Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

GOALS AND VISIONS
1. 98
assisted manufacturers of elegant dresses for export to other rich women. In
brief, the right kind of people.
Those are the successes of American values. Then there are the failures, still
on the slow lane. Perlez selects as her example a 43-01d coal miner, who "sits
in his wood-paneled living room admiring the fruits of his labor under
Communism-a television set, comfortable furniture, a shiny, modern
kitchen," now unemployed after 27 years in the mines and thinking about the
years before 1989. They "were gr"eat," he says, and "life was secure and comfortable."
A slow learner, he finds the new values "unfathomable," and cannot
understand "why he is at home, jobless and dependent on welfare payments,"
worrying about his 10 children, lacking the skill to "Gain Wealth, forgetting
all bur Self."
It is understandable, then, that Poland should find its place on the shelf
alongside the other trophies, inspiring further pride and self-acclaim.
The region is plagued with other slow learners, a problem reviewed in a
"global report" of Christian Science Monitor correspondents in the former
Communist world. One entrepreneur complained that "he offered a fellow
Ukrainian $ 100 a month to help him grow roses in a private plot" (in translation:
to work for him). "Compared with the $4 that the man earned on a collective
farm, it was a fortune. But the offer was rejected." The fast learner
attributes the irrationality to "a certain mentality" that lingers on even after the
victory of freedom: "He thinks, 'Nyet, I'm not going to leave the collenive and
be your slave.'" American workers had long been infected with the same
unwillingness to become someone's slave, until properly civilized; I'll return to
that.
Tenants in an apartment building in Warsaw suffer from the same malady.
They do not want to hand over their apartments to an industrialist who claims
ownership of the building from before World Wa r II, asking "Why should
people profit from something they don't have a right to?" There has been "significant
reform progress" in overcoming such retrograde attitudes, the report
continues, though "there is still great reluctance to let foreigners buy and sell
land." The coordinator of US-sponsored agricultural initiatives in Ukraine
explains that "You'll never have a situation where 1 00 percent of the land is in
private hands. They've never had democracy." True, anti-democratic passions
do not run as high as in Vietnam, where a February 1995 decree "set the clock
back": "In a tribute to Marx, the decree aims to help Vietnamese by squeezing
rent from the privileged few who have land certificates for businesses," granted
in an effort to attract foreign investment. If only foreign investors and a tiny
domestic elite were allowed to buy lip the country, the natives could work for
them (if they are lucky), and we'd have freedom and "democracy" at last, as in
Central America, the Philippines, and other paradises liberated long ago. ?