The first one basically says that Chomsky is a minarchist. He starts with basic definitions of an-archy meaning “not” an “archy” which means state. That Chomsky has redefined anarchy to suit a liberal white middle class reader (hey that was me!) to just mean “less government” or “less hierarchy” which is functionally libertarianism which exaggerated would be minarchy. He makes a good point that there’s almost no difference between that view and classical liberalism. He quotes some 1800s anarchist book that inspired Chomsky and chews into it.
Ziq seems to be primarily a prominent poster on raddle.me. I don’t want to say he’s not a significant anarchist thinker, but it makes me wonder if some of the posts the decade+ I’ve been posting about anarchism on internet forums maybe belong in the Anarchist Library also.
I’m not super familiar with his work, but he comes off as coming from the anti-civ branch of anarchism. It’s very popular in this branch to represent themselves as the only true exemplars of anarchism, so a forum personality denying Chomsky his due is pretty on message. Franklin López of The Stimulator fame came up from this trend, but it also includes Deep Green Resistance and Derek Jensen; there’s some troubling concordances with eco-fascism, ‘bio-truth’, and trans-exclusionary philosophies.
Unlike the C4SS article this looks like something worth analyzing, as they seem to have done some research. I don’t have time now, but might come back to it later, especially if there’s interest.
I do find the use of ‘minarchist’ here unusual also. Contrary to the C4SS article, minarchist is a bad thing in context. Ziq does seem to be using minarchist to mean a kind of authoritarian or capitalist, but it’s strange language to use. It seems like a rhetorical trick in that calling Chomsky this very specific, underutilized word that usually means capitalist sounds less ridiculous on the face of it than saying plainly that Chomsky is an authoritarian or capitalist, actually.
Left-libertarian minarchists justify the state as a temporary measure on the grounds that social safety net benefits the working class. Some anarchists, such as Noam Chomsky, are in agreement with social democrats on the welfare state and welfare measures, but prefer using non-state authority.[14] Left-libertarians such as Peter Hain are decentralists who do not advocate abolishing the state,[4] but do wish to limit and devolve state power,[5] stipulating that any measures favoring the wealthy be prioritized for repeal before those which benefit the poor.[15]
Some minarchists argue that a state is inevitable because anarchy is futile.[16] Robert Nozick, who publicized the idea of a minimal state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), argued that a night-watchman state provides a framework that allows for any political system that respects fundamental individual rights and therefore morally justifies the existence of a state.[6][17]
Though you have to go looking for the left minarchist position, the right minarchist is most prominant at the top.
I’m impressed by the research you’re doing. I think this is a fruitful exchange for both of us.
I’m not familiar with Peter Hain, he seems to be a Labour Party MP with a history with Democratic Socialism, like an Irish Bernie Sanders. I wonder what he would think of the Wikipedia author labeling him a minarchist. I’m a little more familiar with Nozick, but I’ve never seen the term minarchist in his writing.
Language is fluid and labels are for conveying ideas. I don’t think left-minarchism is a concept that deserves much currency. Regardless of labels, you could do worse than pick Hain or Nozick as role models. But unlike Chomsky, I don’t think they’re anarchist, and worse, their methods are likely to be counter-productive to their benevolent goals. I’ll explain this wrt to Hain here. The Night-Watchmen state as a ‘leftist’ construction deserves its own thread.
Hain has squarely placed himself in the ‘reform from within’ camp. I’m basing this on the Wikipedia summary and one of his articles for the Chartist so I may be speaking out of ignorance here. His characterization of anarchists (not bolsheviks) on the edge of the revolutionary axis, while refreshing, is troubling. Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system. From the political spectrum statement, it seems Hain views his goals as similar to anarchists, while rejecting the methods that have historically achieved those goals. Meanwhile he has placed himself in a position that is leveraged to take credit for those goals if they are ever achieved. It has the stink of opportunistic cynicism.
While I don’t mean to imply from the previous paragraph that MLK Jr. was an anarchist, he was a socialist. Most importantly, he was the kind of socialist that anarchists can (and did) work with for the mutual achievement of their goals.
On the other hand, politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.
Anarchists don’t want small government; our typical goals could paradoxically described as simultaneously wanting both no government and the largest government possible. We want something that is so different from modern governance that it can no longer be called government: the liberation of everyone to participate in directing society.
The first one basically says that Chomsky is a minarchist. He starts with basic definitions of an-archy meaning “not” an “archy” which means state. That Chomsky has redefined anarchy to suit a liberal white middle class reader (hey that was me!) to just mean “less government” or “less hierarchy” which is functionally libertarianism which exaggerated would be minarchy. He makes a good point that there’s almost no difference between that view and classical liberalism. He quotes some 1800s anarchist book that inspired Chomsky and chews into it.
Ziq seems to be primarily a prominent poster on raddle.me. I don’t want to say he’s not a significant anarchist thinker, but it makes me wonder if some of the posts the decade+ I’ve been posting about anarchism on internet forums maybe belong in the Anarchist Library also.
I’m not super familiar with his work, but he comes off as coming from the anti-civ branch of anarchism. It’s very popular in this branch to represent themselves as the only true exemplars of anarchism, so a forum personality denying Chomsky his due is pretty on message. Franklin López of The Stimulator fame came up from this trend, but it also includes Deep Green Resistance and Derek Jensen; there’s some troubling concordances with eco-fascism, ‘bio-truth’, and trans-exclusionary philosophies.
Unlike the C4SS article this looks like something worth analyzing, as they seem to have done some research. I don’t have time now, but might come back to it later, especially if there’s interest.
I do find the use of ‘minarchist’ here unusual also. Contrary to the C4SS article, minarchist is a bad thing in context. Ziq does seem to be using minarchist to mean a kind of authoritarian or capitalist, but it’s strange language to use. It seems like a rhetorical trick in that calling Chomsky this very specific, underutilized word that usually means capitalist sounds less ridiculous on the face of it than saying plainly that Chomsky is an authoritarian or capitalist, actually.
Lol now I think I pissed off the Raddle community by participating on their anti-tech anti-civ threads
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-watchman_state
Under Philosophy it says:
Though you have to go looking for the left minarchist position, the right minarchist is most prominant at the top.
I’m impressed by the research you’re doing. I think this is a fruitful exchange for both of us.
I’m not familiar with Peter Hain, he seems to be a Labour Party MP with a history with Democratic Socialism, like an Irish Bernie Sanders. I wonder what he would think of the Wikipedia author labeling him a minarchist. I’m a little more familiar with Nozick, but I’ve never seen the term minarchist in his writing.
Language is fluid and labels are for conveying ideas. I don’t think left-minarchism is a concept that deserves much currency. Regardless of labels, you could do worse than pick Hain or Nozick as role models. But unlike Chomsky, I don’t think they’re anarchist, and worse, their methods are likely to be counter-productive to their benevolent goals. I’ll explain this wrt to Hain here. The Night-Watchmen state as a ‘leftist’ construction deserves its own thread.
Hain has squarely placed himself in the ‘reform from within’ camp. I’m basing this on the Wikipedia summary and one of his articles for the Chartist so I may be speaking out of ignorance here. His characterization of anarchists (not bolsheviks) on the edge of the revolutionary axis, while refreshing, is troubling. Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system. From the political spectrum statement, it seems Hain views his goals as similar to anarchists, while rejecting the methods that have historically achieved those goals. Meanwhile he has placed himself in a position that is leveraged to take credit for those goals if they are ever achieved. It has the stink of opportunistic cynicism.
While I don’t mean to imply from the previous paragraph that MLK Jr. was an anarchist, he was a socialist. Most importantly, he was the kind of socialist that anarchists can (and did) work with for the mutual achievement of their goals.
On the other hand, politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.
Anarchists don’t want small government; our typical goals could paradoxically described as simultaneously wanting both no government and the largest government possible. We want something that is so different from modern governance that it can no longer be called government: the liberation of everyone to participate in directing society.