Хомского - всегда пожалуйста (*).
Только вот переводить времени нет, извините.
Собственно рабочая пресса прошлого века и теоретическая подкованность "фабричных девушек" той поры в Америке факт очень широко известный.
Из "Democracy and Education"
www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9410-education.html
What Ware describes, looking mostly at the labour press, is how the value
system that was advocated by private power had to be beaten into the heads
of ordinary people, who had to be taught to abandon normal human sentiments
and to replace them with the new spirit of the age, as they called it. He reviews
the mainly mid-nineteenth century working class press, often, incidentally, run
by working class women. The themes that run through it are very constant for a
long period. They are concerned with what they call "degradation" and "loss of
dignity and independence, loss of self-respect, the decline of the worker as a
person, the sharp decline in cultural level and cultural attainments as workers
were subjected to," what they called, "wage slavery," which they regarded as
not very different from chattel slavery, which they had fought to uproot during
the Civil War. Particularly dramatic and quite relevant to today's problems was
the sharp decline in what we call "high culture," reading of classics and
contemporary literature by the people who were called the factory girls in
Lowell and by craftsmen and other workers. Craftsmen would hire somebody
to read to them while they were working because they were interested and had
libraries. All that had to go.
What they described, quoting from the labour press, is "when you sell your
product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell
yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth
establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone
who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills
ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots
who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive
downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in
the new commercial feudalism." Just in case you are confused, this is long
before Marxism. This is American workers talking about their experiences in
the 1840s.
The labour press also condemned what they called the "bought priesthood,"
referring to the media and the universities and the intellectual class, that is, the
apologists who sought to justify the absolute despotism that was the new spirit
of the age and to instil its sordid and demeaning values. One of the early
leaders of the AFL, about a century ago, late nineteenth century, expressed the
standard view when he described the mission of the labour movement as "to
overcome the sins of the market and to defend democracy by extending it to
control over industry by working people."
