4 ms·

The topic of the article, and therefore of my comment, is progressive takes on the issue. If you aren't a progressive, you don't agree with any of those. That's

by blast 5y ago

The topic of the article, and therefore of my comment, is progressive takes on the issue. If you aren't a progressive, you don't agree with any of those. That's fine but trivial, it doesn't need pointing out. My point is that within the range of progressive arguments, Chomsky's is definitive because it doesn't involve the intellectual contortions that other progressive positions are increasingly depending on.

dash2 5y ago
You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.
- blast 5y ago
  There's more to Chomsky's argument than that, and if you read it closely, he says "redistribution of income would appear to be an equally obvious strategy", which is much closer to a mainstream progressive position.
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  > value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That is not a stance Chomsky holds nor the vast majority of socialist. How have you become so anti-socialist without even knowing what socialism is?
  - visarga 5y ago
    Socialism is a system where a clique of powerful people jail and abuse anyone who opposes their ways. Ostensibly it's for the good of society, but in reality it's just for the ruling class. Source: lived under socialism for 14 years. Also observe N.K. Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      Sorry about your experience, but here in America it's not much better. We imprison more people than anywhere else in the world, including the USSR at its height, in raw numbers and per capita terms as well. Our system is one built on a concept of punishment and retribution, rather than rehabilitation and forgiveness. Here's a glimpse at how our ruling class views the role of prison in our society: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman The other half of that of course is that prison is highly profitable in the United States, making the incentives to imprison people incredibly perverse. Housing people involuntarily is an industry in America, and people are working very diligently on optimizing and perfecting it to be as profitable as possible. This leads to insane situations where prisoners are being used to fight fires with little to no pay, which may sound like slavery to you, but... well. It is. The 13th Amendment which "abolished" slavery even carves out an if someone is convicted of a crime. I'm sure you witnessed and were subjected to terrible things. I would be careful though of concluding the problem was with "socialism" rather than powerful people abusing their power to maintain and amass more power. That dynamic is pretty universal and happens under any system with psychopaths in charge. Whenever it happens under one "-ism" people from other "-isms" will use that to point out how flawed the opposing ideology is. But really, all the system determines is how hard of a time the psychopath-in-charge has pulling the levers of power. We just put a psychopath in charge of our Democracy here in America 4 years ago, and his term ended with him instigating an insurrection on the country's Capitol in an attempt to maintain power, bringing an end to 240+ years of peaceful power transitions. It can happen anywhere. TLDR; the American ruling class will pretextually raid your home and throw you in prison if you opposed their agenda of invading foreign countries and segregating the population by race. Not only will they put you to work and not pay you anything, they will actually charge you for the privilege of imprisoning you (again, for pretextual reasons), making a profit off of your misery. I guess we can conclude this is Democracy?
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The statement you are putting forwards assumes many things - that value is decided by solely by monetary values as decided by "the market", that a market that can calculate values perfectly is possible, that social rewards have no value, that socialism is incompatible with rewarding people materially for material product, etc..., which most people would say are false.

by blast 5y ago

dash2 5y ago

You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.

blast 5y ago
There's more to Chomsky's argument than that, and if you read it closely, he says "redistribution of income would appear to be an equally obvious strategy", which is much closer to a mainstream progressive position.
Kbelicius 5y ago
> value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That is not a stance Chomsky holds nor the vast majority of socialist. How have you become so anti-socialist without even knowing what socialism is?
- visarga 5y ago
  Socialism is a system where a clique of powerful people jail and abuse anyone who opposes their ways. Ostensibly it's for the good of society, but in reality it's just for the ruling class. Source: lived under socialism for 14 years. Also observe N.K. Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Sorry about your experience, but here in America it's not much better. We imprison more people than anywhere else in the world, including the USSR at its height, in raw numbers and per capita terms as well. Our system is one built on a concept of punishment and retribution, rather than rehabilitation and forgiveness. Here's a glimpse at how our ruling class views the role of prison in our society: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman The other half of that of course is that prison is highly profitable in the United States, making the incentives to imprison people incredibly perverse. Housing people involuntarily is an industry in America, and people are working very diligently on optimizing and perfecting it to be as profitable as possible. This leads to insane situations where prisoners are being used to fight fires with little to no pay, which may sound like slavery to you, but... well. It is. The 13th Amendment which "abolished" slavery even carves out an if someone is convicted of a crime. I'm sure you witnessed and were subjected to terrible things. I would be careful though of concluding the problem was with "socialism" rather than powerful people abusing their power to maintain and amass more power. That dynamic is pretty universal and happens under any system with psychopaths in charge. Whenever it happens under one "-ism" people from other "-isms" will use that to point out how flawed the opposing ideology is. But really, all the system determines is how hard of a time the psychopath-in-charge has pulling the levers of power. We just put a psychopath in charge of our Democracy here in America 4 years ago, and his term ended with him instigating an insurrection on the country's Capitol in an attempt to maintain power, bringing an end to 240+ years of peaceful power transitions. It can happen anywhere. TLDR; the American ruling class will pretextually raid your home and throw you in prison if you opposed their agenda of invading foreign countries and segregating the population by race. Not only will they put you to work and not pay you anything, they will actually charge you for the privilege of imprisoning you (again, for pretextual reasons), making a profit off of your misery. I guess we can conclude this is Democracy?
sudosysgen 5y ago
The statement you are putting forwards assumes many things - that value is decided by solely by monetary values as decided by "the market", that a market that can calculate values perfectly is possible, that social rewards have no value, that socialism is incompatible with rewarding people materially for material product, etc..., which most people would say are false.