a comment on the Chomsky appearance

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I had not meant to watch all of Chomsky on the Net.  But this is marking
time and I am easily tempted.  Besides it was very interesting.  In many
ways this was an astonishing performance by a 74 year old man who recently
had a bout with cancer. He did look very tired at one stage but he still
kept going for the entire three hours.

Back in 1991 I interviewed Chomsky for a journal article and he was
extremely polite and generous with his time.

I also studied linguistics way back in 1971 in Essex Uni when he was still
the rage.

So I consider him one of the good guys and feel no need to hack into him.

However the signing of the Cuban petition does point out the libertarian
nature of his politics and I feel their limitation.

What interests me as well however is how he consistently stays within the
radical liberal critique.  As a consequence he seems happiest when he is
quoting Dewey and Twain and Quincy Adams in his criticisms of wage slavery
and American foreign policy and the genocide of Native Americans.

Similarly he seems to like to cite Adam Smith to show that contemporary
capitalism does not conform to liberal economic ideals.

What he does not do and the Bookchinites have pointed this out consistently
is to move from critique to the outlining of an alternative politics.

So what do we have in Chomsky?  Well to begin with he is an enduring critic
of American foreign and domestic policy. He is still nibbling away at the
shins of the powerful. He is also accumulating something of a mass
following in this conjuncture.  To be frank in this conjuncture I welcome
the fact that his book on 9/11 is a best seller.

But for all his brilliance he is no dialectician.  Thus he hailed the fall
of the Soviet Union as a 'victory for socialism'.  He can not see that what
was crucial was the trajectory of the fall. The collapse of the CPSU
towards Thatcherism was hardly a victory for socialism.

Despite these criticism the fact remains that he models very well the kind
of persona that we need to cultivate with the educated middle class -
gentle. persuasive, dogged and with a complete devotion to a notion of
truth as revealed by patient research.  Compare that with the idiot
poststructuralists and postmodernists with their neo Nietzschean notion of
truth as a mobile army of metaphors.  Equally important here is his refusal
of conspiracy accounts of Sept 11.  Something that Lou has had to fight out
on this list btw.

regards

Gary