Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Chomsky calls himself, for lack of a better word, an anarchist. I take that to mean he won't engage in the "I know what's good for you" brand of not only liberalism, but socialism too. And I certainly don't see any reason to believe that a nation-state such as ours, or even France or Spain's, is consistent with true human liberty, such as Marx envisions it.
I think of Chomsky's anarchism as a form of intellectual modesty.

After the egalitarian rhetoric and communal control (i.e terror) were stripped away, the French Revolution was just a bourgeois revolution. There's no prospect of another bourgeois revolution, but rather some kind of retrenchment, re-immiseration, reaction, whatever. The best we can hope, for our grandchildren, could be what Thom Hartmann calls "new tribalism" -- a patchwork of local communities trying to survive after central government has collapsed.

"I certainly don't see any reason to believe that a nation-state such as ours, or even France or Spain's, is consistent with true human liberty"

who does comrade
but i must say i'm impressed you have
such a detailed sense of what true liberty is
that you can see
wedon't need no blody path thru a succession of states to arrive all together at that liberty

do u feel this liberty ould be here ..now
ready to grasp
if only we all could see it ??

i don't
---

as to noam and the nanny liberals
that makes my point
he's a reactionary liberal
ie he unlike the main stream of liberals
despairs the liberal state can chivy us to
heaven here on earth

he has reacted to state failure
but going state less

as to his modesty
unlike clement attlee
noam has few things
--cereberal at any rate ---
he needs be modest about

but
his deeper politics might just
be one of them

questioning authority
---his self proclaimed life long watch word---
by its very substance
can't be institutionalized

he restricts his good will
to the level playing field
of one social atom interacting with
another social atom or social atoms

now i'm a great one for bombard
the headquarters
but i have a suspicion we agents of our own destiny
if not pure self legislators
can group up and make head way

and in grouping up doubtless
authority will creep in
as we attempt to make certain routines automatic

i guess i see progress as still requiring
organizations and organizations
still becoming institutionalized

alas new states as still the key to
social progress

folks like chomsky may well retain a sense
of their transcendence or what ever
but we others must march on in congress
with each other regardless of our bloody sides

I am put in mind of one of the main problems I've seen with 60s era "New Left" analysis. As someone who is far too young for that sort of thing, I'm bewildered by the fact that it doesn't seem to matter if Chomsky is right or wrong. Or rather the correctness or incorrectness of his position is established not by reference to the facts nor even to theory, but by torturing logic until a series of buzzwords emerge to negatively describe him. In this case, it's a blend of "reactionary" and "liberal" which ought to make any self-respecting Trot burn her copy of Hegemony or Survival. Not being a Trotskyite of any kind, I'm left slightly cold by what passes for 'analysis' in the New Left.

Chomsky is an anarchist of sorts, not a libertarian. He doesn't have any ideas on how to fix society, just criticism of how it's setup now and criticism for those who might try to transform it (those crazy socialists, don't they know that socialism automatically leads to Stalin?). This is one reason why I think he occasionally adapts himself to lesser-evilism, such as in 2004 when he advocated a vote for John Kerry.

The state is the product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. If you abolish it, something else will take its place. Look at Spain in the 30's. The anarchists brought down the government but refused to take power. The fascists regrouped, took over and virtually exterminated the Left.

To do away with the state you must first do away with classes. The only way to accomplish that feat is for the working class to take power, create its own worker-run state and use it to gradually transform society and end classes forever (and put down the inevitable counter-revolutionaries who dream of the good ol' days of exploitation and suffering).

Easier said than done, obviously, but aside from platitudes about freedom and criticism of failed attempts at socialism, the anarchists have little to offer. So for critics like Chomsky the best we can hope for is to attenuate the harshest aspects of capitalism and wait for some far off date when mankind spontaneously decides to cast off its shackles once and for all.

Or else we just need V to show up, ship 6 billion masks to every person on the planet and blow up a few government buildings on Guy Fawkes day.

Nullifidian: You mean... liberals... are NOT reactionary?!

On the other hand it does seem harsh to call Chomsky a liberal, at least in the sense we attach to that term nowadays.

But I have a very soft spot for old Noam, and OP no doubt feels obliged to compensate for my failings in this respect.

In a comment on contemporary libertarianism, a few posts back, I struck at a hero of this here site, the miraculous Noam Chomsky. In a sort of offhand slap, I suggested he -- like all progressive libertarians today -- is essentially a reactionary liberal. I had hoped to provoke a nasty response but didn't, so now I'll try again.

I believe I can help with some aspects of the nasty response.

Owen, are you getting the cadres warmed up to rusticate Noam Chomsky? I remain loyal, needless to say, but I cannot possibly help or participate until certain conditions have been met.

He has to be called a running dog lackey of imperialism, and a petit bourgeois sentimentalist. Nothing less will do!

To have any legitimacy, the rustication must include the phony pro-Situ art gallery owner who tried to rip off Ms. Xeno.

While I love to read Chomsky's analyses, I have always been more comfortable with the Michael Parenti school of leftism (Parenti made the same arguments as you, Nicholas, in his "Blackshirts and Reds"), which accepts the reality of the state as a guarantor of collective rights, not to mention common defense, and enjoins us to stop waiting for the "perfect revolution". Chomsky engages in quite a bit of "Left Anti-Communism" to this day - knocking Lenin any chance he gets - perhaps because even he was worries about maintaining an air of "legitimacy". I personally have always viewed Marx's idea of Communism's end product being the collapse of the state as a step backwards.

P.S. I must say I felt very disillusioned when both Parenti AND Chomsky called for us to vote Kerry in 2004. Shame on both of them...

But there was a time we couldn't envision getting on without the Church and that seems to have turned out to be a mistake.

No one--who is hones--knows what is possible. However, it's not clear how imperialism, which the (contemporary) state is an organ of, can continue. Weapons have advanced to the point that serious wars will lead to mutual destruction. And even an accidental release of a weapon system has the potential for catastrophe. Those who ignore these salient perils are choosing to act profoundly irresponsibly, what ever else one can say. (To those who say this is just hysteria, WWII nearly resulted in the destruction of Europe. The catastrophe almost happened once and it is unlikely we will be given another warning.)

Here's one anarchist whose been bashing Chomp for most of his liberal politics of the last 40 years!
His uni thesis is an anarchist classic though
- ' Objectivity and liberal scholarship' - even if it was a random accident. Spain 36 was easily the greatest revolution of all human history and Chomps thesis is well worth reading.

Confucius say - ' burning strawmen bad for one-bung-lung'

"it doesn't seem to matter if Chomsky is right or wrong"

about what???

aspects of syntax or the role of the state ????

" the correctness or incorrectness of his position is established not by reference to the facts nor even to theory"

"the facts "
in noam's able wide rangin hands
are well sorted by not reprocessed
they're quite simply shaped
and evaluated in a fashion
any of us born and raised here
in the belly of the beast
can spontaneous "get to"

he can rely on our shared instinct for decency
--bourgois humanist decency to contextualize it---
and that's his offering
serve up the inhumanity of our institution on a plate for us self legislating hungry
isolated high renaissance moralists

".. by torturing logic until a series of buzzwords emerge to negatively describe him "

do you mean a torturing logic or tortured logic

subjecting innocent grey haired predicate logic to a session of serious water boarding
to evince a false confession
hey that's an old gimmick of mine

"..a blend of "reactionary" and "liberal" which ought to make any self-respecting Trot burn her copy of Hegemony or Survival"

u lost me there
but u may have a fine struggle formula

" the new left" : illogical in form
and trot in essence

".. Not being a Trotskyite of any kind, I'm left slightly cold by what passes for 'analysis' in the New Left "

indeed

short hand cheap shots
you are correct to suggest
are not for convincing but for the convinced

not for conversion but for... adversion

noam is in fact self rusticated al
we needn't go for him
bust up his groaning book shelves
rip down his poster of b russsselllll

he's just one man essentially speaking
for himself and all thats right and holy
to a fragment of the merit class public

a robinson crusoe of right thought and right speak like the space alien in he day the world stood still
surrounded by a civil society dominated by his enemies
thru a state
still largely "believed in "
even "form the side of social progress"
and not just by opportunists
but millions of decent merit pole fools

alone with his six dozen bright
transformative poli-econ algorithms
and a structured fast respons data base
of n zillion facts

alone alone alone
a shining mind on a podium

nick

i agree with you
on chom the ageless spirit
the wunderkind anarchist
the mind of a raw 16 year old prodigy
in the brain of a ....

and i agree obviously
on the necessary "evil"
of the new rev state
any new rev state
apres the collapse of the ancien regime

hegel i guess sez the necessary is never evil
i can buy that as a half loaf even three quater loaf line

but noam ...

the much aged
but still undiminished
Beaver Cleaver
of amerika's continuing
anti empire sit com

still appeals
to the ultra -PB-rad in me

on certain nites
a cartoon image of the last days at kronstadt
or barcelona libre
rises up thru the fog of my near sleep ruminance
and i can hear the muffled tramp
of rifle shots

oh what iron beast kills that soft beauty

"But there was a time we couldn't envision getting on without the Church and that seems to have turned out to be a mistake"
of course the church was dispensible
in the big pinch of things
where were the pope's tank divisions

the serious working part of the state
is its gun barrel
all else
as ncssary as it may be for sustenance
is dress up and dressage

the church's state chambers can be as easiy occupied by the hardened cadre
of
a party of atheistic social pharasseeeeeessss

Michael Parenti

you mean

el loco parenti ?

despite his hat
this by mr p ...was fun

http://www.michaelparenti.org/stolenelections.html

i think you are right
he's not grasping the orthrian dual core system

the dems as we know em
can gain both congress and the WH
and still remain..manageable
by the corporate tower trollery

we'll need maybe ten times the rate of direct actions we've had in the last 30 years
to wrench the dems to new new deal mode

Celebrity analysts like Chomsky can be instructive, but dwelling on the grand spectacle is not the same as effective engagement. Just look at ANSWER and Move On.

Communication and linguistics studies can help develop better strategies in undermining the anti-democratic movement, but they have to be deployed through organized community actions--actions based on strategic research and education, not the fantasies and ideologies of ivory tower pundits.

Fighting the war of ideas over democratic governance is aided immensely by exposing the many frauds of poseurs, thus depriving them of resources, legitimacy and liberties. Getting the goods on the cons in one's community is a good way to learn the skills of investigative research and tools of organizing.

Chomsky is an anarchist of sorts, not a libertarian. He doesn't have any ideas on how to fix society, just criticism of how it's setup now and criticism for those who might try to transform it (those crazy socialists, don't they know that socialism automatically leads to Stalin?).

This is completely true of Chomsky, but I think you overgeneralize from Chomsky to anarchists in general. I have noted elsewhere that Chomsky is a safe salve for the wounded liberal conscience because he simply discusses the role of Big Bad America in foreign policy and little else. It is because he doesn't turn his mind to spinning out scenarios of an anarcho-syndicalist solution to these problems that he's such a popular writer.

The state is the product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. If you abolish it, something else will take its place. Look at Spain in the 30's. The anarchists brought down the government but refused to take power. The fascists regrouped, took over and virtually exterminated the Left.

Which is due, in large part, to the fact that Stalin had the International Brigades fighting the anarchists and unaffiliated Marxist militias in order to ensure that victory was not handed over to them. A fascist Spain was infinitely preferable, because he could point to it as a counterexample of how bad things were in a capitalist society, even as things deteriorated from bad to worse under his regime. An anarchist Spain, on the other hand, would have demonstrated that a society like that advocated by those who fought in Ukraine and were involved in the Kronstadt Rebellion was a workable form of organization. Had it not been for Stalin's meddling, the fascists may well have been put down, because they had significantly less internal support than the anarchists did.

Furthermore, it's historically incorrect to say that the anarchists refused to take power. In fact, the power in the land was the Popular Front, which was a wide-ranging government of Republican left, Marxist, communist, etc. groups which the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo supported.

To do away with the state you must first do away with classes. The only way to accomplish that feat is for the working class to take power, create its own worker-run state and use it to gradually transform society and end classes forever (and put down the inevitable counter-revolutionaries who dream of the good ol' days of exploitation and suffering).

The question at hand, though, is how does the state assist us in "transforming society"? One could establish a dictatorship with propaganda in the schools and films, but that would be an abrupt transformation of society, not a gradual one. And if it's a social democracy, then how are you going to ensure that the worker-run state stays in power long enough and doesn't cut deals with the bourgeois until society is transformed? The experience of social democracy in Western Europe has hardly been cheering. There are better social safety nets in Europe, but they're exploited and controlled by the powerful for their own sake. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Hartz-Konzept of means testing, created by the former head of human resources at Volkswagen, a man who was probably never poor a day in his life.

And who gets to wield this transformative power, and who is purged? In Cambodia and the China of the Cultural Revolution, a great many of the posters here, perhaps even you, would have been purged. I'm not saying that it's possible that the bourgeois are going to happily give up their control, but that when you have purges coming from the top of an unaccountable hierarchy (because to make them accountable would be "counterrevolutionary"), then it simply invites atrocities.

Easier said than done, obviously, but aside from platitudes about freedom and criticism of failed attempts at socialism, the anarchists have little to offer.

The anarchists don't, or Chomsky doesn't? It seems to me that when it comes to actually coming close to establishing a new society the anarchists have done it, time and again. They're also far more effective at creating worker-controlled workspaces, even right in the heart of a highly capitalist socialist democracy like Germany, or Italy of the turn of the century.

In fact, much of anarchist writing since anarchism emerged as a fully-fledged political philosophy has been focused on how to create an anarchist society. Proudhon, Kropotkin, Rocker, Bookchin, etc. all discussed liberatory frameworks for society.

So for critics like Chomsky the best we can hope for is to attenuate the harshest aspects of capitalism and wait for some far off date when mankind spontaneously decides to cast off its shackles once and for all.

I doubt if Chomsky would agree with this, but I grant that his writings do invite this misunderstanding (if it is).

Nevertheless, while there are many anarchists out there, few of them are actually "critics like Chomsky". Chomsky is a public intellectual precisely because he soft-pedals his anarchist affiliations and any thorough analysis of state power and concentrates on being a social critic of the American empire. He is, in his own way, as much a beneficiary of American empire as the neocons and corporate structures he critiques. (I would also make the same observation about Michael Parenti, who has been referenced in this thread.) However, since anarchism emerged around the mid to late 19th century in a wholly different political context, it is obviously the case that the conditions which obtain for Chomsky are not those for anarchism or anarchists as a whole, and since his critique is replicated by others on the left the only way in which anarchism can distinguish itself as a political philosophy is by going where Chomsky doesn't.

P.S. to MJS, I was thinking of the famous Mill quote: "A liberal may be a reactionary, but not all reactionaries...."

"the rustication must include the phony pro-Situ art gallery owner who tried to rip off Ms. Xeno"

hell no
that swindling deviate
and spare time lackey of abstract expression
just
happens to be...

my cousin henri "new caledonia" paine....

nepotism survives all rectifications

rustic as l'il abner
or
urbane as george raft

"Fighting the war of ideas over democratic governance is aided immensely by exposing the many frauds of poseurs, thus depriving them of resources, legitimacy and liberties."

behind these edge-e-cated words
i detect the bold and round
hand of a notorious road scholar
and urban commando

i'll go further

captin jay

i am guilty as charged

then again keep me fed
and
a worthy watch dog iam iam iam

arrrh
takes a poseur to catch a poseur
eh mate-eee !!!!!

null

you need to keep posting here
you have the energy to scramble over well
trampled ground

you deserve a detailed response

i hope its forth coming
unfortunately

it brings out the retired canal horse in me

As to any or all of us becoming targets
of a red guard moment...
let it rip baby...

i'll take my chances

THE GPCR REMAINS MY PARADIGM FOR ...
CIVIL REFORMATION CITY STYLE

but it and its rabble of rebels
reached an uncross-able rubicon
with the intended declaration
of the shanghai commune

states within states ????
nope

call out the PLA

the hezzy wezzys seem
the paradigm
for what's today's sustainable
limit of the possible
on the urban enclave front

the famous Mill quote: "A liberal may be a reactionary, but not all reactionaries...."

no no the quote goes

"all anarchists may be fools
but not all
liberals are anarchists "

mill was a poor logician

"how to create an anarchist society"

a proposition of the logical form

templated from

"how to catch a big foot "

the science of social change

how does the state plan on withering away

even if by stages

no really comrades
is it like sound changes
spontaneous unintended ...
or
do it require a sequence
of new state formations
filled with new better more rational
redesign intentions
a sequence of incarnations
that suddenly rise and as suddenly fall
in world historical succcession

do we need some of us to become that terrible thang
a minds of a new state
to propell ourselves to the next stage

hegel

"the state is god standing among us "

all gods are man made

"Stalin had the International Brigades fighting the anarchists and unaffiliated Marxist militias in order to ensure that victory was not handed over to them"

as i recall
that insurance move
took very little
time effort thought
or blood
to accomplish
and was nearly all about one province
catalonia fell to the stalinoids
long before the madrid fell to the fascists

"A fascist Spain was infinitely preferable, because he could point to it as a counterexample of how bad things were in a capitalist society, even as things deteriorated from bad to worse under his regime"

you actually want to suggest
uncle joe feared the syndicalists ??

the rap i hear most is simpler
stalin's boys refused to unleash
social revolution
even in the republican safe areas

why ??

to preserve the popular front
with the "liberal burgers"

whether he expected the republic to survive
the fascist onslaught
seems a very different question

an international question

the action/inaction
of
france and britain must be weighed
in the scales

ahh this is painful
schematics
i'll go silent

"when you have purges coming from the top of an unaccountable hierarchy (because to make them accountable would be "counterrevolutionary") then it simply invites atrocities"

on a formal level
who can gainsay that

just like guns
leninist orgs
despite the power amping effect
can be dangerous to operate
if the revs core gets built into one
and it ends up leading the whole new gig ...
well obviously
such a set up only gets justification
from its necessity

"It seems to me that when it comes to actually coming close to establishing a new society the anarchists have done it, time and again."
that my friend contains its own self destruct button
push hard on the word close
and boom
humpty dumpty

".. They're also far more effective
at creating worker-controlled workspaces, even right in the heart of a highly capitalist socialist democracy like Germany, or Italy of the turn of the century."

i'm lost here

post great war or pre great war ???

again if post
press the close button

if pre
i have not the slightest notion
what you refer to...

btw null

i love Kropotkin

maybe almost
as much

as mjs loves his noam-bo

"What however is struggling to be born, somewhere in the multichambered womb of planet earth's hyperpower-plagued present reality, is another storming of the Bastille, and more sharply, another moment of terrible liberty..."

That seems as fantastical as Noam's lib-soc paradise.

behold a celebrated brit take on prog lib
heuristics

"Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases
the confidence,
the autonomy,
the initiative,
the participation,
the solidarity,
the egalitarian tendencies
and
the self-activity
of the masses

and( oh ya )
whatever assists in
their demystification."

meaningful = demystifying = do it themselves

" Sterile and harmful action
is whatever reinforces
the passivity of the masses
their apathy,
their cynicism,
their differentiation through hierarchy,
their alienation,
their reliance on others to do things for them and
the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf."

"even by those allegedly acting on their behalf."
"even by those allegedly acting on their behalf."
"even by those allegedly acting on their behalf."

harmful sterile ---> kill baby kill

my my

seems
the organized struggle for existence
in any post tribal society
must be largely harmful to the majority

contemporary
modes of exploitation
must be just a better mouse trap

hmm

but but but
24/7/365 mass mobilizations ???
just trying to imagine that
i'm already prepared
to surrender power
back to the capitalist trolls

This is all a big raft of dookie.

I don't have my books at hand, but Chomsky has said many times that the only path to a decent human future is through an expansion of state power under democratic control. Anarchy is his ultimate target, as communism was for Marx, not what he prescribes for tomorrow.

I'm always surprised at the secret resentment/jealousy some lefties carry for Noam. It's almost invariably based on ignorance of what Chomsky says.

"That seems as fantastical as Noam's lib-soc paradise"

really ..must i count the times
for u
its already happened

or is the only bastille worthy of the name
wall street
if so ...you of course are correct

recall france though a great power at that moment
was not the center of world power
if the world as yet had one
it was already britain

"Chomsky has said many times that the only path to a decent human future is through an expansion of state power under democratic control"

ahh that's the liberal in him
the jeffersonian the kropotkin

now ask him
what ould constitute democratic control
and he turns dark of face
and talks hamlets like godwin

in fact e hasn't thought it through
and to that he's entitled
its enogh to point the finger of anathema at the trans nat's
corporate empire

"I'm always surprised at the secret resentment/jealousy some lefties carry for Noam"

please sir may i have another

but sports fans...

i love the guy
honest i do
not so much as father smiff of course
or apparently you dear dawson's creak

but his deeper notions of social dynamics
are pure static structure
note the paradox
he's at bottom
an enlightenment goo goo
like marse jeff
a fuckin liberal

okay so am i on alternate parking days

"the only path to a decent human future is through an expansion of state power under democratic control."

may prove when we get to the nasty bits
a contradiction in terms

by liberal bill of rights lights
chavez is naughty and maybe on the way
to mugabe ville

"Anarchy is his ultimate target, as communism was for Marx,"
both share the obvious finale
state less ness
and without the aid of spirit beings
the jehovah witnesses not with standing

"not what he prescribes for tomorrow."

don't he proscribe
for the good of his self legislation
ever joining
in attempts to build rev orgs
here or abroad ??
not loose circles pf course
that's fine
i suggest he simply tolerates
the folks who do it all
as the de facto agents of the good
albeit as butcher boys for progress

long and short

like a statue in the park
guys likenoam
can't...make it all happen

protest witness truth told to power
yup

org to storm the bastille
nope

May I reply in kind, amateurishly no doubt:

True, 'tis always unwise
to ever say never

And living in these blighted States
no doubt
diminishes unduly
my concept of the possible

But if liberty is the freedom to consume
then by and large Western man
counts himself "terribly" free indeed

and if scarcity comes
I bet he'll hedge his bets--
Conservative chap that he is--
And go with what got him here

We've been trained you know
The French peasantry
and urban poor
didn't have Time mag and the TV
telling them
just how swell they have it
and how the only conceivable politics
is the two party system
consisting of Kirche and Krieg

Not to say
that the modern western state
organized and technified
makes the musketeers
look like
policing pikers
of
the most mickey mouse sort

The State will undoubtable crumble
but more likely by its own hand
Give or take a hundred years:
I foresee a nuclear exchange
if only by accident

And we musn't forget
Mother Nature.

Other than that,
I endorse Michael Dawson's
words above

md
i think he talks state reform
not state revolution
his take on the october revolution
at least what i read
seemed very "received" and swallowed whole
some where i took notes on same
but for him to suggest reforms..like i do
imply the contiunation of the liberal state

much more needs to be made explicit

i shan't drop this
libertarianism even cxoupled with socialism
is a serios confusion
a babl of good intentions at cross purposes with the forward march of actual social reality

Hey, thanks, fellas, that was good for all, talking about this slow-talking Wellfleet prof - is there some secret society of Noamians who gather 'round and live life in an anarcho-syndicalist collective? Is that where this discussion comes from? What a party must be had at that swinging soiree ever' night!
Chomsky, Parenti, Nader, Zinn - probably a fairly good Bingo table, as far as that goes, not a whole lot of laughs and self-mocking, maybe a little curt with the staff when their cups aren't refilled, but as one posting before said, they've been quite the ivory tower beneficiaries of the very supersystem they rightly decry. To be talking solemnly about what these emeriti do or didn't believe in, as if they or their formerly endowed professorship kind had that 60's kind of cultural Q factor, when every single one of their causes of the last 50 years has been co-opted and hollowed out and then obliterated by the neocon hedge fund global militarist alliance - let them have their naps, please.

mark
you reflect the first stage of libertarianism

no state i know is anything but bad
co opted by the trans nats etc etc

look for the brake thrus
and
the systemic reactive ameliorative adjustments they entail

the system to defend itself morphs benign
or smi benign

i submit we raise enough outlaw hell
and it might fork left this time
not right

shit i sound like tom hay-dome

owen
I don't think I've reflected anything
other than
my own pessimism on the question
of storming the bastille

of course I haven't been precise

Social foment
isn't inconceivable to me
And independent organizing
from left
"raising outlaw hell"
just might exact
a national politics
headed
in new new-dealish directions

which would suit me ok-fine

because I'm no purist
hardly

Precisely because
I don't see the "overturning of the present system of social relations"

or the eradication of the state
as a likely possibility

And I don't think I
or you
have said anything
that Noam wouldn't endorse.

Again, I smell dookie, OP-san. What on Earth makes you think Chomsky trips over the definition of "democratic control?"

He heaps praise on the achievements of the 1960s and social movements in general, even when they are meager. He endorses the welfare state and wants it bigger. He favors public enterprise. He favors world democracy and jurisprudence. He most certainly does not turn ashen and fall silent on the topic of what to do next.

NC doesn't mistake any of these things as sufficient in themselves. Indeed, "democratic control," nay democracy itself, is a goal, not a stationary state, right?

And, btw, what's wrong with being an Enlightenment liberal, if by that one means a libertarian socialist, a believer in both the sanctity of the individual and the reality of the social, and the seeking of the best of all possible calibrations of the two? What is the alternative to that? It isn't obvious, at least not to my Chomsky-filled brain...

Do tell...What have I missed?

md
i just read you're comment and marks
i will post a response up top
i think this deserves a fresh thread

thanx for the cross talk
we need more of it here

i wish i could provoke it every time out

i hate choirs
i like
a den of cut throats
in an all in
free for all

I have received a thunderous response to my provocative broadside- e-mails all over the place, huzzahs, encomiums - how could I have been so bold as to take on the grand wizards of our proud "movement," seems to be the tenor of the awed messaging from the suddenly alert blogosphere. These are our saints! We must look to our Alphas to discern even the most infinitesimal shift and concern from them!
Again and again, I have urged the faithful: look at us. Chomsky and brethren own no stinger missiles, own no houses of congress, neither here nor in Pyonyang. We sit ever-always on the 0 yardline of politics and power. There is not an American alive with an ounce of political power who can be called "progressive" - oh, some nice Rocky Anderson-type folks, but have they stopped the banks? Have they whipped up the bankrupt bourgeoisie to march on Greenspan's summer home? Have we, or they, stopped a Predator drone today? No. We couldn't. We won't. There is nothing wrong with reading 18,000 newspapers a day like Chomsky, or in traveling the country with a "progressive" dog-and-pony show like any number of billable-hours consultants like Sirota or his fellow green capitalists - but none of them will "make" the news - Regency College graduates and Federalist Society ectomorphs will be the ones literally making it, the news, the real consequences, the actual warps and woof of power. Was ever such, will be ever such. Thanks again, fans!

mjoe

of what do u speak ???
e mail ??

"There is nothing wrong with reading 18,000 newspapers a day like Chomsky, or in traveling the country with a "progressive" dog-and-pony show like any number of billable-hours consultants like Sirota or his fellow green capitalists - but none of them will "make" the news.."

right !!!!

OP-
Just being sarcastic, eh? No e-mails, no huzzahs, no encomiums. I was lying. Straight perjury. Absolute and total disregard for the truth. I wanted to try it for once, see how the neocons feel when they open their mouths...

Mjoe, youthinks the "neocons" lie any more or less frequently than the other few but fulgent pseudo-fauna of the duopoly? Wherefore and why?

Personally, whenever I hear the word "neocon," I reach for my snooze button.