Noam Chomsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why does the whole left libertarian tradition, at least to me, seem to be so weak today? If I mention Rudolf Rocker to someone, the chance they have heard of him is extremely small. I’m sure you experience the same. Maybe they’ve heard of him because they’ve read your writings, but to have heard of him separately? That hardly ever happens. The New Left of the 1960s mostly has vanished. How and why did that happen? I don’t think it’s true. I think the New Left of the 1960s, which incidentally was a very brief period — it scattered, splintered, but it left a major imprint. What I’ve just described was largely an effect of the New Left of the ’60s. It civilized the society in many ways. Things were just taken for granted in the ’60s. You couldn’t possibly even say no. Well, that’s the effect of the activism of mostly young people, what was called the New Left. It’s not a movement, but it’s all over the place. It’s changed the way we see and think of things, almost everybody. It’s libertarian, socialism, anarchism. Of course, they’re not going to be popular. We have a class-based society, rigid class-based society. The business classes, the ultra-rich are dedicated to class war. They’re basically vulgar Marxists, fight values inverted, constantly fighting a harsh class war. They control the resources, control the institutions, control the economy. So yes, ideas that they don’t like, you don’t hear. Nothing novel about that. Go back to George Orwell. In one of his essays, he wrote about how in England . . . It was set in free England. Unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force just because of the class nature of the society and the subordination of intellectuals to power. Incidentally, his essay was suppressed, just to make it a little more dramatic. Found later in his unpublished essays. If I think of some of the New Left critics of say, the Cold War, the revisionists — you have Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism, Sidney Lens, D.F. Fleming. I’m sure you knew many or all of these people. To me, they sound, if anything, more like the Trumpian right than, say, the Democratic Party. There’s been this odd inversion where foreign policy ideas, fears of a deep state manipulating the system — those have shifted to the Trumpists. What do you make of that? How do you feel?…

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