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August 19, 2005
Chomsky on Anarchism
My opinions have long been extremist. I tend not to fall in the middle of the spectrum. I recall being impressed at age 12 by the Third Reich and the level of control those guys had, even if they subsequently got demolished.
Later on in high school I believed in capitalism of the Ayn Rand variety, a meritocracy of loner individualists. My tendency until late 2001 was in that direction, though the older I got and the longer I lived in France, the more I "mellowed" from thinking the losers should get nothing to thinking the winners should act like guardians to the losers, keeping them from want, but without letting them get in the way.
At the same time, I was convinced we could have more winners by working within the system to improve our approach. Six Sigma was getting traction at Sun and looked like a great way to improve the processes that could lead even losers to deliver winning products and services. Capitalism was great after all, just look at my pay rises, at the price of SUNW, at how Telco Software was growing, and how excited we felt. Finally I got a chance to get involved in Sun's Sigma effort, getting training as a black belt.
In retrospect it was a rough time for an idealist to start learning about how great management can be. Sun was going through a first round of layoffs. The bubble had popped, yet we were all still in denial. People's bad sides started to show. Not only was the time ripe for politics, but I was completely green, working for an experienced manager in a difficult situation, a guy who even in the best of situations wasn't going to have lots of time to groom someone of dubious value.
I'm not, by nature, an eager manager anyway. By nature I'm a cynical dictator, partly because my own laziness and low motives are so obvious, partly because my patience is virtually inexistent. Management and parenting are for those reasons hard to appreciate. Put all that together with my idealism and I turned out to be a lousy fit for that black belt job.
Anyway, I found myself pulling up to work and having trouble getting out of the car. I might have been diagnosed as clinically depressed some of those days. I say that because I remember sitting in front of my screen in a panic, yet unable to move. I felt vaguely like killing myself, crying, storming out of there, but also felt completely out of touch with my emotions.
It reminds me of the summer I went to Richardson, Texas to sell books door to door. The worst part of that was one day late in the first week when my team leader took me around and I actually made a sale. This poor woman finally got her checkbook and signed. After that I got in my car and drove 22 hours straight back to my mother's house, almost falling asleep at the wheel near the end.
Finally, about the same time the World Trade Center buildings were getting blown up, I found a way out, going back into docs in the team where I still work now. Although the episode in Richardson turned me off to sales, it was only in late 2001 that I'd been turned off to hierarchy and authority. And the turn off was still not very clear.
Somebody, probably Rob, got me to read Howard Zinn's People's History of the US around this time, and also Chomsky's book on Year 501. Those hit an immensely receptive reader. Then I read the Art of War again, and Machiavelli's Prince, and a book on the GE way by Jack Welch. It was as though I could finally see everything that'd been written in invisible ink. The fnords were all there.
Someone watching from the outside would've laughed at my reversal, kind of like someone who quits smoking and then decides smoking is such a horrible thing, and how could anyone ever do it. Of course I'm very earnest and fairly stupid, so it took me a long time to see the irony, even though it's plain for everyone.
Only recently have I started to see the challenge we have to get ourselves out of this system based on heirarchies, authority, and coercion and alternately to get the system out of ourselves. In Chomsky on Anarchism, Chomsky makes the point that we might as well aim at this through gradual experimentation. Emotionally to be sure I have trouble with that, but I see the parallels in the real world, in software for example. Generally it takes one or more prototypes before you get it right, even if you do considerable thinking beforehand.
So the book is frustrating there, but encouraging in other areas. Chomsky has studied the history of people organizing non-coercive, non-authoritarian, participatory arrangements, and it looks to be getting easier. Years ago, people would get their heads bashed in, or would get starved out, or whatever. That's less likely to happen now, so there's probably more room than before for experimentation.
A funny thing about Chomsky's work, and Zinn's, and Hahnel's, etc., in fact about moving to more participatory, anarchic arrangements of social relations is how hard it is to start getting your mind around even the problems, let alone the solutions. A good place to start is any one of Chomsky's books on the subject. All these guys are teachers, though. They all make their points in very accessible ways.
For those who disagree with this stuff and see it as a load of bunk, I'd definitely recommend Chomsky's work, specifically Necessary Illusions. I'd like to see a reasoned rebuttal against that one, because it would be the start of an interesting and doubtless hugely instructional debate.
Posted by Mark at August 19, 2005 09:19 PM