Sat 13 Mar 2010
Shorter Noam Chomsky interview:
Question 1: “blahblahcognitivescienceblah?”
Noam: “Yup, and it’ll make psycho’s eyes glaze over!”
Question 2: “Anarchist movement…WTF, yo?”
Noam: “Coherence & foresight would be nice. Oh yeah, and no more Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea stuff”
Question 3: “Government as check on other power, at least in short run: you = for, but reality = why bother. So…why bother?”
Noam: “You silly idealist! State > Corporate or collapse!! Organize! BTW: health care reform?”
Me, in reaction to response #3: “Circle any more & GoDaddy’ll slap a logo on your ass…”
So, according to Noam, though he in the long run rejects government, it in his view has to be kept & “improved” before then to ameliorate the same things that it has enabled in its entire existence, even though the effect is two tears in a bucket & the effort for even that is like pulling teeth, because…well, just because. Yet in the next breath he talks about organizing radical labor in the meantime, as if Roderick could possibly be unaware of such a strategy.
It appears that Noam Chomsky thinks the point behind such moves outside of electoral politics as he mentions must be to maintain the socio-political system they respond to, rather than to undermine it. If that kind of organization works though, then what would be the point?
March 14th, 2010 at 2:53 am
I watched the video a couple of days ago. While Chomsky accepts the libertarian class critique of the State, he nonetheless counters with 2 points:
1) The State is not going to be abolished anytime soon
2) The State is more accountable than private tyrannies(corporations/firms)
Therefore, in terms of activism, work through electoral politics to strengthen the State’s coercive authority.
Frankly, it’s absurd reasoning from my perspective. Any anarchist order(even a Laissez-faire capitalist one) is going to have to have vibrant, even elaborate forms of mutual aid collective action. This kind of institutional collective action evolves out of culture and norms, for the most part. The All-powerful providing/regulating State ends up destroying the cultural underpinnings of mutual aid collective actions. Politically factious Democratic Socialist government do not evolve to peaceful anarchies, they eventually collapse into violence or devolve into tyranny(a dictator). Anarchy is not an evolutionary emergent property of politics; sociopathy is the more likely emergent property of political tit-for-tat…