“Totalitarianism no longer comes in the form of communism or fascism. It comes now from corporations. And these corporations fear those who think and write, those who speak out and form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their power and their profits. Our democracy, as Snowden I think has revealed, has become a fiction. The state, through elaborate forms of political theater, seeks to maintain this fiction to keep us passive. And if we wake up, the state will not shy away from draconian measures. The goal is complete subjugation, the iron rule of our corporations and our power elite.”

—  Chris Hedges

Source: “ 25:13 Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Dec. 13, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Totalitarianism no longer comes in the form of communism or fascism. It comes now from corporations. And these corporat…" by Chris Hedges?
Chris Hedges photo
Chris Hedges 81
American journalist 1956

Related quotes

Barack Obama photo
Chris Hedges photo
Boris Sidis photo

“Psychology is the science of psychic states both as to content and form, regarded from an objective standpoint, and brought in relation to the living corporeal individual.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914), p. 39

Adolf A. Berle photo

“Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community.”

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter VII : "It's Just Like Living", p. 181

“Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Introduction : The Libertarian Tradition http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism1.htm
Communalism (1974)
Context: Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations. They believed that this was what society was naturally, and that the State was only a morbid growth on the normal body of oeconomia, the housekeeping of the human family, grouped in voluntary association. Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century.

Chris Hedges photo
Anton Chekhov photo

“It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act IV
The Seagull (1896)

John Kenneth Galbraith photo

“When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Power and the Useful Economist (1973)
Context: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.

“Advertising has formed us to give our affection not only to the products we consume, but also to the personified corporations that supply them.”

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Related topics