Manifestoon Response

The greatest similarity between the excerpt from Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and Chomsky’s propaganda model is the underlying idea of the controlling minority influencing the public to conform to the controller’s wishes. Marx’s bourgeois, which holds “exclusive political sway” fills much the same role as Chomsky’s unnaturally influential figures at the center of media and politics- perhaps because the groups being described are one in the same. Understand that the groups described overlap to the extent of being identical is critical to understanding how Marx’s view of their economical control is related to Chomsky’s view of their societal control.

Chomsky and Marx offer a similar view of how the controlling minority exerts its influence, though the two men argue for different actions to fight this control. The bourgeois’s desire to “[create] a world after its own image” parallels the efforts by the central media figures to excise and censor any information that doesn’t conform to their own vision for the world. In both cases, the most effective tool for doing this is not hard-fisted tyranny, but much more subversive means. Marx and Chomsky agree that the governing class seeks to implant the idea into the masses that the world it envisions is the correct version, and that anything divergent from this is incorrect. In essence, both men hold the position that the ruling class seeks to control through suggestion over force, and that the masses need to recognize what’s happening in order to fight back.