Chomsky is smart, but not very useful because "In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is" - Yogi Berra
In general, his ideal end-goal world would include smaller states with more direct control by the populace, with worker-owned and worker-managed corporations, with free markets of goods and services between different corporations and different states, and of course freedom of movement. Strong environmental control would be almost implied if the people doing an economic activity were in charge of decisions and were also directly impacted by the effects of those decisions. Localizing and letting corporations be small would also put a natural cap on inequality, though democratically run states could impose additional safeguards where needed (minimum wages, estate taxes, non-discrimination clauses etc.)
I understand that workers also, at times, vote to externalize some costs, as their jobs may depend on it.
That's certainly not Anarchism, in which there are no states and no commercial corporations. And of course - no markets.
Now, as for what Chomsky supports personally - that's more difficult to say, since he's been known to support Democrats in US politics, to support a two-state arrangement in Palestine etc.
Many companies do just fine without growing to enormous proportions, being acquired, acquiring others etc.
A free market, lacking counter-pressure to maximizing firm size, favors large firms, and large firms becoming larger is a positive feedback loop. Note that this is an idealized model and there's plenty of room for counter-pressure in reality (can the large firm actually pull demand away from the smaller firm, or does the smaller firm have a leg-up in e.g. customer relations that the larger firm can't compete with?).
How do you account for that?
I also strongly suspect that they're less present, on average, in unlisted companies.
You may be right that centralization is inevitable for game-theoretic reasons.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how well game theory can model the decisions of large groups of people who participate in multiple organizations at the same time.
Definitely though, there are no examples from history of a society of democratic societies and how it might behave. Perhaps the closest examples are the ancient Greek cities and post-WW2 Europe (looking only at the state level, democratic corporations have not been tried to any large extent that I know of). In both those cases, there was no spontaneous centralization from within (i.e. one entity conquering the others), though for Europe it is still very early to tell, and there are future signs which may point to more centralization.
There are multiple ways an anarchist society might respond to a corporation growing too large: convincing its workers to split or find work elsewhere to avoid economic collapse, seizing its assets and forcibly splitting or shuttering its operations, denying it use of supply chains, of debt if the market has currency, etc. a critical aspect of anarchist societies is lack of private property and capital.
Trade unions can hold much of the power; I can’t speak to the concepts of anarchist states. In fact the idea of anarchist currency (anarchy-capitalism or market socialism, I guess?) is something I am unfamiliar with, in part because it obscures the cost in man time and effort it takes to produce a good or service—rather easy too, just consider subscription services where you pay a flat rate, or the labor it takes to get you chocolate or coffee vs how much it is valued in terms of your wages (presumably in a post-industrialization service economy if you’re on this forum). Similarly I do not know what an anarchist state is.
Regardless, the idea is founded in large part on the concept of mutual aid. There is certainly plenty of research into how mutual aid tends towards or away from stability. A quick google search turns up this, for instance: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00275386/document
I agree, but I believe a firm past a critical mass of size can defend against all of them, and defense breeds the resources for further defense.
> convincing its workers to split or find work elsewhere to avoid economic collapse
Unlikely if the firm's size lets it offer better life than alternatives
> seizing its assets and forcibly splitting or shuttering its operations
Hard if a firm's size grants it the ability to challenge monopoly on violence
> denying it use of supply chains, of debt if the market has currency, etc.
No longer possible if the firm is large enough to have vertical integration
How do you figure? This implies the compensation is different from other "firm"s.
> Hard if a firm's size grants it the ability to challenge monopoly on violence.
How do you figure? Monopoly typically implies private property.
> No longer possible if the firm is large enough to have vertical integration.
How do you figure? Monopoly typically implies private property.
Well the traditional linguistic connotations of possession certainly persist. Here "seize" simply means take control of.
To be clear, I'm criticizing the notion that small worker-owned / worker-managed corporations and a free market are an inherently stable structure (because free markets will favor consolidation). I'm not against large worker-owned / worker-managed corporations, and I think they could be a significant improvement on the ecosystem of shareholder-owned corps we find in the US.
As I see it, open source technology IS the great decentralized of power. We just need people to build Good open source software.
My personal passion (which I poured a lot of money into) was qbix.com and intercoin.org . That’s also why I reached out to Andrew Yang back in early 2018 when he announced running and met him in May 2018. We agreed my company would build https://yang2020.app to support his campaign, and he would help introduce us to mayors of cities that want UBI locally (he knew a few dozen, like Michael Tubbs of Stockton, although since then Michael has not been a fan of Yang’s approach for various reasons).
I believe in UBI + Gift Economies / Collaboration as the best system, better than socialism or capitalism. But we have a while to get there.
Yang is trying to boil the ocean by going for UBI on a national level. I believe the future is in decentralization, and I talk about it extensively. I think UBI can be done via cryptocurrency on a local level. We can also do voting this way. I’m writing a piece about this at the moment, very apropos of the recent fiascos.
Printers, Email, Blogs, the Internet have replaced large corporate and state gatekeepers we used to have (newspapers, cable channels, telephone companies, printing presses etc) and costs went down to near zero. Technology decentralizes power.
We can have towns and cities run decentralized:
Solar power networks (resilient to EMPs and carrington events)
Mesh networks (better than cellphone networks)
Social networks (chat, events, appointments, everything that fb does but w local servers)
I’m trying to build the software to run on these networks (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)
PS: sorry for all the links but honestly I am passionate about this stuff and need to illustrate it instead of talking. A video is worth a thousand words. To mitigate the shilling I will say that TimBL’s solid and MaidSAFE * IPFS and others are also working on decentralizing power
I would have agreed with that statement at one time. Now I'd qualify it to read "Technology can decentralize power." Unfortunately, it can also do the opposite. I'm at a point now where I'm torn on the question of whether or not technology inherently tends one way or the other. But in either case, I'm now convinced that human nature is much more a factor in the centralization / decentralization of power than technology.
In that system, there are no stock holders demanding ever greater returns, those doing the work are always completely in control. They can choose to do "just enough" to live a good life. Or they can choose to focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their work, and not on the profit.
In that system, it's easier to pass regulations that prevent the worker cooperatives from externalizing, because the survival pressures aren't nearly as intense.
But it's not top-down centrally managed.
Enforced by a central top-down bureaucratic organization.
In this hypothetical world would you let foreign companies motivated by profit compete in your country that only has worker co-ops? Or would you have a closed down market, similar to North Korea that only Approved Co-ops would be allowed to work in?
Under your standard, all regulation is "top down bureaucratic driven". In practice this has not proven to be incompatible with market driven economics. Not that libertarians don't scream about it anyway.
This is the same thing, just a different shape.
The comment you selectively quoted ends with "But it's not top-down centrally managed.".
A complex interconnected system will adapt in unforeseeable ways, causing novel externalities for which we have no built up immunity. Ask a soviet.
We can pursue self-organization that pursues escape from the pathological patterns of profit driven production without advocating for, striving for, or tolerating a totalitarian, bureaucratic nightmare. See, e.g., https://thenextsystem.org/start-with-worker-self-directed-en...
I think this is a bit simplistic or at least too optimistic. The pressures of being listed on the stock market are such that management is more or less compelled to pursue short-term goals.
Indeed in the very long run a lot of corporations are harming themselves by harming the environment, impeding innovation etc. but in the short run firing people, cutting R&D budgets, digging up more coal, oil etc. can be very effective. And shareholders really only care about what your profits are gonna be in the next few quarters, not so much about what's gonna happen decades down the line.
Now, here's an interesting thing to consider. You bring up coal and oil - both industries that are on the way out in the long term. Would it be wise for shareholders to push these companies to invest in R&D to improve their long-term capabilities? No, if coal and oil are on the way out, then the best financial strategy would be to run the companies into the ground as you slowly liquidate them, ideally so that there's nothing left on the very day that fossil fuels are no longer needed. In that case, short-termism is the best strategy.
All in all, putting lives at risk was a good move for Boeing, and they'll surely do it again.
In any case, such judgement is only clear in hindsight (that is, calculating effectiveness implies a time window over which effects are to be tabulated).
Most charitably, the executives perhaps felt they were making judicious, acceptable tradeoffs that would maximize business outcomes over the time horizon they were concerned with - periods measured in quarters or years or even decades.
How would we incentivize people to only take profits over an arbitrarily long (and ever-widening) window? What happens when a black swan occurs and significantly drives down the effectiveness of prior decisions (which until then had been deemed quite effective)? Are profits clawed back?
If the judgment was really only clear in hindsight then no power structure could have altered it. What's clear only in hindsight to a CEO is clear only in hindsight to a union boss, or a collective, anyone else.
>How would we incentivize people to only take profits over an arbitrarily long (and ever-widening) window?
The corporation is already incentivized: in exchange for thinking about long-term profits, it is rewarded with long-term profits. However, executives often have different goals than the corporation they're supposed to represent. If you could figure out how to better align the interests of executives with their corporations, you would see more effective profit-seeking, which would include less killing due to blunders but more killing due to tobacco-industry style exploitation. Giving executives the freedom to put their own interests first (the source of next-quarterism and next-bonusism) is necessary if you want to give them the freedom to pursue ethical goals. You either trust them to make the right decisions or you don't.
>Are profits clawed back?
Yes! That's what happens when something causes you to lose money.
Shareholders?
> If you want to start a non-profit aerospace company, nobody is stopping you.
Yeah, just found an aerospace company. You don't need anything beyond hard-work and a can-do attitude. Definitely don't need decades worth of relationships, unimaginable capital, or readily hirable talent. You just gotta believe in yourself.
The system doesn't force anyone to make a profit. If you borrow capital from people, your investors may demand a profit. But that's between you and your investors. Nobody is forcing you to take investment or sell equity in your company on the public markets.
> Yeah, just found an aerospace company. You don't need anything beyond hard-work and a can-do attitude. Definitely don't need decades worth of relationships, unimaginable capital, or readily hirable talent. You just gotta believe in yourself.
My point is to contrast a system where everyone is forced to be a non-profit or co-op (@jp555's hypothetical), and our system, where you are free to be a non-profit or co-op, if you want to. If you can't raise capital or hire top-notch employees under that structure, then that's a problem with the non-profit/co-op organization, not a shortcoming of our economic system.
If you want to just completely change the conversation, and hyperfocus on the individual, then you're free to do so, but I don't want to be brought along for the ride. You responded to a comment concerning Boeing, not some fresh-faced up-and-comer of your own creation.
In practice, powerful corporations have enough influence over the government that regulating them in that manner isn't possible without flipping the whole system on its head (i.e. removing the profit motive that drives monopolization and cost externalization).
Penalizing the behavior sounds like a top-down solution to me. Government decides it's bad, then government sends the police to come get you if you do it.
I dump some chromium waste on my property, pretty soon this "government" is saying it's bad and sending police to come get me saying that "the green goo is making people sick". I hate that top-down big gubmint telling me what I can and can't do!
I refuse to employ black people, pretty soon there's a top-down big gubmint telling me that's "discriminatory" and "violates labor laws"! What's next, telling a man what he can and can't do with his own business!?
Yes. Regulation from a central source of authority is what a top-down model is. I'm not sure what your contention is here.
"I don't like Erik Satie or any of that stuffy, high falutin' classical stuff."
In both cases, the writer is unwittingly saying very little about the subject and very much about their ignorance.
Governments on the other hand have a monopoly on violence, so I am more wary of handing them power over the choices I can make in my life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain#Battl...
If you're in another country working for a U.S. corp you're in much worse shape. Coca-Cola can murder you for forming a union in another country and get away with it!
In both cases, borders matter.
If you really want to judge him on his real-world solutions, then take at look at Michael Albert's Participatory economics that he's been supporting for a while : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
But according to me, what Chomsky lacks in his analysis is some hegelian stuff, so I'd recommend to go further and dig some Slavoj Zizek and Deleuze and so on..
I mean that I find him too theoretical - His thinking is all very smart and appealing but useless in practice.
Fake easy-solutions are good to make you feel better before work, but it prevents you from going into deep thinking from which real solutions may emerge.