Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

INTERVIEW WITH BRRRY PRTEMRN
every organizer knows this. Take the women's movement, as a striking example.
It begins with consciousness-raising groups. Where people talk to each
other and bring out elements of their lives that they may nor perceive very
clearly. And it's true across the board for educational institutions, factories and
everywhere else. It's very striking to see how this has worked over the years. Go
back to the early days of the industrial revolution, right around here in Lowell,
Lawrence, the places where the textile mills were being created. Among the
people who were drawn into the early factories-young women from the
farms, Irish artisans from the slums etc.-there was an extremely radical consciousness
that was just natural. They didn't read Marx, weren't aware of
European radicalism, had never heard of anarchism or anything else. It was just
the natural assumption. They had a very free press-something that we have
lost. The free press of those days just (Ook for granred that wage labor was pretty
much like slavery, that those who worked in the mills ought to own them­
"Why do we need these bosses telling us what (0 do?"-and that "the factory
system, industrial system is just crushing our cultural values and creative
impulses; they are turning us into robots" and so fo rth. All of this was understood,
taken for granted. You go out to a working class neighborhood roday
and you won't find it. But it's not that people have to be taught it: it has to be
brought oU{ from their inner nature where it has been suppressed by very conscious
efforts.
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It's striking to see how conscious this is. About a century ago Taylorism was
introduced into industry-"Taylorism" for Frederick Taylor-basically to turn
workers in(O robots so every emotion is controlled, so they don't have any
choices and they become essentially robots. Like everything else it was initiated
in the military system because there you can carry out experiments cost-free,
at public cost and risk. Then it was transferred to industry, the mass production
system and so on. Lenin was very enamored of it. He had about the same
conceptions as capitalist managers and the idea was to robotize work. But it
was quickly recognized in the 1920s that what they called "on-job control"
could be extended to "off-job control." That is, controlling every other aspect
of life in the same way. So why should people not be robots in their entire life?
And to be a robot means to focus your attention on what were called the superficial
things of life. Like fashionable consumption, nor on care for one another,
not on working together to create a decent environment, not on what the
world will be like for your children. To turn you into a passive consumer, a person
who pushes buttons every couple years and is taught that that is democracy.
Follow orders, don't think. IdentifY your own value as a human being in the
amount of useless consumption that YOll can carry out. That's "off-job control."
It runs through all the instirurions and it's a huge industry. And, yes, to
overcome off-job control YOll have to make people realize that your value as a
human being is not how deeply you can go in debt and how many credit cards
you can max out to get commodities you want. That is not your vallie as a
human being. You go to a mall over the weekend and see young kids who in