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Chomsky Interview on Occupy and other questions
...Noam Chomsky: Well the Occupy Movement already has had a number of significant successes. One of them, as you say, is to kind of change the national discourse. These concerns and fears and so on were, of course, prevalent for a long time for perfectly objective reasons, having to do with changes in the socio-economic system in the last 30 or 40 years. But they werent crystallized very clearly until the Occupy Movement put them forward. And now they are kind of common coin. So the 99 percent and one percent, the radical inequality, the farcical character of purchased elections, the corporate shenanigans that led to the current crisis and have been crushing people for a long time, the overseas wars, and so on. Thats one major contribution.
The other one is not discussed so much, but I think its pretty important. This is an extremely atomized society. People are alone. Its a very business-run society. The very explicit goal of the business world is to create a social order in which the basic social unit is you and your television set, in which youre watching ads and going out to purchase commodities. There are tremendous efforts made, that have been going on for a century and a half, to try to induce this kind of consciousness and social order.
In fact if you go back say 150 years, in the early days of the industrial revolution, right here in Massachusetts, where it started, there was a very lively press at the time, probably the period of the greatest free press in the United States. All kinds of press ethnic, labor, etc. And the labor press, which was extremely interesting, lively and participatory, had a great many harsh criticisms of the industrial system that was being imposed and to which people were being driven. One of the core criticisms was what 150 years ago they called the New Spirit of the Age: Gain wealth, forgetting all but self, which they considered savage and inhuman and was being driven into their heads. Well, 150 years later they are still trying to drive into peoples heads, Gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Now its considered kind of an ideal, but its also intolerable to human beings.
One effect of the Occupy Movement has been simply to spontaneously create small social systems of solidarity, mutual support, cooperation, cooperative kitchens, libraries, health services, general assemblies in which people actually interact and so on. Thats something that is very much missing in this society. When we talk about potential, part of the potential would be to first of all maintain those bonds and associations after the tactic has outlived its usefulness. And tactics do outlive their usefulness. After that happens, if what has been learned and internalized can be sustained and extended, that would be very important in itself...
read it here: http://www.zcommunications.org/a-conversation-by-noam-chomsky
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Chomsky Interview on Occupy and other questions (Original Post)
limpyhobbler
Mar 2012
OP
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)1. Wow, marvelous interview.
Noam Chomsky gets it. Occupy is about so much more than just economic reform. It is about opening up perceptions.
This paragraph, especially, hit me:
The other one is not discussed so much, but I think its pretty important. This is an extremely atomized society. People are alone. Its a very business-run society. The very explicit goal of the business world is to create a social order in which the basic social unit is you and your television set, in which youre watching ads and going out to purchase commodities. There are tremendous efforts made, that have been going on for a century and a half, to try to induce this kind of consciousness and social order.
Occupy allows people to step outside all the corporate indoctrination and begin to see it for what it is. which is a huge, huge step. We are for the first time in a long time starting to make explicit all these implicit messages we are fed about what is important in life....consumption, competition, material wealth....and realize that they are manipulative and serve a function for the corporate elite. They keep us working in our hamster wheels for their profit, and they teach us to accept and even embrace the constant push to get us to work longer hours, take more time away from our families, retire later, and participate in disparaging the poor and celebrating billionaires.
People really are beginning to question all this, all of these messages. People are starting to wonder if this is really the best way to run a society....if there might be a different way of doing things, and a different set of values to emphasize.
It's a change in perception that is sorely needed. It's also one that the corporate elite are not going to want to sit still to allow us to experience.