[lit-ideas] Re: Chomsky
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:36:37 +0000 (GMT)
________________________________
From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
Andy wrote
Chomsky is brilliant, even on Harvest Festival Day. Here's a talk by him from
1989, which puts into perspective socialism and the Soviet Union, and why the
two are mutually exclusive. He mentions Germany as the most advanced
capitalist country of Lenin's time but doesn't mention what Germany became in
the 30's. Given that history doesn't repeat itself but does rhyme, this talk
against the backdrop of the Occupy movement has a certain eerieness to it in my
opinion.
>
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI&feature=relmfu
>>Thanks, but I gave at the office.>
And Larry has just eaten thanks.
On a more serious note, where is going Chomsky going with the
'Leninism-was-corrupt-deviation-from-Marxism' thesis? Even if we accept this
thesis, how does it get round the point that Marxism was always liable to be
corrupted this way, and not simply because opportunists would wear its
clothing: Marxism's philosophical foundations are much too naive about how
power corrupts [Marx treats political power as if it were simply akin to a
force in physics] and about the need for restraints on the use of power; and
its historicism [evident here in the somewhat blind adherence to the idea that
the revolution must start in Germany] is much too blind to the value of the
individual to guard against the gulag and the horrors of 'collectivism'
[including the genocide justified in the name of 'collectivism'] . That's even
before we move onto Marxist economics and its flaws that are so deep that Hayek
(no historicist) predicted in the 1930s that the Soviet economy
would, if run on the lines of Marxist economics, eventually run itself into
the ground - as, we know, this eventually happened and was perhaps the central
reason for the collapse of the Soviet system.
More specifically what would Chomsky make of Popper's The Open Society, a book
that Magee says is such that no rational person could read it and still remain
a Marxist?
Donal
England
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