One of the most profound political discussions I have ever heard (post yours too!)

Decent vid. I need to find the one where an interviewer actually presses him on the specifics of what an anarchist society would look like.

Anyway, this one isn't just my favorite Chomsky video, but my favorite political video ever. One staggering hour of straight logic and facts, as per usual with him. Since it was done in 1970, Chomsky's young and his delivery is fast and crisp.

He breaks down four systems of government (1. classical liberalism, 2. libertarian socialism, 3. state capitalism, 4. state socialism) and his opinions of each, as well as his reasons why he thinks #2 is the best and most appropriate.

Just an avalanche of historical, philosophical, and political goodness.



(I especially love his breakdown of classical liberalism (starting at 1:45) and the how/why modern right-wingers claiming this philosophy is laughably off-mark)
 
Trotsky said:
Should you care what I find to be informative, thought-provoking, or profound? Well, depending on your opinion of me and of other people's perspectives generally, the answer probably ranges between "lol" and "fuck no."

However, this discussion came up on my YouTube suggestions yesterday and, though I had seen in a few years ago, I was taken aback at how incredibly informative and, yes, profound that it was to me now - especially in a somewhat politically and economically regressive period in which some persons are yearning for a return to the past. This was especially surprising to me both because I had seen it before, and wasn't particularly impressed, and because I have been generally dismissive of anarchist organization and theory as being flabby and indistinct.

So, if you have a spare 20 minutes and want to learn something, or even just want some ammunition for future days to call me a quack or an idiot, I highly suggest that you listen to this discussion.




Additionally, what discussions, lectures, or exchanges would you recommend as being particularly informative or enlightening?
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Fuck no.



I kid i kid. You're an ass but you are not dumb. So I might give this a go.
 
Chomsky has a ton of great political debates.

Even his debate with that can William Buckley Jr was damn good. A lot of Vietnam discussion.
 
RubberGuard5 said:
Sure, and his explanation is vague and didn't get me any closer to understanding anarchism. I don't know which hierarchies are deemed unacceptable. Why are they unacceptable? Is there gonna be a state? Who is gonna start and fund businesses that workers are going to own and manage? How is the transition to worker ownership going to function? Are people going to lose their private property? Who is going to enforce this change?

This video just wasn't informative for me.
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I will try to earmark this for later when I am less tired, but, yes, the title of the video is somewhat misleading, as he's only talking paradigmatically about implementation of anarchist doctrine (just like implementation of socialist doctrine, neoliberal doctrine, etc.) and transforming society through anarchism: not creating a revolutionary utopia, which Chomsky very explicitly dismisses as a very daft perspective.

As far as the existence of the state: yes, the state will always exist in some capacity through any political transformation. Anarchism definitionally, somewhat similarly to Marxist communism, predicates the withering of the state. But while communism dictates workers' seizure of the organs of the economy and more or less seeks to starve the preconditions of the state from the top down and redefining the state's power against itself, anarchist organization individually tailors and carves out unnecessary hierarchy and the replication of hierarchy through the apparatus of the state through systematic upward audits. I can't tell how coherent that explanation is right now, so if it's not, I apologize.
 
RubberGuard5 said:
I don't know which hierarchies are deemed unacceptable. Why are they unacceptable? Is there gonna be a state? Who is gonna start and fund businesses that workers are going to own and manage? How is the transition to worker ownership going to function? Are people going to lose their private property? Who is going to enforce this change?
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I think a large part of chomsky’s point here is that these are questions that an anarchistic society has to keep in mind with regularity. There is not a perfect answer for any of those questions but through constant re-evaluation we find answers that better fit our societies.

We used to be ruled by kings. A new point seems to have been reached (temporarily?) where democracy seems to be an obvious answer that most of us agree on. There was a tIme when that would have seemed as ludicrous to people as anarchy does to you today. What is most crucial to Chomsky’s point is that just because it has been done a certain way in the past doesn’t mean that’s the only way it can ever be done.

Anarchy to him seems less an answer and more a blueprint to finding answers.

Thanks for posting this trotsky
 
Peter Joseph is always illuminating if you are willing to step outside the dominant cultural and economic paradigm, I enjoyed this conversation with Christopher Ryan quite a bit the other day.

 
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Profound, huh?
I'm just going to leave this here...





 
Trotsky said:
Holy shit, is this real? At first I thought it was a edited parody, but.....it's real?
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Those were exactly my first thoughts and I asked the same thing. Yes, it is real. It's from a libertarian convention.
 
tonni said:
Those were exactly my first thoughts and I asked the same thing. Yes, it is real. It's from a libertarian convention.
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After that post I went up and looked at the actual videos.

Good fucking grief. Right libertarians delude themselves into thinking they are economic savant uber-capitalists but don't understand economic logic AT ALL. The constant tragedy of the commons fallacies re private voluntary funding of welfare/social security/military was just embarrassing.
 
Trotsky said:
After that post I went up and looked at the actual videos.

Good fucking grief. Right libertarians delude themselves into thinking they are economic savant uber-capitalists but don't understand economic logic AT ALL. The constant tragedy of the commons fallacies re private voluntary funding of welfare/social security/military was just embarrassing.
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The video of the convention was hilarious.

I don't think the cringe compilation captures all of the goodies, but when that woman proposed a Dobby from Harry Potter mascotte I thought she was making fun of this guy.
height.182.no_border.width.320.jpg
 
PHATV said:
Profound, huh?
I'm just going to leave this here...





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I don't dislike Friedman, but in the first video he victory laps over a demonstrably false premise: that the innovations and successes of Western capitalist countries were due to unregulated competition and unregulated trade. That is just factually incorrect: state intervention, protectionism, and research investment by the state later, passed down in the form of IP to the private sector, is what launched the United States and modern Germany in addition to artificial suppression of wages by the rule of law in the form of slave labor and labor busting, and the expropriation of foreign capital. There is really no basis in saying that the American economic empire was grounded in organic or libertarian market development.

The rest of it is just ideological crap, if I'm being honest, that you could get from any viral Facebook video on the virtues of capitalism against the straw man of socialism, such as an anecdote about a fictional college professor giving all his students C's, etc.
 
This is a good one between 2 nobel prizes in literature.

 
tonni said:
The video of the convention was hilarious.

I don't think the cringe compilation captures all of the goodies, but when that woman proposed a Dobby from Harry Potter mascotte I thought she was making fun of this guy.
height.182.no_border.width.320.jpg
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The folks who love liberty start rioting at the end about how offensive to them that naked dude was.

The dude who said "I have read a HUNDRED books on this ideology!" killed me.
 
Trotsky said:
The folks who love liberty start rioting at the end about how offensive to them that naked dude was.

The dude who said "I have read a HUNDRED books on this ideology!" killed me.
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The video has had me in tears. There are libertarian groups in my country too, I hope they will hold a convention.
 
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