Dan Scanlan wrote: > Collateral Language > > An Interview With Noam Chomsky > David Barsamian > > ------------------------------------ > It also led to the rise of the public relations industry. It's > interesting to look at the thinking in the 1920s, when it got started. > This was the period of Taylorism in industry, when workers were being > trained to become robots, every motion controlled. It created highly > efficient industry, with human beings turned into automata. The > Bolsheviks were very impressed with it, too. They tried to duplicate it.
No big surprise here. Chomsky misses the essential class difference between the USA, where Taylorism originated, and the USSR. Standing behind time and motion studies was the lash of unemployment in the west. If you can't fire a worker, it is very difficult to discipline her or him. Later on, after the rise of Stalinism, discipline is enforced through the threat of prison. But in the early 1920s--in other words, when Bolshevism was still in power--nothing like this went on.
> There is nothing negative about propaganda, he [Laswell] said. It's as > neutral as a pump handle. You can use it for good or for evil. And since > we're noble, wonderful people, we'll use it for good, to ensure that the > stupid, ignorant masses remain marginalized and separated from any > decision-making capacity. > > The Leninist doctrines are approximately the same. There are very close > similarities. The Nazis also picked it up. If you read Mein Kampf, > Hitler was very impressed with Anglo-American propaganda.
Chomsky does not believe in governments, so naturally he would oppose all government-sponsored messages. It is all the same. Cuba promoting volunteer literacy brigades or the USA promoting war with Iraq.
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