BARSAMIAN: At the Mellon lecture that you gave in Chicago... you focused primarily on the ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell [regarding education]... CHOMSKY: ... These were highly libertarian ideas. Dewey himself comes straight from the American mainstream. People who read what he actually said would now consider him some far-out anti-American lunatic or something. He was expressing mainstream thinking before the ideological system had so grotesquely distorted the tradition. By now, its unrecognizable. For example, not only did he agree with the whole Enlightenment tradition that, as he put it, the goal of production is to produce free people, -- free men, he said, but thats many years ago. Thats the goal of production, not to produce commodities. He was a major theorist of democracy. There were many different, conflicting strands of democratic theory, but the one Im talking about held that democracy requires dissolution of private power. He said as long as there is private control over the economic system, talk about democracy is a joke. Repeating basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesnt do much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical. Basically, a classical liberal view. His main point was that you cant even talk about democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking, everything. That means control by the people who work in the institutions, and the communities.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 20:30:05 +0000
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