Noam Chomsky: John Dewey: Politics Is the Shadow Cast on Society by Big Business

March 28, 1995 Noam Chomsky - 1995-03-28 - Education & Democracy https://archive.org/details/NoamChoms... @52:03 Noam Chomsky - Education & Democracy - Audio only    • Noam Chomsky - Education & Democracy - Aud...   Noam Chomsky: Democracy and Education (Loyola University, Chicago; October 14, 1994) https://web.archive.org/web/200203300... https://web.archive.org/web/202110161... Transcript: John Dewey understood that politics, in his words, "is the shadow cast on society by big business." And as long as this is so, attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. Reforms will therefore be of limited utility because democracy requires that the source of the shadow be removed. Not only because of its domination of the political arena, but because the very institutions of private power undermine democracy and freedom. He was quite explicit about the anti-democratic power that he had in mind. So, I'm quoting Dewey from the 1920s: "Power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation, and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country. Even if democratic forms remain. Business for private profit, through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda, that's the system of actual power and the source of coercion and control. And until it's unraveled, you can't talk seriously about democracy and freedom." In a free and democratic society, workers should be the masters of their own industrial fate, not tools rented by employers. On the same grounds, Dewey held that it is, as he put it, "illiberal and immoral to train children to work not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the work earned." In that case, their work is not free because it is not freely participated in. And Dewey therefore held that industry must be changed from a feudalistic to a democratic social order based on workers' control and free association. "I have ventured to quote scattered statements at considerable length because the picture of the immediate situation in Washington is typical. The condition at Washington reflects accurately the condition of politics throughout the country. The former has nothing to do with the realities of American life because the latter is completely out of connection. The situation explains the discontent and disgust of the people with the old parties and it constitutes the opportunity for a new party. We have long been told that politics is unimportant, that government is merely a drag and an interference; that the captains of industry and finance are the wise ones, the leaders in whose hands the fortunes of the country are safely entrusted. The persons who keep reiterating such sayings forget, or they try to conceal from view, that the confusion, the perplexity, the triviality, the irrelevance, of politics at Washington merely reflect the bankruptcy of industrial "leadership," just as politics in general is an echo, except when it is an accomplice, of the interests of big business. The deadlocks and the impotence of Congress are definitely the mirror of the demonstrated incapacity of the captains of industry and finance to conduct the affairs of the country prosperously as an incident to the process of feathering their own nests. It would be ludicrous, were it not tragic, to believe that an appeal to the unregulated activities of those who have got us into the present crisis will get us out of it, provided they are relieved from the incubus of political action. The magic of eating a hair of the dog which bit you in order to cure hydrophobia is as nothing to the magic involved in the belief that those who have privlege and power will remedy the breakdown they have created. As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. The only remedy is new political action based on social interests and realities." John Dewey: The Need for a New Party II: Breakdown of the Old Order (1931) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:...