Noam on anarchism/libertarian socialism. Stonking form as ever (see below) but commenting more specifically on a vision of society in addition to the usual, endlessly repeated (but nonetheless important-to-be-familiar-with), paired examples some commentary.

"RBR: ...you compare the politics of President John F. Kennedy with Lenin, more or less equating the two. This, I might add, has shocked supporters of both camps! Can you elaborate a little on the validity of the comparison?

CHOMSKY: I haven't actually equated the doctrines of the liberal intellectuals of the Kennedy administration with Leninists, but I have noted striking points of similarity - rather as predicted by Bakunin a century earlier in his perceptive commentary on the new class. For example, I quoted passages from McNamara on the need to enhance managerial control if we are to be truly free, and about how the undermanagement that is the real threat to democracy is an assault against reason itself. Change a few words in these passages, and we have standard Leninist doctrine. I've argued that the roots are rather deep, in both cases. Without further clarification about what people find shocking, I can't comment further. The comparisons are specific, and I think both proper and properly qualified. If not, that's an error, and I'd be interested to be enlightened about it."

Also parallels with Habermas' discourse ethics (bargaining after discounting the bargaining power of participants) and Rawls original position in that the justice of social arrangements/institutions can be measured by the extent to which participants can be said to "control" these arrangements/institutions.

"CHOMSKY: ...The tendencies in anarchism that I've always found most persuasive seek a highly organised society, integrating many different kinds of structures (workplace, community, and manifold other forms of voluntary association), but controlled by participants, not by those in a position to give orders (except, again, when authority can be justified, as is sometimes the case, in specific contingencies)."

Habermas seeks to describe a situation where such arrangements could be arrived at, an idealised bargaining scenario. Rawls speculates as to what arrangements such a situation, that is one in which control is in the hands of the participants, would result in.

Chomsky is pointing to the fact that once there are authoritarian type institutional arrangements the voluntary nature of social arrangements disappears, along with the justification of those arrangements. He extends the critical nature of the other thinkers observation as to the circumstances of justice (those in which justice can arrive) to observe that social arrangements are, particularly when formalised, likely to be prejudical to the liberty of the community as a whole. He is genuinely stressing the importance of individual liberty, not in the sense usually used by commissar hardliners (liberty = liberty in the marketplace, which is a cipher for freedom, in fact allowing the illegitimate power of capital free reign), but that any power, which by definition must limit the residual liberty of those it excludes (power after all being a question of relativity), must be justifiable and in particular be something to which those whom it sugbjugates genuinely consent (and which therefore, if they are rational, will be in their own and societies interest, and if not, well, they're being duped clearly...).

"CHOMSKY: ...One major element has been what has traditionally been called 'libertarian socialism'. I've tried to explain there and elsewhere what I mean by that, stressing that it's hardly original; I'm taking the ideas from leading figures in the anarchist movement whom I quote, and who rather consistently describe themselves as socialists, while harshly condemning the 'new class' of radical intellectuals who seek to attain state power in the course of popular struggle and to become the vicious Red bureaucracy of which Bakunin warned; what's often called 'socialism'. I rather agree with Rudolf Rocker's perception that these (quite central) tendencies in anarchism draw from the best of Enlightenment and classical liberal thought, well beyond what he described. In fact, as I've tried to show they contrast sharply with Marxist-Leninist doctrine and practice, the 'libertarian' doctrines that are fashionable in the US and UK particularly, and other contemporary ideologies, all of which seem to me to reduce to advocacy of one or another form of illegitimate authority, quite often real tyranny."

Here's some more from znet.

"As I understand the term "anarchism," it is based on the hope (in our state of ignorance, we cannot go beyond that) that core elements of human nature include sentiments of solidarity, mutual support, sympathy, concern for others, and so on. "

Voltaire said "if god did not exist it would be necessary to create him" and i think that given Feurbach's compelling argument for god as a cipher for the cream of humanity we can say that if there is no such thing as human nature it is necessary to create a conception. for the idea that life is purposeful, that we have a nature or essence at all or that it is "knowable", is pervasive and a sigificant social fact, so by seizing a description that we would like to fit we evolve, or try to. rather than grimly accepting our fate as "mutually disinterested utility maximisers" (ask yourself who benefits from this! hoho!) we might at least appreciate that perseverance as a species is contingent on cooperation without restraint.