Manifestoon

While reading Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” he describes two different types of people, first being the “bourgeoisie” who are essentially those of ownership of occupations and capital within their time period, and secondly the “proletariat” who are essentially the lower class. These can immediately be paralleled to Chomsky’s description of two distinctive groups in society, first being, conglomerates and those in mass media, and secondly the general public. Karl Marx within his article describes how the bourgeoisie has taken every occupation that is looked at with awe and reverence and stripped it of its dignity while making these professionals simply money hungry laborers. The bourgeoisie class has established a sense of “giant production”, and has taken away the importance of family value and in its place has put the importance of having money. Marx explains that “it compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production”, which creates a never-ending cycle for the proletariat to follow in this mode of thinking and leave their old traditional more personal lifestyles.

In parallel stance to Marx’s beliefs on these two classes in “Manufacturing Consent” Chomsky’s idea of mass media turning the working class into following whatever they distribute through their medium channels. Chomsky’s view essentially demonstrates that major TV, newspapers, online sites, etc. determine exactly what to feed to “us” (the working class”) in order to serve their interests as the dominate elite groups by using propaganda. In parallel to the proletariat group, we usually adopt this way of thinking, because everyone else is doing it, and we sometimes believe we do not have another choice, or either follow it unconsciously because we don’t know any different. Marx’s describes that the bourgeoisie feels as if they are giving “freedom” to those of the proletariat group, because they are giving them free trade. Just as the mass media feels as if they are giving us, the working class, freedom to pick what channel of media we want to watch, but both leading classes know better than this. They know that the freedom is still being ruled by them (the bourgeoisie and mass media), and no matter which way we decide to turn, they are still managing what we choose to see or do under that freedom.