[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Wed Sep 28 11:38:19 PDT 2011


On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> Before you lob stinkbombs at someone, don't you think you should familiarize yourself with the target?

I didn't think I was lobbing stinkbombs; I thought I was offering legit criticisms, rationally stated (at least by my standards). I guess I was wrong.


> "The text" at hand concludes thusly:

I've read this three times before reading it again just now, and each time I've been frustrated at how he manages to start to approach what's at stake in these arguments but manages to miss it. Namely, he moves from the racial to the economic, but never combines them; we have race on one hand and capitalism on the other, and though those things frequently intersect, it's an accidental relationship and not actually ("essentially") constitutive of social relations. He sorta kinda approaches treating them as mutually constitutive when he says "the struggle against racial health disparities, for example, has no real chance of success apart from a struggle to eliminate for-profit health care," but then makes clear that questions of class/capitalism take precedence, are more determinative, than race. It's his prerogative to believe that, but I think he's wrong.



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