This is a useful pamphlet sized book that reproduces a couple of speeches and interviews made by Noam Chomsky regarding the world-wide Occupy movement. There probably isn’t anything in it that hasn’t been said or thought before but Chomsky does give the whole movement a sense of gravitas, a sense of historical perspective. For someone as pre-eminent as Professor Chomsky to give his philosophical and spiritual blessing to this ill-defined but nevertheless cutting edge movement is no small thing. To most established journalists and commentators the Occupy movement is little more than a rag-bag army of middle class discontents who are having a bloody good time until such time as a job and a mortgage come along.

But Chomsky sees something else, something that portends to the future. Something, dare I suggest it, that contains the seeds of a future co-operative society, a communist society if you like. Chomsky starts by reflecting on the protest movements that sprung up during the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the comparisons to today. Chomsky recalls:

There was a militant labor union organizing going on. It was getting to the point of sit down strikes, which are really very frightening to the business world because a sit down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind.’ P25

Chomsky then makes the observation that no matter how difficult things were in the 1930’s, there was a sense that, somehow, we’re gonna get out of it. But Chomsky now, correctly in my view, sees a different scenario:

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s kind of a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.’ P26

And this is where Chomsky hits the nail right on the proverbial head. Chomsky, remembering his Marxist economics, cites the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. This is at the very heart of the malaise in European and American capitalism. As the dependency on technology to boost profits has increased relative to the amount of labour used so, paradoxically, has the tendency for the rate of profit to decline. US and European corporations have attempted to offset this tendency by exporting capital and mercilessly exploiting cheap third world labour and resources, but that option is now rapidly contracting. Asia, Africa and South America are no longer prepared to quietly acquiesce to this type of imperialist exploitation.

Accordingly, the developed western capitalist economies are running out of options. They are now left with two possibilities; squeeze their home workforce in the manner that they are used to squeezing their foreign workers, or alternatively, try to recapture the high end technology part of the manufacturing process. The first option, already well and truly under way, will result in major social explosions on the home front. We have already had a taste of that in UK cities during last year’s street riots. The second option is much talked about but is difficult to deliver because finance capital is no longer interested in long term investment, it simply wants to reap the maximum return in the shortest possible time. It is behaving, as Marx predicted capital would always behave, ie moving to the point of highest return regardless of national long term development. The nation state has become an irrelevancy.

Chomsky then goes on to discuss the growing gap between public policy and public will. This is where the Occupy movement steps in. They are the front line troops for the 99% against the entrenched economic and political position of the one percent. In fact, to be accurate, it is not really the one percent that is the problem but rather the 0.1 percent. They have amassed such unbelievable economic, political and social control that they are able to set up and fund such spurious popular movements as the American Tea Party. What a sick joke they are to be sure. Funded to the tune of hundreds of millions by the billionaire Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox news channels, the Tea Party movement is in many ways a totally artificial construct. It has been set up to obscure what is really taking place in the US and other capitalist countries. Chomsky summarizes the situation perfectly:

Well now the world is indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat again, in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now the plutonomy is where the action is. If it does continue like this, the historical reversal that began in the 1970’s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major popular reaction that could avert this.’ P34

Chomsky, as we might expect from a man of his proven pedigree, spells it out clearly enough, but he is careful to leave the ball firmly at our feet. Either we snipe and sneer from the touchlines as what is left of our post war social gains is privatised, or we help to legitimise the Occupy movement by joining in. It’s an historical choice which future historians and commentators will surely pontificate about at length. The imperative for this generation, right now, is to take sides. To make a stand. To be heard. To be defiant. To stand up for our collective humanity. It’s the world precariat versus the global plutonomy and there will be no sitting on the sidelines.