Chomsky on Socialism

E transcrito por alguém num fórum anônimo, logo abaixo:
"Now as far as socialism is concerned that term has been so evacuated of content over of the last century that's its hard even to use. I mean the Soviet Union for example was called a socialist society. And it was called that by the two major propaganda operations in the world, the U.S., the Western one and the Soviet one. They both called it socialism for opposite reasons. The West called it socialism in order to defame socialism by associating it with this miserable tyranny. The Soviet Union called it socialism in order to gain whatever benefit from the moral appeal that true socialism had among large parts of the general world population. But this was about as remote from socialism as you can imagine. The core notion of at least traditional socialism is that what you mentioned: that working people have to be in control of production and communities have to be in control of their own lives and so on. Its a...This goes...The Soviet Union is the exact opposite of that. Working people had no control over anything. They were virtual slaves. The collapse of the Soviet Union is in fact a small victory for socialism in my opinion. It eliminated one of the major barriers to it and should have been recognized as such. But the term as been as I said so meaningless that its hard even to use. If we use it in the traditional sense which you brought up that goes straight back in American history. You read the working class in the mid 19th century. Press published by artisans and what were called factory girls, young women from the farms, working in the textile mills in eastern Massachusetts which was the beginning of the industrial revolution. Their press was called for a...they said their theme was those who work in the mills ought to own them. Wage labor which was called wage slavery was regarded by most Americans as not any different from slavery. Even the Republican Party regarded wage labor as a preliminary to free labor but intolerable because its a kind of servitude. A large part of the the North population fighting the Civil War was fighting under that banner. This goes straight through the twentieth century. The idea that people should be in control of their own destinies and lives including the institutions in which they work, the communities in which they live and so on. Call what name you want, but that's traditional socialism. There are today attempts to describe a kind-of detailed vision of the future based on these notions. The most extensive and detailed one I know is by Michael Albert at ZNet she mentioned. Its part participatory economics. There are other such proposals. But I think this is deeply ingrained in people's understanding and consciousness and barely below the surface. In fact its a call for an extension of democracy to the industrial sphere and to communities as well. We should also bear in mind that the leading American social philosopher John Dewey as mainstream as apple pie. He...His main work was concentrated on democracy. He pointed out over and over again that as long as we have what he called industrial feudalism that is tyrannical control...private power controlling production and commerce democracy will be very limited. We have to move to what he called industrial democracy if we hope to have significant democracy. As for politics he was that until that happened politics will be the shadow cast over society by big business. Whatever the...I think that most of the population recognizes that and accepts it."