I’m hoping to generate some good discussion with this video so please feel free to comment below 
tankie Noam at it again
The people I know who have read a lot of Chomsky are pretty pro-Ukraine/NATO.
It’s strange how he’s got a good take on it even though people who like him ignore him. If he was playing to an audience he wouldn’t say that, so for all the criticism you can’t say he’s not genuine
ironically, his readers would say the same thing every time they trotted Noam out to say “vote for the democrats” to the other anarchists they hung out with
Chomsky is like AOC to me, I do not have the energy to keep up with the good/bad seesaw shit that happens whenever a new take drops.
Maybe I’ll care when he drops the next election take since he might conceivably have influence there, but I dont have the energy to care that hes a latecomer to the NATO bad party.
latecomer to the NATO bad party.
to be fair to him he really has always shit on NATO, it’s just that he’s a complete freak about China and especially the USSR, and has said that he hasn’t even tried to understand dialectical materialism, he looked at it once and gave up, which is probably why he has so many other bad takes (not so much the not understanding, I’m still learning about it but him refusing to keep trying to learn about it is probably explains most of his dogshit takes.)
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You’re focusing on the materialism part, not the dialectical part, which is the issue. Chomsky comes from a massively different philosophical paradigm, analytic philosophy, so dialectical materialism is incommensurable with pretty much all of his training and his work. The words it uses are the same, to a certain extent, with the words he uses, but their meanings and the web connecting them to other words is totally alien. Efforts to bridge that gap and make it intelligible to non-dialecticians have been attempted, but they only succeeded in making all the diaMat folks very angry.
In much the same way that when I read Mao’s On Contradiction, or Engel’s Dialectics of Nature, it all comes off as total nonsense, because from the western scientific perspective (which is just one perspective), it is.
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I mean it doesn’t really require any digging into analytic philosophies. Chomsky and Marx speak two different philosophical languages, and Chomsky doesn’t care enough to learn an entirely new language to render a judgement on Marx, so he just dismisses it as gibberish, which to him, it is.
To answer your original question, basically it’s analogous to Einstein not understanding cantonese despite being one smart cookie.
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You won’t catch me dead defending Western STEM peep’s tolerance of methodological pluralism, but in my experience, they’re only exceptional in the degree, not quality of their intellectual chauvinism.
Red Menace has a couple of good episodes for “On Contradiction.”
yeah it’s hard to believe, it seems out of character, but I saw it few months ago (maybe even a year ago?), he wasn’t saying he disagrees with it, he was flat out saying he couldn’t make any sense of it and there’s nothing to disagree with like there’s nothing to disagree with because it doesn’t even make sense. I’m not even sure when the interview was filmed other than he’s pretty old looking so like the last 10-15 years, I’ll try to find and link it to you later.
I think it’s from an interview he gave, but the piece I’ve seen is from his book Understanding Power, page 228. Here’s the quote:
Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually-I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels? And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about “dialectics”-I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know.
I’m no fan of Chomsky, but even still, that whole section is kinda wild. He says Marxism is basically just theology and “an irrational cult”, and then takes deep issue with the name “marxism” because we should just absorb the good ideas thinkers and scientists have and move forward from them? I don’t know, it comes off to me as an incredibly juvenile and unserious critique. Noam is obviously smart, but he just obviously doesn’t give a shit about even trying to understand marxism. Obviously he’s not one, but it comes off as intellectually lazy.
ah thanks for finding that, I’ve been looking for the interview and couldn’t find this one I was looking for, I guess I misremembered how old he was in the interview if that’s the one I saw? Or maybe he just repeated similar phrasing in an interview in the last few years…
https://hexbear.net/comment/3738042
Can’t find the video interview I watched but this is at least pretty close to what I remember watching him say
Zizek as well. They’re in a weird superimposition of supporting and denouncing NATO at the same time.
Their defenders will say there is nuance but how many drops of nuance can you really squeeze out of western imperialism?I hate Zizak so much.
I think the content of what he actually says is more important here.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day
Itt: all the people shitting on a 94 y/o professor do a heel-turn now that they agree w/ him
His criticisms of US foreign policy have always been without peer
Are you sure?
I love Papa Parenti as much as the next comrade and he puts on a hell of a show, but is very simply not on Noam’s level. Noam always came strapped with a fortress of citations that even in his 90s he can still seemingly recite from memory. He really is on another level.
Nahhhhh
“People agree with others when they agree with them, and disagree with others when they disagree with them”
Reddit-tier observation
You still have to answer for your weird connections to Epstein, Noam, but yes, yes, broken clocks.
shouldn’t be a surprising take from grandpa tbh
I think people here need to recognise that while Noam has done a bunch of bad shit, he is currently quite good and useful to the left. Given that he’s working with Vijay Prashad so much.
This shit is a useful gateway for liberals into realising that leftist points are worth hearing. Amplifying it is good.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Chomsky came from a Ukrainian Jewish family. So seeing the proliferation of Nazis in Ukraine probably struck something in him on a personal level.
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He’s not an op. He’s just within acceptable left of discourse in the West, so his voice is elevated while those who actually support AES are minimized.
Gabriel Rockhill calls this group of academics the “radical recuperators” whose function in the west is to divert those amenable to arguments for an alternative to capitalism (“the compatible left”) away from voices that validate truly effective methods to counter capital. I’d recommend you check him out.
Gabriel Rockhill calls this group of academics the “radical recuperators” whose function in the west is to divert those amenable to arguments for an alternative to capitalism (“the compatible left”) away from voices that validate truly effective methods to counter capital. I’d recommend you check him out.
Isn’t that like, ridiculously teleological? That’s not how he see’s that function and it’s not a function that anyone has given him if he isn’t an op.
I’m not sure I understand the problem, many people in the imperial core fulfil a useful function for power without realizing it, and without specifically being given orders to do so.
I don’t know, function to me implies some sort of purpose assigned by some sort of entity with agency. His effect may be useful for those in power, but he hasn’t been assigned this role by anyone specifically.
He performs the function just by the law of large numbers stating someone, somewhere, is gonna have the views and motivations that are convenient for hegemony. Hegemonic institutions can do their part to get that person a platform larger than the anti-hegemonic position’s, so he performs his function without ever being handled directly (except by
? I think we’ll never really know, but I doubt Epstein was giving him any direct instructions).Yeah but there’s no ‘hegemon’ as such; this model is all evolutionary and stochastic, where the hegemony is distributed and emergent, so while I think it’s okay of the context of the model to say he has some ‘effect’ that reinforces certain power structures, it’s not correct to say he has that ‘function’.
Sort of like saying the ‘function’ of mushrooms is to decompose organic matter. That’s what they do, but no one put them there to do that.
Huh, well I’ve definitely heard lots of sentences like that, so I guess we’ve just read different texts. Not much reason to argue semantics here.
His effect may be useful for those in power, but he hasn’t been assigned this role by anyone specifically
That’s my explicit point, that’s what I meant when I said he’s not an op.
Right, I might just be quibbling over words but ‘function’ implies purpose and design which are absent in this case.
I really think you’re wrong, it can just mean “role” or “effect”. Like wind’s function in a turbine is to spin the blades, the function of the Bernoulli Principle in stream dynamics is to cause meandering, or the function of a cat’s whisker is to detect objects in the dark.
Came from Ukrainian Jewish family. It’s personal yo.
cool. too bad he’s spent most of his career driving home the message that there is no/can be no alternative to US hegemony
Yeeaaah, can’t really credit anything this jackass says anymore after that whole Epstein affair
NATO is imperialist, and this is not made false just because Chomsky said it
I agree comrade Chomsky
What will he say about his ties to
?Still “none of our business?”
