Optimism over Despair

This book is a collation of interviews by C. J. Polychroniou with Noam Chomsky about the state of the world in 2017 - and boy, lemme tell you, it's bleak going. I got it chiefly because I hoped from the title that Noam was going to slice through the despair-inducing series of global events and trends dominating the headlines of this past year with a knife made of pure hope, but no, it's basically just a thorough, concise, and horrifyingly well-informed exploration of just how fucked we are, but of course resorting to despair will only make us get more fucked, and so the only morally or politically viable course for all those with progressive agendas to maintain as an attitude is a resigned, stoic, optimism.*

   Throughout, C. J. and Noam discuss:

• Collapsing American hegemony
• Unravelling European integration
• The new phase of the global 'war on terror'
• ISIS, NATO, Russia, and the shitstorm in the Middle-East
• Inequality and unsustainability in the plutocratic model of post-neoliberal 'really existing capitalism'
• Trump and the decline of American civil society
• Republicans (the most dangerous group of people on the planet) and global warming
• US meddling in other countries' elections/societies/etc
• Religion's dogged resistance to separating from politics
• Utter failures of US healthcare and education systems
• The potential of anarcho-socialist democratic change when all these trends/events are placed with optimistic consideration in their historical context

   It is very scary stuff. To be honest, with the level of detail and insight Noam brings to each of these broad fields of discussion, one is left with an overbearing sense of dread at the state of the world far moreso from reading this book than if one had read separate books on each issue or even a potent digest of leftist critique-responses to most of the actual news items comprising these larger problems over the past year. I'd recommend it as an oh-shit-inspirational text for progressive activists, but really most of those already know to a large degree just how fucked we are on all the fronts discussed herein, and so this book effectively just serves as an educational reinforcement from that raspy old prophet of contemporary western anarchism. You would probably learn a lot from this book, especially historical blips of detail that often elude mainstream narratives on these big issues - but overall I don't feel there is as much to be gained from reading this as there is by simply reading the news and maintaining one's dedication to taking action, if one is politically inclined similarly to Chomsky or myself, which if you're thinking of reading this you probably are. But yeh. It lives up to the title in prose conclusion only.

* That's not to say good things aren't happening, because they are. Just nowhere near big or fast enough to substantively offset some of the bigger and more pressing factors in why we're fucked.

Occupy

This book, an edited selection* of material by Noam Chomsky concerning the movement Occupy Wall Street (which soon sprawled to many major cities across the world** and ended up seeping into the general global left-activist consciousness), is an insightful and heartening peek inside what was probably the most important popular movement in the west this millennium so far.

   The general thrust of Occupy was extremely broad - people taking part cited concerns ranging from climate change to mental healthcare to western foreign policy to institutionalised racism - but at the core of it was the classic Marxian struggle: the disempowered working masses against an entrenched established elite.*** Neoliberalism has accelerated this inegalitarian conflict to enormous levels; our whole societies are increasingly structured so as to benefit economic growth, which disproportionately benefits a tiny clique of investment-holders and financiers at the top, whose control and influence over economy, media, policymaking, and more, is high enough to pretty much maintain their position so long as the people don't realise what's happening, remember they live in a democratic society, and kick off. The first rule of Anarchist Club is you don't talk about Anarchist Club always question power structures to determine whether their authority can be legitimately purported to be for the public good and can be held accountable to be so. Democratic societies, in principle, make this easy; but neoliberalism knows this, and has spent several decades feeding the idols of careerism and consumerism that make people feel autonomous while they're being exploited, without them clocking onto the system that is funneling power that should ostensibly be democratised upwards as wealth concentrates it in ever smaller pockets of control. Unless primary political decision-making power is in the hands of the general public, then issues like institutionalised racism and climate change and everything else will only be tackled when it is either cheap, easy, or politically unavoidable to do so - unfortunately, solving these kinds of issues is rarely cheap or easy, but given the sheer capitalism-induced apathy of much of the western public and the outright irrelevant spectacle of the actual political system, these things are often extremely politically avoidable to boot. Which is why Occupy scared the shit out of the establishment - and of course, the police were sent in, and peaceful groups of people congregating in public spaces to hold constructive discussions about tackling our societies' biggest problems were arrested in large numbers. The 2008 crisis was the beginning of the end for neoliberalism: it became clear that it was a highly unstable system, and one that people are starting more and more to wake up to as having not served the public interest at all. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are now serious prominent political figures, showing that the public has rediscovered its capacity to think past the establishment-preferred disgust/hate/fear reaction to 'socialism' and are seeing how thoroughly congruent with the ideals of democratic society these notions are - not to mention that higher equality helps support progress in a wide range of other socioeconomic issues.

   Occupy, while only really supported by leftish activists at the time, was big enough and loud enough to propel the idea of the 99% and the 1% into wider awareness - and that has had enormous sociopolitical repercussions and hopefully will continue to do so. Things change. Often for the worse, often surprisingly, sometimes for the better - more often if large numbers of people group together, organise, mobilise, and make themselves heard. That is the essence of democracy, and of progressive activism. I am proud to have been a participant (an extremely minor one - see **) this historic movement, and this book by the inimitable indefatigable Noam Chomsky was like an adrenalin-boost to my gusto for activisting**** - and if you're of similar ilk to me it would probably work for you too. So yeh, I'd recommend this book chiefly to lefties, as a potent encouraging reminder of what movements can achieve by bringing people together - even if tangible change is not immediately achieved, it always has longer-term deeper impacts by setting off ripple effects that start provoking conversation that can help to change the general consciousness.

* The selected bits include transcripts of a lecture, a Q&A, an interview, another interview, and a short passage in remembrance of Noam's late fellow radical Howard Zinn, and how the values he espoused in academia and activism were being rekindled.

** Including, at the peak of its spread, a small gathering outside Sheffield Cathedral, which I (only eighteen at the time, and nowhere near as actively political as I am today) tentatively visited for half an hour and had a really interesting conversation with a guy who looked like a cartoon punk brought to life about co-operatives (he recommended Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread to me and I read it on a family holiday - my first anarchist book!) and another with a friendly hippy-type about windfarms. 

*** Occupy's biggest achievement, other than rebooting western leftist activism with a massive surge of cross-pollinating ideas and methods for organisation, and (arguably) spawning anarcho-hacker collective Anonymous, was reframing this class conflict in terminology that made the reality of inequality far more accessible to the generally depoliticised (and often highly suspicious of people who talk like Marxists) public; out with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in with the 99% and the 1% - and then presumably out with the 1% as their obscenely excessive privileges are curbed and redistributed.

**** Which admittedly is why I read it - as you're probably aware, there is a general election coming up soon, and the Tories are probably going to win big, and it's hard to cling to constructive optimism in the face of all the present's turbulent perversions of systematic social and political reasonableness.

[edit - June 9th: ahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, what a night to be the underdog. Jeremy, go and have yourself a well-deserved day off at the allotment.]

On Anarchism

This book, an edited selection* of title-fitting work by esteemed intellectual (as well-known for his radical political activism as for his revolutionary work in the field of linguistics) Noam Chomsky, serves as an accessible, engaging, and surprisingly broad (for such a slim volume - Noam knows how to pack his sentences) introduction to its titular family of sociopolitical viewpoints - anarchism. Now, anarchism has an unfair baggage of connotations in the modern industrialised world, largely as a result of intensive efforts by established elites to discredit and marginalise those who align themselves with it to clip the wings of any movement of the masses that may take on board its core, which is truly dangerous to those established elites: underlying anarchism is a radical skepticism to all authority structures. If relationships entailing power inequalities** cannot be morally justified, which in most cases they cannot, they should be dismantled and replaced by structures in which all participants have equal stakes. Anarchy is the fullest and truest expression of democracy. This book is one I would recommend for any progressive leftist types - even if you don't identify yourself as an anarchist, there is definitely much in there you'll be sympathetic to, and engaging with a thinker as heavy-hitting yet accessible as Noam on the topic will leave you both with a revitalised spirit for activism and some new thought-provoking angles from which to consider yourself, your communities, your society, and the unjust power structures we struggle against.

* The selected bits include:

• Some introductory notes discussing anarchism's place in modern politics
• Excerpts from Understanding Power, discussing in more detail how anarchism challenges and demands participatory change in existing political structures
• Part of a book called Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship, in which Noam reviews mainstream academic assessments of the Spanish civil war's revolutionary anarchist movement, cross-referencing the earwax out of it to demonstrate how mainstream accounts all-too-often airbrush over/out the positive popular role played by this movement, and what this implies about political-economic elite power over academia that anarchism should be sidelined so
• Extracts from an interview with Harry Kreisler about how Noam came to develop his political consciousness
• An incredibly juicy little essay on Language and Freedom

** Edit - April 28th: I've just watched Noam Chomsky's documentary Requiem for the American Dream. It's on Netflix and is definitely worth a watch - he walks us through how over the last century these elite forces have shifted the blame, indeed even the public attention, away from themselves, and following the onset of neoliberalism continue to ever-further secure their stranglehold on wealth and power, with ruinous consequences for the rest of society. It's like watching an enormous conspiracy theory play out, backed up by What Actually Happened In, Like, History.