The 99%

Occupy, by Noam Chomsky, Penguin, RRP£5, 122 pages

Since the 1970s, Chomsky argues, a “ridiculous maldistribution of wealth” has been centralising US power in a fraction of a per cent of the population – with the disenfranchised masses kept largely docile through a growing PR industry, consumerism and the political clout of corporations. The Occupy movement, Chomsky suggests, which coalesced in New York’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 as an outcry against corporate power, is an overdue reaction to elitist, anti-democratic governance.

Collecting Chomsky’s interviews and addresses on the subject, this pamphlet is occasionally repetitive and perhaps pitched at the converted. One of Occupy’s main achievements has been in creating “real functioning communities”. Yet if Occupy is to have any future as a persuasive movement, in transition from tents to hearts and minds, it will need to capitalise on this connectivity. Chomsky’s reasoning is sharp; his lucid commentary endorses the theory but offers limited practical steer.