[lbo-talk] Time to Get Religion

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Mon Dec 4 05:48:58 PST 2006


On 12/3/06, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Lack of ideology critique? Have you ever cracked a
> > book written by anarchists?
>
> Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, to take one example.
> Lot's of detailed institutional analysis (to use his
> own phrase) of the North American news media. Nothing
> approaching ideology-critique.

I think you want to go one level down from things like anarchism. After all, you'd want to critique anarchism itself -- its limitations and nature.

The most serious work on this topic that I currently know of actually comes from an anarchist. Michael Albert's work on radical theory. Among other things, he uses it to illustrate the limitations of an anarchist framework.

Text and audio: <http://www.zmag.org/instructionals/rtinstruc/index.htm> <http://www.zmag.org/michaelalbertaudio.html>


> I am not referring to Noam Chomsky's attitude towards
> religion. I am referring to the lack of
> ideology-critique common to all anarchists. Chuck and
> Noam Chomsky's anarchisms may be far apart, but the
> "just the facts" attitude is common to both.

Just the facts? Take Chomsky's claim that, "I tend to agree that anarchism is formless and utopian..."

(But he goes onto say, "... though hardly more so than the inane doctrines of neoliberalism, Marxism-Leninism, and other ideologies that have appealed to the powerful and their intellectual servants over the years, for reasons that are all too easy to explain.")

Personally, I think there's a strain in anarchism which is highly imaginative, liberated from conformity. That's in stark contrast with the cold rationality you observe. I think they're two sides of the same coin; the rejection of dogma can lead to both a firm adherence to truth and exploration of unconventional thought.

Tayssir



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