The Dawn of Everything:A New History of Humanity has an excellent analysis of ideas about sharing and freedom.

David Zitner



> On Jun 6, 2022, at 12:36 PM, Dennis Raphael <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> CAUTION: The Sender of this email is not from within Dalhousie.
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> “Marx’s Old Mole is Right Beneath the Surface”
> Noam Chomsky on his new book, the Capitol coup attempt, 2020 unrest, and the prospects for progress under Biden.
> 
> https://bostonreview.net/articles/marxs-old-mole-is-right-beneath-the-surface/
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> DB: You conclude the chapter on social change in Consequences of Capitalism with Karl Marx’s old mole. “We recognize our old friend, our old mole,” he wrote, “who knows so well how to work underground, suddenly to appear: the revolution.”
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> Noam Chomsky: Marx had this image of a revolutionary spirit that is just below the surface. Going back to Hume, there is consent, and power is based on consent—but beneath that consent there is a current saying, I don’t really want this. I don’t want to be ruled by a master. And it doesn’t take much for that to break through. And when it does, you have the kinds of changes that really make a society move forward.
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> So that old mole is burrowing in there, and it can go in many ways. Look at the history of the early days of the labor movement, right through the nineteenth century and the early Industrial Revolution. The main theme of the labor movement was that having a job is a terrible attack on your personal rights and dignity. Having a job is not something you look forward to. It’s something you may be forced into, but it’s an attack on your dignity as a human being, your rights as a free human being. Having a job means being forced to live under the orders of a master for most of your waking life. Nothing wonderful about that. Skilled workers in the late nineteenth century had a very lively working-class press. They expressed their hope that over time people wouldn’t succumb to this attack on their rights—that they wouldn’t accept as normal the idea that they have to be subject to a master. If that day comes, they hoped it would be far in the distance.
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> Well, the day has come. People do think having a job is the greatest thing in life. But I think Marx’s old mole is right beneath the surface. If there’s an opportunity to think about it, to recognize the possibility that you don’t have to be subject to a master, you can run your own life, you can run your own enterprises, that keeps coming very close to the surface. The sit-down strikes when I was a child during the Depression, they were a step toward saying: we don’t need the bosses, we can take this place over and run it ourselves—which is true.
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