> On May 1, 2011, at 8:56 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Cf. his lecture from 40 years ago, "Government in the Future" (Seven Stories Press 2005):
>>
>> "I think that the libertarian socialist concepts - and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through anarchism - are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society."
> Classical liberalism? Really? You like this, Carl? This only confirms my worst suspicions about anarchists - they're individualists of a fundamentally conventional sort.
This seems like an unhistorical way of looking at things. The claim is that socialism is to advanced industrial society what classical liberalism was to pre-industrial (or proto-industrial) society: i.e. an emancipatory project. What is the counter-argument? That you could have had socialism in a rural society emerging from feudalism? Or that the bourgeoisie contributed nothing in its day?
I agree that many strands of anarchism are scurrilously individualistic, but I don't think Chomsky's really suffers from that flaw, or at least not that much.
SA