Chomsky's New Socialism

Just to make this clear, I didn't mean for my last post to turn into an encomium for "Chomsky's American sensibilities." In fact, I find a lot of his foreign policy writing to be distasteful, and for exactly the opposite reasons I was praising him for below. I find that his is a basically simplistic worldview: Everything that the U.S. does is necessarily expansionistic; nothing that those who are "oppressed" by our policies themselves do has a baring on their status as the categorically oppressed. And his written tone, in contrast to the 1971 debate, is usually embittered, caustic, meandering and belittling to those who disagree. So if you were to confront my previous post and say his foreign policy work undermined his authority as a "pragmatist" in the sense described below, I'd say "well, maybe that's the what you've got to do as a dissenter. Maybe pragmatism is an untenable position to take as an advocate." And I'd also say, "Yeah, unfortunately, you're probably right."

That said, I did want to point to this gem from the debate, which I didn't have a chance to bring up in the last post. This, at least, he got exactly right:

As to the idea, which was perhaps lurking in your question anyway-it's an idea that's often expressed-that there is some technical imperative, some property of advanced technological society that requires centralised power and decision-making-and a lot of people say that, from Robert McNamara on down-as far as I can see it's perfect nonsense, I've never seen any argument in favour of it.

It seems to me that modern technology, like the technology of data-processing, or communication and so on, has precisely the opposite implications. It implies that relevant information and relevant understanding can be brought to everyone quickly. It doesn't have to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making. So technology, I think, can be liberating, it has the property of being possibly liberating; it's converted, like everything else, like the system of justice, into an instrument of oppression because of the fact that power is badly distributed.

The question posed to him was whether socialism demanded centralized power, and, if it did, how this could be reconciled with his belief in the priority of individual freedom. His choice of answers, really, was remarkably prescient. Information technology, in fact, has distributed a great deal of power from the hands of "a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making" -- and that Chomsky could predict this, while framing it as an affront to traditional notions of socialism, is goddamn impressive for a debate in 1971. And it's even more impressive because guys like Kevin Kelly are today publishing articles in Wired Magazine saying the very same thing:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.