A Conversation with Noam Chomsky pt.1
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The viral growth of the Occupy Movement, and the public support of it,
is testament to the tremendous dissatisfaction
with the inequities and abuses of corporate capitalism.
The slogan "We are the 99%" has resonated with many people
What is your view of the potential strength
of this type of mass protest
and its possibility to effect social change?
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 weren't crystalized 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.
That's one major contribution.
The other one is not discussed so much,
but I think it' s pretty important.
This is an extremely atomized society. .
People are alone
It's 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 you're 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 Massachussetts, 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, anything.
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 people's heads,
“Gain wealth, forgetting all but self.”
Now it's considered kind of an ideal,
but it's also intolerable to human beings
One effect of the Occupy Movement
has been simply to spontaneously
create