I recall having seen this before, but don't recall where or when. If
y'all have seen it, my apologies - it reads well.
MichaelP

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Noam Chomsky on The Common Good

    From his speech delivered at the Progressive Challenge, an
    educational forum featuring progressive thinkers and activists,
    held on Capital Hill on January 9, 1997.

Background issues are worth attention, because it's important, I think,
to recognize how sharply contemporary ideology has departed from
traditions and values which are quite important and significant and which
it claims it upholds. That divergence is worth understanding and I think
it carries a lot of direct lessons about the current scene.

Let's begin with the common good. We can trace that concept back to the
earliest foundations of political theory. Anyone who went to a good
college knows that it all comes from Aristotle's Politics which is
surprisingly timely in many ways. In Politics, which is pretty subtle and
complex, the main problem is how to achieve what Aristotle calls, "the
Common Good of All." Per Aristotle, "the state is a community of equals."
It's aiming at the best life possible for all of them. The people must be
supreme and they must participate fully and equally. (A qualification:
"people" is a narrow category for Aristotle. We've at least learned
something in 2,000 years.) But among those he considered the people, they
have to be equal, free, participatory. And the government must not only
be democratic and participatory, but also a welfare state, which
provides, as he put it, "lasting prosperity to the poor by distribution
of public revenues" in a variety of ways that he discusses.

The point being that an essential feature of a decent society, and an
almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of
outcome-not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously
talk about a democratic state.

These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the
core of classical liberalism, of enlightenment thinking. Adam Smith, as
everyone knows, advocated free markets, but if you look at the argument
for free markets, it was based on his belief that free markets ought to
lead to a perfect equality, which is a desideratum in a decent society.
Like Aristotle, Smith understood that the common good will require
substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by
distribution of public revenues.

So Adam Smith's praise of the division of labor is well known, but less
known is his condemnation of the division of labor for its inhuman
effects which, as he said, "will turn working people into objects as
stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be" and
there fore must be prevented in any improved or civilized society by
government action to overcome the devastating market forces.

Other leading contributors to classical liberalism went much further than
this, condemning wage labor itself, for the reason that it deprives
people of their humanity. When the laborer works under external control,
we may admire what he does but we despise what he is-a classic liberal
slogan. deToqueville said that the art advances, the artisan declines. He
was, of course, also a great figure of the classical liberal pantheon and
he agreed with Smith, Thomas Jefferson and many others, that equality of
outcome is an important feature-a crucial feature in fact-of a free and
just society. And he warned of the dangers of a permanent inequality of
condition and an end to democracy if the manufacturing aristocracy (which
is growing up under our eyes in the United States in the 1830s, remember,
one of the harshest that has ever existed in the world) should escape its
confines, as it later did beyond his worst nightmares.

That's classical liberalism, way back to Aristotle.

Similar ideas run through the independent working class press from the
very origins of the industrial revolution. There was a lively press, say
in eastern Massachusetts-Lowell, Lawrence and places like that-back in
the 1840s and 1850s. It was run by working people, "factory girls" as
they were called, artisans and so on. They bitterly condemned what they
called "the new spirit of the age"- "gain wealth forgetting all but self"
which they regarded as a demeaning and degrading doctrine that sweeps
aside any concern for the common good, and also was destroying their
culture, the rights that they'd felt they'd won in the American
Revolution, later the Civil War. They bitterly condemned the tyranny of
rising industrial capitalism, much as deToqueville had, insisting, in
their words, "that those who work in the mills should own them," and that
people should run their own affairs, certainly in the political arena,
but beyond as well.

Well, I don't think the mill hands of Lowell and Lawrence would have been
much surprised by the views of America's leading Twentieth Century social
philosopher, John Dewey, who like them was as American as apple pie. He
describes politics as "the shadow cast over society by big business" and
he-the leading philosopher of democracy in this century- goes on to say,
"talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of
the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the
press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication." Like
the working people in eastern Massachusetts almost a century earlier, he
held that in a free and democratic society, workers must be masters of
their industrial fate and private power must be changed from a
feudalistic to a democratic order.

These are ideas that trace back to the Enlightenment and classical
liberalism and they've reappeared constantly in popular struggle in the
United State and elsewhere. I don't think they have lost their
significance, or relevance or, for that matter, appeal.

Some of the concerns of working people had been expressed by James
Madison years earlier. By 1792, shortly after the Constitution was
established, he was already expressing deep concerns over the fate of the
democratic experiment that he had crafted. He warned that the rising
developmental capitalistic state was leading to a real domination by the
few under an apparent liberty of the many. He deplored what he called,
"the daring depravity of the times, as private powers become tools and
tyrants of government, bribed by its largesses and overawing it with
their powers and combinations, casting over society the shadow that we
call politics."

Madison's words, but not the values, can easily be translated into a
description of the contemporary scene, and you can read them in current
writings. For example, Business Week in late 1995, reported with wonder
that the new Congress "represents a milestone for business. Never before
have so many goodies been showered so enthusiastically on America's
entrepreneurs." Though they go on to say that's not enough-the lobbyists
are called to go back to the trenches to demand more. Another
accompanying headline reads, "The Problem Now: What To Do With All That
Cash"-as surging profits are overflowing the coffers of Corporate America
and dividends are booming, while wages are stagnating or declining, along
with security and work conditions. In large measure, that's an effect of
policy decisions which were directed to these ends, including the
criminal assault-criminal in the technical sense-on labor rights in the
'80s which happens to be reviewed rather well in the same journal.

Let me turn to another contemporary issue that traces back to Aristotle's
Politics and took an interesting turn along the way. Aristotle recognizes
that democratic systems can come in many different forms. The best
functioning of them, even the best, most properly functioning democracy
would be flawed, he felt, as long as the goal of equality is not reached.
And the reason was that if you had sharp inequality, but perfect
democracy, the poor majority would seek the interest of the needy, and
not the common good of all. That can be safeguarded only to the extent
that people generally have moderate and sufficient property-that is,
neither great wealth, nor poverty.

Similar concerns actually entered into our own Constitution, but in a
somewhat different form, and not without a lot of tension-which continues
right to the present. In the constitutional debates, Madison raised the
same problem. He warned that "democracy would undermine the
responsibility of government to protect the minority of the opulent
against the majority," that is, to keep them from plundering the rich, as
John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower described the great problem
of international affairs in secret some years later.

Madison expected the threat of democracy to become more severe over time
because he expected an increase in the proportion of those who "will
labor under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal
distribution of its blessings."  He was concerned by what he called, "the
symptoms of a leveling spirit" that he already discerned, and he warned
of the future danger "if the right to vote were to place power over
property in hands without a share in it."

That problem confronting Madison-the same as Aristotle's problem-could be
solved in one of two ways. One is by reducing poverty. The other is by
reducing democracy. Aristotle's choice was the first. Madison's was the
second. He recognized the problem, but since the prime responsibility of
government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the
majority, he therefore urged that political power be put in the hands of
the more capable set of men, those who represent the wealth of the
nation, with the public fragmented and disorganized.

And that's the Madisonian system, which has remained fairly stable over
two centuries-although with outcomes that he very soon deplored, as I've
indicated. The reason for his surprise, I think, is that Madison, like
the rest of classical liberalism, was pre-capitalist and anti-capitalist
in spirit. And he expected the leadership to be benevolent and
enlightened and so on.

He learned differently very fast.

There is no reason now-anymore than there ever has been-to accept the
doctrines that sustain power and privilege. Or to believe that we are
somehow constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws-not simply
decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will. They
are human institutions and they have to face the test of legitimacy. And
if they do not, they can be replaced by others that are more free and
more just, as has often happened in the past.