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Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

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Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#51

Post by anoncowherd »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #49
anoncowherd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how much we want everyone to live, we can't try and ensure it through coercion . Besides, coercion only works for evil. You can't achieve good through coercion. Whenever you try, it has the opposite effect. Take minimum wage for example. You want poor people to get higher salaries, but in reality, all you accomplish by raising the min. wage is preventing some lowest-skilled people from getting a job (which…

> No matter how much we want everyone to live, we can't try and ensure it through coercion. Besides, coercion only works for evil. You can't achieve good through coercion. Whenever you try, it has the opposite effect. Justify your religious faith using objective data and control groups, or go back to church, please.

Feel free to refute my minimum wage example for starters. Here's another:

  1) you want to help the poor
  2) you confiscate wealth from other people, and give it to the poor
  3) you have just removed money from the economy 
     and caused it to get used much less efficiently 
     than it would have, and demotivated lots of people 
     from doing business and producing value 
     to the world at large.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#52

Post by icebraining »

anoncowherd wrote: post #28
ryanbrunner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a large body of literature that attempts to justify centralization of power. Social contract theory, to name one. You may not agree with it, but the possibility of a justifiable centralization of power can at least be argued.

>> There's a large body of literature that attempts to justify centralization of power Of course there is. We've lived under centralized power for hundreds or thousands of years, after all. Why would The Powers That Be suddenly cease wanting to Be? But centralized power cannot be justified , it can only be rationalized. If you think about the idea of the social contract for a moment, you should realize that it's not…

Sounds much like the system of property.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#53

Post by peterwwillis »

nailer wrote: post #29
klez wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too many people who believe in violence and seizing of others property loudly proclaim themselves 'anarchists' Just like people committing computer fraud call themselves hackers. The fact that fraudsters (and media, as is the case with both 'hacker' and 'anarchist') use the term wrongly doesn't diminish the original and correct meaning that dates back to the 19th century.

I think the analogy's spot on, but that it /does/ diminish the original meaning. Eg, I don't call myself a 'hacker' around people who aren't geeks because I know it will be misinterpreted, and additionally people who think that definition is a good thing will want to associate with me.

This gets round to the comment I wanted to make about the whole topic: Anarchism is a word that closes people's minds and should not be used to try to promote some better system of organization or community.

Can you imagine people trying to encourage community and a family unit by trying to bring back Skinhead culture? Try as you might to explain its positive, non-racial origins, people just associate it with neo-naziism. And though I acknowledge Anarchism can be a productive form of collective organizing, if I see somebody with a torn jacket with a circled A patch on it, I think that person's a jackass.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#54

Post by jaekwon »

polshaw wrote: post #46
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anarchists are not confused. "Anarcho"-capitalists are just not anarchists. Anarchism is anti-property, anti-capitalist, and anti-state. If your proposal is to replace the rule of the state with a purified rule of property and capital, you are not an anarchist.

Anarchism is against private property, not personal property. It has no issue owning your own house, car, laptop, etc etc. That is yours and does not belong to the state, or 'everyone', or anyone else. It just does not want rent seeking; owning other peoples' homes and means of production, or hoarding otherwise (eg owning vast tracts of land you do not use). So for example a factory should be owned by it's workers.

As I understand it, anarcho-socialism is against private (and especially corporate) "property" enforced by a state government in favor of personal "property". What "property" means in anarcho-socialism is still muddy to me.

Anarco-capitalism is for "property" if you can defend it, even if it is more than say what a typical person needs for a normal life. Anarco-capitalism would also be for "property" owned by distributed-autonomous-corporations.

The only thing that can be ascribed to Anarchism, is the dethronement of a central "state". What you described is Anarcho-socialism.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#55

Post by swashboon »

klez wrote: post #30
lukifer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common misconception about anarchism is that it means an absence of rules and laws. Instead, the various flavors of anarchism propose models for distributed, bottom-up authority and decision-making. Statism : 90s Microsoft :: Anarchism : Web Standards

> Statism : 90s Microsoft :: Anarchism : Web Standards Maybe I'm nitpicking, but Web Standards are mandated by the W3C, which I don't see as an anarchistic organization, but more as an extended oligarchy. To participate, an organization (from what I found, individuals cannot join) needs at least 1950.00 EUR per year.[1] [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees I'm not criticizing W3C per se, just the fact that it's bein…

Web Standards are only useful becasue people agree on them and utilize them. There is no mechanism for enforcement or ordering, just the majority rule essentially.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#56

Post by javert »

SwellJoe wrote: post #6
javert wrote: post #3

Anarchism is pure nonsense. There is literally no such thing as "no government." In a "state of nature," every government is size 1---you. You are responsible for retaliatory and initiatory force, and every interaction is foreign diplomacy with a gun behind it. From there, things can (and will) evolve so that there are larger governments, but you cannot get "no government."

So, you have no knowledge of the philosophy of anarchism (not even the amount of knowledge you would have gained from actually watching the video linked), but feel both empowered to dismiss it, and capable of explaining what it means.

People keep telling me to watch videos like this, and it never resolves the contradiction. I can't watch them all.

However, the interesting thing is that you can't (or haven't) pointed out any contradiction in what I said. If what I said is wrong, you should be able to correct me quite easily.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#57

Post by javert »

agilebyte wrote: post #4
javert wrote: post #3

Anarchism is pure nonsense. There is literally no such thing as "no government." In a "state of nature," every government is size 1---you. You are responsible for retaliatory and initiatory force, and every interaction is foreign diplomacy with a gun behind it. From there, things can (and will) evolve so that there are larger governments, but you cannot get "no government."

In Introduction to Anarchism, the author suggests that the future direction in anarchism could be to support local governments and having power on a local, rather than national level. http://www.amazon.com/Anarchism-A-Very-Short-Introduction/dp...

Well, that would be highly devolved government, not anarchism, no? Shouldn't Chomsky avoid such confusing langauge?

I'm no better off serving a local collective than a national collective.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#58

Post by jaekwon »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40
ethana wrote: post #11

I find it completely ironic that anarchism itself cannot even escape the left-right paradigm. Going down lower Manhattan on a weekdays, you can find heated arguments between an anarcho-communist vs another anarcho-capitalist. But I also find the term anarcho-communism to be an oxymoron.

Anarchists are not confused. "Anarcho"-capitalists are just not anarchists. Anarchism is anti-property, anti-capitalist, and anti-state. If your proposal is to replace the rule of the state with a purified rule of property and capital, you are not an anarchist.

Anarchism is anti-state. Anarcho-socialism is also anti-property, given some muddy definition of property.

Your statement is typical from anarcho-socialists who want to squat on the word "anarchism" while failing to define what property should be granted to an individual (call it possession if you wish), how to reach consensus about it, how to enforce it without a higher authority, and what to do about the higher authority that naturally arises in such a state of chaos.

At least anarcho-capitalists have an out when it comes to defining property... it's whatever you can afford to defend, probably through third parties that offer defense as as contract.

I'll keep saying this until I'm convinced otherwise: What is needed is something between anarcho-socialism and anarcho-capitalism that both sides can agree upon, but such a thing cannot happen unless everybody looks further into the future, understanding that there are aspects of humanity & private trade that are both needed for us to prosper.

Squatting on the word "Anarchism" or calling one side or the other confused doesn't help either cause. They're both two ends of a spectrum and the reason why we have the spread is because we don't understand how to bridge the gap, or we don't yet understand that neither end points alone will go very far.

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#59

Post by javert »

seanccox wrote: post #5
javert wrote: post #3

Anarchism is pure nonsense. There is literally no such thing as "no government." In a "state of nature," every government is size 1---you. You are responsible for retaliatory and initiatory force, and every interaction is foreign diplomacy with a gun behind it. From there, things can (and will) evolve so that there are larger governments, but you cannot get "no government."

"Pure nonsense"... is that your educated critique, or are you just trolling to make space for a straw man argument? Because I get the sense that you haven't read enough about anarchism if you think it constitutes 'no government'.

Maybe you are actually pointing out a misunderstanding I have. I thought "anarchism" meant "no government." If it doesn't, why don't anarchists use a different term? Can you think of a more descriptive term?

It is certainly the case that anarcho-capitalists are for "no government."

Re: Noam Chomsky – "On Anarchism" [video]

#60

Post by icebraining »

ravingraven wrote: post #26
ethana wrote: post #11

I find it completely ironic that anarchism itself cannot even escape the left-right paradigm. Going down lower Manhattan on a weekdays, you can find heated arguments between an anarcho-communist vs another anarcho-capitalist. But I also find the term anarcho-communism to be an oxymoron.

Allow me to disagree. Therms and ideologies do not only describe what someone works towards but also how he does so. In the case of anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism both are very different. A striking difference is how each one of those ideologies views open markets. Quoting from the wikipedia article on anarcho-communism:

You lost the quote ;)
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