Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Anarchists should oppose specialized labor and ensure direct worker control of capital.
In plain terms
Workers should directly control capital without elite intermediaries.
What can you take from it?
Avoid elite intermediaries in worker ownership.

Where it applies

  • unions
  • cooperatives
  • organizing

Putting it to work

  • Form worker co-ops
  • Reject top-down leadership

Questions to consider

  • Can direct control scale effectively?
  • Is elite representation ever necessary?

Another view

Direct control is difficult at large scale.

More from Noam Chomsky

  1. Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.

    Permalink to quote #1
  2. The long tradition of naivete and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a w…

    Permalink to quote #3
  3. A lot of the people who call themselves Left I would regard as proto-fascists.

    Permalink to quote #4

Related quotes

  1. I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its bes…

    Tony BlairTony Blair quote #1
  2. 'I am a Catholic. I am a pacifist. I am a Christian anarchist. In Russia the enemies of the free worker are the bureaucrats and the communists. In the United S…

    Ammon HennesseyAmmon Hennessey quote #1
  3. The two principles referred to are Authority and Liberty, and the names of the two schools of Socialistic thought which fully and unreservedly represent one or…

    Benjamin TuckerBenjamin Tucker quote #2