Chomsky on Anarchism (sidenote; education)

[Bill Haywood]

Borodog wrote:

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productivity would completely crash without private ownership.... if you started with a completely, totally equal division of property, in the first minute of socialism inequalities would immediately arise.... To maintain "equality" would require ongoing massive violence....
Not to mention, who makes the decisions about what to produce? Who bears the risks if the wrong things are made?

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You misunderstand him thoroughly. Chomsky is not so arrogant as to imagine the details of how an anarchist society would work. In fact, in the interview he refused to be drawn into discussing the specifics of an ideal society, because he appreciates that grandiose schemes of human engineering are empty, naive, fantasies. To burden him with the failings of planned economies is pure straw man.

He gave a very, very, modest definition of anarchism:

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an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary

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Further,

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it is not a movement with an ideology. It is a tendency in the history of human thought and action which seeks to identify coercive, authoritarian, and hierarchic structures.... and if their legitimacy [cannot be justified] to work to undermine them and expand the scope of freedom.

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That's all it is to him. A philosophical belief that power must always be forced to justify hierarchy, and limited when it cannot. So methods of production, distribution, ownership, are all up for negotiation. Unlike Leninists or libertarians, he says "I don't think there are formulas that can be applied."

The difference between Chomsky and anarcho-capitalists is that he makes the toweringly obvious observation that private power can be a source of tyranny, just like public.