Chomsky on Trump

[french frank]

To choose a label is to select a position

Or, 'to choose a label' is to reveal your own position?

[teamsaint]

Or, 'to choose a label' is to reveal your own position?

or to open yourself to other people's interpretation of your( or that) position.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't like the man but it appears to me that the accusations of anti-semitism largely emanated from his wife's statements in court. There are broader but related issues about the Orwellian "post-truth" which is to say that definitions about identity or position can be moved to suit political preference. Pollak may be interpreted as Jewish, a US immigrant, a South African by birth or a white South African by birth who left when South Africa was changing. Each of these definitions can place him in a different light. The British media can be dismissed as right wing or left wing depending on the focus even where it strives for neutrality. Russia is communist, post-communist, full of crony capitalism, borderline fascist or ostensibly Christian. To choose a label is to select a position and a policy in an increasingly complex world. There are umpteen other examples. Not all are helpful to solutions.

Mr GG could put this much better than I, but isn't it the case that all definitions and categories belong in the realm of defining and categorising - helpful on their own termsfor practical purposes, but disastrous when used to perpetuate confusion and further division out there? As sages in mostly non-Western traditions across millennia have put it, the description only fits the described if that description is limited to certain parameters, rather in the way Newtonian physics is useful when it comes to everyday tasks, and not confused with deeper underlying realities reachable to some extent through mathematics and science: the menu is neither to be mistaken for the meal, nor the map for the journey. The problem with definitions, however useful they may be, is that on the one hand they complexify - because language with all its rules and conventions makes heavy work of what the wisdom of the unimpeded organism can accomplish in every millisecond - and on the other, in its own terms it oversimplifies, because at any one moment more is happening than can be contained within its limitations, including fixed ideas about identities etc., and all this having to be taken into account on its terms, when deciding this is when we have enough evidence on which to act would be asking for the impossible, and courting total snarl-up.

This doesn't of course help as far as the specifics of what is under discussion here are concerned - for that Wittgenstein came to a practical application of words as comprising of their meaning - meanings residing in the "province of meaningfulness" they and the concepts into which they are woven occupy. But its not a bad relativising point from which to proceed in life in general, which is a balance of interactive agency. After that the complexities of the system we live under - and it is complex, requiring computers, algorhythms and so on to figure out what is best at any given moment - and the oversimplified ways in which words are used to trap people, begin to make more sense: namely the incontrovertibility that those with the greatest wealth and power use ideas, words and images to control the rest in order to secure their own position. As tools ideas are the sole means civilisations have devised for intercommunicating the issues and tasks necessary for their maintenance. Along the way, with the rise and rise of dominant classes of powerful individuals directing what others did and thought, the "wholeistic" vision transcending of conceptual nets, initially retained in spiritual traditions and rituals that enabled contact with realms of interconnectedness beyond words, incorporating artistic, musical and other pathways such as craftsmanship to sustaining this sort of understanding, was supplanted by religious institutions, which in turn have proved effectively durable in legitimising notions of control and domination needing to be exercised from above.

[french frank]

or to open yourself to other people's interpretation of your( or that) position.

It works both ways. Or comes to the same thing: the label you choose is based on your interpretation of what you are labelling.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think at the heart of this is a widespread lauding of "the killer instinct". I am probably more inclined than you, s-a, to draw large distinctions between the workings of post war capitalism before 1979 and after it with a measure of the rose tinted about the former.

Briefly, Lat, to reply to this one point, no, I am actually with you on the qualitiative change pro-capitalism's apologism underwent, though I would put it a little earlier than 1979, when the practical consequences of that change started taking hold.

The biggest thing that caught the Left on the hop after WW2 was the belief generally held in its many manfestations, revolutionary to reformist, that another world war would bring about the end of capitalism, as those most suffering under the consequences of its operations would rise up and take command of all means of production and distribution and their underpinning state apparatuses. They had not taken Keynsianism into account, nor looked squarely at the American New Deal's success in winning the working masses for consumerism. The importation of American cultural influences in the 1950s, vital in appealing to the consumer desires of the baby-boomer generation, conceived [sic] amid the optimism of the wake of the Allied victory, was a political add-on to Keynsian demand-management policies of state interventionism (the ones that you would still advocate) which included creation of the NHS, a massive slum-clearance housebuilding operation in which local authority housing occupied a large part, and eventually nationalisation of essential bedrock industrial and service areas as infrastructure vital to the successful running of a modern competitive productive economy. The latter was never seen by the liberal applicators of postwar recovery as "socialism by stealth" but the means to underpin profitability in the private sector: indeed, nationalised industries were run as profit-making units with top-down management, with the concurrence of the trade union leadership, for whom trade unionism was about improved wages and conditions, while Labour governments would enact policy changes beneficial to those who would without controls would remain exploited and therefore potentially at the mercy of agitators. Revolutionary politics, prior to the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956, had shrivelled to a miniscule handful of Trotskyist purists who held that the capitalist collapse had only been delayed, later joined by the rise of Maoism in the wake of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The reformists of the Labour Party still at this stage continued to hold that socialism could be achieved gradually through electing majorities and enacting progessive legislation through Parliament, and were joined in thinking at least by a Communist Party still holding to the prioritisation of defending the USSR against US aggression and thus "peaceful coexistence", which, for practical purposes, restricted their main power base, the trade unions, to "economistic" matters of pay and conditions non-threatening to the political status quo.

Thus it came to be that the main source of the 1960s radicalism in the West, unevenly expressed, was middle class youth whose future, as Marx had predicted, was predefined in terms of the "proletarianisation" of the professions, to be manfested as the unionisation of teachers and medicals. Such being the cultural development associated with the open thinking encouraged as a contrast with the unfree Communist world, many such students were coming to see the illusoriness of the happiness model promoted by the new consumerism, with its suburban ideals and unimaginative standardisation of desires and expectations, and new fears about ecological unsustainability were entering the picture to become campaigning issues alongside that of the hypocrisy of the Vietnam War, America's military/political domination of the globalising economy and other Western countries' complicity. Meanwhile the ruling classes were increasingly aware that their profitability rested on capital export, in turn dependent on the continued impoverishment of the peoples of the Third World whose post-colonial anti-imperialist struggles for genuine self-determination were fuelling the methods and cultural sympathies of that western middle class youth sector, while returns on production in the "home" countries were unlikely longterm to sustain the levels of public spending commensurate with anything resembling a humane welfare-based infrastructure. Hence "monetarism" as practically applied in easily digestible stages post 1979, and the gradual erosion of collective workers' rights in preference for new management methods, leading to where we now are.

[Lat-Literal]

Or, 'to choose a label' is to reveal your own position?

This question deserves more than a glib response.

However, my immediate response is that it will reveal an emphasis on polarity which is clearly the fashionable way.

I like to think that I am more inclined to consensus.

[Lat-Literal]

Briefly, Lat, to reply to this one point, no, I am actually with you on the qualitiative change pro-capitalism's apologism underwent, though I would put it a little earlier than 1979, when the practical consequences of that change started taking hold.

The biggest thing that caught the Left on the hop after WW2 was the belief generally held in its many manfestations, revolutionary to reformist, that another world war would bring about the end of capitalism, as those most suffering under the consequences of its operations would rise up and take command of all means of production and distribution and their underpinning state apparatuses. They had not taken Keynsianism into account, nor looked squarely at the American New Deal's success in winning the working masses for consumerism. The importation of American cultural influences in the 1950s, vital in appealing to the consumer desires of the baby-boomer generation, conceived [sic] amid the optimism of the wake of the Allied victory, was a political add-on to Keynsian demand-management policies of state interventionism (the ones that you would still advocate) which included creation of the NHS, a massive slum-clearance housebuilding operation in which local authority housing occupied a large part, and eventually nationalisation of essential bedrock industrial and service areas as infrastructure vital to the successful running of a modern competitive productive economy. The latter was never seen by the liberal applicators of postwar recovery as "socialism by stealth" but the means to underpin profitability in the private sector: indeed, nationalised industries were run as profit-making units with top-down management, with the concurrence of the trade union leadership, for whom trade unionism was about improved wages and conditions, while Labour governments would enact policy changes beneficial to those who would without controls would remain exploited and therefore potentially at the mercy of agitators. Revolutionary politics, prior to the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956, had shrivelled to a miniscule handful of Trotskyist purists who held that the capitalist collapse had only been delayed, later joined by the rise of Maoism in the wake of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The reformists of the Labour Party still at this stage continued to hold that socialism could be achieved gradually through electing majorities and enacting progessive legislation through Parliament, and were joined in thinking at least by a Communist Party still holding to the prioritisation of defending the USSR against US aggression and thus "peaceful coexistence", which, for practical purposes, restricted their main power base, the trade unions, to "economistic" matters of pay and conditions non-threatening to the political status quo.

Thus it came to be that the main source of the 1960s radicalism in the West, unevenly expressed, was middle class youth whose future, as Marx had predicted, was predefined in terms of the "proletarianisation" of the professions, to be manfested as the unionisation of teachers and medicals. Such being the cultural development associated with the open thinking encouraged as a contrast with the unfree Communist world, many such students were coming to see the illusoriness of the happiness model promoted by the new consumerism, with its suburban ideals and unimaginative standardisation of desires and expectations, and new fears about ecological unsustainability were entering the picture to become campaigning issues alongside that of the hypocrisy of the Vietnam War, America's military/political domination of the globalising economy and other Western countries' complicity. Meanwhile the ruling classes were increasingly aware that their profitability rested on capital export, in turn dependent on the continued impoverishment of the peoples of the Third World whose post-colonial anti-imperialist struggles for genuine self-determination were fuelling the methods and cultural sympathies of that western middle class youth sector, while returns on production in the "home" countries were unlikely longterm to sustain the levels of public spending commensurate with anything resembling a humane welfare-based infrastructure. Hence "monetarism" as practically applied in easily digestible stages post 1979, and the gradual erosion of collective workers' rights in preference for new management methods, leading to where we now are.

A very good post - I do agree with almost all of it. Arguably, two key moments in Britain were Ralph Miliband's fairly sudden disillusionment with the Wilson Governments in the mid 1960s and Keith Joseph's "discovery" in the early 1970s that he hadn't until that point ever been a Conservative. But personally, I am not sure that either did us many favours.

[vinteuil]

. Such being the cultural development associated with the open thinking encouraged as a contrast with the unfree Communist world, many such students were coming to see the illusoriness of the happiness model promoted by the new consumerism, with its suburban ideals and unimaginative standardisation of desires and expectations,

... but how many is many?

I was a student in the early 70s; - yes, there were people such as you describe - but my feeling is that most were happy to 'buy in' (ho ho) to what you see as 'the happiness model of consumerism', - and your patronising turn of phrase here - " suburban ideals and unimaginative standardisation of desires and expectations" won't win you many supporters to your cause... You are merely asserting your ideals without establishing what others wanted.

I am far from being convinced that there is anything more 'illusory' about such people's desires and world-views than those which I think you espouse.




.

[Serial_Apologist]

... but how many is many?

Many is many - anyone even vaguely Left around at that time would acknowledge that.

I was a student in the early 70s; - yes, there were people such as you describe - but my feeling is that most were happy to 'buy in' (ho ho) to what you see as 'the happiness model of consumerism', - and your patronising turn of phrase here - " suburban ideals and unimaginative standardisation of desires and expectations" won't win you many supporters to your cause... You are merely asserting your ideals without establishing what others wanted.

I am far from being convinced that there is anything more 'illusory' about such people's desires and world-views than those which I think you espouse.

These aren't just my views - while consumerism provided the pretext many had waited for post post-WWII austerity to "make hay while the sun shone", drawing on that collective historical memory of undurable economic security while the capitalist class always had the means to secrete safely away when times were rough, they're general consensus now, I would have thought - anecdotally, medically, academically, and satirically. Patronising would have been to say that working class people were or are constitutionally incapable of resisting consumerism, whereas in truth they, unlike the rich, have less of a choice when it comes to product and where to live, and have to chance it.

[ardcarp]

A point of view:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082kmws

[Lat-Literal]

Isn't it the fact that in the end power is always expressed in terms of economic control, and that howevermuch the cultural consensus of the West has moved in the direction of freedom of thought, what is wished for is always shaped in terms the system can accommodate, this in turn being dependent on its needs at any particular juncture? Generally speaking, those systemic needs have gravitated towards the short term because that is the way companies have to behave to survive; it was once thought possible to make adjustments, but the whole thing has become so skewed by virtue of the tenuous relationship between wealth creation and distribution and money supply that anything resembling interventionism to reduce the maleffects, ie environmentally unsustainable energy dependence, overpopulation, unemployment, insufficient home building, is seen as questioning the previously unquestionable and threatening the given order.

Historically, the ruling class (assuming one accepts there is one) always depended for its freedom to control the making of money on the existence of the nation state, with its laws, courts and other institutions, police and armed forces. The generalising internationalisation of capital led to the great power blocs needed to secure dependable and, within practicable reason, balanced trade relations - in particular in the wake of the progressive removal of large exploitable tracts of land and sea initiated by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 from access to Western business. Hence the rhetorical pull of nationalism - already exposed by the Left in the 1930s as the last refuge of discredited capitalism: Farage, Le Pen & co don't really believe they can take us back to a future of self-sufficient little states that can show their muscle power and bully each other. The oft-repeated mantra of business that we are in it not to make the world a better place but to make money for our shareholders was omnipresent in the goal of re-gaining the post-capitalist world - not primarily, I would argue, to save those peoples from totalitarianism, but to re-open their lands and seas to capitalist exploitation. Yes, not all capitalists are evil money-grubbers - liberal democracy and the freedoms of thought and movement it fosters rebound positively on what we call human nature - but capitalism as a self-perpetuating system is systemically wanting. The problem is that those who benefit most by having arrogated to themselves the power to control and shape the popular will to their advantage - the fact which defines them as the ruling class - won't countenance a challenge to their position. And from merely looking at them, it clearly isn't a question of innate capacities to rule by virtue of intelligence, let alone virtue, because if the system wasn't set up to limit fostering the fullest capacity of human intelligence to be brought to bear on all our problems, it wouldn't be in need of replacement!

A point of view:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082kmws

I doubt Farage and Co have the aim of us being in self-sufficient little states as they claim to want broader and easier international trade. It is simply globalisation under a different name and the notion is that this will come without any real need for adjustments or indeed imposed conditions. New Zealand, of course, has mainly halal meat to offer, India wants greater freedom of movement with any trade deal and being first in the queue for the Americans appears to involve a requirement to bypass HMG in favour of the temporary UKIP leader. It isn't just the EU that has ways - and a mind - of its own. No, our new leaders stir. Everyone stirs. The 21st Century is the century of stirrers. Anger for the sake of it.

One thing I think we can say goodbye to is the idea that any western trade can have a number of so-called liberal or democratic conditions attached it. It looked good at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Mandela but when it comes to morality we didn't ever have a leg to stand on. China and the Far East saw it and let us meddle to our detriment. Our "why sort out the problems here when we can wag the finger at everyone else?" On Russia and Eastern Europe, well, we might have given them a couple of decades to settle into their own patterns without interference but oh no. That was ostensibly Blair for even avid Europeans felt at one point that they were being pushed too far by him and Straw. All of it is posturing and all of it is labels. What is non-social liberalism anyway - the right of a few to have an abortion or the right of everyone to have the latest gun?

Who are the awful Latino immigrants - all Latinos, the illegal Latinos or the illegal criminal Latinos? Nobody knows - and even less do they care. What about the working class males, de-industrialised, who voted for Trump? Actually many didn't - for the lowest tier of people voted for Clinton but then why let facts stand in the way of a chance to demonise? Anecdotally, the BBC has carried several pen pictures of very well-to-do ladies who have moved from Southern Florida to Georgia because they like to hear everyone in their neighbourhoods speaking English. That veneer of civility contrasts starkly with the language now in politics and culture. Aggression is universally popular. I do accept the middle brackets have lost 30% of their wealth. I have and more - but I think I am fortunate rather than having incorporated in my personality a permanent instinct to grasp.

As Trump considers appointing establishment figures like Romney and assesses how he can work either with sceptical Democrats or Republicans towards his goals, what white Americans will see is that all of the anti-establishment stuff was misleading. It has to have been not only because of the character of the newly elected President but the fact that he now has to work within a system. That was the issue that more militant non-whites had with Obama. They expected him to give them precedence when he and the system are designed to work for all. The sectarian instincts for power-grabbing from top to bottom will ultimately bring the whole thing down. Luckily, that will be the greatest of levellers.

[Serial_Apologist]

I doubt Farage and Co have the aim of us being in self-sufficient little states as they claim to want broader and easier international trade. It is simply globalisation under a different name and the notion is that this will come without any real need for adjustments or indeed imposed conditions. New Zealand, of course, has mainly halal meat to offer, India wants greater freedom of movement with any trade deal and being first in the queue for the Americans appears to involve a requirement to bypass HMG in favour of the temporary UKIP leader. It isn't just the EU that has ways - and a mind - of its own. No, our new leaders stir. Everyone stirs. The 21st Century is the century of stirrers. Anger for the sake of it.

One thing I think we can say goodbye to is the idea that any western trade can have a number of so-called liberal or democratic conditions attached it. It looked good at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Mandela but when it comes to morality we didn't ever have a leg to stand on. China and the Far East saw it and let us meddle to our detriment. Our "why sort out the problems here when we can wag the finger at everyone else?" On Russia and Eastern Europe, well, we might have given them a couple of decades to settle into their own patterns without interference but oh no. That was ostensibly Blair for even avid Europeans felt at one point that they were being pushed too far by him and Straw. All of it is posturing and all of it is labels. What is non-social liberalism anyway - the right of a few to have an abortion or the right of everyone to have the latest gun?

Who are the awful Latino immigrants - all Latinos, the illegal Latinos or the illegal criminal Latinos? Nobody knows - and even less do they care. What about the working class males, de-industrialised, who voted for Trump? Actually many didn't - for the lowest tier of people voted for Clinton but then why let facts stand in the way of a chance to demonise? Anecdotally, the BBC has carried several pen pictures of very well-to-do ladies who have moved from Southern Florida to Georgia because they like to hear everyone in their neighbourhoods speaking English. That veneer of civility contrasts starkly with the language now in politics and culture. Aggression is universally popular. I do accept the middle brackets have lost 30% of their wealth. I have and more - but I think I am fortunate rather than having incorporated in my personality a permanent instinct to grasp.

As Trump considers appointing establishment figures like Romney and assesses how he can work either with sceptical Democrats or Republicans towards his goals, what white Americans will see is that all of the anti-establishment stuff was misleading. It has to have been not only because of the character of the newly elected President but the fact that he now has to work within a system. That was the issue that more militant non-whites had with Obama. They expected him to give them precedence when he and the system are designed to work for all. The sectarian instincts for power-grabbing from top to bottom will ultimately bring the whole thing down. Luckily, that will be the greatest of levellers.

A really good post, Lat. What troubles some of us regarding your closing remark is that they will bring the whole thing down on top of the rest of us, having first made sure of their own escape routes.

[Lat-Literal]

A really good post, Lat. What troubles some of us regarding your closing remark is that they will bring the whole thing down on top of the rest of us, having first made sure of their own escape routes.

That bit was slightly ironic.

[jean]

An opinion piece!

Whatever you may think about the way Mugabe went about it, surely there is something disquieting about the writer's view that

Mugabe...whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving.

As though the status quo just needed to be left alone?

[Serial_Apologist]

A point of view:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082kmws

Gopnik's argument, or hope, rather, is that American institutions of democracy will prove strong enough to pre-empt the establishment of repressive dictatorship. One hopes he is right. One just has to look at how the monarchy is viewed in this country, namely as a bulwark against its own misuse by incumbents, to see that the way bourgeois democracy (as we call it) has become its own belief system in the minds of the masses supportive of it.