Avram Noam Chomsky (born 7 December 1928) is an American linguist, analytical philosopher, cognitive scientist, political analyst, human rights activist and anarcho-socialist.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Augusto Starita / Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación (CC BY-SA)
The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called "minimizing the state," that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: "to the people" in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.
Rather, democracy is when every free citizen has authority and oligarchy is when the rich have it. Democracy is when there is a majority of free, poor men who have authority to rule, while oligarchy is when it is in the hands of the wealthy and well-born, who are a minority.
Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society, and by explicit judgments of value concerning the character of this future society.
