On occasion I refer to myself as being on the conservative wing of the extreme left. Now, if you were wondering, you know why. Which you weren’t, of course, but if…
StS, I don’t think you’re a troll. But although you have repeatedly made claims of advanced age (i.e. in your forties - and then, sometimes it sounds like you’re claiming to be older than that), pretty much everything you write comes across to me like the writings of a college student newly exposed to new ideas in politics, philosophy, and science who stays up all night playing with these ideas in dorms or coffee houses with like-minded newbie philosophers.
It’s not that you’re stupid, it’s just that a lot of us have been there, done that, and got over it. We’re no longer so blown away by our own iconoclastic brilliance, and many of us eventually found out that there were good, practical reasons why many of these ideas are not in the mainstream.
You may be right, and hunter-gatherer tribes are the highest level of social organization that can be sustained over the long haul. You may be right, and reality doesn’t match our world view if we really open our minds and realize our memories are really in the third person. You may be right, and the US military is stupid enough to have zombie-attack contingency plans. You could conceivably be right about everything. But mostly, what you are is a dead bore.
I’m just curious if you are aware of how often you’ve been factually wrong in this thread alone. It’s pretty well impossible to take any arguement you make seriously when the foundations are shown again and again to be based on untruths.
You don’t seem to understand the idea of scale. What would a village elder in a country as large the US be? How would people stop by and consult said elders? While your suggested form of governance might work on a small scale, and I don’t doubt it would work well in small scales, it simply isn’t workable when a society has some 300 million people. Even with debate, laws, agreement, we can’t get everyone to cooperate towards all but the rarest common goals.
I think it’s naive and completely backwards to suggest that local systems would be as workable on a far larger scale. The evidence just isn’t in favor of that.
Damn you! Damn you straight to hell!
Some people have twenty years experience. Other have one year of experience twenty times.
Regards,
Shodan
Sorta like anarchists, no?
I wanted to say ditto to** Oy! **, and to add the following:
Often anarchists believe that the brain-dead masses out there would accept or prefer anarchism if the masses just snapped out of their consumerist dazes. Or worse, they believe that the masses realize how morally depraved their philosophy is but they profess it for the material gain they reap in democratic capitalism. The anarchist is privileged to be free of the terrible forces that indoctrinate the common man, the anarchist believes. His explanation for why he and only a select few are free from this terrible brainwashing, if he has examined it at all, usually rests the notion that he has some unique life experience.
The typical anarchist doesn’t stop to consider that many people have seriously examined various political philosophies in good faith–from anarchy to libertarianism–and rejected them for principled reasons. He is surprised to learn that congressmen and federal judges have read The Conquest of Bread or Pacifism as Pathology.
What he is missing is that many of the masses, in addition to reading Chomsky or Kropotkin, have also read Shakespeare. They’ve learned something about human nature, if not through education, then through sheer (varied) life experience. They’ve studied economics and cognitive science. They’ve read anthropology and sociology. And we, the masses (if I may speak for us), see that human conflict is not what method of property ownership a society adopts, or how much paternalism there is in a society. We recognize a need for a legitimate actor with a monopoly on the use of force. And we look upon the anarchist who believes he has a monopoly on the truth, and we think: it is not our philosophy that is clouded by indoctrination or personal interest, but yours.
I’m not quite sure where you get your “typical anarchist” from. I don’t claim to have conducted any sort of scientific survey, nor do i claim to have known a huge number of anarchists. But i’ve met quite a few in my time, and very few of them believe that it is merely indoctrination or ignorance that leads people to think differently. Or, at least, no more anarchists think this than people of other political persuasions.
Plenty of people, from all political stripes, seem to hold the position that those who disagree with them do so merely out of ignorance or stupidity or self-interest. Anarchists have no monopoly on this sort of hubris.
It’s also interesting that, in your blanket condemnation of anarchists’ alleged myopia, you raise Noam Chomsky’s name. Chomsky is not only a professed admirer of anarchist philosophy, he’s also one of history’s most respected cognitive scientists, and has conducted extensive work touching on economics, sociology, political economy, history and all the other areas of education and life experience that claim anarchists ignore.
I’m not saying that no anarchists fit your model, only that reducing them all to you model is just as silly as what you’re critiquing.
That is one eloquent fucking post. But I gotta say; I just don’t believe that ‘the masses’ have read Chomsky. That is some heavy reading, there.
ETA: mhendo, I think he was acknowledging that Chomsky was in favor of anarchy.
I recognize that.
The paradox is that, in a post making blanket generalizations about anarchists’ alleged ignorance, one of his exemplary anarchists is also one of the most educated and erudite men on the planet.
Your objection is perfectly fair. Perhaps my personal experience with anarchists is not representative. In the absence of something other than anecdote, however, I’ll probably go on believing that this is a common trait among anarchists. I did not mean to imply that this is true of all anarchists, only that I’ve found it to be common among them.
Thanks, and you also raise a fair point about how many people are reading Chomsky. But I do think that a much higher proportion of people have read anarchist literature than many anarchists like to think. And yes I was acknowledging Chomsky as an anarchosyndicalist.
I did not intend to characterize anarchists as ignorant about those fields of study. I intended to characterize them as ignorant about those who disagree with them (specifically that their philosophical opponents are also well-educated and have read the works of anarchism and have come to different good faith conclusions).
I would add that Chomsky is a great example of an anarchist who rejects his ideological opponents as biased sell-outs instead of engaging in charitable, good faith arguments with them. He thinks his fellow academics are just too comfortable in capitalist society to speak out, rather than disagreeing with him over the need to do so.
The thing is, though, despite Chomsky’s admitted anarchist sympathies (he tends more frequently to use the term “libertarian socialist”), very very little of his writing actually discusses or espouses anarchist philosophy.
His linguistic stuff is, for the most part, pretty narrowly scientific and apolitical. He has even explicitly stated that he can find very few satisfying connections between his linguistic work and his political beliefs. He says he would be happy to find some connections but, for the most part, they’re just not there.
As for his explicitly political stuff, virtually none of it deals with anarchism, or indeed with much at all in the way of abstract political theory. Probably his best-known political work is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (although, as he frequently points out, his co-author Edward Herman actually made a greater contribution to the book, which is why Herman’s name appears first on the title page), and that has nothing about anarchism at all. It is a study of media bias, mainly in the United States, in dealing with important international political events.
Other well-known Chomsky works include: The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians; Deterring Democracy; Year 501: The Conquest Continues; For Reasons of State; The Political Economy of Human Rights (2 vols, also co-authored with Herman); and American Power and the New Mandarins. I’ve read all of those, and other Chomsky works, and i don’t recall him saying anything much at all about anarchism in any of them. Nor do the criticisms and proposals offered in those books seem, in my view, to reflect anarchist priorities; they are, in most cases, far more pragmatic.
In fact, the main reason i originally became aware of Chomsky’s anarchism is that it is brought up in the excellent documentary film, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media by Canadians Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. I’ve also heard him discuss it in interviews, mainly in response to questions about his own worldview and political philosophy.
Most of his writing, especially over the past couple of decades, has attempted to address immediate policy concerns, and has often suggested solutions or policy changes that show no hint of anarchist priorities, but that fall squarely in the left wing of the political spectrum. He’s no liberal, and no Democrat, but he had also made clear that, in many cases, voting for the least-bad mainstream party is a viable and reasonable political choice. In a speech called Goals and Visions, which i attended in Australia back in the mid-1990s, he explicitly stated that, while he holds anarchist principles as his vision for a good society, his short-term goals are often designed to strengthen rather than weaken the state, because he recognizes that, for all its problems, the state is often more responsive to popular needs and the popular will than the “private tyrannies” (his words) of corporations.
One of the few pieces of Chomsky’s work that i 've come across that deals specifically and comprehensively with the anarchist worldview is an essay from 1970, Notes on Anarchism. Apart from that essay, if someone asked me to recommend some reading to help them learn about anarchism, i think that Chomsky would be well down my list of suggestions.
I think that dramatically oversimplifies Chomsky’s arguments about the way that liberal academia becomes entrenched as part of post-war liberal society.
While i agree that Chomsky tends to be a little dogmatic about others on the left/liberal sides of the political spectrum, i’m not sure that it’s fair to lay the blame solely at his feet for the lack of “good faith arguments.” He’s rarely ever even asked to participate in mainstream discourse, something that wasn’t true in the 1970s when he used to write pieces for mainstream organs like the New York Review of Books.
I’ll accept oversimplification, but not dramatic oversimplification. Deal? 
I agree about Chomsky mostly not writing about anarchism. But he is part of the anarchist canon because of his criticisms of government, just like the works of anthropology cited by SmashTheState are not about anarchism per se but are part of the canon.
SmashTheState impresses me as an ever-youthful TrustFundie, even if he is one of those elderly 40-year-olds. (Grrr…)
He’s done some interesting research & the more thoughtful responses on this thread are fascinating. (Responses by others, that is.) And, at least, his missionary work among Those Less Fortunate shows more originality on his part than just becoming another arty coke-head. Perhaps he’s already tried & abandoned several roles; not having to work for a living does allow time for experimentation.
I don’t consider him a troll. Although I wonder whether he’ll smash the Kanadian state before the Amerikan one. Probably not–down here, a catastrophic illness or accident could stress even a trust fund. (It’s a pity that, despite his extreme decrepitude, he’s still too young to realize that the “k” substitution is* so* 1970’s!)
Plus, he was actually kinda vocal about his sympathies for the anarchy movement. I mean, maybe not the bulk of his writings reflected that, but he definitely did interviews and such, right? I mean, it seems like mhendo is trying to downplay the fact that someone as respected as Chomsky was ‘into’ anarchy. But he was.
I could be wrong about mhendo’s point, of course. Sorry, but I am posting from overtime hours at work.
You are about as wrong as you could possibly be, especially considering i explicitly said in my post:
In a previous post, i also said:
Yeah, i’m really trying to downplay Chomsky’s anarchism. :rolleyes:
My point, as i thought i made clear in my rather long post, was merely that most of the writings for which Chomsky is best known, and which received the greatest exposure in book reviews and public commentary, do not deal with his anarchism. I could hand you most of Chomsky’s linguistic and political oeuvre and, once you had read the books, you might still not really know anything about anarchism.
I sort of take Richard Parker’s point that Chomsky is part of the anarchist canon, largely because Chomsky himself has made clear, on numerous occasions, that he’s a libertarian socialist, or anarchist, and has expressed admiration for anarchists such as Rudolph Rocker.
I don’t, however, agree with Richard Parker’s contention that Chomsky’s work is part of the anarchist canon “because of his criticisms of government.” It takes more than criticism of government to make someone an anarchist, and the vast majority of Chomsky’s political works demonstrate a criticism of government rooted in particular policy decisions and in the way that government caters to particular powerful interests. That sort of political economy critique is not really (or, at least, it’s not only) an anarchist critique of government. Read something like The Fateful Triangle or Manufacturing Consent or Deterring Democracy. You’ll find basically nothing in those books, or in plenty of Chomsky’s other books, that smacks of a particularly anarchist argument.
I was at a libertarian conference a few years ago, and was discussing Chomsky with a few of other people there. Most of them dismissed him as simply another leftist, and were quite surprised when i mentioned his anarchist sympathies, and his respect for anarchist writers like Rocker, as well as classical liberals like Wilhelm von Humboldt. I’d be willing to bet that there are plenty of people who know who he is but who have no idea about his anarchism.
I’m not saying that he’s not an anarchist; i’m merely arguing that his anarchist principles and beliefs are not immediately obvious in much of his work.
mhendo, my apologies. I skimmed, as I am posting from work. In my eagerness to post on this topic, I dropped the ball. sorry.