Noam Chomsky: Expanding the Floor of the Cage (Private Capital Is a Saber-tooth Tiger)

Noam Chomsky - Expanding the Floor of the Cage
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Noam Chomsky: Expanding the Floor of the Cage (December 13, 1996)
https://www.alternativeradio.org/prod...

Q: Your ultimate political goal is anarchistic, the erosion of state institutions and any form of authoritarian control. But you have also recognised the need to defend some forms of state regulation as protection against a wholly unregulated market. Can you say more on how you view this two-edged process of possible political transformation?

Noam Chomsky: I'm not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there's a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there's a justification for cages. That doesn’t mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called transnational corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.
https://chomsky.info/199808__-2/

Q: At this point, what do you see as the greatest threat to democracy?

Noam Chomsky: The greatest threat to democracy right now is the transfer of decision making into the hands of unaccountable private power. It’s done by a lot of ways, but one of them is what they call "minimizing the state." This is kind of paradoxical for me. I'm an old-time anarchist from way back. I don’t think the federal government is a legitimate institution. I think it ought to be dismantled, in principle; just as I don’t think there ought to be cages - I don't think people ought to live in cages. On the other hand, if I'm in a cage and there’s a saber tooth tiger outside, I'd be happy to keep the bars of the cage in place - even though I think the cage is illegitimate. I think that image is not inappropriate. There are plenty of good arguments, in my opinion, against centralized government authority. On the other hand, there's a much worse danger right outside. The centralized government authority is at least to some extent under popular influence, and in principle at least under popular control. The unaccountable private power outside is under no public control. What they call minimizing the state - transferring the decision making to unaccountable private interests - is not helpful to human beings or to democracy or, for that matter, to the markets. In this time when we are told there is "a triumph of the market," the markets are threatened themselves, aren't they? What’s developing is a kind of corporate mercantilism with huge centralized, more or less command economies, integrated with one another, closely tied to state power - relying very heavily on state power, in fact - and enforcing social policies and a conception of social and political order that happen to be highly beneficial to the interests of the top sectors of the population, the richest sectors.
https://chomsky.info/19970303/

"They speak of widening the floors of the cage, the cage of existing coercive institutions that can be widened by popular struggle […] And we can extend the image to think of the cage of coercive state institutions as a protection from savage beasts roaming outside, the predatory statesupported capitalist institutions that are dedicated in principle to the vile maxim of the masters, to private gain, power and domination, with the interest of the community and its members at most a footnote, perhaps revered in rhetoric but dismissed in practice as a matter of principle and even law."
Noam Chomsky: What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2015)
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/what-ki...

"Some of the rural workers in Brazil have an interesting slogan. They say their immediate task is 'expanding the floor of the cage.' They understand that they're trapped inside a cage, but realize that protecting it when it's under attack from even worse predators on the outside, and extending the limits of what the cage will allow, are both essential preliminaries to dismantling it. If they attack the cage directly when they're so vulnerable, they'll get murdered. [...]
When you eliminate the one institutional structure in which people can participate to some extent - namely the government - you're simply handing over power to unaccountable private tyrannies that are much worse. So you have to make use of the state, all the time recognizing that you ultimately want to eliminate it."
Noam Chomsky: The Common Good (1998)
https://books.google.cz/books/about/T...