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1.
The first question here is from
cocoon56. Do you currently see ["]an elephantroom["] ofCognitiveScience,
just like you named one fiftyyearsago, I guess that's a reference to my
critique of radicalBehaviorism, something that needs addressing that gets too
little attention?
2.
Well, one thing that I think
gets toolittleattention in the room ofCognitiveScience isCognitiveScience. Most
of the work that's done just doesn't seem to me to bear onCognitiveScience. I
could pick up a couple of journals here and give examples. CognitiveScience ought to be concerned, should be just a part
ofBiology. It's concerned with theNature,
the growth, the development, maybe ultimately the evolution, of a particular subsystem
of the organism, namely the cognitivesystem, which should be treated like the
immunesystem or the digestivesystem, the visualsystem, and so on. When we study those systems, there are a number of questions we
ask. One question is of course, you know, what they are, Can we characterise them? But that's almost totally
missing inCognitiveScience. I mean, take my own particular area of interest, Language.
A ton of work in what's calledCognitiveScience on what they call Language, but
it's veryrare to see some effort to characterise what it is. Well, if you can't
do that, it doesn't make much difference what else you do. The second kind of
question you have to ask about any organ if you like, some use the term loosely,
subsystem of the body, is how it gets the way it is. So how does it go from some initial state, which is geneticallydetermined, to
whatever state it assumes? And in investigating that topic, there are a
number of different factors that you can take apart for analytic purposes. And
one is the specificgeneticconstitution that's related specifically to this
system. It doesn't mean that everypiece of it is used only for this system, but
just whatever combination of genetically determined properties happens to
determine that you have a mammalian rather than an insect visualsystem, for
example, or a gutbrain, or whatever it may be. That's one. The second is
whatever data are outside that modify the initial state to yield some attained
state. And the third is: how do LawsOfNature enter into the growth and
development of the system? Which of course they do, overwhelmingly. I mean,
nobody, for example, assumes that you have a particular geneticprogram to
determine that cells split into spheres, not cubes, let's say. That's due to,
you know, minimisation ofEnergy, otherLawsOfNature. And the same holds
throughout the course of development. Of course, the same is true for
evolution. Evolution takes place with a specific physical, chemical channel of
options and possibilities, and physicalLaws enter all the time into determining
what goes on. And the third question is that, it's kind of like a whyquestion, Why is the system this way and not some other way? Well,
there again, you go back into, at this point you really are facing, first of
all, just historical accidents like, you know, an asteroid hit theEarth, but
moresignificantly, how do the physical and chemical properties of the universe
enter into determining that certain evolutionary changes take place under
particular circumstances? Well, that's the array of questions that ought
to be asked. It is veryhard to find any focus on these questions, at least in
the areas ofCognitiveScience that I'm particularly interested in, like Language
for example. What you have is extreme efforts, which
are sometimes extremelystrange, to try to show that trivial problems for which
we basicallyknow the answers and have for sixtyyears, can be somehow dealt with
by massive dataanalysis. And so I could give examples, but, and, in
fact, I've written about examples. But I think it's kind of [pointless] off
track. I'd like to seeCognitiveScience focus on the topics that it ought to
be addressing. Now, this is a verybroad brush, so a lot of it does, and there's
verygood work inCognitiveScience, but it's, in my opinion, muchtoo restricted,
and a lot of time and effort is spent, in my view largely wasted, on the
peripheral issues which just don't make any sense which [when] you look at
them, and efforts which just ["]collapse["], and constantly. In fact,
many of them are a kind of a residue of the radicalBehaviorism that the field
sought to overcome as it developed. I could give examples, but it's, a verygeneral,
["]broad brushfeeling["], unfair to a lot of verygood work. But we're
trying to pick out tendencies which I think are [pointless] off track
and missing things.
3.
The second comes from
thesilentnumber. What are some of your criticisms of today'sAnarchistMovement?
How to be as effective as possible is something many anarchists overlook, and
you're perhaps themostprolific voice on this topic, so your thoughts would be veryinfluential.
4.
Well, I don't agree with the
last comment, but my criticisms of today'sAnarchistMovement are a little bit
like the critique ofCognitiveScience. What is today'sAnarchistMovement? I mean,
there's quite a lot of people, in fact, you know, an impressive number of
people, who think of themselves as being committed in some fashion to what they
callAnarchism. But is there anAnarchistMovement?
I mean, can one think of, you know, is there something like, say, during the
day. Twentyyearsago, I happened to be inMadrid. That happened to beMayDay. And
there were huge demonstration, MayDaydemonstration, hundreds of thousands of
people from theCMT, the old anarchistlabourorganisation.
Well, you can have all kinds of criticisms of theAnarchistMovements inSpain and
so on, but at least there was something to point to, there was something
there, there was something to criticise or to support or to try to change or
whatever. But today'sAnarchism in theUnitedStates, as
far as I can see, is extremelyscattered, highlysectarian, so each particular
group is spending a great deal of his time attacking some other tendency, sometimes
doing useful, important things, but it's extremelyhard to. I think what
is, this is not just true of people who think of themselves as anarchists, but
of the entire activistleft. Count noses. There's plenty of people, I mean, more
than there were at any time in the past that I can think of, except for maybe,
you know, tiny, ["]pyoosh["], verybrief moment late[19]60s, or CIO
organizing in the[19]30s, and things like that. But there are people interested
in all sorts of things. You know, you walk down the maincorridor at this
university, you see, you know, desks of students, veryactive, veryengaged, lots
of great issues, but highlyfragmented. There's verylittle coordination. There's a tremendous amount of Sectarianism and intolerance,
mutual intolerance, insistence on, you know, my particular choice as to what
priorities ought to be, and so on. So I think the main criticism of theAnarchistMovement
is that it just ought to get its act together and accept divisions and
controversies. You know, we don't have the answers to. We have, maybe,
guidelines as to what kind of a society we'd like, not specific answers. Nobody
knows that much. And there's certainly plenty of range, of room for quitehealthy
and constructive disagreement on choice of tactics and priorities and options,
but I just see toolittle of that being handled in a comradely, civilised
fashion, with a sense of solidarity and commonpurpose. As to how to be as
effective as possible, yeah, that's exactly the point, what should we address?
You don't have to give a list of severe problems that the world faces. Some of
them are extremelysevere. So, for example, there are really questions of
species'ssurvival literally, at least two, maybe more. One
of them is the existence of nuclearweapons.
Somebody watching fromMars would think it's a miracle that we've survived for
thelastsixtyyears, and it's extremelydangerous
right now, so I can't see how that can fail to be a priority. And the other is a looming environmental crisis. And that
is something that anarchists in particular should be verydedicated to
addressing, because it involves. On the one hand, it does involve questions of
Technology, like, you know, can you get solarpower to work, and so on. And the antiSciencetendency inAnarchism, which does exist, is
completelyselfdefeating on this score. [Accurate] I mean, it is going to
take, it is going to require sophisticatedTechnology and scientificdiscoveries
to create the possibility for humansociety to survive. I mean, unless we
decide, well, it just shouldn't survive, we should get down to, you
know, onehundredthousandhuntergatherers or something. Okay, except for that. If
you're serious about, you know, the billions of people
in the world who, and their children and grandchildren, it's going to require
scientific and technological advances, but it's also going to require radical
social change. I mean, there's been a, particularly in theUnitedStates,
but it's true elsewhere, too, there have been, you know, massiveStatecorporate
socialengineeringprojects. Veryselfconscious. They don't hide what they are
doing, since the SecondWorldWar to try to construct a social system that is
based critically on wasteful exploitation of fossilfuels. You know, that's what
it means to suburbanise, to build highways and destroy railroads, and so on
through the whole gambit of planning that's been undertaken. Well, you know, that
means verysubstantial social changes in order, and anarchists ought to be
thinking about it. You know, thinking about it doesn't just mean I'd like to
have a free and just society, you know, that's not thinking about it. We have
to make a distinction if we want to be effective. That's the question, If we
want to be effective, we have to make a distinction between what you might call
proposals and advocacy. I mean, you can propose that
everybodyoughttoliveinpeace.loveeachother, weshouldn'thaveanyhierarchy.everyoneshouldcooperate,
and so on, okay? It's a nice proposal, okay for an academicseminar somewhere.
Advocacy requires more than just proposal. It means
setting up your goals, proposal, but also sketching out a path from here
to there, that's advocacy. And the path from here to there
almostinvariablyrequires small steps. It requires recognition of social- and
economic-Reality as it exists, and ideas about how to build the institutions of
the future within the existing society, to quoteBakunin, but also to modify the
existing society. That means steps have to be taken that accommodateReality,
that don't deny its existence. Since I don't like it, I'm not going to
accommodate it. These are theonlyways to be effective. You know, you can see
that if you look at, you know, the serious, substantial anarchistjournals.
Like, take, say, Freedom inEngland, which maybe is the oldest or one of the
oldest anarchistjournals, that's been around, you know, forever. If you read
its pages, most of it is concerned with mild reformist tactics. And that's not
a criticism. It should be. It should be concerned with worker'srights, with
specific environmentalissues, with problems of poverty and suffering, withImperialism,
and so on. Yeah, that's what it should be concerned with if you want to
advocate longterm, significant social change towards a more-free and -Just
society, and I can't think of any other way to be effective. Otherwise, the
insistence on purity of proposal simply isolates you from effectiveness in
activism, and even from reaching, from even approaching your own goals, and it
does lead to the kind ofSectarianism and narrowness and lack of solidarity and
common purpose that I think has always been a kind ofPathology of marginal
forces, the left in particular. But it is particularlydangerous here.
5.
Which gets to the next
sentence, fromBerserkRL. It's a long question, but I'll just summarise it. As
far as we favour a Stateless society in the long run, it would be a mistake to
work for the elimination, I've said that it would be a mistake to work for the
elimination of theState in the short run, and we should be trying to strengthen
theState, because it's needed on the check of power of large corporations. Yet
the tendency of a lot of anarchist research, my own, too, is to show that the
power of large corporations derives fromStateprivilege, and Governments tend to
get captured by concentrated privateinterests. That would seem to imply that
the likelybeneficiaries of a morepowerfulState is going to be thesamecorporateelite
we're trying to oppose. So, if business both derives from theState and is so
good at capturing theState, why isn't abolishing theState a better strategy for
defeating businesspower than enhancing theStatepower would be? Well, there's a verysimple
answer to that. It's not a strategy, and since it's not a strategy at all,
there can't be a better strategy. The strategy of eliminating
theState is back on the level of let'shavepeaceandJustice. How do you proceed to eliminate theState, okay? Can you think
of a way of doing it? I mean, if there were a way of doing it in the
existing world, everything would collapse and be destroyed. You just can't do
it. I mean, there is nothing to replace it. If there was a rich, powerful
network of, you know, cooperatives, community organisations, workercontrolled
industry, you know, extending over the whole country, and the whole world, in
fact, yeah, then you can talk about eliminatingStates. But to talk about
eliminating theState in the world as it exists is simply to keep yourself in
some remote academicseminar or small group, you know, saying, Gee, this would
be nice. It's not a strategy, so there can't be a better strategy. We are faced
withRealities. What is described here, and in fact it's true, I've written
plenty about it, too, is that we have a number of systems of power, closely
interlinked. One of them's corporatepower,
businesspower. That's by far themostdangerous of all. That means, effectively,
unaccountable privateTyrannies. A second, prettyclosely linked to them,
is Statepower. And the comment is correct, as
the commentator says, I've written about it, too, a lot, that Statepower tends
to be overwhelminglyinfluenced by concentrated privatepower. Okay, those are
real problems. Now we face strategies. So, for example, say, take, say, Healthcare, okay? Right on thefrontpages. What's the
strategy for dealing with the fact that tens of millions of people can't get,
thebestHealthcare they can get is to be dragged to an emergencyroom when it's
toolate to do anything? I mean, that's a real problem, and that's a huge part
of the population. Second problem is that in a privatised,
unregulatedHealthcaresystem like theUnitedStates. I
shouldn't say like, because it's the only one. In
a privatised, unregulatedHealthcaresystem where the drugcompanies are so powerful
that theGovernment isn't even allowed to negotiate drugprices, in that kind of
system. First of all, Healthcare is strictlyrationed by wealth, verystrictly,
and secondly, it is designed in such a way that the federal budget is going to
be destroyed. You just take a look at the tendency lines. There won't be anything
left for schools, for SocialSecurity, for workersafety, anything. What'll be
left is for the military. That's untouchable. It keeps going up. Another
problem we've got to look at. Obama has thebiggest militarybudget since
theSecondWorldWar. But as long as that is over there, untouchable, another ["]elephant
in the closet["], the radicallyinefficient privatised,
unregulatedHealthcaresystem, is extremelyharmful for people, except for the
wealthy. You know, they do fine. And is also going to destroy everyone else. So
what do we do about it? Well, it's not a strategy to say, Okay, let's abolish
theState. That doesn't do anything about it, and in fact it's just a gift to
the corporateStatepowersector because it offers nothing. A shorttermanswer is
to do what the large majority of the population has wanted for decades, namely,
to develop a sensible nationalHealthcaresystem of the kind that everyother
industrialcountry has, one variety or another. Well, it happens to be a large
majority opinion, so you don't have to break down many walls to organise
people about it. It has been for decades. It's stronglyopposed by the
corporateStatenexus, but that's not unbreakable. You know, bigger victories
have been won. We could go into details, you know, like what you do about the
fact that the democrats have sold out for obvious reasons on even minor
palliatives like a public option and so on. What do you do about the fact, a veryconcrete
fact. There was just an election inMA which surprised everyone totally,
almostcompletelymisrepresented, but I won't go into that. But one of the
striking things about the election was that the unionmembers, Obama's natural
constituency, most of them didn't bother voting because there was tremendous apathy
in the poor, workingclassareas. The election was won by the wealthy suburbs.
But of those who voted, most of them voted forScottBrown, the republican, against the democrats, shooting themselves in the
foot incidentally, bcause one of the first things that happened is to knock off
one possibly prounionmember from the NationalLabourRelationsBoard. But they had
reasons, and the reasons are veryclear, just read the labourpress. The reasons
are that Obama made it veryexplicit that he was willing
to compromise or give up on everything except onething, taxing unionmembers for
theirHealthcareplans. So, sure, people are enraged about that. I mean,
why shouldn't they be? It's not an anarchist position. It's
just a simple, elementary, human position. Well, okay, if you're
interested in the longtermproject of the questioner, namely dissolvingState-
and corporate-power, you should be paying attention to that and you should be
organizing workers on that. You shouldn't leave it toRushLimbaugh to organise people with real legitimate grievances, you know, that's
the way toFascism. You should be out there organizing them themselves, on their
concerns. You know, their concerns can be related to, and easily related to,
muchlonger term anarchiststyleprojects, but that's where anarchists should be
working. And the same is true in everyother part of the society. I mean, look,
some of the things that are going on now are kind of surreal, but would offer
real opportunities for anarchist organizing. So let me take another one. The
tendency in theEconomy for thelastthirtyyears byStatecorporateplanning, and
these things don't happen from out of the blue, has been towards financialising theEconomy. And corollary to that is undermining domestic production, okay? The two go
together. So, for example, the share of financial institutions inGDP, you know,
grossdomesticproduct, was maybe threepercent back in1970. Now, it's approaching
onethird. And, concomitantly, productive industry is being dismantled, which is
fine for the owners, you know, great with them if they can produce in, you
know, Mexico or inChina or something, but it's terrible for communities and
workers. At the same time, it's finally being recognised,
even by the corporateélite, which has been fightingbitterly against it for
years, that there's a real environmentalcrisis coming, and they're going to
lose what they own. So they want to do something about it. And so what they're now kind of timidlysaying is, Well, we shouldn't,
not be theonlycountry in the industrial world that doesn't have highspeedrail.
We should have highspeedrail, a minimal but significant move towards dealing
with a severe potential crisis. Well, right at this moment theGovernment and
the corporations are dismantling productiveindustry, say in-Michigan and -Indiana,
by closing GMplants and so on and sending the
production abroad, or, you know, they're doing that. That's one thing
they're doing. The other thing that's happening is that Obama's
transportationsecretary is inEurope, inSpain, using federalstimulusmoney,
namely taxpayermoney, to try to get contracts for spanishfirms to provide
highspeedrail that theUnitedStates needs. Can you think of a better. I mean,
it's hard to think of a moredramatic criticism of theStatecorporate
socioeconomic system. Here are communities and workforces being destroyed,
while we, while their taxmoney goes to purchase inSpain what they could be
producing themselves. Now, if you can't organise about that, you're really in
trouble. You're not a movement at all.
Of course, should the. Take, say, the workers in GaryID, or FlintMI, and so on.
Do they have to just sit and watch this happen? No, they can take over the
workplaces, the factories. They can run them themselves. They can convert them.
It's been done before with much greater conversion during theSecondWorldWar to
wartimeproduction. They don't needStatesupport for that, because that's the
only institution that exists and the only one that people can influence. You
can't influence a privateTyranny. You can influence theGovernment. It's often
been done. It would take some support, but nowhere near as much as
["]bailing["] out GoldmanSachs, and so on. It would take some,
it would take a lot of popular support, but it can be done. I mean, it can even
be done within the framework of conservative economic theory, which is prettystraight
about this. I mean, you read textbooks on corporations that say, well, you
know, it's not graven in stone that they should work only for the benefit of
shareholders, which means a tiny percentage of wealthy shareholders. They can
work in the interests of stakeholders, meaning workforce and community. And
they're not going to decide to do that, but the workforce and the community can
decide it for them. Those are perfectlyfeasible efforts. In fact, it's been
done. You know, there are cases where it's been done. There's cases where it's
even been tried on a verylarge scale. Like, USSteel came close to succeeding,
and could with morecorporate support. Well, you know, these are. I could go on
with this, but these are real organizing strategies which combine shorttermefforts,
which confront real problems that people face in their everyday lives, with
longtermobjectives like creating part of the basis for a society based on free
association and solidarity and popular control and so on, and it's sitting
right there in front of our eyes. Those, in my view, are the things we should
be looking at, not abstract questions like should we try to destroy theState,
for which we have no strategy. My feeling is that's the kind of direction in
which thinking ought to move. It doesn't mean giving up your long-term goals.
In fact, that's the way to realise them. And if there's another way to realise
them, I've never heard of it.
6.
NoamChomsky's question
to-redditcommunity.
7.
I guess the question that comes
to mind that just grows out of these comments is there's a verylarge number of
people who are committedsincerelyandrightly to the kind of longtermobjectives
that anarchists have always tried to uphold. And the question is, Why can't we get together and decide on, and instead of, you
know, instead of condemning one another for not doing things exactly the way we
do, why can't we try to formulate concrete proposals which combine twoproperties.
One, dealing with the real problems that people face in their immediate, daily
lives. If you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to deal
with those, and it's not just for tactical reasons, it's also out of simple
humanity. So, on the one hand, those, while maintaining
as your guidelines the conception of the kind of Just and free society that you
would like to bring into being through these steps. And sometimes the
two are veryclose together as in the case that I mentioned, like takeover of a
productive enterprise by a workforce and communities, which is not, you know,
it's a feasible objective, and one that has great deal of appeal or would have
if it were put forward, as do others, and combines both longtermvision and the
shorttermdealing with real, existing grievances and problems. And there are
quite a few things like that. So the question is, Why
not focus on that rather than on abstract questions, such as what's thebeststrategy
for destroying theState? Answer, Well, no best strategy, because
nobody's proposed any.
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