Noam Chomsky - Making The Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance

Making The Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance (Kindle Retail)

by Noam Chomsky

Collection of the monthly columns that Noam Chomsky wrote for the New York Times Syndicate from April 2007 to October 2011. As a bonus, I've also included Chomsky's short pamphlet "Occupy" which was released last month. The tribute to Howard Zinn is worth the price of admission alone.



Making the Future presents more than fifty concise and persuasively argued commentaries on U.S. politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2011.

Taken together, Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S. presidential race; the ascendancy of China; Latin America's leftward turn; the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea; Israel's invasion of Gaza and expansion
of settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank; developments in climate change; the world financial crisis; the Arab Spring; the assassination of Osama bin Laden; and the Occupy protests. Laced throughout his critiques are expressions of commitment to democracy and the power of popular struggles. "Progressive legislation and social welfare," writes Chomsky,
"have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above. Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace."

Making the Future is a follow-up to Interventions, published by City Lights in 2007 and banned from Guantánamo Bay by U.S. military censors. Both books are drawn from articles Chomsky has been writing regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, but which go largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Making the Future offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by one of America's foremost intellectual and political dissidents.




Chomsky presents his latest thinking on the core issues, questions and demands that are driving ordinary people to protest. How did we get to this point? How do the wealthiest 1% influence society? How can we separate money from politics? What would a genuine democracy look like? How can we create new institutions to increase freedom and equality for all? Following the old course, says Chomsky, isn’t going to work. He argues that if we continue to follow the model of growth set for us by the 1%, we'll be like lemmings walking off a cliff. The only alternative is to get involved and fight for a better future. If not now, when? If not us, who? Features photography by Alex Fradkin and Stanley Rogouski, art by R. Black, a "what to do if you get arrested guide" by the National Lawyers Guild and a tribute to Howard Zinn.