>
>> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> What a ridiculous figure Chomsky has become: No government likes
>> what
>> I have to say, he says as he's on the way to seek an audience with
>> and
>> give counsel to a government, one headed by a World Bank-trained
>> neoliberal reformer. Why does the world's most famous anarchist seem
>> to want to be consultant for states?
>
> i've never taken his 'anarchism' seriously. i always thought he called
> himself libertarian for a reason: as a crack against a certain faction
> of the left that he despised early on. it comes out in one of his
> debates with foucault, where he's at pains to distinguish himself from
> other socialists. i've always seen that as one of those situations
> where chomsky took the bait because he's simply not a red.
>
> shag
yeah. i'm misremembering the speech where he opens by castigating other socialists in a weasily way, but the debate with foucault was what cemented my disdain for chomsky's theories, beyond the silly mechanical marxism which is irritating enough.it also contains his statements that make it clear that he's a statist anti-statist.
as chomsky points out, his marxism and revolution is motivated by the idea that he happens to hold that there is a justice that exists in the world independently of humans' conceptions of that justice, and there is a human nature unfolding, repressed and oppressed by capitalist social relations. thus, if you act against the state, you act on behalf of a justice that exists outside the state. this justice, as foucault correctly point out, is the basis for chomsky's statist anti-statism. doesn't zizek speak of it as schizophrenic - where you listen to voices in your head that command you to do justice: you can because you must or something?
foucault says that the proletariat must take power in order to win, not take power in the service of a higher power, justice. chomsky disagrees with this, is in fact frightened by this, because there is no guarantee, to chomsky's way of thinking, that such taking of power will turn out to be a taking of power that will lead to more freedom, unfolding of human nature. this is where chomsky and others who take this view reveal their deep distrust of this "human nature". it is so easily warped and dominated that it can easily be exploited, moved this way and that, so that, if the proles take power merely to "win" and not sanctioned in The Name of Justice that is bigger and beyond mere human nature, etc., then this is a troubling possiblity indeed.
Must bring Justice in, like God, to make sure it All Turns out Right, to steer the ship of humanity in the right direction in spite of human 'nature'. which makes me think that socialists of this persuasion are a lot more like the conservatives of Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery than we'd like to think.
shag
FOUCAULT:
Yes, but I would like to ask you a question. When, in the United States, you commit an illegal act, do you justify it in terms of justice or of a superior legality, or do you justify it by the necessity of the class struggle, which is at the present time essential for the proletariat in their struggle against the ruling class?
CHOMSKY:
Well, here I would like to take the point of view which is taken by the American Supreme Court and probably other courts in such circumstances; that is, to try to settle the issue on the narrowest possible grounds. I would think that ultimately it would make very good sense, in many cases, to act against the legal institutions of a given society, if in so doing you're striking at the sources of power and oppression in that society.
However, to a very large extent existing law represents certain human values, which are decent human values; and existing law, correctly interpreted, permits much of what the state commands you not to do. And I think it's important to exploit the fact...
FOUCAULT:
Yeah.
CHOMSKY:
...it's important to exploit the areas of law which are properly formulated and then perhaps to act directly against those areas of law which simply ratify some system of power.
FOUCAULT:
But, but, I, I...
CHOMSKY:
Let me get...
FOUCAULT:
My question, my question was this: when you commit a clearly illegal act...
CHOMSKY:
...which I regard as illegal, not just the state.
FOUCAULT:
No, no, well, the state's...
CHOMSKY:
...that the state regards as illegal...
FOUCAULT:
...that the state considers as illegal.
CHOMSKY:
Yeah.
FOUCAULT:
Are you committing this act in virtue of an ideal justice, or because the class struggle makes it useful and necessary ? Do you refer to ideal justice, that's my problem.
CHOMSKY:
Again, very often when I do something which the state regards as illegal, I regard it as legal : that is, I regard the state as criminal. But in some instances that's not true. Let me be quite concrete about it and move from the area of class war to imperialist war, where the situation is somewhat clearer and easier.
Take international law, a very weak instrument as we know, but nevertheless one that incorporates some very interesting principles. Well, international law is, in many respects, the instrument of the powerful : it is a creation of states and their representatives. In developing the presently existing body of international law, there was no participation by mass movements of peasants.
The structure of international law reflects that fact; that is, international law permits much too wide a range of forceful intervention in support of existing power structures that define themselves as states against the interests of masses of people who happen to be organised in opposition to states.
Now that's a fundamental defect of international law and I think one is justified in opposing that aspect of international law as having no validity, as having no more validity than the divine right of kings. It's simply an instrument of the powerful to retain their power.
But, in fact, international law is not solely of that kind. And in fact there are interesting elements of international law, for example, embedded in the Nuremberg principles and the United Nations Charter, which permit, in fact, I believe, require the citizen to act against his own state in ways which the state will falsely regard as criminal. Nevertheless, he's acting legally, because international law also happens to prohibit the threat or use of force in international affairs, except under some very narrow circumstances, of which, for example, the war in Vietnam is not one. This means that in the particular case of the Vietnam War, which interests me most, the American state is acting in a criminal capacity. And the people have the right to stop criminals from committing murder. Just because the criminal happens to call your action illegal when you try to stop him, it doesn't mean it is illegal.
A perfectly clear case of that is the present case of the Pentagon Papers in the United States, which, I suppose, you know about.
Reduced to its essentials and forgetting legalisms, what is happening is that the state is trying to prosecute people for exposing its crimes. That's what it amounts to.
Now, obviously that's absurd, and one must pay no attention whatsoever to that distortion of any reasonable judicial process. Furthermore, I think that the existing system of law even explains why it is absurd. But if it didn't, we would then have to oppose that system of law.
FOUCAULT:
So it is in the name of a purer justice that you criticise the functioning of justice ?
There is an important question for us here. It is true that in all social struggles, there is a question of "justice". To put it more precisely, the fight against class justice, against its injustice, is always part of the social struggle : to dismiss the judges, to change the tribunals, to amnesty the condemned, to open the prisons, has always been part of social transformations as soon as they become slightly violent. At the present time in France the function of justice and the police is the target of many attacks from those whom we call the "gauchistes". But if justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is as an instrument of power; it is not in the hope that finally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded according to their merits, or punished according to their faults. Rather than thinking of the social struggle in terms of "justice", one has to emphasise justice in terms of the social struggle.
more at http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm