Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits—those are fundamentally different interests. MAN: In an industrial society, though, one might argue that people need to have jobs. Sure, but having jobs doesn’t require destroying the environment which makes life possible. I mean, if you have participatory social planning, and people are trying to work things out in terms of their own interests, they are going to want to balance opportunities to work with quality of work, with type of energy available, with conditions of personal interaction, with the need to make sure your children survive, and so on and so forth. But those are all considerations that simply don’t arise for corporate executives, they just are not a part of the agenda.