Chomsky is good for some things – primarily thoughts about media and foreign policy.
However, it seems Chomsky never misses a chance to defend the state even if he is an anarchist (from being anti-gun, to anti-property, to being for every single other petty bourgeois liberal “program” every thought up, to even directly recommending a growth in federal power). And even declaring the state’s indispensability to human existence, development, etc. against free markets (which he finds to be tyranny). In fact, he’s stated that capitalism being allowed is worse than the state and that libertarians – American libertarians (not the European socialist kind) – are only interested in promoting the worst tyranny.
One of the indispensable gifts of the state, in his opinion, is the computer. The computer wasn’t created by capitalists! No! It was created by some intellectuals in the 1920’s, he declares, because they were recieving government money (to increase efficiency of the state and not some purely altruistic act or public demand, but never you mind that: he’s an anarchist). No idea where the idea originated… probably with the godlike brilliance of some random government bureaucrat and not any programmer’s actual thought. Or why they took money for their efforts, if it was purely in the common good. So there you have it: capitalism is a utopia. Things like computers came about because of the pure divine love provided by the state. In Orwellian/Chomskyan terms… the state is freedom/anarchy.
Of course, the problem is that no one uses that same computer today. It doesn’t serve any of the same functions. It doesn’t look in any way similar. And computer companies don’t require assistance in developing actually usable computers in a market from government… nor any help in their distribution. Computers today aren’t one single thing for the community to enjoy, but much more useable as a personal device. It even caught on largely because of the higher productivity demanded by corporations. Anyway, what relevance does the state have to the current idea of computers?
The only thing this proves in effect is that the state is just as equipped to provide for itself (having taken its funds through taxation). Though who that surprises exactly is anyone’s guess. It is not equally equipped (or even equiped at all) to provide services in a way the masses actually want. To chomsky, it’s enough that the computer exists. Maybe the whole world can crowd around this same old dinosaur computer (that would probably be as big as a barn)?
I wouldn’t say Chompsky is good on anything. He has spoken mistruths and lies about our imperialist foreign policy. He’s even denied that the Khemer Rhouge has ever happened. The first computer if Chomsky, wants to go way back, was not created in the 20’s by a state program but rather in the 19th century by Charles Babbage (it was a mechanical caculator but they are considered computers). Personal computers were created and mass produced thanks to the likes of Apple’s Steve Wozniak in the 70’s and 80’s
This is a 66 page pdf called the “200 Chomsky lies”, with detailed references from his books and transcripts from interviews, citing his “facts”, and then actual data.
I watched the video response to that too and was less than impressed. Those are the people running around calling themselves anarchists today, praising social security and using the argument that the veterans were in the capital as a plan to overthrow the government back in the 30s as a defense for the New Deal?
Oh, and the little icon that looks like a film strip lets you imbed video like this:
Crazy ass web 2.0
Needs to get meself one of them there webcams so I can tell y’all youngsters what’s up with what methinks…
Chomsky is a joke. I use to like his stuff initially, but it quickly became evident that the guy just tries to tear down without bringing anything of his own to the table.
And I’m relatively certain that the computer isn’t a creation of the state. The concept itself is ancient, going back to the Antikythera Mechanism. And the more modern forms were in development in private and public. The computer is no miracle of state-funded research. But I know facts are a very subjective thing for Chomsky.
That’s a common problem with socialists, they have this pathological inability to think in anything but classes. To him, “the computer” was invented in the 20’s. and everything since is just insiginificant details. That one act of creation (if even that much is true, I thought the first computer in the modern snese was done by Turing at Bletchley Park), was the one and only act of creation needed because it created the class of things we know as computers. Everything since hasn’t been creation or invention, it’s just been, hell, I don’t know, accidental discoveries happened upon by automotons whose thinking has been conditioned by the existence of The Computer. Or something.
Oh, my analysis of Chomsky as a Marxist claiming to be an anarchist. I enraged a lot of people with that, since for some reason a signficant portion of social anarchists are in love with Chomsky and consider him an anarcho-syndicalist hero. I’ll take Bakunin over Chomsky any day.
“right-wing anarchism… [is] an extreme form of authoritarianism… under the
formulations of someone like, say, Murray Rothbard, you will get such inequalities of power
that it would be like living under Genghis Khan or something like that. Even though everyone
would be technically free, they’ll be free to make contracts with the person who has all the
power, who owns the police, and so on, or they’ll be free not to.”
It would be nice if he’d even give some sort of source of where he got his information about Murray Rothbard in that book. For 1) to advertise Murray Rothbard is a good thing. 2) So his readers can actually examine what he has said in context (Murray has a great way of explaining things persuasively and in depth). 3) Upon the knowledge of Murray’s incredible breadth of work, one would see that he is probably as well rounded as Chomsky but has far more substance and personal oversight over his own work (Murray never resorted to cash-in interview books or reprinting the same essays again and again under different titles). Meaning his body of work is more coherent (not to mention never apologetic of the state or any mass murderers). But alas, he only mentions the name. Meaning his readers probably think he’s some hybrid of Mussolini and Milton Friedman. The important point is to imply how much greater the state is than allowing people to make their own contracts (oh the horror!). Meaning the anarcho-syndicalist revolution has to be delayed forever (also the function of his love for more federal power and gun restrictions/bans).
I think chomsky is only really good for his cognitive research. As far as his work on the media and foreign policy I think he is overwhelmingly one sided. He talks about how the Sandinistas never got any jet planes from the Soviets yet the media was up in arms about it. The fact is Ortega admits today that they were making a deal to get some jet planes but the Soviets backed down from the deal. His whole view of the cold war properly critiques United States actions but then he goes overboard and ignores the fact that the Soviets were doing just as much. I think he ignores this because he loves any third world communist movements despite the fact they were usually Soviet proxies. He also completely ignores how the FCC only allows certain companies to broadcast by their rules (usually only the richest companies can afford these regulations) and how the FCC fines or harasses people who do not follow through with their regulations. Mostly the FCC hits down on smaller broadcasting agencies preventing diversification in this market.
I really think the problem with much of his critique of the American state (and it’s foreign policy) is that he will go out of his way to then glorify some other state somewhere else. As if the one is better than the other. It makes his anarchism nonsensical. His only problem with statism is that it is not some other type of statism. To my knowledge, he really doesn’t even have a strategy for how society should be organized other than the majority have to get everything they want. And if they don’t, it’s because someone is preventing it because of greed. It’s like the little boy who doesn’t get everything he wants for Christmas… his concern would be legitimate if he claimed his dad or mom was undermining “democracy” within the family.
Actually, it’s interesting you mention this: initially, I had heard of Chomsky because of his research into linguistics, not due to his politics. I haven’t checked back into that area in quite a while, but I remember being interested in what he did with generative grammar (I think that’s what it was called).
This was a few years ago though; at some point, I decided to boycott Chomsky due to the massive name dropping I had to endure while in classes.
Same here. I am actually a student in linguistics currently. I probably read Syntactic Structures a year before I ever read Manufacturing Consent or any of the other stuff he wrote. I think there is a hatred of him in linguistics – sometimes from computer scientists.
I don’t think the wider world of today’s liberals really understand his science or his political views, though. Young Marxists in particular are mystified by his being a distinguished professor who wears sweaters and is old (he must be a genius) that they shrug off some of the things he says. I think even if they claim to agree with him, he is far removed from them. Though some of his ridiculous views about wages and property will make certain people who don’t take his work with a grain of salt into idiots. I mean his obligatory performance in The Corporation is a perfect example.
Still, I don’t hate him. I could be comletely off base here, but I think he is doing something similar for linguistics that the Austrians try to do for economics. Really making empirical research and lab testing and data and graphs and sociocultural studies and stuff irrelevant and replacing it with elegant theorizing that actually works and is not just mounting worthless knowledge.
‘In fact, the amount that you have to know in a field is not at all correlated with the success of the field. Maybe it’s even inversely related because the more success there is, in a sense, the less you have to know. You just have to understand; you have to understand more, but maybe know less’.
Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. TheManaguaLectures. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
That’s really where he separates from the rest of academia in my opinion. Because the rest of the people out there like Rorty or the postmodernists all believe the exact opposite things.
I dunno. Computer science isn’t my field, but I saw reviews somewhere online of his The Minimalist Program a year or so ago and there were some really nasty reviews from those types. He also gets nasty reviews from people who do comparative studies in languages (which is the opposite of what he tries to do). People are still trying to fight him, I guess. Of course, I’ve also heard people who are ignorant of the study of linguistics take someone’s rumours that Chomsky is somehow a joke or his ideas are not even considered anymore. Which is false.