4 ms·
I'm in the middle of reading "The Jungle", by Upton Sinclair. The working conditions described within were pretty cruel and totalitarian. However it's also easy
by subjectsigma 8y ago
I'm in the middle of reading "The Jungle", by Upton Sinclair. The working conditions described within were pretty cruel and totalitarian. However it's also easy to compare and contrast the corporate greed and suffering within to modern day concepts like minimum wage and see that we've obviously made tons of progress and things continue to get better. Like all extremist positions, though, this will never be enough for Noam Chomsky - from where he sits, reality itself is totalitarian. How dare humans have to work for their food? What a tragedy it is that wolves must run to hunt their prey, and that this prey must die an agonizing death so someone else can live! At some point you have to suffer in life; if you agree with this then "wage-based servitude" doesn't sound so bad, and modern white-collar work is really only "wage-based servitude" by technical definition.
- peisistratos 8y ago> How dare humans have to work for their food? The point is that there is a class of humans who do not work for their food - the heirs. The Saint Grottlesex aristocracy who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. Who are calling right now in the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek to increase unemployment and enlarge the industrial reserve army, no doubt then to bemoan the grain then handed to those workers left idle, like the optimates of two thousand years ago. Chomsky's whole argument is against the parasitic elite who do not work expropriating from those of us who do.
- subjectsigma 8y agoIf that was his argument, it didn't gracefully survive being taped and uploaded to Twitter. He seemed to be against the idea of contracts, working for pay, and hierarchy itself.