Noam Chomsky: Wage Slavery

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December 21, 2020
Noam Chomsky on Jung, Wittgenstein, and Gödel (Ask Me Anything)
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Transcript:
You can make a case that humans have always been striving for freedom and resist constraints on their activity. Now, this can be suppressed, and there are very interesting cases of it. So, take something in our ordinary experience - getting a job. Suppose you're out of work, you don't have anything to eat, you look for a job. It's considered a wonderful thing to get a job. It wasn't always that way. You go back to the origins of the Industrial Revolution, mid-19th century, and take a look at the literature, the working-class literature. There was a very rich working-class literature and political discussions. The idea of having a job was considered a totally intolerable assault on elementary human dignity and human rights. Why should you be subjected to a master? Why should anybody spend most of their waking hours following orders given by a totalitarian ruler? That's what having a job is. It means you're following the orders of a master. And in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, this was regarded as not really different from slavery. In fact, it was called wage slavery. It was different from slavery only in that it was temporary, until you could become a free, independent human being again. That was the slogan of the major working-class organization, the major one in American history, Knights of Labor. It was a slogan of the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party held that to be subordinate to a master and under wage labor is intolerable, it can't be tolerated. Now, that's been beaten out of people's heads over 150 years, but I don't think it's far below the surface, and I think it can be elicited. And there are many other cases like that. It's the kind of thing that Gramsci talked about when he discussed how hegemonic common sense captures people and imprisons them, and gets them to not comprehend their own natural instincts and desires. And this is, for a revolutionary, the first step: to try to unravel these kinds of constraints on thinking that make us automatically obedient and subservient, instead of asking, "Is that right?"