Wick Welker's Reviews > Chomsky On Anarchism

Anarchism is pure and decentralized democracy.

This brief and meandering read is not a bad intro in the philosophy of anarchism. To be clear, Chomsky explains that anarchism is not chaos but is in fact the truest form of socialistic democracy where all power is decentralized and any power structure must continually justify its existence or be dismantled. Indeed, anarchism is actually libertarianism. The Ayn Rand/neoliberal brand of libertarianism is a capitalist distortion where power is indeed decentralized away from government authority and funneled to corporate plutocrats. Americans often conflate these two disparate forms of libertarianism.

Capitalism, in practice, is actually extremely authoritarian because it inevitably involves collusion with government power and militarization. Free markets are not real but a neoliberal fantasy sold to the public to support a failing power structure and target political enemies. The right seeks to subvert the federal government, atomize all power into the states where it can capture control and privatize everything. Adam Smith was actually quite liberal, as Chomsky points out is often ignored, and Smith would have abhorred the rent seeking of labor and the enslavement of humanity. When a person has the choice between renting their labor or starving, that is not choice and that is not freedom.

Socialism, just like neoliberalism, can be awful if it's under the tight fist of state control, like communism. Communism is state-capitalism and a socialized economy where technocrats are pulling the levers. This also does not work. And so anarchism seeks to dismantle any of this tyrannical power structures and spread the power out over the labor class. I suppose I could sum up anarchism with a single scenario: a person goes to their job and uses their labor in an industry in which they, and everyone of their co-employees, have partial ownership.

I still don't really know what anarchism is supposed to look like in reality and I don't think Chomsky does either. He mentions that it is a theory and must be socially tested like any other scientific theory before it can be refined. As I finished this book, I became even more convinced that wholesale belief in any one philosophy, be it anarchism or "free" markets, is fundamentally flawed. To be an ideologue is to tear down the current structure and start fresh . This seems terribly counterproductive, destructive and with no guarantee that something good would come out of the ashes. Can't we just lift ourselves up from our current situation? Let's work with what we have and where we're at.