At the very tail end of the last one, Chomsky says that the Civil War has never ended. It’s played out today in the electorate, where the South generally speaking is still very much pro-slavery for every cotton picking working class drone of any color. It plays out in cop shootings and in prisons and the everyday lives of all of us.
It’s not just the South though. Good jobs and the putative dignity of work are championed by the NYC game show host president and the Scranton/Delaware president from MBNA alike. Wage slavery is normal, has always been normal, and always will be normal, though the corporatist dream of actual wageless machine slaves replacing the pesky meat-based kind may alter what it means to be human substantially–because poor humans and their ability to labor will have ever less value to the Machine.
In the earlier, lecturing video, Chomsky leans heavily when defining Anarchism on a guy with the unlikely name of Rudolf Rocker. I’m planning on listening to some of his books on audio.
Speaking tangentially of Syndicalism, it’s just an old word for what we’re trying to get at here, according to Richard Wolff. Old or not, it still beats the hell out of the co-opted and problematic ‘progressive’ …
More here:
Noam Chomsky on Anarcho-syndicalism
I’m more than happy to call myself an anarchist, mainly because no one really understands what the word means, and I get to make my own definitions, as I am doing rather studiously these days.
I’m pro-green too, for whatever that’s worth, if it means valuing green leaves over greenbacks.
One last little language problem is the term “working class”, and even “worker”.
The Wikipedians say “the working class includes all those who have nothing to sell but their labor. These people used to be referred to as the proletariat”. Marx copped the term from his study of Roman law, where the proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens who owned little or no property.
“Marx defined the proletariat as the social class having no significant ownership of the means of production (factories, machines, land, mines, buildings, vehicles) and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor power for a wage or salary.”
So going forward and on a trial basis, I’m going to lean toward self-defining as a prole, instead.