Noam Chomsky: Renting yourself not much different from selling yourself | [wage slavery]

May 20, 1985

No more reason to accept wage slavery than there was to accept slavery or feudalism

NOAM CHOMSKY LECTURE - DECIPHERING FOREIGN POLICY JARGON 1/2

"I don't see an enormous difference between a society in which you sell yourself to someone and a society in which you rent yourself to someone. I mean, they seem to me approximately equally inhuman. Well, we agree now, though we didn't 100 years ago, on the first - that slavery is wrong. But there's another thing, which in the old days used to be called wage slavery, which means that you rent yourself to somebody else in order to survive. It means that control over resources, and production, and investment is in the hands of a particular, and rather small group of people, and everyone else has the choice of either dying or renting themselves to them, more or less on their terms. And that seems to me a totally intolerable form of human life, you know. I mean, there's no reason to accept that any more than there was a reason to accept slavery, or feudalism, or whatever. How do you change that? Well, you try to change it through existing institutions. You probably fail. In which case you change the institutions, which are not graven in stone, you know. History hasn't come to an end."

[wonkmonk]

Noam Chomsky: YOU ARE A WAGE SLAVE (and you don't even realize it)