In this post, I’m sharing powerful, thought-provoking quotes from Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism. I will start with one that feels compatible with the concept of ungorvenment I discussed in a previous post, where I argue that “we need something we’ll call ungovernment (for now), which is an institution (or a yet undefined thing) whose role is to remove unnecessary control and restore agency, responsibility, and decision-making to individuals.”
… at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to — rather than alleviate — material and cultural deficit.
– Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism
The second quote is a rewording by Chomsky of Kant’s defense of the French Revolution:
Freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved.
The third quote is on wage slavery.
If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract” — but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve,” that’s not a choice — it’s in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.
– Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism
(Later in the book, we read the shorter version of the above. Chomsky says, “I think wage slavery is an attack on fundamental human rights.”)
Now, the fourth quote. And I think this can be an add-on to the concept of ungovernment that I’m building. The government has to justify why constraints are in place, and the people must have the right to question it and the right to request amendments.
People have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom then you’ve got to justify them.
– Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism
And the last one, which reminds us of what Herbert Marcuse says in One-Dimensional Man.
Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking that are cut off from us in our society — not because we’re incapable of them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to prevent people from thinking in those ways.
– Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism
