On May 1, 2011, at 9:14 PM, SA wrote:
> On 5/1/2011 9:02 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> 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.
I'm just reacting to this excerpt, which is rather nonsensical.
I'd just been watching a clip from the Chomsky-Foucault debate from, what, 1971? Chomsky went on about "intrinsic" human nature and notions of justice, which are deeply problematic. Foucault took him to task for having the presumption to know anything about an "intrinsic" human nature, for not noticing that those notions would be deeply contaminated by the society we live in, and how all our ideas of justice are deeply influence by class society. In other words, I pretty much agreed with everything F said.
But C's position on liberalism sort of fits in with that. If individuals weren't "distorted" by society, they'd naturally tend towards truth and justice. Which is a very strange and shallow notion of the individual, isn't it?
I don't see C arguing by analogy here - he said "the extension" of classical liberalism. In other words, remove the "distortions" and we'll blossom into freedom and self-realization. Which fits in perfectly with C's whole political project of fact-checking the bourgeois media. If it weren't for those lies, the truth could run free. Sure.
Doug