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with Noam Chomsky
LeighaCohen on Nov 20, 2013
Noam Chomsky spoke at MIT Wong Auditorium on November 18, 2013. The event was sponsored by the Boston Review. This event was based on the topic of Noam Chomsky’s new volume, On Anarchism.
Noam Chomsky, world-renowned public intellectual and MIT Professor emeritus discussed the reasoning behind his fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. Chomsky’s anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. It is a living, evolving tradition, situated in a historical lineage, which emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
His scathing analysis of everything that’s wrong with our society reaches more and more people every day. His brilliant critiques of – among other things – capitalism, imperialism, domestic repression, and government propaganda, have become mini-publishing industries unto themselves.
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Q&A
After Noam Chomsky’s lecture, What is Anarchism? Mr. Chomsky answers 4 extremely revealing questions in the following order:
What is the history of trying to set up collective non-hierarchical business models?
How did Mr. Chomsky early life experiences impact his current beliefs?
How is surveillance technology and militarization of police impacting radical thought today and in the future?
Was Slavery and the Civil War a natural extension of the US Revolutionary War and is the politics associated with Slavery still going on today?
Many of Mr. Chomsky answers also cover sub-topics and tangents which makes this Q&A fascinating and something very worthwhile watching independently or as a follow up to his main lecture.
see
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That’s a great talk, alerting our numbed sensibilities to many critical nuances. Worth listening to more than once.
My own personal bugbear is the occasionally platitudinous sense in which the term “the people” is so often bandied about with insufficient critical reflection.
The quandary for me is its advised literal significance ~ as to whether it is supposed to refer to “us” or “them” for example; this is not often adequately addressed. The real nature of such received “empirical” notions of human relationship, may be quite other than what they are interpreted as inferring. The colloquially euphemistic acceptance of socially-reinforced habitual reflexes, may actually encode a multitude of faceless assumptions, both conscious or unwitting.
Living in the UK (even!) it is sometimes quite hard to distinguish between our present socio-dynamics and those seventeenth century realities Professor Noam brings into such vivid focus.
As for slavery, many of our vaunted freedoms are little more than anodyne delusions. It is as though you can dance all you like, providing your feet are thoroughly bound & shackled, so as to never risk scuffing the patent-sheen perfection of the well-shod hoodlums, whose principle obsessive compulsion (other than gratuitous psychotic aggression) is dynastic perpetuity.