All of us need to unite

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a system of convenient myths.

I think he means 'All civilization has developed within a system of convenient myths'?

The driving force has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.

I've always thought Noam like so stage his arguments with suggestions presented as fact. So on this point I instead think it tends to be 'engaged', and given that, promises the opportunity for public benefit only among other things. I'd disagree it's the main reason - rather its just the industrialization of human endeavor. The issue at hand is the forms that endeavor can take, socialism takes the power away from the individual by limiting a capacity for growth while capitalism mediates growth into a uniform element to serve as a measure of the system throughout the system - so that something can mitigate the dynamics of civilization without it falling back to the cycle of empire rise, empire crash. Capitalism is not perfect, but its weaknesses are mostly representative of factors which would be worse in socialism. There are entire professions dedicated to sorting out the weaknesses specific to capitalism, so there is no need for academia to invent fairytales and confuse people with crosstalking concepts.

His key point here seems to argue against any nature of specialization, which itself generates a suite of needs from the public to support what it offers the public. That exchange becomes the place for a market, and a currency is needed to allow the market to self regulate based on demand. The root of the problem of any market is the peoples use of the market. There should be plenty of regulation in place to protect markets from being controlled, but that is the real game I'd imagine and outside of campuses or lecterns.

It has long been understood very well that a society based on this principal will destroy itself in time.

Yea, because capitalism like this has been done before..... never. But seriously, to his point that material private gain was done for public benefit can be projected across into all sorts of things like feudalism etc. I just do not see the relevance to capitalism beyond the realization that a person can create and trade, and as a result any increase in their own capacity meant they could increase that which they can create and trade.

It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can.

Has he been to socialist countries?? I haven't, but they seem to have been very inefficient and slow in achieving progress. Even in those places population growth rapidly outstrips those civilizations and succumb to the very same fate he levels at capitalism.... at least the capitalist system endeavors to maximize efficiency and progress in an attempt to allow that problem to be detected and confronted. To blame the incumbent system for all things because its incumbent is inane. Is his point to create an emotional distortion on reality for career reasons, and in that he is not alone, so perhaps he is just using capitalism to his own ends at the expense of risking hypocrisy to his true self and either confusing folk or motivating them to explore an erroneous line of reasoning.

At this stage in history one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control.

Agreed, we'd need a system to promote efficiency and progress, while maximizing individual freedoms but also providing protections for complexity to be built into the system to support those two things. Sort of sounds like how capitalism is supposed to work to me. I tend to think its about the right blend of regulation and free markets, but I aint no economist or lawyer so bugger that. His whole premise seems to ignore the hard realities of achieving anything of any complexity. As I said, people need to specialize to achieve progress, and by doing so they develop a suite of needs to support what they offer. That is taking control of their destiny to some extent, but no-one can fully control their destiny - to assert as much is absurd IMO. What is being probably being interpreted by readers of that is how to best let people take control of their own destiny, so offering no suggestion is not adding anything but again, creating an emotional distortion for his own gain by the looks of it.

As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy for the special interests that it serves.

This sentence is interesting. The concept of class does not exist in capitalism except for that which a person perceives. The market should be accessible to anyone, and instead what determines ones interaction is their resources to interact. A class is different, and incurs other restrictions. So again I think he is blurring things to distort reality to promote his agenda. I've never liked the blokes arguments personally, but he is the Professor so I'm probably wrong... maybe. The use of 'specialization' here is interesting also, because as I've said capitalism developed out of the reality that people tended to specialize in certain things and not others and so to allow each person to have a role in society, the economy emerged to balance work effort with worker need, using markets as the place for that to mediate itself. Over time it showed weaknesses and regulations became required to protect the extent of participants capabilities from entry level to hugely advanced, from abuse of positional power within the system. Any system has positional power though, so an enquiry into the different natures of that might be interesting across different political and economic systems.

But the conditions of survival let alone justice require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and by now that means the global community.

Agreed, but its tricky and gets trickier the bigger the scope. Another thing which becomes more tricky as scope increases is the possibility of orderly radical change to the system.

The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose necessary illusions to manipulate and deceive the “stupid majority” and remove them from the public arena.

It's about ensuring the freedoms exist in access, and innovation within, communication platforms. The internet has sort of solved that problem he is talking about. We know how fast online stuff can spread far and wide from someones webcam etc. But while I can build a fancy news website, I cannot afford to hire anyone to write stories. So it comes down to having a free market which allows products to emerge freely which meet the needs of the people. So people develop platforms which allow the individual to reach millions of people without having to build a website and employ journalists. The only worry I have for the 'stupid majority' is when people distort information and create emotional bias for personal career reasons, whether they be presidents or professors - because while his argument there is redundant, the reality is now information is more accessible to and from anyone, it means anyone can manipulate anyone if they produce an effective enough product. The problem with empowering the buyer is often the buyer is not really aware of what they are buying - but again, that is not a problem of the system but of the people using it. What is human civilization to be but not representative of the action of humans?

The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.

To me, capitalism is the most democratic and free system on the table. So if he was selling socialism for example, his is sales pitch to the darkside is complete and the distortion goes full circle there to end up fully inside out and pretending to be capitalism itself!! Basically more of his socialist propaganda nonsense massaged into a thought virus and spluttered far and wide, hehe, just having a bit of fun.