- 12 Aug 2015 03:07
#14591037
Chomsky has an uncanny knack of giving you that "hmmm I never thought of it that way" feeling.
I was particularly interested in this idea that American libertarianism completely opposes the classical libertarian idea of having right to access information - thus creating an effective tyranny.
The rest of the interview is definitely worth a read - and expands on this concept that the American system is specifically designed to protect and consolidate the tyranny of big business - the less than 1 per centers. His example of how the contracts for the CEO's bonuses had to be honoured, but the contracts to honour teacher's pensions didn't - I found particularly outrageous.
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/creating- ... -chambers/
I was particularly interested in this idea that American libertarianism completely opposes the classical libertarian idea of having right to access information - thus creating an effective tyranny.
The rest of the interview is definitely worth a read - and expands on this concept that the American system is specifically designed to protect and consolidate the tyranny of big business - the less than 1 per centers. His example of how the contracts for the CEO's bonuses had to be honoured, but the contracts to honour teacher's pensions didn't - I found particularly outrageous.
Libertarianism has a special meaning predominantly in the United States. In the United States, it means dedication to extreme forms of tyranny. They don’t call it that, but it’s basically corporate tyranny, meaning tyranny by unaccountable private concentrations of power, the worst kind of tyranny you can imagine.
It picks up from the libertarian tradition one element, namely opposition to state power. But it leaves open all other forms of — and in fact favors — other forms of coercion and domination. So it’s radically opposed to the libertarian tradition, which was opposed to the master servant relation.
Giving orders, taking orders — that’s a core of traditional anarchism, going back to classical liberalism. So it’s a special, pretty much uniquely American development and related to the unusual character of the United States in many respects.
America is to quite an unusual extent a business-run society. That’s why we have a very violent labor history. Much more so than comparable countries, and attacks on labor here were far more extreme. There are accurate libertarian elements in the United States, like protection of freedom of speech, which is probably of a standard higher than other countries. But libertarianism is designed in the United States to satisfy the needs of private power.
Actually, it’s an interesting case in connection with the media. The United States is one of the few countries that basically doesn’t have public media. I mean, theoretically, there’s NPR, but it’s a highly marginal thing and is corporate funded anyway. So there’s nothing like the BBC here. Most countries have something or other. And that was a battleground, especially when radio and television came along.
The Founding Fathers actually were in favor of different conceptions of freedom of speech. There’s a narrow conception which interprets it as being a negative right, meaning you should be free of external interference. There’s a broader conception which regards it as a positive right: you should have a right to impart and access information, hence the positive interpretation. The United Nations accepts the positive interpretation, and theoretically, the US does too.
If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think Article 19 says that every person must have the right to express themselves without constraint and to impart and receive information over the widest possible range. That’s the positive right.
That was a battleground in the 1930s and 1940s. Particularly right after the Second World War, there were high level commissions taking both sides. And the position that won out is what was called corporate libertarianism, meaning corporations have the right to do anything they want without any interference.
But people don’t have any rights. Like you and I don’t have the right to receive information. Technically, we can impart information if we can buy a newspaper, but the idea that you should be a public voice that people, to the extent that this society’s democratic and participatory, was eliminated in the United States. And that’s called libertarianism. Meaning mega-corporations can do what they like without interference.
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/creating- ... -chambers/