Occupy (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series) by Chomsky Noam & Ruggiero Greg

Author:Chomsky, Noam & Ruggiero, Greg [Chomsky, Noam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Wall Street, Chomsky, social justice, Zuccotti Park, Occupy, protest, economic justice
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

First of all, nobody owns the concept of “anarchism.” Anarchism has a very broad back. You can find all kinds of things in the anarchist movements. So the question of what an anarchist society can be is almost meaningless. Different people who associate themselves with rough anarchist tendencies have very different conceptions.

But the most developed notions that anarchist activists and thinkers have had in mind are those for a highly organized society—highly structured, highly organized—but organized on the basis of free and voluntary participation. So, for example, what I mentioned about the Ohio network of worker/community-owned enterprises, that’s a traditional anarchist vision. Enterprises, not only owned but managed by participants in a free association with one another is a big step beyond. It could be at the federal level. It could be at the international level. So yes, it’s a highly democratic conception of a structured, organized society with power at the base. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have representatives—it can have, but they should be recallable and under the influence and control of participants.

Who’s in favor of a society like that? You can say Adam Smith, for example, who believed—you can question whether his beliefs were accurate, but he believed—that market systems and the “invisible hand” of individual choices would lead to egalitarian societies of common participation. You can question the logic of the argument, but the goals are understandable and they go far back. You can find them in the first serious book of politics that was ever written, Aristotle’s Politics.

When Aristotle evaluated various kinds of systems, he felt that democracy was the least bad of them. But he said democracy wouldn’t work unless you could set things up so that they would be relatively egalitarian. He proposed specific measures for Athens that, in our terms, would be welfare-state measures.

There are plenty of roots for these concepts. A lot of them come right out of the Enlightenment. But I don’t think anyone has the authority to say this is what an anarchist society is going to look like. There are people who think you can sketch it out in great detail, but my own feeling here—I essentially agree with Marx—is that these things have to be worked out by people who are living and functioning in freedom and work out for themselves what kinds of societies and communities are appropriate for them.

The late British philosopher, Martin Hollis, worked extensively on questions of human action, the philosophy of social science and rationality. One of the claims he made was that any anarchist vision of a society rests upon an idea of human nature that is too optimistic. In short, he argued that anarchism is only viable if humans by nature are good. He says that history shows us that humans cannot be trusted to this degree; thus, anarchism is too idealistic. Would you mind responding to this objection very quickly, given your commitment to some of the ideals of anarchism?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.