Chomsky And Globalisation - Jeremy Fox

 CHOMSKY AND GLOBALISATION - JEREMY FOX

I eat Noam Chomsky books for breakfast. I chew them up and then spit them out. I gorge on them. This one, however - Chomsky And Globalisation - written by Jeremy Fox is but a snack, a nibble, a morsel and because of this it's not enough and after reading it I'm still hungry.

Chomsky is known as the 'Einstein of modern linguistics' and was once arguably the most important intellectual alive although whether that accolade still holds today is debatable due entirely to how old he is now. He is still to this day regularly interviewed, however, popping up more recently on YouTube zoom-talks where his views are sought on various geo-political and environmental issues.

For most, Chomsky's major work has been around the manufacturing of consent, American hegemony and globalisation; the driving force behind it being what Bakunin once called an 'instinct for freedom' and an objection on principle to unjustified claims of authority over people. 'Any form of authority requires justification' Chomsky once wrote 'And any time you find a form of authority illegitimate, you ought to challenge it.' Which, once you start looking is practically all authority.

Jeremy Fox's book is about globalisation and the way it's presented and the way it's perceived as opposed to the reality of it as explained by Chomsky. Economic globalisation in all its supposed grandeur is meant to be the path to universal prosperity and the solution to the Third World's economic problems. It is, however, nothing of the kind and is instead the arbiter of social, political and economic decline for the many and vast profit and consolidation of power for the few. It's the legitimization of inequality being normal, natural and even desirable. As Fox puts it: '70 per cent of global economic activity is nowadays speculation and in the windowless bunkers in which fortunes are made, nothing is actually produced. Nothing, that is, except wealth.'

And to whom and to where does this wealth go? Who actually profits? According to the established wisdom as declared by all those in positions of security and advantage we all ultimately benefit. And of course, the system isn't rigged and of course it's only right and proper that the winners should end up enormously rich. And as for the losers? Well, they end up on the breadline but that's their own fault for being losers.

It's the philosophy and language of Donald Trump. Remember him? Except that Trump was just being open about it because it's also the philosophy and language of every cut-throat, Ayn Rand-influenced, middle-of-the-road, so-called reasonable, sensible, neo-liberal advocate of the democratic free-enterprise system that ever crawled over the bodies both physically and theoretically of every dead child refugee washed-up upon the shore, portrayed in your daily newspaper tabloid as a threat to the national standard of living.

The thing about Jeremy Fox's book is that, as I said, it's not enough. It's important to state where problems lie, of course, and it's important to recognise them but beyond that things start to get a little vague specifically in regard to the question of what is to be done about the problem? According to Fox we have two choices: We either acquiesce in global injustice and tyranny or we join in the struggle for justice, democracy and freedom. 

So what to do? When all political Parties support free enterprise, globalisation, the private ownership of property and the profit motive then who do you turn to? Where do you go? What to do?

What to do...?

John Serpico