Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

GOALS AND VISIONS
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can be attained by extending (Q the direction of the economy the principles of
democratic politics." "It is by the people who do the work that the hours of
labour, the conditions of employment, the division of the produce is to be
determined," he urged in what David Montgomery calls "a clarion call to the
1893 AFL convention." It is by the workers themselves, Lloyd continued, that
"the captains of indusny are to be chosen, and chosen to be servants, not masters.
It is for the welfare of all that the coordinated labour of all must be directd
.... Th· · d "15
IS IS e emocracy.
These ideas are, of course, familiar to the libertarian left, though radically
counter to the doctrines of the dominant systems of power, whether called
"left," "right," or "center" in the largely meaningless terms of contemporary
discourse. They have only recently been suppressed, not for the first time, and
can be recovered, as often before.
Such values would also have been intelligible to the founders of classical lib
eralism. As in England earlier, reactions of workers in the industrial rowns of
New England illustrate the acuity of Adam Smith's critique of division of labor.
Adopring standard Enlightenment ideas abour freedom and creativity, Smith
recognized that "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily
formed by their ordinary employmenrs." Hence:
the man whose life is spenr in performing a few simple operations,
of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or
very nearly the same, has no occasion ro exert his understanding
... and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible
for a human creature to be .... But in every improved and civilized
society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that
is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government
takes pains to prevenr it,
as mllst be done ro bar the destructive impact of economic forces, he felt. I f an
artisan produces a beautiful object on command, Wilhelm von Humboldt
wrote in classic work that inspired Mill, "we may admire what he does, but we
despise what he is": not a free human being, bur a mere device in the hands of
others. For similar reasons, "the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a
truer sense its owner than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits."
Genuine conservatives continued ro recognize that market forces will destroy
what is of value in human life, unless sharply constrained. Alexis de
Tocqueville, echoing Smith and von Humboldt a half century earlier, asked
rhetorically what "can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his
life in making heads for pins?" "The an advances, rhe artisan recedes," he commented.
Like Smith, he valued equality of condition, recognizing it to be the
foundation of American democracy, and warning that if "permanent inequali
ty of conditions" ever becomes established, "the manufacturing aristocracy
which is growing up under our eyes," and which "is one of the harshest that
has ever existed in the world," might escape its confines, spelling the end of