Chomsky self-identifies as an ‘libertarian socialist’, which is widely regarded as a synonym for or category of anarchist, I don’t know what authoritative source told you he’s a minarchist. I’ve usually heard ‘minarchism’ used as a synonym for capitalists of the Libertarian Party persuasion. There’s a lot of disagreement about where the ontological borders of anarchism are, and it sound like someone who disagrees with Chomsky is trying to metaphorically push him outside of those borders rather than engage with his ideas.
Okay, in your own words, how would you summarize each of those articles? If you want to discuss them perhaps putting each in their own thread would be convenient.
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 sounds like someone 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 second thread just covers left minarchy. Not much to say about that other than that it considers the idea of cooperating with right-minarchy and right-libertarians on minimizing government which I think is a BAD IDEA. But basically it just says yeah, there is such a thing as left minarchy and it’s basically what left libertarian, dem socs, etc are. Lists some examples even listing the Green Party.
I don’t have a lot of experience reading Logan Marie Glitterbomb, but I’ve read a bunch of Kevin Carson’s C4SS, and their focus seems to be integrating early American anti-government entrepreneurs like Lysander Spooner into the ‘Anarchist canon’ and this article seems no different. Calling Bernie Sanders and AOC ‘minarchist’ seems like intentional language abuse.
The authors’ interpretation of minarchist includes Social Democrats and state socialists. In the context of the article, minarchism is a good thing, and an umbrella term that includes people on both the left and the right. I don’t see Chomsky included here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s included also in the author’s mind, given how broadly she defines the term.
I agree with your summary – both that it’s a plea to work with capitalists that want to slash the welfare functions of the state, and that it’s a bad idea to ally with them.
Given the rhetorical purpose of the article, I don’t think it’s a reputable source for defining ‘left minarchism’ if such a thing existed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re on the same page on this.
Have you also experienced though the general impression on the internet that Chomsky-anarchism is a watered down anarchism? When i learned about it I got the impression “oh anarchism is actually more of an ethic of toppling unjust power structures and organizing horizontally” but if you go online to anarchist places and you aren’t full on in belief you can live without state you aren’t an anarchist. And I do think we likely do need a constitution, some kind of law enforcement, some kind of military or militia, and a system of equitable ownership and rationing of resources. Just NOT the one we have now. And not the one Marxist Leninists want.
Anarchism is old, and the internet is new. Younger people’s views on the subject are severely over-represented on internet forums, and lack the experience and gravitas of a longer life of living anarchism.
Anarchism is both a theory and a practice, and while I don’t agree with Chomsky on all counts, I deeply respect his practice of the philosophy throughout his life. He was a champion of anarchism at a time when it was even more unpopular and repressed, and his tireless advocacy had given it stronger roots that bear fruit to this day.
I wouldn’t say that Chomsky-anarchism is watered down; only that Chomsky saw anarchism not as a terminal goal, but a means to end war, poverty, and systemic injustice. Defining specifically and succinctly what that anarchism looks like takes a back seat to identifying and critiquing the systems of control and power that were obstacles to those terminal goals. It’s very easy to determine what anarchism is not from Chomsky’s corpus; but it will leave you unsatisfied if you’re looking for someone to describe exactly what is the perfect Anarchism. I don’t think Chomsky was wrong in his focus.
I don’t mean to denigrate anarchists that only seem to exist on the internet, what is theory today may be practice tomorrow. But it’s helpful to study lives, societies, and groups that are practicing anarchist ideas and doing anarchist work.
Anarchists during the French Commune, Spanish Civil War or the Russian Revolution formed militia, rationed resources, distributed land. They built mutual agreements similar to constitutions, and created incentives to keep those agreements. They created laws by popular assembly, and enforced those laws. They made a lot of mistakes we can learn from, but it was the overwhelming forces that opposed them rather than the flaws in their beliefs that doomed their movements.
The lesson I think you’re picking up is that they’re a lot of diversity in Anarchist thought, and no single authority on what is or isn’t anarchist. While enforcing the ontological boundaries of anarchism isn’t a worthless endeavor, living anarchism is much more difficult and meritorious. You could pick a much worse model than Noam Chomsky.
Ok maybe I just need to be a bit more author skeptical on these loosely moderated libraries. I’ve encountered the same problem on Marxist Internet Archive.
Chomsky is absolutely a minarchist. He has stated that some structures of authority are admissible in non-ephemeral forms if they can be justified as necessary for the common good. But justified to whom? By what metrics? It’s just another way of saying, “only the small subset of hierarchies I agree with”.
"Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can’t be met, the authority in question should be dismantled.”
I think that Chomsky thinks he is a “pragmatic” anarchist, which in his view means accepting certain hierarchies if people decide they’re “necessary”. If he were making pragmatic tradeoffs in the process of actually, actively organizing an anarchistic society, I’d say that is a necessary evil to be dealt with in time.
Barring that, I think it’s an unnecessary own-goal at best. Personally, I don’t know him, and have no reason to trust his good intentions in insisting that fellow anarchists accept, quite oxymoronically, certain anarchist hierarchies.
Chomsky self-identifies as an ‘libertarian socialist’, which is widely regarded as a synonym for or category of anarchist, I don’t know what authoritative source told you he’s a minarchist. I’ve usually heard ‘minarchism’ used as a synonym for capitalists of the Libertarian Party persuasion. There’s a lot of disagreement about where the ontological borders of anarchism are, and it sound like someone who disagrees with Chomsky is trying to metaphorically push him outside of those borders rather than engage with his ideas.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-anarchy-vs-archy-no-justified-authority
Idk this seems pretty persuasive.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/logan-marie-glitterbomb-demystifying-left-minarchism
I read these before posting.
Okay, in your own words, how would you summarize each of those articles? If you want to discuss them perhaps putting each in their own thread would be convenient.
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 sounds like someone 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.
The second thread just covers left minarchy. Not much to say about that other than that it considers the idea of cooperating with right-minarchy and right-libertarians on minimizing government which I think is a BAD IDEA. But basically it just says yeah, there is such a thing as left minarchy and it’s basically what left libertarian, dem socs, etc are. Lists some examples even listing the Green Party.
I don’t have a lot of experience reading Logan Marie Glitterbomb, but I’ve read a bunch of Kevin Carson’s C4SS, and their focus seems to be integrating early American anti-government entrepreneurs like Lysander Spooner into the ‘Anarchist canon’ and this article seems no different. Calling Bernie Sanders and AOC ‘minarchist’ seems like intentional language abuse.
The authors’ interpretation of minarchist includes Social Democrats and state socialists. In the context of the article, minarchism is a good thing, and an umbrella term that includes people on both the left and the right. I don’t see Chomsky included here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s included also in the author’s mind, given how broadly she defines the term.
I agree with your summary – both that it’s a plea to work with capitalists that want to slash the welfare functions of the state, and that it’s a bad idea to ally with them.
Given the rhetorical purpose of the article, I don’t think it’s a reputable source for defining ‘left minarchism’ if such a thing existed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re on the same page on this.
Have you also experienced though the general impression on the internet that Chomsky-anarchism is a watered down anarchism? When i learned about it I got the impression “oh anarchism is actually more of an ethic of toppling unjust power structures and organizing horizontally” but if you go online to anarchist places and you aren’t full on in belief you can live without state you aren’t an anarchist. And I do think we likely do need a constitution, some kind of law enforcement, some kind of military or militia, and a system of equitable ownership and rationing of resources. Just NOT the one we have now. And not the one Marxist Leninists want.
Anarchism is old, and the internet is new. Younger people’s views on the subject are severely over-represented on internet forums, and lack the experience and gravitas of a longer life of living anarchism.
Anarchism is both a theory and a practice, and while I don’t agree with Chomsky on all counts, I deeply respect his practice of the philosophy throughout his life. He was a champion of anarchism at a time when it was even more unpopular and repressed, and his tireless advocacy had given it stronger roots that bear fruit to this day.
I wouldn’t say that Chomsky-anarchism is watered down; only that Chomsky saw anarchism not as a terminal goal, but a means to end war, poverty, and systemic injustice. Defining specifically and succinctly what that anarchism looks like takes a back seat to identifying and critiquing the systems of control and power that were obstacles to those terminal goals. It’s very easy to determine what anarchism is not from Chomsky’s corpus; but it will leave you unsatisfied if you’re looking for someone to describe exactly what is the perfect Anarchism. I don’t think Chomsky was wrong in his focus.
I don’t mean to denigrate anarchists that only seem to exist on the internet, what is theory today may be practice tomorrow. But it’s helpful to study lives, societies, and groups that are practicing anarchist ideas and doing anarchist work.
Anarchists during the French Commune, Spanish Civil War or the Russian Revolution formed militia, rationed resources, distributed land. They built mutual agreements similar to constitutions, and created incentives to keep those agreements. They created laws by popular assembly, and enforced those laws. They made a lot of mistakes we can learn from, but it was the overwhelming forces that opposed them rather than the flaws in their beliefs that doomed their movements.
The lesson I think you’re picking up is that they’re a lot of diversity in Anarchist thought, and no single authority on what is or isn’t anarchist. While enforcing the ontological boundaries of anarchism isn’t a worthless endeavor, living anarchism is much more difficult and meritorious. You could pick a much worse model than Noam Chomsky.
Ok maybe I just need to be a bit more author skeptical on these loosely moderated libraries. I’ve encountered the same problem on Marxist Internet Archive.
Chomsky is absolutely a minarchist. He has stated that some structures of authority are admissible in non-ephemeral forms if they can be justified as necessary for the common good. But justified to whom? By what metrics? It’s just another way of saying, “only the small subset of hierarchies I agree with”.
"Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can’t be met, the authority in question should be dismantled.”
It sounds like you’re saying you don’t think Noam Chomsky is an anarchist. Is that correct?
I think that Chomsky thinks he is a “pragmatic” anarchist, which in his view means accepting certain hierarchies if people decide they’re “necessary”. If he were making pragmatic tradeoffs in the process of actually, actively organizing an anarchistic society, I’d say that is a necessary evil to be dealt with in time. Barring that, I think it’s an unnecessary own-goal at best. Personally, I don’t know him, and have no reason to trust his good intentions in insisting that fellow anarchists accept, quite oxymoronically, certain anarchist hierarchies.
So you think Chomsky thinks he is an anarchist. But you don’t think he’s an anarchist, is that right?
In essence, yes, I personally think he’s a minarchist.
I’m don’t hold anyone else to that, though; if you prefer to consider him an anarchist, feel free.