It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
Cuba forces in Angola gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds.
The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.
Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it’s growth in a sense...
There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.
If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.
The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can’t go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who’s sniffing cocaine.
If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.
Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
You also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems.
He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.
Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s just fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have well-known inherent inefficiencies. They’re very destructive.
Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they’re attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That’s the standard way to run imperial wars.
Stakeholders – meaning workers and community – the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination,’ we might say – exercised through the mass media.
If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.