Next edition of An Anarchist FAQ needs to scrub every mention of this fucking scumbag 🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Socialism
Rules TBD.
Michael Parenti's Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media has always been better than Manufacturing Consent, which is what Chomsky is most known for anyways. Chomsky has always been terrible as a leftist. Highly recommend On Chomsky.
Chomsky has always been terrible as a leftist.
Honestly, even from a purely anarchist perspective, Chomsky had a lot of trash takes. Like I would have previously described him as an "anarcho"-liberal. Chomsky was really only useful in my view to convince liberals averse to communism to seek out other anarchists.
Michael Parenti's Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media has always been better than Manufacturing Consent, which is what Chomsky is most known for anyways.
It's been on my reading list since I first found out that Chomsky's on the Epstein list. If you don't mind me asking, how does Parenti's book differ from Chomsky's in terms of the content?
The limits of Chomsky are in his rejection of dialectical materialism, as well as his liberalism, which you accurately call "anarcho-liberalism." This frame of analysis severely limits the extent of Chomsky's own analysis. Parenti isn't burdened by such a limitation. From On Chomsky:
Here is Chomsky holding forth on Marx, dialectics, and political language:
He had an abstract model of capitalism which — I’m not sure how valuable it is, to tell you the truth. It was an abstract model, and like any abstract model, it’s not really intended to be descriptively accurate in detail, it’s intended to sort of pull out some crucial features and study those. And you have to ask in the case of an abstract model, how much of the complex reality does it really capture? That’s questionable in this case — first of all, it’s questionable how much of nineteenth-century capitalism it captured, and I think it’s even more questionable how much of late-twentieth-century capitalism it captures.
[…]
There’s nothing about socialism in Marx, he wasn’t a socialist philosopher — there are about five sentences in Marx’s whole work that refer to socialism. He was a theorist of capitalism. I think he introduced some interesting concepts at least, which every sensible person ought to have mastered and employ, notions like class, and relations of production…
(Dialectics?)
Dialectics is one that I’ve never understood, actually — I’ve just never understood what the word means. Marx doesn’t use it, incidentally, it’s used by Engels. [8] And if anybody can tell me what it is, I’ll be happy. I mean, I’ve read all kinds of things which talk about “dialectics” — I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is. It seems to mean something about complexity, or alternative positions, or change, or something. I don’t know.
[…]
In fact, it’s extremely rare, outside of the natural sciences, to find things that can’t be said in monosyllables: there are just interesting, simple ideas, which are often extremely difficult to come up with and hard to work out. Like, if you want to try to understand how the modern industrial economy developed, let’s say, that can take a lot of work. But the “theory” will be extremely thin, if by “theory” we mean something with principles which are not obvious when you first look at them, and from which you can deduce surprising consequences and try to confirm the principles — you’re not going to find anything like that in the social world. [9]
All of this is a horrible butchering of Marxism, and easily verified as incorrect (such as the idea that Marx never used the word "dialectics:"
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.
- Karl Marx, Afterward to the Second German Edition of Capital
I actually did read On Chomsky. I was asking specifically about the contents of Inventing Reality vs Manufacturing Consent.
Parenti gets nearer to the truth by describing propaganda as fabricating a new version of reality, "alternative facts," while Chomsky focuses more on bias, minimization, and exaggeration. While Chomsky is correct on a lot of it, Parenti completes the thought, so to speak, leaving it more complete.
Awesome. I can't put a deadline on it since engineering school is a thing, but I'll get around to it eventually 
No worries, and good luck on your studies!



