Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky - Plot & Excerpts
You could argue that we haven’t been ready for it yet—but there was also a period when we weren’t ready for ending slavery either; when conditions, including subjective conditions, were such that abolition just wasn’t in the cards. So one could argue that conditions today are such that we need the degree of hierarchy and domination that exists in totalitarian institutions like capitalist enterprises, just in order to satisfy our needs—or else a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or some other authoritarian structure like that. I mean, I don’t believe a word of it—but the point is, the justification for any kind of power system has to be argued and proven to people before it has any claim to legitimacy. And those arguments haven’t been made out in this case.If you look at what’s actually happened to the various efforts at libertarian socialism that have taken place around the world, the concentration of force and violence present in those situations has just been such that certain outcomes were virtually guaranteed, and consequently all incipient efforts at cooperative workers’ control, say, have simply been crushed.
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