Noam Chomsky's Beloved Cage
Although he is a formidable intellect and although he always provides extensive evidence and citations for his positions, when it comes to anarchism -the professor's ideology- his lifelong habit of serious and careful scholarship is curiously no longer practiced. He falls back upon dogma and appeals to authority. He no longer provides evidence for his most crucial claims, perhaps believing them too obvious to require proof. Or perhaps he finds it too difficult to provide evidence for his thesis because it is, on the whole, contradictory, sometimes incoherent, and riddled with dogma.
His description of foundational aspects of anarchism is accurate enough. It is a tendency in human history towards freedom and against authority and subordination. It identifies social, economic, and political structures which are oppressive and if they can’t justify themselves it dismantles them. This is, as Chomsky says, a burden of proof which very few if any oppressive institutions could meet, and any which sought to justify themselves would be subject to very harsh examination.
...He says this, and yet he also confidently argues that the State is justifiable on the basis that it protects us from big business and the accumulation of private capital. This proposition is not accompanied by the harsh examination which anarchists are supposed to make of oppressive institutions and their justifications for existence. He does not provide anything in support of it except for hyperbole and imagery. He invokes an image of the State as a cage which we can make larger or smaller through our struggle. But the cage doesn’t just confine us, it protects us as well, for savage beasts roam outside - “State-supported capitalist institutions. We love the cage. We mustn’t leave the cage. It is scary outside the cage.
In simpler terms, his claim is that the State does more to restrain than to bolster authority, oppression, subordination, and so on. Whether or not this claim is right, it is definitely controversial and demands exposition and justification. And as to whether it is right...well, it’s dubious to say the least. Take note of how near his analogy comes to incoherence when he identifies the predators roaming outside the cage: they are State-supported capitalist institutions...the cage keeps us safe from cage-supported beasts. So he admits, as he must, that the State has a role in capitalism. But his dogma states that free or unregulated markets are a priori evil and absurdly oppressive; ergo it must (according to dogma, not logic or evidence) be true that, although the State supports oppressive businesses and predatory business practices, those businesses would be even more oppressive and powerful without the State supporting them...we’ll come back to this. Just quickly two minutes after the cage analogy, he characterized the American government as a plutocracy. So the plutocracy will protect us from the rich...yeah.
Anyway, there are two schools of thought on the role of the State in capitalism. The first, which Chomsky subscribes to, holds that economic regulation has been lobbied for by anti-business advocates and enacted to restrain big business. The second holds that most economic regulation has been lobbied for, written by, and enacted to the benefit of corporate interests; and that this regulation forms and intricate web of subsidies, privileges, and direct and indirect grants of monopoly protection. The first position seems naive, whereas there is plenty of evidence for the second position. That being the case, if the State is a cage then rent-seeking corporations are the jailers.
It is obviously my feeling that Chomsky is profoundly mistaken in his belief that the State is a bulwark against oppression and inequality in our economic system, but the very fact that we disagree raises another serious problem with his concept of anarchism. He says that power must justify itself or else be destroyed: according to whose ideology is it to be justified; and who, finally, gets to decide? The problem is that like most Leftist theories of anarchism, Chomsky’s anarchism describes a society run according to the dogma of a single ideology (not anarchism*) which, because this is so contrary to the pluralist and anti-dogmatic nature of anarchism, is impossible to achieve without force. This is not often stated by anarchists - likely it is not realized or intended. But is nonetheless implied in what is left unsaid. Descriptions are given of business structures which are pre-approved by socialist anarchism, and it is said that currently-existing property and businesses will be dismantled and rebuilt in this image. It is never said who will do the dismantling, and it is never said what will be done about people who don’t agree. There is never any discussion of conflict resolution, despite the universal recognition that there is no broad agreement on many important issue, even amongst anarchists. Nevermind all that, it’s simple: structures which socialist anarchists deem oppressive will be dismantled and rebuilt according to the designs of socialist anarchists, and nobody will need to be forced or persuaded, they’ll all simply agree with the socialists.
Let’s look at something a little less complicated than the reconstruction of the whole economy. Many anarchists believe that the patriarchal family is an oppressive structure. There;s certainly a lot of truth to that, but what can be done? People who don’t like the structure of their family are allowed to change it through mutual agreement or to leave if this is impossible. But what about people who like belonging to a family which anarchists see as oppressive? Are we to dismantle and rebuild families? Surely not.
We can go on like this endlessly. Dogmatic anarchism raises more questions than it answers, because it presumes to describe how everybody will live, so perfect is its analysis of authority and subordination. As an anarchist, I believe in pluralism. I don’t know how people will live. I only know that they will live according to their own free will; and as a corollary, that nobody has the right to force another to do anything. Ergo, where there is no force, there is not sufficient subordination or oppression for me to intervene; my own analysis of these concepts does not supercede the analysis of somebody who has chosen to enter into a relationship I perceive as oppressive.
And that being the case, I have no cause to cage people for their own protection.