Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- Anarchism is usually connected to violence and chaos, but as a philosophy, its tenets are more nuanced than mere destruction for destruction’s sake.
- It may surprise some to find out that Noam Chomsky, famous for his innovations in linguistics and philosophy, describes himself as an anarchist.
- Whether you agree with him or not, understanding anarchism can lead to a better understanding of our society and its politics.
What comes to mind when we think of an anarchist? Most likely, it’s some punk wearing a bandana throwing Molotov cocktails at riot-control officers. We don’t typically imagine anarchists as elderly, soft-spoken professors, but there’s probably more of the latter than one would think.
Best known for his revolutionary work in linguistics and cognitive science, Noam Chomsky is an avowed anarchist. It seems a like a contradiction. Anarchy is so often portrayed as chaos for chaos’s sake, a perverse impulse to implode a society that’s the product of thousands of years of social progress. What business does a celebrated thinker have advocating for something that seems so fundamentally thoughtless?
Our conception of anarchy has been colored by its most visible proponents — the black-clad protester breaking shop windows with a baseball bat and spray-painting a circled “A” in red. But, like most philosophies, anarchism and anarchists come in a variety of flavors. Mohandas Gandhi, for instance, has been described as an anarcho-pacifist. Noam Chomsky is an anarcho-syndicalist.
What is anarchism?
While anarchism may not be 100 percent focused on dismantling the current system, it would be disingenuous to say that that is not a fundamental tenet. In a 2013 interview, Chomsky explained how he sees anarchism and its role:
“Primarily, [anarchism] is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times.”
By labeling himself as an anarchist, Chomsky is stating that he doesn’t believe the institutions and systems that underpin our society are just. In essence, this is the heart of anarchism; the current system is illegitimate and must be dismantled to be replaced with something better. Popular culture just has a tendency to focus on the dismantling part rather than the illegitimacy part.
A Brazilian protester holds up a black flag with the anarchism symbol. This may be the popular vision of an anarchist, but it would be an oversimplification to paint all anarchists with the same brush. Photo credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP / Getty Images
How is anarcho-syndicalism different?
So, what does Chomsky advocate as a replacement to the current system? Here’s where the “syndicalism” part of “anarcho-syndicalism” comes in. Chomsky and others in his school of thinking…
The post Noam Chomsky: Writer, linguist… anarchist? appeared first on FeedBox.