Noam Chomsky on Libertarian Socialism

hire a comment I'll move maximum Hippolyta Theresa and Noam Chomsky in Serie start socialism Somnath Arviso elder-tree hard-fought professor Noam Chomsky males piloting songs are equal met Emily hurt Lisa Lisa Audrey Hadley organized airing among our their assumption latinum Chomsky a secret claritin it elect lovara professor a linguistic also are three Hekla socialist Aqualad samosa mood marked Dharavi surfer Glee GLaDOS thought of the harem hari-kari desam Scotia are equal at Chomsky Ville Delta in some Ptolemy Adrian Wilkins frog not mocked Oh disco handsome Tolleson for God is not hollentier or v40 tip tres4 Shmuel assalam alikum are higher equal half a till build almost allah special till Chomsky over harp located a partial mission fear than ourselves some taller over we are at will this rain tomorrow for single slaves so the vacates he declares personal motive cyst Darrell rush - no - a cute book poetry to Pagani on will be Salamis ASP and not Chomsky teeth little under cure bucket so the instead of our my or and see a clear calm until professor Noam Chomsky [Applause] well time veterans well hi and welcome first of all I thank you for joining us here today what is it is that all right yeah I think so yeah cool well I'm just going to go start really right on there since we've lost some time you've repeatedly defined anarchism as the view that the burden of proof is on the authority and if that burden fails to be met then the authority is illegitimate and should be dismantled but you also seem to use the terms anarcho-syndicalism and our theme for today libertarian socialism interchangeably with anarchism is there a difference between these terms and if so can you describe the differences well first of all anarchism covers a very wide range I mean the what you just quoted seems to me like a kind of a core principle of anyone who's involved anywhere in anarchist movements should at least accept that that authority is not self justifying authoritarian hierarchic institutions you know authoritarian structures structures of domination and dominance and control are have a burden of proof I mean they don't they're not self-justifying they have to meet a challenge they should be challenged and I think that everyone ought to be an anarchist in that sense it doesn't carry any that then come further questions about what you do about it but it already challenged and if it can't meet the burden of proof which is usually the case that not always then they should be dismantled that's this will be done everywhere not from families to international affairs and professions science whatever it is actually is kind of striking but in some domains is just taken for granted like in the in the sciences for science students it's so that the task for students is to challenge you're not supposed to just copy but you heard the fields would die if they did so you're supposed to challenge a request it demand evidence and proof and if you can't find a change but that ought to extend to all of life now anarcho-syndicalism tall' ittle bit different that is a particular brand of anarchism which was particularly concerned with things like the workers control control by working people of production the means of production decisions over production it's like a kind of a core part of it that's the syndicalist part libertarian socialism is just the traditional word for anarchism it's I mean that it's young French term rigidly and so if you take a look at the French journals and societies in Liberty of its anarchist journals it's it's the non status component of the anarchist tradition and a lot of it was anarcho-syndicalist in character so one of the main French writers Daniele give as published major volumes on libertarian socialism is basically an honor but dealing with the anarcho-syndicalist a variant of it of course there are plenty of other things that call themselves anarchist you know so this is by no means the whole story yeah we're going to touch up on that a little later - libertarian socialists and vision and work to create predictably enough libertarian socialist society what would be the core features what are the core features of that theory what are the core features of that Society well apart from accepting the general principle of anarchism it concentrates tends to concentrate on the productive system so for example workers control and Industry control of other institutions by people who participate in them it's not inconsistent with what sometimes called communitarian anarchism which concentrates on control of communities by participants in fact they generally both groups think these ought to be integrated it's question of where the focus of attention is but I don't think the real conflict is just a question of what Sprite what's prioritized what's the center of concern and activity what other things will flow from it partly tactical choices partly the ideas about where the source of creativity power search for freedom would be in a society you can have different views in it when we when we speak about anarchism when we when we talk about anarchism it's often about well people understand it as not being organized as being in a kind of chaos well in but in fact it's trying to find the institutions that can be effective but are minimally coercive in a libertarian social society what would those what would what would what kind of institutions would that be well within the main libertarian socialist anarchist anarcho-syndicalist tradition what's assumed is it should be a highly organized society it should be based on popular control at every level so begins with for example the control by working people of whatever institution they're working in factory you know offices whatever might be and control of communities and then these should be integrated a through voluntary Association that could be regional then there should be Federation federated structures that extend beyond and on to organization of international society but it should be highly organized though controlled from below not with I mean anything complex is going to have to have some degree of represent representative decision-making but always under direct control and recall and so on so it's kind of a you know so pure democracy if you want hmm in fact you know a few the exempt it takes a numb of the one of the major achievement of mainly anarcho-syndicalist development was libertarian Spain and what was it didn't have a lot of time it was wiped out pretty soon but it was a pre what developed rather quickly was a fairly organized society with a lot of interaction between agriculture and industry and communities and so on pretty successful economically do hmm that's interesting because another challenge as a libertarian socialist when you when you're rounding talking to people is the dominant idea that the current political and economic system is either joyously the end goal or there were joyously the end goal or more common sadly without any real alternative is to no other way of organizing society and are there real-life examples of libertarian socialist societies historically no there's there's no libertarian socialist society and any large scale that was able to withstand destructive attacks so for example Spain which was the most successful it didn't arise spontaneously that which it's often described as the thirty six revolution it had been it was in people's heads there had been many experiments many attempts that take over as a lot of impressed by force there had been an artist educational programs for you know 40 years which extended over a lot of the population so when the opportunity came people kind of had in their heads a picture of where it should go and then implemented ideas that they had as I said it was within they were fighting a war for one thing and then they were the under attack by their suppose it allies I mean the the movement was really destroyed by the communists the famous Mayday in 1937 was a a communist led attack on the anarchist structures and leadership a lotta more assassinated the the Communists were the party of the petty-bourgeois the police of course backed by Soviet Union which was just using this quite opportunistically but but during the period when the spent in fact communist armies went through the the countryside destroying collectives which were successful collectives so yes that didn't it didn't last it didn't last against repression it might have succeeded there were interesting proposals as to how to fight the war the mud the when when the fighting was taken after the I mean what actually happened is the if you look closely that the during the during the revolution first year of the war roughly 36 July 36 to May 37 the that was just unity among the entire the entire global power system that this had to be destroyed of the communists were in the forefront fascists were there the Western democracies were backing it they all wanted to destroy this play it was too frightening not because there's no alternative but because there is an alternative therefore you can't let it succeed it's a sometimes called a virus that would spread contagion if you'll allow it to survive so it was crushed but there were and then the mostly communist-led government took over and fought a war against the fascists but by that time a lot of the popular support it eroded I mean people were involved in the revolution they cared that much about who was going to pick up the pieces and the Republicans finally were wiped out by the by the fascist forces with the support of the Western democracies they should say it's a complicated story there was one serious proposal as to how to fight the war which was not implemented but it might have worked about the only thing that could have that was from an anarchy in Italian anarchist who was murdered and by the Communist Sunday they Camilla binary who Italian anarchist activist who proposed that instead of fighting a military battle against Franco they should fight in part a guerrilla war in Spain which is quite conceivable you know Spain has long tradition of guerrilla warfare back to the bullion conquests and but more significantly they should fight a political war Franco's armies were based in Morocco they were Moorish armies now there was a revolutionary movement going on in northern Africa which was trying to had a lot of facets but one aspect was trying to break up the feudal structure the land that estates when the peasants and so on and so forth and binaries as a suggestion was that the anarchists in Spain ought to support that and that would they thought maybe rightly undermining the basis the social base for Franco's armies of course it would have utterly horrified France England the United States anybody else who had any power so you could imagine to be huge because it was undermining colonial control of North Africa but it could have succeeded you know nothing else would have been of course it was dried did are there other such things well yes there germs of them all over the place I mean in the United States pre conservative society they're probably thousands of worker owned were to run enter some of them fairly substantial some not if when what what typically happens is that they often are very successful but it's embedded in a capitalist system so if they are successful what frequently happens is they're bought out the workers are kind of bribed to sell them off and it's pretty tempting you get a substantial bribe from some big corporation you know why work the rest of your life so that's and that's happened over and over and the reason is because they are successful the there some that there's some major worker owned conglomerates the main one is Mondragon and Spain which didn't start from anarchist base but from a kind of a Catholic left base but it's it's huge I mean banks industries all sorts of things but there and it's worker owned but not worker managed it's crucial difference so they hire managers and the managers operate within a capitalist framework so Mondragon well it's quite egalitarian internally is a you know expanding abroad to exploit the cheap labor in Vietnam and so on and so forth I mean it's kind of it's kind of hard to function and the broader society without while keeping the decent principles but there are pieces of it all over the place and that can be successful and there's there are other things from it like Texas a publicly controlled budgets the kind of thing that I think one of the most famous places was a fertilized egg today in Brazil that's why the world Social Forum meets there the first meanings of it Bay the local regional budget is as determined by the public in public meetings interactions that's been successful there you know there are a lot of these feel like anarchist experiments and if they reach a sufficient scale will things can happen of course they're always facing a violent repression because they're very frightening to power systems what happened in Spain is quite instructive there was actually real cooperation among the Stalinists fascists the liberal democracies to crush this heresy hmm here in Norway most people know of no other revolutionary strategies than than the one you've just described the ones named after dictators Leninism Stalinism Maoism in other words the only socialism when you say socialism that that's what pops in their head that that's what they think of what are the main differences between libertarian socialism and revolutionary state socialism well state socialism in my view is just a contradiction in terms you can't have workers control over production which is I mean socialism also has a core notion you know back to the beginnings in the 19th century and the core notion is workers control over production that's very similar to a dark ISM but at least that's the core you can't have that if you have total state control so for example by that standard the United States was more socialist than Russia was I mean workers don't control production but they have at least some influence that go at strike you know they can they can part to goodness here maybe there's co-determination and so on that Russia was a Euro that was the least socialist country in the world now as China was much more complex actually a lot of it was pretty much a lot of rotten things happened a lot of brutal things happened but there were some pretty remarkable successes actually this is a study which would be famous if it weren't for the conclusions that came up with by marchis sends a Nobel laureate famous economist is a specialist on famines his Indian and he did a study of one of his major conclusions he's quite famous works very well-known and highly praised one of his conclusions is that you don't get famines in democratic societies he says the tries to show that the real you know as occasional things was just the you know the crops die but if he points out and he's right but in most famines this plenty of food around but it's not getting to people and these lot of studies of this and one of the striking cases is India is native country which had horrible famines under the British now millions of people died in the famine and that went on until independence since independence hasn't been a single famine the country has the same ecology and everything else but a different administration his point is that famines in a debt in a more or less democratic society information flows and gets back to the authorities you know the center and they can do something about it you know if they want to so India had no famines since 1947 then you took a look at China he along with a colleague of his an Indian economist and of course China had one horrible famine the 5816 1958 to 60 in which maybe 30 million people died well they point out they consider that a political famine and not because anything was planned but because the society was so totalitarian that information about what was happening in the countryside never got back to the central decision-making system and time to do anything about it so that's they correctly call that a political famine okay that part if their work is known very well but there's another aspect to the work which appears in the very same articles that is never cited they compared mortality in India and China from independence late 40s up until 1970 1980 they stopped in 1980 because that's when the so-called reforms were initiated in in China you know the liberal reforms from nineteen say forty nine to nineteen eighty they calculate that about a hundred million lives were saved in China as compared with India because of health programs the rural doctors hygiene a distribution of the food in the countryside and so on that's even counting the Chinese famine even with that famine thirty million killed still China save two hundred million lives well that's just you can't say that you know so people read the articles but that half disappears somehow it can't be that Maoist China saves a hundred million lives as compared with a democratic capitalist India so that's kind of out of history but it's there and in fact it was just a recent recent work on Chinese demography by American scientists who came they didn't compare it with India but they did study mortality rates and it's quite striking from 1949 China independence up till nineteen eighty there's a very sharp decline in mortality remarkable decline through rural health programs barefoot doctors you know hygiene teaching and so on the 1970 at nineteen eighty it stops in fact the death rate is now higher than it was in 1980 that's when the capitalist reforms began will you can read that in science journals now not in the general public so it's a complex story China you know so simple but it certainly wasn't almost no stuffing like socialism but so I would just say that state socialism is just a contradiction you can't talk about it but so the only kind of socialism there is is one or another variety of libertarian socialism and Norway to contribute in which we now sit is considered to be one of the most successful social democracies in the world many things that working-class people are struggling for in the United States like proper health care and education are available here to almost everyone should libertarian socialist Norway simply shut up and enjoy the good life truly so they shut up and enjoy the good life is it time to kick back yes it's a better life than say 200 years ago a doorway but you could say that about other things too so say take the know Niels Christie the famous Norwegian criminologist I just read his history of the penal system in Norway now it's from memories I may get the details wrong but up until like I think the early 19th century there wasn't much criminalization in Norway didn't bother putting people in jail the reason was that if somebody was say suspected of shoplifting he had drive a stake through his hand okay don't put him in jail as things got somewhat more civilized that you start putting people in jail well you know it's better to be in jail than to have a state driven through your arm but that doesn't mean you should stop and enjoy life and it's the same with this and it's better to have decent health care available than not but that's not the end of life and incidentally although the Nordic countries are quite good in this respect it's all over it's all over most of the world I mean Cuba for example which has extremely poor country it's under constant attack it's capita health expenditures I think are 5% of the United States as the same health standard because they put resources into it the United States is kind of off the chart in health care it's it's the only industrial country that doesn't have one or another variety of national health care that has an unregulated privatized system the kind that you know there's no alternative Maggie Thatcher would like and it's about twice the per capita costs of comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes everyone talks about that a huge deficit in the United States and what a terrible problem that is it's bringing down the global economic system you take a look you find out that if the United States had a health care system like other industrial countries like say France or even Canada which is not very good or Norway not a would there be no deficit there'd be a surplus of it's a rural drain on the economy and on the global economy because of you know the effect of the US deficit on the global economy and ever and it's perfectly clear how to solve it like it's not utopian to say let's get a european-style health care system that's not pie in the sky but the power of the financial institutions is so enormous that it can't even be discussed actually a majority the population has been in favor of it for a long time but it's just it's called politically impossible or something you know they're lacking political support meaning the insurance companies won't allow it it's quite striking to see what Obama did I mean he a lot of his support was especially Union support was which was quite important not so much votes but just getting out the vote you know activism not the money and getting him elected was based on a hope that he would Institute national healthcare which was his policy of course that went out the window like in five minutes not even any discussion there was a residue left namely a public option that is to allow people the choice of picking a public program he just gave that away even though there was maybe the you know least two-to-one support for it but insurance companies wouldn't allow it so so yes there there are plenty of alternatives even short there I'm going to go beyond of course many more and the Norwegian government which calls itself red-green is now conducting war in Afghanistan it exports weapons it's a major exporter of oil and thereby a major contributor to the global environmental catastrophe and you know we have benefits healthcare education but if we put those aside in counter powers analysis this state is neither red nor green rather it's a state which instead of crushing capitalism as is the right thing to do with it is administering capitalism it seems to me that we witness kind of the same thing from Stoltenberg to Norway to Blair's Britain where just like the revolutionary state socialists which are not socialists at all the reformist once instead of crushing capitalism is administering it would you agree with me that that means that states state socialism as it's called either as revolutionary or reformist variant is ultimately a dead end for those that long for a future beyond capitalism and what are implications of that well I think you can drop the words beyond capitalism those who yearn for a future to destroy destroy the environment there is going to be a future you know and in fact Norway is kind of an interesting contradiction because you know by comparative standards it's which are not very high so it's not a great compliment but by comparative standards it's maybe one of the most humane states around on the other hand as you say it's making a major contribution to ensuring that a human life isn't going to survive it's not a joke you take a look at the projections on for example the International Atomic Energy Agency couple a couple of months ago I guess came out with a conservative warning that they pointed out just first a little data that the emissions you know the greenhouse gas emissions had risen very sharply last year despite the recession so drop in production but sharp increase in emissions and the issued warning that we're reaching the point or maybe have even passed the point which is kind of the considered to be the threshold for doing anything to stop destructive climate change that was you know this scientific consensus is about two centigrade two degrees centigrade warming and they estimate that that's about where we are so doing anything more may very well doom the species so it's phrase after capitalism is understated there's a real this should be a real dilemma and countries like Norway about the having a moderately decent life you know plenty wrong with it but by comparative standards fairly decent at the cost of making sure that your grandchildren may not have any life at all all right well if we don't believe in state socialism then we have to find a way to build libertarian socialism I'm going to talk a little bit about libertarian socialist organization now libertarian socialists traditionally insist that the organizational structure of organizations must prefigure the desired society so for instance if we want a direct democratic society then we should use direct democracy here and now why is that so important well the traditional idea goes back to Bakunin is that you should the way to carry out social change is to build the the seeds of the future within the present society to try to event what's really involved in social progress ultimately is a kind of change of consciousness not not just organization but letting different values and different concerns come to prevail and the way that happens is through participation in action not not by reading about it and one of the ways to do it is to start with direct democracy where you are and that's a lot of ideas about how to do this I mean work sharing lots of possible decision-making common decision-making and that helps it's it's essentially I agree with this it's essential for gaining an understanding of what a free democratic society might be like even if it's a small group let's say a publishing house with 10 people and you learn you experiment you see what works what doesn't work you can go on to bigger things but unless I mean that's to get back to Spain that's why the Revolution was able to take place and over such a broad part of the country and so quickly if there had been plenty of things like that crushed but they'd been tried it goes on all the time that's what's happening right now in the Arab Spring not libertarian socially but something similar the stick that there's been a couple of studies of this if you there's a very close correlation in the Arab world between the success of the uprising and the history of labor militancy very closely correlated so Tunisia and Egypt the two places where there's been some successes have quite a long history of a very significant labor militant militancy in fact if in Egypt as you may know the the January 25th uprising is called the April 6th movement well in the West nobody knows why but in Egypt they know why very well April 6 2008 was the date of a major labor action one of many but supposed to be a really big one centered in the biggest industrial conglomerate and Egypt mahalo textile plant was designed to take place all over the country with sporting activities popular activities and so on that was April 6 2008 what was crushed by the dictatorship with the backing of the West of course but they remember and in fact there was series a long series of such action some of them somewhat successful whether some of them crushed and the current uprising really took off when the labor unions joined and in fact they're the ones they've gained a lot I mean the military regime is still in place but there is effective labor organizing there for the first time able to develop a non-state union which they've been trying to do for years raise minimum wages and in some places there's actual worker takeover industries that's and something similar was true in Tunisia they also had a militant labor union the places that didn't have them are nothing much is happening but this is a kind of an example of you know what you were raising when you have the experience of carrying out cooperative actions for socially progressive purposes then you have a basis for going on when the occasion arises if you one was to build the libertarian socialist organization what would be the core features of it will be the core elements well core elements first of all would be authentic participation that means everybody not one person's a secretary one person's a janitor you know one person does the finance and therefore you kind of automatically get a hierarchy of decision-making Vicki based on role in the system but really participating that doesn't mean everybody can do everything like you know I can't be a surgeon somebody else can but it means that in anything that involves decision making functions it should really be shared that should be true in say universities like where I am or publishing houses or factories or anywhere else that's the beginning and as soon as you do that it just breaks down barriers among people for one thing it means there is some kinds of work that nobody wants to do but has to be done well that has to be shared if that's not shared then you got a problem but that can be instituted then a joint participation decision-making can be instituted if there is representation immediate recall when under public you know cooperative action I mean all of these things can be instituted on very small scale and can spread the larger ones and that if it goes far enough becomes a major organization in the United Center there's some very specific proposals about this yeah so if you I mean I don't have to agree with all of them so I'm not particularly advocating it but if you take a look at the participatory economic movement powercon they call it there are extremely detailed proposals about how to proceed with this and you know I think there we're thinking about things I don't agree with but debating them maybe changing them and so on but it's a pretty live movement all over the world incidentally my friend Michael Albert who is kind of at the center of this right now is in Turkey talking to people doing popular organizing in the Kurdish area your picture or water am I not talking loud I'm sorry too much talking I've been talking solidly for three days would you like some more why sure that's enough thanks all right well we are in the United States a large part of those who proclaim themselves anarchists have a very individualistic perspective like crime think for example well like a crime thing for example that's a tendency here too how do we move people from chanting slogans or non participation in society to organized action proceeded to do it they set up the I mean yes it's in the especially in the english-speaking world libertarian has a different meaning that it had in on the continent or historically it means ultra capitalist so the people who call themselves libertarians in the United States the libertarian movement are you know there are aspects of you know people like Ron Paul people like that there are some of the things that they proposed you know I think are okay but they're but they're basically advocating although they don't know it is pure corporate tyranny just the exact opposite of Liberty and that's based on a certain notion of freedom which as people should be free to do what they want you know okay you have that then people who have resources capital they'll hire other people they'll hire their own armies they'll build their own road soon you go on to some indescribable horrible form of corporate of private tyranny that's a particular pathology item I think that's the word for it particularly in the United States and in England but and if you have that here I think people have to be talked out of it by thinking through what the consequences are what it means in terms of any authentic notion of liberty and freedom but it's kind of like arguing with neo-nazis how do you organize them well you get them to think about what they're doing and well that's not our approach actually libertarian socialists obviously must take some of the blame for our lack of influence we have been poorly organized for instance our own organization counter power or moot mocked only recently began organizing another reason could be that as state socialism held a firm grip on the revolutionary Left since the Russian Revolution in 1917 but after its collapse in 1989 the state socialist parties have been in a permanent crisis would you agree with me that time we're living in after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 could be a unique historic opportunity if libertarian socialists start to organize and build strong organizations could we become the most important ideology for those that seek fundamental change well right that's sort of what I was hoping myself than the ladies in fact around late 80s sometime one of the I won't mention the name but a well-known left journal socialist journal asked me to write an article on the Soviet Union so the article you can find it it was called a Soviet Union versus socialism and what I was arguing is that the Bolshevik Revolution was the worst blow against socialism that had taken place in the 20th century partly because it did appropri if take a look what happened then there were two major propaganda systems in the world the one huge one based in the state capitalist democracies another smaller one growing out of the Bolshevik Revolution and they disagreed on a lot of things but they disagreed on one thing that the Soviet Union the Russia that first was was socialist I mean the Leninists wanted to insist on that so that they could benefit from the sort of the moral commitment to socialist values which spread all over the place so if they became the leaders of socialism they'd benefit from that the state capitalist system insisted on it because they wanted to defame socialism so when the two major propaganda systems in the world agree on something it's kind of hard for people to extricate themselves from it and in fact that settled in this is socialism when as it started to decay finally in the late 80s look like there'd be an opportunity I should say that this article the journal refused to publish it and it finally ended up being published in our generation and anarchist journal and in Montreal but it just was kind of on there wasn't so much censorship that couldn't be understood no because the idea is so embedded that what grew out of the Bolshevik Revolution is may be distorted socialism there's nothing like that I mean you take a look at when Lenin and Trotsky took over and for you know what they considered good reasons they very quickly dismantled all of the socialist institutions which had arisen during the Revolutionary period during the nineteen it goes way back but from February 1917 right up to October they built a lot of activism in Russia popular activism factory councils so it's all sorts of things and they wanted to get rid of that very quickly and did it was crushed you had to have a they called a Labour army under the command of a single leader and there's an ideology behind it wasn't just the idea it was a kind of a their version of Marxism I don't think I'd much do it Marx but their version is that was that you can't have a socialist revolution in Russia which was a poor very poor mainly agricultural society first you have to drive the population to industrialization and then after that you know the iron laws of history will begin to work and so on so to drive them to industrialization you had to destroy all of the socialist true socialist institutions that had developed like factory councils and Soviets they were pretty quickly dismantled of course constitute the convention was dismantled because that was going to be taken over by the radical peasant movements and peasants can be radical according to their view they're not more since that way us but but that just crushed socialism very quickly and when we talk about these two the steady state capitalist democracies and the authoritarian communist regimes one of the things that comes up a lot is you know as libertarian socialist is I think a lot of the common doubts or questions when it comes to any Anarchy oh I think I want to be asked this question different answers okay yay all right well I'll try another one that an often heard objection against a libertarian socialist society is that no one would bother to work in it you think that's a valid objection what about those that don't want to work well it's an interesting concept actually this is one of the things in which different for some time on the pair with the Paragon people they basically have the same view Mike our Robin Hahnel and the others we've disagreed about this for many years this question of what you think work is I mean there is a point of view associated with capitalist systems that holds the work is a burden if you weren't driven to work it prefer to vegetate I don't think that has anything to do with human beings and in fact it's kind of striking that the people who hold this view most of them come from the University or in scientific backgrounds we you're going to save the University where I work MIT mainly scientific university now people are working 80 hours a day 80 hours a week because they love their work and their work is under their own control you know of all the social institutions these especially science-based it's the universities are places where you really do control your own work now you got to meet some conditions but it's pretty much controlled by participants so you know optimally and in fact often realistically and under those conditions people just want to work that they're carpenters who love what they're doing and can control it they work all the time and in fact you know there's an old tradition from the Enlightenment which is came out grew into classical liberalism and finally anarchism which holds that work as the should be the highest ID one of the highest ideals of life creative work under your own control and I think most people know that that's true we have an opportunity to do creative work under your own control with especially if it has some social purpose and so on and it's best thing to do it's a lot better than you know lying on a couch and watching a boring television program so I just think it's the wrong it's a concept of work that comes out of capitalist ideology which as people have to be driven work actually is very interesting to watch the debates about this it's debated in mainstream circles not so much in these terms but it take a look at the debates about a taxing taxation of the wealthy the standard argument against taxing the wealthy is well if you put high taxes on the wealthy they're not going to do anything and they're the ones who invest and make things happen and so on and so forth now the people have pressed this most are economists and sometimes it's almost comical there was an article 1 of the major journals by a well-known Harvard economist liberal economist Greg Mankiw wrote the major texts and he argued he said look he can't he's kind of a liberal he says you can't tax the rich because they're not going to do anything and then he did prove there's no economic theory behind it or any other theory but he just so he gives an example of himself he says well if I didn't have a high salary I wouldn't do anything you'd never get anyone in the university saying that except from an economics depart and that's because the ideology is so built-in they can't think they can't look at the next office and see that the guys in the lab all day because he loves what he's doing of course people want to want to do meaningful work especially if they can run it themselves the Paragon position that I've discrete with is they want they believe that pay remuneration ought to be proportional to input you know the harder you work the more I should be paid but I think that's a very demeaning conception of non of what work is but what human beings are like and I don't I don't think it's true you know in fact they themselves work very hard they don't get paid for so are they different from other people you know and could you talk a little bit more about the you rocks but you often said that your views which are are based in classical liberalism and often the same text that mark that libertarians in the American sense used to justify capitalism no they don't they use the names but not the writings and it's very interesting to look at the Lex I take Adam Smith no greater hero I'm sure you've all read some of Adam Smith but if you actually look at what he wrote it's totally different unless I think say the concept of invisible hand everybody's heard of the invisible hand it's used once in wealth of nations see it's pretty hard to miss and what it is is a critique of neoliberalism and literally what he points out is is not a fool he pointed out that he's talking about England that's you know his topic he says if in England merchants and manufacturers people who sort of ran the country if they were if they decide the manufacturers decided to produce abroad outside of England and if merchants decided to import from abroad they would profit but the society would be seriously harmed what he's in our Terms he's saying the old liberal globalization will harm the society and then how'd he get around it well he got around it by a kind of a sentimental argument he said that the merchants and manufacturers will have what sometimes called a home bias they would prefer to manufacture at home and purchase at home because of the commitment to the home society and therefore as if by an invisible hand England will be saved from the ravages of what we call neoliberal globalization take a look you can find it easily this one occurrence take a look at the index of any work that's the context and incidentally David Ricardo the other major founder of classical economics he drew the same conclusion he recognized that his famous principle of comparative advantage who wouldn't work if again it's kind of England and Portugal it's cases studying if the the rich the manufacturer if the manufacturers in England decided okay we want to produce everything in Portugal because we make more money that way and the merchants in England said ok we'll import everything from Portugal because it's cheaper he said England will be destroyed but then he said he he the same as Adam Smith it says well he expects that the rich in England will have enough commitment to their own society so that they won't do this they'll accept a lower rate of profit in England than they could get in Portugal then he ends up saying I I hope that these ideas will never disappear because if they did we'll be in real trouble well that's classical economics you don't learn that in an economics course in fact the well enough to tell you what you learn because you know and it's that way right across the board now it takes a division of labour everybody's read you know been taught the first paragraph of wealth of nations where the butcher does this you know the baker does that they do it for their own profit and we all benefit we should have division of labour so division of labour is a wonderful thing you go on and read a couple hundred pages into the book at wealth of nations and Smith has a lengthy discussion of division of labor and it's very closely related to this matter of work remember he was an Enlightenment figures growing out of the Enlightenment he says division of labor in any civilized society the government is going to have to intervene to prevent division of labor because it's going to turn people into creatures as stupid and it current as a human being can possibly be it's going to lead to people doing road work under control external control and doing it because that's the way Labor's divide it's going to destroy people people their highest goal is creative work under their own control so you have to block division of labor that passage is so intolerable - it's a little bit like Amartya Sens work on Indian China it can't be read in fact if you look at the scholarly edition that bicentennial of Wealth of Nations the University of Chicago you know Maine supposedly classical liberal Department published a scholarly edition of Wealth of Nations and take a look at the index it doesn't even give an index entry for this discussion of division of labor it's just too unacceptable and of course nobody reads Adam Smith's discussion of the Mac the Masters of mankind and how they pursue their vile Maxim all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else and how awful this will be I mean there's a lot I'm not strolling out of Smith particularly but if you take a look at the actual text it's not the way it's presented so I think it's correct to say that classical liberalism was this it grew out of the Enlightenment and it's the source of the non of the anarchist movement but even Marx drew from that same tradition the same tradition about work for example and in fact the early Marx manuscripts read very much like classical liberals and fun humble to Smith and others is coming from exactly the same background I kind of agree with Ralph rocker who's one of the main anarcho-syndicalist intellectuals and historians who argues that classical liberalism as he put it was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism it was pre capitalist and when capitalism came along that was the end to classical liberalism and the anarchist tradition grew out of it and emphasized the positive elements of it so it's true that they do cite Adam Smith and classical liberalism but are strongly opposed to it I mean this is all over the place take the about a century ago in the United States and increasingly in the other state capitalist systems the corporations were given extensive rights given person the rights of persons in particular back about a century ago there were conservatives by now is the name that doesn't this and conservative bitterly opposed this because an attack on the fundamental principles of classical liberalism that rights in here in persons not in organic entities created by state power they don't have rights but that's the way our so-called liberal societies work now these organic entities have rights enormous rights in fact greater than the rights of persons by now and just totally inconsistent with classical liberal ideals I have one final question before we move over to some of them some questions from the audience it's it's little cruel if I have to force you to generalize what would you say are the most important tasks for libertarian socialists a day usual tasks create real libertarian socialist movements and then you can proceed to do a lot of things that ought to be done from carrying out the kinds of reforms of existing society are very badly needed up to creating the germs of a future society and your own lives and activities and then expanding them but there's no particular thing they'll pick I mean if you take a take a look at a say maybe the oldest anarchist journal in the english-speaking world at least freedom in England if you read the articles and freedom they range from how to deal with how to get involved in protect particular crucial store social struggles that are taking place right now let's say onerous tuitions for English students which are going to wipe out opportunities for the poor to go to school the crushing of strikes whatever ecological issues whatever may be up to designing and trying to implement parts of a future society a whole range of things is there and there's plenty of it I mean you know and some of them are really critical like the human species is in a very unique stage of its history we're at a stage where we can destroy ourselves that in fact it's it's almost inevitable the way things are now structured a partly nuclear war which is always imminent and the threats are getting worse to kind of a miracle humans have survived and the other is environmental destruction and unfortunately the environmental destruction is virtually an imperative in existing societies it's part of the state capitalist system they have to move towards environmental destruction not because there are bad people but because it's a requirement and if you're the CEO of a corporation you may be the nicest guy in the world you may be giving away all your money to the environmental movement on your own but in your role as CEO of a corporation you are compelled to maximize profit and to ignore what economists call externalities that is the impact of your transactions on others well that's why we have repeated financial crises ever since Reagan and Thatcher the deregulation of the financial institutions means that the people who run them have to ignore what's called systemic risk the risk that a transaction is going to bring down the system and since you ignore it you're increasing the probability of it and therefore repeatedly happens so we repeatedly have financial crises each one worse than the last ever since around 1980 when Reagan and Thatcher began there's no alternative but in that case financial crises well there's a kind of a remedy the the taxpayer can come along the state can come along and rescue the financial institutions which is what just happened that is going to happen in Europe pretty soon as soon as Greece defaults but but in the case of when you ignore the ex one of the externalities is survival of the species and nobody's going to come along and rescue and pay off that one so you say you're doomed basically if we keep the current system we're doomed and that's you know Norway has a particular case of it to think about should we produce oil and have a rich Society but it's a problem for everyone its inherent in state capitalist institutions and those are really big problems I mean those are problems about literal species survival and beyond that there are problems with justice and freedom all over the place so there's no shortage of tasks I mean don't see any pointless listing let's give them a hand folks right [Applause] okay semester in learning society a portion I had equals mob Litvak to tiller steel erector sets for small to Chomsky is that they see these doctor met special through you wholeness Benetton um to start uh it's um I have a question let's see in the mid-1970s many people argued in the West in the West that Phyllis or even mid seventies many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue but in the mid 1980s many of them no longer considered that it had what exactly happened did it turned out that it was all just a big joke well I think what happened is what you brought up before Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union and now is China and other so-called communist systems but you know Marx what it turned over and his grave to see what they were doing they were radically Adi Marxist radically but as long a like tech see the way the Bolsheviks Lenin Trotsky that decided they had to drive the backward peasantry through industrialization by force in order to lead ultimately to a socialist society in the last twenty or thirty years of his life and Marx was working on peasant society in Russia he was the word than the rod Nix you know the urban has lectures went out to the countryside to collect information to figure out how the peasants are living and so on and so forth try to assist them in things and they collected tons of data and Marx was just pouring over the data and he convinced it he became convinced that there's real revolutionary potential in peasant society that peasant communes in cooperative tradition and so on this the the urban socialists both the Bolsheviks and the Social Democrats literally suppressed all that work it was just too inconsistent with their own class interests of you know controlling social movements so that was gone but and the same is true across the board I mean the dead I'm not again colleague Adam Smith he can't worship Mars had things to say and what he had to say what he believed was utterly inconsistent with what are called the communist socialist movement even more the Communists and the then the social democratic ones after all he believed that in England you noticed that's the social democratic society of his day that there could be a parliamentary road to communism but you notice there was enough participation of the public in in decisions but in any event once you associate Marx with Russia and it's clear that Russia is becoming a disaster as was becoming clearer by the 80s well of course then you have to say let's give up Marx and I think that's essentially what happened okay and that's the special Afra is so I know my leghul that I thank you very much for an interesting conversation um I wanted to touch upon the one of the last things you were talking about about tasks for libertarian socialists today and you said there is a range of tasks that has to be done for example carrying out reforms that are necessary in today's world so my question is how do you do that without ending up just being reformist a few years ago you had in an interview series that was entitled expanding the floor of the cage so how do you expand the floor of the cage without well accepting the cage you don't accept it you expand the war the K the floor of the K that was a phrase taken from rural workers movements in Brazil where they say they were in a cage but we've but we can't we're in the cage we can't deny that we're there we have to expand the floor of the cage so then we can break out of it and yes that's the way we should explain the war the cage explain expand the floor of the cage to with the goal of breaking out of it once they are once we've created the basis for going beyond you don't have to be caught up in the existing structures of power in order to try to while you're trying to improve them that's a step towards dismantling them so I I don't think it's any means in the same as truth that say the Spanish anarchist revolution it began four years with trying to create collectives within the quasi feudal quasi capitalist system and that made sense and then when they had a chance they broke out of it okay our third and final question for tonight is from Martin the revenue bank there has been a real public demands and mobilization for political change in in eastern Mediterranean countries like Egypt and Tunisia well we saw this demonstration spread to the western part of the Mediterranean like Greece and Spain same kind of mobilization a lot of rage but we see only what I would classify less mildly reformist concrete alternatives coming out of this like the reform of the election law in Spain is why are we not able to transcend our current notional Western democracy and to what extent do you think theory is necessary to create viable public alternative to the current status my theories are kind of a fancy word makes you think of you know physics or something like that I mean we should have ideas and principles and things that you debate and discuss as concrete things for example in a future society should a remuneration be contingent on effort as haricot insists and I think that's wrong you know that those are things which we should discuss and think about I don't see any point using an inflated term like theory to discuss this it's mostly common sense not enough is understood about humans or societies to have far-reaching theories from which you can draw conclusions that mean much but yeah you should think about what you're doing think about the consequences in that sense of course you should have theories that why haven't these movements gone far enough in Spain and Greece well they're facing very immediate problems Greece is facing the problem of you know destruction of the society Spain it's not quite that bad but it's not that far off and the popular movements I think are pretty impressive especially in Greece as far as I can see they haven't formulated sets of operable demands in Spain they have like the programs that are coming out of the you know indeed not owes the are feasible they couldn't it could be implemented in Spain and if they do they could make a difference and you could go on for more but that goes back to your questions but do we have to get caught up in reformism no you don't have to be caught up in it you have to see it as a step towards something else all right well I actually think we have time for one more question they don't clap yet' could raise your hands and does anybody have a one more question don't be shy and yeah what do what does really remuneration mean oh that means pay hey yeah remain uation is pay should use fancy words I coming back over so further me okay seen on a date my name is Irina I'm student at the faculty for humanities at University of Oslo I have a question regarding the Middle East and uprisings there do you see any chances for a kind of collective socialist movement in for example Egypt and us is Egypt is a very remote country with spread population that somewhere kind of is Malia the DC night but larger groups can well an organization can form there well that's a it's an interesting question we really don't know but I mean it is significant I think that within the workers movement which again is a militant movement with a long history of activism they are moving partly towards authentic social libertarian socialist structures like worker takeover of industry they're ahead of us in that respect and that's important I mean whether it will succeed well you know who knows there's they're facing very powerful barriers it is a military regime the West is going to do anything it can to prevent even formal democracy in these areas for perfectly obvious reasons I mean I don't know about here but in the Western countries I know of the there's some things you just can't report that one of the things you can't port although the certainly known is the studies of of attitudes of the public in the Arab world a very careful study is done by the most prestigious American polling institutions and they're released publicly by Brookings Institute people like that and that obviously planners know those results even though the press won't report them and people don't know what they show explains exactly why the Western countries will do anything they can just to prevent even formal democracy in these countries you just take a look at the attitudes so take say Egypt you know which you mentioned also the most important country I mean in Egypt about 90% of the population think that the major threat that they face is United States in Israel Iran and maybe 10% think it's a threat in fact opposition to US policy is so strong that in Egypt eighty percent think that the region would be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons to counter us power and it goes on from there as okay I don't see a percentage with this overwhelming opposition to the way in which the Egypt Israel treaty has been interpreted by the dictatorship they don't want to go to war but the treaty has been interpreted by the dictatorship former dictatorship as neutralizing Egypt so that Israel so there's no deterrent when Israel invades Lebanon as they did immediately after the treaty was formed or expands in the West Bank and so on and the population is very angry about that well and surely the United States and Sal eyes don't want these attitudes translated into policy which was what would happen if you had erratic societies and when you get things like workers take over factories the opposition is going to be even stronger that's an idea that can spread that if it spreads you know the whole structure of power begins to unravel so they're going to play face plenty of barriers but they're doing things in fact they're doing more than we're doing and we should be ashamed of that all right thank you very much we have keep happen [Applause]

Channel: Savician

Views: 96,302

Rating: 4.7356224 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Libertarian socialism, Anarchism, Economy, Politics, Political Science, Democracy, Communism, Socialism, Radical, Freedom, Political freedom, Worker rights, Self management, Autogestion, Philosophy, Chomsky, Anarcho-syndicalism

Id: hkaO12X-h1Y

Length: 78min 4sec (4684 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 02 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/danecarney]

I've always thought it a better label than "anarchist" really. At least when you're first introducing someone to that stream of thought. I guess the only time it doesn't apply is when you're an anarcho-individualist, like the mutualists, or something.