Rob > Rob's Quotes

“MAN: What do you think about nationalization of industry as a means of allowing for this kind of large-scale social planning?

Well, it would depend on how it’s done. If nationalization of industry puts production into the hands of a state bureaucracy or some sort of Leninist-style vanguard party, then you’d just have another system of exploitation, in my view. On the other hand, if nationalization of industry was based on actual popular control over industry—workers’ control over factories, community control, with the groups maybe federated together and so on—then that would be a different story. That would be a very different story, in fact. That would be extending the democratic system to economic power, and unless that happens, political power is always going to remain a very limited phenomenon.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“the effects of this commitment throughout the Third World are dramatically clear: it takes only a moment’s thought to realize that the areas that have been the most under U.S. control are some of the most horrible regions in the world. For instance, why is Central America such a horror-chamber? I mean, if a peasant in Guatemala woke up in Poland [i.e. under Soviet occupation], he’d think he was in heaven by comparison—and Guatemala’s an area where we’ve had a hundred years of influence. Well, that tells you something. Or look at Brazil: potentially an extremely rich country with tremendous resources, except it had the curse of being part of the Western system of subordination. So in northeast Brazil, for example, which is a rather fertile area with plenty of rich land, just it’s all owned by plantations, Brazilian medical researchers now identify the population as a new species with about 40 percent the brain size of human beings, a result of generations of profound malnutrition and neglect—and this may be un-remediable except after generations, because of the lingering effects of malnutrition on one’s offspring. 54 Alright, that’s a good example of the legacy of our commitments, and the same kind of pattern runs throughout the former Western colonies. In fact, if you look at the countries that have developed in the world, there’s a little simple fact which should be obvious to anyone on five minutes’ observation, but which you never find anyone saying in the United States: the countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“Well, every one of the rich countries hit upon more or less the same method of getting out. They did it independently, but they more or less hit on the same method—namely, state spending, public spending of some kind, what’s called “Keynesian stimulation.” And that did finally get countries out of the Depression. In the Fascist countries, it worked very well—they got out pretty fast. And in fact, every country became sort of fascist; again, “fascism” doesn’t mean gas chambers, it means a special form of economic arrangement with state coordination of unions and corporations and a big role for big business. And this point about everyone being fascist was made by mainstream Veblenite-type economists [i.e. after the American economist Veblen] right at the time, actually—they said, everybody’s fascist, the only question is what form the fascism takes: it takes different forms depending on the country’s cultural patterns.6”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky