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.

[Case Closed]

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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.

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I don't think that anyone debates this. But the one part about AC as far as I know is that there will always be the possibility of a competing tyrannical body that would mess the other one up.

[ConstantineX]

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

Who limits this power? If there are rules to the game, like "power must always be justified", you should be able to clearly explain how those rules are enforced - just foreshadow or sketch the institutions that do so. All you are doing is picking a space in an infinite field, you can have an infinite subset of different possibilities if you wish.

I think many ACists & libertarians make a HUGE mistake when they assert that anarchy by itself spontaneously self organizes to bring fruits of civilization. Yes, even within libertarianism and ACism there are institutions that enforce the "rules" of the society, which generally are entailed in concepts of natural rights. ACists assert that autonomous private institutions in competition can enforce those rules. It isn't proven. But there is a definite difference between it and communism, which tries to enforce rules of egalitarianism and communal ownership of the "means of production", which is simply that communism has empirically failed in all the manifestations it's been tried in.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
Borodog wrote:

[ QUOTE ]
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?

[/ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

The classic tactic of Marx. Since the Utopian Socialists had been utterly destroyed, Marx came along and claimed that any attempt to say what the inevitable socialist society would look like or how it would work, or any attempts to debunk it, were summarily "unscientific", because there were "inevitable laws of history" that would inexorably bring socialism about, regardless of how it actually worked. Hence, all the socialists should just focus their efforts on attacking capitalism, rather than describing socialism. Brilliant rhetorical tactic, and it worked beautifully.

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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

[/ QUOTE ]

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Hey, I agree with this completely. Unfortunately, it isn't a definition of anarchism.

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Further,

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

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."

[/ QUOTE ]

"Up for negotiation"? They aren't up for negotiation. Economics is a science, and the implications of various doctrines, like the absence of the private ownership of the factors of production, the absence of freedom of exchange and contract, the absence of money, etc., all these things can be investigated, and their real world implications understood. Abolishing any of these things, the underpinnings of capitalism, would have disastrous real world effects on the productivity of society that would cause mass death and a return to the Stone Age. You can *have* anarchosocialism. It *works*. It's just that it only works for very small groups of people at a Stone Age level of sophistication.

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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.

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No, the difference between Chomsky and anarcho-capitalists is that he has bizarre definitions of things like "coercion" and "tyranny." According to Chomsky, me owning my home is somehow "coercive" and "tyrannical".

[BCPVP]

Been listening to some Salerno lectures, Boro? [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Borodog]

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Been listening to some Salerno lectures, Boro? [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]