Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

MAN: But you could say that “to truck and barter” is human nature—that people are fundamentally materialist, and will always want to accumulate more and more under any social structure. You could say it, but there’s no reason to believe it. You look at peasant societies, they go on for thousands of years without it—do those people have a different human nature? Or just look inside a family: do people “truck and barter” over how much you’re going to eat for dinner? Well, certainly a family is a normal social structure, and you don’t see people accumulating more and more for themselves regardless of the needs of the other people. In fact, just take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself: look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken—conscious efforts—to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population.