What do you guys think about Noam Chomsky and Libertarian Socialism?

[Droopy]

Here's a link giving a short explanation for libertarian socialism if you are unfamiliar with it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Here's a link about Noam Chomsky if you are unfamiliar with him http://www.chomsky.info /

Chomsky is a libertarian socialist. That's kind of a nice phrase for 'anarchist.' When I found out about that I was disappointed because I'd always thought of anarchism as an impossible political system and it seemed to me that a guy as smart as Chomsky would advocate something more practical. Now I don't know. According to Chomsky, anarchism works in small groups and was working in Spain during the Spanish Revolution until they were squashed by military power. According to Chomsky, libertarian socialism is the only system in which people are totally free.

And as far as freedom is concerned I can see how most of the people in this country are limited in some way. In America, money equals freedom. Since most people aren't rich in this country they are involved in what lefties like to call wage slavery. I am not rich and believe me there are times when I do feel like a slave. I am not truly free and equal to other people in this society. I am subordinate to people who have more money than me; I am subordinate to my bosses at work; I am subordinate to the large international corporation that I work for; I am subordinate to law enforcement; I am subordinate to politicians.

I love Chomsky and I love the work that he has done. When I hear him speak I hear truth ringing loud and clear. But what do you make of this libertarian socialist stuff? Me? I don't know. It's going to require some more investigation.

[Hardrada]

1. For it!

The CNT is active in Spain again. That was the Spanish anarchist group that opposed both Stalinism and fascism. The American IWW was also largely anarcho-syndicalist.

[Droopy]

3. You seem to know something about this stuff

Here's something that bothers me about anarchism. Medical care. I have a condition that requires medication. The drug that I take is made by Phizer and I bet you know about them. How would I get treatment in an anarchist system?

[Hardrada]

35. Collective ownership of drug manufacture and distribution would

ensure cheaper medication and a delivery system unhampered by heavy layers of capitalist bureaucrats looking for the bottom line and their own aggrandizement. This would require social change and much education and organization but is entirely possible.

[The Straight Story]

2. Well, there ya go - you answered your own question really, to wit:

"According to Chomsky, anarchism works in small groups and was working in Spain during the Spanish Revolution until they were squashed by military power."

It works in small groups but there is always a bigger group more organized who can take over.

So while great in theory, in practice it probably would not last long :)

[Selatius]

4. I am an anarcho-socialist. It's possible provided there is education.

For example, if the government were involved, what could happen is the government under a liberal president establishes a new work program with the specific goal of organizing workers in as many communities as possible into worker cooperative enterprises.

These enterprises are different from traditional business models in that employees in these firms are also the owners or shareholders. They jointly own the firm's assets, and they decide collectively how assets are to be used, set production schedules/business hours, decide when to procure new capital, etc.

I've seen cooperatives work. Basically, you have a popular assembly, and usually there is an elected president, treasurer, and secretary. The popular assembly is made up of workers, and if the firm is large and complex, usually individual workers are assigned into different committees that handle the various operations of the firm. The president operates at the leisure of the assembly and can be recalled at any time.

Even if the government weren't involved--and it's likely they won't given the huge amount of corporate influence in Washington--this can be done through pampleteering, agitation, education, and popular organization of the workers. The key is organization of the workers. If workers are not organized to effectively communicate with each other, there will be massive problems.

To give you a clue as to how long the education phase may take, it took almost 60 years of agitation and education of local workers in Spain. Once the Spanish Civil War began, workers already knew what to do, and the result was several communities reorganized the bulk of the local economy along cooperative lines.

As you noted, all communes established during that civil war were eventually annihilated. If it wasn't Franco's forces and his support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy who killed these people, then it was the Stalinists backed by the Soviet Union, who also wanted to control Spain.

[Syrinx]

5. I Don't Know Exactly What Chomsky means by "libertarian socialism"

And I'm too tired to read about it right now. But I have described myself as a libertarian socialist.

In my own simplistic terms, it just means that I don't think anyone should go hungry, or without healthcare or decent housing, just because they can't afford those things, and that people shouldn't go to prison unless they cause tangible harm to other people.

That's basically what I mean when I call myself a libertarian socialist.

I'm definitely not a communist, because I believe that people who work especially hard and provide benefits to society at large deserve to be rewarded.

And I'm definitely not a capital-L Libertarian, because to think that the "free market" can solve every problem that society faces is just Loony-Tunes crazy.

That's why I call myself a libertarian socialist.

[Droopy]

9. Chomsky has a different definition of libertarian socialism

Check out the Wikipedia link in my original post for his definition of libertarian socialism when you are feeling more up to it.

[BlooInBloo]

6. He, Vidal, and Rorty were 3 pillars of American intellectualism. Now there are only 2.

[Droopy]

7. And Chomsky is damn near 80 years old

Who do you see picking up where Chomsky and others have left off?

[BlooInBloo]

10. I see America being up intellectual shit creek.

[warren pease]

36. And without a frontal lobe for a paddle...

And don't forget Howard Zinn is in his mid-80s, as are just about all the black voting rights and anti-Vietnam activists from the 60s and 70s.

Other than Michael Parenti and a few others, I don't see anybody dealing with US history or political science like Zinn does. And Chomsky is absolutely irreplaceable. Zinn himself says, about Chomsky, "Of all the movement people I knew, there was no one person who combined such intellectual power with such commitment to social justice."

When we lose Chomsky, I think we'll be shit out of people of conscience with gigantic brains. At least he's prolific: I've got about 12 of his books and I haven't even scratched the surface of his body of work.

And there's another whole body on human cognition and linguistics that I'm probably way too uninformed to understand, while he just happens to be the world's leading authority on the subject and was the youngest fully tenured prof (at 28, I believe) in the history of MIT.

Other than that, just a normal guy, doing what he can to get by.


wp

[ConsAreLiars]

8. Chomsky advocates for a system that provides full and universal access to health care and so on.

You are using the corporate definition of anarchism to attribute to him views he does not hold. Straight Story does the same thing.

If you want to find out what he actually supports, check
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Noam_Chomsky, in particular http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Noam_Chomsky#Views_on_anarchism
and http://www.zmag.org/chomsky_repliesana.htm

"One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow -- the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive."

[Droopy]

11. I have not attributed anything to Chomsky that he has not said

In his own words he is an "anarcho-libertarian socialist." He favors dissolution of the state. Unless he has changed his views since I watched Manufacturing Consent.

Now other than that I have done very little reading about libertarian socialism. I'm sure he has ideas on how society would function in such a system and they probably have to do with community and collectivism. Like I said, I need to investigate more.

[ConsAreLiars]

13. Do more reading, as you suggest you intend.

When he talks about "the state" it is as a institution by which the few exercise power over the many. He'd rather see a system in which power is shared, something resembling democracy. Don't get hung up by labels.

Edit to add - A lot of video and some audio can be found at http://onebigtorrent.org/index.php . Just put Chomsky in the search box. If you're not familiar with torrents go to http://www.utorrent.com/ to get the software you need. A bit slow until you give more than you get, but it works, and the more you share the faster it gets.

[pnorman]

12. The "Left-Right" and the "Authoritarian-Libertarian" lines by themselves,

rarely if ever explain such things adequately. But used together as a two-dimensional area, does a FAR better job. Test yourself at this website: http://www.politicalcompass.org/

It's HIGHLY recommended that you take the test BEFORE reading the rest of the contents on that site. As for myself, I tested deep into the Third Quadrant ("Left-Libertarian"). I feel quite comfortable with that, although I realize that it isn't a career-enhancing item on a resume. In my opinion, there is NO "abnormal" (ie: "sociopathic") score per se (except perhaps for those at the very extreme of any of those Quadrants".)

pnorman
On edit: I dug out an old score of mine from 3~4 years ago. Here it is:
Economic Left/Right: -7.50 Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.92
I'm tempted to retake it, but that probably isn't a good idea.

[David__77]

14. I don't think Spanish anarchists were very "libertarian."

They made the communists look positively liberal by comparison. The Spanish anarchists forced collectivization, prohibited religious practice, mass arrested all clergy, abolished money, and prohibited private property. I don't think that sounds too libertarian to me. And it certainly is a terrible political program for an agrarian country like Spain was at the time. And it made for a terrible diversion from the war effort against the Franco fascists and their Italian and German reinforcements.

[Selatius]

16. Your description sounds more like that of the communists supported by Stalin than CNT-FAI folks

I don't know where your sources of information came from, but anarchism gained a large foothold in Spain because there had already been a long tradition of communal property held in common and that communists of the era often felt that city workers and industrialized workers would serve as the vanguard of a worker revolution, as opposed to agrarian workers and peasants, and thus ignored people in the countryside in many cases.

If I remember my history, it was the communists who started the bloodshed with the anarchists that became known as the Barcelona May Days and that it was the communists who launched a counter-revolution against the socialists/anarchists even though everybody was fighting Franco.

[David__77]

18. I don't agree with that description.

There are certainly a lot of contrary histories out there on the matter.

PCE (the communists) were pretty moderate in their economic policy. The FAI opposed them precisely on that point, and so they launched a coup (aka "revolution") in Barcelona that was a disaster for the unity of the republican forces. I guess I would argue that the "revolution" should have waited until the fascists were defeated. Collectivization was absolutely imposed by the anarchists in the countryside. PCE opposed it and supported land redistribution on an individual basis.

[Selatius]

19. From what I've read, imposed collectivization was rather rare but did happen.

I'm not condoning atrocities where they happened, but at the same time I would say it happened in the context of an extremely personal civil war where anybody who wished to seized power had an opportunity to do so, even if the manner in which they did was very un-libertarian like.

The big reason anarchism became so widespread and popular in Spain was not simply because Marxists tended to view urban workers as vehicles of change and thus largely ignored many people in Spain because it was largely agrarian but because anarchist ideas of the time tended to coincide very closely with ancient Spanish traditions of mutual aid and village-level organization. Communist statism never really flourished as it did in other parts of Europe because the idea of a powerful, centralized government never took hold in Spain as it did in other parts of Europe.

The CNT at the time actually did decide to take part in the Republican government of Largo Cabellero in 1936 before the revolution precisely because they felt Franco was the biggest threat out there against that government as well as everybody on the left even though many anarchists outside Spain criticized the concession, but other anarchists such as Emma Goldman didn't blame them for making such a move given the situation with Hitler's increasing power and his increasing aid to Franco. It was also the CNT that correctly warned Madrid of an impending uprising by rightist forces in July of 1936, and anarchism and communism conflict not only on ideological grounds but political grounds as well, as many in the CNT condemned Stalin and the COMINTERN that the PCE was involved with and received weapons from.

[David__77]

21. The left was successful when unified, not when it wasn't.

All left parties made errors during the war. Not surprisingly, the anarchist forces weren't a monolith like the PCE. Some military columns worked very differently than others. Relations with other parties were mixed. The dogmatists in each party caused major problems. The Soviets supplied most of the arms to the Spanish Republic, not to a political party, though I'm sure PCE received some weapons. It's a good thing they send aid, because the self-styled democracies sat on their hands with "neutrality" while Italy and Germany waged their dress rehearsal for the continental offensive against human progress.

[Selatius]

38. I'm not sure it was a good thing. Stalin was not supporting the Spanish communists out of good will.

He was merely trying to spread his control into other nations, just as he had done with the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farmers, which by some estimates led to the death of millions. With the weapons and warplanes sent to pro-Stalin elements in Spain, I wouldn't be surprised if Spain became a soviet satellite state if Franco was crushed.

[many a good man]

37. Can you recommend any good books on the period?

Can be English, Spanish, or Catalan (if my wife will translate for me!) I've read a little but it is still such a hot topic it's hard to weed out the biases. My elder Spanish in-laws are very reluctant to talk about it so all I hear are little bits and pieces.

[David__77]

15. "Libertarian socialism"

Sounds like communism. As an ideal, both proposed social systems descibe a union of free individuals engaging in non-alienated labor. They just argue over how to get there. I'm afraid the argument between them is rather ethereal since humanity is obviously centuries away, at a minimum, from transcending class society. I'm far more concerned about how to achieve possible goals in the current political context.

[Leopolds Ghost]

17. I'm a Radical Populist -- is that close? n/t

[ixion]

20. Anarchism was founded as an non-violent intellectual movement

not the "wild-in-the-streets" kind of image that has been put forth by the status quo.

Mikhail Bakunin is considered one of the fathers of the true concept of anarchy.

Here's a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin


Chomsky rules. :yourock:

[xchrom]

22. i wish i could recommend your reply.

i think it also points out the problem with anarchism and the left or the right.

anarchism practised by chomsky and others like hime would be one thing -- but practised by the masses? -- shudder.

i strongly lean left -- and socialism.

but i have no real love for libertarianism -- because i have no trust or faith in the ''masses''.

i have some belief in a kind of hierarchy -- you might call it a hierarchy of the mind.

[ixion]

30. it could work on a community level...the mechanism to enforce it is already in place

that is this: if you do something the community does not like, it ostracizes you from the community, which for most humans is very uncomfortable, so they seek out like-minded people elsewhere. Certainly, there will be trouble-makers. There will be trouble makers in any system. However it should be up to the surrounding community, not the federal or even the state government to decide what is socially acceptable and what is not. It is not up to the government to legislate morality, in my opinion. :hi:

[xchrom]

33. i understand your position -- but my experience as a gay person

finds this political system more frightening than i can possibly tell you.

more, for me it has the possibility of institutionalising ''group dumbness'' -- which will be as easily an available option as as ''group intelligence''.

for me -- since reagan -- we've seen what pandering to the selfish interests of ''community'' can bring us.

but -- i certainly understand others think otherwise.

[eridani]

23. Most anarchists don't think he's a "real" anarchist

Modern anarchists are into bloviating about theories, and Chomsky just thinks it describes a system that would be nice to live in. He's more interested in the pragmatic policy of just trying different things and seeing how they work. Also, he sees governments as the only possible real world checks on corporations at present, which is a big anarchist no-no.

[thunder rising]

24. Excuse me...but did Noam Chomsky say this?

Or is it yet again somebody trying to bracket Chomsky. This framing of Chomsky has been going on for years. He was a "communist" in the 70's. I have read a lot of Chomsky (including his language work) and I have never heard him SAY we must tear down anything. He merely reports, with a keen eye that which we refuse to see about our country and it's motivations.

[Droopy]

25. Yes

In the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media he says that he is an "anarcho-libertarian socialist." In the Wikipedia article that I posted a link to there are quotes in there from him. Check it out.

[thunder rising]

28. a string of words

Sorry, I didn't see the movie. "anarcho-libertarian socialist" is a string of words that only Chomsky could put adjoin and have people think about it. When he said it, I'm sure there was a pause in the entire audience's thought processes trying to decipher the meaning of that phrase. anarcho-libertarian socialist? I'm laughing.

Well let me know if you come to any earth shattering conclusions.

[Droopy]

29. There is actually a philosophy called libertarian socialism

and it contains several sub-philosophies. It's been around since long before Chomsky walked the earth. He did not coin the phrase or create the philosophy. It's no joke.

[porphyrian]

26. I'm mostly in agreement with him.

I remember arguing with someone else who claimed to take his position, but I don't remember what that was about. Anyway, I think freedom is one of the most important human rights, and the one most people seem least equipped to handle or allow.

[TreasonousBastard]

27. Sounds a lot like pre-industrial tribal life...

where everything is essentially owned by the tribe in common and each member is pretty much responsible for his or her actions.

But, this seems to only work in a closed, isolated, society, perhaps where survival is the primary problem. As societies become more complex and leisure is discovered, someone always manages to use all that leisure time to figure out ways to own it all for himself.

Our aggressive tendencies toward warfare, acquisition, and whatever else do tend to wipe out these more peaceful and idealistic social experiments.

In the end, a neat idea, and tracks with my own fantasies of an ideal society, but just ain't gonna happen any time soon.

[ComerPerro]

31. It can't exist. The unions themselves would be the authoritarian system

human nature

[blueworld]

32. I also enjoy Chomsky

But I don't get Libertarian Socialism at all. The Wikipedia entry states, "...Libertarian socialists place their hopes in trade unions, workers' councils, municipalities, citizens' assemblies, and other non-bureaucratic, decentralized means of action."

IMO, these are all institutions of power, simply on a smaller, more local scale than states, and each has its own inherent bureaucracy. When humans gather together for society, mutual exchange and survival there's a pecking order.

Complete freedom, as defined by complete anarchy, wouldn't benefit anyone but the strongest anarchist. We presumably sacrifice a little for the common good & common survival of the many. What we presumably sacrifice is a little freedom to have it all our own way. In order to share the beans, someone has to count them first, and the best of us might be tempted to hoard unless...

[Droopy]

34. Thanks for all of the replies

I appreciate all of the posts. I'm going to go read some Chomsky now :). I will check this thread later for more replies.