Does Chomsky get way too much hate?
He is responsible for getting yanks into socialism through libertarianism, where they can they then discover the other tendencies of socialist thought and continental philosophy. I remember years back when he was talking about how renting yourself (wage-labor) was not too different from selling yourself (chattel slavery).
Thoughts?
I mean, he's indispensable on US foreign policy. He may have some opinions that I disagree with but his work is fine.
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Well, to what extent do you believe that one's political consciousness is predetermined by their material conditions? Chomsky's background is not conducive to a revolutionary consciousness. He is removed from struggle by his institutional support. If you think he does not deserve the hate he gets, you might be from a similar background, one that is gulag-worthy IMO.
i admire and respect him, his works and much of what he has to say. but I also think he says some plainly stupid things, is often delusional/wilfully ignorant, and in practice little more than a socdem
into the trash it goes
Chomsky's political philosophy is whack, but in terms of actually gathering information and putting forward analysis of events and criticism of government he's great. So he serves his purpose well. It's not like you're supposed to read him for "libertarian anarchism".
I mean libertarian socialism*
It depends on what you'd consider "too much." I think he definitely gets too much hate from the more Marxist among us, however, let's be completely fair, his rejection of different people's ideas are usually absolutely silly. His response to Derrida was basically "I don't get it," his Zizek response was him crying about Zizek's new-found popularity and calling him a "charlatan" (which, quite frankly, the only way one can come to that conclusion is by not reading him), even his rejection of right-Libertarianism is essentially conspiratorial in nature. That said, however, I think we should treat Chomsky as Chomsky says to treat any thinker - take what's good, leave what's stupid. Get the good shit out of Chomsky's book, critiques, lectures, etcetera, but investigate his claims as well, and come to your own conclusions about when he's right or wrong. [pic unrelated]
That's basically every socialist public figure. Stop with the larping.
Well by that logic, we'd have to gulag Marx as well for using certain Capitalist-state apparatuses, wouldn't we? This just seems petulant and kind of naive, bordering on feels > reals.
Chomsky and Herman didn't deny what was happening in Cambodia. They were critiquing the coverage given to what was happening there as opposed to East Timor. They were also skeptical of the numbers being reported. Atrocity propaganda being pushed by the media to lend public support to an intervention is what they were trying to point out.
This is his blog: antichomsky.blogspot.mx
What do you mean?
Chomsky is absolutely wrong on BDS. His comments denouncing the most radical elements of the BDS movement read like chauvinism.
youtu.be
He reduces right-Libertarianism to a series of corporations making slam-posts every time the government fucks up, however, what he ignores is 1. AnCaps and right-libs don't exactly share the same values as a lot of these corporate types. Intelligent Capitalists usually go toward a sort of Liberalism or welfare state in order to prevent large-scale uprising. Furthermore, a bunch of know-nothing economists in shit-tier universities who object to things like intellectual property and the like are not gonna be positively viewed by the corporate elite, and 2. that this criticism he's making sort of falls apart once those are taken into consideration.
If I'm wrong here or misinterpreting him, please correct me, it just kinda seemed like a strange critique.
P.s., that was one point that was off in an otherwise alright video. Apologies if it seemed like I was just writing off the entire video off of that one point.
Dude, do you know who helped fund and thus begin, the American Libertarian Party? It was the fucking Koch brothers
I also think its true to an extent when you think of the Tea Party and its funders tricking desperate proles to get vocal against their own interests.
Doing some reading now
Not quite, he's an analytical Marxist, and one that makes sure they would stay away from 'muh intellectuals' (of the continentally inclined kind) in particular.
I don't hate the guy, but the lack of hatred may be unrequited.
I've been doing some reading into this, apparently the Koch's are very fond of kicking out the right-libs who disagree with them on things like copyright law, and the like. Doesn't help the case for the Libertarian party itself, and insofar as they're the spearheads, Chomsky's words do seem far more likely and understandable than I'd previously thought.
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I think that was just kind of the dude slipping up a bit. He is right about Chomsky being very in-tune with the analytic tradition/method in philosophy, though.
I don't think so; he's anarchistic. but in terms of what he proposes directly, he's more of a reformist.
You're a Marxist yes?
Remember that the bourgeoisie are not some evil united force that will not disagree. They can fuck with the proletarians until they see enough resistance growing and corporate-owned media outlets like Fox News do oppose food stamps and other social welfare programs
Watch this: youtube.com
Listen to what he says about the capitalists unlikely to get rid of the nanny state. And, the propertarians ("libertarians"), idealistically, are tricked to be there to blame the state when things go wrong to veil the inherent self-destructive nature of capitalism. For them, it'll always be the (bourgeois state). They're duped and the bourgeoisie does take advantage of that. There will be a nanny state to prevent revolution, but then the bourgeoisie greedily chip down the reforms and things turn to shit for the proletarians. The state is then blamed, etc.
No he fucking didn't why do people still believe this meme?
youtu.be
Proudhon was superior anyhow and he was a peasant.
His theoretical incompetence deserves most of the critique it gets. Read him for US foreign policy, not for his theory.
OP here.
yeah I agree with this
He is an analytical autist who unironically thought clinton was better than trump
I think he thought that because of the whole climate change stuff.
Yes. "Marxist"-"Leninists" have been butthurt ever since he BTFO'd them. To date they haven't come up with a single counter-argument.
That did hurt my butt.
Chomsky deliberately ignores historical context and Lenin's own writings to make that argument.
Again and again, people have repeated the tautology "Lenin called it state capitalism, therefore it was state capitalism." And claimed that Lenin was not actually Lenin, but was in fact Blanqui, and that the USSR was totalitarianism, and hence equivalent to Nazi Germany. This is ridiculous, but what else can you expect from a radical liberal like Chomsky, who argues that Imperial Germany was more "socialist" than post-1917 Russia. Most irritating at all, he argues that critics who disagree are actually complicit with Western propaganda and as such are betraying themselves and the movement; that kind of arrogance has no truck with the nuances of history.
If you look at Lenin's writings, particularly this speech: marxists.org
You can see the context in which Lenin used the term state capitalism. This is in early 1918, when Chomsky said that all trace of socialism was being extinguished. It would have been more plausible to claim that by 1921, but I digress.
>What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism were established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.
The first thing to note is that there is no discussion of state capitalism as a mode of production – Lenin was adamant, against left criticism, that what was being built was socialism. Second, as Trotsky argued,
>Socialism is a keeping of accounts. Under the conditions of the New Economic Policy only the forms of our account keeping are different from those which we endeavoured to employ during the period of Military [i.e. War] Communism, and which will receive their final form with the development of socialism.
marxists.org
There is no contradiction here. The construction of socialism requires the accounting and control mechanisms that had already been carried out in more, comparatively, highly developed capitalist nations like Germany. To build socialism was, in large part, to build an integrated economy. This is the historical context Chomsky ignores, as he ignores Lenin's point of view, and for a definite political purpose: he equates, like all liberals do, Lenin with the eventual reign of Stalinism in the USSR, and as such Lenin a petty version of Stalin who was diligently laying the bricks for an inevitable totalitarian dictatorship. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Lenin was aggressively recruiting from former Czarist experts:
>The only socialism we can imagine is one based on all the lessons learned through large-scale capitalist culture. Socialism without postal and telegraph services, without machines is the emptiest of phrases. But it is impossible to sweep aside the bourgeois atmosphere and bourgeois habits all at once; it needs the kind of organisation on which all modern science and technology are based.
This was state capitalism. It should be no controversy to state that socialism is only possible through capitalism. The problem the Bolsheviks faced was they had capitalism, but it was a decrepit, war-torn, petty bourgeois capitalism. They could not dispense with what bourgeois expertise existed when they had nothing to replace it. There was a dearth of contemporary information technology and as such poor accounting and control. The only thing holding the USSR together was the party and Trotsky's military discipline, which Chomsky much despises; ironically, because the revolution was made possible in large part by soldiers' soviets cooperating with workers' soviets.