Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

TEN
INTERVIEW
WITH BARRY PATEMAN
(2004)
Thank you for seeing us today, as you know we want to talk about the ideas
of anarchism and your thoughts on anarchism. And its going to be a rather
wandering chat but hope folly we'll get somewhere.
In the middle 1990s in an interview that you gave YOlt talked about one
of the problems with anarchism was that maybe it was too negative, that it
criticized but didn't offer a positive ...
Well, if! said that I shouldn't have because I don't agree with it. In fact you
can take a look at the shelf up there. lPoiming, laughterJ There are anarchist
studies which offer proposals fo r sociery in such meticulous detail that [hey go
beyond anything plausible in my view. Diego Abad de Santillan is a famolls
case who in 1936 wrote a critique of the anarchist revQlurion in Spain. He was
an Argentinian anarchist who was in Spain. It was called After the Revolution
and he laid out a very detailed program for what a largely anarcho-syndicalist
vision of Spanish society, or for [hat mauer any society, ought to be like. And
there are many other proposals. I think the question fo r detailed planning for
the future isn't so much "can we do it?" Sure we can do it, but it's whether we
know enough about human beings, about society, institutions, the effects of
introducing ins[iuaional structures into human life. Do we know enough
abom that to be able to plan in any detail what a society should look like? Or
should it be experimental, guided by certain general ideas about liberty, equality,
amhoriry and domination and let people explore different ways of working
through this maze and see what comes namral to them? How much variety
should there be? What are you going to do with people who don't want to
work or people with criminal tendencies or people who don't want to go to
meetings? There are millions of questions that come up. To what extent do you
want to interchange jobs or delegate responsibility on the basis of inrerest and
talent? If somebody wants to be a carpenter, a nuclear physicist or a pianist and
someone else wanrs to be an administrator do you necessarily require that they
interchange jobs as a mauer of principle, even if they are all happier if they
don't? I don't think we know, [here are both positive and negarive commenrs
you can make about that, bur I don't think we know the answers.
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