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Those are my notes on the text. I find it really fun to read to be honest.
I didn't take note in the beginning of the text because I didn't have my computer to write with it.
Let me just say that I don’t really regard myself as an anarchist thinker – Noam Chomsky
The book from chomsky "on anarchism" has 241 pages but only 70 pages are about anarchism, and those 86 pages could be condensed to about 25 pages.
Chomsky also don't want to learn about any recent form of anarchism (queer, egoist, green, primitivist, anti-work, insurrectionary, post-left, etc).
Chomsky is also absolutely uncritical about modern industrial civilization.
Civilization has many aspects, it doesn’t mean anything to be for or against it.
Well, to the extent that civilization is oppression, sure, you’re against it. But then the same is true of any other social structure. You’re also against oppression there.
But how can you give a criticism of civilization as such? I mean, for example, an anarchist community is a civilization. It has culture. It has social relations. It has a lot of forms of organization. In a civilization. In fact, if it’s an anarchist community it would be very highly organized, it would have traditions . . . changed traditions [“changed traditions”? ]. It would have creative activities. In what way isn’t that civilization? ~ Noam Chomsky
Chomsky is ignorant about the reality that human beings lived in anarchist societies for about two million years before the first state arose about 6000 years ago. And this is excluding the other primates.
Some primates now living also have culture if culture encompasses learning, innovation, demonstration and imitation. But Chomsky dismisses that because for him, what is distinctive about humans is language, not culture.
Peasant societies can be quite vicious and murderous and destructive, both in their internal relations and in their relations with one another ~ Noam Chomsky to Columbia anarchists
Chomsky only likes peasant violence when it's controlled by Marxist intellectuals like himself.
Culture and civilization aren't the same. A civilization is a politically administered, urban dominated society with class divisions and subject to the state. It's the state that differentiates civilization from tribal society.
Therefore an anarchist civilization is impossible. An anarchist society or culture is possible though.
In his book Chomsky never cites any anarchist thinker who is more recent than Rudolf Rocker (1938).
Over and over again he repeats the same few quotations from the same few authors: Rudolf Rocker, Michael Bakunin, and Wilhelm von Humboldt (not an anarchist: but a Chomsky favorite because Chomsky fancies that Baron von Humboldt anticipated his own linguistic theory). He mentions Kropotkin once, but only to drop the name. He mentions Proudhon once, but only on the subject of property, not with reference to his anarchism or federalism or mutualism. Chomsky never mentions William Godwin, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Tucker, Errico Malatesta, Lysander Spooner, Emma Goldman, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Elisee Reclus, James L. Walker, Emile Armand, Alex Comfort, Sam Dolgoff, Ricardo Flores Magon, Voltairine de Cleyre, Albert Parsons, Gustav Landauer, Emile Pataud, Peter Arshinov, Paul Goodman, James Guillaume, Albert Meltzer, Dorothy Day, Emile Pouget, George Woodcock, Emma Goldman, Octave Mirbeau, Enrico Arrigoni, Ammon Hennacy, John Henry Mackay, Renzo Novatore, Josiah Warren, Alexander Berkman, Jo Labadie, Voline, Luigi Galleani, Robert Paul Wolff, Alfredo Bonanno, Herbert Read, Gregory Maximoff, Pa Chin, or Francisco Ferrer or any other Spanish anarchist.
Chomsky refers as Max Stirner as an influence on the American belivers in laissez-faire economics. Sirner never played such roles and was openly against free competition, capitalism or the free market. According to stirner "men have no right at all by nature".
Chomsky's linguistic theory have come to serious attacks by other linguists. An entierly different theory "Cognitive Linguistics" is replaceing it.
Chomsky never aknowledged the existence of that theory. Which seems to show not only anarchists get this silent treatment from Chomsky.
Chomsky thinks language is innate and biological like an organ in the brain, he thinks childs don't learn to speak but "activate a system of ideas". He describes language as a "faculty" like vision.
Neurobiologists will find the language organ on the same day that archaeologists find Noah’s Ark.
Chomsky has a weird obsession about trying to find the defining difference between "Humans" and "animals", to him "Language" is what defines this difference and this is the reason why this "innate" property is so important to him. Which is something no psychologist, biologist and outsid eof Catholic Church, any philosopher is accepted.
Anarchy is not a reversion to animality or a triumph on animality. It's taking it to another level, realizing it without suppressing it.
Chomsky strongly believes in the idea of "Human Nature", the "human essence". According to Chomsky this human essence is language.
Natural law, according to John Locke, is what stands between us and – anarchy!: “if you would abolish the law of nature, you overturn at one blow all government among men, [all] authority, rank, and society.”[142] Sounds good to me. Democracy, which Chomsky espouses, after all involves manipulation: “The action of the democratic process itself, in terms of argumentation and persuasion, represents an attempt to manipulate behavior and thought for given ends.”