened of course and very much the same happened in the history of our form of collectivist legal institutions corporations as power as the concept of what the corporation is first of all got a status as an organic entity over and above people with greater rights but also it became identified with the Central Committee not the participants and the leadership the CEO even in legal theory those are interesting parallels it should be more discussed I think I should say that all of this was appalling to conservatives genuine conservatives this shift the collectivist legal institutions was very much opposed by conservatives who regarded the laws that ratified these as laws that ratify a new absolutism that's when the in conservative legal scholar put it establishing entities that are like kings and princes and destroying individual rights and of course also destroying markets remember that these are huge commands economies I mean any business is an interference with the market internally doesn't work by market principles when you get to these huge organic entities I mean internally market principles are gone and of course they're enormous another one classic study Robert Brady Veblen died economists around nineteen forty point and an important book pointed out that these new corporate entities he said are strict its top to bottom absolute isms the inverse of democratic control they follow the strict conditions of dictatorial power and if you look at the structure you see that that's pretty obvious equally obvious they cast the shadow that we call politics over society the there are its tools and its tyrants to quote Bowie and Madison and they're also of course dedicated to a propaganda program I'm quoting Brady that becomes a matter of converting the public to the goals of the control pyramid it's another matter of great importance for contemporary democracy to not really have time to go into but of enormous importance again the kind of thing that would be taught in high school civics courses in a free society well that brings us up to our present period the question is often raised how corporations affect democracy kind of an odd question it's sort of like asking how sulfuric acid affects metals or how liens affect lambs in the real world not particularly friendly the their antithetical you know they're absolutely antithetical in their internal structure their totalitarian their influence and control is extraordinary in economic economy politics and social life as to the means of communication which are of course essential to a democracy we don't even have to ask how corporations influence them they just are corporations with consequences that are quite predictable and well verified as enormous international implications as well which I can't go into well let me just sum up there is a line of thinking it goes from Aristotle right through the Enlightenment and classical liberalism to John Dewey others Bertrand Russell and others in this century major theme of the indigenous American working class movements independently and it seems to me to identify a very significant and appropriate principles about democracy and freedom in a sense the business world agrees with this accept that the values are reversed that is they're opposed to democracy for perfectly obvious reasons although it's ok if the shadow is properly cast and power remains in the hands of the wealthy of the country the business world is also opposed to markets again for obvious reasons those selectively markets are okay for temporary advantage when the playing field is properly tilted typically as a result of large-scale state intervention that's a leading thesis of economic history from England right up till the new clean growth areas of East Asia the United States is a dramatic example illustrating that from its origins as a highly protectionist country relying heavily on state power for industrial development and that goes right up to today to the celebration of the World Trade Organization on telecommunications a couple of weeks ago meanwhile the Society resists and over time that has it has never accepted the principle of the new science that people have no rights the societies resisted in various ways and over time it's expanded the reach of human rights of democracy it's a painfully slow process it's also cyclic their periods of regression we're in a period of significant regression right now in my opinion but over time I think you can sort of sense a slow advance towards something like the Aristotelian principles now however extended beyond his category of freemen and towards a conception of human rights that has been much enriched and widened by intensive popular struggle over the years all of this goes on in parallel to increasing power for the new absolutists absolutism of the corporations the new kings and princes that conservatives condemned ascent a century ago as did working men and women well the long term outcome of that conflict is unpredictable but I think it's important to stress that it is controllable there's a major propaganda effort underway now to make people feel hopeless and resigned it's all out of control you know mysterious forces of globalization and markets and this is not the other thing almost total fraud when you look at it but understandable it makes people feel hopeless resigned passive you know what can I do look for survival strategies these are human decisions and human institutions are they're under popular control in principle and even in practice if there's sufficient dedication in support of democracy and human rights even the famous globalization is not dramatically different in scale from say early in this century and the extent to which it is different is easily under public control as for the institutions themselves and like others including the fascist and Bolshevik forms of absolutism they have to demonstrate their legitimacy as always in human life if they can't demonstrate their legitimacy they should be dismantled as has often happened in the past and dismantling them makes it may make it possible at least to advance towards fundamental principles of justice and freedom that are quite deeply rooted in the traditions of thought and popular struggle for thousands of years [Applause] [Applause] okay yeah must be early in the morning Topsy what do you recommendation be for corporations just should they be eliminated or a zero his of at rent or changing them adapting them to the democratic ideals well my feeling about corporations is very much like my feeling about Bolshevism and fascism to which they which they resemble in a short term period you want to reform them okay so if you're living under say the rule of a king you know it makes sense to plead with the king to be to act more kindly to his subject you know and that's always good you know instead so don't torture as many people and you know give more gifts to poor people and so on and that makes good sense when the population of the United States by twenty to one says that corporations ought to sacrifice profits for communities and workers that 95% majority is saying the king ought to be more benevolent not so harsh and that's good I agree with that the King oughta be more benevolent but of course you can go a little further and say is the institution legitimate at all and I don't think it is for the reasons I discuss so therefore it ought to be dismantled and workers ought to be the masters of their own industrial faith as do we put it and all the rest you know a way back to Lincoln and you know back to Aristotle and so on now it's kind of an interesting commentary on the way the propaganda system the doctrinal system has functioned that ideas that were standard among you know mill hands and Lowell a hundred years ago sound unimaginable today I mean they were saying look the institution's illegitimate it's infringing on our rights as free men and women we're not they were not asking the autocracy to be more benevolent they were saying it should disappear because we want to enjoy the rights that we want in the American Revolution or so they thought nowadays that's almost unthinkable and the most that can be asked for is that the absolutism be more benevolent but the King act a little more nicely well that's a tremendous victory of a propaganda system in which educated sectors have played the leading role after all should remember that we're talking about ourselves and it has very it's been extremely hard for a hundred eighty years now there has been an effort to drive out of people's heads normal ordinary human sentiments and to make them think just for themselves you want things just for yourself you know instill the new spirit of the age gain wealth forgetting all of itself you have no rights other what but you can get on the market with of course that big footnote that the rich and the powerful insist on massive protection from the ninety state in extreme forms under say Reagan and Gingrich but always and it's been a very hard battle to get that across but it's you know over time it has worked so now people don't even think about being free the most they think about is asking the ruler to be more benign but to get back to your question I don't think we should limit ourselves to that yeah it's important to ask the ruler to be more benign so for example I think we should urgently do something about the fact that we are facing a major social crisis as the advocates of a powerful nanny state for the rich are kicking our continuing a massive war that they've been conducting for 15 years against children and families and women particularly and are winning it they're going to be out in the streets hungry the main effect of the welfare reform and certainly its purpose is to lower wages for poor people I mean didn't take a genius to figure that out obviously if you force people notice the assumptions that underlie that as well the assumption is that women who are raising children have to be sent to the workforce now the implication it's no work to raise children that just sort of you know comes free like raising children taking care of a home that's not work you know anybody who's had a child knows that what's work is going to the office in downtown Boston and speculating against currencies to lower growth rates that's work and you can sort of prove it because after all we live in a meritocratic society so you measure the value of work by the amount you get paid for raising child you get paid zero for speculating against currencies to lower growth rates you get paid huge amounts so those guys must be doing real work and now we've got to take these other people who aren't doing any work just raising children taking care of homes and so on we have to make them work but of course they're gonna have to work at government subsidized jobs at below minimum wages which simply harms the lower sector of the workforce naturally now you know there's a principle of law that you can determine intent by predictable outcome you know if you can if the outcome is predictable you use that as evidence for intent which means that obviously this was the intent of the law the intent is to continue the major battle against families and children and women and the poor generally and the same thing abroad but now also to harm even further the what's called unskilled labor it sounds like a small part of the workforce except that it's 70% of the workforce and that's proceeding and we should do something about that so I think that should be immediately on the agenda make the autocrats be less brutal and cruel but I don't think they should have the right to rule either I think we should be able to understand what mill hands and Massachusetts or Abraham Lincoln or others understood if one assumes that nationalism represents a possible threat to democracy isn't one possible antidote the multinational corporation or is the is the Cure worse than the illness well first of all I don't think that nationalism in itself is a threat to democracy I mean nationalism is you know it has all kinds of facets nationalism can involve a focus on the richness and authenticity of individual cultures for example I mean natural if nationalism is exclusive and oppressive yeah it can be a threat to freedom if on the other hand nationalism means accentuating and enriching your traditional cultures then quite in its very positive development so nationalism in itself I don't think you can say anything about pent out it's used as to the Cure multinational corporations yeah that's I mean we could have an East India Company running running the world I don't see what that yours that's you know form of absolutism kind of like Bolshevism and fascism so it's not a cure for anything you know it's just a increase in the power of absolutist institutions I'm here I entirely agree with conservative with the few conservatives who are grown there aren't probably Harn any anymore but the ones who were around a century ago incidentally these multinational corporations just for to eliminate some illusions about this there are there are some very good technical studies of multinational corporations that's one I know is seen a truck but there's a very good and highly regarded technical study by two British economist just came out recently the best one they study the top corporations and the fortune list of international corporations and what they find is that they are really national corporations they're not multinational overwhelmingly their sales are domestic their power is domestic they rely essentially on their national governments to protect them their own conclusion is that of the top hundred on the fortune list everyone has benefited from industrial policies of its home government and more than twenty have been able to survive as businesses because of takeover or bail out by their own government that's over 20 out of a hundred that includes for example Lockheed Gingrich's favorite cash cow which was saved from destruction by a huge government bailout well that's you know that's the top multinational corporations they're not really transmitted they're very few that are really transnational they're domestically based they rely on the powerful state and their and on local markets they do international eyes but not to the extent that's believed furthermore most of the interactions among them about seventy five percent are in Europe Japan and the United States that is at 75 percent of the transactions well those are three areas of the world where formal mechanisms do exist parliamentary mechanisms to control all of this without fear of military foods forget the title of the book but something about came out about a year ago and it's the major technical study of multinationals the moment they're very skeptical about the whole idea of globalization as are plenty of other people if you look at gross figures of trade flow and investment and so on and so forth relative to the economy it's not much different than it was in the early part of the century under the gold standard there are some differences but mostly in short-term financial speculation that's everything do understand correctly I take it that your view is fairly optimistic and a fair in the following regard that you don't regard the existence of these large organizations as an inevitable result of a sort of technological determinism or scientific determinism I don't think there's anything to do with it I mean the you know this first I think one should be extremely skeptical about that for one thing you should just initially people always ought to be skeptical when some view is put forth that makes you passive and resigned that happens to benefit the people who are putting forth the view okay that's already initial grounds for skepticism for a reasonable person when you look at this pretty true but you know you're kind of you start reaching for your wallet at that point the in this case I think it's just not true I mean take say information technology you know the big new wave of the future I mean it can be used to dominate and control it can be used to liberate to you know the same information technology that can concentrate decision-making in you know offices in New York and Zurich and the you know a London that same technology can be used to provide information to working people in a factory in real time so they can make their own choices I mean the bottom the information doesn't care this has been pretty well studied in some cases with very interesting results there's a couple of interesting books by Dave Noble used to be at MIT not there some argue because of these books but well that others debate that in which he studied the he's a he studies the development of modern technology and industry very good modern historic economic historian he he dealt specifically in these books with the machine tool industry numerical control of machine tools so you know that's computer controlled machine tools big central part of the economy and he discovered that the the technology like most technology was developed in the public sector industry doesn't want to waste money on research and development that can be used by anybody they want the public to pay for that ok that's one of the ways in which the public pays the costs of advanced industry and transfers public resources to the rich so it was all developed in the public sector meaning you know the Army and the Navy and so on that was true of automation generally and virtually everything in the contemporary economy Internet is a dramatic case which were just seeing transferred into the public private hands right now the he pointed out that he went in detail through the ways in which these technologies were developed and he pointed out I think pretty convincingly that the you could have done it in two different ways the methods could have been developed so as to place decision-making power into the hands of skilled mechanics who would sort of run you know the work flow and decide what's going to happen or you could use the same technology 2d skill workers and to put the control process in the hands of managerial sectors which is incidentally highly inefficient from an economic point of view because managers are essentially waste you know the the United States has many more than other countries we have about three times the level of managerial control of other comparable countries the and it was designed the second way you know not because of the technology but for power interests it was designed to descale workers and empower managers and bosses well yeah it could be used for that and it was and of course when you work through the state sector that's what's going to happen because those are the guys who control the state sector but his argument is and you can see how convincing it is I think quite convincing that it the technology could have allowed the opposite as far as I can see that's true of just about anything it's very hard to find an argument for a technological imperative look look for it I mean you hear it all the time but you should always be skeptical when you hear that because that argument is an argument that says look you're powerless just you know suffer in silence and meanwhile I benefit I mean anytime an argument has those properties you should be skeptical and you should want a strong argument I don't see one in this case could you please tell us of what you see is the alternative and if there are any examples of a well-functioning alternative and how we would transition from our current system to that alternative no there's alternatives just as there were alternatives to feudalism and slavery and Bolshevism and fascism namely dismantle the repressive institutions and place power in popular hands it's always it's never an all-or-none business you know so there's elements of it all over the place for example unions let's say were a big attack on the privileged character of private power of the opulent minority these the sort of social contract that developed from around the mid 19th century was the result of a social reaction to the new science and its doctrines I mean what basically happened is the if you look at the history the vibe around 18 the 1830s it looked like the masters had won the day you know end of history and all that sort of thing the in England that is they had legislated you know the rules of the new science people have no rights can't live on the market go somewhere else etc the only problem was that it turned out that the British army he was spending all of its time putting down riots because people got the weird idea that if we don't have a right to live and you don't have a right to rule you know and then it got worse because they started labor organizing and the Chartist movement came along and so on well you know fortunately the science is rather flexible since it largely is an instrument of ideological warfare and it just changed so the same people who were giving the old story like NASA a senior now said yeah it turns out according to the new science that the people do have other rights by the time you get to say John Stuart Mill you have sort of you know kind of a social democratic picture of political economy and that leads the way to the social contract and the welfare state okay that was an improvement took a long time to reach the United States in the United States didn't really come until 1930s and it was always weak at how weak it is you can see by looking at the newspapers right now for example in South Korea workers are struggling rather bitterly right now to protect themselves from laws that have always been enforced in the United States in the United States the laws have always permitted corporations to fire workers and replace them not just with scabs which is bad enough but with permanent replacement workers meaning kick them out if they try to organize I mean that the United States has been censured for that by the International Labour Organization I think it's the only industrial country to have been censured but here it's kind of taken for granted in South Korea you know they don't accept it and that's what the big struggles are going on with industries trying to impose it in the government and the working people are rejecting it so you know we don't the idea that we have to go teach people how to be free you know funny idea but all of these are steps have been steps forward there are a lot of Rights that were not recognized before voting rights for example franchise economic right social rights are always under attack right now it happened to be under sharp attack and there have been more serious attacks against the whole conception of absolutist rule so they're all over the place but maybe the biggest one is in Spain the big Mondragon enterprises which is one of the most successful economic enterprises in Spain you know industry banks communities and so on it's essentially worker owned this came out of a kind of a left Catholic tradition and it's you know it's not utopia like it has managers and so on but it's worker owned and been very successful one of the more successful parts of the Spanish and European economy is in fact and there's other things all over the place that you can look in but these are just constant battles I mean there's a constant effort to construct you know to intensify the system of absolutist control and state power supporting the rich Reagan and Gingrich for extremes and there's always a popular struggle against it as to the asking is there a viable alternative to absolutist rule that doesn't really mean much it's like asking in the 18th century is there a viable alternative to kings and princes well you know you couldn't point the one you couldn't point to a parliamentary democracy in the 18th century did that mean you couldn't have parliamentary democracy no didn't mean that you could have it but you have to create it you pretty much answered my question but basically what I was gonna ask is along the other alternatives is there I think pretty much is there an alternative to institutional means of production and I think other other ways of arranging production yeah I mean you sort of seem to be hinting that the way to go is to sort of impose regulations that would ensure more democratic institutions and the means of production is that well I think it's not so much imposed regulations that would ensure it III think absolutist institutions should not be given legal status I don't think we should give legal status to organic entities that stand over above the rights of individuals whether they're called fascism or Bolshevism or corporations or whatever so I I do think that in human rights come from that are sort of rooted in human nature really and that these collectivist institutions are not persons it shouldn't have right how should the production be organized well you know I don't think that's a trivial question to answer you have to sort of experiment but the principles ought to be I think pretty much the ones that were expressed by mill hands in Lowell century ago those that work in the mills or on them and they ought to carry out to democratic decision-making about how they work in conjunction with communities who play a role as consumers and families and participants and so on there are a lot of modalities in which that could be worked out but I don't I mean there are people who in fact have sketched out detailed proposals personally I'm a little skeptical I don't think anyone's smart enough to design a society at least I don't know how but I think you have to sort of try you know try various things see how they work and so on I I realized that a lot of our economic system you know has a lot of flaws that a lot of problem problems with it you know like wage labor that's not particularly pleasant that you know the rich have the big gap between like rich and poor but I mean it's together now because there's been like increasing standards of living in America and isn't in that one way like the justification for it the why it's still around why capitalism for mine standing has triumphed and it's still not I don't think so I mean there was rising standards of living in slave societies slaves were much better off in the early 19th century than in the early 18th century said an argument for slavery well I'm it's a terrible argument you know I mean UN any system in fact you can give that argument for Stalinism there was a very substantial economic growth in Soviet Union it's the second world not the third it was until 1989 it was the second world not the third world now it's back in the third world because it's undergoing capitalist reforms something you're not allowed to say incidentally but if you read you'll notice they've had ten years of capitalist reforms which have driven them right back into the third world where they came from okay but if you just look at it in terms of economic growth it was reasonably successful that's exactly what bothered Western leaders if you read the documentary record right up to the 1960s where it sort of runs dry at the moment you find that the great concern was that the second the Soviet Union was presenting itself as a model for modernization within a single generation and that was route raising all sorts of trouble not only in a third world but even in the rich countries they didn't care about Russian aggression what they cared about or you know Stalin's terror or anything and no didn't bother anybody in fact Truman admired Stalin you know thought he's an honest and and you know deal with him and so on he said you didn't care what happens in Russia you know someone but the same with Churchill incidentally who's defending Stalin and cabinet meetings is a great man and so on and so forth they it kills me people's they want that's irrelevant the problem was then they never expected them to be attacking anybody you know but the what they were afraid of was the economic growth which was especially in the third world considered quite impressive actually seems true of Cuba the documents have just been released and they're interesting on Kennedy in the Kennedy administration in Cuba and it's kind of interesting to see the way the facts are being hidden so for example just to illustrate that when you know this thing is going on at the World Trade Organization the European Union has brought charges against the United States for violating the World Trade Organization agreements with the Holmes Burton Act and the Cuban embargo altogether and the United States is isolated on that I mean in international arena the only votes for the United States are Israel which is reflexive that's like saying the Ukraine voted with Russia and in the old days so Israel and Uzbekistan for some reason I don't know why who's Beck it's done and Israel are the only countries that voted with the United States on this whole European Union's against it what was interesting is that when the United States has simply withdrawn from the World Trade Organization jurisdiction says you have no right to deal with us because we're the boss of the world but the reasons were interesting the reasons were that this is a policy that goes back they said falsely to the Kennedy administration we've had three decades of a policy of overthrowing the government of Cuba and the European Union has no right to challenge our policies I was Stuart Eizenstat the government spokesman well there was no reaction to that it's kind of interesting in itself it's taken for granted that we have a right to overthrow another government if we feel like it and if anyone challenges that they're off base but there was an interesting response on narrower by Arthur Schlesinger in the New York Times he had a letter and he said to said want to remind his friend Stuart Eizenstat that he misunderstood the Kennedy administration policies the policies he said were based on I'm quoting Castro's troublemaking in the hemisphere and the Soviet connection but now that's past so it's an anachronism well as Schlesinger was here becomes the discipline of the educated classes for example the people in Fletcher school and so on who certainly know what I'm going to tell you right now the documents that came out not long ago from the early 60s and bear directly on this question Arthur Schlesinger was the head of the Latin American mission of the Kennedy of the incoming Kennedy administration which was laying out you know talking about the problems and the plans for Cuba and there he explains what troublemaking in the hemisphere means and what the Soviet connection means he said the problem with Castro he said is the I'm quoting the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands okay which he said has great appeal to people in Latin America most of whom live in terrific poverty and oppression and are trying to find a more decent life and with the model of this is Cuba in front of them they're likely to do all sorts of things so that's Castro's troublemaking in the hemisphere what's the Soviet connection well the Soviet connection he said is that in the background the Soviet Union is presenting itself as a model for modernization in a single generation okay that's the Soviet connection well yeah so therefore we have to overthrow the government because of that kind of troublemaking and that kind of connection and in fact that extends much more broadly you know Kennedy and McMillan in their discussions in the early 60s were worried about the Anur potential for economic growth of the Soviet Union Oh what it would imply the same was true of Dulles in goes right back to 1917 so the facts of the opposite of what you're describing perhaps my question could be put differently if if this system is so bad and everything why hasn't there been excuse me power system our system in slope is so bad why hasn't why hasn't that been grid of movements to challenge it only isn't challenged all the time I mean we have a for example we have a very violent labor history and hundreds of American workers were being killed right into the late 30s and finally they got labor right there has been a very extensive challenge for this through the 50s in the sixties the whole thing blew up and in fact many concessions had to be made and it still continues I mean we right now happen to be in a period of regression but as I say it's cyclic you know it was much more regression in the 1920s when labor was really crushed so yes there's always challenge and struggle but when you say is the system so bad I don't even know what that means I mean slave societies went on for centuries and centuries without any challenge ok did that justify them and in fact if you really want to be serious about it the slave owners were giving arguments rather like yours so slavery very much like it take a read say George Fitzhugh who was the leading spokesman for the American you know south slave owners in the south at the time when it was becoming a serious issue like around the 1840s he had pretty powerful arguments in favor of slavery what he was saying is he was saying is look the reason you northers northerners are against slavery is because you're an e Negro racists we are not racists we think that you should take care of your subjects so we treat them nicely and we even do that on economic grounds because they're our capital you know like if I own make an anachronistic analogy if if I buy a car and you rent a car ok and somebody comes a year later and has a look at the two cars which car is gonna be in better shape ok well mine because I own it so I'm gonna take care of it not yours because you rent it and you can just throw it away and get another one okay that's exactly fits Hugh's argument he says look we own people you just rent them so therefore we take care of them we treat them well we respect them there are capital besides we have human relations with them we are pre-capitalist we still have human relations you just treat them as tools under wage slavery and they're much worse off and so we're the ones who are moral you're the ones who are tomorrow and in fact under under the slave system if you take a look it was reasonably efficient you know conditions were sort of improving people live better slaves live better in 1850 than in 1750 okay everything you're saying could stand as a perfectly good art nanak could be a good argument for slavery but was offered as an argument for slavery similar arguments were given for Bolshevism kartik say fascism and why was Hitler so popular you know Hitler was the most through the 30s it was the most popular leader probably in German history well the reason is he carried out a social revolution people are living a lot better I mean like not everybody you know not Jews for example but people were but Germans were living a lot better it was very successful Hitler on either understood or you know figured out or his advisers did that large-scale scale state expenditures could rescue a morbid capital economy from destruction pretty much what American business learned during the Second World War and he was doing it and it was the Connery was booming they were better off and so on is that an argument for fascism I'd like to thank dr. Tomsky for a great speech and

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Published: Sun Sep 03 2017