Something I have observed from reading a lot of libertarian philosophy is that the 'right-wing' expressions of libertarianism are generally very clear and systematic. — Virgo Avalytikh

I would agree that they are very clear and systematic, but I think they are also simplistic in their analyses of how things really work; and they tend to start from the assumption that selfishness or individualism is true and good, something I strongly disagree with.

Chomsky has written and said a great deal that is political. He is critical of a great many people and institutions; particularly, governments and capitalism. — Virgo Avalytikh

In my opinion, Chomsky might as well work for the GRU. His criticisms do a lot to undermine Western institutions, which are a mix of good and bad, not just evil as he seems to imply.

No book of his directly tackling what you're after that I know of. But there is this collection of his writings that aims to do so:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12618.On_Anarchism

This may also help (transcript in the description).

Chomsky's contributions are immense. If he had wished to lay out a political program, reflecting his political philosophy, he would have. I have found his refusal frustrating, but we can't hold it against him. He has done his part -- describing and criticizing the existing political world.

It is someone else's part--my part, your part, anyone's part--to decide what kind of political action to take.

Read Chomsky, listen to his speeches. But what, Virgo Avalytikh, do you want to do?

I don't know, it seems a little cheap to me. Critiquing the status quo - even voluminously or insightfully - is a relatively trivial undertaking. Justifying the principles by which one does so in the battle of ideas, where one has so many competitors, is more ambitious. Until he does so, he is leaving the substance of his philosophical system open to the reconstruction of an interpreter, and Chomsky's inner consistency, and even his first principles, are still very much in question. Simply, it is just not at all clear that Chomsky is right.

Take his critique of modern right-libertariansm. He asserts confidently that it is really no such thing; not really 'libertarian' at all, because it actually endorses coercive institutions. Now, a claim like this is far easier to assert than to justify. Even if it is true, it is not obviously true, and even if it is obvious to some, it is not obvious to me. As with his hero Rocker before him, these things are simply stipulated. Hearing him critique Nozock's 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia', a work of extraordinary breadth and ambition (even if misguided in places), makes me want to see if Chomsky can respond in kind, which he has not done.

You think keeping up a sharp critique of the status quo, analyzing the way thinking is warped and/or controlled by major institutions (government, press, corporations, etc.) and doing this for decades on end is trivial? Cheap? And what have you done that entitles you to be so demanding?

Chomsky isn't God, of course. But I think you might cut him some slack if he doesn't happen to meet your criticism needs at some particular moment.

Chomsky isn't God, of course. But I think you might cut him some slack if he doesn't happen to meet your criticism needs at some particular moment. — Bitter Crank

I found that what I’ve read from Chomsky is pretty disturbing and scary stuff. I think his criticisms should be leveled at the individuals who led and continue to lead these institutions more so than the institutions themselves. My opinion.

Very true. If you are criticizing the New York Times, it makes sense to criticize not only authors, but editors and owners. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. (publisher) is fair game. Institutions, of course, do not have "agency". What they have are human actors with agency who do things under the umbrella of the institution.

I haven't heard Chomsky speak recently, but as I recollect, he didn't shy away from targeting specific human actors. The thing is, though, the NYT has many writers, reporters, editors, and managers. Criticizing "The New York Times" is easier than naming every person who wrote something that adds up to the NYT presentation of Iraq, Vietnam, Trump, Obama, et al.

Critiquing the status quo - even voluminously or insightfully - is a relatively trivial undertaking. — Virgo Avalytikh

If the critique is good, then it is very useful. If it is not, then it is not.

It seems to me you are ruling out the value of critique in the absence of a clearly outlined alternative. A bit like when people say you can't complain unless you have a solution.

I think this is not a good position. First, some people might be better at seeing problems. They have one skill but not the other. I see no reason for them to suppress this skill. We have often have different roles in organizations. Red teams can be very valuable, for example. Decomposers in nature.

Second, there can also be a set of steps to any process of change. Let's say you think something is wrong in society. First you may have to convince a significant portion of society that that something is problematic. Once you have a significant agreement on this, solutions are more easily found and accepted. Now you have many minds in many portions of society ready to look and change and consider.

They will not look at alternative and potential solutions in the same way before there is a significant group in agreement that change would be good, if there was a viable alternative.

It's cart before the horse to debate solutions when in fact most people don't think there is a problem or assume that this must be the best option because they are not seeing the problems.

If one wants to say his critique has no merit or little or no merit, then a set of arguments demonstrating this are appropriate. But it seems to me that the OP implicity asserts that regardless of whether his critique is valid or not, it is wrong to present critique unless one has an alternative. I think that is a bad restriction on all of us.

You can find a summary of Noam Chomsky's political views, in his Wikipedia page, along with attribution to his original publications (in the footnotes). For the sake of the argument, I will just assume that the page is neutral and objective in its description of his political philosophy. You can also find examples of criticism on his Wikipedia page, external to Wikipedia. These critics do fret about details that they do not agree with, but they seem to find his page on the whole rather satisfactory.

and they tend to start from the assumption that selfishness or individualism is true and good, something I strongly disagree with. — Noah Te Stroete

My own opinion on the matter is that western thinking has some kind of indigestion concerning the issue of self-interest, spectacularly exemplified during that silly bout of 20th-century Soviet Marxism. Other cultures have much better handled, and adjusted to, the scaling problem of the hamlet economy.

In the hamlet economy, people don't engage much in tit-for-tat trade. They rather tend to share. For example, today, you get a chicken from me, and tomorrow I can get a piece of the ox that you will slaughter. Fine, very lofty, but unfortunately it does not scale. If you live in a metropolis of ten million inhabitants, you cannot allow all of them to exercise hamlet-style sharing rights on your assets. No matter how many resources you have, you will undoubtedly still go under in Gambler's Ruin.

A switch to tit-for-tat trade, instead of liberally sharing resources, is not inspired by individualistic selfishness. It is rather a strategy to cope with the scaling problem of the hamlet economy.

The Soviet approach to solving the scaling problem of hamlet-style sharing, which already dramatically fails to scale at relatively small scale, was to implement it at the largest possible scale, i.e. the national scale. It obviously did not work.

If you look at Chomsky's political philosophy:

[Noam Chomsky] envisions an anarcho-syndicalist future with direct worker control of the means of production and government by workers' councils, who would select representatives to meet together at general assemblies.

And concerning Chomsky's "workers' councils":

According to the official historiography of the Soviet Union, the first workers' council (soviet) formed in May 1905 in Ivanovo (north-east of Moscow) during the 1905 Russian Revolution (Ivanovsky Soviet). However, in his memoirs, the Russian Anarchist Volin claims that he witnessed the beginnings of the St Petersburg Soviet in January 1905.

You can see that Chomsky advocates a return to the initial, embryonic stage of Soviet collectivism; of which the later stages can be assumed to be a natural consequence and dramatic sequel of their otherwise modest beginnings.

There is actually no need for grand social experiments. In other cultures, such as for example Islamic one, (tit-for-tat) trade is considered a viable social practice, if it is respectful of not engaging in explicitly forbidden behaviours, and if it is supplemented with a system of mandatory (zakaat) and voluntary charity (sadaqah); with mandatory charity not required to exceed a preset level of assets/income.

In my opinion, human society is effectively capable of scaling into the millions (and even billions) without unduly restricting personal freedom or imposing ill-founding collectivism; which is what Noam Chomsky's political philosophy would lead to. (Well, it historically certainly did.)

Of course, it is not a trivial undertaking if he is right, but whether he is right remains to be seen. It's not unreasonable to hold him to the same standard as many of the political philosophers he critiques, given that he himself has a political philosophy, even if he does not articulate it or seek to justify it in the same systematic way. Maybe it is a matter of starting point. I imagine that, if you are already in Chomsky's camp going in, you will find his critiques impressive, whereas if you are not, you will find them rather empty as I do.



I think you might have misunderstood me. I have not said that you should not critique the status quo unless you have an alternative solution. Chomsky has an alternative: anarcho-syndicalism. What I have said is that levelling a barrage of critiques against the status quo presupposes a political philosophy, but Chomsky has not laid down or argued for that philosophy in a way that aims to convince someone who might disagree with, or simply be ignorant of, his first principles. The result is that, in my view, Chomsky does an awful lot of preaching to the converted. This is unfortunate since, among anarcho-syndicalism's rivals, especially on the right, there are such clear systematic works of political philosophy.

First you seem to complain that he does not have a systematic political proposal based on first principles. Then you say that this problem can be traced back to his mentor but here the complain is no longer the absence of a systematic proposal based on principals. The complain now is that he takes as granted that capitalism and statism are coercive. Of course, one can take that as granted and still be able to propose a political philosophy based on principals. In this case, the principal (or one of them) seems to be non-coercion. Building a proposal upon this is one thing, arguing why capitalism does not satisfy these criteria is another.

No, I think I am making largely the same critique of both, but the problem is more pronounced with Chomsky. The writings of many of Chomsky's syndicalist heroes, like Rocker and Proudhon, have not aged terribly well, and so making uncritical appeal to them, as Chomsky seems to do, is not all that impressive. It would be a worthy use of time and ink, it seems to me, for Chomsky to bring these ideas up to date, and to present them clearly in his own modern treatise, and it is disappointing that he has not done this over the span of his extremely long career.

You may think you do. I do not think you do.

I think you might have misunderstood me. — Virgo Avalytikh

Could be. I reread it and it's seems more ambigous now.

What I have said is that levelling a barrage of critiques against the status quo presupposes a political philosophy — Virgo Avalytikh

It would certainly presuppose values, but not necessarily a fully thought out system. He may have one. I don't know. I guess I would still take the word 'barrage' to imply it wasn't ok to criticise so much if you haven't made clear what your political philosophy is, how your proposed system would work (better, presumably). Like it might be ok if one leveled a smaller number, but if one is going to be systematically or continually critical, then one has this other obligation.

The result is that, in my view, Chomsky does an awful lot of preaching to the converted. — Virgo Avalytikh

I am not sure how putting forward critiques in the absence of a set of principles is more preaching to the converted than not doing this. Those principles will likely be at least as polarized politically and appealing, in his case, to part of the Left and certainly not the right.

For example, Chomsky often points out the way news judgment is inconsistantly applied to the behavior of Allies, the West, The US, Israel, and countries that are communist or Muslim or whatever. This can include or be using the values presented by the West and showing it is not being applied fairly. Here no need to provide an alternative is present. If he adds to this that we should have the following structures as priorities in society - equal distribution of wealth or whatever - that seems just as much preaching to the choir.

If we move into critiques that are aimed at economics and capitalism directly, again it seems to me no more polarizing or preaching to the choir to present critiques without also presenting anarcho-syndicalism. For example someone on the right or in the center might read why Chomsky says and think, damn, I did not realize things were like this, while at the same time not wanting to shift to anarcho-syndicalism. I think critique without the alternate system actually allows more swing room for opponents and fence sitters. They can more easily concede points. I mean this in practical terms, or perhaps better put psychological terms.

I also think there are separate issues, in every instance.

In the life project of a philosopher, well, perhaps it makes sense to also present a system, if one has one fully fleshed out.

On the other hand, if it is something that is new,then on some level their should be humility about how it would actually look. As a society moved towards his version of anarcho-syndicalism there is going to be a lot of intermediate stages which will teach us and supporters problems and challenges and consquences they did not forsee. This might tweak or radically change the actual form of the 'solution' or the solution.

It's not unreasonable to hold him to the same standard as many of the political philosophers he critiques, — Virgo Avalytikh

This was in response to someone else, but I think it is relevent. Of course it is not unreasonable to hold his solutions to the same standard as the solutions or systems he is critical of. But these are in the end separate issues. IOW perhaps much of his criticism is correct but his solution is terrible - I have often though this was true of some of Marx's analyses. Still, his criticism stands on its own. They need not be hinged. If he puts forward a system as better, well, certainly we are all free to criticize that system. In fact I can't imagine that not happening with great vigor, in the future and in the past. But the poverty of his solution does not eradicate the use of his criticism. Unless we truly have the best of all possible systems and this can be known. Then the response to him can be, yes, but your points don't matter nothing could be done about that and no system could be better. Those are the inevitable lesser evils of capitalism.

In my opinion, human society is effectively capable of scaling into the millions (and even billions) without unduly restricting personal freedom or imposing ill-founding collectivism; which is what Noam Chomsky's political philosophy would lead to. (Well, it historically certainly did.) — alcontali

I was thinking that selfishness and individualism cannot be the sole foundation as there is a duality to humanity which includes concern for the community. There is a selfishness and an altruistic drive in most people who aren’t psychopaths or sociopaths.

That’s why I believe in responsible capitalism with aspects of democratic socialism, namely the inclusion of unions, worker inclusion on company boards, and a strong social safety net.

You sound like you'd be fun to debate.

You sound like you'd be fun to debate. — Virgo Avalytikh

If you like to win, then yes. I’m a terrible debater.

Haha, fair enough.

inclusion of unions, worker inclusion on company boards — Noah Te Stroete

In my opinion, the very first question is rather: do corporations even make sense any longer?

We do not need taxi companies any longer, because we have Grab, Lyft, and Uber. We do not need hotels any longer, because we have Airbnb and similar networks. If it weren't for government regulations protecting existing cartels, this principle would now generalize much, much faster.

If you don't know what to do with your time, and you want to make money, then just create the Uber of {X}, and duly disrupt the existing corporate nonsense.

a strong social safety net — Noah Te Stroete

It is obviously time that will tell, but in my opinion, the inevitable bankruptcy of the US social security system will undoubtedly put a stop to that particular social experiment.

I believe that social safety needs to be provided, first and foremost, by the extended family. If that happens to fail, mandatory and voluntary charity will kick in.

If that is still insufficient -- rather unlikely -- only then I could, as a matter of exception, agree to other urgent, emergency measures.

You see, it used to be that people would make sure to have children to have someone to take care of them in their old age. Now they do not need to do that any more, because the government will take care of them. And where does the government get the resources to do that? Answer: from other people's children.

The entire system works like that. Lots of women say that they do not need a man (as a provider). Why? Because the government will provide them with money and free services. And where does the government get the money for that? From the men, of course.

As far as I am concerned, that particular social experiment is just a pile of steaming bullshit. I am 100% convinced that it won't keep flying. The long-term trends for that particular social experiment are all pointing off the cliff and into the abyss. Good riddance!

Well, obviously I disagree, but I don’t want to battle you on social policy.

In my opinion, the very first question is rather: do corporations even make sense any longer?

We do not need taxi companies any longer, because we have Grab, Lyft, and Uber. We do not need hotels any longer, because we have Airbnb and similar networks. — alcontali

What are Grab, Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, et al if not corporations listed on stock exchanges?

The first food chain stores disrupted the locally owned food stores. Sears and Wards disrupted retail trade across the country. The auto disrupted the horse business, and we are still talking about events a century past. What Amazon or Airbnb calls "disruption" or "innovation" is the old capitalist principle of "creative destruction". The "destruction" isn't "creative". The purpose of destruction is to get rid of a competitor in order to create new business. We didn't need CDs; the music companies needed a way of destroying the old vinyl record business so they could sell it all again. CDs have since been "disrupted".

The entire system works like that. Lots of women say that they do not need a man (as a provider). Why? Because the government will provide them with money and free services. And where does the government get the money for that? From the men, of course. — alcontali

Speaking of something steaming, This is unadulterated bullshit.

I am in agreement with you. I just didn’t feel like ripping into someone I like. Besides, I’ve been through this song and dance before. Usually the right-wing libertarians give straw man arguments and oversimplify how the world works. I just get exhausted arguing with them.

Wow. Talk about pulling a Chomsky.

Not really. I’ve outlined my views elsewhere before. I’ve just no interest in doing it again. This just harkens to my thread on identity politics. I suppose I am stubborn in a lot of ways, too. I’m open to new ideas, but the right-wing libertarian philosophy is morally bankrupt.

Where have you outlined your views?

I self-published a now unpublished book, and I wrote a little in the Philosophers’ espousing socialism thread.

Great, can I see the book?

I don’t have a copy anymore. I deleted it in a self-destructive fit.

Well, 'morally bankrupt' is quite a serious charge if you don't have anything with which to back it up. 'I wrote a book but then deleted it' isn't too impressive, you understand.