Ian Murray wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kendall Clark" <kendall at monkeyfist.com>
>
> > > Chomsky has never said anything of the sort.
> >
> > Perhaps not, but he's said things which are close to that.
> >
> > For example,
> >
> > Corporations come from the same intellectual roots as the other
> > forms of modern totalitarianism, namely, Stalinism and fascism.
> > Corporations have no more legitimacy than any other kind of
> > totalitarian regime.
> >
> ==================
Chomsky's "forms of modern totalitarianism" points to my point of departure. Fascism, precisely, was _A_ form of authoritarianism: and there will be other forms, and a focus on fascism (a dead form) disarms us in the face of whatever form authoritarianism takes _next_ in world.
Someone suggested I must be joking in referring to capitalist democracy. Of course there is such a thing as capitalist democracy -- mostly won and maintained by working-class struggle, but that is another topic. It is idiotic to deny the freedoms we enjoy -- partly because only through studying those freedomes is it possible to see how much freedom we _don't_ have, how repressive even the "softest" capitalist rule is.
I think Chomsky is in error in using the word "totalitarianism." It's a term that obscures more than it illuminates. And I think it is unuseful to place "Stalinism" and fascism in the same genre. Chomsky's "anarchist" tendencies (and his misunderstanding of Luxemburg) do show through often. His work is still invaluable for understanding the world we live in.
A final minor comment, "Corporations come from the same intellectual roots." This is meaningless. Corporations were a historical development, in which (more obviously than in many historical developments) the "intellectual roots" did not began to grow until the whole damn tree was there already. They had no intellectual roots.
Carrol
>
> Corps. have their origins in military hierarchies and in many cases the charters
> were given to ex-military officers in the 17th and 18th centuries. See Geoffrey
> Hodgson's "Economics and Evolution" and Maxine Berg's "The Age of Manufactures"
> for some refs. My former employer was started by a Viet Nam flyboy [napalm
> Freddie as my co-workers called him] who got his 'seed' capital as a reward from
> his folks for busting Greyhound's Union. Went to Yale as I recall..........
>
> Ian