shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>
> i was going to ask if this was a general stand against being "in power" but
> I decided to find out what Chomsky said.
>
> But boy, he does come off as a fuckwad in the beginning. _She_ engages in
> rhetoric, _he_ engages in facts. What an annoying fuckwad.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI
I discovered years ago that I could best maintain my admiration for Chomsky by (for the most part) reading only his analyses of u.s. policy in the world. He remains a national treasure as someone once said.
But when he attempts to formulate counteracting policy (or critique the history of attempts at counteracting policy) -- well, I have bettyer uses of my time.
I am more and more convinced that the best _starting point_ for understanding the history of anti-capitalist struggle is Tomas's point: It has been a struggle for equality (Rousseau) rather than freedom (Marx). But that is NOT a negative criticism; it is merely a description of what could not have been otherwise. (It is, of course, not some utopian never-never land equality that is in question but the equality of citizenship in the state: Not really completed of course. E.g., until migrants, legal or illegal, have the same rights as native-born residents of the u.s. equality has not been achieved.)
Dennis R's bubbling re the "Developmenal State" has one thin thread of attachment to reality: the struggle for bourgeois equality is still going on in those states, and that is all for the better. *But they are not in the least advancing towards freedom. Nor are we.
Freedom depends on a close relationship of act and motive, which is only attainable in a social order that has abolished wage labor and commodity production.
Carrol