On Anarchism

by Noam Chomsky

What is your advice for people who have the same concerns, who identify with the tradition that you come out of, and who want to be engaged in opposition? The same as the factory girls in the Lowell textile plant 150 years ago: they joined with others. To do these things alone is extremely hard, especially when you’re working fifty hours a week to put the food on the table. Join with others, and you can do a lot of things. It’s got a big multiplier effect. That’s why unions have always been in the lead of development of social and economic progress. They bring together poor people, working people, enable them to learn from one another, to have their own sources of information, and to act collectively. That’s how everything is changed—the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the solidarity movements, the workers’ movements. The reason we don’t live in a dungeon is because people have joined together to change things. And there’s nothing different now from before. In fact, just in the last forty years, we’ve seen remarkable changes in this respect. Go back to ’62, there was no feminist movement, there was a very limited human rights movement. There was no environmental movement, meaning rights of our grandchildren. There were no Third World solidarity movements. There was no antiapartheid movement. There was no anti-sweatshop movement. I mean, all of the things that we take for granted just weren’t there. How did they get there? Was it a gift from an angel? No, they...