Chomsky and Marx!

Both Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx illustrate two main groups in society. In Noam Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” he argues that there are the powerful media corporations and the consuming general public. In Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” he articulates that there are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are essentially the upper class who have taken all respected occupations from the proletariat, with motives of self-interest and greedy expansion. The proletariat is the lowest group of society, suffocated by the bourgeoisie who do not allow them to climb any higher on the social ladder. They are forced to take whatever occupations are left from the bourgeoisie. A parallel between Noam Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” is the sense of a private group of people controlling the consuming lower class. In Noam Chomsky’s argument, he draws attention to the private conglomerates that have power over what goes into the media that the general public views. In the “Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx argues that the bourgeoisie rule what kind of occupations the proletariat can receive. In his text he argues that the bourgeoisie “has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.” This is very similar to how in Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” there are only a small amount of elitist groups who, ultimately, have captured the general population through their centralized media and manipulated them into thinking whatever these private corporations desire them to think.