[PDF] The Chomsky effect or the anarchism of the State

So I did a thing and translated a French ''Oiseau-tempête" journal's (post-Situationist; Marxist autonomist/insurrectionary anarchist) critique of Chomsky into English. Hyperlink to the original can be found in the PDF file at the top.

Honestly I don't even agree with everything in it and on the whole have a lot of problems with Oiseau-tempête (not just them but post-Situationism on the whole) but thought this might interest ya'll, especially since it was only available in French until now.

Fun fact/translator's note: the title of the journal refers to the petrel family of birds, in particular the storm petrels.

Other urls found in this thread:

subversionpress.wordpress.com/.
theanarchistlibrary.org/action/text/new
subversionpress.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/on-the-woman-question/
theanarchistlibrary.org/action/text/edit/chomskyeffect
libcom.org/library/chomsky-effect-or-anarchism-state-oiseau-temp-te-claude-gillon.
troploin.fr/node/85
archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1966
archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article2027
news.mit.edu/1992/citation-0415
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Thank you for your work. Did you submit a copy to the Anarchist Library?

Thank you, this is wonderful. I really despise Chomsky.

No. Think they'd appreciate it? I discovered this (in the original language) on the ultra-left reddit boards a bit ago and plan on sharing it there as well as sending it to subversionpress.wordpress.com/.

The site proudly hosts many works with much less merit than this.
theanarchistlibrary.org/action/text/new

Aight, gonna do that then.

subversionpress.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/on-the-woman-question/
Let's read this together

Sent.

That's a good-ass text. Can't believe Dauvé is the first to really re-examine the woman question from a materialist POV (n.b. within the productive relation of capital) since fucking Engels in Origins and to a lesser degree Marx in Capital 1, or it's at least the only one I know of.

So since this is rather well-received maybe there are more texts I could translate from Oiseau-tempête or anything else in French. I also speak Dutch, German, Mandarin Chinese and some Hakka Chinese so suggest whatever and I'll see if it piques.

Bump

Update: fixed some typos, grammar and complemented the citation section.

Neato, thank you.

PS: Chomsky did nothing wrong.

how?
o
w?

Exblain. I came out of that read learning only true things about him (checked in the sources and shit) and now dislike him even more than before.

it's a catchphrase

Thanks. Interesting critique, although sometimes the verbosity of the author made it hard to comprehend. There are still some typos I've noticed, but all of them are really minor stuff:

In the final paragraph

In fourth citation. Should be Kosovo.

In fourth citation.

You can fix them yourself on the anarchistlib:
theanarchistlibrary.org/action/text/edit/chomskyeffect

Now also on libcom: libcom.org/library/chomsky-effect-or-anarchism-state-oiseau-temp-te-claude-gillon.

Again:

if anyone thinks it's worth translating anything in French or the above languages give me a ring.


Thanks, fix't.

That's because he isn't. Autonomist/feminists marxists like Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework have long pointed out women's (especially housewife's) role in the reproduction of capital and labor power. The third citation in the text even discusses this

I don't know, maybe I just didn't understand it fully but it seems to me that he only said that women are treated as inferiors because we are living in a world designed for work and child bearing forces women to temporary drop out of it.

I don't see how this corrects the mistakes of previous revolutions.

libcom will surely accept it

Raising a child and housework is still work, even if it doesn't directly produce goods and value. It is unpaid labor that reproduces the labor power of the workforce, thus indirectly contributing to the creation of value and surplus value.

Dauvé mentions this in footnote 3 and claims that it is bullshit because it would mean that a bachelor's wages would be higher compared to a father's, which is false.

Why would a bachelors wage be higher?

Because the cost of the father's labour power is partially "paid" by the free work of the wife.

But I thought one of the core arguments was that wages are determined what's socially necessary to keep the worker alive, therefore in a Fordist mode of production most men would have a housewife, thus having their general wages set after that(and how much their collective class struggle has managed to raise it)

Wages are around the cost of production of labour-power. If wives subsidize it, then unmarried man will either need higher wages or won't be able to reproduce their labour-power on their own.

He has a full article about Federici but I've not read it yet: troploin.fr/node/85

Is that a valid take on the cost of labour power? After all, the labour of the wife is not "productive", it doesn't produce any exchange value, so having her do it for free wouldn't reduce the cost of labour power. Reproductive labour is not taken into account in the capitalist system, since it manifests in use values, not exchange values, unless that labour is commodified. However, a man who has a family has a higher labour cost, since he has to support that family, while a bachelor has a lower cost of labour, since he only needs to support himself. This doesn't mean that the father has a higher wage than the bachelor, but rather that a society with wages overall higher than the cost of reproduction will have a lot of families (see the baby boom), while a society with a wage that is lower overall will be a society of bachelors, with few families (see now). Furthermore as the wages decline women are forced to sell their labour power as well, but since reproductive labour is still labour, even if it is not commodified, that labour must be commodified in order for women to have the same labour power as men (ie. childcare), but since some reproductive labour cannot be reasonably commodified (maternity), the woman will will always have less labour power to sell as the man, and thus will have a lower wage
Really just thinking aloud here and I don't know if this actually goes against what you're saying so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong

Housework isn't unpaid labor. If I clean my house, I receive the exact product of my labor: a clean house. If I wanted someone else to clean my house I would have to pay them because their labor would not be improving their own living space.

If child rearing is to be paid labor, then it should be folded into the same central planning system as all other paid labor. That is to say, women would have to first be assessed and hired before they would be permitted to have a child. That would at least eliminate a lot of the worst examples of shitty parenting, and could serve as a means of population control if necessary.

I was trying to show why it is not. However I'm not sure about your take, as far as I know people with more income tend to actually have less children.

Reminder that your average anarchist black block guy would consider this image "objectifying".

Translation is a little rough and some of the ()s will be alien to non-french speakers, but overall it's a pretty good article.


How is this relevant? Outside of Holla Forums anime would get you considered a reactionary racist woman hater by most self-described marxists and anarchists.

And that's why the current movement of marxists and ananrchists is trash.

That's not true, weebs deserve bullying

I'll read it later and tell you what I think. I'm probably gonna agree with it, always liked Zizek more than Chomsky.


here's your (you)

He's not wrong, tho. (not trying to start a feud about whose side is more infested w idpol)

What happened to the posts in this thread?

On reddit yeah, but they're the anomaly.

Yo, so I wanna translate these two:
archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article1966
archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?article2027

Same journal, different articles from different issues. The first is on the relationship between the "Republican" nationalism and the State France knows reflected with the rest of the world, the second analyzes football and its implications for modern society (soccer for the Yanks). Anyone interested?


No clue.

Do you have it in French?

I think you could stand to be more consistent. If Chomsky's not anarchist enough for you, why would Zizek be?

It's probably more that Chomsky is the Anarcho-Liberal. Personally I think both are shit at looking to for advice on action and should be ignored in that particular area.

The football one sounds interesting I don't really understand what the other is.

So in France there exists a "Republican" style of nationalism; one which upholds pride in the French nation, even supremacy over others, through values and concepts deemed foundational to the Republic. We're here talking about a set of values found in all five iterations of the Republic, but mostly those of the third and fourth Republics, the ones most typically upheld by these nationalists, "coincidentally" because these were all mostly defined by martial matters in the two world wars.

Guess I'll start with that one then.

Or rather it's simply because one candidate benefits the anarchists more than the other candidate. Republicans are failures & usually more retarded than their competition. No joke..

Get out of the echo chamber.

...

good stuff op and yea translate more obscure french ultra shit i need that in my life

No candidate benefits anarchists. They all seek to maintain capitalism and will work towards that.

It's funny because Chomsky is one the ten most cited intellectuals of all time, more than Hegel is.

not in any relevant places. fucking sam harris and richard dawkins find themselves on normie intellectual heavyweight rankings. wouldn't be surprised to check out a top 10 in a few years that includes jordan peterson in it

”Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Chomsky and accept that he was the most cited being the world has ever known, even greater than Hegel!"

That's Jordan Peterson, not Chomsky.

news.mit.edu/1992/citation-0415
nope

I know Zizek is not an anarchist, I'm not an idiot.

I don't like Chomsky but this is complete denial.

have you ever seen chomksy cited or positively mentioned in a theoretical left journal that isn't a pretend-radical rag like jacobin? the text from OP shows he's got fame in the mainstream press but any actual anarchist review thinks he's just a good linguist but a clown of an "anarchist"

The mainstream press is sadly far more relevant than an obscure leftist journal. By that logic Dauve would be more relevant than Mao.

then if mainstream popularity is your measuring stick for theoretical relevance jordan peterson is better than zizek. and i've seen mao positively reviewed in the mainstream. relevance is tied to notoriety in notoriously good circles of theory, and chomsky has said basically everyone who doesn't just "speak the facts" is an obscurantist charlatan so of course nobody worth any salt theoretically will think he's valuable. never mind though that he looked like a brainlet compared to foucault.

and i would wager that outside ML and offshoot cults dauve is actually more popular than mao. in sweden and china for example almost everything he's written gets translated and there are influential communist groups there inspired by him (in china illegally, though they persist underground), see: riff-raff, kammpa tillsamans, chuang, etc.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. I'm not arguing that Chomsky is good, I'm arguing that he is far from irrelevant because of his relative popularity and he will likely be the first thing one outside the intricacies of socialist journals finds when looking for modern anarchist takes. This isn't good for reasons in OP's translation, but it is.

ok so I just read it and agree with most of it, I found it pretty funny that it mentioned bookchin, I've always thought of him as pretty obscure
but I wouldn't lump in anarchist municipalism with chomsky-style anarcho-liberalism as the former is pretty much indistinguishable from councilism and fits with concepts like dual power
I also feel a bit conflicted about public services under capitalism. Mail, rail, energy, education, health etc. function a lot better when run by the state so I'd like to know the leftcom stance on this. I mean, I would never vote or support succdems, but I do appreciate functioning public transport.

The "Virgin Anglo-Psychologist"" is Jordan Peterson, not Chomsky.

Euro here. Zizek has been on TV several times and I regularly see him mentioned in newspapers. Can't say that for Peterson.
Like Stalin, Mao is represented muh-horseshoe style 98 % of the time.

Imagine being this delusional. In China alone, there are over 1000000000 people. You think the number of people in China and India who know of Mao and have a positive opinion about him without being diehard MLs is somehow a smaller number than people who like fucking Dauve?