Old Communist genocide denier dogs can’t be expected to learn new tricks. Here, courtesy of the Under Fire account is Noam Chomsky discussing “Black Lives Matter, Universalism, and Hopes for the Left” at the Einstein Forum.

After mumbling his way through a condemnation of “wage slavery”, Chomsky bizarrely claims that capitalism is worse than Stalin.

“People have to rent themselves to a tyranny so that most of their waking lives, they’re under totalitarian control of a kind that Stalin couldn’t dream of. Like, Stalin couldn’t say here’s where you can go to the bathroom. Or here’s where you can talk to a friend,” Chomsky argues.

With some lefties, you don’t know if they’re ignorant enough to believe the stuff they’re spouting. Chomsky doesn’t get that kind of pass. 

As Chomsky knows quite well, the USSR had no labor unions and workers had no rights. Amazon’s warehouses look like a paradise compared to labor rights under Communism. Wage slavery was not a problem in the USSR. You worked because you were a slave and you didn’t hope for much of a wage. You worked because the alternative was prison and death.

And what were the bathroom policies in the gulags?

During Stalin’s reign, workers could be accused of sabotage and jailed or executed for being late to work.

Then there were the so-called, ‘wrecking’ arrests. If something went wrong, fall guys would be selected to take the blame.

Of course much of the Soviet economy under Stalin was managed by slave labor. 

The 1619 Project of the New York Times falsely claimed that America was built on slave labor, but before that revisionist history project, the paper had run a Red Century project defending Communism when Soviet Socialism was, from Moscow University to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built on slave labor.

At its peak, as many as 1 in 5 Soviet construction workers were convict laborers and massive slave labor projects like the White Sea-Baltic Canal, hailed as triumphs of socialism, killed tens of thousands.

The Soviet Socialist system was built on forced labor, from the collective farms that peasants were not allowed to leave, to mandatory ‘volunteer’ brigades like those that helped build the Moscow Metro or harvested crops, to a massive slave trade in convict labor which built roads, tunnels, and canals, mined and did every form of dirty work, and was traded back and forth to Socialist civilian organizations.

China’s forced labor system with the Uighurs was heavily inspired by this Soviet setup.

Chomsky complains that people shouldn’t be forced to work to live. Except in the USSR, a failure to work branded you a “parasite” and was a crime. 

Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution stated that, “in the USSR, work is a duty” and that the “principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

That was based on an idea from Karl Marx, who had had described the ideal Communist society as a place where, “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” The message echoed the one placed over the gates of National Socialist concentration camps, “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work makes you free.”

As Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the architect of the Red Terror and the secret police put it, “Even now the labor of prisoners is far from being utilized on public works, and I propose to retain these concentration camps to use the labor of prisoners, gentlemen who live without occupation, those who cannot work without a certain compulsion, or, if we talk of Soviet institutions, then here one should apply this measure of punishment for unscrupulous attitude to work, for negligence, for lateness.”

Perhaps when Chomsky meets up with Dzerzhinsky, they can have a talk about bathroom policies.