Chomsky seems to think that immediate liberty would somehow be worse than the current system of complete control by government and politically connected corporations. This is an interesting argument. It’s unproven.

Chomsky notes that the government is controlled by corporate elites who use it to benefit themselves. If they have more to gain, why wouldn’t they be lobbying for the total abolition of all govermment? Etc.

Chomsky is just dead wrong. Great on foreign policy, the media, the US power structure etc. But completely wrong on economics.

If Chomsky thinks it impractical or meaningless to speak of “getting rid of the state” without offering a coherent strategy for doing so, it seems to me he’s a utilitarian anarchist (or anarchy sympathizer). He’s basically saying, of the variety of coercive or voluntary options out there, which one best protects workers’ rights, civil liberties etc.?

He hasn’t in the least demonstrated that immediate liberty is unworkable. This is something he assumes. I’m glad Roderick asked the question and Chomsky answered because I now understand, I think, why Chomsky is so wrong about this.

Bryan Caplan above is dead wrong. Chomsky is not a Leninist. Chomsky is an (anarcho) syndicalist. He thinks that worker controlled economic and political structures are the ideal. The path to this he thinks is through workers or the people taking over the most powerful institution, the state, and then presumably, decentralising power to cooperatives/ democratically controlled syndicates etc.

The point is Chomsky doesn’t believe in liberty itself or market corrections. He thinks liberty has to be rationed out once the people have gained control, cooperatives first set up. I don’t think he’s grappled with the work of Mises (Socialism in particular).

He’s familiar with Bakunin but I haven’t heard him deal with Bakunin’s criticism of Marx. That is, how can the workers or the people ever take over a fundamentally coercive, large and unwieldy institution such as the state? Inevitably, a vanguard or faction of some sort will have to take over leading to the usual shenangians. This should especially concern him given the thoroughly utilitarian nature of his support for liberty.

Bascially, the problem with Chomsky’s philosophy is economics. I thought he hadn’t engaged much with the economics of a more optimal society but he has. The problem is he settled for the syndicalist model. He’s also a utilitarian and thus not radical enough. He needs to read Mises (but won’t).

Have you penned any thoughts in response to Chomsky’s answer to your question?

I’d love to read them if you have.

Thanks so much for all your efforts, J.R.

Tangentially, I find this criticism, though Beaumont’s tone annoys, very interesting since from the left:

http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2006/06/chomsky-problem-peter-beaumont-brad.html

Anyway, thanks for the discussion and links!

And, more or less, he’s correct in this.

And, apparently, he hasn’t considered agorism, which both offers a rudimentary strategic theory of how to get rid of the state and how to construct those alternative social institutions.

The problem at this point, of course, is that agorist theory is still very rudimentary. Chomsky offers a gradualist strategy of developing worker/community cooperatives to re-build failed industries — but he also envisions a degree of corporate/state involvement here which I think is only a little less utopian than getting rid of the state tomorrow. However, I think the gap between Chomskyite gradualism and agorism is not so wide as to be un-bridgeable.

But the question is whether or not a Dr. Strangelove-style bunker community is a sufficient representation of the Agora. Or is it something that ought to infiltrate everyday life — the workplace specifically.