Consequences of Capitalism Quotes

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.” Some people might now call that the deep state. I wouldn’t, but some people might. “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of” (1928). He is referring to himself and other people who are behind the scenes manipulating public opinion, which is another phrase for common sense. “In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, the nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society…. When machines and computers, profit models and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” The context in which Martin Luther King made this comment was a pivotal point in his own career. This is his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, after which virtually all of his former allies turned against him. He was isolated after giving this speech.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“So think about the mentality of the people who devote themselves to destroying the prospects for organized human life, know very well what they’re doing, and are perfectly rational human beings. How do you put all this together? Take, say, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, then moved into the Trump administration, but was soon kicked out because he was considered too rational. As CEO of ExxonMobil, he was responsible for what I was just describing. Or take Jamie Diamond, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. I haven’t seen what he has to say about the topic, but he certainly understands all this. He’s an intelligent rational person, keeps his finger on the pulse of the world. He has to in order to make money. So what’s going on? Put yourself in their place. What do you do if you’re Rex Tillerson or Jamie Diamond? They actually have a couple of choices. One choice is to seek to maximize profits. The other choice is to quit and be replaced by somebody who will seek to maximize profits. So those are your choices. Does that account for the mentality? I don’t think it absolves the individuals from responsibility, but it does indicate that they have little choice. The problem is not just individual, it’s institutional.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“The alternative to late-stage capitalism, which is what we’re describing here, sometimes termed really existing capitalism, which, as we’ve begun to discuss already, often actually means socialism for the rich and brutal or gangster capitalism for the rest. The alternative to this is not a planned economy run by an authoritarian state, which is often portrayed in the obverse sort of mythology as communism or really existing socialism. For example, in the former USSR or Russia today, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and so on, virtually all of those experiments, many of which were Marxist or socialist inspired, were really a state capitalism in a slightly different inflection than the state capitalism we see elsewhere in the world. That’s not the alternative. The alternative that we’re thinking about is an economy that’s run by the producers, that is the workers themselves, through a democratization of the workplace. We say we value democracy very highly and yet we don’t institute it in the places where we spend most of our lives. That is, the workplace is a very authoritarian kind of environment and we don’t really question that.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“I’ve been discussing elite attitudes toward democracy. I sketched a line from the first democratic revolution, with its fear and contempt for the rascal multitude who were asking for ridiculous things like universal education, health care, and democratization of law, wanting to be ruled by countrymen like themselves who know the people’s sores, not by knights and gentlemen who just oppress them. From there to the second major democratic revolution establishing the US Constitution, which was, as discussed last time, a Framers’ Coup, the title of the main scholarly work, a coup by elites that the author describes as a conservative counterrevolution against excessive democracy. On to the twentieth century and such leading progressive theorists of democracy as Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and their conception that the public has to be put in its place. They’re spectators, not participants. The responsible men, the elite, have to be protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd, who have to be kept in line with necessary illusions, emotionally potent oversimplifications, and, in general, engineering of consent, which has become a gigantic industry devoted to some aspects of the task, while responsible intellectuals take care of others. The men of best quality through the ages have to be self-indoctrinated, as Orwell discussed. They must internalize the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. It must be so fully internalized that it becomes as routine as taking a breath. What else could anyone possibly believe? As long as all of this is in place, the system functions properly, with no crises. This picture, I think, captures crucial features of thought control in the more free societies, but it is misleading in essential ways. Most importantly, it largely omitted the constant popular struggles to extend the range of democracy, with many successes. Even in the last generation, there have been quite substantial successes. Such successes typically lead to a reaction. Those with power and privilege don’t relinquish it easily. The neoliberal period that we’re now enduring, long in planning, is such a reaction.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“The mid-seventeenth-century conflict is usually presented as a war between king and Parliament, the latter representing the rising merchant and manufacturing classes. The final “glorious revolution” established the primacy of Parliament. And also registered victories for the rising bourgeoisie. One not inconsiderable achievement was to break the royal monopoly on the highly lucrative slave trade. The merchants were able to gain a large share of this enterprise, a substantial part of the basis for British prosperity. But there also were wild men in the wings—much of the general public. They were not silent. Their pamphlets and speakers favored universal education, guaranteed health care, and democratization of the law. They developed a kind of liberation theology, which, as one critic ominously observed, preached “seditious doctrine to the people” and aimed “to raise the rascal multitude … against all men of best quality in the kingdom, to draw them into associations and combinations with one another … against all lords, gentry, ministers, lawyers, rich and peaceable men.” Particularly frightening were the itinerant workers and preachers calling for freedom and democracy, the agitators stirring up the rascal multitude, and the authors and printers distributing pamphlets questioning authority and its mysteries. Elite opinion warned that the radical democrats had “cast all the mysteries and secrets of government … before the vulgar (like pearls before swine),” and have “made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.” It is dangerous, another commentator ominously observed, to “have a people know their own strength”—to learn that power is “in the hands of the governed,” in Hume’s words.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“One of the leading intellectuals of the libertarian movement, Nobel laureate in economics James Buchanan, outlined the guiding principle lucidly. In his major work Limits of Liberty, he pointed out that the ideal society should accord with fundamental human nature, which makes good sense. And then went on, reasonably, to ask the next question: What is fundamental human nature? He had a very simple answer: “In a strictly personalized sense, any person’s ideal situation is one that allows him full freedom of action and inhibits the behavior of others so as to force adherence to his own desires. That is to say, each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“As Crehan is arguing, based on Gramsci, we need to be able to formulate a new common sense to combat the existing one and open up the possibilities of different imaginaries. “The value of Gramsci’s concept of common sense is that it offers us a way of thinking about the texture of everyday life that encompasses its givenness [that is, the way in which we’re thrown into it at birth]—how it both constitutes our subjectivity, the way we think about ourselves, and confronts us as an external and solid reality” (2016). This is back to Giddens’s notion of structuration (1984). The way the world works doesn’t seem to have been created by us. It simply seems to confront us as a kind of materiality that we have no say in changing. This is what we really need to be combating. “But that also acknowledges its contradictions, fluidity and flexibility. For all its apparent solidity, it [that is, common sense] is continually being modified by how actual people in actual places live it” (Giddens 1984). So it’s important, it’s vitally important, to understand the sort of fluid nature of common sense, that it is not solid in the way that it’s constantly being told to us.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“An essential mechanism of censorship, in Orwell’s view, is a good education. If you’ve gone to the best schools, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn’t do to say, or, we may add, even to think. It all becomes part of your being. And if you’re a good student and have properly absorbed the lessons, you can become a responsible intellectual. That’s the unpublished preface to Animal Farm.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“You’ve all read Animal Farm in school, I’m sure. But it’s pretty unlikely that you’ve read Orwell’s preface to Animal Farm, which was not published. It was discovered many years later in his collected papers. It sometimes appears in contemporary editions, but was probably missing from the book you read. You’ll recall that Animal Farm is a satirical critique of Bolshevik Russia, the totalitarian enemy. But the preface, directed to the people of free England, says that they shouldn’t feel too self-righteous about it. England too has literary censorship, of a kind appropriate to free societies in thrall to hegemonic common sense. “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England,” Orwell wrote, “is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“The propagandist as one who creates symbols which are not only popular but which bring about positive realignments of behavior is no phrasemonger but a promoter of overt acts.” Note the free use of the term “propagandist,” as with Bernays. This was in the ’30s. In those days, the term did not have the negative connotations it has since assumed (in English; other languages still use the term neutrally). Putting aside the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, we’re back to the same principles. In a democratic society, we, the intelligent minority, have the duty of directing the “ignorant and stupid” masses to what we decide are proper goals, using whatever deception is required. All for their own good.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Because we take certain things about the world for granted when we encounter new data, we accept it or reject it based in large part on whether it corresponds with or contradicts what we think we already know. This is what I had said earlier. This is being increasingly reinforced by the so-called bubble or silo effect in which computer algorithms channel our online behavior so that we rarely encounter views with which we disagree”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“these six corporations, and more precisely, the key decision makers within them, set the boundaries on acceptable debate on what’s socially, politically, economically possible. They make their decisions on those things based on profit maximization, both short and long term. If you think they’re making their decisions on anything else, you are mistaken.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“part of the potency of the common sense, is to rule out our thinking any differently about the world. That is, to subjugate our own mental capacity to imagine the world otherwise.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“The American dream, here it is: In America (and this is not just confined to America of course), if you work hard, play by the rules, you will succeed. Work hard, play by the rules, you will succeed. That’s part of the dream. Typically, it also includes a metric for what constitutes success. It almost invariably takes a commodified form, success. Since that’s the kind of reward a capitalist system can and must deliver. For example, a recurrent formulation is a home of one’s own.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“The phrase itself, the American dream, was coined in the ’30s basically in the heart of the Depression. Much of this framing was pointed at the need to keep the economy rumbling at a great pace when World War II ended. So one of the ways in which industry could keep going was to promulgate not collective consumption, but individual consumption.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Those who are advantaged by the status quo are continually at work to make us understand that the way things are is the way things should be. And thus, the ways in which we understand the world are very much connected to the ways in which we interact with the world.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, which was efficient but also a highly controlling device. There was a problem with the assembly line. It’s so onerous that people dropped out. They couldn’t stand it. They had to hire almost a thousand workers to see if they could get one hundred to stay on.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Hegemony, as I’m using the term here, is governance with the consent of the governed. The alternative form of governance is coercion. Now think about it, if you’re an elite and you want to govern people, which of these forms is preferable? Well, of the two, hegemony is much more desirable for the governors since governance with consent does not produce opposition and resistance by definition. If people are consenting to be governed, why would they object? Why would they resist?”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“I’m just going to say, there’s an obverse meaning to take away from the common sense understanding of how our society operates. That obverse meaning is this: In America, if you don’t succeed, you are either not working hard enough, or you are not playing by the rules, or both. So if you don’t succeed, and this is the obverse of thinking about the American dream as it’s laid out, essentially, your failure is your own fault. This is another corollary of the individualized notion of how society works. All the opportunities are there. If you fail, it is your fault. There is nothing structural or systemic or unfair getting in your way, either historically, contemporaneously, or into the future.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“When you rent yourself to some concentration of capital in the private sector—that’s what taking a job is—you’re giving your life over to a dictatorship, in fact, an extreme form of dictatorship that reaches far beyond political dictatorships. The tyranny to which you are handing yourself over to has almost total control over you. It controls every minute of your working day: what you wear and are allowed to say, when you’re allowed to get a bathroom break, how your hands and legs move, whether you smoke cigarettes at home. Just about everything in your life is controlled by this extreme dictatorship, which goes far beyond any totalitarian dictatorship in the degree of control it exercises.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Here is the myth first of all. This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite. The other lazy rascals, spending their substance more in riotous living. Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell, except their own skins. That’s really what happened. From this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority, that despite all its labor has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such childishness is every day preached to us in the defense of property. (Capital, vol. 1, 873–74)”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Lippmann was a major figure in many domains, including political theory. The main collection of his political essays is called “political philosophy for liberal democracy.” In these essays he explains that the “public must be put in its place” so that “the intelligent minorities” may live free of “the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd,” the public. Members of the bewildered herd are supposed to be “spectators of action,” not “participants.” They do have a function, however. Their function is to show up periodically to push a button to vote for a selected member of the leadership class. Then they are to go away and leave us alone. That’s progressive democratic theory. I”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“The new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. This is not pointed at anyone. —Max Planck”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“one of the things we’re concerned about is the quest for infinite growth (an unavoidable feature of capitalism) on a finite planet. With that imperative, the biosphere is now subsumed under the economy. This has to be reversed. That is, the biosphere is now seen in strictly utilitarian terms to be simply a storehouse of resources, and/or a receptacle for waste. Also under capitalist compulsion, people now serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Development should be about people, not about objects. Development, often seen as synonymous with progress, is equated with growth, measured as GNP or GDP, sometimes per capita. This must be challenged, and we need differential criteria and different metrics for what constitutes development and progress. Right now these are equated. Development doesn’t necessarily require growth, development has no limits, growth has limits or should. And this is clearly referring back to the growth/de-growth debate that we read about. All of this is underlain by issues of what constitutes happiness, satisfaction, and quality of life. What do these actually essential elements of life actually depend on? At the moment, under our current capitalist system, and its associated common sense, these aspects are measured by the acquisition of more and more things. But we don’t go readily into this mindset, we have to actually be induced or seduced. Global advertising spending in 2014 was $488.48 billion and is projected to grow to $757.44 billion by 2021. So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“One consequence of all of this has been a severe erosion of democracy, an immediate consequence of sharp concentration of wealth and business power. We’ve discussed some of the means: virtual purchase of elections, radical escalation of lobbying, undermining of voting rights, all facilitated further by the most reactionary Supreme Court in living memory. There is no longer fear of excessive democracy. There’s a lot of fuss, as you know, about alleged Russian meddling in the elections. It is scarcely detectable, but even if it existed on any substantial scale, it would be invisible in comparison with the interference in elections by extreme wealth and corporate power. But these are more things that it wouldn’t do to say. Best to worry about the Russians. One consequence of all of this, also well established in the academic political science literature, is that a considerable majority of the population, those who are lower on the income-wealth scale, are literally disenfranchised. They may cast votes, but it doesn’t much matter. They’re disenfranchised in the sense that when you compare their preferences and attitudes with the decisions made by their own representatives, there’s virtually no correlation. The legislators are listening to other voices. The donor class. During the neoliberal period, the past generation, both parties shifted pretty far to the right. The Democrats abandoned the working class. They delivered them to their class enemies, who try to mobilize them on what are called cultural issues: white supremacy, fundamentalist religion, and in other ways to which we’ll return. And with the promises of decent jobs, which oddly enough are not fulfilled.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“At its heart, neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual—not collective, please note—individual entrepreneurial freedoms defined in very particular ways, and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, so-called “free markets,” and so-called “free” trade. If I could just have my hands doing air quotes, I’d be doing it continuously, but you can see that in your imagination. The role of the state under neoliberal philosophy is to create and preserve an institutional framework that’s appropriate to these kinds of practices. It must guarantee the quality and integrity of money. Also set up those military defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights, and to guarantee, by force if need be (and we’ve seen some of this already in the conversation about militarism; we’ll see more of it), by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. That’s the role of the state. If markets do not exist in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution, then they must be created by state action if necessary. You can see these things immediately as either prior public goods or public resources, these are all to be brought under the rubrics of the market through privatization, an essential feature of neoliberalism. Any other actions by the state are deemed then to be illegitimate, but you can tell already that the state has a very significant role to play here, even though proponents of neoliberalism and their rhetoric constantly downplay both the role and the necessity of the state. It should also be quite clear, immediately and despite this rhetoric, that neoliberalism is not really an unencumbered, non-state-mediated enterprise.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“1945, immediately post–World War II, to up around 1970 or so. These dates are not precise, of course, but they encapsulate certain kinds of changes in the political economic system. This is a period that’s sometimes called regulated capitalism. Sometimes it’s called embedded liberalism. Sometimes it’s called the Golden Age of Capitalism. Then, the second period from about 1970 to about 2008, which is really the advent period of neoliberalism. And then, following the crash in 2008, I think we’ve actually moved into a new moment, which a number of analysts, including people like Henry Giroux, have called gangster capitalism”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“They all know exactly what they’re doing, not just the reporters and the editors of the major press, but also the CEOs of the energy and financial corporations. And, of course, also the political leaders. They’re not illiterate.”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance